"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart not with his lips only follow me."And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was Garibaldi; and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of Italy is in the world to-day.But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit—"I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To take up the cross did not mean bearing life's little inconveniences with equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one's neck, and be ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of Him:"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making dull the one great adventure of the world.There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God, Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow; and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinningHe shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.APPENDIX ION THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESSIt is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.We may take another instance from a slightly different department of thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.So we may, I think, reverently believe that our Lord Himself passes through the experience of the apocalyptists at moments of great exultation, as, for example, when the seventy return and say that the devils are made subject to them, or when He realises the imminence of the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore the removal of the chief barrier to His Kingdom's progress. All time is foreshortened; Satan falls from Heaven and the Son of Man appears in glory; but this is no forecast of history as we understand history. One evangelist tells us of a parable which He uttered precisely because of His perception that the disciples erroneously supposed "that the Kingdom of God was immediately to appear." All His insistence upon the coming Kingdom is focussed in the Passion, as has been shown in the text. When the revelation of God's inmost nature was completed in the completion of His own self-sacrifice, this brought with it the power that could change the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. From then onwards "He cometh with the clouds"; but the completion of His Kingdom when "every eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him," lies still in the future. The contrast of tenses in this passage can hardly be accidental; from the moment when He was lifted up from the earth in the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension (which are the revelation in successive phases of the one unchanging glory of God) His coming is a present fact; but our perception of His coming is something still growing as His Spirit guides us into all the truth, until at last we know even as we are known.APPENDIX IION MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITYIt may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances employ force—at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection is due, partly to a latent Manichæism which holds that matter is always evil, or at least "unspiritual," and partly to a very just fear that force may be wrongly used if its use is permitted at all. Yet there are some cases where the Church would plainly be not only at liberty, but morally bound, to use force.Suppose a clergyman begins to give teaching that is absolutely at variance with the doctrine of the Church, the Church may appeal to his better feelings and ask him to resign; but if he will not, the Church must assuredly have the right to turn him out, and that, if necessary, by force.No doubt in a civilised country what the Church does as a rule is to ask the State to act against the man, on the ground that he has broken contract and holds his position on false pretences. This is what the Mediæval Church called "handing the offender over to the secular arm."But let us imagine the situation in a Mission Church where a convert has, for penance, been excluded from attendance at public worship for a period. Suppose he insists upon coming; then certainly the congregation would be right forcibly to remove him. Again, supposing the use of force as discipline may be of advantage to moral development (and up to a certain stage I am sure it may), and supposing there is no civilised State to employ it, the Church will be right to do what is best for the character of those for whom it is concerned. But no doubt all this is purely preparatory to the positive spiritual work of the Church, which must always take the form of appeal and not of force.There is, however, so much confusion on the subject of moral and spiritual authority in general, that it may not be out of place to add here some remarks upon it.The word "authority" is derived from a Latin word which may perhaps be best translated by "weight."When we speak of a man of weight, or an opinion that carries weight, we have something very near the original meaning of the term authority. Sometimes we are inclined to think of authority as best represented by the political ruler, or the military commander. But these are not really typical kinds of authority. They are very special cases where authority is clothed with compelling force. But in the spheres of which we are thinking there is not necessarily present any compelling force at all. When we think of authority in religion, in its connection with morals and such questions, there is no force, at any rate necessarily, present at all, and the Church's authority in the true sense is not any the less because it does not practise the methods of the Inquisition: nor was it any greater in the days when to its own proper authority it added coercive power, appealing to people in the name of what is in itself not authority strictly speaking, at all. For if I believe just because the Church is an assembly of the saints of God and its formularies are summaries of their experience, then I am believing on the ground of the Church's authority. But if I believe because an officer of the Church threatens me with the rack in the case of disbelief, I am believing not because the Church has authority, but because I dislike physical pain.So authority always in the end means weight—what carries weight with our judgment. We can weigh one authority against another; we may weigh the authority of one theologian with that of another by considering which has shown the greater knowledge of the subject in question and the sounder judgment in dealing with it. In moral questions we do as a matter of fact perpetually come back to the man of moral weight. And what constitutes his weight is to begin with a certain uprightness in his own character, and then a certain sympathy and insight which enables him to understand how he would apply to the circumstances of other people the principles by which he lives in his own. So, for example, Aristotle in the end determines all moral questions by reference to the standard which the man of moral sense would use; everything in the last resort is determined simply by his judgment. Virtue, he says, resides in a mean between two vicious extremes, and the mean is to be determined by a principle which the man of moral sense would use. Later on, after an interlude of two or three books wisely interpolated, he comes to ask, Who is the man of moral sense? and he turns out to be the man who has the right principle enabling him to determine the mean between vicious extremes; that is to say, that his standard of judgment in the end is simply the good, sensible man, and for practical purposes that does well enough, because for practical purposes we do know whose judgment we value, we do know who it is whose approval we should care to win, whose approval would of itself assure us that our conduct was right, and whose disapproval would of itself go far at least to assure us that our conduct was wrong, or at any rate that the matter needed careful reconsideration.There is indeed another method than this of reliance upon the authority of a wise man, and it is represented by the other great thinker of Greece, by Plato. Plato's ideal method in moral questions was to try to determine the purpose of the whole universe and then determine how in any given circumstances a man may serve that purpose. The basis of his morals, in other words, was what we should call theological; and so far as we are able to apply this, it is the only finally satisfactory method; so far as we can say that the principles of Christianity imperatively demand some particular action or attitude of mind, we shall not care how little other authority we can quote, but shall say that we can see quite clearly that our allegiance to Christ and His religion involves a certain point of view for us; and if no one else has taken that point of view, provided we can find no flaw in our reasoning, we shall say none the less, This is the point of view which we, as Christians, are bound to take.That has been the method by which, as a matter of fact, most Christian reforms have been carried out. That was the way by which, in an instance to which I shall return in a moment, slavery was abolished. Slavery had been tolerated by the Christian Church for centuries. The authority of the Christian Church might therefore have been quoted as substantially in favour of it. A very large number of Christians did, in fact, favour retaining it, because, of course, the abolition of the slave trade was an interference with property, and heartrending appeals were made in the name of "the unfortunate widow with a few strong blacks," as in our day appeals are made against legislation in the name of the widow who has shares in breweries. But Wilberforce's point of view was simply this, that whatever the Church may have said through all these centuries, when you look at the Christian principle of the right way to treat human beings it condemns slavery; and if all the Christians in all the ages had denied that, it would not have altered the fact that, as we see it—so Wilberforce and his friends would have urged—as we see it, slavery is condemned; that is enough for us; we go forward in the certainty that we are carrying out the will of God. Wilberforce brought people round to his point of view; now you will hardly find a Christian to defend slavery as an institution. Some day, perhaps, it will be the same with war.But in most moral questions the authority to which we appeal is not that of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other. That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give any argument—an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it, even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is something more than any convention or social growth about the distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time to time to train children in which it would not be well to train grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development, spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and absolutely fundamental and invariable.Now, how is it that in society progress is actually made in morals? The appeal to authority can always be made in two ways. It can be made in the most obvious form in the interest of mere stagnation, by saying, "What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us," a thing nobody ever does say; or by saying, "What is good enough for us is good enough for our children," a thing which numbers of people say. While the first form may be some safeguard against wild experiments—and wild experiments in morals are more dangerous than wild experiments anywhere else in life, for a reason I will mention in a moment—yet the tendency of this appeal is to pure stagnation. But the right appeal is to ask, not what the great men of the past actually did, but what were the principles upon which they acted. What we want to be doing with the prophets of the last generation is not saying again, like parrots, just what they said, but finding out the principles and spirit of their life and applying that same spirit to circumstances which are changed just because those prophets lived and wrought. They would not have been prophets, they would not have been great men, if they had not changed in some degree the world they lived in. Then just because they have changed the world their action may no longer be appropriate; it is not the action which they themselves would now take if they were still alive and retained their power of development. What we do then is to appeal, not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle to the particular problem of slavery.In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive. It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the ages has built up. But the wisest man of all is surely he who, rejoicing in that great inheritance, can still appeal not to its outward form, but to its indwelling, living spirit, and carry forward the work which the past has done. The ages in the past that we value are not those in which people were mainly concerned to praise their predecessors, but those in which men were agreed to press forward to whatever new life God has in store. So it must be here: if we would be true to the great men of the past, to the authority of those who have built up our moral life, it will not be by standing still, but by moving on in the direction to which they point.The appeal to authority, then, will not be an appeal to practice, but always an appeal to principle; and so we shall be saved from that danger of moral experiment, a danger that is so immensely great because the individual who has made the experiment has thereby very often spoilt himself. One cannot experiment in the moral life with the detachment that we use in science. I may try mixing a couple of fluids together to see what happens, and I can regard the result quite accurately; but I cannot try the experiment of stealing, or of murder, in order to see what the real moral value of the thing is, because in the process of doing the act I shall vitiate my own soul; here the material in which we experiment is itself the instrument by which we have to judge; and the man who has once done an evil thing himself, very seldom has the same clearness of vision concerning its good and evil as the man who has kept true to some lofty purpose. The mere experiment, the mere trying what it feels like to be a murderer—not that anyone would take so extreme an instance as that—is always a method condemned in advance to futility, because in the process of making the experiment we destroy our power of judging the result. We want therefore to rely upon some authority; being unable to experiment for ourselves, we must follow the general rule that I have stated; the authority to which we appeal must be an authority of principle and not of practice.But what of the authority of our Lord Himself? To us who have accepted it, or who are trying to accept it, it is final; yet still, surely, in the spirit rather than in the letter. Why did He teach by a series of amazing paradoxes if it was not to prevent us setting up a code of rules as His legislation, if it was not to force us back upon the spirit of His teaching, behind the detailed regulations in which that spirit was embodied? Even here it is still true that the appeal is to the authority of His Spirit and not to that of detailed action or individual precept.And beyond all this, it is certain that He Himself wins His authority by first submitting Himself to the moral judgment of His people. He rejects, in the second and third of the Messianic temptations after His baptism, the method of coercion. He rejects this, and stands before men submitting Himself to their moral judgment, to their conscience, to their capacity to understand pure goodness and love, as that capacity has grown through the civilisation which God Himself had guided as the preparation for His final revelation in His Son. So He submits Himself first of all to our moral judgment; and thus our conscience, coming down to us, as it does, out of the Divinely-guided history of the past, is the supreme authority; if we choose Him to be the Guide of our life it is because our conscience has first pronounced Him to be the highest and the holiest, which we must needs love when we see it.APPENDIX IIION JUSTICE AND EDUCATIONAs long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true liberty.As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless, when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both. The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object, must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact, one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself; appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually conscious of its truth.The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test for a degree is "residence"—that is, an adequate share in a general life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some knowledge—not very much, it is true—but it never asks where or how he got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those who represent the system's success, and they are the great majority, though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or instinctive; but the action is right all the same.In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their interaction.The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and experience.Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the result of the interaction between two predominant educational types, which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages, and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is that in practice—whatever its theory may have been—in practice it is corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to educate people in direct relation to their social context, your educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time, the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public school. I mean they don't learn anything there." The instruments which for the most part this education has used have been the great literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because, while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The aim of this type of education has been to bring the student's mind into closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history), with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly (in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism. This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree, though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and, consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all social divisions.Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to despise his own people. And when once a man's native sympathies have been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply standards of judgment.Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and "get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good. Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but, also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge them—to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one remembers the words of Clough:—"'Old things need not be therefore true,'Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition. It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts in his own interest? I am very doubtful.I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously, in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said 'You must be getting along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.'" The religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.Now I wish to express a purely personal conviction with regard to these two types of teaching, and it is this: while we have got to incorporate all, or at any rate, nearly all, that the more modern type of education has given us, it has got to be used in such a way as to leave the great marks of the traditional type predominant. Education, I hold, should remain primarily corporate rather than individual, primarily spiritual (that is, effective through influence, and through an appeal to sympathy and imagination), rather than primarily intellectual (that is, effective through an appeal to intelligence and memory), primarily concerned with giving people the power to pronounce judgment on any facts with which they may come in contact rather than supplying them simply with the facts. It should be primarily co-operative and not primarily competitive.It is mainly the new democratic movements in education which have emphasised this view. Indeed, the Workers' Educational Association has understood more definitely than any other body I am aware of, that what it finds of supreme value in the great centres of education is the spirit of the place rather than the instruction; and those of us who have received the best, or at all events have been in a position to receive the best, that Oxford can give, and those who have had just a taste of her treasures at the Summer School, will agree that Oxford does more for us than any lectures do. But while we say that, we need also to insist on a greater energy and efficiency, a greater and more living contact with the world of to-day in some, at least, of the centres of the old traditional type. Yet it is the traditional type that must control, because the traditional type on the whole stands for spirit against machinery. I have no doubt it is true that the old schools and universities are amateurish in method; and I have no doubt that we ought to organise ourselves more efficiently. There is a good deal of waste that may be saved; but I shall regret the day when we become efficient at the cost of our spirit.I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the Workers' Educational Association you will find upon the whole the soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation. These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power shall be beneficent.APPENDIX IVON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITYThe position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body. In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to quote the following from his article—"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu Conference," in theChurch Quarterly Reviewfor January, 1914."On December 20th, 1912, the Bishop of Madras delivered an informal speech to the members of the National Conference of Missionaries, at Calcutta. This created in India and elsewhere a considerable amount of sensation. As in that speech he referred to something which the present writer had written and to an article in theChurch Quarterly Reviewby Dr. Frere,[#] and as his speech has been very widely misunderstood, I think I may be allowed to refer briefly to the points he raised. The views which he propounded were those which I had put forward in the 'Prayer Book Dictionary,' and I should like to be allowed to quote them again:[#] "The Reorganisation of Worship," by W. H. Frere, D.D., Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield (Church Quarterly Review, October, 1912).
"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart not with his lips only follow me."
"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart not with his lips only follow me."
And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was Garibaldi; and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of Italy is in the world to-day.
But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit—"I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."
The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To take up the cross did not mean bearing life's little inconveniences with equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one's neck, and be ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of Him:
"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."
"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."
Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making dull the one great adventure of the world.
There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God, Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow; and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."
Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinningHe shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinningHe shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.
APPENDIX I
ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS
It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.
We may take another instance from a slightly different department of thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.
So we may, I think, reverently believe that our Lord Himself passes through the experience of the apocalyptists at moments of great exultation, as, for example, when the seventy return and say that the devils are made subject to them, or when He realises the imminence of the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore the removal of the chief barrier to His Kingdom's progress. All time is foreshortened; Satan falls from Heaven and the Son of Man appears in glory; but this is no forecast of history as we understand history. One evangelist tells us of a parable which He uttered precisely because of His perception that the disciples erroneously supposed "that the Kingdom of God was immediately to appear." All His insistence upon the coming Kingdom is focussed in the Passion, as has been shown in the text. When the revelation of God's inmost nature was completed in the completion of His own self-sacrifice, this brought with it the power that could change the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. From then onwards "He cometh with the clouds"; but the completion of His Kingdom when "every eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him," lies still in the future. The contrast of tenses in this passage can hardly be accidental; from the moment when He was lifted up from the earth in the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension (which are the revelation in successive phases of the one unchanging glory of God) His coming is a present fact; but our perception of His coming is something still growing as His Spirit guides us into all the truth, until at last we know even as we are known.
APPENDIX II
ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY
It may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances employ force—at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection is due, partly to a latent Manichæism which holds that matter is always evil, or at least "unspiritual," and partly to a very just fear that force may be wrongly used if its use is permitted at all. Yet there are some cases where the Church would plainly be not only at liberty, but morally bound, to use force.
Suppose a clergyman begins to give teaching that is absolutely at variance with the doctrine of the Church, the Church may appeal to his better feelings and ask him to resign; but if he will not, the Church must assuredly have the right to turn him out, and that, if necessary, by force.
No doubt in a civilised country what the Church does as a rule is to ask the State to act against the man, on the ground that he has broken contract and holds his position on false pretences. This is what the Mediæval Church called "handing the offender over to the secular arm."
But let us imagine the situation in a Mission Church where a convert has, for penance, been excluded from attendance at public worship for a period. Suppose he insists upon coming; then certainly the congregation would be right forcibly to remove him. Again, supposing the use of force as discipline may be of advantage to moral development (and up to a certain stage I am sure it may), and supposing there is no civilised State to employ it, the Church will be right to do what is best for the character of those for whom it is concerned. But no doubt all this is purely preparatory to the positive spiritual work of the Church, which must always take the form of appeal and not of force.
There is, however, so much confusion on the subject of moral and spiritual authority in general, that it may not be out of place to add here some remarks upon it.
The word "authority" is derived from a Latin word which may perhaps be best translated by "weight."
When we speak of a man of weight, or an opinion that carries weight, we have something very near the original meaning of the term authority. Sometimes we are inclined to think of authority as best represented by the political ruler, or the military commander. But these are not really typical kinds of authority. They are very special cases where authority is clothed with compelling force. But in the spheres of which we are thinking there is not necessarily present any compelling force at all. When we think of authority in religion, in its connection with morals and such questions, there is no force, at any rate necessarily, present at all, and the Church's authority in the true sense is not any the less because it does not practise the methods of the Inquisition: nor was it any greater in the days when to its own proper authority it added coercive power, appealing to people in the name of what is in itself not authority strictly speaking, at all. For if I believe just because the Church is an assembly of the saints of God and its formularies are summaries of their experience, then I am believing on the ground of the Church's authority. But if I believe because an officer of the Church threatens me with the rack in the case of disbelief, I am believing not because the Church has authority, but because I dislike physical pain.
So authority always in the end means weight—what carries weight with our judgment. We can weigh one authority against another; we may weigh the authority of one theologian with that of another by considering which has shown the greater knowledge of the subject in question and the sounder judgment in dealing with it. In moral questions we do as a matter of fact perpetually come back to the man of moral weight. And what constitutes his weight is to begin with a certain uprightness in his own character, and then a certain sympathy and insight which enables him to understand how he would apply to the circumstances of other people the principles by which he lives in his own. So, for example, Aristotle in the end determines all moral questions by reference to the standard which the man of moral sense would use; everything in the last resort is determined simply by his judgment. Virtue, he says, resides in a mean between two vicious extremes, and the mean is to be determined by a principle which the man of moral sense would use. Later on, after an interlude of two or three books wisely interpolated, he comes to ask, Who is the man of moral sense? and he turns out to be the man who has the right principle enabling him to determine the mean between vicious extremes; that is to say, that his standard of judgment in the end is simply the good, sensible man, and for practical purposes that does well enough, because for practical purposes we do know whose judgment we value, we do know who it is whose approval we should care to win, whose approval would of itself assure us that our conduct was right, and whose disapproval would of itself go far at least to assure us that our conduct was wrong, or at any rate that the matter needed careful reconsideration.
There is indeed another method than this of reliance upon the authority of a wise man, and it is represented by the other great thinker of Greece, by Plato. Plato's ideal method in moral questions was to try to determine the purpose of the whole universe and then determine how in any given circumstances a man may serve that purpose. The basis of his morals, in other words, was what we should call theological; and so far as we are able to apply this, it is the only finally satisfactory method; so far as we can say that the principles of Christianity imperatively demand some particular action or attitude of mind, we shall not care how little other authority we can quote, but shall say that we can see quite clearly that our allegiance to Christ and His religion involves a certain point of view for us; and if no one else has taken that point of view, provided we can find no flaw in our reasoning, we shall say none the less, This is the point of view which we, as Christians, are bound to take.
That has been the method by which, as a matter of fact, most Christian reforms have been carried out. That was the way by which, in an instance to which I shall return in a moment, slavery was abolished. Slavery had been tolerated by the Christian Church for centuries. The authority of the Christian Church might therefore have been quoted as substantially in favour of it. A very large number of Christians did, in fact, favour retaining it, because, of course, the abolition of the slave trade was an interference with property, and heartrending appeals were made in the name of "the unfortunate widow with a few strong blacks," as in our day appeals are made against legislation in the name of the widow who has shares in breweries. But Wilberforce's point of view was simply this, that whatever the Church may have said through all these centuries, when you look at the Christian principle of the right way to treat human beings it condemns slavery; and if all the Christians in all the ages had denied that, it would not have altered the fact that, as we see it—so Wilberforce and his friends would have urged—as we see it, slavery is condemned; that is enough for us; we go forward in the certainty that we are carrying out the will of God. Wilberforce brought people round to his point of view; now you will hardly find a Christian to defend slavery as an institution. Some day, perhaps, it will be the same with war.
But in most moral questions the authority to which we appeal is not that of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other. That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give any argument—an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it, even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.
But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is something more than any convention or social growth about the distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.
But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time to time to train children in which it would not be well to train grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development, spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and absolutely fundamental and invariable.
Now, how is it that in society progress is actually made in morals? The appeal to authority can always be made in two ways. It can be made in the most obvious form in the interest of mere stagnation, by saying, "What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us," a thing nobody ever does say; or by saying, "What is good enough for us is good enough for our children," a thing which numbers of people say. While the first form may be some safeguard against wild experiments—and wild experiments in morals are more dangerous than wild experiments anywhere else in life, for a reason I will mention in a moment—yet the tendency of this appeal is to pure stagnation. But the right appeal is to ask, not what the great men of the past actually did, but what were the principles upon which they acted. What we want to be doing with the prophets of the last generation is not saying again, like parrots, just what they said, but finding out the principles and spirit of their life and applying that same spirit to circumstances which are changed just because those prophets lived and wrought. They would not have been prophets, they would not have been great men, if they had not changed in some degree the world they lived in. Then just because they have changed the world their action may no longer be appropriate; it is not the action which they themselves would now take if they were still alive and retained their power of development. What we do then is to appeal, not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle to the particular problem of slavery.
In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive. It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the ages has built up. But the wisest man of all is surely he who, rejoicing in that great inheritance, can still appeal not to its outward form, but to its indwelling, living spirit, and carry forward the work which the past has done. The ages in the past that we value are not those in which people were mainly concerned to praise their predecessors, but those in which men were agreed to press forward to whatever new life God has in store. So it must be here: if we would be true to the great men of the past, to the authority of those who have built up our moral life, it will not be by standing still, but by moving on in the direction to which they point.
The appeal to authority, then, will not be an appeal to practice, but always an appeal to principle; and so we shall be saved from that danger of moral experiment, a danger that is so immensely great because the individual who has made the experiment has thereby very often spoilt himself. One cannot experiment in the moral life with the detachment that we use in science. I may try mixing a couple of fluids together to see what happens, and I can regard the result quite accurately; but I cannot try the experiment of stealing, or of murder, in order to see what the real moral value of the thing is, because in the process of doing the act I shall vitiate my own soul; here the material in which we experiment is itself the instrument by which we have to judge; and the man who has once done an evil thing himself, very seldom has the same clearness of vision concerning its good and evil as the man who has kept true to some lofty purpose. The mere experiment, the mere trying what it feels like to be a murderer—not that anyone would take so extreme an instance as that—is always a method condemned in advance to futility, because in the process of making the experiment we destroy our power of judging the result. We want therefore to rely upon some authority; being unable to experiment for ourselves, we must follow the general rule that I have stated; the authority to which we appeal must be an authority of principle and not of practice.
But what of the authority of our Lord Himself? To us who have accepted it, or who are trying to accept it, it is final; yet still, surely, in the spirit rather than in the letter. Why did He teach by a series of amazing paradoxes if it was not to prevent us setting up a code of rules as His legislation, if it was not to force us back upon the spirit of His teaching, behind the detailed regulations in which that spirit was embodied? Even here it is still true that the appeal is to the authority of His Spirit and not to that of detailed action or individual precept.
And beyond all this, it is certain that He Himself wins His authority by first submitting Himself to the moral judgment of His people. He rejects, in the second and third of the Messianic temptations after His baptism, the method of coercion. He rejects this, and stands before men submitting Himself to their moral judgment, to their conscience, to their capacity to understand pure goodness and love, as that capacity has grown through the civilisation which God Himself had guided as the preparation for His final revelation in His Son. So He submits Himself first of all to our moral judgment; and thus our conscience, coming down to us, as it does, out of the Divinely-guided history of the past, is the supreme authority; if we choose Him to be the Guide of our life it is because our conscience has first pronounced Him to be the highest and the holiest, which we must needs love when we see it.
APPENDIX III
ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION
As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true liberty.
As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless, when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both. The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.
But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object, must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact, one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself; appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually conscious of its truth.
The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test for a degree is "residence"—that is, an adequate share in a general life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some knowledge—not very much, it is true—but it never asks where or how he got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."
At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those who represent the system's success, and they are the great majority, though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or instinctive; but the action is right all the same.
In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their interaction.
The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and experience.
Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the result of the interaction between two predominant educational types, which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages, and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is that in practice—whatever its theory may have been—in practice it is corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to educate people in direct relation to their social context, your educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time, the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public school. I mean they don't learn anything there." The instruments which for the most part this education has used have been the great literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because, while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The aim of this type of education has been to bring the student's mind into closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history), with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly (in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism. This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.
The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree, though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and, consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all social divisions.
Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to another is to expose him to a terrible temptation—the temptation to despise his own people. And when once a man's native sympathies have been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply standards of judgment.
Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and "get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.
The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good. Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but, also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge them—to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one remembers the words of Clough:—
"'Old things need not be therefore true,'Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."
"'Old things need not be therefore true,'Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."
"'Old things need not be therefore true,'
Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."
Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition. It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts in his own interest? I am very doubtful.
I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously, in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said 'You must be getting along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.'" The religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.
Now I wish to express a purely personal conviction with regard to these two types of teaching, and it is this: while we have got to incorporate all, or at any rate, nearly all, that the more modern type of education has given us, it has got to be used in such a way as to leave the great marks of the traditional type predominant. Education, I hold, should remain primarily corporate rather than individual, primarily spiritual (that is, effective through influence, and through an appeal to sympathy and imagination), rather than primarily intellectual (that is, effective through an appeal to intelligence and memory), primarily concerned with giving people the power to pronounce judgment on any facts with which they may come in contact rather than supplying them simply with the facts. It should be primarily co-operative and not primarily competitive.
It is mainly the new democratic movements in education which have emphasised this view. Indeed, the Workers' Educational Association has understood more definitely than any other body I am aware of, that what it finds of supreme value in the great centres of education is the spirit of the place rather than the instruction; and those of us who have received the best, or at all events have been in a position to receive the best, that Oxford can give, and those who have had just a taste of her treasures at the Summer School, will agree that Oxford does more for us than any lectures do. But while we say that, we need also to insist on a greater energy and efficiency, a greater and more living contact with the world of to-day in some, at least, of the centres of the old traditional type. Yet it is the traditional type that must control, because the traditional type on the whole stands for spirit against machinery. I have no doubt it is true that the old schools and universities are amateurish in method; and I have no doubt that we ought to organise ourselves more efficiently. There is a good deal of waste that may be saved; but I shall regret the day when we become efficient at the cost of our spirit.
I believe that in the University Tutorial Classes organised by the Workers' Educational Association you will find upon the whole the soundest educational principles which are at this moment operative anywhere in England. The classes choose their own subjects, and, as a general rule, they choose those subjects about which nobody knows the truth. Those are always the best instruments of education; for if anyone knows the truth, he has only to say what it is and his hearers believe him. That may be instruction, but it is not education. Real education is always best conducted as a joint search for truth; and in these Tutorial Classes we have, not one teacher and thirty hearers, but thirty-one fellow students, one of whom has commenced the study earlier than the rest, and can therefore act as guide.
These are wide-reaching problems; and, indeed, there is no limit to the range of the influence of education. It is the supreme regenerative force. What is the chief obstacle of all who work for progress in any department of life? Always the apathy of those whom we especially wish to help. And why are they apathetic? Simply because they have had no opportunity of finding out what is the life from which they are excluded. But open by the merest chink the door of that treasure-house wherein are contained the garnered stores of literature and science, of history and art, and they will be foremost in demanding that they shall no longer be excluded from the birthright of the sons of civilisation. These are the good things of which no one is deprived because another possesses them; they are the true social goods of which possession by one redounds to the enrichment of all. It is the taste of them that can most stimulate the zeal for progress; and as it supplies the motive power, so it supplies also the directive wisdom. The perfecting and expansion of our education is just what is most vital for social progress to-day, and for the establishment of real justice in our social life, for it alone can bring within the reach of all that knowledge which is at once the source of power and the guarantee that the power shall be beneficent.
APPENDIX IV
ON ORDERS AND CATHOLICITY
The position taken in the text of these lectures might be summarised as follows: It is the living body which gives authority to its Orders; it is not the possession of valid Orders which gives authority to the body. In support of this view I have the kind permission of Dr. Headlam to quote the following from his article—"Notes on Reunion: The Kikuyu Conference," in theChurch Quarterly Reviewfor January, 1914.
"On December 20th, 1912, the Bishop of Madras delivered an informal speech to the members of the National Conference of Missionaries, at Calcutta. This created in India and elsewhere a considerable amount of sensation. As in that speech he referred to something which the present writer had written and to an article in theChurch Quarterly Reviewby Dr. Frere,[#] and as his speech has been very widely misunderstood, I think I may be allowed to refer briefly to the points he raised. The views which he propounded were those which I had put forward in the 'Prayer Book Dictionary,' and I should like to be allowed to quote them again:
[#] "The Reorganisation of Worship," by W. H. Frere, D.D., Superior of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield (Church Quarterly Review, October, 1912).