I have tried in previous lectures to show that the apprehension of
religious truth does not depend upon some special kind of intuition;
that it is not due to some special faculty superior to and different in
kind from our ordinary intellectual activities, but to an exercise of
the same intellectual faculties by which we attain to truth in other
matters--including, however, especially the wholly unique faculty of
immediately discerning values or pronouncing moral judgements. The
word 'faith' should, as it seems to me, be used to express not a
mysterious capacity for attaining to knowledge without thought or
without evidence, but to indicate some of the manifold characteristics
by which our religious knowledge is distinguished from the knowledge
either of common life or of the physical Sciences. If I had time there
would be much to be said about these characteristics, and I think I
could show that the popular distinction between knowledge and religious
{128} faith finds whatever real justification it possesses in these
characteristics of religious knowledge. I might insist on the
frequently implicit and unanalysed character of religious thinking;
upon the incompleteness and inadequacy of even the fullest account that
the maturest and acutest Philosopher can give of ultimate Reality; upon
the merely probable and analogical character of much of the reasoning
which is necessarily employed both in the most popular and in the most
philosophical kinds of reasoning about such matters; and above all upon
the prominent place which moral judgements occupy in religious thought,
moral judgements which, on account of their immediate character and
their emotional setting, are often not recognized in their true
character as judgements of the Reason. Most of the mistakes into which
popular thinking has fallen in this matter--the mistakes which
culminate in the famous examination-paper definition of faith as 'a
means of believing that which we know not to be true'--would be avoided
if we would only remember, with St. Paul and most of the greater
religious thinkers, that the true antithesis is not between faith and
reason but between faith and sight. All religious belief implies a
belief in something which cannot be touched or tasted or handled, and
which cannot be established by any mere logical deduction from what can
be touched or tasted or handled. So far from implying {129} scepticism
as to the power of Reason, this opposition between faith and sight
actually asserts the possibility of attaining by thought to a knowledge
of realities which cannot be touched or tasted or handled--a knowledge
of equal validity and trustworthiness with that which is popularly said
to be due to the senses, though Plato has taught us once for all[1]
that the senses by themselves never give us real knowledge, and that in
the apprehension of the most ordinary matter of fact there is implied
the action of the self-same intellect by which alone we can reach the
knowledge of God.
It may further be pointed out that, though neither religious knowledge
nor moral knowledge are mere emotion, they are both of them very
closely connected with certain emotions. Great moral discoveries are
made, not so much by superior intellectual power, as by superior
interest in the subject-matter of Morality. Very ordinary intelligence
can see, when it is really brought to bear upon the matter, the
irrationality or immorality of bad customs, oppressions, social
injustices; but the people who have led the revolt against these things
have generally been the people who have felt intensely about them. So
it is with the more distinctly religious knowledge. Religious thought
and insight are largely dependent upon the emotions to which religious
{130} ideas and beliefs appeal. The absence of religious thought and
definite religious belief is very often (I am far from saying always)
due to a want of interest in Religion; but that does not prove that
religious thought is not the work of the intellect, any more than the
fact that a man is ignorant of Politics because he takes no interest in
Politics proves that political truth is a mere matter of emotion, and
has nothing to do with the understanding. Thought is always guided by
interest--a truth which must not be distorted with a certain modern
school of thought, if indeed it can properly be called thought, into
the assertion that thinking is nothing but willing, and that therefore
we are at liberty to think just what we please.
And that leads on to a further point. Emotion and desire are very
closely connected with the will. A man's moral insight and the
development of his thought about moral questions depend very largely
upon the extent to which he acts up to whatever light he has. Vice, as
Aristotle put it, is _phthartike arches_--destructive of moral first
principles. Moral insight is largely dependent upon character. And so
is religious insight. Thus it is quite true to say that religious
belief depends in part upon the state of the will. This doctrine has
been so scandalously abused by many Theologians and Apologists that I
use it with great hesitation. I have no sympathy {131} with the idea
that we are justified in believing a religious doctrine merely because
we wish it to be true, or with the insinuation that non-belief in a
religious truth is always or necessarily due to moral obliquity. But
still it is undeniable that a man's ethical and religious beliefs are
to some extent affected by the state of his will. That is so with all
knowledge to some extent; for progress in knowledge requires attention,
and is largely dependent upon interest. If I take no interest in the
properties of curves or the square root of -1, I am not very likely to
make a good mathematician. This connexion of knowledge with interest
applies in an exceptional degree to religious knowledge: and that is
one of the points which I think many religious thinkers have intended
to emphasize by their too hard and fast distinctions between faith and
knowledge.
Belief itself is thus to some extent affected by the state of the will;
and still more emphatically does the extent to which belief affects
action depend upon the will. Many beliefs which we quite sincerely
hold are what have been called 'otiose beliefs'; we do not by an effort
of the will realize them sufficiently strongly for them to affect
action. Many a man knows perfectly that his course of life will injure
or destroy his physical health; it is not through intellectual
scepticism that he disobeys his {132} physician's prescriptions, but
because other desires and inclinations prevent his attending to them
and acting upon them. It is obvious that to men like St. Paul and
Luther faith meant much more than a mere state of the intellect; it
included a certain emotional and a certain volitional attitude; it
included love and it included obedience. Whether our intellectual
beliefs about Religion are energetic enough to influence action, does
to an enormous extent depend upon our wills. Faith is, then, used, and
almost inevitably used, in such a great variety of senses that I do not
like to lay down one definite and exclusive definition of it; but it
would be safe to say that, for many purposes and in many connexions,
religious faith means the deliberate adoption by an effort of the will,
as practically certain for purposes of action and of feeling, of a
religious belief which to the intellect is, or may be, merely probable.
For purposes of life it is entirely reasonable to treat probabilities
as certainties. If a man has reason to think his friend is
trustworthy, he will do well to trust him wholly and implicitly. If a
man has reason to think that a certain view of the Universe is the most
probable one, he will do well habitually to allow that conviction to
dominate not merely his actions, but the habitual tenour of his
emotional and spiritual life. We should not love a human being much if
we allowed ourselves habitually to {133} contemplate the logical
possibility that the loved one was unworthy of, or irresponsive to, our
affection. We could not love God if we habitually contemplated the
fact that His existence rests for us upon judgements in which there is
more or less possibility of error, though there is no reason why we
should, in our speculative moments, claim a greater certainty for them
than seems to be reasonable. The doctrine that 'probability is the
guide of life' is one on which every sensible man habitually acts in
all other relations of life: Bishop Butler was right in contending that
it should be applied no less unhesitatingly to the matter of religious
belief and religious aspiration.
The view which I have taken of the nature of faith may be illustrated
by the position of Clement of Alexandria. It is clear from his
writings that by faith he meant a kind of conviction falling short of
demonstration or immediate intellectual insight, and dependent in part
upon the state of the will and the heart. Clement did not disparage
knowledge in the interests of faith: faith was to him a more elementary
kind of knowledge resting largely upon moral conviction, and the
foundation of that higher state of intellectual apprehension which he
called Gnosis. I do not mean, of course, to adopt Clement's Philosophy
as a whole; I merely refer to it as illustrating the point that,
properly considered, faith is, or rather includes, a particular kind or
stage {134} of knowledge, and is not a totally different and even
opposite state of mind. It would be easy to show that this has been
fully recognized by many, if not most, of the great Christian thinkers.
One last point. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between
the process by which psychologically a man arrives at a religious or
other truth and the reasons which make it true. Because I deny that
the truth of God's existence can reasonably be accepted on the basis of
an immediate judgement or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that
an apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of Christianity, as of
other religions, actually exists. The religious belief of the vast
majority of persons has always rested, and must always rest, very
largely upon tradition, education, environment, authority of one kind
or another--authority supported or confirmed by a varying measure of
independent reflection or experience. And, just where the influence of
authority is most complete and overwhelming, it is least felt to be
authority. The person whose beliefs are most entirely produced by
education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions
are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is
not the case--even where the religious man is taking a new departure,
revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief
absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his
society--I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due
to unobserved and unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most
cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would himself give some
reason for his change of faith is obvious, though the reason which he
would allege would not in all cases be the one which really caused the
change of religion. There may be other psychological influences which
cause belief besides the influence of environment: in some cases the
psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether beyond analysis.
But, though I do not think M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming
that a belief is true, and must come directly from God, simply because
we cannot easily explain its genesis by the individual's environment
and psychological antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist
that it is not proved to be false because it was not adopted primarily,
or at all, on adequate theoretical grounds. A belief which arose at
first entirely without logical justification, or it may be on
intellectual grounds subsequently discovered to be inadequate or false,
may nevertheless be one which can and does justify itself to the
reflective intellect of the person himself or of other persons. And
many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubtedly arisen in this
way. Even in physical Science we all know that there is no Logic of
discovery. It {136} is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon
that he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played in
scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the consequent need of
scientific imagination. Very often the new scientific idea comes into
the discoverer's mind, he knows not how or why. Some great man of
Science--I think, Helmholtz--said of a brilliant discovery of his, 'It
was given to me.' But it was not true because it came to Helmholtz in
this way, but because it was subsequently verified and proved. Now,
undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, often do present
themselves to the minds of individuals in an intuitive and
unaccountable way. They may subsequently be justified at the bar of
Reason: and yet Reason might never have discovered them for itself.
They would never have come into the world unless they had presented
themselves at first to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations,
immediate Revelations: and yet (once again) the fact that they so
present themselves does not by itself prove them to be true.
I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the analogy of Poetry. I
suppose few people will push the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to
the length of denying that poets do sometimes see and teach us truths.
No one--least of all one who is not even a verse-maker himself--can, I
suppose, analyse the intellectual process by which a poet {137} gets at
his truths. The insight by which he arrives at them is closely
connected with emotions of various kinds: and yet the truths are not
themselves emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the fact
that the poet has felt such and such emotions. They are propositions
about the nature of things, not merely about the poet's mental states.
And yet the truths are not true because the poet _feels_ them, as he
would say--no matter how passionately he feels them. There is no
separate organ of poetic truth: and not all the things that poets have
passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical thoughts have been
very false thoughts. But, if they are true, they must be true for good
logical reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in some cases by
subsequent reflection be able to disentangle and set forth. Yet the
poet did not get at those truths by way of philosophical reflection:
or, if he was led to them by any logical process, he could not have
analysed his own reasoning. The poet could not have produced the
arguments of the philosopher: the philosopher without the poet's lead
might never have seen the truth. I am afraid I must not stay to defend
or illustrate this position: I will only say that the poets I should
most naturally go to for illustration would be such poets as
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though perhaps all three are a
little {138} too consciously philosophic to supply the ideal
illustration.
I do not think it will be difficult to apply these reflections to the
case of religious and ethical truth. All religious truth, as I hold,
depends logically upon inference; inference from the whole body of our
experiences, among which the most important place is held by our
immediate moral judgements. The truth of Theism is in that sense a
truth discernible by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it was
first discovered, it was arrived at by the inferences which I have
endeavoured to some extent to analyse, or by one of the many lines of
thought which may lead to the same conclusions. It was not the Greek
philosophers so much as the Jewish prophets who taught the world true
Monotheism. Hosea, Amos, the two Isaiahs probably arrived at their
Monotheism largely by intuition; or (in so far as it was by inferential
processes) the premisses of their argument were very probably inherited
beliefs of earlier Judaism which would not commend themselves without
qualification to a modern thinker. In its essentials the Monotheism of
Isaiah is a reasonable belief; we accept it because it is reasonable,
not because Isaiah had an intuition that it was true; for we have
rejected many things which to Isaiah probably seemed no less
self-evidently true. And yet it would be a profound mistake to assume
that {139} the philosophers who now defend Isaiah's creed would ever
have arrived at it without Isaiah's aid.
I hope that by this time you will have seen to some extent the spirit
in which I am approaching the special subject of to-day's lecture--the
question of Revelation. In some of the senses that have been given to
it, the idea of Revelation is one which hardly any one trained in the
school--that is to say, any school--of modern Philosophy is likely to
accept. The idea that pieces of information have been supernaturally
and without any employment of their own intellectual faculties
communicated at various times to particular persons, their truth being
guaranteed by miracles--in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary
course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative power--is one
which is already rejected by most modern theologians, even among those
who would generally be called rather conservative theologians. I will
not now argue the question whether any miraculous event, however well
attested, could possibly be sufficient evidence for the truth of
spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I will merely remark
that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical
criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles
could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In
proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative
tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would
usually be classed among the defenders of miracles--men like the Bishop
of Ely or Professor Sanday of Oxford--are content to speak of such
evidences. They admit the difficulty of proving that such miraculous
events really happened thousands of years ago on the strength of
narratives written at the very earliest fifty years after the alleged
event, and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles on the
evidence of a Revelation already accepted than to accept the revelation
on the evidence of the miracles. I shall have a word to say on this
question of miracles next time; but for the present I want to
establish, or rather without much argument to put before you for your
consideration, this position; that the idea of revelation cannot be
admitted in the sense of a communication of truth by God, claiming to
be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic reasonableness or of
the intellectual or spiritual insight of the person to whom it is made,
but on account of the historical evidence for miraculous occurrences
said to have taken place in connexion with such communication. The
most that can reasonably be contended for is that super-normal
occurrences of this kind may possess a certain corroborative value in
support of a Revelation claiming to be accepted on other grounds.
What place then is left for the idea of Revelation? {141} I will ask
you to go back for a moment to the conclusions of our first lecture.
We saw that from the idealistic point of view all knowledge may be
looked upon as a partial communication to the human soul of the
thoughts or experiences of the divine Mind. There is a sense then in
which all truth is revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a
sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, all moral and
spiritual truth may be regarded as revealed truth. And in particular
those immediate judgements about good and evil in which we have found
the sole means of knowing the divine character and purposes must be
looked on as divinely implanted knowledge--none the less divinely
implanted because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, quite
natural, normal, and consistent with law. Nobody but an Atheist ought
to talk about the unassisted human intellect: no one who acquiesces in
the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of God ought either on
the one hand to deny the existence of Revelation, or on the other to
speak of Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible.
But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of judging about spiritual
and moral matters to the ordinary human intellect, it would be a
grievous mistake to assume that all men have an equal measure of this
power. Because we assert that all moral and spiritual truth comes to
men by {142} Revelation, it does not follow that there are not degrees
of Revelation. And it is one of the special characteristics of
religious and moral truth that it is in a peculiar degree dependent
upon the superior insight of those exceptional men to whom have been
accorded extraordinary degrees of moral and spiritual insight. Even in
Science, as we have seen, we cannot dispense with genius: very ordinary
men can satisfy themselves of the truth of a hypothesis when it is once
suggested, though they would have been quite incompetent to discover
that hypothesis for themselves. Still more unquestionably are there
moral and spiritual truths which, when once discovered, can be seen to
be true by men of very commonplace intellect and commonplace character.
The truths are seen and passed on to others, who accept them partly on
authority, by way of social inheritance and tradition; partly because
they are confirmed in various degrees by their own independent
judgement and experience. Here then--in the discovery of new spiritual
truth--we encounter that higher and exceptional degree of spiritual and
ethical insight which in a special and pre-eminent sense we ought to
regard as Revelation or Inspiration. Here there is room, in the
evolution of Religion and Morality, for the influence of the men of
moral or religious genius--the Prophets, the Apostles, the Founders and
Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight
are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the
leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the
turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious
progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the
term Revelation in a supreme or culminating sense.
It is, as it seems to me, extremely important that we should not
altogether divorce the idea of Revelation from those kinds of moral and
religious truth which are arrived at by the ordinary working of the
human intellect. The ultimate moral judgements no doubt must be
intuitive or immediate, but in our deductions from them--in their
application both to practical life and to theories about God and the
Universe--there is room for much intellectual work of the kind which we
commonly associate rather with the philosopher than with the prophet.
But the philosopher may be also a prophet. The philosophically trained
Greek Fathers were surely right in recognizing that men like Socrates
and Plato were to be numbered among those to whom the Spirit of God had
spoken in an exceptional degree. They too spoke in the power of the
indwelling Logos. But still it is quite natural that we should
associate the idea of Revelation or Inspiration more particularly with
that kind of moral and intellectual discovery which comes to
exceptional men by way {144} of apparent intuition or immediate
insight. We associate the idea of inspiration rather with the poet
than with the man of Science, and with the prophet rather than with the
systematic philosopher. It is quite natural, therefore, that we should
associate the idea of Revelation more especially with religious
teachers of the intuitive order like the Jewish prophets than with even
those philosophers who have also been great practical teachers of
Ethics and Religion. But it is most important to recognize that there
is no hard and fast line to be drawn between the two classes. The
Jewish prophets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a great
deal of hard thinking, though the thinking is for the most part
unexplicit and the mode of expression poetic. 'Their idols are silver
and gold; even the work of men's hands. . . . They have hands and
handle not; feet have they and walk not: neither speak they through
their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble
rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his
argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical
argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of
all--the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself--a natural instinct of
reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came by the truth
that he communicated to men; but, though I would not deny that the
deepest {145} truth came to him chiefly by a supreme gift of intuition,
there are obvious indications of profound intellectual thought in his
teaching. Recall for a moment his arguments against the misuse of the
Sabbath, against the superstition of unclean meats, against the
Sadducean objection to the Resurrection. I want to avoid at present
dogmatic phraseology; so I will only submit in passing that this is
only what we should expect if the early Church was right in thinking of
Christ as the supreme expression in the moral and religious sphere of
the Logos or Reason of God.
The thought of great religious thinkers is none the less Revelation
because it involves the use of their reasoning faculties. But I
guarded myself against being supposed, in contending for the
possibility of a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, to
assume that religious truth had always come to men in this way, or even
that the greatest steps in religious progress have usually taken the
form of explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to
distinguish between the way in which a belief comes to be entertained
and the reasons for its being true. All sorts of psychological causes
have contributed to generate religious beliefs. And when once we have
discovered grounds in our own reflection or experience for believing
them to be true, there is no reason why we should not regard all of
them as {146} pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, for
instance, had a share in the development of religious ideas. We might
even admit the possibility that the human race would never have been
led to think of the immortality of the soul but for primitive ideas
about ghosts suggested by the phenomena of dreams. The truth of the
doctrine is neither proved nor disproved by such an account of its
origin; but, if that belief is true and dreams have played a part in
the process by which man has been led to it, no Theist surely can
refuse to recognize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a higher
level, we are told by the author of the Acts that St. Peter was led to
accept the great principle of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a
sheet let down from heaven. There is no reason why that account should
not be historically true. The psychologist may very easily account for
St. Peter's vision by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching
of Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that does not
prevent us recognizing that vision as an instrument of divine
Revelation. We at the present day do not believe in this fundamental
principle of Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's; for we
know that dreams are not always truth or always edifying. We believe
in that principle on other grounds--the convincing grounds (among
others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth {147} on the
following morning. But that need not prevent our recognizing that God
may have communicated that truth to the men of that generation--and
through them to us--partly by means of that dream.
The two principles then for which I wish to contend are these: (1) that
Revelation is a matter of degree; (2) that no Revelation can be
accepted in the long run merely because it came to a particular person
in a peculiarly intuitive or immediate way. It may be that M. Auguste
Sabatier is right in seeing the most immediate contact of God with the
human soul in those intuitive convictions which can least easily be
accounted for by ordinary psychological causes; in those new departures
of religious insight, those unaccountable comings of new thoughts into
the mind, which constitute the great crises or turning-points of
religious history. But, though the coming of such thoughts may often
be accepted by the individual as direct evidences of a divine origin,
the Metaphysician, on looking back upon them, cannot treat the fact
that the psychologist cannot account for them, as a convincing proof of
such an origin, apart from our judgement upon the contents of what
claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts
sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even
now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic
suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the
suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God,
may see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not till then.
From this point of view it is clear that we are able to recognize
various degrees and various kinds of divine revelation in many
different Religions, philosophies, systems of ethical teaching. We are
able to recognize the importance to the world of the great historical
Religions, in all of which we can acknowledge a measure of Revelation.
The fact that the truths which they teach (in so far as they are true)
can now be recognized as true by philosophic thought, does not show
that the world would ever have evolved those thoughts, apart from the
influence of the great revealing personalities. Philosophy itself--the
Philosophy of the professed philosophers--has no doubt contributed a
very important element to the content of the historical Religions; but
it is only in proportion as they become part of a system of religious
teaching, and the possession of an organized religious community, that
the ideas of the philosophers really come home to multitudes of men,
and shape the history of the world. Nor in many cases would the
philosophers themselves have seen what they have seen but for the great
epoch-making thoughts of the great religion-making periods. And the
same considerations which show the importance of religious movements in
the {149} past tend also to emphasize the importance of the historical
Religion and of the religious community in which it is enshrined in
modern times. Because religious truth can now be defended by the use
of our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all possess these
faculties in some degree, it is absurd to suppose that the ordinary
individual, if left to himself, would be likely to evolve a true
religious system for himself--any more than he would be likely to
discern for himself the truths that were first seen by Euclid or Newton
if he were not taught them. To under-estimate the importance of the
great historical Religions and their creators has been the besetting
sin of technical religious Philosophy. Metaphysicians have in truth
often written about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts of
religious history.
But because we recognize a measure of truth in all the historical
Religions, it does not follow that we can recognize an equal amount of
truth in all of them. The idea that all the Religions teach much the
same thing--or that, while they vary about that unimportant part of
Religion which is called doctrine or dogma, they are all agreed about
Morality--is an idea which could only occur to the self-complaisant
ignorance which of late years has done most of the theological writing
in the correspondence columns of our newspapers. The real student of
comparative {150} Religion knows that it is only at a rather advanced
stage in the development of Religion that Religion becomes in any
important degree an ethical teacher at all. Even the highest and most
ethical Religions are not agreed either in their Ethics or in their
Theology. Not only can we recognize higher and lower Religions; but
the highest Religions, among many things which they have in common, are
at certain points diametrically antagonistic to each other. It is
impossible therefore reasonably to maintain that fashionable attitude
of mind towards these Religions which my friend Professor Inge once
described as a sort of honorary membership of all Religions except
one's own. If we are to regard the historical Religions as being of
any importance to our own personal religious life, we must choose
between them. If we put aside the case of Judaism in its most
cultivated modern form, a form in which it has been largely influenced
by Christianity, I suppose there is practically only one Religion which
would be in the least likely to appeal to a modern philosophical
student of Religion as a possible alternative to Christianity--and that
is Buddhism. But Buddhist Ethics are not the same as Christian Ethics.
Buddhist Ethics are ascetic: the Christianity which Christ taught was
anti-ascetic. In its view of the future, Buddhism is pessimistic;
Christianity is optimistic. Much as {151} Buddhism has done to
inculcate Humanity and Charity, the principle of Buddhist Humanity is
not the same as that of Christianity. Humanity is encouraged by the
Buddhist (in so far as he is really influenced by his own formal creed)
not from a motive of disinterested affection, but as a means of
escaping from the evils of personal and individual existence, and so
winning Nirvana. We cannot at one and the same time adhere to the
Ethics of Buddhism and to those of Christianity, though I am far from
saying that Christians have nothing to learn either from Buddhist
teaching or from Buddhist practice. Still less can we at one and the
same time be Atheists with the Buddhist and Theists with the Christian;
look forward with the Buddhist to the extinction of personal
consciousness and with the Christian to a fuller and more satisfying
life. To take an interest in comparative Religion is not to be
religious; to be religious implies a certain exclusive attachment to
some definite form of religious belief, though it may of course often
be a belief to which many historical influences have contributed.
I have been trying to lead you to a view of Revelation which recognizes
the existence and the importance of those exceptional religious minds
to whom is due the foundation and development of the great historical
Religions, while at the same time we refuse, in the last resort, to
recognize any {152} revelation as true except on the ground that its
truth can be independently verified. I do not mean to deny that the
individual must at first, and may quite reasonably in some cases
throughout life, accept much of his religious belief on authority; but
that is only because he may be justified in thinking that such and such
a person, or more probably such and such a religious community, is more
likely to be right than himself. Rational submission to authority in
this or that individual postulates independent judgement on the part of
others. I am far from saying that every individual is bound to satisfy
himself by personal enquiry as to the truth of every element in his own
Religion; but, if and so far as he determines to do so, he cannot
reasonably accept an alleged revelation on any other ground than that
it comes home to him, that the content of that Religion appeals to him
as true, as satisfying the demands of his intellect and of his
conscience. The question in which most of us, I imagine, are most
vitally interested is whether the Christian Religion is a Religion
which we can accept on these grounds. That it possesses some truth,
that whatever in it is true comes from God--that much is likely to be
admitted by all who believe in any kind of Religion in the sense in
which we have been discussing Religion. The great question for us is,
'Can we find any reason for the modern man {153} identifying himself in
any exclusive way with the historical Christian Religion? Granted that
there is some truth in all Religions, does Christianity contain the
most truth? Is it in any sense the one absolute, final, universal
Religion?'
That will be the subject for our consideration in the next lecture.
But meanwhile I want to suggest to you one very broad provisional
answer to our problem. Christianity alone of the historical Religions
teaches those great truths to which we have been conducted by a mere
appeal to Reason and to Conscience. It teaches ethical Monotheism;
that is to say, it thinks of God as a thinking, feeling, willing
Consciousness, and understands His nature in the light of the highest
moral ideal. It teaches the belief in personal Immortality, and it
teaches a Morality which in its broad general principles still appeals
to the Conscience of Humanity. Universal Love it sets forth as at once
the central point in its moral ideal and the most important element in
its conception of God. In one of those metaphors which express so much
more than any more exact philosophical formula, it is the Religion
which teaches the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. And
these truths were taught by the historical Jesus. No one up to his
time had ever taught them with equal clearness and in equal purity, and
with the same freedom from other and inconsistent teachings: {154} and
this teaching was developed by his first followers. Amid all
aberrations and amid all contamination by heterogeneous elements, the
society or societies which look back to Christ as their Founder have
never in the worst times ceased altogether to teach these truths; and
now they more and more tend to constitute the essence of Christianity
as it is to-day--all the more so on account of the Church's gradual
shuffling off of so many adventitious ideas and practices which were at
one time associated with them. Christianity is and remains the only
one of the great historical Religions which has taught and does teach
these great truths in all their fullness.[2] These considerations
would by themselves be sufficient to put Christianity in an absolutely
unique position among the Religions of Mankind.
I have so far been regarding our Lord Jesus Christ simply as a teacher
of religious and ethical truth. I think it is of fundamental
importance that we should _begin_ by regarding him in this light.
{155} It was in this light that he first presented himself to his
fellow-countrymen--even before (in all probability) he claimed to be
the fulfiller of the Messianic ideal which had been set before them by
the prophets of their race. And I could not, without a vast array of
quotation, give you a sufficient impression of the prominence of this
aspect of his work and personality among the earlier Greek Fathers.
Even after the elaborate doctrines of Catholic Christianity had begun
to be developed, it was still primarily as the supremely inspired
Teacher that Jesus was most often thought of. When the early
Christians thought of him as the incarnate Logos or Reason of God, to
teach men divine truth was still looked upon as the supreme function of
the Logos and the purpose of his indwelling in the historical Jesus.
But from the first Jesus appealed to men as much more than a teacher.
It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of religious and ethical
knowledge that it is intimately connected with character: religious and
moral teaching of the highest kind is in a peculiar degree inseparable
from the personality of the teacher. Jesus impressed his
contemporaries, and he has impressed successive ages as having not only
set before man the highest religious and moral ideal, but as having in
a unique manner realized that ideal in his own life. Even the word
'example' {156} does not fully express the impression which he made on
his followers, or do justice to the inseparability of his personality
from his teaching. In the religious consciousness of Christ men saw
realized the ideal relation of man not merely to his fellow-man but
also to his heavenly Father. From the first an enthusiastic reverence
for its Founder has been an essential part of the Christian Religion
amid all the variety of the phases which it has assumed. The doctrine
of the Christian Church was in its origin an attempt to express in the
philosophical language of the time its sense of this supreme value of
Christ for the religious and moral life of man. As to the historical
success and the present usefulness of these attempts, I shall have a
word to say next time. Meanwhile, I would leave with you this one
thought. The claim of Christianity to be the supreme, the universal,
in a sense the final Religion, must rest mainly, in the last resort,
upon the appeal which Christ and his Religion make to the moral and
religious consciousness of the present.