those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it.
Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously
unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously
religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they
were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the
flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every
generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the
constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was
political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has
contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is
markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to
consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book
of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no
attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or
harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another
because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to
visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such
a thing was never intended.
[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean
by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal
freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan's
_The House of Seleucus_. But it remains true that the race from whose
intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any
considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.
Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department;
and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the
inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the
polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We
watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew
up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire
cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so
that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is
predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of
Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of
the Hebrew.
For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men's thought
and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that
there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion;
when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the
Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends
revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad
Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for
more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our
time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they
interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new
product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate
personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which
is something that history has not known before.
The first requirement of personality is always freedom--freedom as we
have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from
without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated
elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the
individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political
sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that
is as having a single spiritual life.
But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are
members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person
is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is
to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one
reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the
political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it;
but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is
its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much
as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves
in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do
in fact need one another, and need one another's full life.
In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a
country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in
every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We
need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson
which the world at this time needs to learn is just this--that all the
nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others
should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the
common life in which all share.
But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we
did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up
lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before,
and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the
conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and
exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie
outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record;
and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is
capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail
to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#]
[#] See Appendix V. _On Providence in History_.
There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own
civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work.
We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that
dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil
one of three functions--prophet, priest and king.
The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly,
not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of
reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men
and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may
require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet
in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.
In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are
democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some
share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management
of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and
one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in
the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort,
how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not
be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to
consider only his own country's welfare; but as a member of the Church
of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and,
having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may
genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God--His
Holy City.
The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of
the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid
men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach
it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every
individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving
each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of
the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the
rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is
usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own
soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine
Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for
while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are
sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.
But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear
testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom
that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts
for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other
men's efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the
spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit
of all heroism in all ages.
In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and
purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked
by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the
capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the
great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode among them the man
whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the
wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided,
he made no acknowledgment, but simply said:
"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' sinning
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.
_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 mediaeval 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 Manichaeism 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
Mediaeval 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.