CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND BIBLICAL CRITICISM

The value and significance of Biblical Criticism 200

Relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament 201

I. The Pauline Epistles 203

The Tübingen view and later criticism 204

The Epistle to the Ephesians 204

II. The Acts of the Apostles 205

Evidences of trustworthiness 206

Harnack on the Lukan authorship 208

Harnack and Koch on the date 210

Did Luke use Josephus? 213

III. The Synoptic Problem 216

The Two-Document theory 217

Modifications of the theory by the assumption:

(1) of a larger dependence on oral tradition 219

(2) of the use of Q by Mark 220

(3) of different editions of Mark 220

"Secondary elements" in Mark 221

Bearing of Harnack's early dating of the Lukan writings 225

The inter-Synoptic differences 226

IV. The Johannine Problem 227

Evidence for Apostolic authorship 228

Rejection of Apostolic authorship on the assumption:

(1) that John never lived at Ephesus 230

(2) that there were two Johns at Ephesus 232

The partition theory 234

The internal evidence: style and contents of the Fourth Gospel 234

Relation to the Synoptic Gospels as supplementary,

explanatory and independent 236

Concluding remarks 242

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF RECENT IMPORTANT WORKS 244

INDEX 249

I

What Is the Christian Faith?

If every rational discussion, as Cicero has said, should begin with a

definition, it would be well at the outset to try to answer the question

which forms the title of this lecture. Of the definitions which may be

given of the Christian Faith two may be selected as typical: (1) it is

the faith in the providence and love of God which Jesus exercised and

exemplified; or (2) it is the faith of which Jesus Himself is the

object. In the one case the essence of Christianity will be found in the

simple precepts of the Peasant-Prophet of Galilee, in the other in the

developed Christology of the Apostle Paul.

It is safe to say that the average Christian will not be satisfied with

either of these definitions. He looks to Jesus, it is true, as his

Teacher and Example, but he also trusts Him as his Redeemer and worships

Him as his Lord. The real question at issue is whether original

Christianity, the religion which Jesus taught, was thus inclusive of

doctrine as well as ethics. Does Christianity in its essence include

Christology? The attempt to answer this question will not only introduce

our general theme but will bring us into the heart of it. It will be

convenient to consider in order: I. The Christianity of the New

Testament Writers; II. Primitive Christianity and Pauline Christianity;

III. The Christianity of Jesus and of Paul; and IV. The Dilemma of

Historical Criticism.

I. THE CHRISTIANITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITERS

The scientific study of the New Testament has brought clearly to light

the individual traits of the various writers, but has shown at the same

time the striking agreement of these writers in their fundamental

conception of the Christian Faith. For those who set forth objectively

the words and ministry of Jesus as well as for those who deal more

explicitly with doctrinal interpretation, the centre of interest lies in

the Person, the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ. It may be well

to illustrate this unity of standpoint, while the fact of it is so

generally conceded that it needs no elaborate proof.

In the Apocalypse the sacrificial expression, "the Lamb," occurs at

least twenty-eight times; and the central figure is that of the Lamb

that was slain but is now seated upon the throne. In the First Epistle

of John, Jesus is described as the propitiation for sin (ii. 2; iv. 10),

and as the Son of God throughout the book. In First Peter the readers

are addressed as those who have been begotten again to a living hope by

the Resurrection (i. 3), and redeemed by the precious blood of Christ

(i. 19). The Epistle to the Hebrews is saturated with the language of

the sacrificial ritual, and describes the priestly work of Christ who

tasted death, put away sin, and ever lives in the heavenly sanctuary to

make intercession. The Christological element is of course very

prominent in Paul's Epistles. According to the Book of Acts, the

Apostles preached Jesus and the Resurrection (iv. 2; xvii. 18, etc.).

The death of Christ, mentioned some thirteen times, the Resurrection,

mentioned or implied twenty times, and the forgiveness of sins,

mentioned in more or less close connection with these eight times,[1]

were the central themes of apostolic preaching, which included in the

case of Peter, an eye-witness, the teaching and mighty words of Jesus

(ii. 22; x. 36-38).

1: See especially v. 30, 31; x. 39, 40, 43; xiii. 37-39.

In the Gospels it will be found that almost exactly one-third of the

textual material (in the Westcott and Hort edition about eighty out of

the two hundred and forty pages) is taken up with events connected with

the Passion and Resurrection, including the incidents and teachings of

the Passion week. In Luke the proportion is somewhat smaller (some

sixteen out of seventy-three pages) than in the other Gospels; but that

the Passion is equally prominent in the mind of the writer is shown by

the fact that the shadow of it is projected back even to chapter ix.

51, and that in Luke alone the "exodus" at Jerusalem is the theme of

conversation in the Transfiguration scene (ix. 31). Even Mark, showing

least of all, it used to be said, the influence of later theological

reflection, has been called a history of the Passion with an

introduction. As Harnack has said: "The whole work of Mark is so

disposed and composed that death and resurrection appear as the aim of

the entire presentation."[2]

2: "Aus Wissenschaft und Leben," II, 1911, p. 217.

The centre of interest for the Evangelists as well as for Paul and the

author of Hebrews is Christ and Him crucified, the Passion and

Resurrection. It may be said, though, that the interest of the

Evangelists is a biographical one, an interest in a beloved teacher or

martyred leader, comparable with that of Plato and Xenophon in the last

days and words of Socrates, and not a distinctly theological interest

such as Paul felt in the death of Christ, as intimately connected with

his own experience of redemption from sin.

One answer to this is that the interest of the Evangelists is not merely

in the death but in the resurrection of Jesus. It is worthy also of note

that the author of the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of John has shown

that, to one New Testament writer at least, description and

interpretation were equally important. John's description of the death

of Christ is as detailed and as objective as that of the other Gospel

writers; yet his interpretation of the Passion as a propitiation for sin

(I John ii. 2; iv. 10) is the same as that of the Apostle Paul. While

John places the words "Lamb of God" in the mouth of the Baptist (i. 29,

36), and uses the expression, "the blood of Jesus his Son who cleanses

us from all sin" (I John i. 7), he never, except possibly in a veiled

way, places the language of sacrifice in the mouth of Jesus Himself.

There is no reason to doubt that the other Evangelists who record the

thrice repeated prediction of the Crucifixion (see Mark viii. 31; ix.

12; x. 33, and parallels) would, equally with John, be interested in its

doctrinal interpretation. Such an interpretation is in fact suggested by

the words of Jesus Himself. At the Last Supper, He brought His death

into connection with the forgiveness of sins, and when He spoke of it as

a "ransom for many"[3] used language which is naturally interpreted in a

sacrificial sense. Luke, it is true, nowhere uses the word "ransom," but

there is no reason to doubt that he shared the Pauline view of the death

of Christ. This is clearly indicated by the expression, "purchased with

his own blood," contained in one of the "we-sections" of Acts (xx. 28),

and in fact by the words of the risen Jesus (Luke xxiv. 46, 47). As the

altar was central in the Old Testament, so, from the standpoint of its

writers, is the Passion in the New Testament.

3: λύτρον ἀντὶ πολλῶν [lytron anti pollôn]. Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28.

It is needless to show in detail that an exalted view of the person of

Christ is with the New Testament writers connected with the central

place which they assign to His death and resurrection. Mark, whose

Christology is thought to be least developed, may be taken as a single

example. In the opening scene of the ministry, as in the Transfiguration

scene, the divine voice says: "Thou art (this is) my beloved Son" (i.

11; ix. 7); and in the closing scene the centurion exclaims, "Truly this

man was the Son of God" (or a son of God, Mark xv. 39). The climax of

the narrative is said to be the confession of Peter, "Thou art the

Christ" (viii. 29); and Jesus alludes to Himself as "the Son," above

prophets and men and angels (xii. 6; xiii. 32). At the trial, in answer

to the solemn question of the high priest, "Art thou the Christ, the Son

of the blessed?" He said, "I am" (xiv. 61-62). Bousset admits that the

three first Gospels differ from the Fourth only in degree,[4] and in his

latest work he says that if the phrase "Son of God" (i. 1), omitted in

many manuscripts of Mark, is really an interpolation, it is a suitable

one as indicating the theme of the book.[5] Wrede even says the Gospel

of Mark belongs in a sense to the history of dogma.[6]

4: "Was Wissen Wir von Jesus?" 1904, p. 54.

5: "Kyrios Christos," 1913, p. 70, note 1, and p. 65.

6: See Schweitzer: "Von Reimarus zu Wrede," p. 336; E. T., "Quest of

the Historical Jesus," p. 337.

For the writers of the New Testament, leaving out for the present the

question of sources, in spite of differences in time and place and race

and circumstances, and by implication for the various circles of

readers, Jewish, Greek and Roman, whom they addressed, there was but one

kind of Christianity, one gospel of the Kingdom and the Cross and the

Son of God.

II. PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY AND PAULINE CHRISTIANITY

It is asserted that the striking unanimity of the New Testament writers

in their view of Christianity is not due to the teaching of Jesus, but

to the powerful influence of the Apostle Paul. The statement is made in

many quarters that not Jesus but Paul was the virtual founder of

Christianity, so far as its central doctrines, its institutions, its

worship of a divine Christ, and its world-wide propaganda are concerned.

In Paul, it is said, the gospel of a simple piety and a pure ethic, the

gospel of Jesus, was so overlaid by the incrustations of dogma that its

true nature was hidden until rediscovered by modern criticism; and it

had thus lost the simplicity that is in Christ. It was Paul himself,

whose missionary labours carried the gospel throughout Europe, that

really preached "another gospel." As Schweitzer, following Kalthoff,

suggests with some irony, there was, under this supposition, "an

immediate declension from and falsification of a pure original

principle" in Christianity, comparable only to the Fall in the moral

history of mankind.[7]

7: "Von Reimarus zu Wrede," p. 312; E. T., "Quest, etc.," p. 314.

The teaching of the primitive apostles is sometimes declared to be an

intermediate step between the gospel of Jesus and the doctrinal

Christianity of Paul. It is desirable then to compare the Pauline

teaching, first with the teaching of the other apostles and the

Jerusalem church, and then with the teaching of Jesus.

When we examine the historical situation, the lines of connection

between Paul and the primitive apostles and the Jerusalem church are so

many and so strong as practically to negative the supposition of a

fundamental difference between them in their conception of the gospel.

(1) If Luke had written the Fourth Gospel, the case would be different;

but Luke wrote (assuming his authorship of the Third Gospel and the

Acts)[8] the Gospel which contains the Sermon on the Mount and the

parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. When one remembers

that Luke was the intimate companion of Paul and his co-labourer in

missionary work before he wrote his Gospel, that he derived his material

largely from "eye-witnesses of the word," and that afterwards he

recorded the teaching of both Peter and Paul in the Acts, it is clear

that Luke himself saw no essential difference between the Christianity

of the primitive apostles and that of Paul, and it becomes improbable

that such a difference existed.

8: See Chapter VI.

(2) Paul took with him on his missionary journeys Barnabas and Silas,

accredited leaders and representatives of the primitive Jerusalem church

(Acts xiii. 2f.; xv. 40). Paul's work for years was carried on under the

surveillance of these men, and Barnabas stood sponsor for Paul before

the Jerusalem authorities (Acts xv. 12). The close connection of these

two men with both parties excludes the supposition of any radical

difference in their doctrines.

(3) Paul's Christology was accepted by his Jewish-Christian opponents at

Jerusalem, and never questioned by them. Paul we know to have been

bitterly assailed by a Pharisaic party in the Jerusalem church. They

dogged his steps wherever he went; they impugned his orthodoxy from the

Mosaic standpoint; they called in question his apostleship and his

sincerity. But it is significant that they never assailed as an

innovation the Christological views in which he is supposed to differ

from them. "Certain from James" (Gal. ii. 12), in the bitter polemic

over circumcision, never accused Paul, as they would have done if his

views were different in this respect, of a declension from Jewish

monotheism. Paul doubtless used the name current in Jerusalem when he

spoke, in a context in which he puts Christ above men and above angels

and on an equality with God as a source of grace, of "James, the Lord's

brother" (Gal. i. 3, 12, 19). He used the same titles as did those at

Jerusalem, and a difference in Christological dogma can only be made out

by saying that the names are used in different senses.[9] This is to

admit that the difference discovered by modern critical acumen was so

small as not to be recognized by either party at the time. In Paul's

controversial encounter with Peter, in a context full of the

characteristic Pauline ideas of Justification, of the Cross, of the

indwelling Christ, and of Jesus as the Son of God, Paul appealed to the

essential unity of their Christian faith and experience (Gal. ii.

11-21).

9: So Wernle: "Die Anfänge unserer Religion," 2d ed., 1904, p. 177.

He says that Paul makes of Jesus "an almost new creation," yet uses

the same titles as the other apostles.

(4) Paul asserts the identity of his gospel with that of the primitive

apostles as well known to his readers. He preached the faith of which he

once made havoc (Gal. i. 23). His gospel of a crucified and risen

Christ, he declares, was "received," not invented (I Cor. xv. 3), was

in accordance with Jewish Scriptures, and the inference is unavoidable

that it was held and taught in common by Peter and James, the Jerusalem

leaders. Both Peter and Paul taught Jesus and the Resurrection (Acts ii.

31; xiii. 34; xvii. 31); and as Harnack says, there is no reason to

doubt the representations of the first chapter of the Acts as to early

apostolic belief.[10]

10: "Aus Wissenschaft und Leben," II, p. 217. He adds that "herewith

is the problem (of a 'second gospel' in the New Testament) pushed

back in time from Paul to the earliest disciples of Jesus."

The Resurrection is emphasized alike in the speeches of Peter in Acts

and in the First Epistle (I Peter i. 3; ii. 24; iii. 21). In Romans the

Resurrection is mentioned seven times (i. 4; iv. 25; vi. 4; vii. 4;

viii. 34; x. 9; xiv. 9), and enters into the warp and woof of Paul's

teaching. The thought of Paul is doubtless more systematic and

constructive, but it is unnatural to believe either that Paul had a

different view of the nature of the Resurrection, or that he drew

doctrinal inferences from it which the other apostles would not

accept.[11] It is hard to see, moreover, how the theory that Paul's

teaching was essentially different from that of the Jerusalem church,

and the theory that Paul profoundly influenced all of the New Testament

writers can consistently be held at the same time.

11: If Paul taught not a bodily but a "spiritual" resurrection, as

some interpreters think that his language in I Cor. xv. 50 implies,

the emphasis upon the supernatural would be greater in the case of

the primitive church. In his "Historical Evidence for the

Resurrection of Jesus Christ," 1907, Kirsopp Lake says that the

affirmation of an empty tomb was made by most early Christians, and

"almost certainly by St. Paul" (p. 242). He contends, however, that

the "story of the empty tomb must be fought out on doctrinal, not on

historical or critical grounds" (p. 253).

III. THE CHRISTIANITY OF JESUS AND OF PAUL

A more serious question meets us when we come to the relation of Paul's

teaching to that of Jesus Himself. Behind the writers of the New

Testament and behind the teaching of the apostles, is there not in the

authentic words of Jesus as determined by criticism a simpler gospel of

the love of God and the duty of man, from which Christology and the

doctrines of the Cross are excluded? May we not "lighten the distressed

ship of the gospel" by casting overboard its cargo of doctrine? Harnack

thinks that we may; and in his famous lectures on the "Essence of

Christianity" has set forth the seeming anomaly of the gospel of Christ

with Christology omitted, a gospel which includes only the Father and

not the Son.

The essence of Christianity according to Paul would be contained in the

statements, "While we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. v. 8);

"God was in Christ reconciling the world" (2 Cor. v. 19); "He loved me

and gave himself for me" (Gal. ii. 20). Paul's gospel was the gospel of

Christ and Him crucified. The essence of Christianity according to

Harnack consists in the truths of the fatherly love of God and the value

of the individual soul. It is indeed a gospel preached by Christ, but in

the content of its message is the Father only--not the Son.[12] The

contrast thus asserted suggests the need of a closer examination of the

relation of Jesus and Paul.

12: "The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the

Father only and not with the Son." "Das Wesen des Christentums," 1900,

p. 91; E. T., "What is Christianity?" p. 154.

Nothing is more striking in the comparison between Jesus and Paul than

the difference in their personality and yet the similarity in their

ethical teaching. Jesus was a Galilean, born in humble circumstances,

belonging to the peasant or working class, a stranger to the training of

the schools, a "layman," and an Oriental in His mode of thought and

expression. Paul was a native of Tarsus, a Greek city which was noted as

the seat of a philosophical school; his father was a man of consequence,

a Roman citizen, who gave his son the best education that the Jewish

schools could afford. He was a typical member of the proudest caste of a

proud nation, proud of his race, of his learning, of his strictness in

religion and his zeal for the Law (Phil. iii. 6), trained in the

refinements of Rabbinical dialectic, but an Occidental in his method of

thought. Yet in ethics Paul stands very near to Jesus. Both emphasized

the same virtues, and these the very virtues most foreign to Paul's

early Græco-Roman environment and his later Pharisaic prejudice. Where

Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," Paul, blameless in the

law, said, "Boasting is excluded. By grace are ye saved" (Rom. iii. 27;

Eph. ii. 5). Where Jesus said, "He that exalteth himself shall be

humbled" (Luke xviii. 14), Paul, the Pharisee, said, "In lowliness of

mind let each esteem other better than themselves" (Phil. ii. 3). Where

Jesus said, "Love your enemies," Paul, the persecutor now the

persecuted, repeated the command so foreign to the moral ideals of his

time (Rom. xii. 20). Both taught that in the command to love one's

neighbour was a summary of the moral law (Rom. xiii. 10; Matt. xxii. 38,

39).

Paul's great ethical passages, such as Romans xii. and I Corinthians

xiii., are but republications in Pauline language of the Sermon on the

Mount. In moral teaching Jesus and Paul are at one, although there can

be no doubt which was the originator of the Christian philosophy of

life. Jesus whose code was but the transcript of His character is the

original; and Paul, conformed in thought and spirit to the image of

Jesus, was the echo.

But Paul's moral teaching was by no means merely an echo or reminiscence

of the ethics of Jesus; it was organically connected with his own

doctrinal teaching. In Paul's letters there is usually an ethical

section, but this is preceded by a didactic or doctrinal section.

Doctrine with him, in the words of Phillips Brooks, was the "child of

faith and the mother of duty." Admittedly his doctrine is used to

enforce and to inspire his ethics. A high Christology--"Christ also

pleased not himself" (Rom. xv. 3)--enforces the appeal not to please

oneself. The Incarnation is the supreme example of generosity to the

poor, and the death upon the Cross of lowliness of mind and obedience (2

Cor. viii. 9; Phil. ii. 5-8). His own sacrifice for our sins grounds the

plea for a life of unselfishness (2 Cor. v. 14, 15; Rom. xii. 1). We

should walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us (Eph. v.

2); and should walk in newness of life, as Christ was raised from the

dead by the glory of the Father (Rom. vi. 4). Doctrine with Paul and

ethics in its solemn sanctions and its inspiring motivation are

inextricably intertwined. Paul's doctrine about the person of Christ and

His death and resurrection can be disentangled from his ethical teaching

as little as it can from his experience. Certainly the doctrine was no

alien or extraneous element in Paul's system, and certainly it

strengthened rather than weakened his ethical appeal.

Is there a similar blending of ethics and doctrine in the teaching of

Jesus? For the gospel of Jesus in its purity we must, according to a

popular school of criticism, go back of the Fourth Gospel to the

Synoptics, and back of these to their sources, practically to Mark and

to the source called Q (Quelle), or the Logia, representing the

non-Markan agreements of Matthew and Luke. Even in these sources, it is

often maintained, caution must be used, and foreign elements must be

eliminated. Let us see, then, whether there is such a mingling of the

ethical and the Christological in the authentic teaching of Jesus as we

have noticed in that of Paul. The Sermon on the Mount, the words to the

disciples after the confession of Peter (Mark viii. 34-38), and the

teaching on true greatness (Mark x. 42-45), may be taken as typical

examples of Jesus' ethical teaching. In these passages are not merely

disconnected maxims, but an ethical system, containing a profound and,

as we may say, fully thought out philosophy of life, in which the

religious and ethical elements are organically united.

The Beatitudes begin with passive virtue, humility, meekness, longing

for righteousness; they pass on to the possession of righteousness and

purity of heart; ascend to works of active benevolence; and culminate in

a character so positive and pronounced in goodness as to excite

opposition from the forces of evil. At least one element in the

consciousness of Jesus as He spoke these words may be compared with the

Christological standpoint of Paul. The impression which His teaching

made upon His hearers is summed up in the words: "He taught them as one

having authority" (Matt. vii. 29). If we seek to analyze this authority,

we find it to be, first, the authority of perfect moral insight. A flaw

discovered in the character of a teacher easily neutralizes the force of

his moral appeal. The ethic of Jesus is not merely a system of rules,

but the blending of a code which has guided human progress and a

character in which men have found their supreme ideal of moral

excellence. His sureness of touch, His clearness of moral insight, His

transparent beauty of character, betray a consciousness unique among

men. The verdict of mankind as they have studied the character of Jesus,

and studied themselves in the light of it, is that that character is as

much a miracle in the moral sphere,--that is, opposed to a uniform

experience--as is the birth from a virgin, for example, in the physical

sphere. The consciousness of Jesus, at the very least, must have been

profoundly influenced by the fact, assuming it to be a fact, that He

alone among the children of men did perfectly the will of the Father.

The authority of Jesus, again, was that of a lawgiver from whose words

there could be no appeal. His words superseded all previous legislation,

in the sense of completing it, and all current interpretation. The

imperial "I say unto you" implied the power, not simply of judicial

interpretation, but of repealing old laws and enacting new ones. Nor was

His teaching in His own conception of it a mere phase, albeit the

highest at the time, of moral development. His legislation was final,

and never to be superseded; and obedience to it, or neglect of it, was

to be the decisive factor in human welfare and destiny (Matt. vii.

24-27).

But the authority of Jesus was not merely that of a lawgiver. He

inaugurated the Kingdom whose coming He proclaimed and whose laws He

formulated, and He is to be the final judge of the worthiness of its

members. These members were not merely pious Jews in general or John's

disciples, but were His disciples. They were the light of the world

because they were His disciples, and the crowning element in their

character was endurance of persecution for His sake (Matt. v. 11, "for

my sake"; Luke vi. 22, "for the Son of man's sake"). His teaching

instead of pointing away from Himself to God, in the spirit of the other

wisest teachers of men, pointed to Himself as the One by whom fully and

finally God's will and purpose were to be made known. He plainly taught

or clearly implied that men's relations to Himself as Teacher, Lord,

Lawgiver and Judge, were supremely important for human destiny (Matt.

vii. 21-24).

No words in the ethical-religious message of Jesus are more striking in

form and thought, and no others have more deeply impressed the minds of

men, than those in which He asserted that the value of the soul

outweighs all earthly good: "What shall it profit a man if he shall gain

the whole world and lose his own soul?" These words, says Eucken, have

given the soul a history. In the startling paradox in the context, "He

that saveth his life shall lose it," we have the saying of Jesus most

often repeated in the Gospels, occurring six times, and assigned to four

different occasions (Mark viii. 35; Matt. x. 39; xvi. 25; Luke ix. 24;

xvii. 33; John xii. 25).

The study of these sayings in their context (Mark viii. 34-38 and

parallels) shows that the thought which was uppermost in the mind of

Jesus, and in fact dominated at this point the ethical teaching, was

precisely that of His own person and death and resurrection. His

question to Peter, "Whom say ye that I am?" (Mark viii. 29) shows that

He was dissatisfied with the title of prophet given Him by others, and

that He would draw from the disciples a confession that they had come to

hold a higher view of His mission. When Peter, according to the

accounts in Mark and Matthew, refused to accept the prediction of His

death, He showed that it was necessary for all His disciples to take up

the cross and follow Him. The goal of life is to be reached only by

those who follow Him in spirit in His death and resurrection, and

confess Him before men. The losing of the highest in life is for those

who are ashamed of Him in this generation. The destiny of men hinges

upon their relation to Himself. The connection between the most

oft-repeated and self-authenticating maxims of Jesus and His own person,

death, and resurrection is as clear and organic as the connection

between the ethical and doctrinal, or Christological, teaching of Paul.

It remains to consider the passage (Mark x. 42-45; Matt. xx. 25-28) on

true greatness and service. Here we have a characteristic teaching of

Jesus cutting athwart the ordinary opinion of mankind. But the maxim,

"Whosoever would become great among you," is connected with Himself as

the example of true greatness. He, the teacher and example of humility,

refers to Himself as the supreme illustration of true greatness. His

death is the supreme expression of self-sacrifice for the good of

others, and in it by implication is the highest service done to

man.[13] Ethics and doctrine about Himself and His death are as

inextricably blended in this saying of Jesus as in Paul's statement,

"Though he was rich yet for your sakes became poor," or John's, "He laid

down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the

brethren" (2 Cor. viii. 9; I John iii. 16). In His deepest ethical

teaching Jesus points not away from Himself, as do other moral teachers.

His words in the Synoptics are not essentially different from those in

John: "If I your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you ought also

to wash one another's feet" (xiii. 14).

13: Recent exegesis finds a Pauline meaning in the words whether it

refers them to Jesus or to the influence of Paul. Plummer

("Matthew," p. 280) says: "'The Son of Man came' implies the

preëxistence of the Son; it is not merely a synonym for being born."

(Cf. John xviii. 37.) In the use of the word λύτρον [lytron], Bacon

thinks that, "here and in xiv. 24 Mark goes beyond Paul's careful

use of language" ("Beginnings of Gospel Story," p. 149). Bousset, on

the other hand, emphasizing "the many," thinks that Paul was the

first to give the full reach to the thought. (_Op. cit._, p. 2.)

According to Wendling, in Mark x. 45, the fully developed Pauline

doctrine of the ἀπολύτρωσις [apolytrôsis] (Rom. iii. 23 ff.) is

crystallized into an aphorism and put into the mouth of Jesus; "The

Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, etc." (See Sanday's

"Oxford Studies," p. 399.)

The Christology of Jesus finds expression in the familiar words in

Matthew xi. 25-30 (Luke x. 21, 22): "All things have been delivered unto

me of my Father, etc." These words are often spoken of as the climax of

His self-revelation in the Synoptic Gospels, and modern criticism unites

with Christian devotion in recognizing their importance. The conviction

is growing that the words, as they stand in all the Greek texts, cannot

have been the utterance of a merely human Jesus, the pattern of

truthfulness and the example of humility.

A few examples will show the trend of recent interpretation. Plummer

thinks that the self-revelation of Jesus in the expression, "All things

were delivered unto Me, etc.," "contains the whole of the Christology of

the Fourth Gospel;"[14] and he believes that the aorist verb "points

back to a moment in eternity, and implies the preëxistence of the

Messiah."[15]

14: "Commentary on St. Luke," 1900, p. 282.

15: "Commentary on St. Matthew," 1910, p. 168.

Critical acumen, says Lemme, may seek to empty the saying of its

content, but "there remains the exclusiveness of the mediatorial work of

Jesus for the totality of mankind, there remains the absolute uniqueness

of His redemption, there remains His lonely elevation above the entire

realm of the human, there remains His unique fellowship of life with the

Father, which enabled Him, and Him alone, to know God adequately, or,

what is the same thing, to reveal the truth. We must take our choice:

such an utterance is either the delirium of a reckless self-exaltation,

or the appropriate testimony of a divine Being demanding unreserved

faith."[16]

16: "Jesu Irrtumlosigkeit," 1907, pp. 7, 8.

The logion has been made the subject of an exhaustive monograph by

Schumacher, who concludes that the reciprocal knowledge of the Father

and the Son implies the consciousness of divine Sonship in a full

metaphysical sense.[17]

17: "Die Selbstoffenbarung Jesu bei Mat 11, 27 (Luc 10, 22),"

1912, ("Freiburger Theologische Studien," Heft. 6), pp. 202, 219, etc.

In his lectures on the "Essence of Christianity," Harnack takes the text

as it stands, but, ignoring the implications of reciprocal knowledge,

says: "The consciousness he possessed of being the Son of God is,

therefore, nothing but the practical consequence of knowing God as the

Father and as His Father. Rightly understood, the name of Son means

nothing but the knowledge of God."[18] In his critique of Harnack, Loisy

objects to this interpretation as being "artificial and

superficial,"[19] and says: "Obviously the text indicates a

transcendental relationship, whence springs the lofty dignity of Christ,

and not a psychological reality, which in regard to God is clearly

impossible. Father and Son are not here simply religious terms, but have

already become metaphysical theological expressions, and dogmatic

speculation has been able to take possession of them, without much

modification of their sense."[20] Loisy takes the meaning as

fundamentally the same as John i. 18, and cannot accept it in the form

we have it as a genuine word of Jesus.[21]

18: "Das Wesen des Christentums," p. 81; "What is

Christianity?" p. 138.

19: "L'Évangile et L'Église," 1904, p. 82; E. T., "The Gospel and

the Church," p. 97.

20: "L'Évangile et L'Église," 1904, p. 78; E. T., p. 94.

21: "L'Évangile et L'Église," 1904, p. 80; E. T., pp. 96, 97.

In his "Sayings of Jesus," Harnack omits from the text, on what seem to

be slender grounds, the first clause of the parallel, "No one knoweth

the Son but the Father."[22] He candidly admits, however, that if the

text stands no fair exegesis can prevent a Christological reference. It

must mean "a relationship of Father and Son which never had a beginning,

but remains ever the same." "We cannot by any method of interpretation

make it much less metaphysical."[23]

22: Preferring the indirect evidence of the patristic quotations,

itself divided, to the direct evidence of the Greek manuscripts.

23: "Sprüche und Reden Jesu," 1907, pp. 210, 211; E. T., "The

Sayings of Jesus," 1908, p. 302.

Bousset, who in his "Jesus" (1904) accepted the utterance as spoken by

Jesus,[24] now sees in it the expression of a high Christology. He

believes, against Harnack, that the expression, "All things have been

delivered to me," refers to power, not simply to knowledge; and,

retaining both clauses expressing reciprocal knowledge of the Father and

the Son, he finds in this "majestic self-testimony" in its present form

the work of the Church.[25]

24: "Jesus," p. 89.

25: "Kyrios Christos," 1913, pp. 58, 60, 62.

We may speak, then, of a consensus of opinion in the recent

interpretation of this saying of Jesus. When we remember that the

verbal resemblance between Matthew xi. 25-27 and Luke x. 21, 22 is

remarkably close, and that the saying thus belongs to the earliest

strata of Gospel tradition, that is, to the conjectural "Q," it is

significant that the minute examination to which it has been subjected

has convinced critics of different dogmatic standpoints that they can

only interpret it in a high Christological sense. It is agreed that the

words as they stand imply the preëxistence of the Messiah, a relation

which can properly be called "metaphysical" between the Father and the

Son, and a unique relation to men as the only bearer of the full

revelation of God. The saying, often called an "aerolite from the

Johannine heavens" (Hase), contains in a nutshell, if taken with verses

28-30, the teaching of the fourteenth chapter of John, revealing Jesus

in similar relation alike to God and to men, and as supplying all the

deepest needs of men. Sanday has even said that "we might describe the

teaching of the Fourth Gospel as a series of variations upon the one

theme which has its classical expression in a verse of the Synoptics.

'All things have been delivered unto me, etc'"[26]

26: "Criticism of the New Testament," 1902, by various authors, pp.

16, 17.

It has been argued that the saying of Jesus, Johannine in style and

substance, is so isolated in the Synoptic narrative that, in spite of

its secure position in the sources, doubts of its genuineness must

arise. Bousset employs this argument, remarking that the thoughts of our

logion "in the remaining Synoptic tradition are scarcely found at

all."[27] It is noticeable, however, that the isolation is established

only by cutting away a large portion of the Synoptic material. The

parable of the Vineyard, in which Jesus speaks of Himself as a beloved

son, the heir (Mark xii. 6, 7), is objected to because "never thus did

Jesus elsewhere in His parables force His person into the

foreground."[28] The Markan saying in which Jesus distinguishes Himself,

as Son, from men and angels (xiii. 32) is set aside;[29] the filial

consciousness implied in the repeated use by Jesus of the expressions,

"My Father," "your Father," "the Father," but never "our Father," is

attributed to later theological reflection,[30] and the narratives of

the divine voice at the Baptism and the Transfiguration are discredited.

Similarly the incidental claims which Jesus makes for Himself in

forgiving sin, in speaking of Himself as the "Bridegroom," the Physician

who came to cure the moral ills of men, and as Lord of the Sabbath, are

all referred to secondary strata of tradition or to dogmatic overworking

of the facts.[31]

27: "Kyrios Christos," p. 61.

28: _Ibid._, p. 51.

29: _Ibid._, p. 52.

30: _Ibid._, p. 64.

31: _Ibid._, pp. 48, 49.

So drastic is the process by which Bousset attempts to reduce the

consciousness of Jesus to a purely human level that he even rejects the

major part of the narrative of the Trial and Crucifixion. Whatever

differences there may be in detail, there is no room for doubt that the

charge upon which Jesus was put to death is correctly given by John. "We

have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the

Son of God" (John xix. 7). We may believe that the result would have

been different if for one moment He had disclaimed divine prerogatives,

and said, "I am of thy brethren the prophets: worship God."

If it be denied that Jesus made these claims before and at His trial,

the cause of His death is unknown. This is admitted by Bousset, who

rejects the whole account of the trial, including the question of

Pilate, "Art thou the King of the Jews?" (Mark xv. 2), and the title on

the cross, retaining only the accusation that He said "I will destroy

this temple" (Mark xiv. 58; xv. 29). Apart from this concrete

accusation, not in itself sufficient, because not blasphemy "in the

strict juristic sense of the word," it is admitted that "we cannot say

any more with exactness why Jesus was condemned by Pilate."[32] In the

answer of Jesus to the high priest, telling of the Son of Man "sitting

at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven," it

is said that "we hear directly the Christian confession, 'seated on the

right hand of God, from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the

dead.'"[33] It is to be noted that these passages, implying in Bousset's

opinion the substitution of the "day" of Jesus for the Old Testament

"day of Jahweh,"[34] and implying the metaphysics of the creeds, are to

be found in Mark, not in John, and in the narrative of the trial of

Jesus, not in that of His resurrection.

32: "Kyrios Christos," pp. 54 note, 56.

33: _Ibid._, p. 55.

34: _Ibid._, p. 12.

The "isolation" of the great passage in Matthew and Luke, as to its

essential content, is thus made out only by a thoroughgoing process of

elimination running through the whole story of the Gospels. Every page

of the Gospels testifies, in fact, to Jesus' consciousness of a unique

relation to God and to men; and an examination of His teaching in

whatever part or whatever context confirms the judgment of von Dobschütz

that "Jesus implicitly stands everywhere in the centre of His gospel.

The 'I am He,' which is recognized as the leading motive of the Fourth

Gospel, runs through all His words also in the Synoptics."[35] The

self-revelation of Jesus and the great invitation of Matthew xi. 25-30

may be the climax of Synoptic teaching as to the relation of Jesus

alike to the Father and to mankind (unless the words of the risen

Christ, Matt. xxviii. 18-20, are so regarded), but the passage is no

alien or intrusive element in its context. If it is the high point of

Synoptic teaching, it is the capstone of a pyramid firmly and broadly

supported by the whole Synoptic narrative.

35: "Gibt es ein doppeltes Evangelium in N. T.?" _Theol. Studien u.

Kritiken_, 85 (1912), p. 350.

Carlyle has said that the greatness of a character is measured by the

contrasts it exhibits. The words of Jesus we have been studying, taken

in their entirety and in their context, show the contrasts between

knowledge and humility, between power and humility, and, when the woes

on the cities are contrasted with the invitation, "Come unto me,"

between sternness and tenderness. When Socrates was told by the oracle

that he was the wisest of men, he was in perplexity for a time, but

finally decided that he was wise because he recognized his own

ignorance. In His knowledge of the Father and in the mystery of His own

person, Jesus places Himself on an equality with God. Yet this knowledge

did not "puff up." There was no need with Jesus as with Peter for the

moment of spiritual insight to be followed by a rebuke for presumption;

nor did He need like Paul, because of the greatness of the revelation,

to have the thorn in the flesh lest He be exalted above measure. These

contrasts, not found in any other historical character, are a

self-authenticating feature of the words of Jesus. All of His actions,

in fact, and all of His attitudes towards men, whether they were friends

or foes, and all His words, whether of compassion, forgiveness, warning

or indignation, were those of a "Prince and a Saviour," a Prince in

majesty and power and a Saviour in pity. Both deeds and words showed

that union of qualities which it would be impossible to invent, "the

self-assertion of the great example of humility."

IV. THE DILEMMA OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

An indirect evidence of transcendent elements in the consciousness of

Jesus, and of the essential harmony between His teaching and that of

Paul, is furnished by the increasingly skeptical tendency of liberal

criticism and the complete skepticism in which that criticism has

culminated. We must discount, say the extreme Liberal critics in effect,

the Ascension and Resurrection narratives, because they were written

under the belief that Jesus was the exalted Son of God. We must discount

the Passion narrative because dominated by the belief that Jesus was and

claimed to be the Messiah; we must discount the miracles, and must take

from the Gospel page everything that indicates that Jesus claimed divine

prerogatives, or Messianic honours, or used titles such as "the Christ,"

"the Son of God," "Lord," or even "the Son of Man," because these betray

the dogmatic views of the Church. But why not go further with the

"mythical" school and discount the whole narrative because written under

the prepossession that Jesus was an historical character? If the faith

of the Church--"the enemy of history"--has been able to create those

features in the portrait of Christ which have been regarded as

significant for religion during the ages of Christendom, why cannot its

creative activity have extended to the historical foundation? Why could

it not have created its portrait of Jesus out of nothing, or at least

out of the social strivings and religious needs and practices of a

syncretic age?

The mythical hypothesis, it is clear, is not a mere eccentricity of

criticism. It is more than an effort of youthful audacity in scholarship

striving to gain public attention. It is the natural, if not the

inevitable, outcome of the direction in which criticism, discarding more

and more of the Gospel narrative, and deserting more and more, it may be

said, the sure ground of historical evidence, has been moving. The

method of a progressive reduction of the sources and elimination of

unacceptable material has been only pushed by the Radicals to an

extreme. The Radicals, avowedly basing themselves on the Liberals,

contend that the latter have stopped at an untenable half-way position.

Thus Drews says that since the days of Strauss doubts of the historical

existence of Jesus have never been lulled to rest;[36] and Reinach,

avoiding Drews' extreme, yet declares that "it is contrary to every

sound method to compose, as Renan did, a life of Jesus, eliminating the

marvellous elements of the Gospel story. It is no more possible to make

real history with myths than to make bread with the pollen of

flowers."[37] It was thought that an irreducible minimum had been

reached in Schmiedel's famous nine "foundation-pillars" for a scientific

life of Christ,[38] but even these are shattered by the modern critical

artillery.[39]

36: "The Christ-Myth," p. 7.

37: "Orpheus" (E. T.), p. 231.

38: Encycl. Bibl., art., "Gospels," sec. 139.

39: Bousset, _op. cit._, will not admit that we have the actual

words of Jesus in Mark xiii. 32 (p. 52), in Matt. xi. 5 (p. 71, note

3), in Matt. xii. 32 (p. 9), in Mark xv. 34 (p. 87), or in viii.

14-20 (p. 82).

When Schmiedel finds the bed-rock of historical truth in a few

expressions or incidents which run counter to the general intention of

the Gospel writers, it is open to W. B. Smith to base an elaborate

argument upon a single phrase or even word "the things concerning

Jesus," or "the Jesus," Acts xviii. 25; xxviii. 21, etc., in favour of a

pre-Christian Jesus-cult.[40] And when Bousset with the Gospels before

him confesses that we cannot know certainly why Jesus was put to death,

it is open for Frazer and Reinach to transform the Crucifixion into a

sort of Haman-and-Mordecai play;[41] or even for J. M. Robertson,

criticizing Frazer, to say that the capital error of the latter is in

the postulate that Jesus existed at all.[42] It must be confessed that

there is a facile descent from the "reduced Christianity" of the extreme

Liberals to the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Radicals, and that the

difference between them is often one of degree rather than of principle.

The astringents used to remove the brilliant colours of miracle and

transcendence have proved so strong as to destroy the portrait they were

intended to restore. By proposing the dilemma, A miraculous Christ or a

mythical Christ, the Radicals have shown the difficulty of drawing the

picture of an historical Jesus from which the transcendent elements have

been removed. It should be noticed further that the "historical" Jesus

who is left has a diminishing importance for religion, and even for

ethics. When Jesus is reduced to the level of mere humanity, that

humanity is apt to be of an inferior order. He accepts the title and

rôle of Messiah unwillingly, as a burden and under compulsion from His

followers, or under the strong delusion that, defeated in His earthly

mission, He would immediately come in glory. In either case there is an

element of weakness, whether intellectual or moral, in His character; He

cannot be the supreme example and moral leader of humanity. Or else,

relieved of the Messianic burden in the imagination of the critic, He

becomes a "warrior for the truth,"[43] a sort of Galilean Socrates, the

wisest and best of men, but with no clear outlines in His personality

and no distinctive traits in His message.

40: "Der Vorchristliche Jesus," 1906, Chapter I.

41: "Golden Bough," 2d ed. (1900), III, pp. 187 ff.; "Orpheus" (E.

T.), pp. 229 ff. It is interesting to note that Frazer's section on

the death of Christ has in the third edition, 1910-1914, been placed

in an appendix, with the remark: "The hypothesis which it sets forth

has not been confirmed by subsequent research and is admittedly in a

high degree speculative and uncertain." (Part VI, "The Scapegoat,"

p. 412, note 1.)

42: "Pagan Christs," 1903, pp. 138, 139.

43: Bousset, _op. cit._, p. 90.

Whether the Founder of the Christian religion be pictured as "merely a

pious preacher of morality in the sense of present day liberalism,"[44]

or a "psychopathic anomaly," obsessed with the idea that He was the

Messiah, the picture is not convincing to the historian any more than it

is consoling to the Christian. In neither picture can the Christ of the

Gospels or the Christ of Christian experience be recognized. Matters are

not mended when extremes meet, and Jesus is pictured as at once the

sunny and serene Galilean pietist, and the rapt ecstatic obsessed by the

thought of His own immediate and glorious return--a deluded enthusiast

who saw life steadily and saw it whole. If the representation is not

that of a moral or mental weakling, below the level of the normal in

clearness of outlook upon life or in sincerity and decision of

character, we are left with a largely imaginary figure, from which most

of the concrete features have been removed. We do not know what manner

of man He was, nor, it must be acknowledged, does it matter very much

for religion whether He was at all; for with the increasing vagueness in

the historical portrait of Jesus, there comes inevitably a weakening of

His influence as a teacher whether of religion or morals.

44: Drews, _op. cit._, p. 15.

His gospel, in the first place, was never intended to become universal,

since the Gentile mission is attributed to the influence of later

ecclesiastical ideas. But is not the content of Jesus' religious

teaching, the Fatherhood of God and the value of the soul, unaffected by

any views which are held as to His Person? Tendencies are observable in

modern thought which are not reassuring upon this point; and, in fact,

the history of thought shows that theism, apart from the support of

Christian doctrine, is apt to pass into a pantheistic mysticism or a

semi-deistic naturalism. The Fatherhood of God may be regarded as too

anthropomorphic a conception, and a semi-pantheistic "all-Father" may be

substituted for the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Strauss,

while he is the classical example, is not alone in this passage from

Liberal Christianity to a more complete skepticism which gives up

theistic belief. It is not surprising that in certain circles the

expression "Christian pantheism" is now heard, and that a sympathetic

attitude towards pantheism should be shown by the Liberal critic. Thus

J. Weiss says: "Pantheism may, indeed, have its limitations and defects,

yet, without doubt, it lies very near to our time, inspired as it is by

both scientific and artistic ideas. Why should we not recognize this

form of religious life alongside of other forms, in case it finds vital

expression in emotion and action?"[45]

45: "Significance of Paul for Modern Christianity," _American

Journal of Theology_, July, 1913, p. 358.

On the other hand, the theistic content of Jesus' teaching is

immeasurably strengthened when enforced by His divine authority, and

read in the light of His Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection. As Drews

remarks: "The chief obstacle to a monistic religion and attitude is the

belief irreconcilable with reason or history, in the historical reality

of a 'unique,' ideal, and unsurpassable redeemer."[46] Certainly the

assurance that God is a loving Father and that we are His children, said

to be the essence of Christianity, is wonderfully safeguarded and

buttressed by the doctrines, or facts, of an Incarnate, Crucified, and

Risen Christ.

46: "The Christ-Myth," p. 300.

Whatever happens to the Christian doctrines and the Christian history,

many will declare that the ethical teaching of Jesus will remain, and

will continue to exercise its empire over the lives of men. But such an

inference finds little support in present conditions. An aggressive

militarism maintains that each nation should be free to develop its own

religious ideas, and chides Strauss with half-way measures in holding to

Christian ethics while discarding Christian doctrines and miracles. A

militant feminism which objects to the marriage service, and a militant

socialism which sees in the family the main support of the right of

private property, will not, if they have their way, leave the marriage

relation unaffected. Jesus taught, we are reminded, in a pre-scientific

and a pre-Darwinian age. His teaching, in fact, whatever its

acknowledged excellence and importance, was but a phase, and that not

the final phase, of moral evolution. His teaching, as many hold, was

only an _Interimsethik_, not intended to be the norm for all men and all

time. There is no assurance that even the character of Christ will

remain undimmed in splendour, and undiminished in power of appeal, for

there is no evidence for sinlessness, except evidence which is rejected

on the ground of exaggeration or idealization in the case of miracles,

and other claims implying the supernatural. Christian ethics doubtless

makes an appeal of its own, but apart from the support of Christology

its supremacy is by no means assured. If we go back to the moral

teaching or to the example of Jesus alone, there will be no teaching

with authority, no divine Teacher who is the Truth, and no regenerative

power of the Spirit behind the teaching. The power of Christ's example

lies in the union of humility and authority. "Take Christ's difference

from us out of Christianity and His identity with us loses all its

glorious power." If their Lord and Master washes the disciples' feet,

the example comes with the force of a divine command: "Ye ought also to

wash one another's feet." It is not merely a beautiful act to be admired

(or perhaps by some to be despised); it is a divine imperative to be

obeyed.

The strongest argument for a doctrinal Christianity is not the indirect

one to be found in the lessening significance of a merely

human-historical Jesus, and the tendency of His figure to become dim

upon the field of history, and of His voice to die away as an echo over

the Judean hills. It is rather to be found in the positive evidence of

the Christian documents, in the testimony of Christian experience, and

in the broader effects of a doctrinal Christianity in the course of the

centuries.

The statements of Harnack in his later essays show the inadequacy of a

gospel which does not include in its content the Person of the Redeemer.

"Only God is the Redeemer--and yet Christendom calls Jesus of Nazareth

its Redeemer. How is this contradiction to be solved?"[47] It is a fact

that He is the inner possession of His own. "But that which lies behind

this fact, which is expressed in the confession 'Christ liveth in me,'

the persuasion of the eternal life of Christ, of His power and glory,

that is a secret of the faith which mocks all explanation."[48] When

there is such a contradiction between experience and theory, it will be

natural to question the adequacy of a theory which finds no

interpretation for the deepest experiences of religion. Harnack, indeed,

goes far towards admitting the harmony between the gospel of Jesus and

that of Paul when he says: "The 'first' gospel contains the truth, the

'second' [Paul's gospel of redemption] the way, and both together the

life."[49]

47: "Aus Wissenschaft und Leben," II, p. 87.

48: _Ibid._, p. 91.

49: _Ibid._, p. 224.

There is in essence but one gospel, differently presented by Jesus and

Paul, whose focal point in the teaching of both is Christ and Him

crucified. The differences, as shown by von Dobschütz in a notable

essay, explain themselves naturally from the situation. In John and Paul

there is only expansion and repetition of what was contained implicitly

in the words of Jesus in the Synoptists. The later time was not

creative, but only selected and developed; its message was an echo, not

a new utterance. In the teaching of Paul as compared with that of Jesus

there are three points of difference: (1) the person of Jesus is much

more strongly emphasized; (2) His death and resurrection appear as basal

redemptive acts; and (3) everything is brought into connection with

redemption from sin. All three of these differences are explained by the

historical situation. Jesus Himself had brought them to God, and His

resurrection had brought them out of their despair and strengthened

their faith and given them courage for preaching. As to the differences,

two considerations should be borne in mind: "That the gospel should be

differently set forth before the death of Jesus than it was after that

event is not to be wondered at; and, secondly, it is also natural that

the standpoint and exposition of the recipients of grace should be

different from the attitude of One who was free from sin, and knew that

He was sent to bring man to God."[50]

50: "Gibt es ein doppeltes Evangelium in N. T.?" _Theol. Studien u.

Kritiken_, 85 (1912), pp. 362, 363.

In the future as in the past, we may believe, doctrinal Christianity,

that is a Christianity broad enough to include the teaching and example,

and the person and passion and resurrection of Christ, will be for men

and nations the power of God unto salvation. If the essence of a thing

is shown in its activity, the essence of Christianity cannot be

separated from its doctrinal content. Certainly it was Christianity in a

doctrinal form that inspired the greatest achievements of the Christian

Church in the course of her history. It was doctrinal Christianity that

loosed the bonds of Jewish legalism, inspired the missionary enterprise

of the primitive and the modern church, raised the standard of the

Reformation, laid the foundations of modern democracy, and guided the

sanest and bravest attempts at social reform.

Our argument has been that the primitive gospel which began to be

preached by the Lord was a doctrinal gospel, a gospel of the Kingdom,

the Cross and the Son of God, that no other message can be found with

any distinctness within or beneath the Gospel records, and that this has

been at the basis of Christian experience and of the life of the

Christian Church. The gospel of the grace of God is the gospel of the

glory of Christ.

II

The Christian Faith and Modern Science

A discussion of the present relations between science and the Christian

Faith must be very largely a discussion of the theory of evolution. Our

age has been called evolution-mad; we can scarcely speak or even think

except in biological terms and under biological categories. The

evolution theory has influenced every department of thought and even the

science of thought itself, and it is often assumed that everything

pre-Darwinian must be thrown to the intellectual scrap-heap.

Half a century ago the time was ripe for a new generalization in science

which should include the organic world. Newton had extended the reign of

mechanism in space, and Lyell, by substituting the uniformitarian for

the catastrophic theory of the formation of the earth's crust, had

effected the same extension in time. Men's minds had become familiar

with the thought of immense reaches of space and of vast periods of

time, and with the idea in both spheres of the reign of natural law

instead of immediate divine intervention. The Darwinian hypothesis of

Natural Selection came as the culmination of this movement of a

progressive substitution of a natural for a supernatural explanation of

things. The motions of planets and heavenly bodies, the formation of the

strata of the earth's crust, and now the kingdom of organic life were

brought within the domain of natural and general law.

It is not necessary to describe in detail the ferment in religious

thought which followed the publication of the "Origin of Species," 1859;

but we may notice briefly the extreme inferences which were drawn

unfavourable to religion, and then the inevitable reaction. On the one

hand there were loud claims at first that the death-knell of religion

had been sounded. A cause other than creation had been discovered for

the origin of species and by analogy for other origins formerly assigned

to the Creator. Chance, not only blind but apparently cruel, was

enthroned in the place of design in the production of the various forms

of life. The higher was evolved from the lower, but in a way that gave

to the higher the quality of the lower. Man was no longer the child of

God, not even the prodigal child. He was the progeny of the brute and

shared his destiny. The obligation to be moral, or even decent, had no

higher sanction than the fierce struggle for existence. Theism was

derived from animal-or ancestor-worship, and had no higher authority or

credibility. Man, no longer made in the divine image, could lay no

claim to a divine inheritance; not fallen, but rising out of his brute

inheritance, he had no need for the divine mercy.

Renan in France, Haeckel in Germany, and Grant Allen in England agreed

that religion was doomed.[51] Religious beliefs, according to the last

named, were destined "to be entirely discredited as grotesque, fungoid

growths which had clustered around the thread of primitive

ancestor-worship." Renan inferred as one result of Darwinism the gradual

dying out of religion; while the fundamental postulates of religion,

God, Freedom and Immortality, were, according to Haeckel, all given the

_coup de grace_. The life of man, entangled by descent with lower orders

of being, seemed divorced from the wisdom and purpose of God, and an

all-engulfing mechanism threatened to swallow up the hopes and

aspirations of mankind. The situation illustrated the statement of

Emerson: "The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion

of nations, the manners and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a

new generalization."

51: See Benjamin Kidd in article, "Darwinism," in "Hastings'

Dictionary of Religion and Ethics," Vol. IV, p. 404.

From this extreme position there was an inevitable reaction. Evolution

was seen to present a face not so unfavourable to religion. Origin and

destiny were two questions; the higher might be evolved from the lower,

but not in such a way as to deprive the higher of its proper quality. If

nature and man were so closely related, our idea of the worth of nature

could be exalted without depriving man of his dignity. "A man's a man

for a' that," whether sprung from the dust of the earth, as had been

always held, or derived from organic material below him. An orthodox

evolutionist developed a new and powerful argument for immortality; if

man had gone so far, why not farther? The meaning of the whole

evolutionary process, of the long travail of nature, was obviously, if

it had a meaning (and why deny this to our intellectual confusion?), the

production of man with his endowments, aspirations and hopes. Descent

may become ascent, and the meaning of evolution may well be the

development of freedom, and immortality but evolution at the end of its

journey. A new and grander teleology was discernible in nature, not seen

in the details of its products so much as in the great tendencies and

lines of its development and the outworking of its laws. Most impressive

of all, it was found that devout Christians, like Charles Kingsley,

could become evolutionists without losing their faith; and that

evolutionists like Romanes (who had spoken, during his eclipse of faith,

of the evolutionary theory as a deluge, "uprooting our most cherished

hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life

in mindless destruction"[52]) could become Christians, or regain their

faith, without affecting their scientific views.

52: "A Candid Examination of Theism," p. 51.

With all the problems which evolution has set for religious thought, it

should be noticed that it has distinctly relieved the pressure of one

difficulty which has been felt, though now much less acutely than

formerly, since the time of Copernicus. In the words of Aubrey De Vere:

This sphere is not God's ocean, but one drop

Showered from its spray. Came God from heaven for that?

Life, and life upon the earth, is the centre of attention in the thought

of the day. With the physicist who sees the promise and potency of all

terrestrial life in the primitive star-dust, with the biologist who

speaks of the fitness of the environment to sustain life, or with the

philosopher who sees in the vital impulse the most important thing in

the history of the universe, the viewpoint is necessarily biocentric.

Yet it has been pointed out that the sum of organized matter "is but an

atom in the mass of the solar system, it occupies but a moment in its

duration; it has hardly a place in space; it is but a temporary film on

one of the smaller planets. It can exist only in a very small part of

the scale of temperatures through which the spheres pass from their

first to their last state. Set against the visible universe it is as

near to nothing as we can well conceive anything to be."[53] A

distinguished evolutionist has developed an argument to prove that the

earth alone in the solar system or elsewhere fulfills the conditions of

the existence of any high form of life.[54] It is not necessary to

estimate the value of Wallace's argument in order to emphasize, from an

evolutionary point of view, the importance of life and of man in the

universe. If the standpoint of science to-day is frankly biocentric, in

spite of the insignificant bulk of organized matter, religious thought

need not be accused of provincialism because it is anthropocentric in

its interest.

53: N. S. Shaler: "The Individual," 1910, p. 103.

54: A. R. Wallace: "Man's Place in the Universe."

In studying a little more closely the religious bearings of evolution,

it will be convenient to notice, I. The Method of Evolution, or the

biological discussion; II. The Meaning of Evolution, or the

philosophical discussion; and III. Theism and Evolution, or the more

directly religious aspects of the theory.

I. THE METHOD OF EVOLUTION

While there is general agreement among biologists that species have been

derived from one another by natural causes, there is a wide diversity of

opinion as to the method by which this result has been brought about.

Darwin's theory of natural selection has a struggle for existence of its

own, a fight for life with other evolutionary theories. Emphatic

protests are made from the side of experimental biology (de Vries), of

paleontology (Osborn), and of philosophical evolution (Bergson) against

the Darwinian hypothesis that the selection of minute fortuitous

variations can account for the rise of new species or explain the great

lines of development. It is only necessary to read the two volumes

published in England and America[55] in honour of the hundredth

anniversary of Darwin's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of the

publication of the "Origin of Species" to see that scientific opinion

upon the question of the method of evolution is widely divided.

55: "Darwin and Modern Science," Cambridge, 1909; "Fifty Years of

Darwinism," New York, 1909.

In Biblical language, the question of the hour in biology is, Who (or

what) made thee to differ? "It is the question," in the words of C. H.

Eigenmann, "of how the straight line of exact hereditary repetition may

be caused to swerve in a definite direction to reach an adaptive point.

This is the question of the present generation, perhaps of the entire

twentieth century."[56]

56: "Fifty Years of Darwinism," p. 191.

The Newton of biology, who will discover the laws of variation and

heredity, has not, it is safe to say, yet appeared. Variation in a

definite direction in virtue of an internal tendency in the organism

(Nägeli); variation in response to the specific stimulus of the

environment (Eimer); variation due, at least in animals, to the

conscious effort of the individual (Lamarck); variation inciting a

corresponding strengthening of parts of the individual organism, until

time should be given for hereditary strengthening of these parts

(organic selection as taught by Baldwin, Osborn and Lloyd Morgan);

variation due to the preservation and accumulation of minute

fluctuations by natural selection (Darwinism in its usual form);

variation from unknown causes suddenly and discontinuously (the

mutationism of de Vries); variation due to a mystical vital impulse in

organic life as a whole (the creative evolution of Bergson):--no one of

these views, if we take scientific opinion as a whole, can be said to

have torn aside the veil behind which nature carries on her creative

works.

The most notable attempt to supplement and strengthen the theory of

natural selection has been made by Weismann in his theory of Germinal

Selection. In Weismann's hypothesis, which has furnished in a sense the

philosophical basis for the popular Eugenics movement, the struggle for

existence is transferred to a struggle among the constituents of the

germ-plasm. The minute invisible "determinants" of the germ-plasm, which

give rise to the variations in the organ, or cell, which they determine,

are unequally nourished by the nutritive stream. A determinant at first

favoured by chance may at length gain strength actively to nourish

itself to the detriment of its fellow-determinants, and thus attain a

permanent upward movement. With Weismann the fluctuations within the

germ-plasm "are the real root of all hereditary variations, and the

preliminary condition for the occurrence of the Darwin-Wallace factor of

selection." The struggle for existence, or the struggle for possession

of the mate in sexual selection, practically goes back to "the struggle

between the determinants within the germ-plasm"[57] for food and space.

57: "Darwin and Modern Science": "The Selection Theory," p.49.

Let us see how this theory of determinants will apply to the famous case

of the antlers of the elk or stag. The antlers would increase in size,

in this case, only because the determinants, corresponding in the

germ-plasm to the antlers in the adult organism, attracted nourishment

to themselves, and withdrew it to a certain extent from their fellows.

Instead, therefore, of a corresponding strengthening in the whole

anterior half of the animal, which Weismann admits would be

necessary,[58] we should have, with the increased weight of the antlers,

a decrease in weight and strength of other parts of the body. The

problem, instead of being solved, seems to be involved in deeper

mystery, and there will be hesitation in accepting the statement that

"thus in our time the great riddle has been solved--the riddle of the

origin of what is suited to its purpose without the coöperation of

purposive forces."[59] T. H. Morgan thinks it unfortunate that Weismann

should seek to supply the deficiencies of Darwin's theory by new

speculative matter skilfully removed from the field of verification.[60]

58: "Darwin and Modern Science": "The Selection Theory," p. 32.

59: "The Evolution Theory," II, p. 391.

60: "Evolution and Adaptation," pp. 165 f.

Biologists are generally agreed in holding the doctrine of "descent with

modifications," but there is no agreement as to the method by which

variations in species are brought about. Bateson even declares that

"evolutionary orthodoxy developed too fast," and that "the time is not

ripe for the discussion of the origin of species."[61] S. Herbert

concludes: "In short, while natural selection can be looked upon as the

efficient cause of the progress of evolutionary lines, their first

beginnings must still be attributed to a still 'unknown factor in

evolution.'"[62]

61: "Darwin and Modern Science," pp. 99, 101.

62: "First Principles of Evolution," 1913, p. 224.

The neo-Darwinian who sees in the accumulation of minute chance

variations a sufficient explanation of the origin of species, cannot be

said to hold the field in such a way as to call for the unquestioning

acceptance of his views by the lay public; far less need the more remote

philosophical inferences sometimes drawn from his premises be accepted

without challenge as the teaching of science. While the central mystery,

in the opinion of leading biologists, remains unsolved in the biological

field, evolution or natural selection should be used with caution as the

solvent of all the problems of the universe. The masterkey should

first unlock the doors nearer home.

II. THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION

The more philosophical discussion of the Meaning of Evolution includes

in its scope the questions of mechanism and design and of preformation

and epigenesis.

1. Is the doctrine of evolution a foe to design, or does evolution make

more teleology than it destroys? Let us assume for the present the

neo-Darwinian position, and ask whether design can be excluded, first

from the organic world without man, and then from the organic world

including man. The whole system of things so ordered that through the

operation of the laws of variability, struggle for existence,

inheritance, elimination and selection, there should be worked out the

myriad forms of life in ever increasing complexity, calls more loudly

for the postulate of intelligence than do the special contrivances and

adaptations in nature when viewed from the standpoint of their separate

origin. If Paley's watch calls for a watchmaker, a system or arrangement

of nature which has been likened, not to a simple watch, but rather to a

watch (or a sundial) which makes all other watches, and these watches of

a constantly improved quality and increased complexity, cannot

permanently be regarded in any other than a teleological light. If the

whole process should prove to be mechanical, the evidence for design is

seen even more strikingly in the complex machinery itself than in the

product.

Huxley says that "there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the

doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental

proposition of evolution."[63] When A. R. Wallace at first argued that

many of the characteristic human qualities were not due to natural

selection, because of no value in the struggle for existence,[64] his

view incurred the ridicule of his critics, who interpreted it to mean

that "our brains are made by God and our lungs by natural selection."

After forty years of reflection, Wallace now takes a broader view of the

place of purpose in evolution, and says: "I now uphold the doctrine that

not man alone, but the whole World of Life, in almost all its varied

manifestations, leads us to the same conclusion--that to afford any

rational explanation of its phenomena, we require to postulate the

continuous action and guidance of higher intelligences; and further,

that these have probably been working towards a single end, the

development of intellectual, moral, and spiritual beings."[65] A

distinguished biologist has said that "to believe that all the countless

myriads of centres of coöperation and coördination which have been

required for this cosmos could have been originated and maintained by

unintelligent force acting fortuitously makes an immensely greater

strain upon faith than the alternative hypothesis."[66]

63: "Darwiniana," p. 110.

64: "Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection," 1870.

65: "The World of Life," 1911, pp. 340 f.

66: A. Macalister, M. D., F. R. S., in _Expositor_, Vol. ix.,

1910, p. 5.

The teleological argument has shown of late unusual vitality, and its

renewed support has come, singularly enough, from the evolutionary

quarter. Thus L. J. Henderson, inquiring into the biological

significance of the properties of matter, concludes that "the process of

cosmic (inorganic) evolution is indissolubly linked with the fundamental

characteristics of the organism; that logically, in some obscure manner,

cosmic and biological evolution are one."[67] The biologist, he thinks,

"may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as

biocentric."[68] Wallace, in his "World of Life," draws the inference

which Henderson suggests but, as a scientist, feels that he cannot

adopt: "The remote but more fundamental cause [of the living world],

which has been comparatively little attended to, is the existence of a

special group of elements possessing such exceptional and altogether

extraordinary properties as to render _possible_ the existence of

vegetable and animal life-forms." These elements are like the fuel, iron

and water in a steam-engine. "We may presume that the Mind which first

caused these elements to exist, and built them up into such marvellous

living, moving, self-supporting, and self-reproducing structures, must

be many million times greater than those which conceived and executed

the modern steam-engine."[69]

67: "The Fitness of the Environment," 1913, pp. 278 f.

68: _Ibid._, p. 312.

69: "The World of Life," p. 416.

It does not appear, then, that biological evolution at all necessitates

the acceptance of a mechanical view of the universe from which the

action of purpose is excluded. Protests against such a view have, in

fact, been coming of late from the scientific philosophers and the

philosophical scientists. Bergson, a type of the former, insists that

spontaneity, movement, indeterminateness are the differentia of life.

Among the scientists, Ostwald thinks that an absolutely determined world

is not the real world, but an ideal world;[70] and Sir O. Lodge speaks

of the theory that everything in the world is mechanically determined

as a "modern superstition."[71] How is the southward flight of the bird

and its return in the spring to its own nest, or the journey of an eel

thousands of miles up an inland river and its return thence to spawn in

the deep waters of the ocean, to be explained as the result of purely

mechanical causes? Driesch insists that the chemical-physical processes

"do not constitute life, they are _used_ by life."[72]

70: "Natural Philosophy," p. 50.

71: _Hibbert Journal_, October, 1911, p. 704.

72: See J. A. Thomson, _ibid._, p. 116.

The mechanical interpretation of things, however useful for some

purposes it may be, appears increasingly thin and ghostly as we advance

into the realms of life, consciousness and freedom. It becomes a

caricature of reality. It is not merely a colourless photograph as over

against a portrait--everything reduced to black and white; but it is

like an X-ray photograph of a living man, a mere skeleton without flesh

and blood. Mechanism is independent of time, but time is, in a sense, of

the essence of the organism. The mechanical movement can be reversed,

while life processes are irreversible.

The life and career of a great scientist such as Pasteur, it has been

said, is a more impressive evidence of design than any adduced by Paley

and the Bridgwater treatises.[73] Man has been called "Nature's rebel,"

and the endowments of man and his achievements in controlling nature and

understanding nature are a disturbing element in any theory which would

exclude the operation of intelligence from the course of evolution.

Romanes tells us: "When I wrote the preceding treatise ["The Candid

Examination"], I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance

of _human_ nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in an inquiry

touching Theism."[74]

73: S. Paget: "Another Device," p. 101.

74: "Thoughts on Religion," p. 164.

The drama of evolution as unfolded by science inevitably suggests that

in the fortunes and life of humanity is to be heard the _motif_ of

nature's music, unless indeed all is chaos and discord. The diapason

ends full in man, or rather begins in man and the history of his life

upon the earth. It may still be believed--because of evolution avowedly,

or in spite of evolution--that man is a happy or an unhappy accident, a

sport, a monstrosity, the miscarriage of an ape, a _faux pas_ of nature,

the strangest event in a purposeless series; or man may be regarded,

with much to support such an interpretation, as the intended goal of

evolution, giving significance, rationality and purpose to the whole

history. However slow and gradual the steps by which man has been

produced, and however mechanical in one aspect the process, it may be

insisted that a mechanism so perfect as to produce the varied forms of

organic life, culminating in man, with his mental and moral endowments,

is as strong evidence as could be produced of purpose as the ultimate

and only explanation of the mechanism.

Certainly the difficulty of evolving the fit from the fortuitous becomes

accentuated when man is included within the series. Man, a purposive and

moral being, sees in himself and the structure of his mind and the

experience of his life the crowning evidence of the action of purpose.

If the cause must be adequate to produce the effect, man cannot regard

himself as the product of an accidental or mechanical process from whose

inception and operation the action of intelligence is excluded. In a

word, a purposive being cannot have been the result of a purposeless

process.

It is significant that those who have interpreted evolution to the

masses have quite uniformly done so in terms of progress. But progress

is a teleological conception. In a world where atoms shift unceasingly,

but without the guidance of intelligence or will, there may be change

but there will be no progress; for one arrangement of atoms will be as

high in the scale of values as another. Evolutionists who, as

evolutionists, are inspired with an ideal of human progress must in some

sense be finalists. If the history of the world and of man presents any

real progress, it can only be because it is in so far an expression of

purpose.

2. It is an example of what Cardinal Newman called the development of

doctrine that the theory of Evolution has come to mean, in popular

regard, quite the opposite of what it meant etymologically or in the

mind of its early advocates. Evolution means the unfolding of what was

enfolded, either in primordial living germs or, to go still further

back, in the primitive star-dust. Whatever is in the product must be

read back into the elements from which it emerged, and a complete

knowledge of these elements and their properties would thus disclose

potencies for the production, under suitable conditions, of the

completed development.

A glance, almost at random, at current literature in which the

conception of evolution is employed in philosophical and theological

discussion, shows that the theory has suffered a sea-change. It has now

come to mean, to many who use it freely, not the unfolding of the

implicit, but the production or appearance of something essentially new,

a creative synthesis or epigenesis. Bergson, James Ward, Baron von Hügel

and Loisy are among those who use the term in this sense. Thus the last

named writer says: "That which constitutes man as a human being is that

which he possesses more than the beasts, and not that which he

possesses in common with them. From the fact that humanity proceeds

from animality, it does not follow that it is explained and defined

altogether by animality, otherwise evolution must be denied."[75]

75: "Histoire des Religions," 1911, pp. 61 f.

This modification of meaning is important when the doctrine of evolution

is extended downward into the inorganic sphere. Since species are

derived from one another, it used to be argued, life must be derived

from the lifeless; and it is obvious that if this process is pursued it

will lead to an infinite regress. We go back from the civilized to the

savage, from the conscious to the unconscious, from the organic to the

inorganic, till finally the evolution of the atom becomes the problem of

problems. We go back in an infinite regress, approaching the ideal

limit: In the beginning, nothing. The goal would seem to be the

evolution of primitive matter out of nothing, as Alfred Noyes has

suggested in his poem, "The Origin of Life":

In the beginning?--Slowly grope we back

Along the narrowing track,

Back to the deserts of the world's pale prime,

The mire, the clay, the slime;

And then ... what then? Surely to something less;

Back, back, to Nothingness!

* * * * *

Will you have courage, then, to bow the head,

And say, when all is said--

"Out of this Nothingness arose our thought!

This blank abysmal Nought

Woke, and brought forth that lighted city street,

Those towers, that armoured fleet"?

* * * * *

Will you have courage, then, to front that law

(From which your sophists draw

Their only right to flout one human creed)

That nothing can proceed--

Not even thought, not even love--from less

Than its own nothingness?

The law is yours! But dare you waive your pride,

And kneel where you denied?

The law is yours! Dare you rekindle, then,

One faith for faithless men,

And say you found, on that dark road you trod,

In the beginning--God?

The principle of continuity urges the evolutionist to extend his theory

downward into the inorganic world and upward into the sphere of the

moral and the spiritual. At the crucial points of the origin of life and

of the human race, the advocate of preformation has greater difficulty

than the supporter of epigenesis or creative evolution, which is a sort

of _rapprochement_ between evolutionism and creationism. Let us see how

the case stands at present as regards the origin of life and the origin

of man.

Life may be generated any day in the laboratory, but as yet this has

not been done.[76] In fact so great are the difficulties that Arrhenius

thinks that there was no beginning of life, life being eternal and

persisting, in spite of acknowledged scientific difficulties in the

conception, amid the vicissitudes of cosmic changes and flights through

interstellar space.[77] Weismann does not think that a living germ could

be conveyed in the crevices of meteorites to our planet, because "it

could neither endure the excessive cold nor the absolute desiccation to

which it would be exposed in cosmic space, which contains absolutely no

water. This could not be endured even for a few days, much less for

immeasurable periods of time."[78]

76: Jacques Loeb says that "whoever claims to have succeeded in

making living matter from inanimate will have to prove that he has

succeeded in producing nuclein material which acts as a ferment for

its own synthesis and thus reproduces itself. Nobody has thus far

succeeded in this, although nothing warrants us in taking it for

granted that this task is beyond the power of science."--"Darwin and

Modern Science," p. 270.

77: "Worlds in the Making," 1908, Chapter VIII.

78: "The Evolution Theory," II, p. 365.

Lord Kelvin will not go as far as Arrhenius, but believes that a

meteorite brought the first living germs to this planet. K. Pearson

thinks that under favourable conditions in the remote past life arose,

but arose only once, out of the non-living.[79] The bridge was so

slender that it was crossed but once under imaginary conditions not

controllable by experiment; and as a unique event even in imaginary

history it cannot be said to be subject to any general law. It is

questionable, in fact, whether in scientific merit the hypothesis is

superior to that of special creation.

79: "Grammar of Science," one volume edition, pp. 410 ff.

Dr. Schäfer sees this and points it out very clearly in his Presidential

Address.[80] A scientific account of the origin of life must refer it to

causes operating to-day; so, instead of Arrhenius' eternity of life, or

of Pearson's spontaneous production of life but once under inaccessible

conditions, or Lord Kelvin's meteoric conveyance of life, he believes

that life is constantly being produced, and has always been produced,

from certain colloidal substances which he describes. But what has

become of all this life, constantly generated? He admits there is trace

of only one paleontological series. While assuming that it is the nature

of life to evolve, he admits that there is no evidence accessible to the

senses or discerned as yet by the most delicate instruments for the

existence of these countless beginnings of life. The real question then

concerns not this kind of life, which eye hath not seen, but the origin

of the life which we know, and whose marvellous development evolution

traces. Ostwald thinks that "it is undecided whether originally there

were one or several forms from which the present forms sprang, nor is

it known how life first made its appearance on earth. So long as the

various assumptions with regard to this question have not led to

decisive, actually demonstrable differences in the results, a discussion

of it is fruitless, and therefore unscientific."[81]

80: _Science_, September 6, 1912, pp. 294 ff.

81: "Natural Philosophy," p. 175.

A comparison has often been drawn between the birth of the individual

and that of the race. Theologians have discussed the question whether

the child in his spiritual nature is to be referred to a special act of

creative power, or whether all of his endowments are derived from his

parents.

To the poet the birth of the child suggests the presence of forces other

than those of the seen and temporal. The new life is "out of the deep,

from the true world, within the world we see." Its roots are in another

dimension of being than that of nature or the world of time and sense.

In moments of insight, "though inland far we be, our souls have sight of

that immortal sea which brought us hither."

Again to the philosopher there is in the individual something

indescribable, unique, not to be compressed within the compass of any

general law, something in each individual which his ancestry or

antecedents will not explain nor his environment produce.[82]

82: See Royce: "The World and the Individual," II, p. 325.

Says a distinguished professor of biology[83]: "Familiarity with

development does not remove the real mystery which lies back of it. The

development of a human being, of a personality, from a germ cell seems

to me the climax of all wonders, greater even than that involved in the

evolution of a species or the making of a world." He remarks that "if

personality is determined by heredity alone, all teaching, preaching,

government, is useless." The only hope for the race, he says, is in

eugenics--always supposing that enough freedom is left to carry out its

program.

83: E. G. Conklin: "Heredity and Responsibility," in _Science_,

January 10, 1913.

If the birth of the individual and the full story of his origin is thus

enveloped in mystery for theologian, poet, philosopher and even

scientist, it is not to be expected that the problem of the origin of

the human race can be solved by a neat formula. Here the mystery of the

birth of the individual from parents of the same species is intensified

many fold. Here the problems of mind and body, of their genetic and

metaphysical relations to each other, and of the ultimate relation of

the spirit world to each, press for solution before there can be any

full and final answer to the question of the origin of man. Is it any

wonder that the single occurrence upon which was based the birth of all

future generations which have peopled the earth should be thought to

involve more than can be included in any scientific hypothesis?[84]

84: "No other animal types," says Wallace, "make the slightest

approach to any of these high faculties [such as are seen in man] or

show any indication of the possibility of their development. In very

many directions they have reached a limit of organic perfection

beyond which there is no apparent scope for further advancement.

Such perfect types we see in the dog, the horse, the cat-tribe, the

deer and the antelopes, the elephants, the beaver and the greater

apes; while many others have become extinct because they were so

highly specialized as to be incapable of adaptation to new

conditions. All these are probably about equal in their mental

faculties, and there is no indication that any of them are or have

been progressing towards man's elevation, or that such progression,

either physically or mentally, is possible."--"Man's Place in the

Universe," 3d (popular) ed., pp. 328, 329.

When we seek to interpret these critical points in the history of the

world, such as the origin of life and of man, two roads are open before

us. We may emphasize, with the advocates of preformation, the principle

of continuity alone; and, explaining the higher by the lower, we may go

back as Mr. Noyes would carry us, back on the dwindling track,

explaining civilization by savagery, the non-moral by the moral, the

conscious by the unconscious, the living by the non-living. In this

process, it has been often pointed out, there lurks a sort of _generatio

æquivoca_; primitive star-dust is endowed with the attributes of life,

of consciousness, and even of purpose and morality. Thus J. A. Thomson

says that "if we see any good reason for believing in the erstwhile

origin of the living from the not-living, we give a greater continuity

to the course of events, and we must again read something into the

common denominator of science--Matter, Energy, and the Ether. We have

already read into this Wonder and Mystery, Harmony and Order, and we

must now read into it--Progress and, from a philosophical standpoint,

Purpose."[85]

85: "The Bible of Nature," pp. 131, 132.

The objection will be made that to regard the primitive atoms or cells

as practically self-preserving, self-repairing and self-improving, the

fountain of all life, of all consciousness and morality and

civilization, is to endow these entities with attributes that are

manifestly inappropriate.

Seeing the difficulties of a theory of evolution based upon the

principle of continuity alone, we may emphasize, with many popular

interpreters, not so much this principle of continuity, as that of

progress. Evolution would then mean not a mere shifting of the elements,

a redistribution of matter and motion, but a creative synthesis, an

epigenesis. It will then mean, not "There is nothing new under the sun,"

but rather, "What next?" The descent of man will no longer suggest the

inference that as the progeny of the brute man must share his destiny,

but rather the thought that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

But how to explain the new element which has arisen, not out of, but

alongside of, the others? We would not be content to say, "Now the

inorganic elements incapable of producing life; and now, presto! living

matter;" for this after all would be a break in continuity not

explained, and would lead once more to a sort of creation _ex nihilo_.

The necessities of the case seem to call for some new conception which

shall unite the two great principles of continuity and progress.

III. THEISM AND EVOLUTION

We have reached the point where it can be seen that evolution, when

elevated from a biological hypothesis into a theory of the universe, is

in need of the theistic postulate in order to make it workable. Theism,

in fact, offers a twofold advantage to the evolution theory. It

satisfies the causal demand, and it furnishes the means of combining the

two ideas of continuity and progress which have impressed themselves so

deeply upon the mind of our generation.

In the first place it satisfies the causal demand. If evolution is but

the unfolding of the implicit, as the preformation view would have it,

an explanation is naturally sought for the marvellous properties of the

original star-dust, or mind-stuff, or the primordial living germ. The

more mechanical the interpretation of the course of things becomes, the

more insistent, again, will be the questions, Who made the mechanism?

Who drives the mechanism? Even from the standpoint of epigenesis, the

appearance of an entirely new element, which by hypothesis is not merely

implicit in the previous state of things, must be referred to some

adequate cause or ground. Evolution, in any of its forms, is the name of

a method rather than of a cause; and "logic compels the evolutionist to

assume a force that was not evolved, but which existed before evolution

began."[86]

86: F. H. Headley, "Problems of Evolution," p. 155.

If we interpret the power behind evolution in a theistic sense, and

believe that God is immanent in nature and in the life of man, we are

not absolved from the task of tracing as far as possible the natural

history of life and mind, but we may view that history from a standpoint

from which both origin and progressive development become intelligible.

No scientific hypothesis is able in itself to carry us all the way from

"concentrating nebulæ to the thoughts of poets." A theory of the

universe which shall do justice to the conceptions both of continuity

and progress can best be framed with the aid of the category of purpose.

The continuity is preserved in the unity of the developing plan, no

stage of which is sudden or abrupt, but is related "filially" to the

stage and the stages which preceded. The relation between two stages is

not like that between the two members of an equation, a relation of

exact equivalence between the evolved and the involved. There is a

really new element in the later stage if there is a real progress. But

the new factor comes not in dramatic or spectacular fashion; it comes

without observation, and comes not to destroy but to fulfill.

If the evolution theory is to cover the whole history of the world and

of man, it must be hospitable to the ideas both of continuity and

progress. An interpretation of evolution so framed would be opposed,

indeed, to the conception of a Creator touching the world only with His

finger-tips, and exhausting His creative power in its initial exercise.

It would be opposed to materialistic monism, as well as to an idealistic

or pantheistic monism which would reduce the evolutionary and historic

process to mere appearance. Evolution in its theistic construction sees

in the lower orders of existence and in the earlier stages of life the

promise, but not the potency, of the higher. It assumes the existence of

a power immanent in the universe and adequate to account for the

appearance of new forces. It can interpret alike the continuity of the

evolutionary process, and the appearance once for all in the

irreversible moments of progress of new forms and forces of life. It

admits the possibility of the appearance of new spiritual forces in the

course of history, and opens a vista of illimitable progress.

No one was more certain than Huxley, when speaking of the relation of

man to the lower animals, that "whether _from_ them or not, he is

assuredly not _of_ them."[87] Man's peculiar endowments, his sense of

law and beauty, his spiritual capacities and aspirations, all of these,

if laws of analogy and causation are to hold, point to a different

dimension of being from that of nature below him. If "man still bears in

his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,"[88] he bears

in the framework of his mind and moral nature the indelible stamp of his

spiritual origin. His spiritual endowments can find their explanation

only in a spiritual world. They have arisen, not from the lair of the

wild beast, but rather from the bosom of God. No ascertained fact of

science, nor any legitimate or necessary inference from any such fact,

forbids the affirmation of faith, "It is He that hath made us," and "we

are His people."

87: "Man's Place in Nature," p. 87.

88: "Descent of Man," p. 619.

With each advance of science the thoughts of men are disturbed. The

discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo seemed to destroy the foundations

of the Christian, or even the theistic, view of the world; but the

astronomer to-day can see anew God's glory in the heavens and more

impressive evidence of His greatness and majesty. When Newton's laws of

motion displaced the idea that the planets were conveyed about their

orbits by angelic beings, it was feared that atheism was the logical

inference. But Newton himself remained a devout theist, and even

Voltaire, his admirer, was ready

"To follow Newton in that boundless road,

Where nature's lost, and ev'rything but God."

So when evolution, through the genius of Darwin, came into popular

discussion and acceptance, it was feared that chance had been enthroned

in the universe, and that religion was destined to extinction. But in

the progress of the evolution theory, as its advocates have split into

various camps, the sense of the mystery in the origins and laws of the

organic world has deepened, and many can see in nature the evidence of a

diviner wisdom than before.

Dr. Schäfer in his presidential address before the British Association,

in 1912, spoke in one sense of the continuity of life, giving to it what

seemed like a mechanical or materialistic interpretation. The following

presidential address, by Sir Oliver Lodge, spoke of the continuity of

life in another sense, a continuation of life after death; and argued

that mechanism is inadequate to explain the facts of life, and asserted

that "genuine religion has its roots deep down in the heart of humanity,

and in the reality of things." At each stage of advance in science,

says a recent writer, "this joyful overestimate of the possibilities of

mechanism becomes a marked feature of contemporary thought. As each

piece of knowledge becomes assimilated, it is seen that the old problems

are in their essence unaltered; the poet, the seer and the mystic again

come to their own, and, in new language, and from a higher ground of

vantage, proclaim their message to mankind."[89]

89: "Science and the Human Mind," by W. C. D. Whetham and C. D.

Whetham, 1912, pp. 218, 219.

The horizons of mystery are not at the confines of telescopic vision, or

at the far boundaries of the material universe, but are in the objects

which are most familiar, in the meanest flower that blows, in the

minutest seed and in the smallest atom. As the poet finds in the flower

thoughts too deep for tears, so the scientist sees in it problems too

vast and far-reaching for human comprehension. He can see in the very

atom minute solar systems, and in electricity a mystery lying at the

very heart of material things.

It is the paradox of science that the more the world is understood, the

deeper does the mystery of its existence become. With the enlarging

boundaries of knowledge there is a growing appreciation of mysteries

perhaps insoluble which lie beyond. Science, in fact, only deals with

the connections of things, and the processes by which they came to be

what they are, but not with the ultimate origins and the final ends. The

deeper study of nature will lead men, we may believe, in the future as

it has done in the past, to the reverent attitude of a Kepler, a Newton,

a Clerk-Maxwell, and a Lord Kelvin. They will see in the bird's feather

and the butterfly's wing, in the constitution of the cell and the atom,

in the stellar universe and the mind of man, evidences of creative Power

and Purpose; and, turning from the study of nature, will exclaim, "How

wonderful are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all!"

III

The Christian Faith and Psychology

The Psychology of Religion as a branch of scientific study was "made in

America," and is not yet twenty years old. Its virtual founder and

popularizer was William James, who furnished the introduction to

Starbuck's "Psychology of Religion" (1900) and published his "Varieties

of Religious Experience," the quarry in which all subsequent writers

have mined, in 1903. An earlier American philosopher, Jonathan Edwards,

gained the right to be called the precursor of the science by his

treatise on the Religious Emotions. Of Edwards, named with Emerson and

James as one of three representative American philosophers, Royce has

said that "he actually rediscovered some of the world's profoundest

ideas regarding God and humanity simply by reading for himself the

meaning of his own religious experiences."[90]

90 "William James and Other Essays," p. 4.

The way for a scientific study of religious experience had been prepared

by the development of modern psychology and by the growing popular

interest in religious phenomena. We recall the wide-spread interest in

Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," dealing with personal

religion, and in Kidd's "Social Evolution," which dealt with the place

of religion on the broader field of human progress. The popularity of

monographs on mysticism, such as those by W. R. Inge and Miss A.

Underhill, and of lives of the saints, such as Paul Sabatier's "Life of

Francis of Assisi" and McCabe's "Life of Augustine," showed by the

personality of their authors and the wide circle of their readers that

religious experiences, especially if they be profound and unusual, are

matters of deep human interest even to those not closely connected with

the churches. The saints have been taken from the church historians, and

made to live before us as men of like passions with ourselves. For many

months recently a religious novel, "The Inside of the Cup," held its

place as the "best seller."

Since the pioneer work of Starbuck, Coe[91] and James, the literature of

the subject, largely by American writers, has grown apace. Established

in the college course, the psychology of religion has threatened to

disturb vested rights even in the theological schools. Conversion and

sanctification, once regarded as themes for the theological cloister,

the revival service or the closet of devotion, have become familiar

topics of the text-books and commonplaces of the lecture room.

91: "The Spiritual Life," 1900.

Will this study of religion from the psychological standpoint prove to

be an ally to the Christian Faith, or will it put new weapons into the

hands of its enemies? It may be too early for a positive answer, but the

advertising value of the new movement cannot be denied, and several

specific entries at least may be made on the credit side of the ledger.

The materials for religious psychology have been drawn mainly from

Christian biography and Christian experience. Impressive stories of

conversion, gathered from the ages of Christendom and from the work of

city and foreign missions, have strengthened the argument from Christian

experience. Taken from religious biographies and devotional books and

missionary annals and modern questionnaires, the testimony of the saints

of all ages has been marshalled as they have told what the Lord has done

for their souls. The very fact that it has been worth while to write

psychologies of religion is in itself significant. "Christianity," says

Eucken, "has been the first to give the soul a history; in comparison

with the interest of the soul, it has reduced all events in the outer

world to mere incidentals, according to the words of Jesus: 'What shall

it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.'"[92]

92: "Können wir noch Christen sein?" 1911, p. 10; "Can We Still Be

Christians?" p. 9.

Separating as far as possible the descriptive from the metaphysical

aspects of our subject, we may consider I. The Psychology of Religious

Experience; and II. The Metaphysical Implicates of Religious Experience.

Under the first head we shall find that the study of religious

experience has been favourable to the Christian Faith in at least four

respects.

I. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

I. The scientific study of religion shows that religion belongs to the

essence rather than the accidents of human nature. Man is the praying,

the believing, and the hoping-to-survive animal. It is not the office of

psychology to prove the existence of God, but it may show that belief in

His existence is natural to man, and is favoured by natural selection.

It may show that religious experiences have, in the words of James,

"enormous biological worth,"[93] and that, to quote again the same

writer, "the strenuous type of character will on the battle-field of

human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will

drive irreligion to the wall."[94]

93: "Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 509.

94: "The Will to Believe," p. 213.

One evidence of the normality of religious faith is the vacuum or sense

of loss which continues to be felt in the life of those who have lost

it. If we need God, as Augustine says, in order that the soul may live,

it is natural that there should be a feeling of spiritual starvation

without God. The two classical instances of this "aching void the world

can never fill" are those of two well-known scientists, one writing in

the eclipse, apparently permanent, of his faith, and the other after its

restoration. Says W. K. Clifford: "Whether or no it be reasonable and

satisfying to the conscience, it cannot be doubted that theistic belief

is a comfort and a solace to those who hold it, and that the loss of it

is a very painful loss.... We have seen the spring sun shine out of an

empty heaven, to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter

loneliness that the Great Companion is dead. Our children, it may be

hoped, will know that sorrow only by the reflex light of a wondering

compassion."[95] It is a sad consolation that children will be spared the

loss, because they have not known the joy, of religious faith.

95: "Lectures and Essays," 2d ed., p. 389.

Romanes, during the eclipse of his faith, found that success,

intellectual distraction, reputation and artistic pleasure were "all

taken together and well sweetened to taste ... but as high confectionery

to a starving man." He adds: "I take it then as unquestionably true that

this whole negative side of the subject proves a vacuum in the soul of

man which nothing can fill save faith in God."[96] Such modern instances

show the normality of religion, and are an impressive commentary upon

the words of the Psalmist, "My soul is athirst for God," and upon those

of Augustine, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

96: "Thoughts on Religion," 2d ed., pp. 161, 162.

The normality of religion is further shown in the instinctive turning of

the soul to God, or to some higher power, in times of crisis and danger.

The religious consciousness is best interrogated, not in times of

mechanical routine or worldly preoccupation, but in those moments when

we seem to ourselves to be most religious, in moments of clearest

insight, or of deepest emotion, or of some crisis in action. The story

of one of the survivors of the _Titanic_ disaster is in point:

"The second thing that stands out prominently in the emotions produced

by the disaster is that in moments of urgent need men and women turn for

help to something entirely outside themselves.... To those men standing

on the top deck with the boats all lowered, and still more when the

boats had all left, there came the realization that human resources were

exhausted and human avenues of escape closed. With it came the appeal to

whatever consciousness each had of a Power that had created the

universe. After all, some Power had made the brilliant stars above ...

had made each one of the passengers with ability to think and act, with

the best proof, after all, of being created--knowledge of their own

existence; and now, if at any time, was the time to appeal to that

Power. When the boats had left and it was seen the ship was going down

rapidly, men stood in groups on the deck engaged in prayer, and later,

as some of them lay on the overturned collapsible boat, they repeated

together over and over again the Lord's Prayer.... And this was not

because it was a habit.... It must have been because each one ... saw

laid bare his utter dependence on something that had made him and given

him power to think.... Men do practical things in times like that: they

would not waste a moment on mere words if those words were not an

expression of the most intensely real conviction of which they were

capable. Again, like the feeling of heroism, this appeal is innate and

intuitive, and it certainly has its foundation on a knowledge--largely

concealed, no doubt--of immortality. I think this must be obvious: there

could be no other explanation of such a general sinking of all the

emotions of the human mind expressed in a thousand different ways by a

thousand different people in favour of this single appeal."[97]

97: "The Loss of the _SS. Titanic_: Its Story and Its Lessons," by

Lawrence Beasley, B. A. (Cantab.), Scholar of Gonville and Caius

College, one of the survivors. Boston, 1912.

The instinctive place and biological value of religion in human life,

the restlessness and hunger of the soul without religion, show that it

is not an excrescence upon human nature. The exclamation of a recent

writer seems justified: "The age of scientific materialism is past....

The religious instinct has been adjudged normal."[98]

98: J. B. Carter: "The Religious Life of Ancient Rome," p. 95.

2. The study of religious experience has shown the power of religion

(and certainly for the most part its power for good) in the life of the

individual and of society. The psychologists have thrust upon our

attention with unmistakable emphasis the _fact_ of conversion, however

they may theorize about the fact. The recorded experiences of saints,

reformers and missionaries, the testimony collected by the

questionnaires and the cases of conversion described in such books as

Begbie's "Twice-Born Men" have shown beyond a peradventure that men

_can_ be born again. It only remains for the church to say, "Ye _must_

be born again."

The records show that men who are the slaves of appetite and vice, too

degraded to be reached by appeals to pride or to prudence, can by the

gospel be restored to hope and self-respect and to lives of singular

usefulness. As Begbie says: "There is no medicine, no Act of Parliament,

no moral treatise, and no invention of philanthropy, which can

transform a man radically bad into a man radically good.... Science

despairs of these people, pronounces them 'hopeless' and 'incurable.'

Politicians find themselves at the end of their resources. Philanthropy

begins to wonder whether its charity could not be turned into a more

fertile channel. The law speaks of 'criminal classes.' It is only

religion that is not in despair about this mass of profitless evil

dragging at the heels of progress--the religion which still believes in

miracle."[99]

99: "Twice-Born Men," 1909, pp. 18f.

The psychologists have emphasized not only the facts of conversion but

the variety in its mode. It has been pointed out that "conversion for

males is a more violent incident than for females, and more sudden."[100]

Uhlhorn has observed that it is characteristic of a period of conflict

"that sudden conversions are more frequent then than at other times,

that the marvel inherent in every conversion becomes more evident, and,

so to speak, more palpable."[101] A child brought up under strong

religious influences will not have the intense struggles which are

natural when a hardened criminal or a scoffing unbeliever is converted.

Count Zinzendorf raised serious misgivings in the minds of the Moravians

when he insisted that he "could not tell the day when he first decided

for Christ, and had no knowledge of a time when he did not love

Him."[102] The mother of Edmund Gosse, a woman singularly devoted in her

labours by tongue and pen to the cause of evangelical religion, wrote in

her thirtieth year: "I cannot recollect the time I did not love

religion. If I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to

be holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after my

last willful sin, it is scarcely yet begun."[103]

100: Starbuck: "Psychology of Religion," p. 95.

101: "Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism," p. 168.

102: See Stevens: "Psychology of the Christian Soul," pp. 159, 160.

103: "Father and Son," by Edmund Gosse, 1907, p. 3.

It would be equally one-sided to insist that all conversions must be of

the sudden or cataclysmic type, and to ignore the tremendous

significance of some sudden and dramatic experiences of conversion. Paul

and Augustine are cases in point, and it will scarcely do to dismiss

them with the remark that "Paul was probably a neurotic, and that

Augustine was a sensualist with a highly developed nervous

temperament."[104] The true nature of conversion may best be seen, as

James suggests, in those experiences which are exaggerated and

intense.[105]

104: Ames: "The Psychology of Religious Experience," p. 265.

105: "Varieties," p. 45.

Conversions of the sudden and dramatic type have, as a matter of fact,

exerted the most far-reaching influence in history. The secular

historian is apt nowadays to magnify the influence of Paul upon the

life of Europe, but the church historian must add that Paul, as apostle

or theologian or missionary, cannot be understood apart from the

experience at Damascus. Augustine's conversion inspired his thought and

determined his theology. Of Luther, whose conversion may not have been

of quite so dramatic a type, a recent writer says: "Indeed, the

Reformation in Germany was the spiritual biography of Luther writ large,

a spiritual experience materialized in institutions and intellectualized

in confessions."[106]

106: H. H. Walker: _Harvard Theological Review_, April, 1913, p. 179.

The psychologists unite with the historians in describing the broad

objective effects of religion upon the field of history. Christianity in

its Pauline form presented, in the West, a successful obstacle to the

flood of Eastern thought and culture. When the structure of the Roman

Empire was crumbling, it was Christianity in its Roman organization that

resisted the disintegrating influences of the barbarian invasion. It was

Christianity in its Calvinistic form that became "the seed-plot of

modern democracy." "No student of American history," says a writer on

the psychology of religion, "can fail to recognize the immense value of

religion as a factor in our national development, keeping us in some

measure true to the ideals of our fathers.... The fact that our moral

conceptions have at all stood the strain of this rapid material

development, and that political and social corruption and decay in

America to-day are not hopeless and irremediable as they were in Rome

during the last century of the Republic, is due, I believe, chiefly to

the vitality of religion among us as a factor effectively conservative

of our socially recognized values."[107]

107: W. K. Wright: "A Psychological Definition of Religion,"

_American Journal of Theology_, July, 1912, p. 406.

3. At a time when the sense of sin is declining, it is interesting to

find the psychologists pressing upon our attention the facts of the

disorder, the wrongness, the uneasiness, or frankly the need of

salvation, of human kind. It would be out of place for the psychologist,

as such, to dogmatize upon the subject of original sin, but in his

analysis of human nature he cannot overlook the fact of moral discord, a

fact often politely ignored in the text-books on ethics. Thus when James

speaks unreservedly and autobiographically, he confesses that "we all

need mercy." The morally athletic attitude tends to break down at last

even in the most stalwart; and, in the condition of moral helplessness,

"all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure,

and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being

that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not."[108] The

essential fact of religion, for Royce, is man's quest for salvation;

and the central and essential postulate which he considers in his recent

lectures, "is the postulate that man needs to be saved."[109]

108: "Varieties," p. 47.

109: "Sources of Religious Insight," 1912, pp. 8 f.

A distinction is sometimes drawn between a "once-born" and a

"twice-born" type of religious experience, but the distinction is not

absolute. We have already noticed that those who can trace no abrupt

change in their experience, nor tell the day or even the year of their

conversion, may be zealous in evangelistic labour, and emphatic in their

insistence upon the need of regeneration. A well-known example of the

once-born type of religion is the late Edward Everett Hale, whose words

are often quoted: "I observe, with profound regret, the religious

struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to

the formation of a hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man

has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a

family where the religion is simple and rational; etc."[110] And yet Dr.

Hale's son, brought up in such an atmosphere, has himself described in

the public press an experience under revival preaching which belongs to

the "twice-born" type.[111]

110: Quoted in Starbuck, pp. 305 f.

111: See _The Literary Digest_, February 10, 1906, p. 210.

The secrets of every heart are not revealed to the psychologist, and we

should not expect of him the deepest insight into the sinfulness of

sin; but in emphasizing man's sense of need, of incompleteness, of

restlessness and of disharmony, psychology has done much to confirm, if

it cannot of itself affirm, the Scriptural statement that "all have

sinned."

4. Is man saved by faith or by works, by faith or by character? As

between the evangelical and the legal schemes of salvation, the answer

of religious psychology is emphatically in favour of the former.

Psychologists of all schools unite in insisting that those who pass from

restlessness and impotence to peace and fullness of life do so in

wonderful accord with the Scriptural method of salvation by faith. The

witnesses may be called, even though to a tedious degree one witness

only confirms the testimony of another.

We are advised by Jastrow that it is "necessary for the life that we

live that we should frequently permit the focus of our concerns and of

our struggles to fade away, and allow the surgings from below to assert

themselves."[112] James remarks that "there is a state of mind known to

religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves

and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths

and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.... The time for

tension in our souls is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm

deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be

anxious about, has arrived."[113]

112: "The Subconscious," 1906, p. 543.