DR. L.P. JACKS
_As an excellent amateur huntsman once said to me, "If you must
cast, lead the hounds into the belief that they are doing it
themselves_."--JOHN ANDREW DOYLE.
One of the great ladies of Oxford was telling me the other day that she
remembers a time when friends of hers refused, even with averted eyes
and a bottle of smelling salts at the nose, to go down the road where
Mansfield College had presumed to raise its red walls of Nonconformity.
To-day Manchester College, the seat of Unitarianism, stands on this same
dissenting road, and thither the ladies of Oxford go up in great numbers
to listen to the beautiful music which distinguishes the chapel service,
the chapel itself already beautiful enough with windows by Burne-Jones.
On the altar-cloth of this chapel are embroidered the words, GOD IS
LOVE. No tables of stone flank that gentle altar, and no panelled creeds
on the walls challenge the visitor to define his definitions. The
atmosphere of the place is worship. The greatest of all Christ's
affirmations is reckoned enough. God is love. No need, then, to
add--Therefore with Angels, and Archangels, and all the Company of
Heaven . . .
The Principal of Manchester College is Dr. L.P. Jacks, the Editor of
_The Hibbert Journal_, the biographer of Stopford Brooke and Charles
Hargrove, author of _Mad Shepherds_, _Legends of Smokeover_, and other
books which have won the affection of many readers and the praise of no
few scholars. He is a man of letters, a man of nature, and a mystic.
His face bears a strange resemblance to the unforgettable face of that
great Unitarian, James Martineau, whom Morley calls "the most brilliant
English apologist of our day"; it lacks the marvellous sweetness of
Martineau's expression, but has a greater strength; it does not bear
witness to so sure a triumph of serenity, but shows the marks of a
fiercer battle, and the scars of deeper wounds. It is the masculine of
the other's feminine.
Like Martineau's the head with its crown of white hair is nobly
sculptured, and like Martineau's the ivory coloured face is ploughed up
and furrowed by mental strife; but whereas Martineau's is eminently the
indoors face of a student, this is the face of a man who has lived out
of doors, a mountaineer and a seafarer. Under the dense bone of the
forehead which overhangs them like the eave of a roof, the pale blue
eyes look out at you with a deep inner radiance of the spirit, but from
the midst of a face which has been stricken and has winced.
Something of the resolution, the deliberateness, the stern power, and
the enduring strength of his spirit shows itself, I think, in the short
thickset body, with its heavy shoulders, its deep chest, its broad firm
upright neck, and its slow movements, the movements as it were of a
peasant. Always there is about him the feeling of the fields, the sense
of nature's presence in his life, the atmosphere of distances. Nothing
in his appearance suggests either the smear or the burnish of a town
existence.
It is not without significance that he has gone farther afield from
Oxford City than any other of its academic citizens, building for
himself a home on a hill two miles and more from Magdalen Bridge, with a
garden about it kept largely wild, and seats placed where the eye can
travel farthest.
This man, who is so unpushing and self-effacing, makes a contribution to
the Christian religion which deserves, I think, the thoughtful attention
of his contemporaries. It can be set forth in a few words, for his faith
is fastened in the conviction that the universe is far simpler than
science--for the moment--would allow us to think.
Let me explain at the outset that Unitarianism admits of a certain
diversity of faith. There are Unitarians who think and speak only of
God. There are others who lay their insistence on the humanity of Jesus,
exalting Him solely as the chief est of teachers. There are others who
choose to dwell on the uniqueness of Jesus, who feel in Him some
precious but quite inexpressible, certainly quite indefinable, spell of
divinity, and who love to lose themselves in mystical meditations
concerning His continual presence in the human spirit. Dr. Jacks, I
think, is to be numbered among these last. But, like all other
Unitarians, he makes no credal demands on mankind, save only the one
affirmation of their common faith, with its inevitable ergo: God is
Love, and therefore to be worshipped.
Robert Hall said to a Unitarian minister who always baptised "in the
Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," attaching a
very sacred meaning to the words, "Why, sir, as I understand you, you
must consider that you baptise in the name of an abstraction, a man, and
a metaphor." More simple was the interpretation of a Japanese who, after
listening with a corrugated brow to the painful exposition of a recent
Duke of Argyll concerning the Trinity in Unity, and the Unity in
Trinity, suddenly exclaimed with radiant face, "Ah, yes, I see, a
Committee."
Dr. Jacks leaves these perplexities alone. For him, God is the Universal
Spirit, the Absolute Reality immanent in all phenomena, the Love which
reason finds in Goodness and intuition discovers in Beauty, the Father
of men, the End and the very Spirit of Evolution. And Jesus, so far as
human thought can reach into the infinite, is the Messenger of God, the
Revealer both of God's Personality and man's immortality, the great
Teacher of liberty. What else He may be we do not know, but may discover
in other phases of our ascent. Enough for the moment of duration which
we can human life to know that He unlocks the door of our prison-house,
reveals to us the character of our Father which is in Heaven, and the
nature of the universe in which we move and have our being.
If this should appear vague to the dogmatist who finds it impossible
either to love God or to do the will of Christ without going into the
arithmetic of Athanasius, and reciting an unintelligible creed, and
celebrating in Christian forms the rites of those mystery religions
which competed with each other for the superstition of the Greco-Roman
world in the third century, he will find no vagueness at all in Dr.
Jacks's interpretation of the teaching of Jesus. He may perhaps find in
that interpretation a simplicity, a clarity, and a directness which are
not wholly convenient to his idea of a God Who repents, is angry, and
can be mollified.
Whether Jesus was born of a Virgin or not, whether He raised dead bodies
to life or not, whether He Himself rose from the grave with His physical
body or not, certain is it, and beyond all dispute of every conceivable
kind, that He taught men a way of life, that He brought them a message,
that He Himself regarded His message as good news.
How carelessly men may think in this matter is shown to us rather
strikingly in a page of _Some Loose Stones_, a book to which reference
has already been made. After writing about dogma, and endeavouring to
show that the traditionalist is on firmer ground than the modernist,
because he can say, "Here is the Truth," while the modernist can only
say, "We will tell you what the truth is when we have found it,"
suddenly, with scarcely a draw of his breath, Father Knox exclaims:
The real trouble is that they (the modernists) have got hold of the
wrong end of the stick, that they have radically misconceived the
whole nature of the Christian message, which is, to be one for all
minds, for all places, for all times.
Note that word _message_. What confusion of thought!
The message of Christ is one thing; paganised dogma concerning Christ is
another. The message of Christ does indeed remain for all minds, for all
places, for all times, inexhaustible in its meaning, unalterable in its
nature; the dogmas of theology, on the other hand, demand Councils of
the Church for their definition, and an infallible Pope for their
interpretation. They change, have changed even in the unchangeable
Catholic Church, and will change with every advance of the positive
sciences and with every ascent of philosophy towards reality; but the
message stands, plain to the understanding of a child, yet still
rejected by the world. Christianity, as Dr. Jacks says, has been more
studied than practised.
How far quarrelling theologians and uncharitable Churches are
responsible for that rejection, let the conscience of the traditionalist
(if he happen to know history) decide.
As for the message, here is a reading of it by a Unitarian--a reading, I
venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times--a reading
which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its
profundity, is a message for the simple as well as for the learned.
Christianity is man's passport from illusion into reality. It reveals to
him that he is not in the world to set the world right, but to see it
right. He is not a criminal and earth is not a Borstal Institution.
Nature is the handiwork of a Father. Look deeply into that handiwork and
it reveals a threefold tendency--the tendency towards goodness, the
tendency towards beauty, the tendency towards truth. Ally yourself with
these tendencies, make yourself a growing and developing intelligence,
and you inhabit spiritual reality.
Study the manner of Jesus, His attitude to the simplest and most
domestic matters, the love He manifested, and the objects for which He
manifested that love. These things have "a deeper significance than our
pensive theologies have dared to find in them. . . . They belong not to the
fringe of Christianity but to its essence." Christ loved the world.
His religion, which has come to stand for repression founded on an
almost angry distrust of human nature, is in fact "the most encouraging,
the most joyous, the least repressive, and the least forbidding of all
the religions of the world." It does not fear the world, it masters it.
It does not seek to escape from life, it develops a truer and more
abundant life. It places itself at the head of evolution.
There are points on its path where it enters the shadows and even
descends into hell, for it is a religion of redemption, the religion of
the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, but "the end of it all is a
resurrection and not a burial, a festival and not a funeral, an ascent
into the heights and not a lingering in the depths."
Nowhere else is the genius of the Christian Religion so poignantly
revealed than in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins in
the minor key and gradually rises to the major, until it culminates
in a great merry-making, to the surprise of the Elder Son, who
thinks the majesty of the moral law will be compromised by the
music and dancing, and has to be reminded that these joyous sounds
are the keynotes of the spiritual world.
Dr. Jacks well says that we should be nearer the truth if, instead of
thinking how we can adapt this religion to the minds of the young, we
regarded it as "originally a religion of the young which has lost some
of its savour by being adapted to the minds of the old."
Then he reminds us that it was "in the form of a person that the
radiance of Christianity made its first appearance and its first
impression on the world." A Light came into the world.
The Jesus of history drew men to Him by an inward beauty. His serenity
gave the sick and the suffering an almost riotous confidence that He
could heal them. His radiance attracted children to His side. He was
fond of choosing a child for the sublimest of teachings. He made it
clear that entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven is easiest to those who
are least deluded or enchained by appearances, and hardest to those
whose hearts lie in their possessions. The Kingdom of Heaven signifies
freedom.
He was the great teacher of the poverty of riches, and the wealth of
nothingness. He knew as no other had ever known, and saw as no other had
ever seen, the symbolism of nature. Always His vision pierced behind the
appearance to the thing in itself. He loved "the reality that abides
beyond the shadows." He directed our spiritual vision to this reality,
telling us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on
the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal
fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain
that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on
the outside of things. The materialist is in prison.
He did not condemn the earth; He taught that its true loveliness is to
be discerned only by the spiritual eye. For Him the earth was a symbol,
and the whole realm of nature a parable.
I cannot but think that we are never further from the genius of the
Christian religion than when we treat this luminous atmosphere as
though it were a foreign envelope, of little account so long as the
substance it enshrines is retained intact. Without it, the
substance, no matter how simple or how complex, becomes a dry
formula, dead as the moon.
Losing the radiance we lose at the same time the central light from
which the radiance springs, and our religion, instead of
transforming the corruptible world into its incorruptible
equivalents, reverts to the type it was intended to supersede and
becomes a mere safeguard to the moral law.
Nothing can allay our present discords and the long confusions of the
world, short of "those radiant conceptions of God, of man, of the
universe, which are the life and essence of Christianity."
"Liberty," says Edouard Le Roy, "is rare; many live and die and have
never known it." And Bergson says, "We are free when our acts proceed
from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit
that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between
the artist and his work."
This, I think, is what Dr. Jacks means when he speaks of Christianity
bestowing liberty--a new mastery over fate and circumstance. It calls
forth not only the affection of a man, and not only the intelligence of
a man, but the whole of his intuitions as well. The entire personality,
the entire field of consciousness, the entire mystery of the ego, is
bidden to throw itself upon the universe with confidence, with
gratitude, with love unspeakable, recognising there the act of a
Fatherhood of which, in its highest moments, the soul is conscious in
itself.
Thus is man made free of illusion. No longer can the outside of things
deceive him, or the defeats of the higher by the lower deject, much less
overwhelm him. He sees the reality behind the appearance. He dwells
with powers which are invisible and eternal--with justice, with virtue,
with beauty, with truth, with love, with excellence. More to him than
any house built with hands, more, much more even than the habitation of
his own soul, is the invisible life of that soul, its delight in beauty,
its immediate response to truth and goodness, its longing for the flight
of the One to the One, its almost athletic sense of spiritual fitness.
Dr. Jacks will have no element of fear in this religion. He finds no
room in the universe for an offended God. Belief in God can mean nothing
else but love of God. All our troubles have come upon us from the
failure of the Church to live in the radiant atmosphere of this belief,
to make belief a life, a life that needs no dogmas and expresses itself
by love.
But this was not to be. The Church cultivated fear of God, and could not
bring itself to trust human nature.
Belief passed into dogma; the mind of man was put in fetters as
well as his body; the Church built one prison and the State
another. . . . All this was closely connected with the idea of the
_potentate_ God which Church and State, in consequence of their
political alliance, had restored, against the martyr protest of
Jesus Christ.
But how should man be treated? Here it is that Dr. Jacks makes a most
valuable suggestion:
Treat man, after the mind of Christ, as a being whose first need is
for Light, and whose second need is for government, and you will
find that as his need for light is progressively satisfied, his
need for government will progressively diminish.
Is it not a significant fact that while the churches are
complaining of emptiness, the schools, the colleges, the
universities, are packed to overflowing?
Dr. Jacks has asked quite recently a Frenchman, a Swede, a Dutchman, an
American, a Chinaman, and a Japanese, "What is the leading interest in
your country? What do your people really believe in?" The answer in each
case was, "Education."
When he varied his question, and asked, "What have you learnt from the
war?" the answer came, "We have learnt our need of education."
Some would prefer them to have said: "We have learnt our need of
Christianity." But is it not the same thing? In grasping the vast
potentialities of the human spirit, and that is what this hunger
for education means, have they not grasped an essential
characteristic of the Christian religion and placed themselves at
its very growing point?
Education is Light, and Light is from God.
Dr. Jacks believes that a movement has begun which, "if it develops
according to promise, will grow into the most impassioned enterprise so
far undertaken by man."
The struggle for _light_, with its wide fellowships and high
enthusiasms, will displace the struggle for _power_, with its mean
passions, its monstrous illusions, and its contemptible ideals.
The struggle for power will end, not, as some predict, in
universal revolution, which would merely set it going again in
another form, but by being submerged, lost sight of, snowed under,
by the greater interests that centre round the struggle for light.
I say these things will happen. But they will not happen unless men
are sufficiently resolved that they shall.
Let the reader remember that those who now flock to the schoolmaster are
less likely than men of the previous generation to fall into the pit of
materialism. They begin at a point which the previous generation did not
believe to exist--a visible world reduced by positive science to the
invisible world of philosophy. They confront not a quantitative
universe, but a qualitative. They almost begin at the very spirit of
man; they cannot advance far before they find themselves groping in the
unseen, and using, not the senses given to us by action, but the eyes
and ears of the understanding by which alone the soul of man can
apprehend reality. Even the Germans have gone back to Goethe.
This, then, is the contribution which Dr. Jacks makes to modern thought.
We are to consider man as a creature of boundless potentiality, to
realise that his first need is for light, and to define that mystic
all-important word in terms of education. Christianity was not concerned
with the moral law; it was concerned with the transcending of all law by
the spirit of understanding.
I need not guard myself against the supposition that so true a scholar
is satisfied with the system of education which exists at the present
time. Dr. Jacks looks for a reform of this system, but not from the
present race of politicians.
"How can we hope to get a true system of education from politics?" he
asked me. "Is there any atmosphere more degrading? Plato has warned us
that no man is fit to govern until he has ceased to desire power. But
these men think of nothing else. To be in power; that is the game of
politics. What can you expect from such people?"
He said to me, "Men outside politics are beginning to see what education
involves. It involves the whole man, body, mind, spirit. I do not think
you can frame an intelligent definition of education without coming up
against religion. In its simplest expression, education is a desire to
escape from darkness into light. It is fear of ignorance, and faith in
knowledge. At the present time, most people have escaped from darkness
into twilight; a twilight which is neither one thing nor the other. But
they will never rest there. The quest of the human spirit is Goethe's
dying cry, Light--more Light. And it is from these men that I look to
get a nobler system of education. They will compel the politicians to
act, perhaps get rid of the present race of politicians altogether. And
when these humble disciples of knowledge, who are now making heroic
efforts to escape from the darkness of ignorance, frame their definition
of education, I am sure it will include religion. The Spirit of Man
needs only to be liberated to recognise the Spirit of God."
Most people, I think, will agree with Dr. Jacks in these opinions; they
are intelligent and promise a reasonable way out of our present chaos.
For many they will shed a new light on their old ideas of both religion
and education. But some will ask: What is the Unitarian Church doing to
make these intelligent opinions prevail?
Dr. Jacks confesses to me that there is no zeal of propaganda in the
Unitarian communion. It is a society of people which does not thrust
itself upon the notice of men, does not compete for converts with other
churches in the market-place. It is rather a little temple of peace
round the corner, to which people, who are aweary of the din in the
theological market-place, may make their way if they choose. It is such
a Church as Warburton, to the great joy of Edward FitzGerald, likened to
Noah's family in the Ark:
The Church, like the Ark of Noah, is worth saving; not for the sake
of the unclean beasts that almost filled it and probably made most
noise and clamour in it, but for the little corner of rationality
that was as much distressed by the stink within as by the tempest
without.
It is significant of the modesty of the Unitarian that he does not
emerge from this retirement even to cry, "I told you so," to a Church
which is coming more and more to accept the simplicity of his once
ridiculed and anathematised theology.
"You must regard modernism," I said to Dr. Jacks on one occasion, "as a
vindication of the Unitarian attitude."
He smiled and made answer, "Better not say so. Let them follow their own
line."
No man was ever less of a proselytiser. In his remarkable book _From
Authority to Freedom_, in which he tells the story of Charles Hargrove's
religious pilgrimage, he seems to be standing aside from all human
intervention, watching with patient eyes the action of the Spirit of God
on the hearts and consciences of men. And in that little masterpiece of
deep thought and beautiful writing, _The Lost Radiance of the Christian
Religion_, from which I have made most of the quotations in this
chapter, one is conscious throughout of a strong aversion from the field
of dogma and controversy, of deliberate determination of the writer to
keep himself in the pure region of the spirit.
Christianity, he tells us there, has seen many corruptions, but the most
serious of all is not to be found in any list of doctrines that have
gone wrong:
We find it rather in a change of atmosphere, in a loss of
brightness and radiant energy, in a tendency to revert in spirit,
if not in terminology, to much colder conceptions of God, of man,
and of the universe.
"As man in his innermost nature is a far higher being than he seems, so
the world in its innermost nature is a far nobler fabric than it seems."
To discover this man must live in his spirit.
"God," said Jesus, "is Spirit," and it is a definition of God which
goes behind and beneath all the other names that are applied to
Him.
The spirit is love; it is peace; it is joy; and perhaps joy most of
all. It is a joyous energy, having a centre in the soul of man.
It is not a foreign principle which has to be introduced into a man
from without; it belongs to the substance and structure of his
nature; it needs only to be liberated there; and when once that is
done it takes possession of all the forces of his being, repressing
nothing, but transfiguring everything, till all his motives and
desires are akindle and aglow with the fires and energy of that
central flame, with its love, its peace, its joy.
A man who sees so deeply into the truth of things, and lives so
habitually at the centre of existence, is not likely to display the
characteristics of the propagandist. But the work of Dr. Jacks at
Manchester College may yet give not only this country but the world--for
his students come from many nations--a little band of radiant
missionaries whose message will repel none and attract many.
BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON
DURHAM, Bishop of, since 1920; Rt. Rev. Herbert Hensley Henson; b.
London 8th Nov., 1863, 4th s. of Late Thomas Henson, Broadstairs
Kent, and Martha Fear; m. 1902 Isabella Caroline, o.d. of J.W.
Dennistoun of Dennistoun, N.B. Educ.: Privately and at Oxford.
First Class Modern History; Fellow of All Soul's College, Oxford,
1884-91, reelected 1896; B.D. 1898; Hon. D.D. Glasgow, 1906;
Durham, 1913; Oxon, 1918; Head of the Oxford House, Bethnal Green,
1887-88; Vicar of Barking, Essex, 1888-95; Select Preacher at
Oxford, 1895-96, 1913-14; Cambridge, 1901; Incumbent of St. Mary's
Hospital, Ilford, 1895-1900; Chaplain to Lord Bishop of St.
Alban's, 1897-1900; Canon of Westminster Abbey and Rector of St.
Margaret's, 1900-12; Sub-Dean of Westminster, 1911-12; Dean of
Durham, 1912-18; Bishop of Durham, 1918-20; late Hon. Professor of
Modern History in Durham University; Proctor in Convocation,
1903-18.
[Illustration: BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON]