closer and ever closer, to the being of God. It is, itself, nothing
but this act of personal adherence, of personal cohesion; and all else
is, for it, material that can be subdued to this single service. Each
bettering of knowledge intensifies the possibilities of this cohesion;
and, for that, it is welcomed. It opens out fresh aspects of the good
Father: it uncovers new treasures of His wisdom: therefore, for faith,
it is an ever-mounting ladder, by which it draws nearer and nearer,
spirit to spirit, heart to heart. No idle or indifferent matter this;
and right knowledge, therefore, is for faith, a serious and pressing
need. And, moreover, faith is pledged to use all possible guidance and
direction in making its great act of self-surrender to God. And it is
the peculiar office of reason, and of the rational conscience, to
guard it from any distorted and unworthy venture. Faith has to make
its leap; but to make it exactly in that direction, and in no other,
where reason points the way. It is bound therefore to use all its
intelligent resources: it may not fall below the level of its highest
reason without the risk of sinking to a superstition. This is the
radical difference between what we here claim, and that which a
superstition demands of us. A superstition asks faith to shut its
eyes. We ask it to open them as wide as it can. We demand this of it
as a positive duty. It is bound, as an act of the whole man, to use
every conceivable means and security which knowledge can bring it. For
so alone can it secure itself against the hazards which encompass its
adventure. It cannot afford to enter on that venturous committal of
itself less equipped and instructed than it was open to it to be. It
must put all to use that can better its offer of itself to God.
It is, in this seriousness, that faith is apt to embrace so fast the
dominant scientific or philosophical creed. It has found, through this
creed, a new and thrilling insight into God's mind, and it fastens on
this precious gift; and dwells delightedly on it, and spends itself in
absorbing the peculiar truths which this particular way of thinking
brings to the front. So that, at last, when the smash comes, when the
floods break in, when the accumulation of new facts outside the old
lines necessitates a total reconstruction of the intellectual fabric,
faith seems to have gone under with the ruined scheme to which it had
attached itself so firmly.
Yet, if ever it has implicated its own fate with that of any
particular form of knowledge, it has been false to itself. It has no
more right to identify itself with any intellectual situation than it
has to pin its fortunes to those of any political dynasty. Its eternal
task lies in rapid readjustment to each fresh situation, which the
motion of time may disclose to it. It has that in it which can apply
to all, and learn from all. Its identity is not lost, because its
expressions vary and shift: for its identity lies deep in personality;
and personality is that which testifies to its own identity by the
variety and the rapidity of its self-adaptation to the changes of
circumstance. So with faith. Its older interpretations of itself are
not false, because the newer situations have called for different
manifestations. Each situation forces a new aspect to the front. But
ever it is God and the soul, which recognise each other under every
disguise. Now it is in one fashion and now in another: but it is
always one unalterable wisdom which is justified, recognised, and
loved, by those who are her children.
We will not, then, be the least afraid of the taunt, that we are all
accepting and delivering from our pulpits that which once threw us
into anger and dismay. Only let us learn our true lesson; and, in our
zeal to appreciate the wonders of Evolution, let us hold ourselves
prepared for the day which is bound to come, when again the gathering
facts will clamour for a fresh generalisation: and the wheel will give
one more turn; and the new man will catch sight of the vision which is
preparing; and the new book will startle; and the new band of youthful
professors will denounce and demolish our present heroes; and all the
reviews and magazines will yelp in chorus at their heels, proclaiming
loudly that now, at last and for ever, the faith, which has pledged
itself so deeply to the obsolete and discredited theory of Evolution,
is indeed dead and done with. Faith will survive that crisis, as it
has survived so many before: but it will be something, if it does not
drag behind it the evil record of passion, and blindness, with which
it has too often disgraced its unwilling passage from truth to truth.
IV. But here our objections take, perhaps, a new turn altogether. 'Ah,
yes!' it will be said; 'faith, if it were a simple surrender of the
soul to God, a childlike adhesion of the spiritual sonship in us to
its Father, Who is in heaven, might sit loose to all formulæ,
theories, discoveries, in the way described. Faith, if it limited
itself to this mystical communion, might be beyond the scope and
criticism of reason. But this is not the least what you really ask of
us. The faith, for which you practically plead, the only form of faith
actually open to us, has rashly left these safe confines: it has
implicated itself with a vast body of facts recorded in a book. It has
involved itself in intricate statements of dogma. How can you claim to
be free from the control of logic and criticism, in things so directly
open to logical treatment? This spiritual faith of yours has mixed
itself up with alien matter, with historical incidents, with
intellectual definitions: here are things of evidence and proof. Here
its locks are shorn; its mystic strength is gone. Delilah holds it
fast; it is a prisoner in the hands of the Philistines. If you will
retreat again back into the region of simple spiritual intuitions, and
abandon to reason this debatable land, how gladly would we follow you!
But that is just what you refuse to do.'
Now, here is the serious moment for us of to-day. It is quite true
that all would be plain and easy, if we might be allowed to make this
retreat--if we might limit our claims for the spirit to that simple
childlike intuition which, instinctively, feels after, and surrenders
to, the good Father in heaven. But what would that retreat mean? It
would mean an attempt, desperate and blind, to turn back the world's
story, to ignore the facts, to over-leap the distinctions of time and
place, to deny experience, to force ourselves back into primitive
days, to imagine ourselves children again. Simple intuitions of God,
simple communion with the Father, unquestioned, undistracted,--this is
the privilege of primitive days, when minds are simple, when
experience is simple, when society is simple. Plain, easy, and direct
situations admit of plain, easy, and direct handling. But our
situation is not plain, easy, or direct. Our minds are intricate and
complicated; our story has been a long and a difficult one; our social
condition is the perplexed deposit of age-long experiences. The faith,
which is to be ours to-day, must be a faith of to-day. It cannot
remain at the level of childhood, when nothing else in us or about us
is the least childlike. It cannot babble out in pretty baby-language,
when the situation with which it has to deal is terribly earnest,
serious, perilous, and intense. It must be level with its work; and
its work is complicated, hard, disciplined: how can it expect to
accomplish it without effort, without pain, without training, without
intricacy? The world is old; human life is old; and faith is old also.
It has had many a strange and stormy experience; it has learned much
on the way; it has about it the marks of old troubles; the care, the
patience, the completeness of age, have left their stamp upon it. It
has had a history, like everything else; and it reaches us to-day, in
a form which that history behind it can alone make intelligible. Four
thousand years have gone to its making--since Abraham first laid hold,
in a definite and consistent manner, of the faith which is ours
to-day. All those centuries it has been putting itself together,
growing, enriching itself, developing, as it faced and measured each
new issue, each gathering complication, each pressing hazard. This
long experience has built up faith's history: and, by study of that
history, we can know why it was that faith could not stand still at
that point where we should find it so convenient to rest. Faith
appeals to its own story to justify its career; it bears about that
history with it as its explanation, why, and how it has arrived at its
present condition. That history is its proof how far it has left its
first childhood behind it, how impossible it is, at the end of the
days, to return to the beginning. The history, which constitutes our
difficulty, is its own answer. For there, in that Bible, lies the
recorded story of the facts which pressed hard upon the earliest
intuition of God, and drove it forward, and compelled it to fix
itself, and to define itself, and to take a firmer root, and to make
for itself a secure dwelling-place, and to shape for itself a career.
The Bible is the apology which our faith carries with it, and offers
as a proof of the necessity which has forced it to go beyond its
primitive efforts, until it has reached the stage at which we now
encounter it. It portrays there, before our eyes, how it all began;
how there came to this man and to that, the simple augury, the
presage, the spasm of spiritual insight, the flash, the glimpse, the
intimation; until there came the man, Abraham, in whom it won the
emphasis, the solidity, the power, of a call. 'Oh! that we might be
content to feel, as he, the presence of the Everlasting! Why not leave
us in peace, we cry, with the simple faith of Abraham?' And the answer
is plain: 'because it is the nineteenth century after Christ, instead
of the nineteenth century before.' We are making a mistake of dates.
Let us turn to our Bible and read. There we watch the reasons
disclosing themselves why that simple faith could not abide in arrest
at its first moment; why it must open a new career, with new duties,
and new responsibilities, and new problems. The seed is sown, but it
has to grow; to make good its footing amid the thick of human affairs;
to root itself in the soil of human history; to spread itself out in
institutions; to push its dominion; to widen its range; to become a
tree that will fill the land. Before Abraham, it was but a flying
seed, blown by the winds; now, it is a stable, continuous, masterful
growth. It must be this, if it is ever to make effective its spiritual
assertions over the increasing intricacy of human affairs.
What, let us ask, is that life of faith which historically began with
Abraham? It is a friendship, an intimacy, between man and God, between
a son and a father. Such an intimacy cannot be idle or stagnant; it
cannot arrest its instinctive development. It holds in it infinite
possibilities of growth: of increasing familiarity, of multiplied
communion. And, thus, such a friendship creates a story of its own; it
has its jars, its frictions, its entanglements; alas! on one side, its
lapses, its quarrels, its blunders, its misunderstandings: and then,
on the other, its corresponding indignations, and withdrawals, and
rebukes; and yet again, its reconciliations, its reactions, its
pardons, its victories. Ever it moves forward on its chequered path:
ever God, the good Friend, spends Himself in recovering the intimacy,
in renewing it, in purging it, in raising it. Its conditions expand:
its demands intensify: its perils deepen: its glories gather: until it
consummates its effort in the perfected communion of God and man--in
Him, Who completes and closes the story of this ever-growing intimacy,
by that act of supreme condescension which brings down God to inhabit
and possess the heart of man: and by that act of supreme exaltation,
which uplifts man into absolute union with the God Who made him.
This is the story: the Bible is its record. As a body of incidents and
facts it must be subject to all the conditions of history and the laws
of evidence; as a written record it introduces a swarm of questions,
which can be sifted and decided by rational criticism. This entails
complications, it must be confessed; but they are inevitable. The
intimacy between man and God cannot advance, except through the
pressure of connected and recorded experience. A human society which
has no record of its past is robbed of its future. It is savage: it
cannot go forward, because it cannot look back. So with this divine
friendship. Its recorded experiences are the one condition of its
growth. Without them it must always be beginning afresh: it must
remain imprisoned at the starting-post. The length and complexity of
its record is the measure of its progress; even though they must
present, at the same time, a larger surface to the handling of
criticism, and may involve a deeper degree of obscurity in details.
And, after all, though details drawn out of a dead past permit
obscurity, the nature and character of the main issue become ever more
fixed and distinct, as the long roll of circumstances discloses its
richer secrets. The very shift and confusion of the surface-material
throws out, in emphatic contrast, the firm outlines of the gathering
and growing mystery. Ever the advance proceeds, throwing off all that
is accidental, immaterial, subservient: ever man becomes clearer in
his recognition of the claims made on him by the hope which God keeps
ever before Him, 'They shall be my people: I will be their God.' Ever
the necessities of such an intimate affection point to the coming of
the Christ. Christ is the end, the sum, the completion, of this
historic friendship: and His advent is, therefore, absolutely
unintelligible unless it is held in relation to the long experience,
which He interprets, justifies, and fulfils. Faith in Christ is the
last result, the ultimate and perfected condition of that faith of
Abraham, which enabled him to become the first friend of God. And the
immense experience that lay between Abraham and St. Paul, can alone
bridge the interval, can alone exhibit the slow and laborious
evolution, through which the primitive apprehension of God was
transformed into the Christian Creed--that mighty transformation,
spread out over two thousand years of varied history, which our Lord
summed up in the lightning-flash, 'Your father Abraham rejoiced to see
my day: and he saw it, and was glad.' The Book is the record of those
tested and certified experiments, which justified our Lord in
asserting that to believe in God was, necessarily, to believe in Him.
No one can understand that assertion, unless by seeing it worked out,
in detail, by the searching logic of experience.
Faith in Christ, then, includes faith in the Bible: and, in saying
that, we have already cleared away much of the difficulty that beset
us. For our faith in Christ becomes the measure and standard of our
faith in the Bible. We believe in it as the record of our growing
intimacy with God. Faith is, still, a spiritual cohesion of person
with person,--of the living soul with a living God. No details that
intervene confuse this primitive relation. Only, that cohesion was not
reached at one leap. It is ancient: it has traversed many incidents
and trials: it has learned much: it has undergone patient
apprenticeship: it has been bonded by the memory of multitudinous
vicissitudes. Like all else that is human, it has grown. The details
of events are the media of that growth. In _that_ character they are
vitally essential to the formed intimacy: but in that character alone.
They are not valued for their own sake; but for the cause which they
served. Belief in God never changes its character, and becomes belief
in facts: it only developes into a deeper and deeper belief in God, as
disciplined by facts. The facts must be real, if the discipline is to
be real: but, apart from this necessity, we are indifferent to them.
We can listen to anything which historical criticism has to tell us,
of dates and authorship; of time and place. It may supply all the gaps
in our record, showing how the material there briefly gathered, had,
itself, a story, and slowly came together, and had sources and
associations elsewhere. All such research adds interest to the record,
as it opens out to us the action of the Divine Intimacy, in laying
hold of its material. We watch it, by the aid of such criticism, at
its work of assimilation; and, in uncovering its principles of
selection, we apprehend its inner mind: we draw closer to our God. The
more nearly we can ally the early conditions of Israel to those of
Arabian nomads, the more delicate and rare becomes our apprehension of
that divine relationship, which, by its perpetual pressure, lifted
Israel to its marvellous supremacy, and which, by its absence, left
the Arabian to be what he is to-day.
The point at which criticism must hold off its hands is, of course, a
most subtle matter to decide. But we can, at least, be sure of
this--that such a point will be no arbitrary one; it will be there,
where criticism attempts to trench on the reality and the uniqueness
of the Divine Intimacy, which those incidents served to fashion, and
those books detected and recorded, and Christ consummated. Our faith
in Christ must determine what, in the Bible, is vital to its own
veracity. There is no other measure or rule of what we mean by
inspiration.
The preparation for Christ, then, necessitates such complications as
these. And the character of His advent intensified and thickened them.
For, while asking of us the purest form of spiritual adherence, He
makes that demand in a shape which is imbedded throughout in concrete
historical facts, which, as facts, must be subject to the thumb of
critical discussion, and to all the external handling of evidence and
argument.
And, then, on the top of this, He has, of necessity, raised the
question of His own Personality to such a pitch of vital value, that
the full force of man's intellectual activities is drawn towards its
consideration,--is summoned to contemplate, and measure, and apprehend
it,--is compelled to examine and face its tremendous issues. The
supreme act of personal surrender, for which Christ unhesitatingly
asks, cannot conceivably pass beyond its child-stage without forming a
direct and urgent challenge to the intellect to say how, and why, such
an act can be justified, or such a claim interpreted. No faith can
reach to such an absolute condition without finding itself involved in
anxieties, perils, problems, complications. Its very absoluteness is a
provocation to the questioning and disputing mind,--to the hesitating
and scrupulous will. And the result, the inevitable result, of such a
faith--proposed, as it was, to a world no longer young and childlike,
but matured, old, thoughtful, experienced--is the Dogmatic Creeds. We
clamour against these intellectual complications: we cry out for the
simple primitive faith. But, once again, it is a mistake of dates. We
cannot ask to be as if eighteen centuries had dropped out,
unnoticed--as if the mind had slumbered since the days of Christ, and
had never asked a question. We cannot hope to be in the same condition
after a question has been asked, as we were before it had ever
occurred to us to ask it. The Creeds only record that certain
questions have, as a fact, been asked. Could our world be what it is,
and not have asked them? These difficulties of a complicated faith are
only the reflection of the difficulties of a complicated life. If, as
a fact, we are engaged in living a life which is intricate, subtle,
anxious, then any faith which hopes to cover and embrace that life,
cannot escape the necessity of being intricate, subtle, and anxious
also. No child's creed can satisfy a man's needs, hunger, hopes,
anxieties. If we are asked to throw over the complications of our
Creeds, we must beg those that ask us, to begin by throwing over the
complications of this social and moral life.
But still, with the Creeds as with the Bible, it is the personal
intimacy with God in Christ which alone is our concern. We do not, in
the strict sense, believe _in_ the Bible, or _in_ the Creeds: we
believe solely and absolutely in Christ Jesus. Faith is our living act
of adherence in Him, of cohesion with God. But still, once more, we
must recognise that this act of adhesion has a history: it has
gradually been trained and perfected: and this has been accomplished
through the long and perilous experiences recorded in the Old
Testament; and it has been consummated in the final sealing of the
perfected intimacy attained in Him, in Whose person it was realised
and made possible for us: and it has been guarded and secured to us in
the face of the overwhelming pressure of eighteen strong, stormy, and
distracted centuries. And therefore it is that we now must attain our
cohesion with God, subject to all the necessities laid upon us by the
fact that we enter on the world's stage at a late hour, when the drama
has already developed its plot and complicated its situations. This is
why we cannot now, in full view of the facts, believe in Christ,
without finding that our belief includes the Bible and the Creeds.
V. Faith is, still and always, a spiritual intimacy, a living
friendship with God. That is what we must be for ever asserting. That
is the key to all our problems; and once sure of this in all its
bearings, we shall not be afraid of a taunt which is apt to sting
especially those of us who are ordained. It is conveyed, in its
noblest form, in a book of Mr. John Morley's, on Compromise. No one
can read that book without being the better or the worse for it. The
intense force of high moral convictions acts upon us like a judgment.
It evokes the deepest conscience in us to come forward, and stand at
that austere bar and justify itself, or, in failing to justify itself,
sink condemned. And in that book he asks the old question, with
unequalled power: how can it possibly be honest for men to sign away
their reason at the age of twenty-three?--to commit themselves to
conclusions which they cannot have mastered--to anticipate beforehand
all that experience may have to teach? In committing themselves to
positions which any new knowledge or discovery may reverse, they have
forbidden themselves the free use of their critical faculties: they
have resigned their intellectual conscience.
What do we answer to that severe arraignment? Surely we now know well.
Faith is an affair of personal intimacy, of friendship, of will, of
love: and, in all such cases, we should know exactly what to do with
language of this type. We should laugh it out of court. For it is
language which does not belong to this region. It is the language, it
expresses the temper, of the scientific student--a temper, an attitude
specialised for a distinct purpose. That purpose is one of gradual
advance into regions as yet untouched and unsuspected--an advance
which is for ever changing the relations and classifications of those
already partially known. The temper essential to such a purpose must
be prepared for discovery, for development, for the unexpected; it is
bound to be tentative, experimental, hypothetical--to be cool,
critical, corrective. It deals with impersonal matter; and it must
itself, therefore, be as far as possible impersonal, abstract,
non-moral, without passion, without individuality, without a private
intention, or will, or fixed opinion.
But such a temper, perfectly justified for scientific purposes, is
absolutely impotent and barren in matters of moral feeling and
practice.
The man who brings this temper into play in affairs of the will, or
the heart, or the imagination, in cases of affection, friendship,
passion, inspiration, generosity, in the things of home, of war, of
patriotism, of love, is in the wrong world: he is a living blunder: he
has no cue, no key, no interpretation. He is simply absurd.
And religion stands with these affairs. Just as we see well enough
that if love were approached in this scientific spirit, it could not
even begin, so it is quite as certain that, if faith were approached
in this spirit, it could not even begin.
Mr. Morley has mixed up two different worlds. He is criticising that
form of knowledge, which consists in spiritual apprehension of
another's personality through the whole force of a man's inherent, and
integral, and personal, will and desire, by the standard of another
form of knowledge altogether, which consists in gradual and
experimental assimilation of foreign and unknown matter through
specialised organs of critical observation.