to theological {174} doctrine whether as a subject for study or for
definite instruction. Theological dogmas are alluded to as things
remote from the ordinary concerns of men and associated with the
jarring interests of different religious bodies or of their clergy,
with 'denominationalism' or 'sacerdotalism[5].' This idea has been due
in great measure no doubt to faults in theologians and priests. But it
is none the less absurd, when it is seriously considered. If those
whose lives have given the most shining examples of practical
Christianity in all ages were cross-questioned, it would be found that
the overwhelming majority would, in all simplicity, attribute what was
good in their life to their definite beliefs. Indeed, it is self
evident that it must have a practically vast effect on a man's conduct
whether, for instance, he really believes that his own and other men's
lives, after some seventy years of probation in this world, pass under
divine judgement, only to enter into new and eternal conditions where
they will inevitably reap the fruits of their previous careers. {175}
It must make a vital difference whether he believes that the world is
the expression of blind force or of the will of a living, loving, God;
whether or no he believes that God personally cares for each
individual: whether or no he believes that God's interest in the world
was such as to move Him to redeem it, by the sacrifice of Himself, from
the tyranny of sin: whether he believes in divine forgiveness and God's
indwelling by His Spirit: whether he believes in a divine brotherhood
and divine means of grace in a household of God in the world. In fact,
if the practical ethics of India and China, or the Turkish Empire and
Morocco, are considered side by side with those of Christian Europe, it
is impossible to resist the conviction that men's behaviour depends in
the long run on what they believe about God.
This obvious conclusion is, in part, veiled from our eyes by two facts.
One is that logic works slowly in human life. Take a transverse
section of humanity at any particular moment, and it appears a mass of
inconsistencies. It might almost suggest that there is no connexion at
all between belief and practice. But the same appearance is not
presented by human life in its long reaches. There you see how, in the
{176} slow result, an alteration of belief involves an alteration of
practice. Thus to take an example: at present our social conscience
about the obligations of marriage, or about personal purity, or about
suicide, unsatisfactory as it may appear to be to an earnest Christian,
is still saturated with Christian sentiment which is the result of a
prolonged impression left by Christian doctrine. If the doctrine were
to pass out of the minds of Englishmen in general, after a generation
or two there would be a weakening or destruction of the corresponding
sentiment, and an abolition of what is at present an obstacle to the
reign of sensual or selfish desires. But it takes some generations for
the effect of any weakening of belief to make itself felt.
There is another fact which veils from the eyes of people in general
the real connexion between morals and doctrine. It is that it is
largely mediate or indirect. The moral standard of the 'average man'
is, unconsciously, kept up by the morals of the best men and women.
For social opinion is with the majority the force which mainly
influences their practice, and social opinion depends largely on
leaders. 'It is when the best men cease trying that the world sinks
back like lead.' Let anything {177} happen which should silence the
moral effort of the best individuals, and disaster would be imminent.
But this is exactly what would be the result if the best men and women
were to cease to be Christian believers. It is the highest level of
our common life that would be depressed. The result all round would be
indirect, but it would be widespread and disastrous.
I do not mean, or think, that this weakening of religious belief in the
best men and women is occurring. I only instance its morally certain
results to make apparent how the general bearing of religious beliefs
on social practice is, in one way, veiled by its indirectness.
But to St. Paul all this is self-evident. He sees quite clearly that
Christianity is to be a new life, a new social and ethical
manifestation in the world, because Christians believe that God has
made plain to them in Jesus Christ His character, nature, and
redemptive purposes, and has given, by His Spirit, a practical power to
their wills to correspond with the truth revealed to their
intelligences and hearts.
So he proceeds from his exposition of the great doctrines of the Church
of the Redemption to its practical moral consequences.
[1] Rom. xii. 1.
[2] 1 Cor. xv. 58.
[3] Col. iii. 5, 12.
[4] Heb. ii. 1; x. 19; xii. 1.
[5] An interesting expression of this sort of feeling is to be found in
George Crabbe's poem, _The Library_. On the whole we must have
improved since his day in our perception of the connexion of Christian
doctrine with Christian practice.
{178}
DIVISION II. Sec. 1. CHAPTER IV. 17-24.
_Christianity a new life._
[Sidenote: _New life in Christ_]
The characteristic words of St. Paul's gospel--grace, forgiveness,
mercy, liberty, justification by faith not by works--may naturally,
when taken by themselves and isolated from their context, lead to a
false thought of God as morally 'easy going,' and to a corrupt laxity
of conduct. Such a result has shown itself within the area of modern
history in the antinomianism of some Protestant bodies. But long
before the Reformation St. Paul's words were 'wrested by the ignorant
and unstedfast to their own destruction[1].' It was probably a
misunderstanding of St. Paul's doctrine of justification by faith which
called forth the protest of St. James' epistle. And indeed the traces
of this tendency to pervert the gospel are apparent enough in {179} St.
Paul's own epistles. Divine grace, it was even argued, can better show
its largeness if we afford it an opportunity by the abundance of our
sin. 'Let us continue in sin that grace may abound.' To this
monstrous suggestion St. Paul replies, in his epistle to the Romans[2],
that it rests on a complete misconception. Christian faith is an
introduction into Christ. Believing we are baptized into Him. This
means that we are to live as He lived towards the world of sin and
towards God. It means that we surrender ourselves in a spirit of glad
obedience to be moulded after His pattern. If our believing does not
lead to this new living, beyond all question it is a spurious thing,
and none of the Christian privileges attach to it. With a similar
purpose St. Paul writes here to the Asiatics--newly-made Christians,
who lived in the midst of an appallingly corrupt society, and whose
inherited traditions of conduct were altogether lacking in
self-restraint--to warn them against possible abuses of their Christian
privileges and Christian liberty.
To be a Christian is to be committed to a new life different utterly
from the old life.
What was the old life? In writing to the {180} Romans St. Paul
describes the life of the contemporary heathen world as having its
origin in a refusal of the will to acknowledge God. 'They glorified
Him not as God.' 'They refused to have God in their knowledge.' Hence
a darkening of the understanding. 'They became vain in their
reasonings; their senseless hearts were darkened; professing themselves
to be wise they became fools.' This explains the origin and
possibility of so foolish a worship as that of men and beasts.
Further, with the obscuring of the intelligence there was a perversion
and emancipation of the passions, resulting in all forms of lawlessness
and unnatural vice. A similar description of the 'old life' St. Paul
gives here. The root of evil here also appears to be in the 'heart'
(or will)--'the hardening of the heart'; hence arises 'vanity of the
mind,' an aimlessness or loss of all true and fixed point of view, a
'darkening of the understanding,' an inherent 'ignorance'; and
accompanying this loss of real intelligence has been a loss of what is
the true goal of human life, fellowship in 'the life of God.' Instead
of that a life of uncleanness has prevailed, made into a regular
business[3], and pursued with 'greediness,' i.e. an entire disregard
{181} for others' rights--such a life as is only possible where all
true human feeling and good taste has been quenched. Men have become
'past feeling.'
As regards the relation of this black picture to the actual facts,
enough has perhaps been said above. At least St. Paul's picture is
given as a direct challenge to the experience of those to whom he
writes; and it is not blacker, at any rate, than the picture given by a
philosophic contemporary at Ephesus, who calls himself Heracleitus.
And on the black background of this 'former manner of life,' this 'old
man' or old manhood--a life ruled by lusts which are not only morally
evil but deceive and mock those who yield to them, leading, in fact, to
nothing but corruption and death, a 'waxing corrupt after the lusts of
deceit'--St. Paul sketches in the new life in Christ. To become a
believer is to submit one's intelligence to learn a new lesson, to
study Christ; it is to yield one's self to a 'form of teaching[4]' in
order to have one's life refashioned in marked contrast to old and
abandoned ways of life; it is to imbibe a new principle in the heart of
one's rational being, 'to be renewed in the spirit of one's mind'; it
is to put on deliberately, as a man puts on clothing, {182} a new
manhood, Christ's manhood, which is 'according to God[5],' that is, is
based on His own life, and is His 'new creation' in righteousness and
holiness. And this righteousness and holiness can never deceive us by
false promises, because they are rooted in 'truth' or reality.
This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye no longer walk
as the Gentiles also walk, in the vanity of their mind, being darkened
in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the
ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart; who
being past feeling gave themselves up to lasciviousness, to work all
uncleanness with greediness. But ye did not so learn Christ; if so be
that ye heard him, and were taught in him, even as truth is in Jesus:
that ye put away, as concerning your former manner of life, the old
man, which waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that ye be
renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which after
God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth.
There is one phrase in this passage which may need some further
comment--'The life of God.' Into God's own eternal life, as He lives
it in Himself, we are given but glimpses. But God is also living in
the world as its inherent life, and each form of creation participates
in its measure, even if unconsciously, in the life {183} of God.
Consciously and intelligently man was intended to participate in it,
but he 'alienated' himself from it by sin; and, while he was physically
sustained in life by God, morally and mentally he was an exile. But
Christ embodies the divine life anew in human form, and by His Spirit
imparts it as a new life to men. Once more in Christ men live both 'in
God' and 'according to God.'
This thought of our relation to the life of God is, in part, expressed
in the Latin original of the Collect for the ninth Sunday after
Trinity, in which we pray 'that we who cannot exist without Thee, may
be enabled to live according to Thee.'
[1] 2 Pet. iii. 16.
[2] Rom. vi. 1 ff.
[3] 'To work all uncleanness.' Marg. 'to make a trade of.'
[4] Rom. vi. 17.
[5] Eph. iv. 24, R. V. Marg. 'the new man which is after God, created,'
&c.
{184}
DIVISION II. Sec. 2. CHAPTER IV. 25-32.
_The new life a corporate life._
[Sidenote: _Corporate duties_]
The first characteristic of the new life dwelt upon is its corporate
character, as a life lived by those who are 'members one of another,'
and have therefore a common aim. In a body of people working with a
common aim there may be a healthy rivalry and competition in doing good
work, a manifold spirit of initiation and inventiveness, and there may
be rewards of labour, proportioned not merely to needs but to these
personal excellences. But what there cannot be is a competition which
runs to the point of mutual destructiveness, or such accumulation of
the fruits of skill and labour in a few hands as maims or starves the
life of the majority. The common interest prevents this. 'The members
must have the same care one of another,' so that 'when one member
suffers all the members suffer with it[1].' The life is the life {185}
of a body, and the general well-being is therefore the common interest
of all the members, for the weakening or decay of one is the weakening
and decay of a more or less valuable part of a connected life. This is
the general principle on which the Church is based. This is the moral
meaning of churchmanship. 'Ye are members one of another.'
Various specific obligations follow from this general principle.
(a) _Truthfulness and openness_; for falsehood and concealment belong
to a life of separated and conflicting interests. The prophetic ideal
for the restored Israel is to be realized among Christians. 'Speak ye
every man truth with his neighbour: execute the judgement of truth and
peace in your gates: and let none of you imagine evil in your hearts
against his neighbour: and love no false oath[2].'
(b) _Self-restraint in temper_. We must not injure one another in life
and limb, or wound one another in feelings. Therefore we must watch
the first beginnings of anger, as the Psalmist[3] warns us, lest they
lead to sin and give {186} the devil, i.e. the slanderer of his
brethren, the inspirer of all mutual recriminations, room and scope to
work in.
(c) _Labour for the purpose of mutual beneficence_. Under the old
covenant God had contented Himself with forbidding stealing. Under the
new covenant the prohibition of what is wrong passes into the
injunction of what is right. Labour of whatever kind, labour directed
to produce something good, is required of all. 'If any man will not
work, neither let him eat[4].' The idle man in fact violates the
fundamental conditions of the Christian covenant as truly as if he were
denying the rudiments of the Christian faith. Now the object of
labouring is to acquire 'property,' which is in one sense 'private,'
and in another sense is not. The labourer may have, under his own free
administration, the fruits of his labour, but he is to administer his
property with the motive, not only of supporting himself, but of
helping his weaker and more needy brethren.
(d) _Profitable speech_. Here again the Christian is not to be content
with avoiding noxious conversation. His talk is to be, not indeed
'edifying' in the narrowest sense, but such as {187} 'builds up what is
lacking' in life, or supplies a need, whether by counselling, or
informing, or refreshing, or cheering; so that it may 'give grace[5],'
that is, afford pleasure and, in the widest sense, bring a blessing to
the hearers.
In all their conduct Christians are to have two masterful thoughts.
(1) They are to think of the divine purpose of the Holy Ghost who has
entered into the Church to 'seal' or mark it as an elect body destined
for full redemption from all evil, in body and soul, at the climax of
God's dealings, the last day. The Holy Ghost, with all His personal
love, will be grieved if we thwart His rich purpose for the whole body
by anything which is contrary to brotherhood in the thoughts of our
hearts, or the words of our lips, or our outward conduct.
(2) They are to remember the divine pattern of life. God has shown His
own heart to us in the free forgiveness which He has given us in
Christ. Being in constant receipt of that forgiveness, we must not
prove ourselves hard and unforgiving towards one another.
{188}
Wherefore, putting away falsehood, speak ye truth each one with his
neighbour: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin
not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: neither give place to the
devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour,
working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have whereof
to give to him that hath need. Let no corrupt speech proceed out of
your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that
it may give grace to them that hear. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of
God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all
bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing, be put away
from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another,
tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave
you.
Here, then, St. Paul sketches catholicity in practice. The very idea
of the Church is that of a fellowship of naturally unlike individuals,
harmonized into unity by the new 'truth and grace' of God, which has
been made theirs in their regenerate life. It is this endowment of the
regenerate life that is to enable them to transcend, and overstep, and
defeat natural incompatibilities of temper, and to be one body in
Christ. The practical meaning of catholicity is brotherhood. It is
love, as St. Augustine says, grown as wide as the world[6].
Why has the world lost this sense of the {189} moral meaning of
catholic churchmanship? Why has 'ecclesiastical' come to mean
something quite different to 'brotherly'? Or it is a more profitable
question to ask, How shall we make it mean the same thing again? There
are many who would give up the very effort after recovering the church
principle, the obligation of the 'one body.' But this, as has been
said, is to abandon the ultimate catholic principle of Christianity.
For the very purpose of the one church for all the men of faith in
Jesus, is that the necessity for belonging to one body--a necessity
grounded on divine appointment--shall force together into a unity men
of all sorts and different kinds; and the forces of the new life which
they share in common are to overcome their natural repugnance and
antipathies, and to make the forbearance and love and mutual
helpfulness which corporate life requires, if not easy, at least
possible for them.
This is the principle which must not be abandoned. We must assert the
theological principle of the Church because it is that and that alone
which can impress on men practically the obligation and possibility of
a catholic brotherhood.
But it is folly to assert the theological truth of {190} churchmanship,
and neglect its moral meaning. Quite recently the bishops of the
Lambeth Conference have striven to impress anew the ethics of
churchmanship upon the conscience of the faithful[7]. The principle of
brotherhood must act as a constant counterpoise to the instinct of
competition. The principle of labour shows that the idle and selfish
are 'out of place' in a Christian community. The principle of justice
forces us to recognize that the true interest of each member of the
body politic must be consulted. The principle of public responsibility
reminds us that each one is his brother's keeper. Once more the Church
has been aroused to its prophetic task of 'binding' and 'loosing' the
consciences of men in regard specially to those matters which concern
the corporate life and the relations of classes to one another. And we
pray God that the work of our bishops may not be in vain. What we want
is not more Christians, but, much rather, better Christians--that is to
say, Christians who have more perception of what the moral effort
required for membership in the catholic brotherhood really is.
{191}
No doubt the needed social reformation is of vast difficulty. For
instance, one who contemplates our commercial relations in the world
may indeed be tempted to despair of the possibility of recovering the
practical application to 'business' of the law of truthfulness; and
many a one who is practically engaged in commerce, in higher or lower
station, finds that to act upon the law may involve something like
martyrdom. But the very meaning of divine faith is that we do, in
spite of all discouragements, hold that to be practicable which is the
will of God; and it is nothing new in the history of Christianity if at
a crisis we need 'the blood of martyrs'--or something morally
equivalent to their blood--for 'a seed,' the seed of a fresh growth of
Christian corporate life. No fresh start worth making is possible
without personal sacrifices; and to recover anything resembling St.
Paul's ethical standard for Christian society we need indeed a fresh
start. But the few Tractarians of sixty years ago by industry,
patience and prayer effected a kind of revolution in the Church as a
whole; and reformers of Christian social relations may with the same
weapons--and with no other--do the like.
[1] 1 Cor. xii. 25, 26.
[2] Zech. viii. 16, 17.
[3] Ps. iv. 4, according to the LXX. But the English version 'Stand in
awe and sin not' is probably correct.
[4] 2 Thess. iii. 10.
[5] Cf. Col. iv. 6: 'Let your speech be always with grace' or
'graciousness'; Luke iv. 22: 'gracious words'; Ps. xlv. 2: 'Grace is
poured into thy lips'; Eccles. x. 12: 'The words of a wise man's mouth
are gracious'; Ecclus. xxi. 16: 'Grace shall be found in the lips of
the wise.'
[6] See app. note F, p. 271, _The Ethics of Catholicism_.
[7] See _Report of Lambeth Conference_, 1897. S.P.C.K., pp. 136 ff.;
and app. note G, p. 274.
{192}
DIVISION II. Sec. 3. CHAPTER V. 1-14.
_The Christian life an imitation of God and a life in the light._
[Sidenote: _The imitation of God_]
St. Paul has just suggested the thought of imitating God by ready
forgiveness. And in fact here--in the imitation of God--is one of the
greatest of the new ideas and motives which Christianity supplies. God
has manifested Himself in Christ under human conditions. He has
translated the unimaginable Godhead into terms of our own well-known
human nature. For Christ is very man, yet He is the Son of God, truly
God, and His character is God's character. For the Christian
henceforth in a quite new sense God is imitable: He can become a
pattern for actual human life. As children partly consciously and
partly unconsciously imitate their parents, so we Christians as
'beloved children' are to 'become imitators of God.'
And it is quite plain what the character of {193} God as manifested in
Christ is. It is love; and to imitate God is therefore to 'walk in
love,' that is, to conduct one's life with love as its conscious motive
and atmosphere. Moreover, the love of Christ is a love which shows
itself in self-sacrifice. 'He offered himself as an offering and
sacrifice to God on our behalf; and God, who had of old made it plain
by His prophets that He could find no satisfaction in animal victims,
accepted 'as a sweet savour' this free-will offering of
self-sacrificing love. In the self-sacrifice of Christ, therefore, we
have the clear disclosure both of what God is and of what God will
accept from man.
But this ideal of life as lying in love and in the deliberate
self-sacrifice of one for another is the plain negation of some maxims
for life generally accepted in heathen society. It is the plain
negation of sensual self-indulgence at the expense of others, or at the
expense of our spiritual nature, of 'fornication and uncleanness of all
kinds,' of filthy conduct, of the sort of jesting or wit which ignores
all moral restraints. It is the plain negation again of selfish greed
or the unlimited desire to get--'covetousness.' These things are out
of the question for a body of saints, that is, men dedicated to a holy
God.
{194}
[Sidenote: _Life in the light_]