There is also the objection that the view implied in the preceding pages
leaves out or passes over too lightly our need as sinners in the sight of
God all Holy. Is not our need for forgiveness to impel us towards God? Is
not our need--our need in anxiety, our need in guiltiness--to be a motive
in our religion?
Yes, a motive, but not the motive. It is a question of order. What must
come first is not our need, whether as anxious or guilty, but God's need,
or else our religion will be at the level of natural religion and below
the Christian level. It is because men are poor towards God and think
coldly and ungenerously of Him that they 'are not worrying about their
sins.' Men are not sorry for sin (except with the seedy remorse of 'the
morning after') until their sin has come into contact with love. The more
vital a young man is, the less will he brood in self-regard over his
wrongdoing. "Anyhow, I have lived," he will say. But if it comes home to
him what his wrongdoing has done to another who loves him, then he begins
to be sorry. "I didn't care," he will say, "for myself. I had my fling.
But now I see that what I did has broken my mother's heart. I wish to God
I hadn't done it."
Our religion must begin from God. It must spring out of love fuller and
more hungry than our desirous hearts. It must spring out of love, not--how
could it?--out of our love for God, but out of His love for us. If God's
love for us, manifested in the utterly real and suffering love of Jesus,
and in no insipid fancy of our sentimental moments, wins its way past our
guard and over the barriers of self, hatred of sin and sorrow for sin will
follow. But it is a question of order: first, what God is; second, what we
are. The more vivid the first is to a man, the more inevitable his candid
consciousness of the second. The more he is taken captive by the assurance
that God is his Father, the more glaring it will be to him that he is an
unworthy son. And the more men set out to give effect to their sonship in
service for the kingdom of God, the more they will realise their strange
impotence. The dreadful hiatus between aspiration and performance, between
acknowledged and realised ideals will widen. The eager impulse to
disregard self and to serve God with love and praise and joy, will be
found horridly at variance with a natural and rooted impulse towards
self-devotion and indulgence. The worship and praise of God, not only in
thought and word but in deed, will stumble and fall short of its goal--and
then the tears of tragic failure will start and the cry of despair ring
out. It was so with Peter in the porch and Paul beaten down in bondage
under the Law. "Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?"
I think there is no fear but that, if we do set out to put into practice
our inheritance as sons of God, we shall come to the Cross of Christ in
genuine "Rock-of-ages" fashion, bringing nothing to it in the end, except
our lovelessness. His, after all and in fact, was the one, free, utterly
loving and obedient offering of self to the Father. He did something
others could not do--He died for them, and in Him and through Him alone
did they come unto the Holy Father. I cannot work it out here, but along
this way I seem to travel home into the great evangel of the Atonement.
Only, I plead, this propitiatory work of Christ must come second in the
imagination, and His Love-of-God-revealing work first. And I think in the
course of the history of Christianity an inversion has come about. In
hymns and liturgies the _prima facie_ and predominant emphasis seems
rather to rest on our sinfulness than on God's goodness. Before they do
anything else the Prayer Book, as it is at present used, asks men to
embark on the overloaded phrases of the General Confession. I know that
this may be justified by arguing that the Prayer Book assumes that the
other parts of the Christian religion are in the minds of 'the faithful'
members of the Church. But this assumption is unwarranted as regards the
mass of soldiers whom we keep on inviting to use the more or less
mutilated forms of Morning and Evening Prayer.
And even when we come to the Eucharist, though everything can be found in
it, I often wonder whether there the Church has not come to lay more
stress upon the Cross as the offering for sin than as the disclosure of
the Divine pity for the sinner. If so, is it that too much has been taken
for granted, namely, the Love of God which alone can evoke sorrow for sin
and be worthy of the offering for sin? Has familiarity tended to disguise
and overlay the wonder-compelling revelation of God? In the Eucharist has
He been thought of rather as the Father sitting back in reception of
placation, than as the Father Who, while we are a great way off, runs out
to fall on our neck and bring us home?
I think that a re-ordering is needed. For Christianity, stressed as it
appears to be at present, will never catch the souls of men. I think of
the flying boys who, more than any one else, are winning our battles (I
have been chaplain to a squadron of them for a little time). They are far
from unsinful, but they will nevertheless, I am sure, not _begin_ with the
avowal "that there is no health in them"; they will not sing "that they
are weary of earth and laden with their sins." For as they live almost
gaily and unconcernedly on the edge of things, they know that that is not
the primary truth about themselves. Yet Christ, if in Him they see the
all-hazarding and all-enduring Love of God, can win the love and worship
of their eager hearts. He can catch those living creatures alive.
There must be a re-ordering and simplification and correction of emphasis.
It is possible, now that historical science is unravelling the Bible and
Church history, and extricating from their many levels and complexities
what is simple and specific in the glorious truths of God and of man in
Christ. Some exaggerations must be sloughed off. I think a little of the
sepia, for instance, that was in the brush of Paul must be washed away.
Has not he, or rather have not the great men of his school, over-obsessed
us with the dogma, derived from Scriptural literalism, of human corruption
flowing from Adam?
There is, by contrast, a more radiant and yet as realistic view of the
world as Christ saw it, to be recovered. Some of His glories, dimmed by
the veil of inadequate conceptions in the minds of His witnesses, will
shine as never before, as the Holy Spirit takes of Him and shows it unto
us.