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that as trustees for the Catholic order, and considering the matter in
the light of the centuries, we have no right to sacrifice any of those
means by which this full doctrine has been given to us, and by which
perhaps it has been also preserved for them.
V.—Fifthly, I would suggest that in any scheme for practical
reunion no man must be required to repudiate his own spiritual
ancestry.
After all, if the Church is the fellowship of the baptized, then our
brethren of the separation, as we sometimes call them, are members
of the Church; but they are not members of our branch of the
Church; and their faith is corporate and active in their membership
of their own bodies; consequently we are bound to hold that they
and their bodies are parts of the Catholic Church in this time of the
division—the division which is due to sin.
If it is true that it was largely, and perhaps mainly, the fault of
the medieval Church that the split became a necessity; if it is true
that it was partly, and perhaps mainly, the fault of the Church of
England that the Wesleyan movement (for example) ever broke off,
because we refused to make room for what was in its early stages
most undoubtedly a movement of the Spirit of God in the world,
then we have no right to condemn those who by reason of our sin,
at least as much as their own, are outside our fellowship; and we
must recognise that, just as in St. Paul's argument about the true
Israel, blindness in part happened to Israel, and so God used the
Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy—so blindness in part happened
to Catholicism, and God is using the Protestant bodies to provoke us
to jealousy.
 We must, I believe, maintain that our order is for us the only
possible order for the reunited Church. But order is not everything.
The wall of the Holy City is minute. When the time for reunion
comes, we must insist upon our own part of the truth in such a way
as to avoid all condemnation of other bodies for having been
separated during this time—at least, all condemnation which we do
not pronounce quite equally upon ourselves. What has happened in
the divisions of the Church is a severance from one another of
elements which are every one of them necessary to the healthy life
of the Body. If one set of people could only get dry food and no
drink, and another set could only get drink and no food, neither
would be healthy. They would have to combine their stores before
health was possible. Catholics have preserved perhaps a fuller sense
of worship and of the gifts of God; Protestants have perhaps a truer
zeal for righteousness and a more intimate access to God in prayer.
Let us not judge the past; God will judge. But let us recognise our
need of one another and accept from each other the positive truth
and life which God has given to either.
VI.—Meanwhile, in the time of the division, different bodies
have developed different types of religious life. There is a wealth of
spiritual activity in the world now such as it is difficult to imagine
under a rigidly united Church; but we can easily preserve that if we
are ready that there should be within the United Catholic Church
different Orders—an Order of St. George Fox for example, testifying
to the great ideal which Christ brought into the world, not as I think,
and as I have already explained, the right ideal to be followed by all
men in all sorts of circumstances, but undoubtedly the one method
by which in the end the work of God can be finally accomplished,
and for testimony to which I believe some men, and indeed the
whole Society of Friends, are even now called by God. Also there
may well be an Order of St. John Wesley, insisting more especially
upon the need of individual conversion, which the Church, as a vast
organisation concerned with world movements, is perpetually
tempted to leave too much on one side. These Orders can quite well
govern themselves to a very large extent, and order their worship in
very many ways, just as is the case in the Orders familiar in the
medieval Church, and in the Church of Rome at this time.

These are the principles which I would venture to submit. Probably

not one of them will win universal assent even in our own
communion. But amid all our amiable sentiments it is time for
somebody to say something definite, or as definite as the complexity
of the problem allows. In criticising and rejecting individual
utterances we may at last reach a corporate mind.
But let me add one particular warning about the way we go: for
in my own mind I am quite sure that the Communion is just the
place where we need to be divided until our unity is real. People say
"How terrible to be separated there." Yes, terrible indeed! It is the
measure of the sin of schism. But we must not try to escape the
consequences of the sin until we have got rid of the sin itself. I say
nothing of the problem of the mission field or of the possibility of
exceptional occasions.[#] But I am quite sure that in normal Church
life, where all people have access to their own services,
intercommunion can only be disastrous, as tending to obscure the
need for real unity, and the difference between the various
excellences whose combination is to be desired.
[#] It must of course be recognised that the problem of intercommunion in the
mission field is of urgent practical importance. On the present situation, the
Archbishop of Canterbury's statement, Kikuyu.

But let us come back to what after all is the only true guarantee and
the only condition of reunion—the achievement of holiness; that
holiness needs, as we have seen, to be safeguarded, and the
safeguarding of it is peculiarly entrusted to us, the ministers of the
Church. What need then for personal dedication! For upon the
degree in which we are wholly given to our work depends in large
measure the time when God will reunite His Church.
We keep separate even from many right activities, but only in
order to keep pure that spirit by which we are to permeate the
whole life of the world, bringing it to bear, so far as we are able in
our detachment, upon every sort of problem, private or public—
industrial, commercial, political, international—till at last the whole
world is governed by that spirit, and there is no need for separation
any more nor for any special place of worship nor special order of
religious ministers; for then the world and the Church will be
indistinguishable in the Holy City of God, wherein is no temple,
because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.

LECTURE V
THE CITIZENSHIP OF HEAVEN
"Our citizenship is in heaven."—Philippians iii. 20.
"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."—S. John xiv. 9.

We have considered in outline the functions of the State and of the

Church, the two great instruments of God for the furthering of His
kingdom. Let us now turn to consider, still in mere outline, for
nothing more is possible, the nature of that Kingdom itself.
There are very many ways in which the subject might be
approached, but I think that it will be most consonant with the
general line of our thought in these meditations that we should
consider it as the home of man's spirit, the fulfilment of his spiritual
being. And to that end, inasmuch as the Kingdom can only be known
by living according to the principles of its citizenship, and our
present effort is by its very nature intellectual only, we must try to
reach it in thought as the goal towards which the whole spiritual life
of man is tending.
No life can be set forth in scientific terms. The moment it is
analysed, the vitalising power is gone. And even the poet, who has
far more chance than the logician of making us realise what the life
signifies for those who live it, is still speaking of it from outside. It is
only by life itself that we can truly know the Kingdom of God.
We find, all through the New Testament, a contrast drawn
between earth and heaven. And it is worth while to consider the
logical principle of that contrast, even though the result is somewhat
dry and barren. The place of careful analysis here is analogous to
that which criticism holds in relation to art. The critical analysis of a
work of art will never of itself enable us to appreciate it, if we are
without the cultivated artistic faculty; but it may enrich our
appreciation. We may thereby find more than we should otherwise
have found of the elements that are combined together to make up
the total effect. And then in the unity of the renewed experience we
receive more enjoyment than we had done before. So, too, the
Kingdom of God, which for us is something that we still hope to
reach, and of which the foretaste that we have as yet received is a
very slight earnest of the glory that shall be revealed, may be a goal
more potent in its attraction to our wills, when we have seen it as
the fulfilment of the principles of our whole spiritual life as these are
discoverable in other departments and activities.
The goods of this world, as we have already noticed, are such
that the more one has the less there is for others. The goods of
heaven are of such a kind that the more one has the more there is
on that account for others. So it is with the true virtues of the
spiritual life, with love and joy and peace, the fruits of the spirit. So
it is too with other excellences which belong to man as a spiritual
being, and which are out of the reach of our animal nature: loyalty,
beauty and knowledge.
Now the principle of this whole spiritual life is precisely the
principle of unity, not as distinct from variety but as distinct either
from antagonism or transitoriness. The two things that distress the
soul of man are enmities, and the passing away of that which he
loves. It is by rising above these evils, which beset us in this earthly
state, that the satisfaction of the soul is found.
There are four main departments of the spiritual life which
aspire in this way to rise above the evils which beset our mortal
state. They are Science and Art and Morality and Religion. As we
know them in our experience, they are all of them due on the
human side to a dissatisfaction with our experience as we find it.
The scientific man is disturbed by the apparent chaos in his
experience, and he sets out to give order to it, and he is satisfied in
so far as he discovers that all the while it was not chaotic, as it
seemed, but orderly. The artist is craving for a beauty which, in his
ordinary experience, he does not find. He selects, he concentrates
attention on certain aspects, to reach a satisfaction which the world
otherwise seems not to give. The man of moral aspiration is
dissatisfied with the world as he sees it, and he sets himself
therefore to alter both himself and it, that it may be modelled more
in accordance with the heart's desire. And the religious man finds all
of these sources of dissatisfaction working together within his soul;
he seeks, and in faith finds, that which gives him both peace and
power.
Let us then begin with what is in itself the least rich of these
forms of human activity, and consider how it is that Science reaches
its unity. Let us first recall that there are two forms of multiplicity or
division which we are seeking to overcome: that which arises from
the clash of various ideals or desires, the antagonism of man with
man; and that which arises from the changeableness of the world as
we see it. With regard to the latter, science does indeed reach real
unities; but they are unities which leave Time out of sight.
Sometimes, no doubt, the subject matter which is handled is itself
non-temporal, but not in the sense of being eternal. So, for example,
geometry is entirely without relation to time. There is no temporal
sequence between the equality of the sides and the equality of the
angles in the isosceles triangle. But where the subject studied is
something that changes in Time, it remains true that the aim of
science is to reach an unchanging principle. So, for example, the
student of biology may be trying to discover the unchanging
principle which governs the successive variations of species. But
when he has found it he has not really mastered the transitoriness;
he has not in any way gathered up the past and dead into his
present experience; he has merely found the principle which applies
to every stage as that stage comes. He reaches some superiority to
the transitoriness of things, only by abstracting from Time
altogether.
And, similarly, the unity between men which is produced by a
common absorption in such pursuits does not strike very deep. For a
man's temperament has nothing in the world to do with his scientific
conclusions, or at least ought not to have. In the ideal pursuit of
knowledge, all of the things that set men at variance count for
nothing whatever. Consequently the differences, just because they
are ignored, are not overcome, with the result that, as at the
beginning of this war, we may find professors of the various nations,
who had been linked together, as one might think, closely enough in
the pursuit of knowledge, hurling manifestoes at one another across
their national frontiers.
When we pass to the second of the great departments, a real
progress may be noted in just these points. For in the experience of
the artist Time is genuinely mastered. We get some illustration of
this from the absorption which marks the aesthetic contemplation of
a picture or a statue. For the time that we are really held by it, we
forget about time altogether. But the case is clearer with regard to
those arts which handle temporal processes—music and poetry. For
it is the whole point, let us say, of a drama, that it shall follow a
certain succession; it is vital to its significance that the scenes shall
be in that order and no other. If you have two plays, each in three
acts, in one of which the first act is cheerful in tone, and the second
is neutral, and the third depressing, while in the other the first act is
depressing, the second neutral, and the third cheerful, the total
effect of the two plays is not the average of the three acts in each
case, which would be neutral for both, but is in the one particularly
depressing, and in the other particularly cheering. For the play is
grasped as a whole. It makes a single impression, if it is a good play.
We know what it means—not indeed because we can state it in
other words, for it is the only expression of its own meaning; but it
has a definite significance for us. And the name of the play comes to
stand for that significance. This is especially noticeable in tragedy,
where the Greeks, with their sure instinct, chose a story whose plot
is known to the spectator in advance, so that we have throughout
the play both the impression of the entire story and the particular
impression of each scene as it comes and passes. It is significant
that the Greeks did so choose for tragedy stories whose plot was
known, while their comedians invented their own plots. And most
will agree that we enjoy a great play better when we have read it in
advance, or when we have already seen it on the stage before;
because then we do reach something that may serve perhaps as the
nearest image that we can get for eternity—a grasp of the whole
stretch of time, realised in its successiveness and in the meaning
which that successiveness gives to it, and having the sense of the
whole throughout and seeing each moment, as it comes, in the light
not only of the past but of the future too.
 On this side, then, art is able, for the moment at least, and with
regard to a period definitely limited by our capacities of
comprehension, to master Time and give us a unity which includes
its successiveness within it; so that the past, and even the future,
are gathered up into the real experience of the present, and we are
not only conscious of what is before our eyes, but are conscious of it
as a part of the whole to which it belongs.
In a similar way we notice that while different temperaments
are needed for the production of different types of art, yet in
appreciation all are united. For example, it would be quite impossible
for the great Russian novels to be produced in any other country
than Russia; it would have been quite impossible for the great
German philosophy to have been produced in any other nation than
Germany; it would have been quite impossible for the great English
poetry to have been produced in any other nation than England.
These literatures belong to the soil out of which they spring. But the
people of all the other nations can appreciate them, and all are glad
because they are different. And so far as the artistic side of our
nature governs our whole being, it is capable of linking us together
in a real fellowship, which includes and is based upon our differences
and the appreciation of them, and is therefore firmly rooted,
because what might have been the source of antagonism is become
itself the bond of unity.
But we must notice that each of these only reaches a very
provisional attainment. If science likes to mark off a certain
department of reality for its investigation, it can reach something like
finality concerning just that department. I suppose that mechanics is
something like a complete system of truth, so far as the mechanical
aspect of things can be isolated from all other aspects. But then,
nothing in the world is mechanical and only mechanical. Nothing in
the world is chemical and only chemical. There are always other
qualities there, from which abstraction has been made. Science
therefore inevitably sets before itself as its goal the understanding of
the universe, and it could not reach any absolute certainty
concerning any real fact except so far as it had obtained
omniscience. In mathematics it reaches certainty, because in
mathematics the object is what it is defined to be, and nothing else.
But no given material thing is just a triangle. It may even be
disputed whether any given thing can be, according to the definition,
a triangle at all.
Science then is marked by a restlessness until it reaches this
omniscience. It began when the first man said "Why?" The moment
that question is asked, Science is launched upon its course. But the
answer to that question merely prompts anyone of scientific instincts
to say "Why?" to the answer. Why is there a war? Historical science
will point to the diplomatic documents, and from them to the course
of history moulding national aspiration. Then if we say, "Why was
the cause of war such? And, why were there such national
aspirations?" we shall find ourselves soon investigating the literature
of the countries and then their climates; from this we are shortly
involved in astronomy and geology and all the other sciences. You
can have nothing that is final until you reach omniscience. And so
Science moves, perpetually saying "Why?" to every statement that is
made. Far in the distance, in the infinite distance, is its goal of a
complete satisfaction gained through understanding the universe in
its entirety.
 Art can similarly only achieve a provisional attainment of its
goal; but the attainment while it lasts is more substantial. Its
method, as distinct from that of science, is mental rest. The aim of
the artist is to concentrate attention upon the object, holding it there
by various devices. That is why pictures are put into frames.
Something abruptly irrelevant, although not discordant, is put round
the object to help us fix our minds upon it. That is why poetry is
written in metre. The mind is abruptly brought back by the
recurrence of the rhythm or the recurrence of the sound in rhyme,
and held within the total composition. We notice that it is precisely
where the subject matter of the poem is slight that the rhythm
needs to be strongly marked or the system of rhyme complicated;
where the subject matter itself has a strong appeal, any rhyming
seems to be out of place and tiresome. The aim is simply to grip the
attention and hold it upon the object and make us see it as it is; not
after the fashion of science, connecting it with other things, but
understanding it by getting to know it in and for itself as thoroughly
as may be.[#] Now in thus concentrating attention upon some one
object and claiming complete absorption in that object, art is
implicitly claiming to give a perfect mental satisfaction and an
absolute peace. But it can never succeed in that unless the object
upon which it is concentrating our attention is an adequate symbol
for the whole truth of things in which the whole of our nature will
find such satisfaction.

[#] This is why no great work of art over becomes out of date, whereas the work
of a great scientist is always liable to do so, because his successors revise it in the
light of ever widening knowledge.
Moreover, these activities of the mind or spirit fail to govern our lives
as a whole precisely because they are contemplative and not active.
We stand before the world gazing at it, setting our minds indeed to
work upon it in certain ways, yet not fundamentally changing it. But
we are active beings, with wills as well as contemplative minds, and
our volitional action lies very largely outside the range which these
activities and interests can control. And therefore it is that so little
real unity is reached by means of them.
In Morality the practical instincts and impulses are for the first
time included. Morality is the science or the art, or both, of living in
society; of living, that is to say, as fellow members with other
beings, who also have aspirations and ideals as legitimate as our
own, so that our own claim to pursue our own ideals must be won
by recognition of their equal claim to pursue theirs. And the man
who, with full mastery of himself, if such a man exists, is following
out a great purpose that is adequate to satisfy his whole nature, is a
man who has achieved the conquest of Time in the completest way.
It is essential to the pursuit of a purpose that we move from stage
to stage, as we adapt means to our end, and yet all of it is one
thing, thought and experienced as one. Indeed a test that we always
instinctively apply to a biography is whether it enables us to see the
different stages of a man's life as constituting one spiritual whole.
That is just what we desire the biographer to set forth before us.
At the same time Morality conquers antagonism because it is
the life of fellowship. It begins with the recognition that other men
have as much right to live as we have, and we buy our rights
precisely by conceding theirs. Its root principle is the recognition of
this brotherhood or fellow-membership. And yet it, too, never
reaches its goal; it fails in two ways; every man in this world,
however perfectly he may achieve mastery of his own nature—and it
may be doubted if any man has ever done even that by his own
strength—is so conditioned by circumstances that he is never able to
make his life a perfect masterpiece of art; and as regards the whole
fellowship of which he is a member, and his own relation to it, he
can find no absolute rules except the command to reach a state of
mind which he cannot reach by his own will. There are no moral
laws that are absolute except the law to love one's neighbour as
oneself. All the rest have exceptions somewhere. "Thou shall not
kill," was the formula of the old law. But we have altered it into,
"Thou shalt do no murder." It is always wrong to murder, because
murder is such killing as is wrong. But it is not always wrong to kill.
And so we find no principle that can be made entirely binding and
universal, except the law to love our neighbour as ourselves. But
how are we to do it? Is there any man who seriously thinks that by
taking thought he can make himself love somebody else?
All of these three then, and the last as emphatically as any, in
spite of its comprehending a greater section of human nature, fail to
reach their own achievement.
In the fourth stage, in Religion, all would find their fulfilment.
For the purpose of God, if there be a God, is the principle of unity
which the scientist is seeking. The nature of God, if there be a God,
is that perfect beauty which would be the culmination of the life of
Art. The righteousness of God, if there be a God, is the satisfaction
of the moral aspiration. But we are not left so to conjecture what life
would be like if we could carry our own spiritual faculties to their
own highest development. We are given the express image of the
person of God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." We
shall not indeed have perfect knowledge of the sphere of religion
until we have seen how the whole of history and every detail of our
lives is, after all, the result and work of creative Love; but while
Science and Art and Morality struggle towards their goal and only
realise their need for it, God gives Himself as the satisfaction of that
need. It is His gift, not our discovery; but we see that in this
principle all Time is gathered up, for if the life of Christ is the
manifestation of the nature of God, then it is the manifestation of
the root-principle of all history.[#]

[#] I am aware that the argument here is per saltum, but space forbids its full
development. I hope soon to have completed a book which will fill in the outline
sketch offered in this Lecture. Meanwhile I would refer to my essay on The Divinity
of Christ in Foundations, specially pp. 213-223, 242-263.

Then we see, too, how all men may be united in perfect fellowship,
because all men loving God will find themselves loving those whom
God so loves. This hope or conviction remains in the region of faith,
not of knowledge; what of that? In the other departments also we
have found no knowledge. We have only found approximation
towards it. We have, as it were, converging lines which never meet;
and we have also the point at which we see they would meet if
produced. Is that not enough? Here we find is the principle that will
give unity, as we work it out, to the whole scheme of our spiritual
life. Morality says, "Love all men." How can I? Science says, "Realise
the truth which explains the universe." How can I? But I can gaze
upon the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ; I can meditate upon
His Cross and Resurrection. I can see here and there how it may be
true that this is indeed the explanation of all the sorrow, even of all
the sin. For if it is true that the supreme manifestation of the love of
God was historically conditioned by the supreme sin of humanity in
the treason of Judas, then surely one begins to see how even out of
the grossest evil the glory of God wins triumph for itself, which we
too may share if we are first drawn to share the sacrifice.
As I become absorbed in that contemplation I find in the first
place a new power to love all men, as I remember that He died for
them just as He died for me. In the degree in which I really believe
that this is the manifestation of the power of God and the governing
authority of the universe, I find this thought over-ruling other
thoughts and temptations to hostility or enmity. As I remember that
those whom I am inclined to despise or hate are those for whom He
thought it worth while to die, my contempt and my hatred are
rebuked and cancelled.
And similarly, if I realise—or in the degree in which I realise—
that here is set forth the power that governs all things, that this is
the way in which God rules the world, and that Calvary is the mode
of His omnipotence, I begin to find myself indifferent, and that
increasingly, to those things which are called sorrow and pain.
But we shall only find this as we expect to find it. All through
our spiritual life we may be perpetually in contact, as it were, with
the means of receiving what is good, and never receive it because
we are not expecting it. We have not expected peace of mind from
our worship, we have not expected a sense of security against evil;
that is why we have not found it; but it is our fault. And certainly
most of us have not expected to find fellowship from worship. We
have known something of the grace of Jesus Christ, perhaps even of
the love of God; but of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, of the sense
of being linked to one another because all dominated by that one
power, most of us have found nothing, because we have not
expected it.
But if we are expecting this, all the testimony of the saints in
every generation goes to show that we shall find what we have
expected.
The power that can give us security against the transitoriness of
the world and against the instincts of antagonism is there in the faith
that we place in God. "I will put my trust in God," the Psalmist says,
"I will not fear what flesh can do unto me." This is not because flesh
will not do such hurt as it can to the man who puts his trust in God
—the Jews crucified Christ—but because to the man who puts his
trust in God, anything whatever that happens becomes part of God's
purpose for his life, and therefore he will not fear it. For "all things,"
sorrow as well as joy, pain as well as pleasure, sin as well as
righteousness, "all things work together for good to them that love
God."

LECTURE VI
GOD IN HISTORY

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and
which is to come, the Almighty."—Revelation i. 8.
We have considered the two great instruments of God by which He
fashions the spiritual life of man, and we have considered that
spiritual life itself in the outline at least of its four main departments;
and now, as we close our line of thought, we need still to consider
how it is that, in these fields and by these instruments, God carries
forward His work.
The conception of God as at work in human history, guiding it,
controlling it, and judging men by its course, is the great
contribution of Israel to the religion of the world. It is linked of
course with that belief in the union of perfect righteousness with the
divine, power which we usually speak of under the somewhat
cumbrous title of Ethical Monotheism. We remember what was really
at stake in that great day upon Mount Carmel when Elijah
confronted the priests of Baal; it was whether the conception of God
as righteous and demanding righteousness should prevail, or the
conception of God as a capricious Being, needing only to be
propitiated, and in connection with whose very worship
licentiousness was tolerated and even encouraged.
But, after all, the greatest souls, at least in every highly-
developed religion, have believed that God is righteous in Himself.
What gives to Israel its supreme significance in the spiritual history
of mankind is the conviction that this righteous God is daily and
hourly at work in the history of men; and that conviction gives to the
faith of Israel a primacy and supremacy over all the other partial
faiths, even though they may be superior in certain departments.
If we think of some of the conceptions by means of which we
try to bring before our minds the meaning of the word "God," we
may find that with regard to several of them, other nations had
advanced further than Israel before the coming of the Lord.
God is Spirit. The Hindu knew that, and knows it still, quite as
much as Israel.
God is Law. The more thoughtful at least among the ancient
Romans, and particularly the great Roman Stoics, knew that with a
vividness that was scarcely ever attained in Israel.
God is Beauty. Assuredly the ancient Greeks knew that as Israel
never realised it at all.
But the conception of Israel that God is at work in history
means that the God of Israel gives to these other gods or
conceptions of God, each its own time and place of emergence and
decay. The God who is revealed to us in the Old Testament is
Himself the Being who appoints that the Indian or the Roman or the
Greek should reach these particular convictions; and in these partial
apprehensions of the Divine, before the full revelation came, the
faith of Israel is determinative and regulative for all the other faiths;
and moreover, it is this faith that God is at work in the actual daily
history of men, which makes the faith of Israel the natural and
proper introduction to the Incarnation, where God Himself took flesh
and lived among men and died at a time and in a place—in Palestine
and under Pontius Pilate.
This exaltation of the Holy God, actually at work within men and
at their side, while it leads to a sense of awe before the Holiness of
the Almighty, also leads to a sense of the dignity of this world, and
of man's life in it, which is lacking, as a rule, from other great
religions, and that too in proportion as those other religions are
spiritual. For the Hindu, for example, this world and all that is in it is
mere illusion. He is spiritual enough but he is not material enough;
and we find there that contempt for the things of the body which
invariably issues in a contempt for moral conduct; for our moral
conduct here, while we live upon this planet, is wrought out through
our bodies. But the religion of Israel, and especially its completion in
the Incarnation, wherein God Himself came in the flesh, gives at
once a dignity to this world of ours, to our bodies, and to all the
material side of life.
When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in
appearance, at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the
kingdom of this world; but it is not merely a contrast of good with
evil. It is a contrast of the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet
not merely evil, power. Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in
the moment of His trial, recognises that the authority by which He is
condemned is an authority that is derived from God—"Thou couldest
have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from
above." The kingdoms of this world, which are to become the
kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not simply something
evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the contrast between
good and evil; but it is the contrast between two stages in the work
which God is accomplishing in history, and those two may often
come into conflict.
Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance
of His people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of
history that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I
think, with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual
growth, or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of
personality.
 We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is
something that is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs
to us; but that idea will not stand examination for a moment.
Individual personality is a social product. It can only be developed
under social influences. A man may be born with many great talents,
but if his environment does not encourage their development, these
talents will remain for the most part undeveloped and unknown—
either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed the greater the talent
with which a man is endowed, the more difference is made to him
by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of very few
gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same, whether he
has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or little
opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their
development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely
different being according as those surroundings are favourable or
the reverse; and so we reach the curious result that the greatest
personality, while no doubt he must have brought into the world
something given to him by God that was capable of development, is
yet more entirely dependent upon the society in which he is living
than people with a less wide range of gifts.
Again, it is only within a society which has developed some
character for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that
individual personality can reach very much development. You cannot
have genius in a savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the
personality of a whole people. It is that people coming to life, and
possessed of voice; and you do not find it where there is little social
development. It is only as the tribe or the nation begins to have
some definite character of its own that it is itself sufficiently
organised to develop from its own individual member those gifts,
and elicit those activities, which are the signs of genius.
We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is
dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice
that this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality
in the individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character;
it has claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of
the word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and
impulses which are to be found in human nature, and may be very
discordant with one another, are welded together to make up the
single life of a human being, so the whole gifts and instincts and
ambitions and aspirations of all the individual citizens are welded
together, to make up the personality of the whole society.
Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of
individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of which
have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine
sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.
Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus
goes on side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its
principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been
that isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and
after something like perfection has been reached in the separate
departments taken singly, the combination of them is brought about,
in order that the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all
of them find a place.
European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece
and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence
was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has
bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law.
The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because
one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for
social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in
history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary
political sense and sanity. The Romans were not great political
philosophers. They did not think very much about the principles on
which they acted; but simply because of their peculiar gift in this
direction they welded together a social order which lasted
throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day the law
of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.
To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her
peculiar characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching
perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to grasp,
truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought a
great deal about their ordinary politics and their military activities,
and the wars between the various States; but these matter very
little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because of
the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because
Aeschylus stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine
Justice; because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even
its ugliest manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure,
that as we look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and
beauty; because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk;
because Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth
of history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition
that has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all
time and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do
harm to any man whatever harm he may have done to us;
proclaimed also that "God is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways
absolutely righteous, nor is anything more like to God than
whosoever among men shall become perfectly righteous;" foreseeing
also that if a perfectly righteous man should come on earth he would
die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is nowhere before the New
Testament anything that comes nearer to its own highest truths, not
in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find in Plato.

[#] Republic i. 335*d*; Theaetetus 176*c*; Republic ii. 361*e*.

This influence,—the influence of this intellectual passion—has been

the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has
been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not
Greek in origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we
have learnt "the use of reason to modify experience" and they
derived it from the intellectual passion for truth and beauty.
To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I
have already spoken—the one faith that can give real significance to
these other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.
It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously
weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to
it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was
conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not
conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting
beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of
Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which
almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded
to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas;
the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And
Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social
organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic
gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before
us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of
Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the
imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The
symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of
their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we
try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.

[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by
civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On
this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan's The House of Seleucus.
But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product
sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own
invention.

Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own

department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the
history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and
combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the
Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each
successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the
fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds
even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out
of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The
Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the
Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.
For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying
men's thought and action forward; and then in the 18th century it
would seem that there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to
their exhaustion; when revival came it was because Wesley and his
friends revived the Hebrew element in our life, because Newman
and Pusey with their friends revived the Latin element, and because
F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church movement revived the
Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for more adequate
comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our time.
We watch these three influences still at work; but as they interact
upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new
product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate
personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born
which is something that history has not known before.

The first requirement of personality is always freedom—freedom as

we have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated
from without but is governed by the whole person, and not by
isolated elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as
much as the individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need,
for political sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a
person, that is as having a single spiritual life.
But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who
are members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the
corporate person is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to
destroy a State is to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man,
which is one reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man
should die for the political freedom of his country, and even, if need
be, kill for it; but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality,
fellowship is its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities
quite as much as of individuals that they only find themselves and
fulfil themselves in their inter-action upon one another, and the
nations of the world do in fact need one another, and need one
another's full life.
In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy,
a country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is
so in every other department. We need the gifts of the other
peoples. We need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the
chief lesson which the world at this time needs to learn is just this—
that all the nations of the world need one another, each needing also
that the others should be free, in order that they may bring their
contributions to the common life in which all share.
But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss
if we did not also take account of the fact that there has been
growing up lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to
history before, and exemplified by your own United States and by
the British Empire; the conception of sovereign States linked
together in a single life, and exercising therein a joint sovereignty in
dealing with those who lie outside the federation, is something of
which history bears no record; and we need to try to understand its
principle, and see what it is capable of contributing to the life of men
in order that we may not fail to use our opportunity, and bring our
contribution.[#]
[#] See Appendix V. On Providence in History.

There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our
own civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are
at work. We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the
result of that dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of
necessity to fulfil one of three functions—prophet, priest and king.
The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal
unflinchingly, not considering consequences, not perhaps considering
ways and means of reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its
nature and calling men and nations to penitence so far as they fail to
reach it. It may require more courage than the office of the king or
statesman, and yet in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively
simple.
In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they
are democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He
has some share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the
management of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other
people, and one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is
involved in the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with
genuine effort, how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the
ideal. He must not be content with pious platitudes leading to no
action, nor content to consider only his own country's welfare; but
as a member of the Church of Christ which embraces all mankind,
he is called to think out and, having thought, to pursue in act the
methods by which his nation may genuinely be doing its part to build
up the one great Temple of God—His Holy City.
 The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as
minister of the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true
ideal, and bid men to guard against all self-contentment so far as
they fail to reach it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by
the side of every individual or group of individuals, even of the
nation itself, nerving each to do the best of which it then and there
in the circumstances of the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a
wretched human being like the rest, terribly liable to pride if he
upholds an ideal higher than is usually recognised; terribly liable to
worldliness, alike in his own soul and in his teaching, if for a single
moment he forsakes the Divine Presence; and uniquely exposed to
the deadliest of all temptations; for while we preach what neither we
nor anybody else can practise, we are sorely tempted to be content
with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.
But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear
testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His
kingdom that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so
tame; our efforts for peace and fellowship have been so much less
exhilarating than other men's efforts for war; we have been very
mild; and that is not the spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit
of Christ is the spirit of all heroism in all ages.
In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for
justice and purity of government amid the corrupt States all round.
It was attacked by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day
when the capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered
together in the great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode
among them the man whose faith and heroism had sustained that
siege for more weeks than the wiseacres thought it could last days.
When the cheering had subsided, he made no acknowledgment, but
simply said:

"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters,

nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced
marches, battles, death. Let him who loves his country
with his heart not with his lips only follow me."

And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was
Garibaldi; and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of
Italy is in the world to-day.
But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit—"I offer
neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst,
forced marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me,
let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."
The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real
thing. To take up the cross did not mean bearing life's little
inconveniences with equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope
round one's neck, and be ready simply for anything that might
come. That is the spirit in which we are summoned to work for
Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of Peace was not a "mild man."
This is the vision that His disciple had of Him:
 "His head and His hair were white, as white wool,
white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire;
and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been
refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of
many waters. And He had in His right hand seven
stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-
edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun
shineth in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at
His feet as one dead."

Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like

that compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are
making dull the one great adventure of the world.
There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we
cling to faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our
part; God, Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God,
not only the Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God,
not only the Guide and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls,
enabling us to follow; and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener,
Himself also the Goal to which we would come. "For in Him we move
and live and have our being."

Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning

He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed;
Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,
Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and
which was and which is to come, the Almighty.

APPENDIX I
ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS

It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of

mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more
easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It
has been well said that the mediæval man looked upwards and
downwards—to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a
vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the
past and future—the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall
exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if
possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement.
With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a
literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not
its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it
springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the
seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he
thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary
concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago,
from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days
seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium
following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human
society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed
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