In the hand of the potter : a study of Christianity in action

Front matter

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Preface

N. two chief respects the narratives composing

this book differ from those in Broken Earthenware. They are instances of conversion, but not of sudden, violent, and passionate conversion. Even so profound a thinker and so far-seeing an observer as Frederic Myers appears to have regarded conversion only in this manner, whereas the most interesting, the most striking, and the most conclusive cases of the miracle are those in which a gradual and’ quite tranquil change of heart leads to the new birth.

Professor Granger, in The Soul of a Christian, tells of a revivalist preacher who condemned a Scotch congregation for not responding to his appeal for sudden change: ‘‘A woman rebuked him by saying that her mother had x PREFACE been praying in the hills for five years before she ‘was converted: how was she to be converted in five minutes?” There could be no narrower view of conversion than that which shuts out of count and regards only as cases of natural development, those fundamental changes in the soul which are gradually produced; so long as there is a culminating point, a place at which the spirit completely turns about and becomes definitely, conscious of a new life, however quietly, privately, and dispassionately, these are true cases of the miracle. | The second respect in which this book differs from Broken Earthenware is in the character of the people whose stories it attempts to tell. In Broken Earthenware the testators were all men, and of the humblest classes in the community, some of them the very lees and dregs of society. In the present book most of the stories concern women, and in all cases the stratum of society is above the depths.

Contents

PAGE

PREFACE ° ‘ : ; eee INTRODUCTION . ‘ . i ‘ I SEEKERS AND SAVERS : ° ° nas THE FLOWING TIDE . : ; ° 55 Two pane . ° ° ° enzo THE VISION OF A LOST SOUL ., ° ° 81 BETRAYED Ne ne é : . rok he OUT OF THE DEPTHS . : : ° 133 xi xii CONTENTS

THE CARRIAGE LADY . . . ‘ 160 A GIRL AND HER LOVER, ‘ . « 183 TALE OF A TREATY PORT ‘ . : 205 THE CLEANEST THING IN THE HOUSE ° aoe SISTER AGATHA’S WAY , ° ° . 249

Introduction

I

NE of the aphorisms in Coleridge’s ‘Aids to Reflection is entitled, ‘* The Characteristic Difference between the Discipline of the Ancient Philosophers and the Dispensation of the Gospel.” To insist upon this Difference is to venture a rescue of Christianity, both from the shadows of philosophy and from the sensuous insecurity of zsthetics, which seems at this time more than ever a work of high urgency—a work to which all men may set their hands who believe that life without some form of definite religion is like to be a chaos, and without the true religion must certainly fall short of its reach.

This book attempts such a work, and one could not better express its purpose, or sound the note of its forerunning essay, than by setting forth in full, on the very threshold of its pages, the noble and compelling aphorism of Coleridge in which that characteristic of Christianity. which

Hand of the Potter. 2 differentiates it from all philosophies and all other religions is most powerfully defined.

The Aphorism is as follows:

“By undeceiving, enlarging, and informing the Intellect, Philosophy sought to purify, and to elevate the Moral Character. Of course, those alone could receive the latter and incomparably greater benefit who by natural capacity and favourable contingencies of fortune were fit recipients of the former. How small the number, we scarcely need the evidence of history to assure us. Across the Night of Paganism, Philosophy flitted on, like itself, the lantern-fly of the tropics, a light to and an ornament, but alas! no more than an ornament, of the surrounding darkness

‘‘ Christianity reversed the order. By means accessible to all, by inducements operative on all, and by convictions, the grounds and materials of which all men might find in themselves, her first step was to cleanse the Heart. But the benefit did not stop here. In preventing the rank vapours that steam up from the corrupt Heart, Christianity restores the Intellect likewise to its natural clearness. By relieving the mind from the distractions and importunities of the unruly passions, she improves the quality of the Understanding : while, at the same time, she presents for its contemplation Objects so great and so bright as cannot but enlarge the organ by which they are contemplated. The fears, the hopes, the remembrances, the anticipations, the inward and outward experience, the belief and the Faith, of a Christian, form of themselves a philosophy and a sum of knowledge, which a life spent in the grove of Academus, or the ‘painted porch,’ could not have attained or collected. The result is contained in the fact of a wide and still widening Christendom.

“Yet I dare not say, that the effects have been proportionate to the divine wisdom of the Scheme. Too soon did the Doctors of the Church forget that the Heart, the Moral Nature, was the beginning and the end; and that Truth, Knowledge, and Insight were comprehended in its expansion. This was the first and true apostasy—when in Council and Synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative Systems, and Religion became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. For these, therefore, there remained only rites and ceremonies and spectacles, shows and semblances. Thus among the learned the substance of things hoped for (Heb. xi. 1) passed off into Notions; and for the unlearned the surfaces of things became substance. The Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many, that did not think -at all, and the Few who did nothing but think— both alike unreflecting, the one from defect of the Act, the other from the absence of an Obdject.”’

II

The purpose of this book is to show by the testimony of Christened souls that where the Christian religion makes it her first step to cleanse the heart, results follow which are evidence of her divine origin. And the object of this introduction is to insist that Christianity ~ must be unwaveringly and _ authoritatively declared by its representatives to be a miracleworking religion, a religion able to cleanse the heart and convert the soul of even the most degraded human being, or its inevitable tendency will be towards the unprofitable region of speculation. There its light, which has for so long lightened the world, will surely flicker miserably away, for some generations at least, into the shadows and dispensable mysticism of an inadequate theology.

The supreme danger of the Christian religion comes not from outside, but from within. No attack of a merely unimaginative materialism could so undermine and totter this heavenly edifice as the inclination of those inside to sponge away from its interior walls the ancient testimony of a divine origin. Christianity is either the first essential of life or it is a poor philosophy. It is either a Revelation or a Theory. It is either the Spirit of God or the dream of men. It is either superhuman, or a mere guess.

To make Christianity, as is the tendency in these present times, something so common and compromising that a man may get through the experience of human life almost as well without it as with it, to make it a bracket in religion with Hinduism, and a conjugation in philosophy with Platonism, not to insist upon it as something sole, single, and sublime, not to declare that it makes a unique demand and confers an exclusive benefit—this is most surely to darken the light of the world and to turn men shelterless again into the night of paganism. It is to destroy Christianity. Christianity, irresistible as a religion, is vulnerable at every point as a philosophy. Either it must be brought home to men as the express revelation of God, the chief necessity of existence, and a power unparalleled and supernatural, or it sinks fatally to the level of speculation, and becomes to the man of science a folly and to the bulk of humanity a matter of indifference.

Ill

Christianity differs, with the altitude of heaven and the radius of infinity, from all other religions under the sun, first and foremost in the nature of its foundational affirmation. It declares itself to be a revelation from God and (mark well) a blessing to humanity. All other religions are human explications. Buddha, Confucius, LAo, Zoroaster and Mohammed, all these men stand in the same category as Socrates, Swedenborg, and

Kant. They do not profess to be more than men. Their religions are human interpretations and explanations ; they begin with the honest affirmation that they do but attempt to explain the moral and social problems of human life or to amplify the religion they found already in existence.

To the sick and dying soul of the human race Buddhism comes as a Job’s comforter; Christianity as a healing physician. Buddhism diagnoses the disease and gives it a name; Christianity cures it. Buddhism explains why the patient should bear his sufferings and remain patient under his afflictions; Christianity commands him to take up his bed and walk. Buddhism explains everything, and leaves everything as it was before the explanation. Christianity sets out to explain nothing, and transfigures the whole fabric of existence.

All other religions are efforts, more or less beautiful, more or less intellectual, to find a way. out from the world. Christianity is inwards to the world from the universe which includes the world. It is not the speculation or inspiration of man, but a light from heaven, a hand from eternity, the voice of God. No religion save Christianity makes any such claim; no other religion has so daring an ascription. From the earth in which they have their roots, these shadow-faiths of groping men look up and strive to find their way amongst the stars ; they ballast the soul with pessimism and wing it with arguments, and, thus prepared, send it a circuit of the empyrean; they guess their way across eternity and with a clue of Ariadne would circumnavigate infinity; their God is an intuition, their faith a fancy, and their law of life a conjecture.

Christianity’s foundational affirmation is a supernatural origin. It is not a human presumption, but a divine revelation. It is a gift from God to man, and not a guess by man at God. The human brain is not concerned at all in the origin of this religion; it did not spring from the dreams of poets, the visions of prophets, the reasoning of philosophers. It came to humanity from outside humanity’s history and experience. Christ declared Himself to be sanctified by the Father and sent into the world. ‘‘ This commandment have I received of My Father” is an utterance unique in human records, and it is the ground-motive of all that luminous discourse which is the good-news and revelation of Christianity. St. Paul described himself to men as ‘‘an apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised Him from the dead.”’ St. Paul believed this, and those who heard him knew that he believed it;—‘‘ not of men, neither by man.” A man may doubt or altogether reject the truth of Christianity, but he cannot deny either from its documents or from the course of history, that it claimed to be a divine and supernatural revelation. The cross of Calvary, set up in the centre of time, and dividing the ages of the world in twain, witnesses, if to nothing else, at least to this. ‘Christ did not die for a metaphor.”

At the beginning, then, there is this immense gulf separating Christianity from all other religions. The origin of the one claims to be divine ;, the origins of the others do not profess to be anything but human. Other religions explain; Christianity reveals. :

IV

If men are disposed to forget or to slur the foundational affirmation of Christianity, much more do they obscure the central and unequivocal assurance of Christ that His revelation is a complete satisfaction of the soul, and the only secret of enduring joy.

That this is indeed the case may be seen vividly and amazingly in the disposition even of able and devout Christians to establish a comparison between, and to seek a likeness in, Christianity and Buddhism. For these two religions ‘‘ stand at diameter and sword’s point.” They are each the antipodes of the other. There is no antagonism to be discovered in nature or hit upon in the imagination, save only that one eternal antagonism between good and evil, more complete, contrary, and counter than the antithesis of these two religions.

Christianity is janua vitae; Buddhism, janua mortis, Christianity is an ardent enthusiasm for existence; Buddhism a painful yearning for annihilation. Christianity is a hunger and thirst after joy; Buddhism a chloral quest for insensibility. The Christian is bidden to turn away from sin that he may inherit the everlasting joy of eternity; the Buddhist is told to eradicate all desire of any kind whatsoever lest he be born again. Buddha sought to discover an escape from existence; Christ opened the door of life. Buddha forbade desire; Christ intensified aspiration. Buddha promised anesthesia; Christ promised everlasting felicity.

By what: blunder of the intellect can men have come to believe that a likeness exists in these two hostile attitudes of the soul towards its destiny? The reason is perhaps the fruitfullest. cause of damage to the revelation of Christ. It is because, first Judaism, and then sacerdotalism and calvinism have succeeded in presenting Christ to Europe in precisely the same light as that in which Buddha stands, of his own choosing, to Asia,—namely, as the means of an escape from hereafter woe and not as the giver and bestower of joy, present and everlasting. ‘*‘ These words have I spoken unto you,’’ said the Christ, “‘that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” The supreme glory of His revelation, that the Creator of the universe is the Father of men, cannot make for dejection and abasement, it must make for hope, confidence, and elation. ‘Come unto Me all ye that are weary and heavy-laden. . . . I am the Light of the world.

. . Your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you. ... He that cometh unto Me shall never hunger; and he that believeth in Me shall never thirst. . . . Rejoice and be exceeding glad. . . . Your sorrow shall be turned into joy. . . . I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. . . . He that believeth on Me hath everlasting life. . . . Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

Christianity is a sublime and supernatural optimism; there is no deeper and more exhaustive pessimism than the religion of Buddha. ‘Misery,’ says the ancient formula of the Eastern religion, ‘‘ always accompanies existence. All modes of existence result from desire. There is no escape from existence except by destruction of desire.” Compare these propositions with the words, *‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

It must be noted, if only in passing, that Christ frequently insists upon immortality as a gift from God, not as something inherent in man’s soul. Of those who believe in Him, He says: ‘“‘I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish.” “* Fear Him that hath power to destroy both soul and body.” “ Except ye believe that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.” ‘‘ Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep My word he shall never see death.” ‘** Ye will not come to Me that ye may have life.”’ Few people know that the immortality of the soul is a dogma of the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. ‘‘ According to the first Christian idea, which was the true one,” says Renan, ‘‘ only those would rise again who had helped to establish the reign of God on the earth; the punishment of the wicked and frivolous would be extinction.” . “‘I know of no subject,’’ says a French pastor, who believes that the Romish doctrine of eternal torment has almost destroyed Christianity in France, “‘ on which the Bible is more explicit than on the destiny of the impenitent. It declares as plainly as possible that those who persist in turning from God are on the way to eternal destruction.”” The Encyclopedia Biblica says of the heavenly Kingdom: ‘‘ The righteous rise to share in it; but only the righteous: the resurrection is only to life .. . the resurrection is conceived as springing from God... the wicked have no part. . . . Only those, therefore, attain to the resurrection who ‘are accounted worthy’ to attain to that world, and the resurrection from the dead” (Eschatology, col. 1375). Only in the mouth of Satan does the Bible suggest a universal immortality—" Ye shall not surely die’’; and never once does it employ the word “‘ life’ in describing the state of the iniquitous. Eternal joy is for those who desire it.!

Whether we believe in Universalism, Traditionalism, or a Conditional Immortality, certain and incontestable is the proposition that Christ made His revelation as a blessing, and claimed for Himself the position of a benefactor. “* For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a blessing.” And yet it is this saving, blessing, joy-breathing, and life-giving Christ Who has come to stand in men’s minds chiefly and almost solely as a sorrowful saviour from eternal torment, an intensely tragic and pathetic mediator between a doomed humanity and the wrath of a violent God. Humanity has rejected this idea. The American who closed a discussion on eternal punishment with the amusing judgment, “* Well, all I can say is that our people would never stand it!” spoke unknowingly for the healthy conscience and the clear reason of all the world. Bagehot’s phrase about Satan’s victory over mankind—"“ It is as if an army should invest a cottage ’’—is more than picturesque; it is final. The origin of evil, so far as human intelligence can comprehend it, is sufficiently, explained by

* An interesting pamphlet on l1mmortalité facultative is | Bible Immortality, by H. G. Emeric de St. Dalmas, published by the Colston Press at Malvern; price sixpence. Professor Gerald Leighton in The Greatest Life (Duckworth), argues from a biological standpoint that “a soul is not born but made. It is no more born than mind is born. Both are acquired, even if we suppose they are independent.”

evolution. It is a phase in progressive creation. Mankind will not ascribe either folly or injustice to God. It is a mark of our potential divinity that we cannot worship a Monster or fawn to a Tyrant.

Both sacerdotalism and calvinism are responsible for this false God. They have dreadfully degraded the idea of ‘‘ Our Father which art in heaven,’”’ and sadly obscured the mission of the Christ whom He sanctified and sent into the world. How different, how attractive, how compelling, how infinitely more lofty and divine is the Father of Christ’s parables and the Christ of the New Testament. He came to bring life and immortality to light.” He came to give joy. He came to bestow an immortality of unimagined wonder and delight. In proclaiming the Fatherhood of God He opened the gates of eternal bliss. (With the words Love and Life upon His lips, He stands in the midst of the world offering an immortality of joy. ‘When He turns to the sinner it is to promise an everlasting happiness for repentance. When He turns to the wicked it 1s to warn them of the unutterable loss of eternal life. There is nothing more and nothing less to be made out of the Christian documents. Christ came to manifest the Fatherhood of God and to declare His Will. The Fatherhood of God makes for security and for elation. To do His Will is to inherit everlasting happiness.

Christianity differs from all other religions in its superhuman origin and in its definite promise of life. Any form of religious zeal which does not make this essential differentiation the base of its labour and the spirit of its energy, must tend to bring Christianity into a fatal competition with the mere philosophies and theosophies of human pessimism, and thus destroy its power to cleanse the heart and thus limit its willingness to bestow immortal life. ‘‘ For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a blessing.” !

V,

There is another respect in which Christianity is wholly different from other religions. It is a Faith which seeks disciples, a missionary and converting Faith, a Faith which despairs of no man, and is able to save the most abandoned and wretched victims of sin. You will look in vain among all the other religions of the world for missions to foreign nations and missions to the sinful and sorrowful. No other religion attempts to rescue the malefactor and the sensualist. |

It is the attitude of Christianity to the sinner, a tender, solicitous and compassionate attitude, which more than anything else in its relation to mankind has struck the imagination of the world. The invective of Christ was for the traditionalism and formalism of His day; His t See Note A at end of book.

tenderness and His love were for the weary and heavy-laden. ‘‘ Ye will not come to Me that ye may have life.” The attitude of Christianity to the sinner is the incomparable Fifteenth Chapter of St. Luke. Everything is said in the words, ‘‘ But when he was yet a great way off his father saw him ”’ ; and the conclusion of the whole matter is in the words, ‘‘ It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

Such a spirit exists in no religion conceived in the brain of man. Only in Christianity does the love of God beat down upon the sinful ; only in Christianity does a Saviour stand at the door of the hardening heart ; only in Christianity is it written, “‘ The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

Christianity, then, differs from all other religions, in its superhuman origin, in _ its definite promise of life, and in its attitude to sinners.!

VI

Now, it is of no more avail merely to asseverate the divine origin of Christianity than it is to postulate a good and beneficent First Cause. Unless proofs of an incontestable and persuasive kind can be brought to the heart and understanding of men, proofs which make it impossible to deny the claim of Christ that He was sent

* See Note B at end of book.

into the world by a heavenly Father, mankind will persist in regarding Christianity only as one of many religions, only as one of many. ancient superstitions, only as a philosophy which may or may not be a good guess at the truth of things, but which is certainly dispensable and non-essential.

Is it possible for Christianity to give these proofs?

The body of this book is an answer to that question. The proofs of Christianity lie in the cleansed hearts and higher selves of that vast multitude which Christ has sought and saved. There can be no other proof, and no higher and more miraculous proof. Christianity does what it is declared by Christ able to do, and what no other religion and no arm of science can achieve. It is a power by which men can be born again. It is a power which transforms the sensualist, the criminal, the victim of alcoholic poisoning, the trivial, the mean, the self-righteous, the melancholy, the base, and the ignoble into souls worthy of eternal life. Wherever Christianity seeks the lost, it finds and it saves. Homes of wretchedness and misery become at its entrance microcosms of God. The chances and changes of this mortal life, the violence of the world’s hostility, the whisperings and leadings of temptation, even the havoc and desolation of death, are borne by Christianity with fortitude and without despair. The earth ceases to be either insignificant or meaningless, life becomes definitely grand and beautiful, ‘‘the sacred passion of the second life ’’ ennobles and exalts the soul, character and understanding enlarge themselves to the bounds of an infinite universe, and the spirit of man feels itself conscious of a capacity for everlasting growth in bliss. and conscious of a divine sonship with God. |

The happiness, the peace, the purity, the wonder, and the hunger and thirst after immortality, of the cleansed heart—these are the proofs of Christianity.