Spiritual sacrifice

Preface

My aim in these lectures is not to display a scholarship which I do not possess, and for which I have had no opportunity, but to use the ordinary reading of an ordinary priest for a practical and pastoral purpose. The need of the day is to summon men to the Cross and ito the Altar of Christ, and to show them that worship means self-abandonment, and is not only for edification or for obtaining grace. I find them thinking of religion as the handmaid of righteousness. I find even those who profess devotion to the Eucharistic Sacrifice thinking of it as the offering of Christ’s sacramental presence with a view to their own perfection and salvation. Selfishness in religion is the worst, as well as the most insidious, of all forms of selfishness.

If I trace most of our shortcomings to a Roman source, it is not from any initial prejudice against the Roman Church. To find myself, even apparently, among the prophets of Protestantism is an unwelcome surprise. But I have come to believe not only that the oblation of the consecrated elements is the accidentally born child of Latin ignorance, but also that all Western doctrines of the Atonement are vitiated by the acceptance of Vv vl PREFACE an equally illegitimate Latin assumption, that the death of Christ is humanity’s expiatory gift to God.

The lectures contain no new discovery. My main theses will be found plainly stated in Nairne’s Faith of the Old Testament, in Forsyth’s The Work of Christ, in Mason’s Faith of the Gospel, and other authorities equally accessible, and often equally unpretentious. All that I have attempted is a synthesis of the statements of many well-known writers, and their concentration upon the problem of worship in Christ. And therefore I have not thought it necessary to burden my pages with the names of authorities, whom the scholar will recognise without my aid, and the average reader will not trouble to consult.

J. STEPHEN Hart.

St. John’s College, St. Kilda,

July rors.

Contents

LECTURE

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II

So much then in illustration of what we mean by the spirit of worship. To give expression to it will tax the finest of the fine arts. But what is the actual condition of our own people and Church in relation to it? We may say with confidence that of public and corporate worship they have, for the most part, no experience at all. Even the churchgoers do not generally expect to lose themselves in wonder, love and praise. Further, it is difficult to believe that our services are designed to lead to such an end. And, finally, though critics of the Church and her services abound, they evince no consciousness that this is a defect, and make no demand for greater facilities for worship, for assistance towards attaining the loss of self in the transport of the divine vision. On the contrary, whether the criticism comes from a learned professor or from the anonymous correspondent of a newspaper, the cry is for an amended theology. One will bid us return to the old paths, and another will summon us to construct a system that is wholly new and acceptable to modern thought, and it is difficult to say which proposal has the greater number of adherents or the stronger arguments in its favour. But is not the whole discussion beside the point? Theology is necessary, and it must be true theology, and in every generation the wise steward brings out of his treasures things new and old. But the problem is ae) SPIRITUAL SACRIFICE not a theological but a religious one. The best theology is in vain if its usefulness has disappeared, because men no longer desire God. “ My soul is athirst for God—yea, even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the presence of God?’’ That was the human need that made it worth while to study theology. The crisis of to-day is the apparent decay of the religious instinct, the thirst for the presence of God. For the lament of. every parish priest is not the unbelief or the unorthodoxy of his people. Their glaring defect, he says, is indifference. They are willing to call themselves Christians of one sort or another. They will give spasmodic assistance to Church work. A sickness, a bereavement, the challenge of a great public calamity, will stir them momentarily from their apathy. But too often they sink back into it, and only constant ministrations hold a congregation together. It is plain that Christianity, as we offer it to the people, does not move the people, being such as they are to-day, to any enthusiasm or instinctive response. Somehow or other, a man does not feel the need of knowing himself right with God, or the joy of a reasonable hope in God, or the longing for communion with Him.

It is true that when driven into a corner and forced to defend his indifference, he will base it upon a loss of faith in the old doctrines, or at least upon an uncertainty about them. He thinks the world has learned much during the past few generations which

THE WORSHIPFUL GOD II justifies an attitude of suspense. Now the new learning is, after all, only scientific learning, and so it must be science that is claimed to have undermined religion. The impossibility of this position has been demonstrated over and over again. The field which science explores does not touch the domain of religious truth. It is the world of which our senses tell us, and the internal relations which exist between its parts. Science does indeed dispel the illusions of sense, and it gives a description of the world more accurate and far more detailed than one founded merely on sensation. By means of skilfully framed hypotheses it penetrates in imagination into regions beyond the scope of its most delicate instruments. But even in its hypotheses it never attempts to get away from the sense plane. Thus it never reaches, and so long as it is scientific never can reach, the seat of religion. It cannot find God with its instruments, because He is undiscoverable by bodily sense. It does not need the hypothesis of a Creator, because it accepts the existence of the universe as given. It can never ascribe events to Him as cause, because, for it, cause means only the succession of phenomena. It cannot trace relations between God and the world, because it does not touch the philosophic problem of reality. It has nothing to say upon the problem of the will, because determinism is its necessary assumption. Only so far as the world is a mechanical system, governed by rigorous uniformity, does it come within

I2 SPIRITUAL SACRIFICE the purview of science. If it denies, in an unguarded moment, the existence of freedom and contingency, that is only because it has, without the slightest warrant, assumed that its own field is the whole field of knowledge.

The man who is learned in science has then exactly the same need as every other man to seek elsewhere the grounds for a religious faith. It must not surprise us that, too often, he fails to make the investigation. For the field of science is so large, its recesses still so unexplored, its secrets so full of interest, its promises so alluring, that it offers more than sufficient occupation for a life-time. If business can be so engrossing to a business man that he has no time for anything besides, much more may science be engrossing to a scientist. The heaping up of knowledge is as absorbing as the heaping up of wealth, and it is not checked by the voice of conscience rebuking it for selfishness. But even if this temptation is resisted, the scientist who turns from his work to discuss religious or philosophic problems finds himself in a new and unaccustomed environment. Here his axioms are treated as mysteries, and his assumptions are questioned. The personal equation which has been to him a bugbear is brought to the front as a rich mine of truth. | The strong desire to find something to be true is in religion treated as some evidence at least that it is true. From his accustomed point of view this is intellectually immoral. Harmonious as true science and true religion must ever be, it is plain that a devoted pursuit of science may exercise an influence inimical to religious faith. The mind of the student receives a mould, and acquires a bias, that are unsuited for the sympathetic study of religious philosophy.

The man who appeals to science as justifier of his indifference or even opposition to religion, may then find scientists, and great scientists, to support him, although he has not a single scientific fact to allege, and in the nature of things cannot have. But how comes it to pass that an authority which is weak in proportion as it fails of unanimity, is sufficient to move him from his religious allegiance ? We must allow something for the unstinted admiration which the world of our day has for science. The wonderful additions it has made to our knowledge, the practical utility of its discoveries, the new civilisation which it has created, the new conceptions of the universe which have become common property, and perhaps most of all, the earnestness, the industry, the unselfishness even to heroism of scientific men, have dazzled the eyes of the world and intoxicated the minds of men with a sense of human triumph. In proportion to their ignorance of its limitations is their faith in science to explain everything, and to perfect intellectual certainty as wellas material prosperity. Nevertheless men would not, we think, have accepted so generally the materialistic realism which is the philosophy corresponding to such an idolatry of science, had they not been already biased in its favour. In fact ‘ they wanted to be able to dispense with religion. We find a reason for their desire in the oppressiveness of the revolution which the nineteenth century effected in the whole circumstances of life.

The: erowth of great cities, the immense development of an industrial class (in which we include the employer as well as the labourer), the rise of democratic institutions with their effect upon individual character, the spread of education, and especially of scientific knowledge—all these have made us inhabitants of a new and enormously complex world teeming with novel problems. Since man, on one side of his nature, is subject to the ordinary laws of evolution, so complete a change of environment inevitably demands a corresponding adjustment of his nature to it, and this cannot be effected instantaneously or without painful stress. We have been, and still are, passing through a period of maladjustment to our environment which exhibits itself in restlessness, and a real peril of destruction unless we can restore the necessary correspondence. Man, for instance, is not yet properly adapted for city life. Economic laws drive him to it and constantly increase the burden of it, but the vital statistics of great cities betray his unfitness for it. Instinctively the craving for the country asserts itself whenever a holiday can be taken. The love of nature is a new phenomenon in our race, as modern as the popularity of landscape painting and nature poetry, which-are kindred manifestations of the same instinct. The strain upon our physical organisation is proved by the increase of lunacy, as well as less serious but more prevalent nervous disorders. It has changed our habits with respect to food. Few of us can engage in hard work of any kind while fasting, though our ancestors generally went without breakfast. The havoc wrought in us by alcohol, if we give credence to medical testimony and to the practical experience of military leaders and athletic trainers, is in striking contrast to the evident ability of our grandfathers to withstand the effect of considerable drunkenness. The widespread lowering of the birth-rate in civilised communities, whether the result of natural causes or of perverted instincts, is, so far as it is noxious, a further instance of maladjustment.

The burdensomeness of modern life is also betrayed in another series of facts which witness to a desire to escape from its responsibilities, and to gain for ourselves relaxation by becoming onlookers. We love excitement, but it must be vicarious. We read exciting fiction—another quite modern and dominant phenomenon—or we see it acted in a theatre, or we watch a football match or a horse-race. Our grandfathers acted their own excitement, but our recreation is to get out of the strain ourselves and watch others in the midst of it. Similarly we have largely abandoned the old vice of gambling for high stakes, the joy of which was in the seriousness of loss and gain. Our incessant small bets amuse us because the appeal to chance confers on us a species of irresponsibility.

There is, to sum up the position, an insistent demand for the simplification of life, and there is good reason to suppose that exactly this reaction against the complexity of existence, in itself a purely biological instinct, is the cause of the unwillingness to deal with the problems of religion. The attraction of pseudo-scientific materialism is its apparent simplicity. It seems to us that if there is no other world for which to prepare, we escape the burden upon time and thought and emotion which religion imposes. Or if there is, can we not postpone the consideration of it, and devote ourselves to activities of immediate utility which certainly cannot be postponed? Gordon’s sick stock-rider is a true son of the nineteenth century when he meets death with the reflection that, “‘ The chances are, I go where most men go.’ Where this world makes such overpowering demands upon us we cannot, we say, spare the time—and we mean we cannot afford to spend nervous energy—for worrying about another one. Materialism (and frivolity also in another way) is thus an attempt at self-preservation in a world that overtaxes our powers. It answers in the human sphere to those strange resting stages which the biologist discovers in the lower forms of life, by which, in unfavourable circumstances, such as desiccating

THE WORSHIPFUL GOD i?

drought, all animal functions are temporarily thrown into abeyance. The similar abeyance of our spiritual functions is also, we may hope, temporary. What we have witnessed is not a final death of religion. Once humanity readjusts itself to its world it will be able, with a widened experience and a wealth of new knowledge, to respond again to the selfrevelation of God.

On this subject the conclusion of Eucken’s volume on The Meaning and Value of Life, is interesting.

“The whole cry of our age is for greater plainness and simplicity, not in the sense of a dull takingthings-for-granted, but in the sense of a spiritual spontaneity. It is a demand which comes alike from the nature of our culture and from our human experience. Through much collection and compilation, research and reconstruction, our culture has become altogether too diffuse and complicated. It confuses great and small, alive and dead, chaotically together; it fails to distinguish between temporal and eternal; in the endless diversity of our historical heritage it cannot discover simple guidinglines along which to direct our effort towards a steadfast goal.”’ (English trans., p. 145.)

He goes on to say that the simplicity cannot be found in the world around us. It must be found in our new spiritual attitude towards the world.

“ Thus only can what is simple be at the same time great; only thus can it be the convincing expression of a new depth in the universe and give us spiritual assurance in regard to it. It is with a simple truth of this kind that early Christianity

Cc moved and rejuvenated the world, and only through such a simple truth can we, in turn, win spiritual anchorage and triumph over the irrational and the chaotic.”

The simplification required cannot, we say with Eucken, be really won through materialism, but most certainly by religion. The attempted self-preservation of our generation is truly irrational and suicidal. What we cast away as a burden is in fact that yoke of Christ which alone can make the world-burden bearable and even light. The demand for it is still more imperative than Eucken perceives. Not for our happiness only, but for our very existence is it essential. For always we are faced, in our struggle to adapt ourselves to the new environment, with the possibility of extinction which is Nature’s dread second alternative.

III

The Church of Christ has in its keeping the only key to the bewildering complexity of life. Not by the preaching merely of a theology, but by renewing in men a thirst for the presence of God, she, and she only, may save our civilisation from destruction. It is not the world’s task to discover religion. Religion on the contrary has to discover the meaning of civilisation and to claim the new world for itself. All that is true in modern science, all that is good in modern life, is necessarily a revelation of God. The

Church must be God’s interpreter. Have we begun to treat the discoveries which have changed the face of the earth as, in Illingworth’s phrase, treasure trove upon our own manor? On the contrary, at first they frightened us out of our wits. We have recovered sufficiently to claim with a show of calmness that the faith has proved impregnable and the danger has passed. Calmness? Enthusiasm is the only possible attitude towards this new God’s truth. If we could portray the overpowering world and all its fullness unified as God’s world, the burden of life would be lifted from our shoulders and become again a thing that a man can deal with and still live. It must be turned into thanksgivings. It must be made altar stairs bringing us into God’s presence in wonder, love and praise. And the Church which has this work to do for God and man has forgotten how to worship.

If we are to judge men by their common sayings the object of their church-going is self-improvement. They claim the right ‘‘ to go where they get most good,’ or they absent themselves with the plea that “they are as good as those who go.” They tolerate denominations because “‘a man can be saved in any Church,” and “‘all are trying for the same place.’’ Ceremonialism is rejected because ‘it cannot save souls,” as if no other use for it were conceivable. No sane man wishes to depreciate the importance of getting religion with a view to salvation. Butif this is the whole of religion, God exists for man’s sake, rather than man for God. Wemake God the supreme means of grace, the great Servant of humanity. We make religion the instrument of righteousness, instead of seeing in righteousness the necessary condition for true religion. We make the perfecting of humanity the great event towards which the whole creation moves.

Even among the scholars who have made serious contributions to the study of religion, this view of its purpose is often treated as axiomatic. Sir James Frazer defined religion as ‘a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life’’ (The Golden Bough, and ed., vol. i. p. 63). He is concerned primarily with its primitive forms in which it may or may not be true that it is an endeavour to get the gods on our side for our own advantage. But we cannot acquiesce - in a definition which excludes the less selfish forms, the highest and most typical of all. And it is with Christianity in view that Professor Royce makes religion a matter of morality. A religion, he says, ‘““is impossible without some appearance of moral purpose.’’ It must, however, “‘add something to the moral code. And what it adds is, first, enthusiasm. Somehow it makes the faithful regard the moral law with devotion, reverence, love.’’ This seems to be Matthew Arnold’s “morality tinged with emotion.” But Royce adds that it must have a creed, “‘a more or less complete theory of things.”’ ‘“‘ These three elements, then, go to constitute any religion. A religion must teach some moral code, must in some way inspire a strong feeling of devotion to that code, and in so doing must show something in the nature of things that answers to the code or that serves to reinforce the feeling’ (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 3). The creed is as definitely a means to the morality as the feeling is a devotion to it. Harnack says similarly that “the all-important element in Christ’s religion is the consciousness of being safe in God”’ (What is Christianity ? p. 66), and again that “to represent the Gospel as an ethical message is no depreciation of its value ”’ (p. 72).

Whether the end of religion be called salvation or righteousness, these quotations represent man as religious for his own sake and to achieve his own highest destiny. And so Bender says (as quoted in Foundations, p. 506), “ Not the question about God, and not the enquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but the question about man. All the religious views of the world are anthropocentric.’’

Against all such teaching there stands our Lord’s saying, ‘‘He that will save his life shall lose it, and he that will lose his life for My sake shall save it.” It was an instance of Arnold’s critical perspicacity that he singled out that verse as containing the kernel of the Gospel. But his interpretation of it was perverse. ‘‘ To find his own soul, his true and permanent self, became set up in man’s view as his chief concern, as the secret of happiness; and so it really is.’’ According to the text it really is not; but Arnold would apparently urge a man to fall in love, as the best means to self-culture. From such a position there is but a short step to the representation of God as the servant of morality, and Arnold did not shrink from it. God was to be sufficiently defined as “the Eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.’ The beautiful if unsubstantial visions of Eucken and Royce at least do not descend to that bathos. Royce’s paraphrase of the text already quoted is, ““ Devote yourselves to losing your lives in the Divine life ’’-—which is noble, though Christ said “for Me”’ and not “in Me.” His “loyalty to the beloved Community,”’ and Eucken’s view of life in, and by means of, the Universal Spirit at least lift us out of narrow individualism. On the surface they point to a theocentric life, and yet they do after all remain anthropocentric. Their problem is always “ the question about man.’ They have not grasped the gospel that not only the individual but the race must lose itself. For us the main interest of their defect is that it arises from an unquestioning acceptance of the assumption that religion is a human possession—whether divinely given or selfdevised—to be used solely for man’s own good, his perfecting and his salvation. So they illustrate the hold which the assumption has on modern thought.

The logical end of the drift is a religion of humanity. Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion ends, for instance, as its title would lead us to expect. Grounding religion on psychological facts, he never escapes from them. God indeed must be granted, as an impersonal and non-purposive creative force, but its crowning manifestation is man, and man is his own object of worship.

“A religion in agreement with the accepted body of scientific knowledge and centred about humanity conceived as the manifestation of a Force tending to the creation of an ideal society, would occupy in the social life the place that religion should normally hold—even the place which the Christian religion lost when its cardinal beliefs ceased to be in harmony with secular beliefs ’’ (p. 336).

Faith in humanity, that is, would be useful for self-culture as faith in God, though confessedly it would be the worship of the creature rather than of the Creator. But it is to this that anthropocentric religion leads. The first step has been taken by the man for whom religion is a method of attaining righteousness, or by him who discards religious practices because he can be good without them. For both of them the perfecting of human nature is already the summum bonum, and sooner or later they must worship humanity or nothing.

We challenge that attitude, from beginning to end, on the ground of religious truth. But Leuba’s requirement that the religion of the future shall be “in agreement with the accepted body of scientific knowledge ’’ is sufficient to destroy, on scientific grounds, any prospect of acceptance that it might have had. For anthropocentric religion can only succeed in an anthropocentric universe, and science has made it impossible for us to believe that the real universe is centred in humanity. Exactly that impossibility originates a popular objection to Christianity, which is said to imply that in the immense universe of God this inconspicuous planet has a unique importance for the Creator of the whole. We cannot dispose of this by calling it the fallacy of bigness. Doubtless spiritual intensity does outweigh material immensity. But we have no right to assume that only in our world, and indeed only in man, is there a spiritual nature, and that all the rest of creation is unorganised and material. It is true that the biological law of divergence in evolution forbids us to suppose that human beings exist even on the other planets of our own system. If life exists elsewhere it must, under the very unlike conditions there prevailing, have developed a quite different history leading to a different result. This means more than that the highest beings elsewhere will be of a different species. It is most improbable that anything in the least degree resembling personality exists outside our world. Indeed, living protoplasm seems to have originated here since the

—_ isolation of our world from others; it is not at all likely that an identical substance has appeared independently elsewhere. But it does not follow that other substances, with properties as remarkable as life, or more so, may not exist. We may go further and say that we have no reason to suppose that our universe of matter and energy exhausts the creative powers of God. He may have immaterial universes in which He expresses His will in some form which is not energy. We are not assuming the truth of any of these surmises. We are only denying the legitimacy of the opposite assumption. Any view of God which makes Him essentially the Servant of man is unscientific. We have no right to assert dogmatically our own unique importance for Him, or to assume that the universe has been created solely that at one point in it human personality might be evolved. A religion of humanity is not in accordance with the foundation facts of science. A religion which looks to an ideal humanity as its sufficient goal, or that defines God as the Power that makes for human righteousness, is hopelessly out of date. The God in Whom the present age can believe is One Who fills Heaven and earth with His glory.

It is true that God’s revelation of Himself in other worlds is not only unknown to us, but largely unknowable. We know Him as He reveals Himself to us here, and all that the larger possibilities mean to us is that we must not claim Him as exclusively our own. But even for this world we must allow His interest in all that He has created. Human personality is the highest of the creatures. The process of life, branching out into all sorts of blind ends, which as compared with ourselves may even be called failures, has in us become personal and free, moral and spiritual, and we are for this world “ the roof and crown of things.’’ That we are dearer to God than all our world besides, is a justifiable belief, but not that all else exists solely on our account, and without any intrinsic value of its own in the sight of God.

But, it may be said, can we then believe in the Christian religion, which claims that for us men and for our salvation God came down from Heaven and was made man? We can. For in the first place the Incarnation implies God’s infinite love for us, but in no sense requires that it should be an exclusive love. If there really are in other worlds spiritual beings capable of making their proper response to the love of God, we may be sure that He can make the proper revelation of Himself to them. But this does not mean as many Incarnations. Incarnation, the exhibition of Himself in human personality, the taking of the creation into personal union with Himself, is the particular mode of revelation adapted to personal beings; and, as we have seen, there is no reason to suppose that elsewhere in the universe such beings are to be found. The infinite perfections of God may require other manifestations, but it is our part to manifest His Personality—that truth of His Nature to which our human personality corresponds. The Incarnation is to us a supreme and complete revelation, but others may have been made elsewhere, as complete and as appropriate to other natures, although to us unthinkable. We believe in the Incarnation without jealousy. For an anthropocentric religion we should have to claim much more than this—more than we have any right _to claim—but for a theocentric religion this amply suffices. It is no longer possible to assert with confidence that God exists mainly for man’s sake, and pours out upon him the whole of His love and all His power of self-sacrifice. But that man exists for God remains true, whether we be the only creature of value or one among many. Whatever others may do, man expresses to God His own Personality ; and whatever else God may have done, the Incarnation expresses our share, however large or however small, in the love with which God loves all that He has made.