Thursday mornings at the City Temple

Preface

The following sermons, with a few exceptions, were preached at the Thursday mid-day service in the City Temple during the last twelve months. The Thursday congregation differs greatly in composition from that of Sunday; it is made up of more diverse elements. Not a few of those who attend habitually are out of touch with organised Christianity and never darken a church door elsewhere than at the City Temple; even then they confine their interest to this one service in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. City merchants, young clerks and shopmen, ministers and students, social workers and Labour members of Parliament are to be seen seated side by side in democratic friendliness. There are not many working men, for the reason that working men cannot easily find their way to the heart of the City of London at twelve o'clock on a working day; but occasionally a railway guard or engine-driver drops in. Women come too — some who have to get their living in the City and some who make long journeys from outlying suburbs. Altogether it is the most interesting congregation in the world, and probably one of the keenest and most intelligent; it is no slight to my Sunday congregation to say that I feel more at ease on Thursday than I do in

VI

PREFACE the more formal worship of the Sabbath. It has been a custom from the first to allow applause and interjections on Thursday which, of course, would be out of place on Sunday; Dr. Parker's practice in this respect has been continued under my ministry. It does no harm — rather, I think, the moderate indulgence in the expression of feeling by the congregation helps to keep preacher and hearers en rapport with each other. The only danger associated with it became apparent at the height of the New Theology controversy, when a few eccentric individuals made their way to the City Temple Thursday service with the express object of creating disturbance. Happily this behaviour has ceased without affecting for the worse the latitude allowed to the regular congregation. It may be that the character of the congregation, and the nature of the service, have influenced to some extent the form as well as the matter of the sermons contained in this volume. They may be more colloquial and direct than is usual with pulpit utterances. As most of them were preached while the New Theology controversy was raging most fiercely, the controversial note will be detected here and there. It was impossible to avoid it, although I hope it contains nothing of bitterness and rancour. When the history of this period comes to be written, those who take the trouble to read it will be amazed at the extremes to which serious-minded people permitted themselves to go in their alarm for the orthodox positions. No falsehood, however absurd and extravagant, seems to have been too much for their eager credulity to swallow

PREFACE vii

so long as it could throw discredit upon the character and motives of the pioneers of the new movement. Of such misrepresentations the worst has been that which has credited New Theologians in general, and the minister of the City Temple in particular, with belittling sin. As a consequence there are many good people throughout the length and breadth of the land who are firmly convinced that I am a very wicked person, whose teaching denies the reality of sin and encourages men to gratify their lower nature as they think fit. One might suppose that common-sense would come to the rescue, but, when a prominent and muchrespected preacher stands up before an enlightened congregation and tells his hearers that a promiscuous audience would be sure to cheer a man who tells them that sin does not matter, one begins to despair not only of common-sense but of the sense of humour, not to speak of common honesty. For there is no congregation in the wide world who would cheer any such sentiment, and no preacher has ever existed who would utter it.

The truth is, though it will be a long time before it is clearly seen, that it is the ordinary Christian doctrine of sin which blinds men's eyes to the real seriousness of sin. It is an immoral doctrine. It regards sin in a vague, unreal kind of way as something which has entered into human nature and corrupted what would otherwise have been immaculate. There never has been any such corruption : no faculty of human nature is radically and essentially bad : whether it shall be good or bad depends upon its outcome in conduct and the viii PREFACE

character created by conduct. The ordinary doctrine ignores this, and teaches that a man can be legally justified in the sight of God by an act of faith, and can have the righteousness of some one else imputed to him. This is not only untrue but morally mischievous, and one of its most evil effects consists in the fact that it practically ignores sins of omission. It is this which, more than anything else, lies at the root of the alienation between the churches and the masses in every country of the civilised world to-day. This doctrine of abstract justification for abstract sin enables people to go on living comfortable, self-satisfied lives while assuring themselves that they are washed in the blood of the Lamb and on their way to heaven. It enables the religious plutocrat to exploit the poor while remaining a devout believer in the efficacy of the Atonement of Christ. It enables most men to separate their standing with God from their duty towards their fellows. It fails altogether to take cognisance of the fact that the whole aim and purpose of the message of Jesus was not to induce men to get their sins forgiven but to lay down the life of selfhood to take it again in the larger good of humanity as a whole. The emphasis is entirely different, and the New Theology is an attempt to recover the strenuous moral note of the teaching of Jesus. All through these pages it will be seen that that object has been kept well in view.

It is perhaps too much to hope that those whose eyes are blinded to the artificiality of the traditional doctrine of sin should be able to see this and to

PREFACE ix

recognise that, so far from belittling moral obligations, the New Theology insists upon them with a clearness and force which has long been wanting to the old; but at least they might show a charitable spirit, and, if they continue to hold to forms of stating religious truth which they regard as of vital importance, they need not believe that those who challenge them are necessarily less sincere and earnest than themselves.

The advocacy of Socialism by most of the exponents of the New Theology has helped to create additional prejudice against their theological views. It is as well that it should be so, for no theology is worth the preaching which does not find a social expression. The combination may make progress a little slower, but the ultimate triumph of the principles enunciated in the New Theology is made all the more certain by their practical application to social needs. Whether theology lives or dies I care but little; it is humanity I love and fain would serve. The day is not far distant when the religion of Jesus Christ, the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God, will regain all its former power over the toilers of the world, and inspire them with faith and hope in the dawning of a better and a more glorious day.

R. J. Campbell.

Contents

PREFACE

I. THE IMAGE OF GOD

II. KNOWING GOOD AND EVIL .

II

" Your eyes shall be opened^ and ye shall be as gods^ knowing good and evil.^^ — Gen. iii. 5.

The story of the temptation and fall of primitive man, as given in this chapter, is one of consideraable interest and no little difficulty. It presents problems which up to now have proved to be practically insoluble. In its present literary form it is of comparatively late date; but a far more important question is that of the nature of the different elements contained or presumed in the narrative as it now stands. One of the most perplexing of these elements is that which forms our text: '* Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." If the mind of the average Bible reader were not so uncritical, and if it were not so commonly taken for granted that the story of the Fall, as contained in the book of Genesis, is exactly the same as the modern doctrine of the Fall, this sentence would be sure to arrest attention at once. There are some startling things here. Some primitive beliefs are taken fo^r granted which are far removed from our ordinary way of looking at the relations of God and man to-day. Let us look into this question for a moment.

According to the legend as it stands, Adam and Eve, the primitive man and the primitive woman of tradition, lived in the Garden of Eden in a state of complete innocence. They were forbidden to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and were told by the Almighty that disobedience in this respect would mean immediate death. Then the serpent comes along — how this serpent comes by his wisdom is not explained — and tells them that God has been deceiving them : they will not die, and that God knows they will not die; that, in fact, His real motive in forbidding them to eat of this particular tree is that He knows they will become as wise as Himself. The peculiar use of the plural number — *'gods," instead of *' God " — ought to be noted here, for it is not without significance. It seems to me that we have here a distinct reference to that belief in the jealousy of the gods so characteristic of many ancient peoples. I suppose you all know what I mean. Readers of Greek literature will not need to be reminded of the frequent recurrence of references to the jealousy which the gods were supposed to feel lest humanity should aspire to their wisdom and strength. It was held that all human misfortunes were traceable to this source. So soon as a man became wiser, braver, and more fortunate than his fellows, he was sure to excite the jealousy of the gods, who forthwith proceeded to work him harm. The legend concerning Prometheus is of this order. Prometheus was punished for having conferred a boon upon humanity by stealing fire from heaven wherewith to increase their power over natural forces; 2 i8 KNOWING GOOD AND EVIL

certainly no greater step forward in the history of the race has ever been taken than that which followed from the discovery of the use of fire. But, according to the Greek form of the myth, the gods were so exasperated with Prometheus for having conferred this boon upon mankind that he was chained to a rock for the offence, and his flesh was torn by vultures. Here in this Genesis story we have a Semitic version of the attitude of the gods towards any aspirations of mankind in the direction of divine wisdom and power. The use of the plural number shows that in its original form the story was polytheistic. Here we have the gods telling primitive man that he must not seek to know too much, or he will be destroyed. When he yields to the temptation, however, he is not destroyed, but all kinds of evil results pursue him. Another interesting point is the reason given for driving him out of Eden. " Behold the man is become as one of uSj to know good and evil " — plural number again, you see. *' And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever : therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken." Here we are distinctly told that the motive for sending man away from his pleasant surroundings was that he might possibly aspire to the immortality of a divine being, and this the gods were resolved not to permit. The two trees — the tree of knowledge and the tree of life respectively — are plainly intended as the symbols of an experience wherein man becomes a sharer in the privileges of deity. Who the serpent was it is impossible to say. He does not answer either to the dragons of other Semitic myths or to the Satan of later Jewish religion. It is clear, at any rate, that his appearance at this stage is out of ill-will to the deity, whom he wishes to vex by tempting mankind to a dangerous disobedience.

In this brief examination of the story presumed in our text I have necessarily had to leave some interesting questions on one side, as having nothing to do with the subject I wish to discuss this morning. But sufficient has been said, I trust, to show that the original motif of this peculiar saying was not of the most exalted order. Probably this sentence is one of the oldest parts of the literary whole which constitutes this chapter. It assumes a plurality of divine beings, a sort of cosmic aristocracy who are most unwilling that man should enter into their fellow^ship and share their privileges. Hence, when he takes one step forward they prevent him from taking a second by expelling him from the conditions where it would be possible. The threat that he would surely die was a piece of deceit such as those ancient deities were quite capable of, and was merely intended to deter him from attaining to a knowledge which might make him dangerous to them. There was no question of right and wrong about the matter. It was very much like the behaviour of a civilised race to a subject one, such as was exemplified in the history of the South African Chartered Company when the natives were warned to let the telegraph wires alone. The method adopted in giving the warning was to make a few of them take hold of the wires to which an electric battery was attached. As a result, of course, they received a severe shock, and were forthwith informed that this was what would always happen if they touched the telegraph wires, only that the shock would be more severe, and would be certain to cause a sudden and painful death. I think the parallel is obvious in the case of this Genesis story, or that part of it, at any rate, which forms my text. Probably by this time the eyes of South African natives are so far opened that they know what telegraph wires are for, and why the white men wished them to let them alone.

I have felt it imperative to scrutinise the principal ideas thus presumed in the text, because it is not honest to read into any Scripture passage what is not there. If this were all my text had to tell us, I should not care to pursue the subject farther, although most of you will admit that it is at least interesting. But the most striking thing about it is the tempter's statement of the reason why it was worth while to eat of the tree of knowledge. He says the gods know good and evil, and that man can enter into their knowledge. Now what can this mean ? It seems to me that we have in this expression an example of profound psychological insight. The knowledge of good and evil is a higher state of consciousness than that of the beings which are below humanity in the scale of existence. Moreover, the desire to possess or increase this knowledge is the root motive of every act of moral transgression. I wish to examine these two allied propositions before proceeding to apply to our own experience the lesson they contain.

In the first place, then, I remark that the knowledge of good and evil is a higher stage of consciousness than that possessed by the lower creation ; when man first arrived at this altitude he may be said to have crossed the threshold between the brute and the god. The insight displayed in this passage is therefore truly marvellous, so early in the history of man's thought about himself. I do not wish to read too much into it. It is possible that by the phrase ''good and evil" the writer only means "the secrets of existence." He may mean the command of resources, the power to distinguish between what is beneficial and what is not. The primitive man of Genesis is shown to be a helpless dependent upon the bounty of the gods; the gods themselves are masters of all the forces of earth and air and sea ; they know how to use them, and what will hurt and what will not. I am afraid this is all we can say with certainty as to the meaning of this statement, but I think we are justified in inferring a little more. I will tell you why I think so. Early as this sentence may be, it is not so early as the wisdom of the East, which has always insisted that the knowledge of good and evil, in the sense of choosing between a higher and a lower, was a stage intermediate between simple consciousness and divine consciousness. Some forms of this teaching have been wholly pessimistic, and have amounted to the declaration that it would have been better never to have possessed this knowledge at all; but the best of them have held that it must be accepted in order to be transcended; that is, we must know good and evil in order to arrive at a realisation of that state of being wherein is neither good nor evil, but only the unbroken blessedness of the eternal life. So ancient is this teaching, extending apparently from far Japan to the shores of Greece, that I cannot but feel that it has had some influence upon the wording of my text. To know good and evil, then, means to have arrived at that stage of self-consciousness wherein it becomes possible to see and choose a higher in the presence of a lower. There must have come a day in the history of the world when the first glimmerings of a conscience became apparent in that part of God's creation which, in virtue of that very discovery, became something which the rest of creation was not. It is impossible to say when that hour arrived. We cannot say even now when it first arrives in the dawning consciousness of a child. But it did arrive; and because of it man began to know himself, and to know himself potentially divine. He saw before him the triple ideal of the true, the beautiful, and the good. He did not see, and does not yet see, how far this trinity in unity can take him ; but he knows he ought to seek it, and he knows that to turn his back upon it is to disobey his own highest.

But this knowledge has been bought at a heavy price. When the good to be sought first opened before him, the bad to be avoided opened also with sinister force. The beasts of the field know nothing of duty, and hence they know nothing of guilt; they are naked and unashamed. It is far otherwise with man. He knows something which his brother creatures do not know, and hence he can not only rise higher but sink lower than they. Compare, for instance, the trickeries and lies of some fashionable society lady, who degrades her body to pay her bridge debts, with the unconscious dignity of her Newfoundland dog; he knows nothing of foulness and deceit. Or compare the meanness and craftiness of the bookmaker, who ensnares unwary youth, with the simple innocence of the horse he drives or makes bets upon ; the horse knows nothing of the unholy triumph of getting the better of a fellow-creature. I do not care to enter too narrowly into the question thus indicated. We are now face to face with the old antinomy between philosophy and religion. Philosophy can find little scope for human freedom ; it tends to throw all the responsibility for human wrong-doing upon God, and thus to eliminate all sense of moral responsibility. Broadly speaking, this is the conclusion to which philosophy, hand in hand with science, is taking us at the present time, and on purely intellectual grounds I can see no escape from it. The more closely we examine into the nature of a moral choice the more the reality of that choice tends to disappear. But, on the other hand, religion, hand in hand with morality, insists just as strenuously on man's power of self-direction and self-control, and his responsibility for the use of that power. This is a position with which we cannot afford to trifle, and, to tell the truth, there seems little or no disposition to trifle with it. We all know well enough that the very foundations of our social existence rest upon belief in the reality of human freedom and the power of distinguishing between right and wrong. You will hear theologians cry out from time to time that So-and-so is destroying the sanctions of morality. Do not be afraid. No one can destroy the sanctions of morality; the good sense of the general public, religious and non-religious, will take care of that. But, all the same, we have to admit that antinomy in thought. On the one hand we have the absolute sovereignty of God; on the other, the freedom of the human will. It is difficult to see, too, how there can be any real knowledge of good which does not imply knowledge of evil. How can the real nature of any positive excellence be understood except in the presence of its opposite? It seems, therefore, that any advance from simple consciousness to a knowledge of God must lie along the pathway of the choice between good and evil. I do not shrink from affirming this, for it will hold good whatever view we take of the relations of God and the soul.

We come now to the further question of the root motive of sin. Is it not always the desire to know, to gather into one's self and possess that which lies beyond the present threshold of experience? If you will interrogate some young lad who has gone wrong amid the temptations of a great city you will find that what first lured him on was the desire to enter untrodden regions and taste forbidden fruit. Watch your own children, boy or girl, and you will learn a good deal that seems to have been present to the mind of the waiter of this

Old Testament passage. The thing that fascinates is the unknown; the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life begin in curiosity. I have heard of a man who had tried every vice and every form of excess usual with voluptuaries, and pronounced them rotten. He had plunged into them, he said, because of the fascination of wanting to know what they were like; the only result was nausea and remorse. It may be contended that there are some forms of sin which cannot be thus explained, and I quite agree. Meanness and treachery, for instance, are not a rush for the tree of knowledge, but they are part of the result of eating the forbidden fruit. Such sins as meanness and treachery always appear as the servants of some deeper motive. When a man cheats at cards or slanders a friend, he does so because of some course of action he has already adopted; he has been in search of something just beyond his reach, and these are means towards helping him to obtain it. Thus when Adam had eaten his apple he tried to shift the blame upon Eve, as he has been doing ever since. The man who first wrote that story was a pretty shrewd observer of human nature. You smile, but I am perfectly serious.

Adam's cowardly lie about Eve is still being told in the wickedly unjust social custom which ruins a woman for an offence from which the greater sinner goes scot free; it is just the same old lie. But I must not allow you to lose sight of my immediate point, which is that all sin begins in the desire to know, to possess, to absorb into one's consciousness that which lies beyond it. All forms of sin owe their being ultimately to this.

Now there is nothing intrinsically blameworthy about this impulse; blameworthiness begins with the mode of its exercise. Curiosity has been the compelling motive in every great discovery which has yet been made for the benefit of the human race. An expedition is just being got ready for the purpose of attempting to reach the South Pole ; we should not say that those who have organised it deserve censure on account of the sinfulness of their action; quite the contrary. No; the sinfulness of sin arises from the fact that it is an attempt to separate between one man's good and another's; there is no sin which is not this. It is the desire to subordinate the larger to the lesser, the higher to the lower. There is no such thing as sin which the sinner does not know to be sin. When preachers and theologians assert the contrary, they are just talking nonsense. The essence of sin, I repeat, is the attempt to separate between the good of the individual and that of the race. Nothing is good for me which does not imply larger life for you, and nothing is good for you which means deprivation and loss to me; our goal is one. At our present stage of self-consciousness it necessarily seems that my interest is separable from yours and from the whole, but it is not so, and the saints and seers of the race have always been telling us that it is not so. The way to arrive at the highest life, which is full knowledge of God, is to be willing to surrender the gratification of the finite self, and to live as though the only self were God. The man who is doing this crucifies the poor little finite ego at every turn, and yet he does so because he sees that self-service in the lower sense bars the way to that self-realisation which consists in living the life of love, which is the life of God. This is the life that Jesus lived, and therefore, in a world where other people were not living it, He had to be nailed to a cross; but then — here is the wonderful thing about this life — he who lives it would rather be nailed to a cross than be without it, and while any selfishness or unhappiness remains in the world he will gladly and willingly go on accepting the cross until there is nothing left but love.

I am afraid some of you will feel that this is a statement which needs expansion, and some time I shall hope to return to it. For the moment, what I want you to see is that the tempter in my text and in human experience everywhere only speaks the literal truth. The sinner does become wise, with a terrible wisdom ; he does know good and evil, but it is from the under side. The attempt to capture life and subordinate it to the lesser self is inevitably to lose it. The eating of the forbidden fruit means sooner or later that the eyes are opened to the worthlessness of the gratification thus attained, and the result is shame and remorse. There is no lasting joy except the joy of love. No sinful deed ever achieves what it seeks. As George Eliot puts it: "It was not worth doing wrong for; nothing ever is in this world."

Among those who hear me this morning there may be some who need this word of warning. Before you stretches the great unknown, and your soul is stretching out towards it. There is nothing wrong in that; but what will you do with it? Some of you are absorbed in the rush for commercial success. Well, be it so, but understand it for what it is; this is only one mode in which the soul reaches out towards the infinite. It is not money you are after, even though you think it is; it is self-expression. You want to expand your consciousness of life, to reach forth and gather in from the boundless beyond. If it were not for that longing there w^ould never be any millionaires, neither would there be any bankrupts. But if in this form of self-expression you mistake the means for the end, and lose the soul amid its own machinery, you will learn a lesson indeed, but it will be a sad onet later on you will come to know the good you have missed and the evil you have gained. Still more, if on the road to material success you crush down a weaker brother, and continue your advance over his prostrate fortunes, or if you enrich yourself at the expense of the community whence your resources are drawn, you will live to rue the day. The hour of disenchantment will surely come, and you will know the emptiness and the sadness of the life that is lived for self alone. No life is worth the living, no joy is worth the having, that is not love. Each for all and all for each is the spiritual law that binds the universe together and makes it a universe at all. Disobey that law, and you become wise with the wisdom that knows good and evil; but the former has eluded your grasp, and left only the sadness of disillusionment behind.