The Christ that is to be

Front matter

Glass J57fJ.21

Book -JU-Lt-

GopightN?

Preface

This book is only a series of successive efforts to think what the gospel of Jesus really is. Each line of thought is unfinished, and there is very much in what is said that in a mature work would be more carefully guarded from misconstruction. These fragments are only published in the hope that those who have greater opportunity may find in them something to refine and complete.

Book I His Thoughts And Our Thoughts Page

Our Need of Reformation ..... 3

Jesus meant his salvation to become universal. If the race progresses, that which will be its final satisfaction cannot have been fully comprehended at the beginning.

An era of higher spiritual and physical life would enable us to accept the standard of Jesus. To this end a higher level of corporate faith is needed.

We cannot yet see our way to accept his standard, but our sin lies in our determination to walk by sight.

The Vital Age . . . . . , .15

The converts of the first age of the Church had only such reports

of Jesus as a fair consensus of opinion among New Testament

critics now gives us.

We may find in it more vital inspiration than in the doctrinal

systems which in intervening centuries have perhaps made the

personal character of Jesus more difficult of access. If these systems be true for us, we shall, in finding Jesus, return to

them.

Rediscovering the personal Jesus in the first reports of his ministry,

we may aspire to fill this age with as great a comparative advance

of the Church as the first century exhibited.

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The Actions of Jesus . . . . . .20

If " for this world the word of God is Christ " the words the Christ

spoke can only be part of his message. By obedience to his words we shall be justified or condemned, but

it was by his works that he asked us to judge of him. By his actions, whose significance does not depend on their being

miraculous, Jesus teaches the power of his presence, and that the

will of God is directed against suffering as against sin.

CHAPTER IV Faith ......... 30

Faith is a true estimate of those qualities of personality which are

hidden from sense.

A man's faith depends, not only on his own qualities, but also on

the standard of corporate faith.

A man cannot measure his own faith or that of another. The only test of faith is its result.

CHAPTER V Corporate Faith ....... 44

The race is a corporate unity. The laws of corporate thought are universal, and must govern the condition of the Church.

Church and world are alike affected by mental epidemics and popular reform movements.

Therefore the Church can only be pure in the degree that she purifies the world, be at peace as she pacifies the world, comprehend truth as she teaches the world to comprehend it.

The degree of isolation proved desirable for any community does not counteract the invisible influence of the world's thought upon it,

CHAPTER VI The Doctrine of Prayer , . . . .56

Jesus sets forth his doctrine of prayer in his works.

He teaches a constant procession of life from God to the world.

This life gives physical and mental health, the knowledge of

forgiveness, and the desire to live and die for men.

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God's action is invariable : the reception of his gifts depends on man's faith. Man need never be uncertain as to God's will ; it is in man's will that uncertainty is found, and God will never coerce the wills of men.

The Place of the Kingdom in the Struggle to

As a unit, or a part of a limited corporate unit, man survives by fighting and getting.

But the potentially universal unit, called by Jesus the kingdom of heaven, can only be formed by men who cultivate the faculties of loving and giving to the atrophy of hate and greed.

Until this unit becomes universal the individualism and party spirit of the world will oppose it. Therefore the children of the kingdom — the Church — will suffer persecution 5 but it is only as the suffering is incidental to loving and giving, and is freed from all spirit of retaliation, that it goes to increase the sway of the kingdom.

It is only by accepting this plan that the human race can survive in a higher spiritual environment.

CHAPTER VIII Salvation by Joy . . . . . . .76

Suffering is incidental and temporary in the scheme of salvation that

Jesus taught ; joy is of its essence. The Christian's suffering is that entailed by the opposition of the

world-spirit to love. ^

The Christian is never commanded to undergo suffering for the sake

of personal improvement.

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CHAPTER I The Conflict of the Physical and the Moral

With the growth of a sense of sin the early animal delight in mere living vanished. We see in history that men who strove after righteousness easily embraced physical evil as a means to that end.

But Jesus intended his salvation to end the opposition between moral and physical welfare.

The Use of Sin . . . . . . .103

Sin is a schoolmaster driving men to God.

Because it exists we are bound to believe that it has its place in God's purpose for man's development. But if we believe that it is God's will that we should sin, we part with common sense and all true religion.

The Use of Pain. . , . . . .108

Pain is a schoolmaster driving men to God.

But if we hold God responsible for pain in any other sense than that in which he is responsible for sin, we part company with common sense and the doctrine of Jesus.

If we believe that God deals punitive discipline to men we shall do the same. As we are coming to see that the infliction of suffering does not produce reformation, we shall be compelled to dissociate it from the thought of God's will, and the war against all suffering will become as sacred as the war against sin.

History shows that only those nations have progressed that have distinguished between believing that God permits sin and believing that he wills it.

We must now distinguish between the belief that God permits suffering and the belief that it is God's wiU.

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Fatalism and Asceticism . . . . .119

The ascription of suffering to the will of God produces a fatalism inconsistent with the true genius of Christianity.

It also produces an asceticism founded on the idea that the endurance of suffering is to be sought as a means of mere personal improvement 5 whereas the only justification for self-denial, and the ample field for effort, is the advance of the kingdom.

The essential difference between both fatalism and asceticism and the doctrine of Jesus discussed.^

CHAPTER V Prophets and Apostles . . . . . .132

Prophets and apostles were men of their age, whose inspiration is seen in their lives, and may be gauged by the life they implanted in others.

If Jesus was in any sense divine, his interpretation of God could not have been conditioned by the mind of his age.

The divine authority and infallibility of Jesus is an intuitive assurance of the Christian, but may be buttressed by reason.

Thus ( I ) the unique joy which was the early effect of his message to the world goes to prove that he is himself unique.

(2) So does the fact that his message was transmitted by men obviously incapable of completely understanding it, in a form which meets the needs of successive generations and enables Jesus himself to be increasingly understood.

Many of our conclusions are based on the assumption that the life and words of Jesus have only an inspiration which the interpretations of his forerunners and followers also possess. We need to revise such conclusions, for we do not now believe that the writers of the Bible either possessed the insight of Jesus or were mechanically inspired.

Irreverent Eclecticism . . . , . .147

We do not use Scripture reverently if we base opinions on texts contradicted in their context.

We find two contradictory theories running through the Old Testament and the Epistles concerning God's relation to physical evil.

The only consistent doctrine is in the words and acts of Jesus.

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Dreams of Justice . . . . . .152

We do not think laws just which condemn the innocent to suffer with the guilty. But in life as we know it this must always be.

Thus our notion of ideal justice never appears to be even approximately realised in the world, and, further, the doctrine of Jesus would seem to set it aside as negligible.

We must attribute justice to God, for without it there could not be forgiveness, but we have no conception of what divine justice may be, and therefore we cannot comprehend divine forgiveness from the divine side.

BOOK III GOD'S CITADEL ON EARTH The Devil and his Angels , . . . .165

Jesus appears to express a belief in the existence of a separate Evil Will, subordinate to God, immanent in man's sin and suffering.

The common argument that evil cannot be an active force because that would involve an unthinkable dualism, is equally an argument against man's free will. Therefore, if we believe in free will, it is not impossible to believe in the Evil One.

Whether Jesus, in speaking of the devil and demons, was using words in their plain meaning, or speaking in a parable, we cannot determine 5 if a parable, the truth set forth must have been more, not less, terrible than the figure which conveyed it.

CHAPTER II The Scorn of Superstition . . . .181

We think in this age we can finally distinguish truth from superstition ; but ancient thought often returns disguised as a newly discovered truth.

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The ancient belief about disease-demons has suggestive points of analogy with what we now know of intrusive disease-germs. Although this does not afford any sufficient basis on which to build the belief that diseases of the mind may be caused by the intrusion of spiritual evil, it suffices to teach us that suspense of judgment is the wiser attitude.

All things have their physical explanation, but that is not necessarily an exhaustive explanation,

The permanent Need of ** Exorcism" . . . 197

The characteristic of "possession " is loss of self-control.

Mental compulsions with this characteristic have been common in

aU times. This illustrated by mental epidemics and chronic

hysteria.

We are faced with these undefined evils, half physical, half moral,

before which the Church is helpless. Whatever be their cause,

the commission of Jesus clearly includes their cure.

CHAPTER IV Mind and Disease . . . . . .215 Progressive medical thought tends more and more to recognise the

use of mind in curing the body.

It is now maintained that functional diseases may thus be cured,

but not organic. Further consideration leads to the belief that

this is not a final word in the matter. The unity of nature points to the universal interaction of mind and

body.

CHAPTER V Faith and the Doctors . . . . .226 The quarrel between the mind-healer and the doctor has no bearing

on the bodily salvation Jesus offers. Jesus did not condemn any curative agent, and no good doctor can

condemn any genuine method of cure.

CHAPTER VI The Will of God . . . . . .232

Jesus taught that health was God's will, that it was an inevitable consequence of the right faith.

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This truth has been neglected, but we can neglect it no longer when the advance of knowledge, by many voices, is telling us that body and mind are not two, but one, and that health is essential to the complete saint.

CHAPTER VII History of Health by Faith .... 245 The early Church healed the sick

Later the heathen idea that sin had its root in the flesh, which had already influenced Judaism, triumphed over the doctrine of Jesus that sin was spiritual. Faith in the salvation of the body was lost 5 the physical nature was neglected ; and the war between science and religion was the result.

At the time of Jesus the corporate mind easily received the doctrine of health by faith.

To-day the corporate mind has to recover this doctrine, and till it does so the individual, save in exceptional cases, cannot rise to it.

CHAPTER VIII The Balance of Nature . . . . .256

When the growth of physical and spiritual power do not correspond, man becomes ill-balanced.

A Church that persists in wailing that disease is the will of God is no worthy successor of the apostles.

The only basis for the corporate faith that will bring us health is the acknowledgment that God wills health for every man without exception, just as he wills cleanliness and goodness.

CHAPTER IX The Nature Marvels ...... 263

The "nature miracles" are quite inexplicable, but cannot be

dissociated from the historic Christ. They point to a development of the earthly kingdom to be realised

by future ages.

Careful consideration suggests that they will be found not to be

miraculous.

CONTENTS XV

Chapter X Page

The Conditions of Physical Power . . .274

Examination of the conditions required for the "miracles," especially the ' ' nature miracles, ' ' shows they are closely allied to the directions for successful prayer given by Jesus.

These conditions include perfect amity, individual and corporate, with all mankind.

We cannot fairly draw conclusions from experience of the results of prayer offered under militant conditions, or judge the doctrine of Jesus by that experience.

BOOK IV HIS WAYS AND OUR WAYS Fasting and Temptation . , , , .291

There is record of two world-wide hopes — one, of a Deliverer

who would perfect man's earthly conditions ; another, of a

Saviour who would deliver man from earth. Whether earth was to be glorified or spurned was a question that

divided religious thinkers when Jesus came. After the experience of his desert fast he never wavered in his

effort to improve man's physical condition. He gave no encouragement to the ascetic principle, but gives

perfect satisfaction to the hope of the ascetic.

CHAPTER II The Protest of the Parable ' . . . .301

The Jews were not ignorant of the beliefs and ideas of other nations at the Christian era. Jesus saw that the attention of the religious world was then fixed on arguments and systems of worship.

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In choosing to teach men only by parables Jesus said, in effect —

it is the life, not the form that is essential. Yet form, precise and beautiful, is necessary to a parable, though

no one particular form is necessary.

The Fighting Spirit . . . . . .312

The endeavour to abolish war must begin in our own hearts. We must not love invective. We must overcome party spirit. Energy is better than mere inertness, for Jesus requires strength of purpose. His purpose will utilise all a man's energies. The result will be greater individuality, for the law of love gives full play to all our powers.

The Sword and the Muckrake . . , .326

Must war always exist ? The change in public opinion within the last thirty years suggests hope that it may not.

Must greed always exist ? The question of a reform of business principles is beset with difficulties, but here again individual effort to live the business life on the plan of Jesus must precede any corporate reformation, and commercial history shows that change in the corporate ideal is possible for business men.

The Protestantism of Jesus . . . . '335

Jesus taught that sins of the lower nature do not shut men out from his salvation as do sins of the higher nature. Of these he chiefly condemned the spiritual pride of men who held their religious knowledge to be perfect and final.

As this is a permanent sin of the religious nature there must also be a permanent protest of the reformer against existing religious standards. This, in an ideal form, is found in the life of Jesus.

The abuses of Judaism in his time were very great, but Jesus only protests against those evils already detected by the Jewish conscience. He only treated with neglect doctrines and practices which his positive teaching must eventually supersede.

This principle illustrated by contrasting Jesus and Luther.

By the prophecies of his unexpected return he taught that the Church must be ready to welcome successive reformations.

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The Power of His Death . . . . .349

In the midst of his gift of complete joy — spiritual, volitional, and physical salvation — comes the death of Jesus, the supreme fact of his ministry.

In his death he taught us an earthly thing — to endure all things and forgive all things rather than break the law of love. We have as yet only partly believed this, and can consequently only receive glimpses of the heavenly things his death can teach.

It gave new reality to the hope of immortality 5 for to feel the lifegiving power of Jesus is to know that death could be for him only transition, and the state where his will is more perfectly realised must be the state in which our life will be perfected if we attain to it.

The visions of his resurrection-life show that character and purpose pass unchanged through death. How shall we become fitted in this life to survive in the environment of his fuller presence ?

He teaches that his own shall ever share his joy, but the manner of his death precludes any doctrine of easy and universal bliss.

Concerning the lost, Jesus teaches that God suffers with all who fail, and is always as kind to the evil as to the good.

The only salvation he offers us is the offer of himself — his own character. How many of us can perceive its beauty ? how many approximate to it ?

We do not yet know what divine justice and forgiveness are, hence we cannot know what atonement for sin means. Yet we know that it is the vision of the dying Christ, conquering sin and death by love, that uplifts the sinner.

Human reason fails to hear what God says to us in the Crucifixion. The Church strives to hear and to interpret. This must ever be her function ; but until she has brought the world to be at one with her and with Jesus she will not perfectly understand.

Book I His Thoughts And Our Thoughts Our Need Of Reformation

It is now admitted by New Testament scholars that those words of Jesus which appear to treat of the society he founded as partial in extent, and suggest that the kingdom of heaven would include but a few out of the many, refer only to the period of the kingdom's growth. From the general tenor of his teaching and outlook we gather that he thought, not only that he was providing a salvation for the whole world, but that his salvation must ultimately pervade the whole world ; and further, that the principles of conduct he laid down, the character he exemplified, and the faith he revealed, if closely wrought into the lives of his followers would most quickly and effectually accomplish, not only their own enfranchisement, but the enfranchisement of the race.

Meantime, the reception and transmission of his message of deliverance did not depend upon its being perfectly comprehended ; and the great proof we have of the truth of the earliest traditions concerning him is that his followers passed on an ideal which they only imperfectly understood. There can be little doubt that his figure of coming in the clouds with power and great glory meant to him the world-wide acceptance of his ideals, which he rightly judged to be so far above the ideals of the time that ages would be required for their perfect comprehension by human thought. This is reasonable; he could not be the Christ of all time were It possible for any passing generation to understand more than a portion of his ideal. We are compelled, indeed, to choose between the standard of a past age, which must decrease, as all its preachers must, in the evolution of life and thought, and the God-like standard of a Christ who, because he must continually Increase, must in every progressive generation be imperfectly, but less Imperfectly, understood. But a teacher imperfectly understood may be obeyed, and the first question of any who would understand his doctrine must be concerning the doing of his will.

Jesus came to a suffering and vicious world, and proclaimed a God who required from every man, whatever his heredity, whatever his circumstance, not only the righteousness then acknowledged, but a far more vigorous, more perfect life; a goodness, not only in action but in Imagination, in desire and motive, in every chance thought; an earnest purpose of love multiplied by every possible opportunity of doing good.

Such a God asks the impossible. Good men on all sides, then and ever since, have arisen to welcome the beautiful Ideal and explain that It was meant to be Impossible, — a star for moths to desire, a morrow which humanity would never see,

CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 5

demanded of man by God only in order that his creature might constantly strain himself here in attempting what he could not perform, to the end that he might be a little bigger and a httle better hereafter. And for nineteen centuries we have been learning more and more clearly that man, here and now, is, and since we have any history of him always has been, so hampered by the imperfections of body and brain, the taint of his fathers' fathers, the accidents of his infancy and the limitations of his age, as to be quite unable to fulfil the law of Christ in any rounded and adequate way. Our Christian teachers drew a kindly line between deadly and venial sin, until the psychologists and physiologists told us that some of the so-called deadly sins are those for which men are least responsible; and now we are taught to distinguish between infirmities which must take a lifetime to spend their force and thus diminish, and faults which can be, and therefore ought to be, swiftly cured. More and more we learn that, so far from the doom on children's children being arbitrary, it is inevitable, so inevitable that the man of science and the moralist are at variance concerning the cause and nature and cure of crime. But Jesus taught that the demand of God for righteousness was inexorable. We go back to the historic Christ, and we find that he who was more tender over human frailty than any other showed no recognition of disciples who refused to follow where he led. Even after making every allowance for the figurative nature of our Lord's sayings, we all admit that he made the most stringent demands for earnestness of purpose, an earnestness of which the average man is physically incapable; for a degree of self-devotion which most men's minds are unable to admire, much less acquire; for love of which most men cannot conceive, let alone feel. And we are told that he said, " Every one that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand . . . and it fell, and great was the fall of it."

Truly, indeed, great is the fall ! When we examine the boasted civilisation of Christendom with the searchlight of the precepts of Jesus Christ, we see only broken walls upon the sands of compromise. If our faith in social evolution is strengthened by the testimony of all history that to-day's civilisation is on the whole better than anything the world has yet seen, we must still admit that it is not Christian, that it is perhaps finding its most startling development in a nation not even nominally Christian. We cannot for one moment suppose that our institutions, or the average life of the nominal Christian, are so planned that our house can be said to be built upon the rock of obedience to the sayings of Christ.

There are three objections urged against the practice of Christ's precepts, — that they are meant only to inculcate an inward temper of heart; that they are meant only for a certain class ; and that they are for private, not public, exercise. Let us consider these.

Our Lord's ethical teaching presupposes civil, domestic, and commercial life. We have the city, the court, the officer, the judge, the house, the

CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 7

private room, the lamp, the loaf; or again, the master, the servant, the bushel basket,, the field, the crop, the market. All these are a part of the life to which his injunctions apply, and are used as the pith of his illustrations. Those manydevotional writers who would remove and limit the urgency of our Lord's teaching to the separate life of the soul have there a sufficient refutation, for in that inner chamber the machinery does not exist with which the commands are to be worked out. A man or bodv of men in any isolation, actual or ideal, could no more obey the great Sermon in St. Matthew than a celibate could discharge a man's duties toward wife and child. The peacemaker must live among those who are at variance. The meek must have cause of affront. The persecuted must face some organised tyranny, armed only with the meekness of love. The brother to whom exhaustless love is to be continually offered must be always at hand, a vain, silly, and irritating person; and how is it possible to obey the Christian rule toward such an one if we do not obey it in the market, in the street, in law court, and in religious assembly ^ To sit in any hermitage of fact or fancy and exercise a heavenly temper is clearly futile, so far as obedience to Jesus Christ is concerned; and as futile is the more modern method of limiting the benevolent energies by zeal in chosen channels, buying thus an imaginary license to be good fighters and good haters when our theology or liberty is called in question.

Thus it is necessary, in order to live the religious life as our Lord directs, that we be part of a populace. What virtue is there in humility, modesty, and private devotion if the push and press of the world's opinions are not upon us ? Why should we make a good toilet when we perform our self-denials if no one is to be cheered by the innocent imposture ? There could be no virtue in having no anxiety about our support if we lived without worldly responsibility. The "narrow gate," the "house upon the rock" are clearly to be found only in the busy haunts of men.

If it is wrong to regard the counsels of perfection as applying only to a temper of soul, it is equally wrong to assume that they apply only to some apostolic or saintly class. If there be any class of Christians on whom these injunctions were not laid, we should have to discover what rule of life Jesus laid down for their guidance. He would seem to have left them totally without instruction. His own example cannot be their rule, for he carried out to the uttermost his own precepts. If there are those to whom it does not belong to cast their material cares on God's providence, to lend and give to all who ask, to love their enemies, then neither is it their part to let their light shine, to bring their gift to the altar, or to love their neighbours. In the whole gospel there is no indication that Jesus offers any aid or reward to a partial obedience. No man looking back, yielding only part of himself, failing to take up the whole burden, is fit for the kingdom. If there is a class to whom these tests do not apply, there is no parable, or

CH. I OUR NEED OF REFORMATION 9

any teaching or action of his, indicating that his companionship, his promise, his salvation, are for that class.

Nor is it practical to suppose that the highest teaching is intended to inculcate conduct which men must imitate in their private capacity, but not as members of a social or civic system. Nothing could be more unpractical. In everyday life a man is as he does. If in every relation that binds him to the political and social order he is to act at variance with the code of Christ he will never be Christ-like. Let us ask how a man can divide his private from his public life. We are told that the commercial man or wage-earner may give lavishly in private, but in the countinghouse, the workshop, and the field he must not be lavish, or he will be endangering his own solvency or underselling his neighbours. The ordinary tradesman and working-man must, then, give up attempting to realise the Christian temper, because they have really so little scope for its exercise; Sundays and evenings would be outdone by the sordid six days of the week, when everything must be weighed in a nice balance of selfish thrift; character would be the outcome of the working hours. Again, we are told that a statesman may obey the law of love in private life, but not in national or international relations. But if he be a good statesman all his best thought is given to the state, and in the process his character develops; as he thinks and acts so he becomes. So it is also with the ecclesiastical ruler whose churchcraft is governed by the rules that will bring the Church earthly success. In the end his character will be forged in the heat of his work, not in the quiet of his devotional hours.

Perhaps no better illustration of the prevailing temper of our Christianity can be had than in a quotation from the words of one who is one of the best of the Christians and scholars of our generation.