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"Ye make clean the outside of the

cup."

"Pray in secret."

"Mint, anise, and cummin.”

"The sabbath was made for man." "Meat ye know not of."

"The kingdom of heaven is within you."

"Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees."

"It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing."

"How is it that ye do not understand?"

On the other hand, there are several texts which appear to support material accessories:

In favor of a ceremonial and material form of religion.

"This is my body."

Baptism. "Suffer it to be so now." "This kind goeth not out save by prayer and fasting." (Questionably genuine.)

Breaking of bread and giving thanks. "Eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood."

"Spit and touched his tongue." Anointing eyes.

Wedding garment (otherwise interpretable).

But the most numerous of the teachings have an immediately practical bearing:

In favor of a practical form of religion. Grapes and thistles.

Heal the broken-hearted, liberty to captives, etc.

"Inasmuch as ye did it . . ."

"Go and sell all that thou hast." "Worketh hitherto, and I work." "Well done, good and faithful...." Do the will to know of the doctrine. "Blessed is that servant who is found so doing."

Fruitless tree cut down.

"I was an hungered.”

"Gather them that do iniquity. . . Sower and seed.

Good Samaritan.

"Casting out devils in thy name." "Heareth and doeth."

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"Why callest thou me good?" (capable of other interpretation).

"Ye both know me and know whence I am."

"As the Father gave me commandment, even so I do."

(Statements emphasizing the Divine side will be referred to later.)

A few texts, so far as they are zenuine, can be appealed to as supporting ecclesiastical Christianity:

In favor of an ecclesiastical form of Christianity.

"Keys of the kingdom of heaven." "Sitting on twelve thrones judging,"

etc.

"Bind on earth shall be bound in heaven."

"If he refuses to hear the church, let him be," etc.

But it must be remembered that the

frequency of expressions which, though full of meaning, can hardly be taken literally, but were so strongly figurative that even his Eastern associates were misled, is notorious:

Figurative expressions. "Hateth father and mother." "Renounceth not all that he hath." "Prophet cannot perish out of Jerusalem."

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cerning the kind of religion intended and taught by the Founder of Christianity, I cannot but feel that the balance inclines strongly in the double direction of a spiritual interpretation on the theoretical side, combined with a thoroughly practical and simple outcome in daily life. These elements, the spiritual and the practical-the worship of God as a Spirit, and the service of man as a brother-are undoubted and emphatic constituents-the warp and the woof, as it were-of the pure Christian faith, but it is difficult to maintain that they are uniquely characteristic of it; even when taken together they can hardly be said to constitute a feature which sharply distinguishes it from all other religious creeds. For a still more fundamental substratum or framework we must look away from the detailed words and teachings and contemplate the Life as a whole.

VI.-ECCE DEUS, or THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENT IN CHRISTIANITY.

What, then, is the essential element in Christianity, the essential theoretical element which inspires its teachings on the ethical side? In the inculcation of practical righteousness other noble religions must be admitted to share, but there must be an element which it possesses in excess above others-some vital element which has enabled it to survive all the struggles for existence, and to dominate the most civilized peoples of the world.

A religion is necessarily compounded of many essences, and is sure to be mingled with foreign ingredients, some worthy, some unworthy; but these accessories cannot account for its vitality,

3 It has been pointed out to me that it is hardly fair to treat the doctrine of Incarnation as an intensification of the doctrine of Immaence; inasmuch as some may consider them almost antithetic. Spinoza, for instance, held the one, but would assuredly have eschewed the other. I do not disagree, but point out LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII.

1672

for its adaptation to various ages, and for its acceptance by all conditions of men. A miraculous birth and resurrection were certainly not distinctive of Christianity; they have appeared in other religions too; we must look for some feature specially characteristic and quite fundamental.

I believe that the most essential element in Christianity is its conception of a human God; of a God, in the first place, not apart from the universe, not outside it and distinct from it, but immanent in it; yet not immanent only, but actually incarnate, incarnate in it and revealed in the Incarnation." The nature of God is displayed in part by

that there is a tendency nowadays to strive rather towards a unification of the two doctrines. It may be admitted that emphasis on the philosophical notion of Immanence is comparatively recent on the part of theologians; but it can hardly ever have been completely absent from the Christian atmosphere, since St.

everything, to those who have eyes to see, but is displayed most clearly and fully by the highest type of existence, the highest experience to which the process of evolution has so far opened our senses. By what else indeed can it conceivably be rendered manifest? Naturally the conception of Godhead is still only indistinct and partial, but so far as we are as yet able to grasp it, we must reach it through recognition of the extent and intricacy of the cosmos, and more particularly through the highest type and loftiest spiritual development of man himself.

This perception of a human God, or of a God in the form of humanity, is a perception which welds together Christianity and Pantheism and Paganism and Philosophy. It has been seized and travestied by Comtists, whose God is rather limited to the human aspect instead of being only revealed through it. It has been preached by some Unitarians, though reverently denied by others and by Jews, who have felt that God could not be incarnate in man: "This be far from thee, Lord." It has been recognized and even exaggerated by Catholics, who have almost lost the humanity in the Divinity, though they tend to restore the balance by practical worship of the Mother and of canonical saints. But whatever its unconscious treatment by the sects may have been, this idea-the humanity of God or the Divinity of man-I conceive to be the truth which constituted the chief secret and inspiration of Jesus: "I and the Father are one." "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." "The Son of Man," and equally "The Son of God." "Before Abraham was I am." "I am in the Father and the Father in me." And though admittedly "My Father is greater than I," yet "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father"; and "he

Paul in his Athenian address clearly lent it his countenance, and it is probably implicit in the doctrine of the "Logps."

that believeth on me hath everlasting life."

The world has been slow to grasp the meaning of all this. The conception of Godhead formed by some devout philosophers and mystics has quite rightly been so immeasurably vast, though still assuredly utterly inadequate and necessarily beneath reality, that the notion of a God revealed in human formborn, suffering, tormented, killed-has been utterly incredible. "A crucified prophet, yes; but a crucified God! I shudder at the blasphemy," is a known quotation which I cannot now verify; yet that apparent blasphemy is the soul of Christianity. It calls upon us to recognize and worship a crucified, an executed, God.

The genuine humanity of Christ is now manifest and clear enough, though that too has been in danger of being lost. There have been efforts to ignore it, and many to confuse it-attempts are still made to regard him as unique, rather than as the first-fruits of humanity, the first-born among many brethren.

Realization of the genuine and straightforward humanity of Christ is obscured by a reverent misapprehension, akin in spirit to that which originated the Arian denial of his divinity. Both modes of thought shrank amazed from the suggestion that God can be really incarnate in, and manifested through, man: at any rate, not in normal man; such a thing only becomes permissible and credible if the Man is abnormal and unique-according to the orthodox view.

It is orthodox therefore to maintain that Christ's birth was miraculous and his death portentous, that he continued in existence otherwise than as we men continue, that his very body rose and ascended into heaven,-whatever that collocation of words may mean. But I suggest that such an attempt at exceptional glorification of his body is

a pious heresy-a heresy which misses the truth lying open to our eyes. His humanity is to be recognized as real and ordinary and thorough and complete: not in middle life alone, but at birth and at death and after death. Whatever happened to him may happen to any one of us, provided we attain the appropriate altitude: an altitude which, whether within our individual reach or not, is assuredly within reach of humanity. That is what he urged again and again. "Be born again." "Be ye perfect." "Ye are the sons of God." "My Father and your Father, my God and your God."

The ununiqueness of the ordinary humanity of Christ is the first and patent truth, masked only by wellmeaning and reverent superstition. But the second truth is greater than that-without it the first would be meaningless and useless,-if man alone, what gain have we? The world is full of men. What the world wants is a God. Behold the God!

The Divinity of Jesus is the truth which now requires to be re-perceived, to be illumined afresh by new knowledge, to be cleansed and revivified by the wholesome flood of scepticism which has poured over it; it can be freed now from all trace of grovelling superstition, and can be recognized freely and enthusiastically: the Divinity of Jesus, and of all other noble and saintly souls, in so far as they too have been inflamed by a spark of Deityin so far as they too can be recognized as manifestations of the Divine. Nor is it even through man alone that the revelation comes, though through man and the highest man it comes chiefly; the revelation is implicit in all the processes of nature, and explicit too, so

So, in Professor Gilbert Murray's version of "The Trojan Women" of Euripides, whose tragedies represent a parting of the ways between an old theology and a new, the tortured Queen Hecuba turns from the gods that know but help not, to the majesty of her own immeasurable grief, and in a moment of exalted vision

far as human vision, in the person of its seers and poets and men of science, has been as yet sufficiently cleared and strengthened to perceive it.

For consider what is involved in the astounding idea of evolution and progress as applied to the whole universe. Either it is a fact or it is a dream. If it be a fact, what an illuminating fact it is! God is one; the universe is an aspect and a revelation of God. The universe is struggling upward to a perfection not yet attained. I see in the mighty process of evolution an eternal struggle towards more and more selfperception, and fuller and more all-embracing Existence-not only on the part of what is customarily spoken of as Creation-but, in so far as Nature is an aspect and revelation of God, and in so far as Time has any ultimate meaning or significance, we must dare to extend the thought of growth and progress and development even up to the height of all that we can realize of the Supernal Being. In some parts of the universe perhaps already the ideal conception has been attained; and the region of such attainment-the full blaze of self-conscious Deity-is too bright for mortal eyes, is utterly beyond our highest thoughts; but in part the attainment is as yet very imperfect; in what we know as the material part, which is our present home, it is nascent, or only just beginning; and our own struggles and efforts and disappointments and aspirations-the felt groaning and travailing of Creationthese are evidence of the effort, indeed they themselves are part of the effort towards fuller and completer and more conscious existence.' On this planet man is the highest outcome of the process so far, and is therefore the highperceives that even through her sorrow life had somehow been enriched, and that though Troy was burning and the race of Priam extinct, they had attained immortality in ways undreamed of, and would add to the harmony of the eternal music.

est representation of Deity that here exists. Terribly imperfect as yet, because so recently evolved, he is nevertheless a being which has at length attained to consciousness and free-will, a being unable to be coerced by the whole force of the universe, against his will; a spark of the Divine Spirit, therefore, never more to be quenched. Open still to awful horrors, to agonies of remorse, but to floods of joy also, he persists, and his destiny is largely in his own hands; he may proceed up or down, he may advance towards a magnificent ascendancy, he may recede towards depths of infamy. He is not coerced: he is guided and influenced, but he is free to choose. The evil and the good are necessary correlatives: freedom to choose the one involves freedom to choose the other.

So it must have been elsewhere, amid the depths of cosmic space, myriads of times over in all the vistas of the past; and thus may have arisen legends of the evolution of what are popularly called angels, some ascendant in the struggle, others fallen by their own rebellion. Let it not be supposed that these instinctive legends are based on nothing: they are a pictorial travesty doubtless, but they are not gratuitous inventions; it is doubtful if entirely baseless or purely gratuitous inventions would have any vitality, every living idea must surely be based upon something; these correspond to something innate in the ideas of humanity, because embedded in the structure of the universe of which that humanity is a part.

A question presses on the optimist for answer therefore: Are the rebellious and the sinful not also on the up grade? Ultimately and in the last resort will not they too put themselves in tune with the harmony of existence? Who is to say? Time is infinite, eternity is before us as well as behind us, and the end is not yet. There is no "ulti

mately" in the matter, for there is no end: there is room for an eternity of rebellion and degradation and misery, as well as for one of joy and hope and love. We can see that virtue and happiness must be on the winning side, while crime is a fruit of arrested development, or reversion to an ancestral type; we can perceive that vice contains suicidal elements, while every step in an upward direction increases the potential energy of the moral universe; yet clearly there is to be no compulsion; the door of hope is not closed, but it must of free-will be entered, and good and evil will be intermingled with us for many æons yet. The law of progress by struggle and effort is not soon to be abrogated and replaced by a Nirvana of passive contemplation. There is too much to do in this busy universe, and all must help. The universe is not a "being" but a "becoming"-an ancient but light-bringing doctrine when realized,-it is in change, in development, in movement, upward and downward, that activity consists. A stationary condition, or stagnation, would to us be simple non-existence; the element of progression, of change, of activity, must be as durable as the universe itself. Monotony, in the sense of absolute immobility, is unthinkable, unreal, and cannot anywhere exist: save where things have ceased to be.

Such ideas, the ideas of development and progress, extend even up to God Himself, according to the Christian conception. So we return to that with which we started:-The Christian idea of God is not that of a being outside the universe, above its struggles and advances, looking on and taking ne part in the process, solely exalted, beneficent, self-determined and complete; no, it is also that of a God whe loves, who yearns, who suffers, whe keenly laments the rebellious and misguided activity of the free agents

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