CHAPTER II

THE CAUSES OF THE RELATIVE INEFFICIENCY OF THE CHURCHES

HAVING thus briefly sketched the reasons for my belief that the Church is entrusted with a permanent and indispensable function of vital import to humanity, let me now enumerate the causes of the present comparative inefficiency of the Churches, and the definite points in which they need to reform themselves, in order that they may extend their influence to the whole of our population and multiply the concrete benefits which they produce in the lives of their members, and through them in the common life. It is of course to be understood that the following accusations are true only in general. Doubtless on each point the reader will be able to think of exceptions. I would ask him to bear in mind that I am also conscious of these.

1. The Churches have subordinated life to creed, and, in so doing, have inverted the relation of the end and the means. They have forgotten that the entire machinery of doctrine and discipline, creeds and sacraments, rituals and liturgies, exists solely for the sake of purifying human character and rectifying human conduct. The true principle to be followed in this matter is adumbrated in the celebrated saying ascribed to Jesus: "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath; therefore man is lord also of the sabbath." 1

1 In quoting these words, I take the liberty of substituting for the ambiguous phrase "son of man" what authorities on the Aramaic dialect

The mistake on this point lies at the root of most of the crimes and blunders which give such an unedifying aspect to a great part of Christian history. The Church must now resolutely lay hold upon the principle of Jesus, and apply it unsparingly to the re-statement and re-interpretation of doctrine and to the modification of practice. Religion will then cease to seem hostile to advancing knowledge. It will no longer repel the large numbers of conscientious thinkers who refuse to come into the Church, either as clergy or laymen, so long as it is controlled by the implicit principle that traditional doctrines and methods are more important than the life to which they should be ancillary. The doctrine of Jesus is a radical humanistic one, and the Church should not hesitate to be as free and unconventional as its founder.

2. Acting upon the principle criticized in the foregoing paragraphs, the Churches have to a large extent overlooked the legitimate claims of the human intellect. The whole of the so-called conflict between science and religion was due to this mistake. In their anxiety to stress the miraculous uniqueness of Jesus, they have ignored the indispensable contribution to human salvation represented, let us say, by Socrates. There is surely no impiety in suggesting that the method and secret of Socrates are as necessary to the rounded development

declare to be its real meaning. I am not an Aramaic scholar; but any layman who follows closely the arguments of those who are (Professor Nathaniel Schmidt, for example, in his fine work entitled The Prophet of Nazareth), is bound to admit the cogency of their reasoning. The substitution, moreover, of "man" for "son of man" in this saying of Jesus, is the only means by which the logical force of his argument becomes visible. If "son of man "does not mean man in general, his "therefore" is hopelessly out of place.

of human character as the method and secret of Jesus. One may admit, for the sake of avoiding argument, that Jesus is pre-eminently the Saviour of the world, in the sense that no other figure in history has appealed so universally to the progressive portion of humanity as he.1 Nor is it to be denied that the vital principle of freedom and completeness of thought, to which Socrates was a martyr, is implicit, and even to some extent explicit, in the teaching of Jesus. But so little is it obtruded in the New Testament tradition that it became possible for the Church to forget, or at least to ignore, this element. It has historically been absolutely false to the spirit of the great saying, "Why, even of yourselves, judge ye not what is right?" and to St. Paul's "Prove all things. Hold fast that which is good." It has forgotten that the creed, for which it was so anxious to contend, cannot in strict accuracy be called the creed of one who has not subjected it to rigorous examination. The word belief, as W. K. Clifford remarked, "is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements." We can easily imagine with what distressed contempt Socrates would have regarded any would-be disciple who undertook to believe things simply because Socrates said them.2 Can there be any doubt in the mind of a close student of the Gospels that the attitude of Jesus in similar circumstances would have been the

1 I omit the question of the claims of Buddha and Mohammed because the adequate presentation of my reasons for rejecting them would involve a long and unprofitable digression.

2 "I would ask you to be thinking of the truth and not of Socrates: agree with me, if I seem to you to be speaking the truth; or if not, withstand me might and main, that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my enthusiasm, and, like the bee, leave my sting in you before I die."-Phaedo, § 91.

same? It is an unpardonable limitation of the philosophy of the Christian doctrine of incarnation to encircle Jesus with a fence that isolates his nature from that of all other saviours and reformers. What is the meaning of the teaching that the true light lightens every man who comes into the world, if not that others are to be placed on the same plane with the founder of Christianity? I am not disputing the legitimacy of the preeminence ascribed to him. My contention is that, if first, he can only be primus inter pares. I contend further that the acceptance of this principle is in no wise inconsistent with his teaching, and that the Church can refuse to adopt it only at the cost of sacrificing an immense part of the good which it might otherwise achieve.

3. The doctrine of the transcendence of God has been over-emphasized by the Churches, to such an extent that the true proportions of the mission of Christianity have been almost completely forgotten. What I mean in this connection will become apparent if the reader will contrast the theory of the City of God which was elaborated by St. Augustine, with the idea of the Kingdom of God as we find it in the New Testament tradition.

St. Augustine, and after him the Western Church generally, conceived of human society in the mass as irredeemable. This was one of the many mischievous effects produced upon that powerful thinker's mind by his early acceptance of the Manichæan heresy. He never shook off the notion of the inherent vileness of matter, and of everything associated with it. Among other consequences of this doctrine, it followed that humanity, being (to use inexact popular language) a fusion of the material and the spiritual, is totally de

praved, even on the spiritual side, by reason of this blending. Accordingly, for St. Augustine the City of God consists only of the angels, and of that small minority of human beings into whom, by the arbitrary grace of God, a new spiritual principle is infused.

The Christian doctrine (of which St. Augustine's is the antithesis) begins by affirming the immanence of God in humanity. Addressing himself to an indiscriminate muster of his contemporaries (who had received no sacraments, and who thus cannot be conceived of as regenerate in the Augustinian sense), Jesus begins his teaching with the flat and unqualified assertion, “The kingdom of God is within you." There are, to be sure, inconsistencies in the New Testament tradition, but the dominant note of the early followers of Jesus is that the world in its totality is the subject of redemption.1 Even the Judaizers among the apostles believed this. The squabble between them and St. Paul was not as to this fact, but as to the means of realizing it. In the fourth Gospel the entire presentation of the Christian message centres in the idea that Christ had come in order "that the world, through him, might be saved." The first Epistle to Timothy may not be Pauline, and it may be as late as the most revolutionary critic chooses to affirm. The later it is, however, the more emphatically does it witness to the long persistence of the idea expressed in it, that God "is the saviour of all men, specially of them that believe."2 The Church must return to this true primitive catholicity, and to the

1 See the powerful and unfairly neglected treatise on The World as the Subject of Redemption, by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. Fremantle, Canon of Canterbury. (London: Rivingtons, 1885.)

2 I Tim. iv, 10 (R. V.),