THE SUPREME crisis of Christianity throughout the ages, it has been maintained, was not the Reformation, but a movement two centuries nearer our own time. The French and Germans passed through it as an acute fever and, knowing it to be a crisis, gave it a name the French Illuminisme, the Germans Aufklärung. But we, the first to begin and the last to end, never realised its significance enough to make us invent for it a native designation. Had the title not acquired a cheap association, we might have called it The Age of Reason, but, as it is, if we wish to convey some meaning even at the cost of precision, we must call it Rationalism," and if we wish to be precise even at the risk of conveying no meaning, we must borrow from the French and call it the Illumination.

      The Reformation, it is maintained, was a mere breach in outward organisation, which left the old foundation of external authority unassailed in principle, and the body of dogma which rested on it unquestioned in fact. A portent it may have been, but only as an indication of a much more radical movement of individual [17] emancipation, which reached a clear understanding of itself first in Rationalism.

      Its distinctive mark was the conscious rejection of all the external, authoritative infallibilities. The negative assault was conducted with an apparatus of serious inquiry and criticism never before available, but the new and revolutionary development was the positive assertion that nothing is either true faith or right morality which is not our own; and that, in consequence, external authority is, in principle, an unsound basis.

      The greatest thinker of the movement conceived it to be the arrival of the race at the stage of manhood, when we must take on our own shoulders responsibility for our own convictions, as well as for our own actions, because we ought to know that even a true belief is not for us truth, unless we ourselves see it to be true, and even a right action not moral, unless we ourselves discern it to be right.

      This estimate is unconsciously conceded by the usual criticism of the Reformation, fox what is deplored is less its own work than the ills which seem to have followed in its train. Had it not first opened the breach,, it is argued, the cold waters of scepticism might never have flooded our fruitful fields.

      The rebuilding of the ancient dam of a united Church on the old foundation has, from that interpretation of history, been the dream of many individuals and the inspiration of more than one movement, and so long as the dam alone is considered and the flood ignored, the project seems hopeful. But, if the Reformation was only an effect and not a cause, only the first plain indication of a greater movement, and if its stream is still rising, the stoutest ecclesiastical barrier is a feeble hope. Nay, greater strength might only have been an added danger, for the longer it held, the more devastating would have been the inundation. [18]

      In any case, it matters little what we think might have been. The actual situation is that there is no more any infallible authority left on which to build, at least in openness of mind and with a sense of reality. Saying "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, or "This is the unassailable foundation," when already it is not only assailed but crumbling, is not to make ourselves secure, but only to make ourselves deceived. The loss in finality is obvious, and there are minds to which finality alone is peace.

      A doctrine both of God and of man of the utmost simplicity and definiteness was possible on the old dogmatic basis. God was the absolute and direct might and all He did without error or failure; and man was the creature of His hand, directly fashioned and needing nothing for his making but the word of power. Then to deal with the Omniscient was to have infallible truth, to deal with the Supreme to have absolute legislation, to deal with the Omnipotent to have irresistible succour. Faith was acceptance of infallible truth, justification coming to terms with absolute legislation, regeneration the inpouring of efficacious grace; and the whole dogmatic edifice stood solid and four-square.

      At first sight it might appear that the foundation had only suffered some not irreparable damage from the softness of years of abundance and peace. New ideas effected much, but the easy attitude which went with them did more. The prevailing doctrine of evolution was, in the temper bred by long prosperity, interpreted as a fine flow of progress on which the generations needed but to float. In consequence, all distinctions tended to be toned down, and not least moral and religious distinctions. Religion softened into vague lines and dim chiaroscuros and timid approximations, till truth seemed mainly a business of suspending [19] judgment, and goodness of meaning well. Absolute distinction between truth and error, good and evil, even at the centre, disappeared from a territory where lately all had been absolute. It was not merely that creeds and customs, which had come unscathed through ages of controversy, began to suffer change. The dogmatic form itself began to crumble. Suggestion, hypothesis and practical persuasion took the place of definition and decree.

      Historical investigation also wrought to the same end. The old dogmatic method had been to argue a priori from what becomes Omnipotence and Omniscience: the historical method is to inquire, without presupposition, what God actually has done. Under this solvent all the infallibilities began to crumble. An infallible Orthodoxy followed an infallible Vicar of Christ, an infallible Scripture an infallible Orthodoxy, and infallible Christ an infallible Scripture.

      To many that was not emancipation, but condemnation to wander in perpetual twilight among shadowy ghosts of former faiths they would not expel and could not embrace. Still they felt that God's truth ought to be infallible and God's grace irresistible, that it must somehow be mere human perversity which denies, and that some day God would display all this questioning as nakedly wicked. And new hopes have been stirred by, years of misery and war. When the intellectual ferment dies before the stress of living and the nearness of dying and the confidence in progress changes to a fear of desolation and returning barbarism, and joy in every aspect of human activity passes into a sense of the futility of human endeavour, will not all this pride of intellect be laid low? If we are forced to say once again, It is not in man that runneth, but all victory is only of God what else is the true lesson of the ages? What is our need, if not that God should direct amid human, [20] blindness, and rule amid human folly, and uphold amid human weakness? May not what many have hailed as liberty, therefore, only have been the temper of an easy, worldly, intellectually curious time, which the temper of an age burdened with the practical issues of life and death will repudiate?

      But we must distinguish between the temper of a time and its true lesson and call, whether the temper be intellectual or practical, overflowing with enthusiasm or cautious and critical. Only as we succeed are we true prophets. The false prophet is a shell gathering up and echoing the temper of the age; the true prophet is no echo of the moods and passions of his age, but a living voice declaring what is its true lesson.

      That is never easy. We do not advance merely by widening and correcting our outlook. The new can be won only at the expense of combating the old, and what we combat we are apt to misrepresent. New truth displays itself only as it dethrones ancient error, and new lessons are learned only as they overcome ancient habit: and in that task truth and right, which have been mixed with error and wrong, are not always distinguished and preserved. Concentration is an essential of all human endeavour, and a calm balance of interests is often a mere juggler's trick inconsistent with urgent tasks and earnest purpose, yet that very concentration may cause us to overlook or deliberately set aside important issues.

      Then comes a time when this limitation is discovered and when the losses have to be made good, and, as weariness and haste prevail after effort in most human affairs, the result is usually a reaction which condemns as worthless what is merely imperfect, and tries to ignore the obstacles which make a mere return to the past impossible. Nor is that kind of reaction anywhere so common or so disastrous as in religion. Blindness [21] to the lessons of the past is made a sacred duty, though the deepest lesson of the past may be its religious teaching; and the taking of short cuts is made a matter of faith, though the chief result of the long and weary journey may have been to label them, "No thoroughfare." We have to subject all moods, it matters not what they are, to the spirit of truth and wisdom. And a mood which would suppress intellectual interests and obliterate the varied humanities is not least in need of that control. Nor, if we are to judge by the long ways of Providence in the past, will the true lesson be any less of patience, because our temper is of haste. If the infallibilities have been overthrown by inquiry and reason, they cannot be raised again by affirmation or even by the strongest conviction of their utility.

      Many efforts have been made to rebuild on the old infallibilities, and no doubt others will follow, because there are always persons encased in a jointless armour of obscurantism hard enough to turn the edge of any fact. But the value, for truth and beauty and goodness, of our own insight, choice and deliberate purpose, being once seen, can never again be wholly renounced. Whereupon, faith in the outward powers, which impose upon us what we ought to believe and set up for us what we ought to revere and prescribe for us what we ought to do, can never be an unwavering allegiance; and every attempt to defend them as a work of piety has in it a hectic unreality from start to finish. And once we clearly see that the highest possessions are valueless apart from our possession of them by insight, reverence and loyalty, we can never return by the way we came. Regrets for that straight and level and well-fenced road, with its solid, square dogmatic keeps for the shelter and protection of the pilgrim, may still linger, and the heart may tremble at the uneven, uphill, winding way into a great unmapped land, but we [22] know it is cowardice not to seek along it God's better country.

      Even if we return to the figure of the devastating waters of doubt and denial, which expresses better the sense of desolation in many hearts than a road, which, however forbidding, may lead to a land of promise, there may still be a surer hope than building ecclesiastical dams, hard to construct and little secure. When the Nile spread its obliterating deposit of black mud over the fields hardly won from the desert and watered at such cost of patient toil, the victor over it was not the engineer stemming its current with his barricade, but the inspired peasant who, greatly daring, flung his precious rice into its forbidding ooze. May not that adventure in new discoveries of fruitfulness be the true answer to all life's ills, and, in particular, to all life's questions? May not the great perplexities of our time, as well as its great distresses, be simply a challenge to find in God's doings a loftier purpose and to win from His providence a richer harvest? Above all may not man thereby attain a better security than some uncertain authority outside both of the truth and of ourselves, even the direct witness of truth to our own souls? If on all other subjects we have found the only basis of truth which can bring us to final agreement to be the same witness of the reality to each one, religion is not likely to be an exception, seeing that in religion, as in nothing else, our whole spiritual worth is involved in believing only what we see to be true and following only what we discern to be right. [23]

THE NECESSARY existence of an external infallible ground of belief in some final authority has seemed to many the plainest inference from God's nature and man's need. If God is omnipotent and His omnipotence is directed by omniscience, failure, error or even approximation seem forthwith excluded. Under the stress of this reasoning that, where human defect is present, God is necessarily absent, many have manipulated history as a labour of piety, and others, who have been more submissive to facts, have suffered from a desolating sense of loss, as though God had not acted worthily of His power and knowledge, and man had been left to his own devices.

      So long as God's only adequate dealing with man is thought to be by the might of omnipotence directed in an unswerving line by omniscience, we shall be apt to regard the underpinning of the old foundation, at all cost to facts, as a work of piety; and, when we fail, be shadowed by the fear that the new reality we have dug down to is the mere sand of human phantasies.

      But that conception of God's way of working is precisely the assumption which needs to be challenged. First, we shall never inquire humbly into the actual way of God's dealing with His children, if we commence by laying down regulations for it a priori.

      Second, the regulations are much more determined by the idea of how an absolute force would act than by any notion of God as Father.

      Third, either the sphere of direct operation of [24] omnipotence and omniscience is so restricted to special experiences of special persons that religion ends where our bitterest need of God begins, or, failing that restriction, is so extended, in indifference to good and evil, that God is only another name for the cosmic process.

      Fourth, could we succeed in restricting its sphere to matters of revelation and personal salvation, we should still be left with the unanswerable question, why, if this is His only adequate method, the Almighty should employ the inferior which admits error and failure so extensively, possibly so exclusively?

      These considerations may not be conclusive in themselves, but they are at least sufficiently weighty to require us to look at life and try to understand what it would say to us, without any fixed prejudice regarding the answer.

      God does not conduct His rivers, like arrows, to the sea. The ruler and compass are only for finite mortals who labour, by taking thought, to overcome their limitations, and are not for the Infinite mind. The expedition demanded by man's small power and short day produces the canal, but nature, with a beneficent and picturesque circumambulancy, the work of a more spacious and less precipitate mind, produces the river. Why should we assume that, in all the rest of His ways, He rejoices in the river, but, in religion, can use no adequate method save the canal? The defence of the infallible is the defence of the canal against the river, of the channel blasted through the rock against the basin dug by an element which swerves at a pebble or a firmer clay. And the question is whether God ever does override the human spirit in that direct way, and whether we ought to conceive either of His spirit or of ours after a fashion that could make it possible. Would such irresistible might as would save us from [25] all error and compel us into right action be in accord either with God's personality or with ours?

      When we maintain the contrary, it can hardly be that we are interpreting experience. May we not simply be misled by a vain imagination of how we ourselves should act on the throne of the universe? But to conceive God after the fashion of our own impatient, domineering spirits, is not the way to find Him in all His works.

      When we turn from argument to reality, there is little to show that either truth or righteousness ever came by way of irresistible might. Progress ever winds slowly forward, fretting at every obstacle and constantly returning upon its path, never working with absolute things, but always with the struggle of human thought and purpose. The long sorrowful experience of the ages seems to show that the last thing God thinks of doing is to drive mankind, with resistless rein, on the highway of righteousness.

      All infallibilities presuppose an idea of grace mechanically irresistible. But a direct force controlling persons as things is no personal relation between God and man; and the religion which rests on it does nothing to maintain the supreme interest of religion, which is the worth of persons over things, of moral values over material forces. God might so act upon men and still be a person, but there would be nothing personal in His acting; He might even care for each individual, but it would not be as a soul thinking its own thoughts and acting according to its own thinking; and the whole method has to be restricted to special spheres of grace, else it would not be an explanation of the world in any essential way different from heartless, rational cosmic process. May it not be that we shall not find less of God in life and not find His operation less adequate to our spiritual needs, because we discover [26] His method to be patient enough to pass round by way of persuasion and education through our errors and failures?

      To give any infallibility the appearance of being in accord with fact much manipulation of history is required and zeal for investigation carefully kept in leading-strings. That is a grave result, but it is still graver if it is done in the interest of a conception of grace as the irresistible force of omnipotence directed, in an unswerving line, by omniscience, which, being mechanical and not spiritual, introduces irreconcilable conflict between moral freedom and the succour of God.

OBJECTION MAY reasonably be taken to this reduction of the question of the ground of faith to what is practically the question of the nature of grace, seeing how the modern mind, which so intensely raised the former question, seems to have been peculiarly immune from the latter. How, it may be asked, could that be, if, in the last issue, they are identical? Even were that certainly the case, it would prove nothing. Great concentration on one aspect of a question is a protection, not only from the assaults of other questions, but from other aspects of the same question. This is at once a necessity of concentration without which we cannot advance, and a limitation of it which may make it barren for discovery. Only one interest can be the focus of our attention at one time, but the way in which that relegates other matters to the circumference, not because they are less vital or [27] better solved, but merely because we are not interested, might as much exclude us from the true solution even of the problem which possesses us, as a concentration on mirrors to the ignoring of light would prevent us discovering the reason of a reflection.

      This might be a sufficient reply, the more convincing, that these last two centuries have certainly left us no solution of their problems which is so sure, so much in the nature of things, so harmonising to our perplexities, that it leaves us no call to seek farther afield. But the deeper reason is that facts are often far from being what they seem. The great central problems of life, in particular, change far less in matter and substance than in form and temper from one age to another. The new garb, it must be admitted, transforms the old problem beyond knowing till we confine attention to its main features. Then, under the new names Rationalism and Romanticism, we recognise the old antagonisms of free-will and predestination which at one era bore the names of Pelagianism and Augustinianism, and, at another, Arminianism and Calvinism.

      The most obvious and transforming change is in temper.

      The old intensity required the old dogmatic security, the loss of which has been our dominant perplexity, for the particular way of God's working necessarily becomes a more hesitating concern when we have to face the doubt whether He works at all. Yet the question of whether God works can never be separated from the question of how He works.

      A still more important reason for the different temper is the extension of the question from the sphere of personal salvation to the whole realm of experience. Thereby it underwent the calming change from theological dogma to philosophical theory. But that extension was implicit in it from the beginning, and [28] Calvin had already gone a long way towards making it explicit: and, if principles live in a serener air when applied to the universe than to our individual salvation, they are not necessarily altered, nor even our personal stake in them made less.

      Rationalism, the chief movement of the eighteenth century, is not difficult to recognise as Pelagian. Those who still retained the old dogmatic certainty of the doctrine of election immediately recognised in it the foe. Though it conceived the issue of human freedom far more profoundly, its interest was the same, and its temper not so very different, and for the reason that its principle was the same, and its limitations the same, in kind, if not in degree.

      Its interest too was in the rational and responsible individual. As never before, it realised the amazing significance of the fact that nothing is of real value for truth or beauty or goodness which is not of our own insight, choice and deliberate purpose. In particular, it achieved a clear understanding of the demand for absolute independence in moral judgment and moral decision, if they are to be truly moral. What we merely take over as accepted or do as customary is for that very reason, not moral. The bearing of that significance of the moral person on external authorities has been plain from the beginning, as the defenders of the infallibilities were not slow to perceive.

      Negative assaults can always be resisted, but here was a new, positive, convincing presentation of the basis of all sound reverence, even reverence for man as man, not as great or good or wise, but man simply as a responsible being, an end in himself, and the measure of the value of all other ends.

      Here was the old Pelagian interest, enormously deepened, yet, in spite of that deepening, there went with it much of the same shallow temper. The adherents [29] of Rationalism, with a few notable exceptions, were just as cheaply optimistic about man, talking glibly about the infinite perfectibility of the human race, because they measured what man ought to be very comfortably by rules he could tolerably easily fulfil. The profounder spirits conceived morality by a larger imperative, but its maxims, though coming far short of the infinite in man's striving, imposed a yoke not easy and a burden not light. Though its one concern was moral, it merely achieved a moralistic temper, which, being a thing of rules, within which the fulness of life cannot be compressed, it was never truly moral.

      This temper itself was a limitation, but it showed itself in a dull common-sense, which could only see the world through smoked spectacles and had no sense that the marvel even of man is in reflecting all the world's wonder and variety. It gave nothing to its beloved in sleep, but often talked as if the mind had to make its own world out of nothing, when only it would find it very good. Its supreme limitation is seen in its conception of God. He was a useful explanation of things as they are, and He may be necessary some day again as a judge of things as they ought to have been, but to introduce Him seriously into the system now seemed to upset the whole regard for the moral individual, which was the recent, the intense, and certainly the true discovery. If God did things for us, we seemed to have less responsibility; and to appeal to Him was to betray our moral independence. For it, in short, piety was only morality on crutches.

      The reason was simply that the idea of God as omnipotent direct force was never called in question. Man was a finite force operating within frontiers which, though marvellously delimited, would be utterly submerged by much less than the measureless flood of omnipotence. Therefore, nothing was more important, [30] in the whole system than to delimit man from God, and to secure that God remained in deistic isolation from a system, which, the more perfect He had made it, could the better do without Him. And, with that exclusion, everything went that was not of striving and crying.

      The poetic and philosophical movement which followed, and which dominated the nineteenth century, usually called the Romantic Movement, was not a completion, but a reaction. That it had any kinship with Augustinianism or Calvinism is less easy to perceive, because, while its interest was the same, and its limitations the same, and for the reason that essentially its principle was the same, its temper does not encourage comparison.

      It had the same sense that morality is subtler than rules, and the foundation of peace securer than resolution, and the highest in man a reflection of things far beyond man's achieving, and God the eternal presence of a self-revealing, immanent reality in all happenings. As never before, it conceived the world as a great, changing, opulent spiritual reality, and valued in man that infinite variety of type, that amazing individuality wherein he reflects the riches of the universe. That spacious worldly temper does not suggest either the fifth century or the sixteenth, but how many other interests have suffered a similar transformation! And there are indications that even the old temper was not wholly changed. In its own way it also said "Glory to God in the Highest"; and the authorities at once began to recover their places. Only one authority proclaimed itself infallible, but others acted as though they were. The discovery of the individual had considerable lip service, but was really an embarrassment. The fact that there are no spiritual values except through the worth of our own insight, choice and personal consecration, and no [31] spiritual ends unless the moral person is an end in himself, was implicitly denied even when explicitly affirmed; vague incarnations of values, now more state than church, were set over man, as images to which he must bow and which it is his end in creation to serve. The essence of the whole matter is that the individual is only a pattern in the web, important as pattern, but only because the warp and woof run through him as through all the rest of the universe. The final word was immanent cosmic process, and rational man was but its highest vehicle and most conscious mirror.

      This is predestinarianism in a way to have taken away even Calvin's breath; and it gives a calm superiority to good and evil, which no doubt he would have rejected with all the intensity of his vehement spirit. But is it other than the logic of his position? If the glory of God is to act by omnipotence directed in a straight line by omniscience, He could only fix the scheme of all things in an eternal process of Reason, in respect of which we can only say that we have often had dreams that it is not all very good. Once you begin with the Absolute and conceive it thus mechanically as force, the only peace you can arrive at is to do your best to contemplate the whole as a very marked improvement upon your own unfortunate confinement to the part.

      The problem thus divided is so very easy that one often wonders why so many people have taken the trouble to write so copiously on both aspects of it. Start from one end and you find the moral individual a self-contained force, so you refuse to travel farther; start from the other and the universe is an all pervading force, which, in spite of all appearances, merely flows through the individual. Both are neat, mechanical explanations, and the mind of man feels a satisfaction in what is neat and mechanical.

      But on such terms, how shall we at once reverence the [32] sinner for the great responsibility which even her sin shows she carried in her soul, and the little child who, from his simple receptiveness, has hidden in his heart all the measureless possibilities of the Kingdom of God? Above all, why should we ever speak of God, for, buried in His world, we lose Him as effectively as when He is excluded from it?

      The illuminating fact which makes us persons and not things, is that we are nothing except what we receive, yet we can receive nothing to, profit except as our own; and both are easy and worthless when the things God has joined are divided.

      The problem of the eighteenth century was the individual with that strange frontier over which nothing should pass without his own judgment and activity; and the problem of the nineteenth the different and spacious individuality which is a response to all the varied wealth of the world and the mirror of the infinite opulence of the Reason that works in all things.

      It does not become us to be ungrateful for all the material both movements have provided for the solution. But we shall discover its true value only when we realise that the problem of the twentieth century ought to be to put the problems of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth together and to show how the nature of a person is such and the grace which succours it is such that they cannot be divided, making it appear how a higher sense of responsibility is a deeper humility, and a more entire humility, a more courageous responsibility, or, in other words, how absolute moral independence and absolute religious dependence are not opposites but necessarily one and indivisible. [33]

THE TRANSFORMATION to philosophical theory has diminished passion and increased inquiry, has extended the scope of the question so that, to all things and not merely to a few concerns of a few persons, God's best method of working may be shown to apply, and has made clear the issue as between moral independence in ourselves and a blessed dependence on something greater. Yet most of the philosophical appurtenances are mere stage properties, and the living heart of the issue, when we strip them off, is still the mere theological or anti-theological dogma of the predestined or the free. The vital issue is still the kind of relation to life in which a man thinks he has found his own emancipation, by which alone, after all is said and done, any of us has any means for judging the universe. Because of that religious quality, the nineteenth century despised the eighteenth, and it is certain that, because of its moral quality, the eighteenth would have returned the compliment, had it not been already dead; and there is a new reincarnation of the eighteenth in the twentieth which is ready to do is the belated service. It is, therefore, simpler for us, while not forgetting what the past two centuries have contributed, to begin with the old controversy concerning grace.

      No other controversy has so much life-blood in it. There were hard arguments and occasionally hard blows. Religion was concerned, and not merely theology, for the issue seemed to decide whether man's trust was to be in God or in himself. If the arguments were [34] furnished from the study of the thinker, they were often as hotly disputed in the but of the labourer; and even the trenches have known them in the form of one's number being up.

      Simple, practical faith is without perplexity so long as it trusts the assurance of the heart that God's succour and His children's service are not thus at variance. But we cannot live without thinking, even though thinking, especially about how we act, readily confuses practical faith. Yet there is a haunting sense of an utter trust in God and not in man which not only does not annihilate the moral personality, but is its supreme succour, in respect of which both sides have somewhere, alike, missed their way.

      No criticism short of a criticism of the conception of grace upon which the whole controversy turns, requires any pause for consideration; because, if grace is the might of omnipotence directed by omniscience, no dubiety can arise respecting the side faith must embrace. Its lot must be cast in with Augustinianism, for there is no faith, without, in the end, ascribing everything to God. To-day, as always when we are forced to recognise life's appalling failures, faith must rely, not partially, but utterly, upon God.

      Even Semi-Pelagianism can provide no satisfactory religious basis. If God will only act when we begin, or continue acting only as we fulfil certain conditions, then, in the last issue, our reliance is on man and not God. But, to the miserable uncertainty and painful anxiety of that trust, all experience-and not least our present distress-bears witness.

      The religious man always has ascribed, and found his whole peace and confidence in ascribing, all things to God. Any good result, in particular, he does not dream of ascribing in part to God and in part to his own [35] right resolve. He speaks, not of man that runneth, but of God who giveth the victory, and he has only one hymn of praise: " O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!"

      Pelagianism, instead of affording calm trust and patience, causes men to seek security in their own doings, or, what is worse, in their own emotions, creating in them a restless endeavour to excite their souls in public or to impose upon themselves disciplines in private. But the end of neither is peace. On our own insight and initiative, or on our own fidelity and continuance, faith cannot build, seeing how nothing is more in need of the Divine succour than our failure to make right beginnings, except our failure to continue "in any stay:" Would temptation only abide without, it never would be temptation. Wherefore, the succour of our tempted, weak and wavering wills is the supreme work of grace.

      This whole concern about our own effort, moreover, is hostile to the spirit of peace. The faith which does not rely wholly upon God, but partly on exciting or disciplining its own soul, lives in valetudinarian anxiety about its spiritual health. To be perpetually feeling our own pulse is the surest way to rob ourselves of the self-forgetting vigour in which health is displayed.

      Morally, moreover, even though it be more a moral than a religious theory, Pelagianism is equally shallow and unsatisfying.

      Though, in some sense, we must affirm that, what we ought to do that we can do, moral sincerity, as little as religious earnestness, concurs when Pelagius affirms that " man can be without sin, and can keep the Divine commands, easily if he will." To be able so much as to fancy that true, we must, as Harnack expresses it, "belong to those lucky people, who, cold by nature and temperate by training, never notice any appreciable difference between what they ought to do and what [36] they actually can do," and must have no experience either of the passionate nature or of the moral conflict of men like Augustine. Even thus favoured by the frosty powers, we should still not succeed in cherishing the idea of the easy triumph of good resolve, did we not confuse real morality, which requires true insight and right motive, with respectability, which requires only visible conformity. In true morals, even as in true religion, if we believe in God at all, He must be the strength of all our doing.

      No better success, either religious or moral, attends the attempt to make the theory less Pelagian, by emphasising more the backing of God and making man's doing mainly a condition for deserving God's support.

      Morality, as a doing to win God's backing, is not moral; for it is certain to issue in a corrupt personal motive of selfish good, complicated by a corrupt personal hesitation due to considering another interest than duty. Our attention is directed from our task to our merit with God. But merit is no more a right moral than a right religious motive, and the eye that regards it is not single, and the whole body will certainly not be full of light.

      A mixture of independent purpose and dependent faith, moreover, fails to maintain the very sense of responsibility, for the sake of which the theory is chiefly esteemed. Responsibility requires absolute, not partial, independence. We may not say, "We cannot," in face of what we ought; and not even dependence on God may involve us in dubiety regarding our power to obey. A really independent moral personality is not, as this theory conceives it, a lake at low water and an arm of the sea at high.

      If grace is the irresistible might of omnipotence, directed in a straight line by omniscience, and man's will is a finite force running counter to it, the operation of God must be marked by no failure and no error; and [37] where we meet with either, we do not meet with God. Hodge's argument abides indisputable. Everything, he says, on the Arminian side at once loses its value, if it be admitted that regeneration or effectual calling is the work of omnipotence. As with the scientist or the metaphysician, so here, God is absolute, unconditioned force, force infinite and direct, in respect of which the finite force o£ the human will is in nothing to be regarded. Thereafter, it would seem, nothing is to be said, except that faith and reason are for once agreed.

      The inevitable reaction, nevertheless, from Augustinianism to Pelagianism, from Calvinism to Arminianism, testifies that man's spiritual needs are not satisfied, and the shallowness of the Pelagian argument is only proof of the depth of the instinct, for men are usually satisfied with bad argument only when their convictions rest on other grounds. Being convinced that the very business of religion is to give us succour in this vast world of overwhelming forces, we cannot rest content to ascribe our whole life to the direct operation of God, after a fashion that makes God the most overwhelming of all forces, the most destructive of any reality to which the name personality could be given.

      If grace is the direct force of omnipotence, to keep the personality, in some measure, apart from God, and set it over against Him, would seem the only way of escape. To set the finite against the Infinite, to ascribe value to the human will over against the Absolute will may not be convincing in logic, but how is the personality, which alike gives meaning to morality and value to religions to be preserved, if not by thus setting our religious dependence and our moral independence in antagonisms?

      Argument, moreover, can at times be too triumphant. [38] If we have to consider the work of omnipotence alone in regeneration, what reason have we to go beyond it in any other sphere? Is it responsible only for the regenerate, and not also for the unregenerate? Why should we restrict it to effectual calling, and not ascribe to it also vicious desire and the perverse will? Is not all the world the work of Omnipotence? If, then, God can work anywhere with overwhelming fiat, why not everywhere? Can a world, thus easily to be corrected, be evil, and Omnipotence be good and blameless?

      These questions may not be dismissed as a mere logical dilemma which practical faith may ignore. Faith, on the contrary, is deeply involved: fox the faith which works with this direct idea of God's omnipotence is, in a world in which God seems so sparing of good and so tolerant of evil, continually locked in a death-struggle with the fear that, either God cannot help, or does not care.

EVERY FORM of Catholicism is an attempt at such a compromise with Augustinianism as shall meet the needs both of faith and responsibility. Catholicism also holds the conception of grace as Infinite power in conflict with man's will as finite power. On reaching God we find irresistible might and, therefore, a sphere in which there are infallible authorities and absolutely efficacious operations. But only at times are we within the scope of its full activity. God is the limitless ocean, but the locks so regulate its tides that the little lake of human personality may have something both of the [39] freshness of the ocean and of the amenity of an inland sea.

      The Church is thought to be the special sphere of absolute operations; and the more it is secure, the more the rest can be left to the freedom of its ways. The individual rein, so to speak, can be relaxed if the ring-fence of the Church is without a breach.

      The Augustinian idea of grace thus remains unaltered, and attention is directed wholly to the limit of its operation. The Church is assured, by omnipotence directed by omniscience, of absolute security in creed, organisation and the means of grace. The basis of the Church, in short, is purely Augustinian. It is the sphere of a power which overrides every deflecting agency. But, the absolute reliance upon God which religion requires being thus provided in a definite sphere, we may safely assign freedom to the individual will and even cherish a more Pelagian view of merit.

      The compromise of an Augustinian church with Pelagian members had practical value in providing room both for faith and duty. As an escape, on their own conception of grace, from a rigid Augustinianism or an easy Pelagianism, it had no small measure of success. Yet the hesitating temper known as timor filialis, which demands other securities besides childlike confidence, shows that it does not provide the utter dependence on God religion requires; while its age-long conflict, both with personal and with political freedom, proclaims aloud its failure to provide the absolute independence which alone can satisfy morals.

      Reason and religion alike, moreover, tend to extend and not to limit Augustinianism.

      If prophet or pope can be so overridden by the direct might of God as to guarantee infallible guidance, and if that is the higher way, the only way absolutely manifesting God's working, why is there a lower? If God [40] can so control any spirit, and it is a supreme good so to be controlled, why not all spirits, to the utter exclusion from the world of error and sin? If some souls, by the finger of God's power, are transformed in their substance in melius, as Augustine expresses it, why are not all made of the best substance in the first instance? Or, if for unknown reasons, the improvement must be effected later, the restriction of the operation to so special a channel of grace would surely argue in the Infinite a strangely parsimonious mind.

      Even while the ring-fence of the Church held good, dissatisfaction with this roundabout way of relying on God and desire for a more personal and direct dependence could not be quite suppressed. Every revival of religion, every movement of greater spiritual earnestness and depth, tended to return to Augustinianism for the individual, as well as for the Church. This need for a nearer and more personal assurance of grace was naturally intensified after a large breach in the ring-fence of the Church had been made by the Reformation. Luther, no less than Calvin, was an Augustinian, and many shared in Calvin's intense conviction that everything short of complete pre-determination came short of the glory of God, being so much less reason for putting our trust wholly in Him.

      After the Reformation, however, as before, the conception of grace remained unchanged. More clearly than ever it was conceived as the operation of omnipotence directed by omniscience. The sole problem was still its sphere of operation. That was transferred from the Visible Church to the body of the elect, made one because each is individually chosen and by absolute power made regenerate.

      There was still, moreover, the same distinction between an efficacious and a common grace, only efficacious grace was now a ring for each and not a [41] ring-fence for all. A direct, irresistible, individual force of grace would guarantee for the elect, in a way impossible for a corrupt and divided Church, unity of faith, purity of organisation, and a still more directly and externally secured salvation.

      On this paint the history of English Christianity is illuminating. For seventy years after the Reformation, in so far as it was not Roman, it was Calvinistic. These seventy years cover the whole period during which it was possible to cherish Calvin's hope of a body of elect kept, by the power of omnipotence, in unity of faith and practice. When the might of grace, though backed by the might of the State, failed to maintain even the appearance of harmony, some turned their hopes once again towards the ring-fence of the true Church, whereupon they became Arminian in their view of the individual; while those who continued to maintain liberty without, tended to emphasise still more exclusively God's unconditional election, enlightenment and control within.

      The reason for the divergence was not a difference of goal, but only different ways of seeking to reach the same end of a direct operation of omnipotence, which would secure the one infallible truth, the one true fellowship, and the one unvarying, externally guaranteed salvation. One side placed it in the individual and the other in the Church, but, to both alike, reliance upon God meant, at some point, reliance upon overwhelming force. The tradition was, in the one case, more guaranteed from without, and, in the other, more from within, but for both parties alike, faith was fundamentally acceptance of a tradition guaranteed in some way as infallible. Justification was passed round by way of the Church in the one case, and delivered more directly to the individual in the other, but, for both alike, it was a judgment arbitrarily attached to faith by absolute Divine fiat. Finally, to this justification grace for re-generation [42] and sanctification was appended, with some difference of view as to the necessity of the channel of the Church, but with no real divergence on the view of it as a direct operation of God from without.

      In all these systems there is a unity of aim which makes it plain that, for all alike, the perdurable ground of all high faith and of all deep morality alike is the grace of God. But, if they are all in conflict with fact, bankrupt in logic, and unable to reconcile religion and morality--the most inseparable interests of our nature, would it not seem that something is omitted in their conception of grace, some finer, subtler, more pervasive dependence of man on God, as though we should assume that the lake depends upon the ocean only by canal or tide, and forget the rain-bearing clouds, which not only rise from the bosom of the deep and for ever maintain the lake in brimming fulness, but which refresh all its landscape, so that it is not as a dead eye in the pale and rigid visage of a desert, but is the ever changing glory in the face of the fair and fertile vale?

THIS VIEW of God's will as infinite force and man's as finite force seems, so far as our spiritual nature is concerned, to leave us three options, all alike unhappy. The floodgates of God's might may be so opened upon man as to obliterate all his individual features in one universal inundation; or they may so shut off God's succour as to leave man's whole nature a parched desolation in which uninspired resolutions grow as a meagre salt bush; or they may so let grace out in places and withhold it [43] in others as to break up the desert only by stagnant pools. When we insist that God's power, being absolute, can have no limitation, human responsibility vanishes and no human character is left even in error and sin; yet, if we set over against God man's will, as the only element in moral decision, morals become negative and external, and religion a mere appendage to this formal morality. Working compromises readily ignore logical contradictions, if only, in spite of logic, they can be made to work. But when they work for the corruption of morals by religion and of religion by morals, more than theory is at stake. The conclusion would seem to be that "fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute" involves controversy so endless, unconvincing and profitless that it should be left to occupy a vacant eternity and be dismissed from time. But the question will not remain dismissed, because the nature of our dependence upon God is of the most practical moment both for our liberty and our faith, our morals and our religion, and, so long as we think of God's will as Infinite force and man's as finite force, the only way is to determine their boundaries. Then, forthwith, our moral independence and our religious dependence become

      having nothing in common save a hostile frontier.

      But the method which leads to a practical result so disastrous requires us to carry the question farther back, and to ask whether grace is a force which can be delimited. Behind that question, is yet another of vital importance to the answer we shall give. How shall we ask? Is it to be in the old way of arguing down from the throne of God, or propounding what seems to us fitting in the relation of an Infinite Being to His finite creatures, or is it to be upward from the actual position we occupy here below? [44]

      For mapping out from above God's operations, it must be admitted that we occupy no vantage ground. We are not able at all to soar, and we look up with no eagle eye. Only if we can see grace as it works on earth and understand it as it effects our own experience, can we possibly hope to have either clearness or certainty.

      As soon, however, as we are able to rid ourselves of the idea of omnipotence guided by omniscience as irresistible violence on a pre-determined scheme, and conceive it as freedom to choose its own ends, directed by a manifold wisdom selecting and using the means for attaining them, we begin to see how worthless is this scheme of the Divine and how vital is an understanding of our own experience. If instead of a God circumscribed on every hand by considerations of His own dignity, we have One manifesting His wise care in the most trivial events and common relationships, a God primarily concerned with our need and not with His own schemes or His own honour, to look up from earth will not be a disadvantageous position forced upon us by our lowliness, but the only place from which to understand a relation to us which is of love in the sense at least of being considerate of what we are. If grace is determined by love, not merely as spacious sentiment, but as this practical regard, the first question cannot be, How would it seek to display its dignity? but must be, How would it serve its children? And as that service takes place upon earth, our experience upon earth alone can be the means of understanding its character. The supreme question, therefore, regarding grace, would be, What, amid all it does with us, is the end it seeks to serve?

      If to that question, we can give only one answer, The succour of moral persons, clearly the way to understand the nature of grace is not to theorise about the operation of omnipotence, but to ask ourselves, What is a moral [45] personality, and, how is it succoured? To consider instead the coruscation of omnipotence as resistless might and of omniscience as undeflected fixity of plan, is as if an engineer could only prove his power by making engines weighty enough to break all the bridges. Real power, on the contrary, is never violent, and real wisdom never rigid.

      If grace, therefore, be the operation of love, the essence of which is to have its eyes directed away from its own dignity or any form of self-display and towards the object of its care, an inquiry into its nature must be vain which does not start by considering the human nature it would succour. In that case, the first question is not, What is the nature of God's grace? but, What is the nature of a moral person?

      The moment we turn to this latter question, we find that the vital and distinguishing characteristic of a moral person is what philosophers have called autonomy. When that is lost, man is no longer a person, but is a mere animate creature. The independence is the singular, the unique quality of a person, and in any relations between persons where, on either side, this is ignored, the relation becomes less than personal. All free and noble and right relations between men, on the contrary, depend on keeping it sacred and inviolate, on both sides and in all aspects of life.

      This autonomy appears in the essential quality of our experience, that it is self-conscious; in the essential quality of our aims, that they are self-directed; in the essential quality of our acts, that they are self-determined. Yet, we must beware of regarding these as separate autonomies, because much futile and misleading discussion arises from thus isolating the problems of mind. All these aspects, on the contrary, are necessary for the one independence which marks a moral person. Its autonomy consists in being self-determined, according [46] to its own self-direction, in its own self-conscious world. No succour that would be personal may ignore this central characteristic of the moral person. Every day we are reminded of the impossibility of truly helping people except through themselves, and of the irrelevance for our own lives of all that does not approach us through some personal relationship. Help may be irresistibly individual, as when we pick up a child, in its despite, from under a carriage wheel, yet it may be as little personal as when the child is still left struggling in the arms of a stranger, crying for its mother. No really personal aid can be of purely external operation, but must call forth a response from within. It cannot even be direct in any way, but must pass round so as to embrace the giver and receiver in one fellowship. Nothing could be gained for that end by increasing the might of a direct force even up to omnipotence or directing it on a perfect plan even up to omniscience; but the more overwhelming it were, the less personal it would become.

      If this be also true of God's relation to His children, it is manifest that His grace must work through His world, and that to isolate it from the religious and moral interpretation of our experience is merely, from first to last, to turn a living personal relation into a mechanical abstraction, which cannot but mislead us in all our thoughts about God.

IF GRACE is concerned with the succour of God's children and not with the display of His sovereignty, an inquiry regarding its nature must begin by asking what kind of personality God has given His children, and how it can [47] be succoured. The importance of this course will appear, if we remember that a moral person has already been described as a being which is self-determined, according to its own self-direction, in the world of its own self-consciousness; for the grace which is to be a personal succour cannot be, if this is the nature of a person, mere overriding might.

      First, the moral person is self-determined.

      That issue is not necessarily decided by the metaphysical question of the freedom of the will. To it Augustinians themselves have given opposite answers. Augustine himself declared for freedom and Calvin for necessity, but Augustine no more safeguarded true moral responsibility than Calvin. Whether God presses down the scale or the world weights it, the will is still a mere balance. A direct Divine compulsion would leave no more reality to will than a direct material compulsion. To suppose that will, directly controlled by God, effects anything, is to suppose that the shadow moves the body. No one has devoted more passion and subtlety to proving the opposite than Calvin, and no one proves more clearly the utter hopelessness of ascribing everything to God, either directly or through the operation of the universe, and yet of holding man responsible for his doings.

      Of no fact, nevertheless, are we more directly conscious than responsibility, and that consciousness is guaranteed by the very existence of a consciousness of self. Were freedom merely a question of our own feeling, it might be explained away as a private illusion due to ignorance of the real causes which move the will. But were there not a sphere over which we have power, how could any consciousness of self, over against the world, ever have arisen? Unless we stand up against it, and operate in it otherwise than by the mere law of cause and effect [48] why should we ever have dreamt of distinguishing ourselves from the world of things? Nor does it alter anything to call the force God, if He operate on us as upon things.

      There could, moreover, be no continuous sense of self, without the imputation of our doings to ourselves. Self-consciousness is little concerned with self, except in so far as self is concerned with the conduct of life. We stand with our faces towards our world and our backs towards ourselves, and only catch fleeting glimpses of ourselves over our shoulders; and the continuous personal memory which gives continuity to our experience, is not due to an unbroken vision of ourselves, but to uninterrupted ascription of our doings to our own responsibility. God, of course; could Himself act and delude us into thinking we did, but if life is illusion of that nature, it is vain to speak of God or any other conceivable subject of knowledge.

      Another way of ascribing all to God is to regard action as determined by the character which God has given us. Great subtlety has been expended by many writers, from Calvin to Dr. McTaggart, on wringing from this theory such a doctrine of responsibility as would at least explain such imputation of our doings to ourselves as gives us a sense of continuity and of separateness from all other things.

      But a spinning-top, kept going by a spring within, is just as mechanical a toy as one flogged into motion by a whip without, and has just as little right to distinguish itself from the rest of the mechanical world.

      Still less is it clear why this sense of responsibility should take the form of a remorse which we never ascribe to any cause but our own will. Dr. McTaggart explains that, though it is an illusion to suppose the situation within our power to amend, we are naturally pained to find that it shows us to be bad characters. [49] Thus remorse would be of the same nature as regret for soiling our clothes, because, being lame, we were not good at clearing ditches. So far as remorse has a rationale, therefore, it would not be from anything which could have been different in the past, but, like a splint to the lame, to stiffen our characters for the future, being, like gratitude, appreciation of favours to come.

      Even if we admitted this to be a true description of remorse, which it is not, we should still have to ask how character as moral attainment improves so as to be character, and not mere disposition as a gift of nature. This type of argument appears specious only by importing ethical ideas into character, to which, on this view, it has no manner of right. Character improves and degenerates, but how? Is it merely by storing up in itself motive, as sun-heat is stored in coal--both we hope for domestic consumption and not for conflagration?

      But, does that explain the formation of character? No doubt we all act, in some way, after our character, but, how is it that some of us act in such a way that our characters improve and others in such a way that our characters degenerate? Character is said to form itself rowing in life's troubled sea. But, if we row against it or float with it only according to the kind of persons we happen to be, while life might be saved or shipwrecked, our character ought to remain what it was before, mere disposition, good or bad as the fates decree.

      Unless there is more, what right have we to speak of character at all, and not merely of disposition? By treating action upon moral character as if it were mere action upon natural disposition, and then caricaturing the free-will as a balance possessed of the absurd characteristic of ignoring the weights put into the scales and of kicking the beam by accident and sheer arbitrariness, freedom can easily be proved absurd and even [50] immoral. Is not an action, we are asked, approved or disapproved solely as the outcome of character; and, when a person is held responsible for a bad action, for what is he blamed, if not for being a bad character?

      In a sense that is true. But would it be equally true to say we blame him only for having a defective natural disposition? When we speak of bad character we speak of what this and similar actions have made, and which, therefore, is a just cause for larger blame than a single action. Yet it would be still truer to say that we blame a man for habitual disloyalty to the possibilities in him of being a good character, than simply to say we blame him for being a bad character. Did we think action upon character a fixed, direct, invariable result, as oil, acting after its nature, encourages fire, and water, acting after its nature, discourages it, we should not find it either intrinsic goodness or badness. We should approve or disapprove only as it served the occasion, as we approve of fire in a stove warming us, but disapprove of it in the middle of the room devouring our furniture. In no case should we dream of ascribing responsibility to character for not being something else, any more than we should hold water responsible for not being oil when our stove burns low, or oil for not being water when our carpet is ablaze.

      We ascribe responsibility, not because we are indifferent to motive or uninfluenced by our character, but because we are assured of a power to allow or to restrain motive, according as we are loyal or disloyal to a character which, except in so far as it has been lost by previous disloyalties, has power to approve the good and disapprove the evil. Action is specially disapproved as the outcome of a bad character, but only because character, as distinct from disposition, is itself the most permanent result of our loyalties and disloyalties. Bad action as the issue of mere native disposition, we rather condone. [51]

      The very possibility of abandoning our moral sovereignty, surrendering ourselves to the anarchy of impulse, ceasing to be a person and becoming a feather wafted on every breeze, shows that the will seated on her throne is no mere mandarin that nods with the shouting of the loudest crowd of motives.

      Will, moreover, is one with ourselves as no other possession can be identified with its possessor, and there can be no personal relation with us except through it. Nor may God, any more than man, ignore it, yet treat us as persons. We have much experience of constraints beyond our power to alter, which are doubtless appointed of God. They may be of moral value, if, like a barrier in a wrong road, they encourage us, of ourselves, to search for the right, but in themselves they are not personal, and, therefore, in the strict sense do not concern our moral relation either to God or man.

      Yet self-determination cannot be rightly judged when taken by itself. Only by isolating it from the self-direction by which it is guided and the self-conscious world in which it acts, is necessitarianism made plausible. Wherefore, we must pass on to the further aspect of personality, that it is self-directing, always remembering, however, that that is only another aspect of the same activity and not a new attribute.

      Second, a moral person is self-determined according to his own self-direction.

      All discussion about freedom which is not mere dialectic, deals with loyalty to our own legislation for ourselves. Action, though otherwise not wrong, is less than right, unless we, of our own insight, judge it right; and, when it conflicts with that insight, its innocuousness does not hinder it from being, for us, wrong. Whatsoever is not of our own faith, is for that sole reason, sin. What is called heteronomy, that is [52] legislation for us by others, is, at best, a non-moral state, in constant danger of becoming immoral. As being towed is not steering, and, on damage to the tow-line, may be shipwreck, so is an externally directed morality.

      Though conscience needs to be educated, and all life ought to be its education, it may not, in the sense of being told what to say, be instructed. Education, instead of imposing upon us the verdicts of others, commits us more entirely to the task of producing the knowledge of right and wrong from our own personal insight. What is called the direction of conscience is merely the substitution of rules for insight. Hence it is of the essence of a right relation to God as well as to man that He is not, in that sense, a director of conscience.

      To allow a judgment of right to be imposed on us by other people's consciences is a wrong moral attitude to life, which exposes us both to a wrong measure of duty and a wrong motive for its performance. In the first place, the hardest casuistry is easy to meet, compared with the demands, upon motive as well as act, made by our own consciences. To lay ourselves open to rules laid down for us, is, in practice, to be exempted from all the calls which go beyond good custom and obvious good conduct; whereas, to lay ourselves wholly open to our own consciences is to find our true duty begin where rules end. This is the more certain that, in the second place, we are led, in seeking to make other people's rules our standard, to make other people's approval our motive. But to be influenced, in that way, from without is no moral motive, even as to be content merely with what other people can see is no moral ideal.

      More exclusively than our relation to our neighbour, our whole relation to God is determined by the independence of our moral judgment. The ground of respect for all sincere judgment of right is not that it is infallible, but that, in so far as we see right, we find [53] God's will. That moral faith in God can rest only on our moral independence, for it presupposes the identity of the will of God and the moral order. Once admit external and arbitrary commands as His will, commands imposed from without and arbitrary so far as our discernment can go, and God and the moral order are no more one. Good then becomes merely what God wills; and there is no more any meaning in calling God good. An order imposed by God otherwise than through our own sense of right, however exalted its demands, would be no true moral order. Nothing is morally observed which is done as the exaction of God's will, and not, even in submission, as the expression of our own. Nothing is adequate to our whole moral relation to God short of the identification, through our own insight, of our duty with His will. God cannot be served by setting conscience on one side and consecration on the other. To be independent moral persons, legislating for ourselves, is not only not hostile to true knowledge and right service of God, but is the imperative condition without which God can neither be known nor served.

      The only vital question regarding self-determination concerns our freedom to follow this self-direction--to do, of our own purpose, what we know, of our own insight, we ought. Liberty of indifference may, or may not exist, but the only liberty of moment concerns freedom of choice between preference and duty. The sense of being within our duty is, at the same moment, the sense of being within our power; for what we cannot do no " ought " can impose upon us. To apply that only to physical hindrances and not also to character is mere immoral juggling; and to say that we cannot because we lack the necessary succour of God is equally immoral fatalism.

      Finally, this self-determination according to our own [54] self-legislation is only possible because its sphere is the world of our own self-consciousness.

      When we say the moral person lives in the world of his own self-consciousness, more is meant than that every person is conscious of self. Self always remains at the centre of experience, because the world I deal with is all of it my world, towards all of which I can be active, if only by way of approval or disapproval.

      By that activity the circumference as well as the centre of that world is determined. It is the sphere in which we can be self-determined according to our own self-direction. The horizon is thus drawn by the efficacy of our freedom, just as the width of our outlook by the efficacy of our climbing. In view of the enormous variety of the world without us, capable of being known, and of the enormous variety in our mind within, known already and capable of returning into consciousness, M. Bergson must be right in maintaining that the difficulty is less to explain what enters consciousness than how the rest is kept out. The only answer we can give is, at least, of moral quality. Our window is not designed primarily for the view, but for the practical purpose of watching the road along which events travel, so as to foresee them as they come, bring our experience to bear upon them while present, and preserve their lesson as they depart. The object is not to embrace the largest possible landscape, but rather to confine us to the world of our interests and our activities.

      The result is an experience so intimately one and so essentially our own that we must either rule in it or live in perpetual domestic anarchy. With that rule alone all that is really personal is concerned. Events quite outside of that self-conscious experience may determine the situations with which we have to deal, the springs of motive in respect of which we must direct ourselves, and even the disposition which affects deeply the ease or [55] difficulty of our task, but, till they enter the world of our self-consciousness, they have no personal relation to us.

      The moment they enter consciousness, however, a transformation takes place. Before, they were isolated events, morally indifferent in themselves; forthwith, they are part of our experience and come within the scope o£ one judgment, which includes an estimate of ourselves as well as of our world.

      Not till we realise that we act in a world which is, in that moral sense, our own, can we see the full scope of our personal independence. However much it may be given, the world which is our real moral sphere is ours only as we interpret it, are interested in it, judge it, use it. No new experience can be merely added to it, but can only enter as our whole world is adjusted to accommodate it. Neither impulses, nor anything else prevail in it by being shot into it like arrows out of the dark.

      If an act retain its personal character, and is not mere blind surrender to emotion, it not only springs from our personal will, but it deals with the whole world of our self-consciousness. Acknowledged or unacknowledged, every really personal action is done on what Kant calls a maxim--a valuation not only of a particular way of acting, but of ourselves and of our world in relation to it. The hand is not put forth to steal by force of hunger as the piston rod to work by force of steam, but the course of action involved in thus satisfying hunger is consciously accepted in such a way that all contrary motives in our whole conscious world are ruled out. Thus, for the moment at least, the whole level of our own personal world is brought down or up to the level of our action, and its permanent level is thereby affected.

      The relation of a person to his actions is somewhat [56] like the relation of a reservoir to its conduit. A high conduit with its greater power is not possible without a high reservoir, yet a low conduit lowers the whole level of the reservoir. Thus to offend in one is, in a very true sense, to offend in all, there being no act in which both ourselves and our whole works are not involved. The misery of failure is the anarchy it brings into what cannot be other than our own household, which we must continue to profess to rule. In that task God, no more than man, can help us except through our own purpose, guided by our own insight, dealing with our own world: and, only as grace works in that personal way through ourselves, is it God's dealing with us as His children.

A PERSON IS thus distinguished from a mere individual by the call to rule, in his own power and after his own insight, his own world. The essential quality of a moral person is moral independence and an ideal person would be of absolute moral independence.

      But the essential quality of a religious person is to depend on God; and he must be as absolutely dependent as a moral person must be absolutely independent. As he seeks a peace which shall endure through self-distrust and the sense of sinful blindness and the overwhelming might of adverse fortune, no part of his reliance can be on high resolve or a pure conscience or a manageable world.

      Religion and morality, therefore, cannot be harmonised by compromise and the just mean between reliance upon ourselves and reliance upon God. [57] Compromise, moreover, is as fatal in practice as in theory. In the nature of the case, and not alone by unfortunate accident and individual perversity, piety used as a buttress for moral independence, weakens and corrupts morality. Consciously pious persons are often not moral, in part merely because the natural man can use considerations of piety, like any other convenient evasion, to confuse moral issues, but still more because to substitute dependence upon God for the clear moral sense that we can because we ought, is itself a confusion of moral issues. There is no need to go the whole length of bribing conscience by the hope that occasional times of pleasant and profitable aberration God will wink at; for merely to put conscience on one side and God's mind on the other, and our wills on one side and God's succour on the other, is a frame of mind full of moral pitfalls. And even less is of evil. Though we should admit between them no possibility of conflict, to buttress the approval of our conscience by the motive of doing good to win God's favour would itself endanger the only safe moral attitude, which is to do right solely from reverence for right itself.

      Because morality can be so readily corrupted by compromise between moral independence and religious dependence, the history of modern Ethics is little more than an account of various attempts to free morality from religious authority and religious motives, and to find in itself its own sanction and the reward of its own laws.

      But there is equally good reason why the history of modern Theology is little more than the story of various attempts to rest religion on its own basis, by showing that it is no mere reward for good behaviour, but has its own sphere and is itself the ground of its own trust and hope. Religion, modified by moral independence, [58] cannot be pure, because it is changed from faith in a truly spiritual hope into trust in a moralistic legal righteousness; and it cannot be strong, because faith conditioned by our moral state is, in the last issue, not faith in God, but in ourselves.

      Compromise being found unworkable, isolation has been tried. Religion and ethics, we are told, must, like Abraham and Lot, go their separate ways, and no more attempt to feed their flocks on common pasture. The religious type turns towards the East and the moral towards the West; and their only hope of reconciliation, even in eternity, is to separate far enough to meet somewhere on the other side of the world. On this side, at least, they never could be far enough apart to prevent suspicion and hostile feeling. On the one hand, we shall have a man like Augustine, apt to regard every claim to moral independence as savouring of ungodliness, and treating the appeal to conscience, not as a justification, but as the essence of the offence, when private judgment is set against what is for him God's battalions. On the other hand, we shall have a man like Kant, to whom every kind of dependence, even upon God, is only moral flaccidity, so that to betake ourselves, even in the stress of moral conflict, to prayer for help, is to endanger our moral integrity at the moment we try it most.

      That counsel of despair might, through weariness, prevail, did it leave a situation practically tolerable. But the nature of the case, our own experience, the history of faith and morals, all proclaim that nothing except disaster can result from assigning interests so central and so inseparable to different persons, or even to separate compartments of one life.

      On the one hand, religion ceases to be spiritual when moral independence is sapped. [59]

      Faith is not spiritual unless won by our own insight into truth, received by the consent of our own wills, and applied to the government of our own lives. And, without goodness shining in its own light, every standard by which we could judge a doctrine of God is lost, and faith becomes mere submission to arbitrary greatness. As that greatness had no moral relation to us, it can only operate on us after the manner of a merely mechanical force. Then the self which was expelled by the door returns by the window. The salvation which is of God's arbitrary working can be desired only for our own selfish well-being.

      That in itself is an ominous beginning. But an operation which is effected behind the veil of the unconscious must yet be thought by us to have some condition and some result. The condition, unless it is purely arbitrary, can only be our moral state and the result of our moral improvement, but, being linked up to our salvation in that external way, our moral condition could only enter as merit, which is a thing of pride even when ascribed to God. Merit to condition grace and display its efficacy is self-regarding from start to finish, and it is the task of true religion to set us free from its power. Yet no religion can deliver us which, without merit, would have to regard salvation as the effect of sheer unrelated underground explosion.

      But the moment religion gives any place to merit, it becomes moralistic, which is to say the doing of things by rule, for some outside end; and as such it utterly fails to be our direct, natural, and right relation to God. Thus it is false, in the last result, even to its own interest of utter dependence upon God.

      On the other hand, morality, without religion, ceases to be moral. If religion, without morality, lacks a solid earth to walk on, morality, without religion, lacks a wide heaven to breathe in. Never, except in the [60] atmosphere of living religion, has morality maintained its absolute demand, penetrated from outward conformity to inward motive, grown sensitive to the deeper requirements of humility and sympathy, and, finally,, passed all rigid bounds of law and come face to face with the infinite claim of love, which destroys all idea of merit and leaves men, after they have done their utmost, unprofitable servants. Never, in short, can morality without religion penetrate from good form to goodness, from manners to morals.

      Morality likewise, left to itself, fails to maintain its own special interest--the absolute independence of the moral person. Mere good resolution is no adequate ground for assuring anyone that he can, because he ought. Unsupported by anything beyond isolated determinations, we are certain to bring down our "ought" to the measure of what we "can." Morality is, thereby, reduced to what the older theologians called "civil righteousness," which does not go much beyond decency and fair-play, and leaves out of sight the deepest of all moral requirements, which is not to act conscientiously, but to seek an ever more penetrating conscientiousness. Thereupon, the danger besets us of immoral satisfaction with a perfection which is little more than abstinence from the grosser forms of wrong-doing. And that means dependence on the external standards of our society.

      That restriction of morality to what can be overtaken by resolution explains why, just as there are consciously pious persons who are imperfectly moral, there are consciously moral persons who are not religious. The reason is not too great moral independence, for they are in the highest degree dependent on accepted morality and judge themselves constantly by the approval of others. On the contrary, the true reason is failure to follow the demands of their own consciences to the point [61] where they find that their morality depends on a reality greater than themselves.

      Religion and morality may not be either thus yoked together or divorced without destroying the depth and reality of both. No truly religious and moral person is ever tempted to compromise between his own will and God's, or to consider them alien and opposite. The heart of all right living is to find ourselves by denying ourselves, to direct ourselves by renouncing our own preferences, and to possess our world by losing it. We are persons, and not merely individuals, precisely because we unite in one these seeming opposites, and attain our independence as we find ourselves in God's world and among His children. That living movement the moralist, even more than the theologian, is apt to miss.

      The logical outcome is Fichte's theory that each one builds his own world as a gymnasium for his moral will. Moral independence is then the isolation of a Zeppelin, which not only directs itself by its own mechanism but floats in its self-produced cloud-vision of a world.

      If, however, our world is not of our making, we may not isolate our personal independence, as though it were of no consequence what kind of world we live in, and it did not matter what meaning or purpose it manifests or of what manner of fellowship it admits. Seeing we need a moral world to act in, moral truth to walk by and a moral fellowship in which to serve, to divide moral independence from religious dependence is merely to dissect living reality in order to make explanation easy. As the living unity is thereby turned into separate dead mechanisms, the explanation is as misleading as it is facile.

      When, for example, we affirm that, "we can because [62] we ought," and regard the aphorism as moral and non-religious, or even irreligious, we can only mean that our individual wills have power to realise every ideal we can conceive, and that they have this ability in complete isolation and in any kind of conflict with the nature of reality. But that confidence in mere resolution only the profoundest ignorance of ourselves and the shallowest view of the ideals of righteousness could maintain. In respect of will thus viewed, we can only say,

      The conviction that duty is power, on the contrary, is an assurance of what is possible for us, not in isolation, but in our true fellowship both with our brethren and with the Father of our spirits, and not in any kind of world, but in a world the final order of which is moral and not material. That is to say it is a confidence essentially religious.

      Self-determination is just determination by the self. But when we stop there, we have only a moral individual, not a moral person. The deep significance of the self is its interaction with a world on which it depends, yet, of which, nevertheless, it should be independent. It can act on no impulse till that is transplanted within and becomes our motive; yet its aim is never the motive, but always the handling of a situation appointed for us by a reality outside and independent of us. That situation we can deal rightly with only as we are truer to ourselves, yet have less self-regard, as we are less dependent upon outside influences, yet are better served by them, as we are more loyal to our own ideals and heedless of all else, yet are wholly surrendered to a righteousness which is in no way of our appointing.

      This distinction between an isolated individual and a moral person in a mural world appears still more [63] plainly in our self-legislation. Its independence would be mere individual preference apart from our dependence on a reality beyond ourselves. The more utterly personal a moral judgment, the more clearly it asserts itself as what ultimate reality decrees. It is no inference from the reality around us; yet, the more life seems antagonistic to all its requirements, the more it must be affirmed as life's one safe guide and wise interpreter. Only by being true to ourselves, can we find the reality we must absolutely follow; yet, only by the sense of a reality we must absolutely follow, can we be true to ourselves. Thus our dependence and our independence would seem to be apart merely as strands of one cord, which have no strength except united.

      Our moral judgment, moreover, is also dependent upon the ideals around us. Civilisation is so far from being identical with morality, that every advance in civilisation is merely a further demand upon our personal discernment to differ from its errors and oppose its corruptions. We are not, however, independent, as though it mattered nothing in what age or country we live. Our moral judgment, on the contrary, is the more independent as we most profit from human progress. Only from the summit of the development of human ideals is there any clear and wide moral outlook. But that distinction between faith in mere progress, which would defy history, and dependence on a divine purpose in progress, to be discerned amid human failure, must be religious.

      Finally, our self-conscious world, as a moral sphere, requires the same organic unity of dependence and independence. It is our moral sphere precisely because it is our own world, selected by our interests and arranged for our efforts, wherein we are always at the centre, and which has no circumference, but only a horizon which moves as we move and keeps ever [64] arranging itself round us according to the practical business we must transact in it. Nevertheless, this world, though strictly of our self-consciousness, is wholly provided for us, so that the very basis of selfconsciousness is a regard to reality akin to moral sincerity. It is moral sincerity directed towards a reality beyond ourselves, in the midst of which we cannot be independent after any fashion we choose, but only by dependence on the guidance of truth. Yet this truth, which is of all things most independent of us, we can only follow by fidelity to our own insight. Thus, at the very spring of our consciousness, we find this inseparable demand to be independent only by the right dependence, and dependent only by the right independence.

      Will is moral self-determination, sustained by its true fellowship, guided by moral self-legislation according to a conscience of right which is the meaning of reality, operating in a self-conscious world which, being given, is real and only to be dealt with in truth. Our dependence and independence are no more alien, but are united in equal marriage. We are not independent, as though we could ride over reality; but, also, we are not dependent, as though reality could simply ride over us. The moral personality is neither absolute and self-contained, nor overborne by a force absolute and wholly outside; but it must, in a manner, be always at home, even while it lives most abroad. It knows nothing of will, except as it responds to the attractions of a varied outer world, but it only truly realises its will by possessing all things and not being under the power of any; it has no ideals except as it seeks the ultimate nature of reality, but it cannot find them till it return and discover them as the absolute requirements of its own constitution; it has no knowledge except by going out of itself and forgetting itself in a varied world, but it can garner what it brings back only as its own experience. [65]

      In the end it is a question of the world, that world which is ever new and provided, yet ours as it comes within our horizon, ours, moreover, to be possessed, and not merely contemplated and accepted. Even when it is a monster, there is still trembling on its lips the secret whereby it can be turned into our fairy princess; and religion is concerned simply with the discovery of that secret. In that case, how can we imagine religion and morality alien or even isolated interests?

      But a religion which insists merely on dependence on God, without heed to its moral conditions, is in no better case than an isolated morality. If morality without religion is apt to be slavery to accepted forms, religion without morality is apt to be slavery to accepted formulas. The explanation of the isolation, moreover, is the same. Man is thought of as a unit, and never really as a person. Just as the moralist thinks under such a rule of exclusion that succour by another person who is in possession of true independence and freedom, is necessarily the limitation of our own, so the theologian, under the same rule, thinks it would be succour whether it helped us to this independence and freedom, or merely overbore us. When grace is distinguished from God's ordinary providence as efficacious according as it demands nothing in the helpless individual except a submission which grace, as irresistible might, can itself enforce, a person ruling, of his own purpose and after his own insight, his own world, is merely an obstacle God inexplicably has not removed. A relation is personal wholly as it regards our moral independence; and, in that case, the grace which merely lays a strong hand upon us, even if it be for the individual a kind and helpful hand, remains impersonal. And the situation grows worse when we set up such channels of its working as the purely impersonal dominance of our fellow-men, [66] which also admits of no relation except passive subjection.

      If grace is this kind of strong hand upon the individual, we can no more approve its goodness and wisdom because a grace which can ignore our moral independence can have no excuse for allowing our moral deficiencies. If God's relation to us need only be individual, there is no manner of justification for an evil or even a defective world. But, even in the most restricted religious sphere, the failure of this grace is conspicuous. If it is irresistible power, acting so individually and impersonally that a prophet may be a pen and a pope a mouthpiece, the uncertainties of revelation and the divisions of the Church are mere scandals of God's negligence. Nor is there a fact in history which religion can look in the face without attempting to impose dogmas upon it and drill it, in the spirit of a pedagogue, to give the answer required.

      What reason in the world, moreover, can there be, why, if grace can work impersonally and even have a material vehicle, it should not be efficacious over the whole realm at least of human affairs? Why should it pass in purity only through certain priestly channels, while all other rivers of truth and goodness may be polluted? No reason can be given except God's arbitrary will; and a will that could easily correct by power, and simply will not, is not good. Could it not control the potentates as well as the popes, and secure to their decisions a like infallible expression of God's own mind? Why, when He could by the mere finger of power have made the result so beneficent, is the actual outcome desolation and mutual slaughter?

      Nor is there any reason that is not purely arbitrary, except we distinguish God's grace from His ordinary action in the world, by being more personal, and not by being more powerful. It is not then irresistible, [67] but in the nature of the case, seeing it can only work through our moral independence, it can be resisted. We are never for it mere subjects, and much less mere pawns in God's pre-determined game, but it deals with us as with children, not indeed as those who are free, but as those whom it can only truly bless by helping them to attain freedom. Then we can see that the issues of human choice must have a real efficacy in the world, and that the struggle for good is a real conflict and the surrender to evil a real defeat. If man can learn only of his own insight and purpose, by experience of his own mistakes, his life may even be filled with much struggle that is otherwise futile, and his history be a record of much that is, for every end besides his own personal victory, error and failure. But the reason will be that God is patient, and not that He is weak; that He will not have us accept His purpose save as our own, discern His righteousness save by our own insight, and learn His thought about His world save as our own blessed discovery. Then our dependence upon God is no more in conflict with our true moral independence than in any other perfect personal relation, the basis of which is mutual respect, the relation, let us say, of a father to the son he would equip for finding his task by his own insight and performing it from his own fidelity.

EXPERIENCES, we have seen, are not personal merely because they happen to a person, any more than they would be nautical merely because they happen to a sailor. Yet the confusion between what is personal [68] and what is merely individual is constant, and is responsible for identifying the efficacy of grace with the passivity, even the impotence of man. The grace which was purely the work of omnipotence, would be so individual that no special pleading could acquit it of partiality, yet would have no manner of right to be called personal. On the contrary, it would be irresistible for the very reason that it had no concern with self-determination or self-direction, or anything whatsoever of which any person was conscious. Being pure outside force, it might have so perfect an individual relation to us as to number our hairs, cleanse every thought of our hearts, and straighten out all crookedness of disposition, yet have no more personal relation to us than a storm has to a ship which, without permitting a rag of sail to be shown or the rudder to be stirred, drove it like a log into harbour. The storm would still be the same kind of violence which dashes mote hapless vessels on the rocks; and this form of grace would still be the same kind of force as lands the non-elect into perdition.

      Direct forces act upon us individually, as upon all created things. Spiritual as well as material forces may thus operate, without requiring either our personal consent or our personal co-operation. Our mental disposition is as much given to us as our physical constitution, and the spiritual privileges with which we start life are as externally appointed as our social rank.

      Great remedial, recuperative influences may also act as impersonally on the soul as on the body. There seem to be rapid, transforming influences, which, in some lives at least, work enduring good. Part of the effect may be explained as the sudden manifestation of a hidden process of recuperation, which, in so far as it depended on struggle and aspiration, would be personal, however suddenly the strength it brought was exerted [69] to rend the bonds of evil habit. A sick man is not suddenly cured, because the result appears suddenly in his getting out of bed. But it is not easy to deny that, for persons in whom any continuous purpose of good adequate to the change was conspicuously lacking, new beginnings have been effected by experiences overpowering and impersonal. The result does not appear to be the fruit of moral endeavour, but to be a new impersonal gift given in the midst of life, a new talent, as it were, of disposition.

      Like all created things, a moral person must work with forces which are given, and which act, so far at least as human experience goes, impersonally. They fashion our life at the beginning, and how far they may refashion it later facts alone can show. But the moral and religious significance of disposition is the same, whether it be provided before we are ushered into the world, or be a later endowment. In both cases alike, it is an impersonal gift, of value only as it is afterwards personally employed.

      In their moral aspects, gifts of disposition, whether born with us or later windfalls for the recuperation of wasted powers, are simply raw material for the formation of character. A person naturally disposed to good, resolute of purpose, and with passions not easily roused by temptation, is, morally, just a person to whom much is given and from whom much will be required. Privilege has moral value only as it becomes responsibility; and whether we are born to it or receive it by unexpected bequest, makes no manner of difference. In itself, therefore, no kind of impersonally affected change of nature affords any ground for moral approval. A sudden, mysterious, mystical endowment of strength of will, for example, would be as impersonal and, in itself, as morally indifferent as a sudden access of strength of arm. It might be merely a "talent lodged with us [70] useless," or even be a false object of moral complacency, and, in the end, a cause of moral disaster.

      A gift of disposition, whether as the original shoot or as a later graft, is not yet part of our moral selves, till, by personal use, it is transformed into character. Morality is the pilot, not the stream, however favourable. The moral life is not mere hard purpose, not mere steady rowing in a tideless sea; but, on the other hand, the life is not moral at all which abandons itself rudderless even to the most favouring current. Morality is not the mere set of the stream, but the pilot who must endeavour to take the current at its flood. When, therefore, we use language accurately, we see that the moral self can only be a moral attainment, and cannot be directly forwarded by any kind of impersonal succour, however great may be its indirect obligation.

      The religious aspect of the matter is not fundamentally different. More willingly, as a rule, than morals, religion admits the existence of directly creative, and, so far as their known operation is concerned, purely mysterious and mystical forces. Some connection with our past experience religion, like morality, might desire to establish; because, while God is able of the stones to raise up children to Abraham, the living interest of religion is in God's dealings with Abraham's actual children, such as they are. But, whether it discovered this connection or not, it gladly ascribes all to God, saying with the Psalmist, " He has made us, and we are His." Nor is there any religion which would willingly believe that He may not restore or reinforce what He had formed.

      Nevertheless, a spiritual gift merely given would be no more religious in itself than a physical gift--say good looks, health, or power of endurance. Only as we reach by means of it a spiritual relation to God is it religious. [71] As a mere gift to be trusted to by itself, it might even be irreligious; and as a substitute for a right personal relation to our fellows and to the Father of our spirits, it might be used, as every endowment may, for our undoing. To make the abundance of the change wrought in us the ground of our confidence is no more good religion, than it is good morals to make our happy disposition the ground of self-approbation. It might deliver us from desire, reinforce resolution, dispel the clouds of evil imagination, yet, if it remain mere gift not turned into humility towards God and service to His children, in no way forward in us the ends of religion. True religion is so far from being necessarily succoured by any sudden and transforming experience of what Hodge describes with the Schoolmen as a material change, that to rely upon it is to expose ourselves to grave moral and spiritual dangers.

      There is a temptation to seek an easier deliverance than victory over evil thoughts and evil habits, to hope to vanquish desire as easily and as pleasantly as we succumbed to it, to excuse ourselves, in short, from the moral struggle by which alone real character is formed. Persons who rely on this passive type, of regeneration are often wanting in kind and patient relations to their fellows and even fall at times into utter uncharitableness. The reasons are that right relations to men are for them of no significance for their relation to God, but their superiority, as the work of God's special operation, is rather exalted as the common level is lowered. Then this sense of exceptional spiritual privilege is mistaken for dependence upon God, while they make a true dependence upon God impossible by thinking themselves raised above life's necessary hazards and by limiting God's action to exceptional conditions and overpowering experiences.

      Direct, impersonal changes, therefore, instead of [72] being esteemed the one form of grace upon which to rest our assurance, the one supreme gift to be coveted in ever more resistless measure, should, like all other gifts that are responsibilities, be left to God's wisdom to bestow. Far more earnestly than for their increase, we should pray for their better use; and we should even recognise that, in God's wise appointment for us, they may have no more place than great ability or large possessions.

      The experience of sudden conversion may still appear personal, and yet inexplicable on this view of the moral person. Is it not an invasion of our personality by an influx of the Divine, so overpowering as to justify the belief that it enters through some trap-door in the subconscious, yet does it not work the most personal of all relations--the recognition of our dependence upon a personal God and of brotherhood with all His children?

      Upon the problem of the sub-conscious we are not here called to enter. However large a place it may have in psychology, neither for morals nor for religion can the sub-conscious ever be more than a storehouse from which material is provided for their exercise. Whether it is replenished only from past experience or from some other source makes no difference in that respect. The sphere of the impersonal material with which religion and morals deal may be extended, if the sub-conscious is a source of new experiences as well as a reservoir of old, but, till it enter into the tasks and conflicts of conscious life and present personal issues for our decision, it can raise no question either of faith or duty., The contrary could be maintained only by showing that direction of conscience or a definite idea of God enters directly by some subliminal opening. But that view the long weary struggle for the ideals of righteousness and the unity of the Godhead makes [73] highly improbable; nor, even if it were established, should we be justified in trusting a guidance so given, save as it was tested by our conscious faith and purpose.

      Conversion is thought to rise by unrelated miracle from the sub-conscious, like Aphrodite from the sea, only because of confusion between things that differ. If conversion means an awakening to our true relation both to God and man, and not merely some amendment of disposition, how can it be other than of conscious insight? Being a change of outlook--above all in respect of the lowliest things--how can it be a sub-conscious change of nature?

      A change of nature might afford the impulse which was the occasion of revising our view, but the insight alone can be the operation, even as being turned round forcibly may be the occasion of seeing, but not the act of vision.

      Being insight, not induction, it may be sudden; and being a perception of our right relation to our whole world, it may be transforming. By illumining our whole nature, moreover, it may at once expel the evils which live only in the dark; and by allowing the Divine righteousness and truth to make themselves heard, it may at once amend the kind of slavery to habit and the weakness of moral fibre which is due to listening only to our own desires. Yet the rapidity and extent of these changes are due not to mystical transformation of the soul, but to the hearing ear and the understanding heart perceiving a new meaning in things, which changes for us our whole world. Not through the unconscious moulding of any force is the heart truly converted, but through a conscious vision of the Father, whereby this world, being changed from our own world of pleasure and possession, into God's world of duty and discipline, becomes in all things new, and our fellow-men, becoming His children, are changed most of all. [74]

THIS VIEW of conversion as a discovery that God is worthy of trust, and not as a mystic change in the substance of the soul, should not be too lightly conceded, because, once it is understood and accepted, the reasons for special administrations of grace as a sort of love-philtre, with special persons in whom and through whom they are mainly efficacious, will have lost their cogency. Instead, we require the assurance of a gracious relation to us which would at once cease, were it impersonal in its dealing or restricted in the sphere of its goodness. Its whole quality and distinction is to seek to be personal on both sides, and, if any aspect of life had to be exempted from its wise and loving dealing, we should never know where next it might fail.

      The work of salvation which has this beginning, could be occupied only with revealing God's mind toward us and eliciting our mind toward Him, and not with cleansing our souls by a grace which acts as impersonally as bleaching powder whitening cotton. Thus the question of how we are saved comes back, as, in the end, all religious questions do, to the question of God's real relation to man.

      The view of the Gospels is that God deals with us as with children. On that point, all theologies nominally agree. But, for the most part, the agreement does not go beyond the terms. To one the Fatherhood of God is a wholly mystical relation, man being linked up with Him in a kind of tribal bond, by ties which, though hidden, are almost material; to another it is a purely [75] ethical relation, the whole of it being expressed in mutual responsibilities. But a truly personal relation, gracious to us in all things, is, in the above sense, neither mystical nor moral, being simply religious, simply trust in a Person whose whole dealing with us proves Him worthy of trust.

      The essence of the situation is that God is our Father in the whole breadth of our experience, and not merely in some special sacred sphere of ecstasy or rite or even duty. Nothing less is at stake than the whole nature of the world when rightly used as God's world. The test of a true faith is the extent to which its religion is secular, the extent to which its special religious experiences are tested by the experiences of every day.

      In the life of Jesus nothing is more conspicuous than His meagre interest in specially sacred doings, and His profound interest in the most ordinary doings, of the secular life. In His parables the only figures from the special religious life of a specially religious time are the Pharisee praying with himself in the temple, and the Priest and the Levite turning aside on the road to Jericho--self-approving and little approved men, solitary to their heart's core. But what a varied secular procession of kings and slaves, and bailiffs and debtors, and farmers and fisher-folk, and housewives and children, and all at their secular occupations, with more feasting than fasting, and more marriages than funerals! Yet every mortal is occupied with God, and as he is rightly or wrongly occupied, all his life is right or wrong.

      The customary worship was, with Jesus, also a good custom, but it brought too much conflict to be for Him the sanctuary of peace. The true and quiet and restful and inspiring means of grace He found in the sunrise and the sunset, and the uncertain winds and equal rain and the fashioning of the wayside flowers. All experience was a manifestation of the Father, and not least the very [76]

      indifference of nature which has so often crushed men's hopes when they are based only on a legal and narrow-hearted idea of righteousness and reward. Jesus sees God carefully watering the field of the evil even as the field of the good, not in equality of indifference, but in an affectionate wisdom which does not give all the cake and praise to the good children and only dry bread and correction to the bad, because a rule of equal goodness is necessary for both.

      The Fatherhood of God, as manifested by Jesus Christ, has nothing to do with operations of grace confined to special channels and efficacious in special directions and undiscoverable elsewhere, but manifests itself in a gracious personal relation, which embraces all secularities. It is not as though God gave some help with our worries, burdens, failures, sorrows, sins, but were our Father only in spite of them. The gracious mind of the Father towards His children appears in setting all these experiences on high, with the light of His love shining on them and turning all their shadow into radiance.

      This relation, in its complete bearing upon life, is apt to be better realised by all of us in our prayers than in our theologies. In particular, as they directly draw near to God, Calvinist and Arminian ever tend to enter into a larger world where their differences are reconciled. And even in the Gospels, with all their varied, living presentation of how we ought daily to live in the world of our Father, nothing is so adequate to the whole scope of our relation to God as the Lord's Prayer.

      It is usually divided into a section which applies to God and a section which applies to man, the former religious, the latter moral. But that is to miss the central meaning, that there is nothing which applies to God which is not of practical moment for man, nor any interest of life which can be safeguarded apart from [77] God. Reverence is as vital a need as bread; and even the bread problem can never be settled apart from the higher reverences. In other words, our relation to God is personal after such a fashion that our religion is necessarily an ethic, and our ethic necessarily a religion.

      The whole concerns our relation to our Father, and the ruling thought, from first to last, is, " Our Father which art in Heaven," our common Father in a sphere which is no less in the world for being so far above it. Deliverance from the Evil One, with which the prayer ends, is as much concerned with that name of Father as the hallowing of it, with which it begins; and each new petition follows from what goes before, expanding still farther the content of calling God our Father in Heaven.

      The beginning is right reverence, not right resolve, because, above every other test of us, what we are able to honour is, in our deepest hearts, what we are, and, in our ultimate attainment, what we shall be. The supreme hindrance to the coming of God's Kingdom is idolatry, not evil-doing. But loyalty must perfect reverence. In practice, God's Kingdom means His will being done, and in that every task is included.

      How often is that order reversed! Let us do Thy will, that Thy Kingdom may be gradually brought in, and, in the end, every heart be inspired by the true reverence! The result is striving and crying, with the perpetual menace of defeat and the increasing shadow of despair. But the servant of the Lord should not strive, nor be, after that fashion, morally strenuous. An essentially apocalyptic hope, a dependence, not on man who runs, but on God who gives the victory, dominates this prayer as it does all our Lord's teaching; and the ground of it lies in beginning with our relation to God, and, only through it, passing to man's achievement. The order is first reverence, then surrender, then [78] obedience, yet always one and indivisible, even when successive in their manifestation.

      The significance of these great issues appears forthwith in our dealing with the common things, and not at all in the region of the sacred or the sublime. When we regard the earlier petitions as religious and wholly concerned with God, and take "Give us this day our sufficient bread" as purely moral and concerned with man, we fail to see that the whole persuasiveness of subjecting the bread problem to such severe limitations is derived from its special place in the Lord's Prayer. On the one hand, this contentment is the vital practical recognition that we live by the higher reverences and not by bread alone, in God's Kingdom and so on His supply, to do His will and therefore on a campaign which does not admit of superfluities; and on the other hand, it is a recognition that discontent is denial of our debt to God, and that nothing exposes us more to temptation. Having this confidence about our provision, we cannot be other than mindful of our dependence upon God, which we never can be with worldly ambition and discontent: and so we are brought to a true understanding of our offences in the midst of God's children, and are made aware of the dangers within, from our own hearts, and without, from the might of the organisation of evil in the world.

      Here we find a truly personal relation to our Father, with its gospel inseparable from its ethic and its ethic inseparable from its gospel, with its moral independence always inspired by its religious dependence and its religious dependence ever showing its vital force in our moral independence.

      The same attitude is manifest in all our Lord's life and teaching. His concern is not with operations of grace affecting the mysterious sources of life, but with the conduct of life itself. Yet the central interest is no more moral than it is mystical, but is the religious [79] presentation of life as all of it, except in so far as we prevent it, the manifestation of a gracious Father. Thus, in all events alike, we discover one gracious relation to us which makes them all cry in our hearts, "Abba Father." But that is realised in the service of God's children, and not in ecstatic emotion; for, by the love of the brethren alone, can we realise our place in the family of God.

      When attention is thus transferred from abstract reasoning about the kind of finality which becomes omnipotence, to the true relation of our Father with ourselves, from a relation of grace which prevails the more the less it is personal, to a gracious relationship which succeeds only as it becomes intimately personal, we find that, if we are restricted, the cause is in ourselves and not in God. Then such distinctions as one grace which is wholly common and another which is wholly efficacious, one which is through sacred channels and another through secular, one equal only to civil righteousness and another equal to the Divine requirements, can no longer find a place. Even if such operations exist, they concern religion only as they are brought into connection with a right or wrong personal relation to God. In the right relation, nothing is common, everything is efficacious for spiritual good; in the wrong relation, nothing is efficacious, everything is common. Thus the daily drudgery might crown us with the dignity of faithful, self-forgetting, humble service, while our most overwhelming mystical experience might turn into spiritual pride and uncharitableness.

      If these considerations are sound, Augustinianism have all started out, from the beginning, on the wrong road. Attention is fixed on grace as a gift merely given, and on works as human resolves merely carried through, with no attention paid to the gracious relation of the [80] Father to His children which does away with all that hard contrast between tasks and gifts. How utter is the failure would appear in this alone that grace is conceived as irresistible precisely because it is not conceived as gracious.

      Pelagianisms and Semi-Pelagianisms, making the same false start, fail even more utterly, because, setting God's grace and man's resolution in the same opposition, they assign so much to God and so much to man, which necessarily ends with the emphasis on man's doings and not God's. Such an idea could only arise when God's true personal relation to His children had been ignored and His impersonal doings put in the foreground.

      In a right relation of persons, especially of father and child, the help of the one does not end where the effort of the other begins. How is a son distinguished from a servant, if not by such perfection of help that his dependence on his father has been the unfailing spring of his independence and mastery, and no manner of encroachment on his self-reliance? And how otherwise are we to be sons of God? Not surely as mere tools or sycophants!

      How is a relation personal, except as it seeks a response? And how can we respond in a truly personal way, except in freedom? In short, what is meant by being sons of God, if not that we have such a blessed relation to God that our absolute religious dependence and our absolute moral independence are perfectly realised and perfectly made one? And what else is blessedness?

      This blessed relation means that God's will of goodness is life's ultimate meaning. As this can only be seen by a spiritual victory which does not judge life good merely because things go well with us, the trust which is the only true belief in Providence is the goal and not the starting-point of religion, a prophetic victory over evil and not a metaphysical optimism about the balance of [81] good. Yet unnecessary intellectual difficulties are made for faith by confusing a personal with a merely individual relation to God. The best ordered household can be most graciously personal; the individual treatment of the fond and foolish parent usually issues in a bear-garden. Were the universe managed as our private concern, we should merely be God's spoilt children. A personal rule, on the contrary, expects us to honour the system by which all are benefited and does not hesitate to allow us to suffer the consequences of every breach of it, till we discover that we cannot be blessed apart from our place in God's family. But the system is personal if its end is to help persons, in freedom and independence, both in their own souls and in their service of their brethren, to fulfil themselves.

      From this conception of God's rule as individual, without any regard to the conditions which would make it personal, most of our perplexities regarding the ways of Providence arise. No room is left for moral system or for any use of it in freedom. If God permits sin or suffering He has already come short. How, then, shall we expect Him to remedy what He should never have allowed? Would we, in face of that necessary conclusion from this individual view of God's rule, still maintain that it is both omnipotent and good, we must pass delicately over sin and evil, as a phase of development due to finiteness in its object or irregularity in its progress. On the stress, as at this present time, becoming too severe for that comfortable judgment, on sin insisting on showing itself exceeding wicked and evil exceeding calamitous, the only way left, on this individual, but not personal view, is to return to the old Dualism. God's rule is good, but it is not omnipotent. There is a world of self-existing, brute forces, amid which a good God is struggling as best He may. God is a kind Person doing His utmost to reinforce the good, but He is [82] hedged in by blind resisting powers, much as we are. Taken seriously, this would mean a return to the old agonising sense of doubtful conflict in life, with all its murky pantheon of the powers of darkness, and with the old Manichaean demand for an ascetic renunciation of the world as evil.

      Religion is then no more a victory over the world, but only a not very weather-tight individual shelter in the general storm. Goodness is no more the ultimate meaning of the world, but an alien benevolence precariously imposed upon it; and no religion can have what was the supreme attraction of Christianity for the ancient world, that it gave to God "the sole monarchy." Nor is there any better way so long as we think that God deals with us merely as individuals, whom, if He could, He would manufacture to His mind, and forget that a personal relation has two sides, and requires us to find God's world also our world and His mind our mind and His service our service, and all by our own insight and devotion, and that the essence of a personal system is not to manufacture us free, but to help us to win our freedom. In that case the one thing God cannot relieve us of is our responsibility. Without it we might be the clay and He the Potter, but we should not be children and He our Father. With responsibility, however, sins are real disasters to him who commits them, yet they may be permitted of God to the end of true moral victory over them.

[GAP 17-82]