IF THE relation of God to us is one gracious dealing because it includes all things, its manifestation should be a life made blessed in the assurance that all things work for good.

      Unfortunately, the associations of "blessedness" are no more with a triumphant confidence in good, but call up the idea of lymphatic submissiveness to evil as God's mere inscrutable will. For anyone who has ever loved to hear the cordage sing in a gale, or to pursue breathlessly an elusive secret of nature in a laboratory, or to fight in the arena for liberty and progress, it has no attraction. The aureole of its anaemic calm is, for them, in the same class as the merriness of England which would wet-nurse them back into second infancy by the mechanical smoothness of its social machinery. And this passive state is made even less attractive, when it appears that we must keep ourselves in it by constant effort, like restless boys under the necessity of behaving as becomes their Sunday apparel.

      That impression is constantly left on us, in particular, [84] by the interpretation of the Beatitudes. As the supreme account of the blessed state, they have been called the essence of the Gospel. But, when they are set forth purely as a series of moral precepts, heart-searching, but repressive in respect of motive, and far-reaching, but passive in respect of performance, they sadly lack the joyful witness to themselves which is the essence of good news. A higher moral demand, not content with conformity of act, but penetrating to the intents and thoughts of the heart, while remaining a mere imperative of conscience, would, in any case, be a ground of despair, and not of blessedness; but, if it be also merely for repression and passive submission, it would not seem the worthy end of a positive moral victory for which we might have tried to steel our hearts to endure.

      The Beatitudes deserve their name, precisely because they are not negative moral imperatives to be obeyed by resolution and effort, but are a religious programme of how we can have absolute moral independence in the world by discovering how utterly God is to be depended upon. They are not moral precepts distinguished from other morality by requiring motives still farther beyond the best resolution to provide, but are the inspiration of faith and hope and love through which morality becomes the liberty of God's children. In short they are the good news which Jesus lived and died to manifest.

      There never was a programme which had so little use for merely refraining from evil or even for mere opposition to it, for the essence of it is the discovery that the one way of finding the world on our side is that high, positive, courageous, heroic use of it which subdues it, which was later described as being called according to God's purpose.

      The less systematised form of the Beatitudes in Luke is usually taken to be nearer the original than the more [85] complete and balanced form in Matthew. But the principle that the more perfect literary form is a development of the less perfect is not in accord with experience even to-day, when it is easy to verify our references; and, in days when that was not possible, the probability of the less perfect form being mere inadequate reproduction is still greater. As a matter of experience, also; no one is so likely to set forth a truth in finished form as the person who sees it in its first freshness. Finally, in this particular case, it may be urged that Luke is not habitually the more careful reporter of our Lord's teaching, and that the balanced gnomic form is not without parallel in our Lord's teaching, being akin, in particular, to His way of teaching His disciples to pray. But, while the complete form is thus more probably the original, it would not be of less significance as an account of the way of blessedness, had it been perfected by the thoughts of many who had tried to follow in Christ's footsteps.

      God's relation to us, we have seen, may not be determined by abstract argument from the operation of omnipotence, but is only to be known by our experience of His purpose. As His purpose is concerned with us as moral persons, we have also seen that the true nature of His grace must be determined by what moral personality really is. The impossibility that grace should be a direct and overwhelming power, we have further seen, at once appears when we discern that the essential quality which distinguishes a person from all else in the world is autonomy. Autonomy, we found to mean more than mere freedom of the will, a truly moral person being self-determined according to his own self-direction, or, in other words, by his own conscience of right, and in a world which, by mastery in it, he has made his own self-conscious dominion. The real problem of grace, therefore, is not raised for us till we perceive that, in [86] so far as man is moved merely from without, he ceases to be a person and becomes a thing.

      This conception of moral personality may seem a very technical scheme to apply to anything apparently so simple as the Beatitudes, but, if they are a religious programme, we shall never approach their meaning so long as we regard them merely as a series of simple edifying moral precepts.

      Our Lord reverses the order we have followed and commences with the world. The reason is that He would start from faith and not from resolution, in short, that his order is religious and not moral. "Till we find ourselves in God's world, and not our own, the rest is futile.

      There are three groups: the first sets forth the nature of a blessed self-consciousness; the second, the nature of a blessed self-legislation; the third, the nature of a blessed self-determination. To be poor in spirit is to live under God's rule and possess the world as ours because it is God's; to hunger and thirst after righteousness is to find God's guidance and be directed of our own insight; to be peacemakers is to determine our ways like God's children and act as those made in His image. That is the vital religious order and may not be changed.

      Under each series the relation to God and man whereby they are manifest is set forth, but the relation to man, in And that, no religious insight which is not first ethical, no relation to God which is not, in practice, realised through a relation to man.

      The first beatitude is the key-note which determines the religious music of the whole. The blessedness of the Realm of Heaven is only for the poor in spirit, only [87] for those who utterly accept God's will for them, only for those who have learned complete religious dependence.

      Poverty of spirit is no mere negative submission to evil. It is not a Stoic temper of endurance, or an Epicurean temper of making the best of it. Still less is it a Fatalist temper which despairs of all remedy. Because it must be won against pride and self-will, its form is negative; yet it is won by victory over evil, and not by subjection to it, being the positive discovery of the end for which the whole world of which we are conscious is of God's gracious appointment, showing us how everything is within our power for our victory over the world's hindrances, how, even over what we cannot alter, we are also victorious in the attitude of a soul that trusts the God who appoints it, or who at least has a gracious purpose in permitting it.

      Poverty of spirit is no steeling of the heart which asks

      "What reinforcement we may gain from hope; If not, what resolution from despair."

      It is a present possession which delivers from all temptation to make the world plastic to our desire or to select from it only what we approve according to our ideas of immediate pleasure or visible possession, and which lays us open to all life's lessons and all life's demands, in the whole breadth of God's appointment. Thus it may be summed up as acceptance of the duty God demands and acquiescence in the discipline He appoints, not as submission to the inevitable, but as the discovery that our blessedness is in God's purpose. So long as we can shun life's worst tasks and trials, we might be happy, but to be blessed is to know that there are none we ever need to shun, because, through our Father's unfailingly gracious relation to us in all things, there is nothing we may not face and turn to profit. [88] As our own world, under our own management, for the service only of our own desires, it is not a great exaggeration to describe life in it as "a tale told by am idiot." We can neither add God to it, in the hope that He will ultimately shape it more to our liking, nor find God in it by some process of selection and distillation. In one sense, we find God through the world. The world is there for that very purpose. Yet, without God's purpose beyond it, the world has neither meaning nor good. To call it, by itself, God's world is merely to live in a precarious optimism, which is sufficiently refuted by the way every heroic soul has been received in it, and especially by the poverty, the hatred, the criminal's execution it accorded to Him who uttered these sayings. Yet, in that very defeat in shame and agony and death, He displayed the use of the world, from which no evil in it was to be excepted, but the worst be discerned as working for good.

      The difference is not between a world made by God merely and a world made by cosmic process, but between a world God uses to serve a purpose beyond it, and a world with its purpose in itself and its good only in what we can immediately possess and enjoy.

      That assurance of a world in which, if we have no rebellion when we hear God's call and follow His purpose, even sin and sorrow are no more our foes, is the foundation of the whole blessed state. The question is not whether this faith is edifying, but whether it is true, whether God has actually made the world so that it can be possessed by high consecration to His purpose, and is lost when we seek its purpose in itself, as though God had merely made it, and were no continuous part of its reality.

      This blessed possession of God's Realm by the poor in spirit works out as sympathy towards men and meekness towards God. [89]

      The way to happiness is often the comfort of ignoring suffering, but the way to a blessedness which would embrace all experience, must be the way of sympathy. From hardness or indifference the true purpose and value of life's conflicts and sorrows are hidden. To mourn, therefore, is to be comforted. But mourning does not mean passing through the world as a vale of tears, our eyes red with weeping, our cheeks white with pining, our hearts resolute to accept no joy. A cherished grief is selfish, and selfishness is never blessed. Nor could a cultivated gloom be comforted any more in another world than in this, for a habit of sadness would only feel aggrieved by a change of scene which precluded its exercise. To mourn, on the contrary, is to be unselfish, with the large unselfishness which exposes our hearts to feel with others, and which does not merely by training confer on our hands the facility to help.

      The reason why such sympathy is blessed is not to be sought in the nature of human emotion, even though it be true that to be incapable of sorrow is also to be incapable of joy, but is due to, the nature of things. Not because we are sensitive souls are we comforted, but because sympathy is the way to discover that the true meaning and value of life lie behind life's tasks and trials, and not behind its pleasures and possessions. The lust for pleasure and possession, which makes us hide our face from our brother's need, bars for us the road to reality; while fellowship with our brother's conflict and pain enables us to find God's end in the whole of life, and not merely in the part a selfish hardness would select. If we would have the comfort of God's blessed use of all life, we must, above all, never allow the monotony of sin and suffering to act upon us like the drip from our eaves, which first wakes us to think of the belated traveller and then sends us to sleep in the comfortable sense that our own roof is weather-proof. [90]

      Above all, repetition must be to us the opposite of a reason for dulling our sympathy with every fresh heart that suffers, or for being blind to the disaster of every fresh soul that is overcome. Faith in God is not the hypothesis of an easy indifference, but is the victory which overcomes the world by transmuting its failure and conflict and pain. The most selfish hardness might believe in special acts of grace, by attention to which we might be able to ignore the rest of experience, but only sympathy can discover the gracious relation of the Father to all His children, from the scope of which nothing is omitted.

      Through this sympathy we gain the insight into God's patient purpose of good which enables us to be meek. But, in that case, meekness has little to do with the conventional, stained-glass window presentation of it as bloodless mildness. If meekness is mere pliancy, as of the willow before the storm, He who offered us peace because He was meek and lowly in heart, must have been far astray about Himself. Why, moreover, should the special blessing of it be to inherit the earth? To pious renunciation of earth it might help us; but what could it do to enable us to hold the earth in blessed possession?

      True meekness is the relation to the Father of our spirits which, by laying us open to His whole purpose, shows us all things in the earth working for it. It is opposed, not to energy or courage, but to the haughtiness of spirit which, measuring by its own end and estimating possession by its own private estate, can at most inherit in the earth--and that only under the most favourable conditions--the very small part which pampers appetite and provides the pomp and circumstance of place. And even this meagre portion it has only the illusion of possessing, because what feeds the lusts of the flesh and the lusts of the eye and the pride of life, comes to hold us [91] as its thrall. Only as we discover in them a purpose worthy of us as children of God are all things ours, Cephas and the world, things secular as well as things sacred, sorrows as well as joys, the weakness of decay as well as the buoyancy of youth, failure as well as success, loneliness as well as friendship, death as well as life.

      Then, in the whole realm of our self-conscious world, are we in blessed possession of our true moral independence, by a triumphant meekness, which, having found its own true purpose in God's, need consider nothing beyond the righteousness which unites both, just because it has nothing arbitrary in it, but is discerned as right by our own consciences. Except as we see it for ourselves, duty is not morally discerned and what we decide without moral independence, and merely on the approval of other people, is, by that very fact, morally worthless both for knowing God's will and for directing our own.

      But a conscience merely morally determined could only lay down rules which we think other people would approve. The supreme test is not to be conscientious up to the measure of rules of universal application, but to be continually in search of a more penetrating discernment. As we for ever hunger and thirst after righteousness, and not as we obey a code of accepted moral imperatives, are we truly conscientious.

      But, if the moral demand is thus without limits, a blessed state, in which we could enjoy a sense of moral independence, would seem to be placed beyond all hope of attainment. How, if it is of the essence of our morality never to be satisfied, can we ever be filled? We are never allowed to feel that we have done what is required of us. Our measure is the perfection of our Father in Heaven. After our best devotion, we are still unprofitable servants. That striving after the infinite, [92] moreover, springs directly from the religious source of our moral judgments. Only those who love God are called according to His purpose. But if love is the fulfilling of the law, it is a law without definition or measure or finality. To love God with all our heart and to apply it by loving our neighbour as ourselves makes our best approximation a harassing futility by the immediate extension of the requirement.

      Rather than be troubled by a conscience with this hunger after a limitless righteousness, men will accept the sternest imperatives from without, for, when their measure is fulfilled, they can sit down in the sunshine of self-approval.

      Yet there is a security on the ocean never to be won by hugging the shore. The righteousness which is no longer a rule, but the infinite requirement of love, changes from a code into an inspiration which transforms the measurelessness of duty into the measurelessness of faith, the measurelessness of what God means and will accomplish. With escape from care about conforming to rule, anxiety about merit also departs; while, under the guidance of the perfect law of liberty, the humblest tasks assume the worth of serving in God's household. With the solemn splendour of the stars uplifting our hearts and their far travelling light upon our way, we can unite an ever increasing endeavour with an ever deepening peace, in a way foreign to every form of moral imperative and in an independence of human approval never to be won by a merely moral attitude.

      A quiet sense of possession, with an ever increasing endeavour after an ever enlarging purpose, which gives freedom from every standard of anxious merit, every right moral judgment of life demands, but no rules of a merely moral judgment of life can supply. A measured moral imperative must be changed into the measurelessness of an infinite religious aspiration and [93] assurance, into a hungering and thirsting after righteousness which has its only measure in the infinite love of God, before we can have both ceaseless aspiration and lasting peace.

      The practical effect is mercifulness in our judgment of others, whereby our eyes are purified for seeing God.

      Hunger and thirst after righteousness approves itself as real and unrestricted, by mercifulness in our judgment of our fellows. By this mercifulness we also obtain mercy. This blessing is not attached merely externally by a kind of equity which will treat us as we treat others, but it is a law organic in its nature and direct in its working, something which is a necessary moral result.

      A conscience which has found in the infinite righteousness the perfect law of liberty, has abandoned the external and restricted standards which make swift condemnation easy and confident, and has seen the blessed hope which changes anger against iniquity into sorrow for those who have turned aside from God's gracious way. And that vision of God's infinite purpose, which silences legal judgment and estimates man's failure according to the Divine compassion, also sets our own failure in the light of God's mercy, and teaches us, by our own forgiving, how God forgives.

      Thus we reach the purity which sees God. Without mercifulness purity might mean no more than refraining, after a negative fashion, from obvious breaches of an external code, such purity, for example, as is claimed by the Perfectionists, and is little more than respectability. Then seeing God would mean no more than believing in a Moral Legislator who always acts upon the strictest principles of retribution. As He manifestly does not so act in this world where the tabernacles of robbers prosper and those who fear God are despised, even that belief must be transferred to another life. But, if God is the same and man the same, why, only because we are unhappy [94] in our virtue, should we expect a radical change of method merely from change of scene?

      The pure in heart need no new scene to manifest His blessed rule, for they are purged by mercy from the crude and self-regarding association of rights and rewards which interprets God's equal providence as universal indifference, and not as immeasurable patience and gracious pity. To be perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect is no cloistered withdrawing from the contamination of an evil world, but to be like Him in kindness to the unthankful and evil, and, through our own heart of compassion, to see Him as a love which, without partiality, is concerned about the good of all His children, and not least the sinful and wayward, and which does not determine its action by mere household rules of good behaviour.

      A spirit in judging which grows gentler as it grows more pure, and purer as it grows more gentle, which forgives more easily as it sees more clearly the sin to be forgiven, every right moral judgment requires, but no mere moral judgment can provide out of the hard approval and disapproval of its imperatives. On the contrary, it always ends in a condemnation, which, as we pass it upon others, is ever apt to return upon our own heads. To shield ourselves we are tempted to compromise with human nature, till our moral rules do little more than condemn obviously disastrous crimes and vices. But, as the demands of outward respectability do not grow less harsh as they become more superficial, the mere moralist ends as a death's head at life's feast. He never can become its living and gracious president till he discovers the infinite value of man to God, without which morals are little more than rules of prudence, which it may be part of life's cheerful hazard to deny. We are morally independent, not as we see ourselves in isolation, and are, therefore, negative, legal [95] and hard, but as we see God, in whose infinite holy purpose we find a love which is our true good, and become at once penetrating in our judgment of sin and pitiful to the sinful.

      The third group sets forth the blessedness of a right self-determination. We are to approve ourselves children of God by setting our wills upon making peace.

      Here we find the presupposition of the whole conception of blessedness. Reality alone can be the perdurable basis of peace; and righteousness is the same as reality, if we are made in God's image. With error and evil, even the semblance of peace cannot, by any dexterity, evasion or compromise, be long maintained. The more compromises are dressed out as principles, the more evil imaginations are gracefully suggested, the more oppressions are unassailed, the more self-indulgence is approved as a mark of superiority, and, in general, the more hypocrisies are held in esteem, the more utterly, in the end, is peace undermined. Blessedness can rest on nothing less than peace, peace on nothing less than reality, reality on nothing less than righteousness therefore, the blessed task is to work for truth and righteousness. Under God's rule there can be no peace by way of illusion, or what the prophet calls "agreement with hell to be at peace with it": therefore, there can be no peace by seeking to lead quiet and peaceable lives in convenient blindness and passing by on the other side, and keeping generally on the safe side of the hedge, but only by a resolutely veracious will, which is neither to be attracted by the pleasant ways of evil nor dismayed by its threats. As that is how God seeks peace, that is how we are His sons. But the secret is reconciliation, not resolution--reconciliation to the bearing of any cross which is God's will, and is of God's working, not of man's achieving. [96]

      The issue is persecution from man, and reward only from God.

      This attitude also is first concerned with our relation to men. It exposes us to being persecuted for righteousness' sake and having, all manner of evil said against us falsely, for the sake of Him who is the Prince of Peace because He, alone among men, never accepted any terms nor agreed to any truce in the warfare for truth and righteousness.

      By this certainty of being brought sooner or later into conflict with falsehood and unrighteousness, the peacemaker is shown to be a very different person from the peaceable. They are, indeed, as wide apart as eternal right and immediate expediency, as the way of victory and the path of least resistance.

      The peaceable are so far from being peacemakers that they are peace's most deadly and deceitful foes. From the days of the false prophets who, by saying, " Peace, Peace," when there was no peace, brought their country to irretrievable ruin, all down the ages, it has been the same story. Their principle of letting sleeping dogs lie has provided the indulgence upon which every villainy can rely till it is ripe for disturbance. The true peacemaker, on the contrary, must be an active and resolute guardian of the peace, who so bears himself in the world that all the powers of evil are sure to try to bear him down both by violence and by misrepresentation.

      Thus every peacemaker is a fighter; yet he is not a peacemaker merely by fighting even in the cause of truth and righteousness. To make peace we must ourselves possess it; and there is no mark of possessing it like freedom from anger or impatience at persecution and misrepresentation. But freedom from resentment does not mean merely control of our tempers. It means a quietness of heart the world cannot give nor take away [97] because the Kingdom of God is truly ours, and, under that rule, evil is weak and we need not rage when it wastes its strength, and righteousness is secure and we need not be depressed when it is left to grow strong in the shade, the peace of Him, whose Cross, though the triumph of wickedness, was the exposure of its weakness and the healing of a great pity for its folly.

      In spite of all the opposition of evil, our relations with men are made blessed by the quiet confidence which has too large a security to envy the prosperity of the wicked, and the quiet veracity which is quite simple because its eye is single and its whole body full of light. But this full issue of blessedness appears only when, in courageous conflict with evil, we discern our true relation to God in the Kingdom of Heaven. Being a prophet's victory, it brings a prophet's reward, in a clear vision of God's purpose in the world, which shall abide when all else passes away, and be our perfect reward when we have become its perfect subjects.

      This promise of a reward might seem to lead us back to the idea of religion as an external bribe, and to corrupt the moral will at the moment of seeming to sustain it only by the blessing of goodness, and to burden all our endeavour by anxious care for our merit. But the blessedness of living in the perfect rule of God ceases to be mere future and external reward, and becomes the native air of our spirits in which alone we can maintain an unconquerable will, when, through seeking peace with our fellow-men only in sincerity, we enter into fellowship with the Father of our spirits in His Kingdom. As our serenity in conflict and our assurance of triumph, however great be its blessing in this life or its promise for another, God's rule is never for us a mere external reward and our service of it is never to acquire merit to gain its reward. By thus having its reward in itself, [98] it is the crown of our moral independence, as mere moral striving and crying can never be.

      Unless we serve under a rule of goodness we cannot be blessed: and no morality can be strong which is not blessed. But the strength of breathing our native air no morality can, from its own resources, supply; and when it makes the attempt, it only offers a reward which forces upon us a consideration of our merit which is too external to be moral and too much a cause of anxiety to be blessed.

      Blessedness concerns a gospel and not merely a morality; and yet it manifests itself as a gospel only as it calls forth a profounder morality. Its concern is with the Kingdom of God, but we only find that rule as we discover that it is our own. We have to do with God, but with a God who has to do with man. A true theology is merely an exposition of all that involves, and it is a gospel only in virtue of its theology; yet, as Christ's life and death were its only perfect incarnation, its essential concern is with right living and right dying.

WHILE IN the Beatitudes the will is made good mainly by insight, in the ordinary moral teaching it is made good wholly by effort. Morality is then our own stroke; and, if religion is needed, it is only as a swimming-belt. Then the intimate dependence of morality on religion, which history has recently made plain, is explained as a sort of first aid in learning to float. Law, we are told, at first appeals to religion, and morality to law, [99] but, like learning to swim on bladders, the better the end is served the more temporary the utility. With progress, law ceases to be enforced by the thunders of Sinai and right and wrong have other sanctions than Heaven and Hell.

      Many accept that view, yet still maintain the abiding need of religion on the ground that morality will always need that support. They point to the length of the course and the feebleness of man's arm; and experience doubtless confirms all they say about man's iniquity, even with the bliss of Heaven and the terrors of Hell before his eyes and all promise of help to flee from the wrath to come. Yet religion and morality, when thus associated, are both set in a false light.

      In the first place, even if morality needs that help from religion, the less the help is needed the better, seeing that the essence of moral progress is to have conscience of right and wrong by direct insight into their own nature, and to be able to act upon reverence for good for its own sake. Hence we should ever be less religious as we became more moral.

      In the second place, the backing of our wills either by religious rewards and punishments or by extraneous helps would corrupt the will by selfish, non-moral motive and slack non-moral dependence, and could not help to make the will good, could, indeed, not fail to corrupt it.

      Religion as a device for reinforcing morality, calling in God merely to fill up the gaps in our own effort or to enforce the judgments our consciences fail to maintain, dangerously resembles a mixture of bribery and magic. Not after that fashion ought it to be a physician for the sick.

      The Beatitudes take a different road. They start from the view that a good will is primarily of insight, not of effort. Religion is then no more merely a life-belt, [100] but is our atmosphere, our native buoyancy as it fills our lungs and our native strength as it nourishes our blood, the more necessary for us the greater our effort. The question of God is the question not of an outwardly reinforced, but of an inwardly blessed morality.

      A blessed morality is not one free from conflict, but one which enables us to fight as the citizens of a moral universe, and not as Ishmaelites in a moral wilderness. In that case it must be a religious morality. The question of God is just the question of whether morality is the ultimate reality or only a passing convention; and that means, whether we reach it best by rules or by penetration and sensitiveness, by setting our teeth or by finding the true fellowship of our spirits.

      The issue concerns nothing less than the nature of the world. Is it a world such as Jesus conceived it, where, if we seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, all the rest is secure; or is it such a world as Huxley propounded, where morality is a nightmare accident, to be maintained, at most for a little space and for a little time, against a natural order which can be effectively used only by the cunning of the ape and the ferocity of the tiger? In the former case alone can the strength of a good will be insight, sensitive and penetrating; for the best it can do in the latter case is to stick to rules and set its teeth.

      Morality can only be blessed in the assurance that the world is God's and in the last issue good. But, as it appears and as we measure it, it is not good. Nor can we, by any high resolve we are capable of exercising, either isolate ourselves from the evil or turn it into good. " My mind to me a kingdom is " is but vaguely true at best, seeing how every experience is of mind and how nothing in our mind can be withdrawn from the influence of our whole experience. As a realm within our control, [101] it is so far from being a blessed possession that our fortitude is little more secure than our fortune and our misery at least as much of our folly as of our fate. The world cannot be taken apart from human use of it, so that we must include in it, not only the society of our fellow-men as we share in it, but our own resolve as we exercise it. And thence come its chief evils, both moral and material.

      No religion which has deeply influenced mankind has ever sought blessedness in the world as it appears, but always by redemption from that world; and, the more fully it has faced the issues of life, the more it has included society as part of the world, and ourselves as members of society. From other religions Christianity is distinguished, in this regard, only by a more earnest insistence on the necessity of redemption and by embracing everything more entirely in its scope. Even Buddhism does not travel through as dark a pessimism, for what are virtues for Buddha are often only hypocritical respectabilities for Jesus; while, with Jesus, not only does the fashion of this world pass and its lusts with it, as with Buddha, but the ruler of it, while it lasts, is the Father of Lies, maintained in his pre-eminence by hearts deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

      Redemption from the vanity and vexation of the world, as our world to be measured by our pleasure and valued as we possess it for ourselves, is always the supreme religious need, and, without that redemption, we never can discover God's world to be measured by His purpose and valued by what He gives us to possess. Not till we learn that all things work for evil to those who love themselves and seek their own pleasure and possession in the world, can we discover that all things work for good to those who love God and seek His purpose in the world. [102]

      No faith in God is worth anything which has not faced this need of redemption from the world. Without that, it is at best an easy trust that a pretty comfortable world has a fairly benevolent origin, which adds nothing to the world as we actually experience it. So long as the world, on the whole, agrees with us, that kind of belief in God is not difficult, but, as it alters nothing in our view of the world, it can, with equal ease, be neglected as a superfluity or even denied as an irrelevancy. What we have lightly accepted we can as lightly reject. God may be an intellectual interest, yet, being an easy, and otiose hypothesis, it makes no practical difference. But, if every possibility of discovering that this life, with all its conflicts, all its ills, all its evanescence, may be blessed, depends on finding life God's dealing with us in His world, the question of God involves every question worth asking, because it involves nothing less than blessedness in our whole experience, which, without Him, has nothing in it that is blessed.

THE DISTINCTIVE element in the Christian religion is not any different from other religions respecting the need of redemption from the world, except in so far as deeper moral insight may show more clearly the moral nature of the need, and so derive evil from sin and not directly from desire. What does distinguish it from all other religions is the kind of redemption it offers. In contrast to all ways of renunciation, its way of being redeemed from the world is reconciliation.

      This antithesis, thus baldly stated, might, however, [103] mislead. Other religions, with the possible exception of Buddhism, also aim at reconciliation; and the religion which requires its followers to deny themselves and take up their cross and follow One whose obedience led to a death of shame and lingering agony, in a very high degree, requires renunciation. But renunciation, in other religions, is first and for reconciliation; in Christianity, reconciliation is first and renunciation of value only as it is from reconciliation.

      Especially in times of great stress and calamity, when life seems hard to maintain and cheap to lose and innocence a poor protection and human policies insane imaginations and passion is spent and peace not won, the direct way of renunciation has such a strong attraction that it has drawn to it many professing the Christian name. Then the world seemed a canopy between the soul and God. Under it the most man could hope to do was to erect some candle-lit chamber of ecstasy; to keep the evil dream of life from sheer nightmare by the exercise of a strict ascetic rule to curb its fantasies; to regard the revelation of God as the lightning thrust of infallible truth rending at points the darkness of existence; and to hope for the help of grace as an occasional lift under life's burden.

      But a blessedness which passes through the world and man to the Father, manifestly takes no such direct road to redemption. We are so to deal with the earth as to inherit it, so to value man that we shall see God, so to fight for truth and righteousness as to enter His kingdom of peace. Ours is to be the blessedness of the prophet, the man of all men most determined to see " the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living," to let no event go till it blessed him, to suffer no wrong to alienate him either from peace or service. His call placed him in the forefront of every battle for truth and righteousness, and made him face the world and [104] never flee it. No more by striving for renunciation than by striving for possession did he seek to conquer the world. His life was blessed because, through his personal relation to God, he had found in his life God's real meaning and purpose, and had been delivered from his false self in his own unreal world, to find his true, self in God's real world.

      And how otherwise than by finding what life signifies for personal relations is life ever transformed? Mere gifts, apart from the giving, go only a very little way, and the shorter the richer the giver. " Rich gifts are poor, when givers prove unkind," and not much richer if the givers are indifferent. Wherefore it comes that no gifts from the measureless abundance of the Infinite, even though they were gifts of grace, ever speak of the mind of God towards us by themselves. Grace is gracious only as it manifests in the world a purpose which at once possesses us, yet sets us free; makes us absolutely dependent, yet gives us independence of all things; enables us to lose ourselves, yet truly, and for the first time, to find ourselves.

      No direct operation of grace as power could ever establish such an understanding. What is more, it could not establish a personal relationship at all. The more it is omnipotent in the sense of utterly overriding our personal will, the more it moulds us as mere clay in the hand of the potter, the less it gives us a right to refer its source to a person.

      So long as we conceive the relation to us of the Divine through omnipotent operation, we never can be freed from the fear that, in ascribing the world to a personal God, we are assuming a cause like ourselves, on the ground of an analogy to the work of our own hands which may have no validity beyond the bounds of sense; for any effect which is only of power may possibly be only of process. Like Narcissus with the [105] water, we might, in an obsession of vanity, be using the world merely to reflect our own faces, when we imagine behind it a person like ourselves.

      But, if God's dealing with us, even as man's, is through the world and society, through a moral intercourse whereby we obtain mastery in our whole self-conscious world, our fellowship with the Father is verified by our position in His household, which the world becomes for us as we lay hold of its true order, abandon all thought of explaining it by pleasure and possession and learn to judge it by discipline and duty, and find thereby that we too are masters in it as in our own world. Only by that victory can we be justified in the confidence that we are not deluded, but have laid hold of life's real and victorious secret, when we deal with it through a personal God, without whose moral will it is all vanity and vexation of spirit.

      At this point many will ask, how this is effected by reconciliation: and much theology, it must be admitted, justifies the question. So far from bringing any real change into our experience, are we not escaping into a region over which experience has no control? How can reconciliation to some shadowy Person beyond the world make life in any way different from what it is by itself? What, moreover, is the actual, working meaning of reconciliation in the language of the market-place?

      These questions are reasonable, and according as we succeed or fail in answering them, we shall determine whether religion is for us an essential of life's immediate business, or only a prudent, but we trust not immediately necessary, provision against a possible future life.

      The issue may show itself more clearly, if we first consider what is meant by "enmity against God." [106] That order is the more necessary, if to be at one with God is our natural state, for we are apt to accept a natural state as a matter of course, and only to learn from some measure of deprivation how necessary it is for our well-being.

      As enmity against God is frequently set forth, the suggestion of a practical situation might seem an idle paradox. The expression calls up the vague idea of a quarrel with a dim, vast figure in a remote Heaven, so utterly unconnected with our present doings that it is difficult to see how we ever could come into conflict with Him. An abstract Being can only 'be offended by an abstract independence. For that the only remedy would seem to be some kind of abstract submission, some mollifying of Him by comprehensive confessions and spiritual prostrations. Thus the acknowledgment of being at enmity with God too often ends in superlatives about a guilty and sinful state which deals with no reality that would be admitted if clothed in concrete language and illustrated by examples, and which, even so, are only wrung out by dread of discoveries in another life, without reference to any practical situation in this.

      But reality is not one thing and God another; and if we are at enmity with God, we are at enmity with reality, past and present, as well as to come. To be at enmity against God is neither more nor less than to be in bitter hostility to reality, with the sense that it is all against us. We think reality ought to go the way of pleasure and possession, and when it goes quite another way, in the rebellion of hearts which refuse to inquire what the true way of reality may be, reality not merely appears to be, but actually is against us. Nor can its enmity fail to cause fierce antagonism; for, in a quarrel between us and reality, the strife is unequal, and we cannot escape a resentment which is fierce in proportion as it is futile. [107]

      This resentment is not necessarily wholly personal, because a great addition to our own grievance may come from a generous wrath against a life which outrages all mankind. The world is manifestly only fully displayed as the work of a tyrant, if its cruelty is extended to every creature that feels; and we are only perfectly at enmity against God when we can regard our own bitter experience as universal.

      For a generation this hostility has been growing increasingly vocal, and now possesses a considerable literature which has all the merit, and no more, that indignation can impart. This is the more impressive that it was mostly produced amid an unparalleled prosperity; for it awakes us to the need of a God who shall be more than a mere adjunct to the comforts of life.

      But graver than lyrical pessimism is the dull rebellion of every day which never hurls impious defiance at Heaven and never dreams of offering to curse God and die, which is, indeed, quite piously at enmity with God. Though religious in creed and observance, its attitude towards life remains a mixture of envy and resentment. Were the appointment of life ever seriously connected with God, it could only be a relief to learn that He was dead and would trouble men no more. Religion is often kept so aloof from experience that reconciliation to God may be loudly professed with one breath and everything He appoints be bitterly resented in the next. The God of man's profession is in one compartment, and the God of his life in another. But we are truly reconciled as we live, not as we profess, and we cannot be reconciled to God and be at enmity with what He appoints.

      Being embittered by life must, however, be carefully distinguished from being burdened by it. Otherwise it might appear that there could be no reconciliation to God till stress, as well as rebellion, wholly depart, [108] and that peace with God should be measured by the extent to which we could keep on the sunny side of the street. But the deepest sense of the difficulty and stress of life may be so far from being enmity against God that, if the burden is laid on us by a sense of life's overwhelming significance, it might be the sincerest of all recognitions of God. To accept life as our difficult and strenuous way, because we meet it with sincerity and responsiveness to its calls, would be the highest proof that all rebellion had disappeared. Not the sense that life has so large a purpose that we stagger under its load, but only resentment at its burden, as if the only purpose were to crush us, is enmity against God. Enmity against God is enmity with the lives He appoints, so that we only bear their burden because we do not know how to make it lighter, and not because we are sustained by the sense of its gracious meaning and blessed purpose. In practice, therefore, enmity against God comes to be just the spirit which resents discipline and evades duty.

      That spirit may not be equally manifest when resentment against God takes the form of wrath at the world on account of others. But the world is still estimated as it serves self-love and self-will after the way of pleasure and possession, and in no way as it affords discipline and requires duty. For others as for ourselves the world is expected to suffice without God, and that view yields no blessed meaning for others any more than for ourselves. Life, so interpreted, cannot be saved, even by some benevolence of feeling, from being as much against us as we can possibly be against it. The world as a closed system, with its meaning and end in itself and our desires as their interpreters, is evil and not good.

      By contrast, we may now see the meaning of reconciliation to God. As enmity against God is primarily [109] enmity against the lives He has appointed for us, because we insist on using them for other ends than His, so reconciliation to God is primarily reconciliation to our lives by seeking in them only His ends. Its immediate significance is reconciliation to the discipline He appoints and the duty He demands. It is thus, in the first place at least, concerned with this life, not another, being the promise of sitting in the heavenly places amid the tumult of the present hour and not of sitting in a remote heaven in a passionless eternity.

      The practical issue is comprehended in resenting no trial and evading no task, because of the discernment that there never is a trial love has not appointed or, for a good end, permitted, nor a task love has not imposed, even though it be also from our own past failure. Then reconciliation means no mere vague emotion or dim ecstasy but present fellowship with our Father in His Kingdom, as it is manifested through the world and in the midst of our brethren.

      God's Kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit, but to be poor in spirit is only another name for being reconciled to life's discipline and duty as God's will of love. From this, the true spring of blessedness, all right dealing with life must flow, for it is a gracious relation to us of our Father, from the scope of which nothing is exempted.

      This is the only true belief in Providence, but it cannot be held, either as an instinctive trust that God is kind or as an inference from life that He is benevolent. On the contrary, it is the last and highest victory of a faith which has won a vision of a true and abiding good, which is not in the world, even while all things therein become a new creation, with the express end of serving it.

      The reconciliation to God which gives this vision, seems too easy a way for so hard a victory, if it merely [110] means arising and going to our Father; and, it is thought, there must be other and sterner conditions. But it means going back to God all the way, to God as He is, and not, as, before we come to ourselves, we should wish Him to be, and finding ourselves at home in His household as He appoints it, and not as we would appoint when we prefer to it the Far-country. It is thus its own adequate conditions, being only to be received as a call according to His purpose, whereby we discover that no other purpose can, without disaster, be our own.

RECONCILIATION TO God may be defined as a recognition of God's gracious relation to us through blessedness in our use of the world, our dealings with our fellow-men, and our loyalty in His Kingdom. First and last, it is concerned with God alone; but so far is that from meaning with God in isolation, that it ought to mean that nothing can be isolated from God. While grace as the action of omnipotence is a straight line undeflected by any conscious experience, a gracious relation is a curve which encircles our whole world, and all our dealings with our fellow-men, and our complete victory in the Kingdom of God.

      As such, it has always a concave and a convex side, seemingly contradictory, really complementary. It enables us to find ourselves in God's real world, but only by delivering us from ourselves in our own unreal world; it secures us the perfect liberty of God's children, but only through the perfect service of our [111] brethren; it wins for us the possession of peace, but only through the warfare of the Kingdom of Righteousness.

      Precisely because a gracious relation is personal and ethical, God's dealings with us must take this circuitous route, this way of immediate conflicts but ultimate harmonies. It is the essence of its personal nature too proceed by seeming opposites, which, mechanically considered, are irreconcilable, but which it is the nature of a right personal relation to reconcile.

      At the outset, we are met by the perplexity that, while God's relation to us is only another name for love and love is its only adequate response, love cams neither be directly given nor directly required. Wherefore, our dependence on God is by faith, and not by love.

      The doctrine of grace which operates directly with love to God commits itself, from the start, to the conception of grace as a mysterious influx of God into the soul. Love to God as an emotion, experienced directly and apart from all other experiences, may arise and bear us forward on its flood, but to make it the first demand, nay to make it a demand at all, is to ask from us a change in ourselves, which, however much it mad aid effort, cannot by any effort be effected. Many have made the attempt, but all effort after feeling is unreal, and the resolve to achieve a feeling which is yet expected to come as an overpowering emotion by pure influx of the Divine, has a special danger of unreality. Though a spiritual force to effect a new life of the spirit, the spirit itself submits to it as a merely mechanical change from without, and we are at once in a wrong relation to ourselves when we attempt it from within.

      An emotion which is to take its place in our conscious life, must work through some medium and have some verification. Being, so far as we experience it, a direct [112] impersonal force, it is most easily conceived as passing through the familiar vehicle of such forces--material things. Hence the attraction for this type of mysticism of a material sacramentarianism. But the more mysterious the spiritual grace that vehicle conveys, the more some evidence beside emotion is needed to prove its efficacy. Regarding our whole spiritual state, the precept "Know thyself." is difficult to apply, but, of all difficult things to know, our love to a God who, remains for us a purely ideal Being in the Heavens, is the most elusive. Our actions, therefore, must be added as a test. God's work, in Augustine's phrase, must become our merit. Then this merit, to be of value as a test, must be legally estimated, and be, if possible openly displayed in visible acts of self-imposed disciplines and self-denials. Thus merit seems to be the evidence of our emotion, and so indirectly to prove the inflowing of God's.

      Such merit is not less harassing because, in the last issue, it must be waited for till God chooses to transmute our nature into love. It still remains a trust in our own goodness, hesitating but not humble. Our attention being directed away from the graciousness of God's love to us and towards the nurture of the graciousness of our love to God, we cannot attain to quiet trust in God, but meet in our path again the old nightmare of legal merit. And after we have laboured our hardest to love God, we are no nearer our goal, for the simple and sublime reason that love is not love as it deliberately fans its emotion, but only as it forgets itself in what it loves.

      That this demand of our love to God is not the way to blessedness we shall see, if we ask how it would help us in our relation to the world and to man and to the Kingdom of God.

      I. In respect of the world we have seen that poverty [113] of spirit is the secret of blessedness. It is strength and peace even in disaster and defeat, because it is the assurance that, in spite of our very ungracious relation to life and our constant blindness to its highest values, life, under the frowning face it often wears, has a wholly gracious relation to us. But dependence on our love to God is dependence on our gracious relation to life. In that case, how can life be gracious to us? If, through love to God, we have a high and worthy relation to life, what are we to think of its stern and calamitous relation to us? Must we not feel ourselves superior artists for whom this rough and tumble world was not designed? Surely it is at best a carnal sphere for carnal souls, from which it is right to isolate ourselves in order to cultivate sensitiveness and sentiment. Thus the more we are assured of success in cultivating our emotion and the more we conceive in God an emotion corresponding to our own, the less this discordant world can be referred to God, and the more it is a mere cause of dismay to ourselves.

      II. Blessedness in our dealing with others might seem to be better guaranteed by the demand to love God. Love is the fulfilling of the whole law, and the unrestricted requirement to love our neighbour as ourselves is inseparable from the requirement to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, for, except as a child of God, he cannot have that absolute claim upon us.

      A right relation to man, nevertheless, is not to be won directly from our love to God. Our confidence is that we are the good children of the family. But that is not a reason for being kind to the unthankful and the evil. Rather it justifies us in resenting the despiteful usage and persecution of the bad.

      Nor is that conclusion mere inference and theory. The societies which have sought to realise God's love directly as love to God, have, as a matter of history, [114] tended to regard themselves as God's peculiar people, exclusively the objects of His care, specially favoured of Him in this life and awaiting an abundant entrance into another, while it is no great disturbance to the cultivation of their emotions to think an impassable gulf will finally separate them from the rest of mankind.

      The simple reason is that, to begin with our love to God is to begin with our perfect relation to men, the only possible issue of which is a sense of their deplorable relation to us. A truly blessed relation to others can rest neither on our love to God nor on our love to man, but only on the faith that, in spite of the imperfect relations of all of us to one another, the bond of God's family abides secure because it is guaranteed by the love of the Father from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.

      God's love means that He calls us, not servants, but sons. To that we stand in an effective relation only if its practical, ethical meaning is kindness to the unthankful and the evil. But, when we start from our love, we have only an aesthetic sentiment which must shrink from contact with coarse and erring humanity. So far from leading to the pure-hearted humility which sees God most clearly in His kindness to the worst, it sees a delicate spotlessness which draws its skirts round it when it touches the best. Out of that fear of contamination both for ourselves and God, no blessed victory of love to our enemies in face of their evil and unrighteousness is ever to be won.

      III. Blessedness in the Kingdom of God might, even with more assurance, be thought to rest on our love to God. We enter the Kingdom as we realise that love is the sum of all blessedness, and peace nothing less than assurance of the absolute rule of love.

      But can we say that love as an emotion cultivated in our hearts, which we take to be a response to a [115] similar emotion in the heart of God, gives us either blessedness or peace in respect of any rule of God we know?

      Under the idea of God as love, thus emotionally understood, little more is presented than an indulgent parent, out of all relation to life's stern lessons and austere requirements. Such a God could neither afford us a sense of the overwhelming reality of truth and righteousness nor enable us to stand for them without any sense of distress or isolation or martyrdom. It might rather seem that a benevolent Deity could not mean His children to be so much distressed or to be exposed so nakedly and alone in the open breach. No prophetic call is here, no burden of the Lord to face every conflict, fear no opposition, stand against the world, if need be, on the side of God. An interest in specious schemes of social amelioration to be carried out by the general approval of society would be its utmost effect.

      A sentimental religion with tender appeals to love God, leaving a vague sense that an emotional profession of kindly feeling to others is the fulfilling of the whole law, has been so obviously inadequate to life that, here and there, a teacher has arisen who insisted on giving the justice of God an equal place beside His love. Forgetfulness of the solemn and arresting fact that God is justice as well as love is, we are told, the reason why we have so much effusiveness and so little reality, so much prettiness and so little facing of life's stern insistencies, above all so much cheap benevolence and so little righteousness.

      The weakness here exposed is beyond denial, yet, by that way of setting God's justice beside His love, we shall never reach any blessed rule of God. Justice and love cannot have equality without finding themselves in conflict. Justice must be put first, as a condition [116] to be fulfilled, before love can be suffered to exercise its mercy, and God, like man, must be just before He is generous. Whereupon, love, so conditioned, ceases to be love, and becomes a rather hesitating kindliness on strictly fitting occasions. Nor does justice fare much better, for it becomes little more than adherence to rules of equity.

      The true cause of this error is the notion of love as an emotion in our hearts, responding to a similar emotion in God's, and the remedy is not to say God is justice as well as love, but to know that God's love is a mind towards His children which requires a rule incapable of being anything except righteousness.

      Love to God, as the ground of our confidence, is merely an emotion, which, in itself, need be neither ethical nor spiritual, but is in constant danger of degenerating into sentiment, and, from that, into sentimentalism, which is the merest mask of true feeling.

      To begin with any of our graces commits us to a valetudinarian anxiety about our spiritual symptoms and a harassing punctiliousness about our spiritual regimen, whereas spiritual health, like physical, should forget itself in the exercise of its own energy and thrive on all it finds provided. And this applies even more to faith than to love. As a state of mind requiring to be cherished in ourselves--a grace God implants and a merit by which He saves and yet which it is somehow our fault to be without--the demand for faith keeps men for ever with their finger on their spiritual pulse.

      Forthwith faith ceases to be, in any ethical and spiritual sense, conviction of any reality. Our eyes being turned from God to ourselves, from the outward object to be believed to the inward state of believing, to be maintained simply as feeling, the usual result is a mixture of excited emotions, instigated confessions [117] and suppressed intellectual convictions, all morally insincere and religiously unreal.

      The right beginning is not faith as an emotion concerned about itself, but faith as a trust relying upon God. Only as faith arises from an object which constrains belief is it truly faith, being, by so much as it is of our own effort, the less faith. Only when, on contemplation of the object, belief constrains us, and we have no need to constrain it, is faith real. Except in so far as it impresses us as true, we have no right to believe anything; and to try to impress ourselves in a direction contrary to the object itself is to forget that truth is the basis of all right moral motive, and reality the security of all religious victory. A true faith is simply faith in the truth solely because it convinces us that it is true.

      Faith is only the right beginning when it is directed to God's gracious relation to us and away from all questions of our gracious relation to God. The greatest is still love--and there is no faith to which it is not greatest, but faith has to do with love as a purpose on earth and not merely as a sentiment in the Divine mind. It is called faith, and not knowledge, not because it is more independent of the testimony of reality to itself, but because, the reality being God's purpose, acceptance of it, as we see it, is a necessary condition for receiving its witness, as it speaks in the world and among men, because, in short, it depends, more than other knowledge, on inward sincerity. That personal requirement does not, however, make faith mere subjective response to abstract emotion in the heavens. Faith is still what we see to be true, and this personal condition only concerns the right way of seeing a personal reality. Faith affirms that the actual order of the world, upon which all our blessedness utterly depends, is of the nature of that wise [118] and holy goodness we name love. Being an assertion about reality, about what is the ultimate word of power, as well as the ultimate word of fellowship, it must either be true or the vastest and most misleading delusion. Being concerned with the nature of final reality, the rule of love which faith affirms is either fact or fiction, and can be nothing between.

      By starting from faith in this way, we start from God's love as the blessed meaning of the world, the blessed order of society, and the blessed warfare of the Kingdom of God. Then only can we see that love is no substitute for the moral task, but just a comprehensive name for the full scope of its action and the full height of its motive.

      We believe that God is love when we can reverse it and say that love is God, that, in whatsoever weakness it may meet us, it wields the might of omnipotence. To see this by our own insight is to have faith, and the man who has seen it is blessed in knowing that all the reality of which he is conscious is in his own power for good, all the ideals by which he could direct himself unerringly in the midst of it are for his seeking, and all the rule of God is for him, in all conflict, a kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. If that be the meaning of God's gracious relationship to us, the first question is, Can we trust it, and that means, Can we see it to be true? That can only be answered by the faith which sees its own blessedness to be in reality of that nature, love having, by experience, made its own appeal and been its own evidence. [119]

IF GRACE is thus a gracious dealing of the Father of our spirits with us in all the duty and discipline of life, in all the calls to love those who hate us, and in the whole prophetic struggle for truth and righteousness, and if faith in it is neither an influx nor an effort, but a persuasion of its truth solely on its own witness, how, on the one hand, is faith not of ourselves but the gift of God, and how, on the other, can there be an appeal to believe and a sin of unbelief?

      To answer by raising difficulties on the other side would be easy. If faith is a gift of God, in the sense of being implanted by omnipotence, it cannot be our responsibility; and if we can do anything to attain it, it is not, in that sense, a gift of God. But, while this dilemma shows that neither gift nor effort can be thus directly conceived, it does not show how they ought to be conceived.

      In the first place, faith must be a gift of God. A peace which absolutely depends on God cannot rest on a faith which depends upon ourselves. Yet, if faith is not an impress of power on our hearts, if it is simply persuasion of truth upon its own testimony, how is it a gift of God? In the second place, if we depend upon God for faith as well as for all else, how can we have the independence which requires us to be responsible for our beliefs?

      As the whole problem of the mode of the manifestation of grace is just the question of how God produces faith, it is enough to say here that it is not as a medicine [119] or faith-potion, like the ancient idea of a philtre or the modern idea of an inoculation, but, as any person enables us to believe in him, by showing Himself, in all His dealings with us, entirely worthy of trust. God gives us faith by the whole witness of life, interpreted by the whole of revelation, which, for the Christian, means, in particular, life as interpreted by Jesus Christ.

      But if God's gift of faith is through showing Himself worthy of belief, we may readily have towards it a sin of unbelief, not by failing to force ourselves to believe, but by warding off the necessity of believing. If, in this world of ours and in our present human, society, love actually manifests itself as the final order, the highest security, the last word of power, the real question is, How can men go on believing that the final order is compromise though it sacrifice both truth and justice, the highest security wealth though it never be devoted to a single noble end, and the last word of power armies and battleships quite independent of establishing righteousness? How, if faith in possession and pleasure continually corrupts, can we persist in it; how, if resentment and bitter rivalry are the chief cause of life's misery, do we cherish them as the way of being blessed; and how, above all, if wickedness is misery and weakness, do we resent what is sure to suffer and vacillate before what is sure to fall?

      The cause is neither too much intellectual nor too much moral independence. On the contrary, we never can believe in God's world and God's children and God's Kingdom, so long as we take our opinions and moral judgments from what is accepted around us. Humility here is not moral pupilage, but such a direct concern with God as affords us unqualified courage and independence in respect of man. The sole hindrance is insincerity, breaking the force of the appeal of love as it speaks, through our lives, to our hearts. In the [121] Gospels, therefore, hypocrisy is the only deadly sin, because it is the refusal to allow the deep things of life to touch us, and so the one sure way of escaping the impact of God's truth.

      Unbelief, then, is a sin, not because we fail to force ourselves to believe or to suppress doubt and inquiry, but because, to some evil intent, we are insincere with God's witness to Himself. Yet, for that reason, an evil heart of unbelief may be a clearer manifestation of deep moral corruption than the shadiest action. But it does not follow that we can set the creation of faith before us as a direct purpose, and still less that we ought to maintain faith by suppressing doubt, criticism and contrary opinion. There is no greater moral peril than to attempt to manipulate truth; and the peril is in no way lessened because the task is piously performed. Obscurantism and timid pre-possession are of unbelief and not of faith, if faith is conviction of truth on its own recognisances. A conviction, otherwise imposed, even were it by accident a conviction of the truth, would be a convention, which is never a faith.

      In the strict sense, we should not even try to believe; for we have no right to believe anything we can avoid believing, granting we have given it entire freedom to convince us. Strictly speaking also, we have no right to exhort people to believe, and much of that very common type of exhortation is mere distrust of truth and disregard of veracity, which leaves earnest people with a painful and confused idea that faith is a self-maintained sense of nervous tension, and which undermines real faith by turning attention from God to our own state of mind.

      Paul's exhortation to the Philippian jailer to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, as almost the only text which lends itself to this purpose, has been much pressed into its service. But, can we conceive that Paul simply [122] uttered these words to that agitated pagan, to whom the name of Jesus could have conveyed no meaning? Have we more than Luke's summary of Paul's presentation of the object of belief, which, as he had already given several examples of Paul's real method, he could not suppose would mislead? The Apostle, we find, reasoned of righteousness and judgment to come. As he could do nothing without moral sincerity, that was his usual beginning. Then he reasoned from men's experience of God's goodness in life and from their groping after Him in worship to His presence in their hearts. Finally, he gave a reasoned presentation of the significance of Jesus Christ for faith, all set in the atmosphere of humble and sincere dealing with one's own soul, in which alone men can see the things in which they ought to believe. Similarly, when Jesus said, " Repent and believe the good news," He was there Himself as the embodiment of what was to be believed, and He only asked to be allowed to make His due impression, repentance being just the putting away of the hypocrisies which prevent the gospel from being its own evidence.

      There is only one right way of asking men to believe, which is to put before them what they ought to believe because it is true; and there is only one right way of persuading, which is to present what is true in such a way that nothing will prevent it from being seen except the desire to abide in darkness; and there is only one further way of helping them, which is to point out what they are cherishing that is opposed to faith. When all this has been done, it is still necessary to recognise that faith is God's gift, not our handiwork, of His manifestation of the truth by life, not of our demonstration by argument or of our impressing by eloquence; and that even He is willing to fail till He can have the only success love could value--personal acceptance of the [123] truth simply because it is seen to be true. In a very real sense all sin is God's failure, but He allows Himself to fail in order to win a better success than mere correction of error or repression of evil.

      As, without some element of pleasant self-delusion, there could be no joy in sinning, a measure of hypocrisy exists in all sins, even the most open and flagrant. Can a man, for example, be a drunkard, without persistently and systematically deceiving himself about his state? When a libertine boasts of his conquests, is he saying to himself what truly he is and facing the straight issue o£ what his action means, or is he merely trying to throw dust in his own eyes? Does he look straight at his own brutal selfishness and the degradation and death which shadow his vice? But, while even the most flagrant and open vices are nests of self-delusion, the danger of hypocrisy increases with the respectability of the sin. Nor is there need of actual transgression at all, for the most blinding of all hypocrisies is the amazing spiritual illusion that privilege is merit and a just ground for our self-esteem, and not moral responsibility and a just ground only for humility.

      Because, in that sense, as Professor A. B. Davidson put it, " perhaps mankind is one large Pharisee," unbelief is the most universal and deep-seated corruption in the human heart. Not because faith could be a moral effort, to be directly purposed and carried through, is unbelief culpable, but because the truth would always carry conviction, did we not use our privileges to pamper our self-esteem and create for ourselves a mail of proof of self-delusion to ward off its appeal, till we may end, where there can be at least no human hope of recovery, in loving darkness rather than light. [124]

REAL BELIEF being belief in a reality on its own testimony, belief in God must be a gift of God. In so far as it is of ourselves it is not faith, even though, by chance, it happen to be a right opinion. But neither would it be faith were conviction merely implanted as a dominant emotion. A true faith God can give only by taking the trouble to show Himself worthy of our trust in all He appoints for us, all He requires of us, and all He purposes with us. Thus the question of faith is the question of how God manifests Himself to His children, or, in one word, of revelation.

      But, if we no longer rely on the infallibilities, what is meant by revelation?

      Two difficulties, in particular, the studies of our time have raised for us.

      First, how can we believe in a historical revelation, when we believe in evolution and progress and the advancement of knowledge?

      Second, has not this advancement of knowledge compelled us to study the Bible by the same method as other ancient books, with the result of showing that it was written in the same way and presents the same difficulties regarding authorship, sources, mythologies, traditions? How, then, can we still be expected to speak of it as the Word of God?

      For revelation, in the sense of a Word dictated from Heaven about God's mind there and conveyed by an [125] inspired writer as a mere scribe, science and criticism alike have little room. But the bitter sense of loss, which many feel when they can no longer believe in a literally inspired Scripture, is mainly because their loss is not greater. As they still cling to the idea of grace upon which the view depended, they cannot escape the feeling that God is not acting up to His irresistible power when He permits human error or limitation to mar the perfection of His revelation. Only on a different view of grace, as more patient because more personal, can we see that the living experience of those who, by special faithfulness in high endeavour and large conflict, have understood God's purpose in the world, may be a far Diviner vehicle than a mere animated pen, and that, as it interprets its own experience direct to ours, it has a security which no evidence for past infallibility can ever enjoy.

      To revelation, in one sense, there can be no limitation, for, if God deals with all men everywhere as children, everywhere and to all He is revealing Himself. In a still deeper sense, all history, as the record of experience, is revelation, being a temple of God's purpose, not a mere museum of antiquities.

      But revelation, as usually understood, is concerned with more than God's manifestation of His mind, and deals also with the removal of misunderstandings in ours. And if God seeks to be understood by His children and not merely to display His power, if He is a person who would be personally understood, that dealing with our ignorance and blindness and perversity, which are a cloud between us and His light, is rightly named, by pre-eminence, revelation.

      Like all other progress in understanding God's thoughts, revelation will then have a special line of advance, through what we may call a succession of pioneers, so that particular persons and a particular [126] history may so definitely follow the right line as to make all the rest mere matter of antiquarian interest.

      The agent of revelation is the prophet. But he is not a prophet by passively submitting, like the heathen soothsayer in Virgil's picture of an oracle of the gods, to the pressure and sway of the divine afflatus. He is a prophet, because, more than others, he is intensely awake to life and duty. His equipment is loyalty and moral insight, and his call the sense of great tasks imposed upon him by the pressure of grave and terrible events. Had he been only a passive vehicle for a direct utterance of omniscience, the abiding value of his word would have depended upon proofs of absolute accuracy and guaranteed authorship. But, by actively interpreting God's purpose for his own life among men, his word remains its own evidence by continuing to interpret God's purpose for our lives and our society.

      But, if a word of God is inspired as it inspires us to lay ourselves open to God's appeal, it approves itself as it reconciles and not as it informs. Only as it enables us to accept His purpose in the world and submit to the measureless demands of His love and seek our peace only in His rule of righteousness, does it make us know that we know God.

      Even in this sense of reconcilers, there have been prophets since the world began, and the early Christians rightly accorded the name to the noblest Pagan thinkers. Yet the history of reconciliation is so supremely in the line of the Hebrew prophets as to permit us to include in our thought of their work all other contributions. Their understanding of reconciliation was an understanding of God's mind which so surpasses other views as to give them interest only as preparations and approximations, as much as the discovery of the elliptical orbit of the planets is an understanding of God's mind on that matter which makes obsolete all others. When [127] Jesus comes as the perfect reconciler, their work also is merged in His, and He is Lord of the prophets, the chief corner-stone of prophecy.

      Upon Him, therefore, we may concentrate our attention, and we may be confident that, if we can remove the difficulties about faith in Jesus Christ, no other difficulties about revelation need be insuperable. This will raise for us the question of why a revelation should go round by the way of experience and history, and not be directly implanted both as a knowledge and a grace. Only as we see how this necessity arises from the personal nature of the grace which would manifest itself, can we discover the complete statement of revelation to be that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Thereupon, we may be able to abandon the infallibilities without regret, because we shall have found instead God's patience of love.

      Even if these reasons do not seem sufficient for giving Christ this central significance for revelation, it will probably be admitted that we have no need to seek farther afield for the difficulties of the problem, for, if there are perplexities about revelation in general, are there not still more about Jesus in particular?

      If faith has to do with God's gracious relation to us in the present, and especially with a reconciliation which gives us blessedness in our daily tasks and trials, what connection could that have with a person who lived long ago and who meets us only in a book, even though we were sure we knew exactly what He was and what He said and did? But, still more, if we are to believe only what we see to be true, how can we believe in One regarding whose person--on which so much is thought to depend--there has been such fierce, perplexing and inconclusive controversy, and whose life and teaching have been handed down with such variety in the tradition, that it has been possible [128] --even though it be only a vagary--to doubt whether He ever existed? Can belief in Him ever be more than a very tentative hypothesis, a kind of intellectual adventure, no supreme succour of faith, but a heavy burden faith must carry, the hardest goal to reach, the last victory to be won? And when, finally, we have thus laboriously won faith in Christ, has it really to do with faith in God? Is it not rather something added to that faith, and, in many minds, something substituted for it, and very far from being its one solid foundation?

      That the difficulties are real and practical, and not imaginary and merely theoretical, cannot be denied. Faith in Christ has frequently been so conceived as to be both a burdensome addition to faith in the living God and a misleading substitute for it.

      Faith in Christ becomes a burdensome addition to faith in God when a Christian is conceived to be, not one who has found in Christ the Father reconciling His children to Himself in the midst of this evanescent and evil world, but one who accepts certain facts about Christ's life and holds certain theories about His person. The theories especially have been used, not as a revelation to the individual soul which gives it moral independence in the knowledge of God's will of love, but as ecclesiastical mysteries, the possession of which requires the Church to keep her members in intellectual and even in moral pupilage, seeing that such a faith can only be held by way of not rejecting what official authority enjoins.

      This addition to faith in the living God then becomes a substitute for it, so that whosoever would be saved must not reject these doctrines in any of their mysterious details, till belief in Christ becomes a mere pass-word which, it is thought, God will respect when we come knocking at the door of eternity.

      For that way of escape from real faith mankind is only too ready. They do not find any faith in Christ [129] so difficult as faith in the things He stood for, or any way of salvation so hard as His way of being saved from themselves. A saving faith, not inconsistent with indulging our instinctive rebellion against life's limitations, with seeking to live at ease even at some cost of conscientiousness, with maintaining ourselves as persons of substance and repute even at the price of doubtful compromise and concentration upon personal profit, with having our first reliance for our own security upon a bank account even though selfishly accumulated, and for our country's greatness upon cannon-balls even at some cost of righteousness, would need to have very hard conditions indeed not to exercise a strong attraction for the natural man.

      That faith also is a faith in God's grace, but it is as an act of omnipotence and not as the manifestation of a personal God gracious in all His relations with us. Christ Himself is conceived as the incarnation of that omnipotence, and faith in Him as just such submission as a mysterious emanation of power demands.

      This becomes apparent in the accompanying doctrine of the Spirit, whose personality is used as a device for importing quite impersonal operations both into Christ's life and ours, overriding forces, which require from us no moral dealing with them, but which are pantheistic in all their methods. When, for example, men, whose contribution could be of no human value except as they have had experience and have reflected on it, are exhorted to empty their minds of all thoughts of their own in order to be filled with the Spirit, or when the sick are assured that it is want of faith to use human skill or even common-sense, and are asked to trust only the healing influx of the Spirit, the idea of a personal God is entirely superfluous. In the latter case it is quite openly rejected, but for spiritual healing ex opere operatum it is equally irrelevant. The Spirit of God as a medicine [130] of immortality, active in a sacrament, might be a person, but to think so would add nothing to our faith in its efficacy. The personality of God, to be of any consequence for faith, must appear in a fellowship which deals with our whole nature by moral means and for moral ends, and not merely in operations of grace.

      To be of significance for that fellowship, Christ must manifest our perfect relation to the Father of our spirits by blessedness in the trials, injustices and conflicts of life, so as to manifest them all as of God, and show us how, amid the actual conditions of our life, intellectual as well as physical, we remain in the Kingdom of God, which is perfect blessedness in perfect righteousness. No manifestation of God's power can be a revelation of the Father; and to introduce it in the form either of omnipotence or omniscience into the life of Christ is merely to remove His life out of the plane of our conflict. What human reality, for example, can be left in Christ's sufferings which could enable us to say, " My God, my God," even when we felt forsaken, and commend our spirits to our Father as the floods go over our souls, if, as Dr. Gore supposes, He had the night before observed the eucharist proleptically in His glorified body?

      Such a view springs from the notion that a revelation in our humanity is a mere condescension to our weakness, and that it would have no significance were the condescension to be taken seriously. The king covers himself with a beggar's rags, but he is a king only as his robes, which he still wears beneath, are not concealed. Though God thus graciously condescends to our humanity, in Himself He is really quite different, and a true revelation of Him must be by glory and not service.

      But, if God is not different, if, being the Father, He can have no more adequate manifestation than His [131] children, what could we seek beyond One who accepts all life's discipline and meets all its demands, deals with all God's children in love, and unfailingly makes peace by obedience to righteousness even to death? It is a manifestation, moreover, we can verify, as, even amid our own failure, it enables us to realise God's gracious personal relation to us in all things.

      For that reason, faith in Christ is not primarily as He meets us either in Scripture or in doctrine, but as He meets us in life. When He is hungry, the blessed of the Father feed Him; naked, they clothe Him; sick and in prison, they visit Him. As we treat Him when we meet Him in flesh and blood in our brother, as we recognise the power of His meekness, purity, truth, holiness, amid the actual claims of pleasure and wealth and outward dignity, so is our living faith in Him.

      "How," He asks, "can ye believe who receive approbation one of another, and not that approbation which is of God alone?" Can we, that question means, unite two contradictory faiths in what is life's highest good and final security? How, asks James, taking the same view, can men hold the faith of Christ, "in respect of persons"? which, being literally translated, is "in flunkeyism." What, in short, is the good of looking for Christ who was meek and lowly in heart, in the Gospels, when we should be certain not to recognise Him in our next-door neighbour? Till we believe in Him there, we cannot possibly believe in Him anywhere else.

      After we thus believe in Him in life, many intellectual questions, both about His history and His person, may remain; and we should not think that our belief gives us a right to silence them. This faith cannot decide what sayings in the Gospels are authentic, or what miracles are related without exaltation of the miraculous, or in what formula we shall express Christ's [132] nature; even though, without it, no one will ever answer these questions aright. But, when we believe on Him in life, however many intellectual problems may remain, the religious difficulties will have disappeared; for we shall believe on Him simply because He is the strength of our faith in God. By manifesting God's love in life's hardest appointments and sternest demands, by lifting up our sins and weaknesses into God's compassion and pardon, and so touching us with the love of God in its infinite requirements and infinite succour, and by giving us the spirit of peace in all our weary struggle against the kingdom and power of darkness, He lays us open, as the manifest presence of God alone can lay us open, to God's whole appeal through the whole of life. Here, as nowhere else, we discover that the weak things are the mighty, that, in the end, the things of love, not of violence, prevail, so that we believe, by the only way that can truly be belief, because, in its perfect manifestation in Him, we see our true blessedness to be its own evidence.

      We can now see why no scripture writer ever dreamt that faith in Jesus could be a substitute for our faith in God, or a further burden upon it, or even any addition to it, or anything except the supreme succour of that faith, and why every word said about it thrills with strange, new, contagious joy in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and especially why the Cross was victory over sin and sorrow, and not a mere agony of defeat inflicted by wickedness.

      The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ was put in the centre of God's revealing name, not, as is sometimes said, because faith in Christ was such an addition to faith in God that His followers had to break up their idea of God to put Him in, but, for the opposite reason, that their idea of God was broken and He made it whole. They could in no way unite the God of their [133] experience in the world with the God of the deepest experiences of their own hearts; and their souls' conflict came upon them because they continued to be true children of the prophets, who never, for any distress without or doubt within, abandoned the endeavour to bring them into one.

      The Old Testament still speaks to our hearts because it is this supreme search after one God, not as an intellectual conception, but as a moral victory to unite all our life into one, and because of the confidence it gives us that those who seek after God in that way will find Him. No prophet ever attained, but also no prophet ever rested content with any of the easy solutions found in other religions. None ever sought peace in the dualism of one God of their worship and another of their work, or in the easy but hopeless unity of worldliness, or in the more difficult, but not really more victorious, unity of abandoning the world in order to endeavour to live in an ecstatic religion. When the Old Testament saints prayed, Lord, show us Thy salvation, they did not mean, Help us to avert our eyes from the welter and chaos around, but, Help us to face the Assyrian as well as the enemy of our souls. To the end it remained a distressful and dubious conflict, amid which men were always in danger of falling back on the hope that somehow, after all, this world may be interpreted on mere principles of human justice, if only you will give it time to show that the name of the wicked rots and the righteous are never forsaken or their children reduced to begging their bread. Then, they had to be recalled to the true way of seeking one God, not merely by a great religious book like Job, ending in silence before the greatness of God, but by the vocal pessimism of Ecclesiastes.

      Only when we realise this bitter antagonism between our experience of God in the world and our experience [134] of God in the insight of conscience and the aspiration of the heart, can we realise the supreme significance for our faith in God's whole gracious relation to us when the grace or the graciousness of our Lord Jesus Christ became the middle term between the love of God without and the fellowship of the Spirit within.

      Later we have many attempts to interpret this name of God as Father, Son and Spirit by the conception of grace as the operation of omnipotence, but never in the New Testament, where this Divine name is just the full and complete expression of God's one gracious relation to us in all our experience without and within, making it as certain that all things in this world work together for good through the love of the Father, as that our true good is the kingdom which is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Then only could men overcome the temptation to make the providence of God a cheap optimism, and the righteousness of God a way of compromising with this world and a mere matter of changed conditions in the world to come.

      Belief in God derives meaning and content from experience, and belief in God through Jesus Christ is through the only adequate dealing with it, because of the only perfect relation to God behind it. Neither God, nor aught besides, can we know apart from the world. But, on the other hand, neither can we truly know the world apart from God. We see God through the world, as we see a soul through the body, only because it is not a living body at all except as it is informed throughout by the soul. And even then we only know as we are taught to think as it were parallel with that spirit within, taught by a continuous interaction between knowledge and friendship, which we might equally call revelation and reconciliation.

      If it is the essential nature of God to have this personal relation to His children, He could be manifested only [135] in a life perfectly lived among men, through a perfect relation to Himself. If the love of God is thus the inmost nature, as well as the deepest meaning of His outward working, that would be the only possible revelation; and we should never think of God as in Christ merely in condescension to the limits of our humanity. Through Christ we must think after the order of the Beatitudes, where all knowledge of God is mediated through a right relation to man. As Christ helps us to attain this gracious relation to God's children, we learn how He came from the bosom of the Father to declare Him, and how God is in Him reconciling the world to Himself.

      The final triumph of this manifestation is the Cross, the obedience unto death of the Prince of Peace in the service of God's kingdom of righteousness. When persecution for righteousness, even to shame and agony, stirs only pardon and supplication for His oppressors, it is turned from being an evidence of God's indifference into the triumph of His love; and, by sharing in that triumph, His children are made victorious over all evil. But we share only as we too are taught to sympathise with sorrow, forgive sin and endure the contradiction of sinners against ourselves.

FAITH IN God, through Jesus Christ, is faith in God which is of God's giving. Yet, only because God cannot give it directly, or otherwise than through our own personal conviction, does it require to be mediated at all. Could it be imparted by direct operation of omnipotence, so as to be breathed into our nostrils like the [136] breath of life, there could be no need for making it depend on any other transaction. Every form of historical revelation would, in particular, be an irrelevance and an encumbrance; for if, by the finger of power, God can implant the faith which is the secret of blessedness, other aids could only distract attention from the real fountain-head. Why introduce a saint, or even a Christ, saying to His brother, "Know the Lord," if, by an irresistible might, all can be made to know Him?

      Nor would it be merely an irrelevance. As soon as we returned from what is implanted and came again to our own thinking, it would become a quite insurmountable obstacle to any assurance that the God who governs the world is both good and omnipotent; for, if it were all a matter of operation, why should it require so many reinforcements, and have such obviously inadequate results? If God can mould our hearts, like clay, to real faith, why should there be the slow progress of the ages, or any unbelief, or--seeing He could as easily make us holy as believing--any sin?

      To refer us to the inscrutable will of God is merely to ask us to be satisfied with arbitrariness. But piety cannot hinder us from regarding such arbitrariness as grossly culpable, if it leave or, indeed, ever permit, this chaos of wickedness and misery, were the avoidance of it so completely and easily within the compass of His might. Could He remove, by the mere word of power, all distrust from the heart as well as all evil from the lives of His children, why does He refrain?

      Nor is it any explanation to say that we isolate ourselves from this operation of grace, for that justification of God could only belong to quite another way of thinking of Him. From the point of view of pure omnipotent operations of grace, our isolation from God must be the easiest possible obstacle to remove, or rather the most senseless for God ever to permit. [137] The perplexity, moreover, carries with it grave practical consequences. For such a mystical faith, Christ is constantly no more than a symbol of a Divine operation, and all historical events have to be attached in an external, arbitrary, and even illogical way.

      The value of man's long search after God, the faith of the prophets, and especially the manifestation of the Father in the Son, must have some place assigned to them by any kind of religious thinker. But if the drama of faith is all operation of omnipotence, revelation can only be inserted into it as an epilogue; and, even then, it leaves the impression, which most epilogues do, that the author would not have found it necessary to come from behind the scenes and explain had the drama been completes and better constructed.

      The irresistible operation of omnipotence is thought to work intermittently. God, at various times, according to His good pleasure, has sent His representatives from behind the scenes, to be special vehicles of special grace and to give some much-needed explanations. Especially, on one memorable occasion, He condescended to appear in the person of His Son, in order more fully to clear up the whole issue.

      Being isolated acts in the past, moreover, they must be cherished as heirlooms, else once more all will be confusion. But with the present criticism of our heritage, we find this task increasingly difficult, so that, in fact, we are beyond measure confused. The situation is as though we had fallen into doubt regarding the authenticity and interpretation of some letters our father once sent us from India, while the tradition about his one furlough home had grown mythical, and we could not be sure any more that he actually is in that distant land, toiling, as we had supposed, for the benefit of his family.

      This notion of revelation as supplementary authoritative information causes most of the perplexities [138] which have so often been met only by an obscurantism about Scripture and doctrine which is guilty of fearing that truth cannot shine in its own light, but must, as it were, be lacquered with a kind of luminous paint of submissive piety.

      Butler argues that it would be the opposite of the proof of a Divine revelation to find it attempting to remove the mysteries, which, if humbly and sincerely respected, are the best part of life's discipline and the supreme test of the spirit of duty. To that Leslie Stephen replies by asking, what a revelation is for, if not to remove mysteries. With that position many theologies are agreed, and have, therefore, proceeded to construct out of Scripture elaborate universal and absolute systems, for which nothing remains mysterious or unknown. From disconnected tags of verses information is derived on every kind of subject in this world and the next, in earth and heaven. Especially the origin of the world and the destiny of man have been illuminated to the last detail.

      The result never was much to edification, and more recently it has been mainly to the encouragement of scepticism about the whole business of theology, root and branch.

      Nor shall we ever introduce the sense of reality into it again and establish for it a place among the sciences of experience, till we have revised our whole conception of revelation by relating it, no longer to information by sporadic acts of omniscience, but to the manifestation of an unwaveringly gracious dealing with us in all things.

      If revelation is used strictly in this sense of God's manifestation of Himself, and without reference to the causes of our misunderstanding, we should have to say that there could be no such thing as a historical revelation. A God of love must be self-revealing in [139] all His intercourse, at all times and in all ways, and not alone in special actions. The love of God and the fellowship of the Spirit are always and everywhere revealing themselves, and to restrict themselves to special channels would merely prove the love imperfect and the fellowship narrow hearted.

      But the gracious God is precisely a God concerned with being understood and not merely with being displayed. Hence interludes of more conspicuous realisation depend on the openness of our vision, and not on any less reticence in God's manifestation. The manifestation is always there, always active, always using all means, without and within. What we understand as, in a special sense, revelation is not some extra manifestation to make up for God's defects, but a dealing with the alienation which can see no gracious relation of God to us in any manifestation. In strict accuracy, we should speak of a historical reconciliation, rather than of a historical revelation, yet, seeing how God's manifestation is nonexistent for us, or is even turned into sheer conflict and cause of distrust, till we are put into a position to interpret it aright, it is in effect a historical revelation. As the most direct evidence of His love is His patient way of dealing with the blindness of our unbelief, this reconciliation is even rightly regarded as pre-eminently revelation. Yet we should remember that it is revelation only as climbing an eminence affords us a prospect because the landscape is there already.

      To understand this living interaction of revelation and reconciliation is to understand how faith is the gift of God. It is like the relation between the prospect which inspires the climber to dare the Alps, and the climbing without which there would be no prospect; or like the first mariner whom Horace execrates for impious rashness in launching on the deep from love of gain, who would never have risked his life without [140] prospect of gain and never have had prospect of gain without adventuring on the deep.

      Revelation, being thus concerned with the reconciliation to God's gracious relation to us by which alone we can discover that it is gracious, must be a work of history. What is more, it must be the work of history, the work which gives it meaning and treasures up its gains. The life of everyone who takes the right road and uses life to the right end and lays his heart open to the right influences, will help to interpret God's gracious relation to his fellows as well as to himself. But there will be special significance in the experience of those who meet life with special insight and sincerity and courage and, more particularly when exercised in times of supreme crisis in human affairs. As in all other human progress, they will establish one line of advance, so conspicuously in the right direction as to make all others mere matter of antiquarian interest. Finally, if there were One whose absolutely right relation to God manifested adequately God's relation to us, even that line would become only a preparation for His task, and He would be an ultimate revelation, not in the sense of being a substitute fox our own insight or of exhausting the whole meaning of experience, but as the inspiration of our insight and the pioneer of our experience. Yet Christ is the supreme revelation only as He is the supreme reconciliation. Its finality is not as the guarantee of a body of truth which makes no account of God's patient wisdom in overcoming unbelief, which is manifested in all human history, but as the embodiment of a relation to the Father, the perfection of which we prove only as we use it to interpret His relation to us in all things and at all times. If reconciliation is in a free, a truly personal acceptance of God's gracious relation to us, it can only be by revelation; [141] but, on the other hand, there can be no revelation to our own personal insight except by reconciliation. To understand that interaction, which is only possible between moral persons in a moral universe, but which is the very essence of their relation, is to understand how God's grace is nothing else than the succour of our moral personality into the liberty of the children of God, a succour which we may sum up by saying that faith is the gift of God by the whole of experience, interpreted by the whole of Christianity.

      We shall see what is effected for us, if we consider how, without the grace of Christ as the connecting link between the love of God in our outward experience and the fellowship of the Spirit in our inward experience, the former is a shallow sentiment, as inadequate to the interpretation of life as a shower to fertilise the Sahara, and the latter as barren as a mist which never comes down as rain upon the mown grass and as showers to water the earth.

      The task is not to lay God open to us, but to lay us open to God. The uniting of the love of God and the fellowship of His Spirit is not because they are divided, but because, by reason of unbelief, we make both void by keeping them apart. The revelation which is to bring them into one, deals, not with God's unity, but with man's divided heart, as, when we see the same object apart and different, we do not need to bring the images together but to correct our sight.

      The difficulty to be overcome is primarily the manifold hypocrisies, issuing, in the nature of the case, from all sin, which make us pervert the witness of truth, and look in the world for love as mere goodness without inward moral demand, and in our hearts for God's fellowship in the Spirit without application in any outward moral sphere. Love is then mere sentimental kindliness from which, in this world of hard trials and [142] terrible responsibilities, no true belief in providence can ever be wrung; and the fellowship of the Spirit is a mere shadowy mystical sense of a presence realised in a dim ecstatic emotion, which, if we rest in it, is only a sort of " vacant interlunar cave." Without an abiding fellowship with the Father of our spirits to be our light and confidence in the hour and power of darkness, when, so far as the outward events of our life can show, even God has forsaken us, we can only struggle to believe that life is pretty good on the whole, with an optimism which is not only cruelly assailed, but most deserts us when most needed: and, apart from realising God's love in our actual experience, the fellowship of the Spirit is equally empty of practical significance.

      The nearest analogy is the passive if passionate emotion too often called love, which compels the novelist to end his story where the test of it begins, with the marriage ceremony, a love which the deeper insight of the poet calls blind, and which rude experience teaches us usually flies out at the window as poverty enters by the door. Not being a moral fellowship, it is no preparation for helping those it unites to face the world together and make life blessed, whatever happen. It does not grow into a deeper, stronger, wiser comradeship because of the conflict, but is a mere expectation of being borne up, on the wings of overpowering and delightful emotion, above earth's rough and muddy ways. Then, instead of being life's supreme strength, it becomes its vastest and saddest illusion.

      A mystical sense of the Spirit is often not merely an analogous, but the selfsame emotion, little disguised and not much exalted; and at best is a passive emotion, with no personal moral foundations, a mere way of withdrawing for a little from the inward, if not the outward stress of the world.

      The fellowship of the Spirit is no mere emotional [143] sense of God's presence or even of His power, but a personal dealing with God in His world as the Spirit of Holiness. It is to be realised by so fulfilling our tasks and bearing our trials as to inherit the earth as the place of God's moral purpose with us, and by so living in all sympathy with suffering, in all pardon of offences, and in all calm loyalty to every cause of righteousness, as to find ourselves in the true moral society wherein we serve it.

      By being enabled, through good company, to pursue our journey cheerfully during all the burden and heat of the day, and not by being carried over the rough places of life on the wings of a sustained ecstasy, have we the fellowship of the Spirit in unity with the love of God. To that end the Spirit has become the Spirit of Him who was meek and lowly of heart, and the Father the God and Father of Him who was among us as one who serves. Only in that unity can we see love behind conscience, and power behind love.

      The revelation of God, so understood, means that it belongs eternally to His nature not to be content to direct the world according to His own wise love, heedless of our misunderstanding, or to offer us His fellowship, heedless of our alienation, but that He must seek to overcome, in the freedom of a true reconciliation, our misunderstanding and our alienation. This is the end of all His dealings with us in time, and the task to which He has called all prophetic souls, and which is consummated in the Lord of the prophets, who, being perfectly the Son of God, enables us to be sons of God, for whom, in the fellowship of the Spirit, all things work together for good. [144]

      LIKE A special revelation, a special fellowship in possession of special means of grace must be judged according to the relation of God to His children which it presupposes; and the great confusion which exists on the subject of the Church is due to the failure to set its necessary dependence on our conception of grace in the light of clear thinking.

      As soon as we consider the conception of the Church in connection with the conception of grace it embodies, we find, on the one hand, that things conflicting in principle are often mechanically bound together in one view, and, on the other, that views seemingly pea, apart are as closely linked, by their conception of Glad, as the extremes of the swing of the pendulum by gravitation.

      Practically every church combines inconsistent ideas of grace, and some even glory in it and call it comprehensiveness. Thus we can have in one church a Bible wholly dependent on spiritual insight and a priesthood upon visible succession, or a conversion wholly by an act of God, yet with the failure to produce it resting upon man. Churches which outwardly seem at opposite poles, are often little different in their dominant conception. Thus the extremest Catholicism and the extremest Evangelicalism are curiously akin, just because both depend on the same conception of grace as arbitrary acts of omnipotence. For both alike, as much as for Aquinas or even for Scotus, God's appointment makes things reasonable and right, so that neither of them can [145] appeal simply to reasonableness and rightness as the guarantee of God's appointment.

      From that agreement in theology there follows agreement regarding the fellowship on four important points.

      I. The fellowship, in both cases, is artificially limited. In the one case, the condition is submission to a certain tradition; and, in the other, the undergoing of a certain inward transformation. The latter may be a more religious requirement, yet both alike are conceived arbitrarily and not ethically, so that the fellowship is exclusive by reason of the Divine arrangement, and not simply by the nature of the moral situation. It consists of persons, towards whom alone, and for His own reasons alone, God has a favourable mind, and not simply of persons who have a favourable mind towards God.

      Every fellowship must have some principle of exclusion, else it would be merged inhumanity; and true comprehensiveness never means ease of admission. But a society maybe exclusive, according as its doors are swung to open outwards and be under the control of those within, or so as to open inwards and be under the control of those without. Both Catholicism and Evangelicalism are of the former type. They are not simply societies of those who have understood God's gracious mind towards all His children, and who have come together for the express purpose of helping others to understand that God has to them also the same mind, and of welcoming all who understand to join them in their task, but they are organisations of persons who through special operations of omnipotence, have a special relation to God, the possession of which by newcomers must be investigated.

      2. Both alike are indifferent to moral independence. This appears in their readiness to persuade by impression, rather than to rest all their hopes on impressing by [146] persuasion. One plays on the emotions by ritualism and the other by revivalism, but the aim, in both cases, is to override the moral personality. The means of grace of neither are means in the moral nature of things--moral means for showing our true moral relation to God, in His world and among His children and in the service of His Kingdom--but are merely instruments whereby omnipotent grace may take by assault our personal defences:

      3. Being, both alike, unable to attach any meaning to the liberty of the children of God, a divided church, for the one, and an unconverted world, for the other, are mere unaccountable Divine failures. Frequent charges of schism and obduracy have the appearance of ascribing them to man, but human error has no effective right in either scheme. The kind of submission which alone is required for belonging to the true Church, God could surely have easily imposed upon all rational creatures; while, if man can be converted by the might of God as easily as an infant is snatched from the fire by a grown man, why are not all faces set in the right direction from the beginning? Why, above all, on the one hand, should the unity of the Church be attached to an obviously easily divided priesthood, backed by obviously questionable assertions, and conversion, on the other, be made dependent for its operation on emotional impressiveness, often too obviously self-conscious to be really impressive?

      In neither case do we pass beyond the conception of a God who sets arbitrary limits to His working, which are the less justifiable that He works, in any case, with means which, being arbitrary, are, therefore, not limited by the moral nature either of things or of persons.

      4. For both types of piety the rest of experience is irrelevant. Both are non-worldly, but not, for that reason, necessarily unworldly. The religious life being [147] a special kind of sacred doing concerned with another world than this, this world may remain, as it was before, our world, measured by place and possession. The other world is alongside of this running, in a way, parallel, so that the hope of the other world limits our behaviour somewhat in this, yet to do well in this world is a mark of God's favour which augurs well for the next. In no sense have we now eternal life. The restraints of those whose trust is in ritual naturally more concern matters of taste and their hopes of the approval of God rest more on social position; while those whose trust is in revivalism apply restraint more to habits and estimate God's approval more by possession. But for neither is religion such a relation to God that it can inherit the earth without place or possession in it. Nor is either able to show how that positive victory is the true safeguard of religion, doing away with the need of negative precautions.

      From a fellowship which would express the relation of a personal God to us as moral persons, so that He is gracious in all our experience, all arbitrary dealings are ruled out. Righteousness and truth and joy in spiritual things are the very Heaven in which our Father dwells, which, so far from being outside of our present experience, shows itself real as it turns the perpetual change of our earthly life increasingly into the one purpose of God, so that the uncertainties upon which nothing could be built are shown to be themselves a building of God.

      Of the fellowship which would thus embody the conception of grace as a gracious relation of God to His children in all things, four characteristics may also be distinguished.

      I. It is a fellowship which has no frontiers except those it exists to remove; and in that task it must acknowledge [148] no failure except what is due to the moral independence necessary for the truly personal relation to a gracious God it exists to manifest.

      By the nature of grace as God's gracious personal relation to His children, response to which must be won and cannot be compelled, all its limitations are determined. It is a fellowship of persons who realise their relations to one another through their relation to God and who find their relation to the Father realised in their fellowship with His children; and it takes the form of a society, working under historical conditions, because an understanding of God through human relations requires a common use of experience. But it is a special society only because it rests exclusively on a blessed dependence on an absolutely gracious God, impossible to realise except in freedom and moral independence, which is not the basis of any other society. That may set a severe limit to success, but it is not arbitrary, being imposed only by God's respect for the liberty of His children, and by the nature of His Kingdom as a family and not merely a federation. Arbitrariness is impossible for a gracious God, but, on the other hand, compulsion in a truly personal relation is equally impossible.

      2. It has no means of grace except what enables us to use the world as God's world, in fellowship with men as children of God, and in peace through His rule of truth and righteousness, because it interprets God's gracious relation to us in all experience. Its means of grace must be real means for bringing home the nature of reality to minds made in the image of God, which is to say, they must impress only as they persuade. The Apostle's ideal was, "By manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God"; and from that ideal of appealing by truth alone to the common human conscience and [149] to it alone, there can be no departure. Yet no limit may be set for the variety of the manifestation, so long as it is truly in the sight of God and not an appeal to mere human suffrage. It may draw from us sublime poetic utterance and stateliness of presentation, or it may drive us to the utmost simplicity of speech and worship. Both will be right in their place, if they spring from the vision of spiritual realities; but, also, both will be wrong, not manifesting but obscuring, if they are used as substitutes for consent of the soul, to sweep men along without freedom or insight.

      Prayer, Word and Sacrament are still the means of grace, yet only as they are moral means adapted to moral ends, and not merely as they are devices or vehicles or impressive doings. Except as moral means, they cannot help to manifest God's gracious personal relation to His children, for as devices to wring blessings out of God or as vehicles to convey something into man, however individual they may be, they would not, in any moral sense, be personal.

      Prayer is not bombarding God for acts of omnipotence which, otherwise, He might withhold, but is the intercourse of the family of God, wherein our brethren axe included as well as our Father. As it manifests a gracious relation, whereby all things work together far our good, its chief task is in everything to give thanks; and, though our needs require special petitions, it is because, being straitened in ourselves, we need God's help to receive to profit, and not because God forgets to be gracious till He is urged.

      The word is the natural mode of communication between persons, because it enables both to think the same thought, each as his own thought, being a word only as it is spoken with the understanding to the understanding. The Word, as a means of grace, is, therefore, the utterance of what we have been enabled [150] to see of God's dealing with us, to minds made like ours in the Divine image, that they also may see. Therefore, it must commend itself, not merely to the liking for pleasant or even for solemn and impressive utterance, but to the conscience of right which can enable men to interpret it as a word of God to themselves.

      The Sacraments solemnly employ water, and bread and wine--the common things in daily use--to express and, as it were, give the concentrated essence of the sacrament of life. They presuppose that there is more is every gift of food than to eat of the loaves and be filled, and that we ought therein to see that miracle of a gracious God manifesting Himself in goodness. The miracle is extended in these rites to all God appoints for us; and the special rite which connects this sacrament of life directly with the Cross, forbids us to rule out any part of experience, and teaches us to find in agony and shame and death the manifold wisdom and measureless love of God; and by that message it becomes pre-eminently the sacrament of reconciliation.

      3. The special rites of the special fellowship have distinctive sacredness, not by remoteness from things secular but by penetrating deeper into their true meaning and true uses. They teach men not to use the sacred shrine as a shelter from the secular world, but to make all things sacred and so, in the right way, to abolish the distinction between sacred and secular, till the world is our spiritual possession as much as Cephas.

      Our Lord's religion was in a pre-eminent degree secular. From the day-labourers, farmers and fisher-folk he demanded a righteousness beyond that of the recognised ministers of religion, a demand made reasonable by removing righteousness from the sphere of sacred observances into the sphere of our common relations in the common life, through faith in the Father [151] exercised amid our daily tasks and trials. All His own ministry was simply the absolutely religious handling of the incidents which arose for Him in His intercourse with the ordinary people who met Him, as we should say, by accident. His teaching abounds in illustrations from the secular life, but there are only two from the ecclesiastical religion--the Pharisee praying in the Temple with himself alone, and the Priest and the Levite passing by on the other side. Moreover, most of what he says to the Scribes and Pharisees applies to the dangers of outward organised religion at all times.

      4. The final mark is the relation of the fellowship to the rule of God, the sense in which the Church is the Kingdom of God. Catholicism identifies the Church with the Kingdom as far as it outwardly extends, and Evangelicalism only as far as it inwardly succeeds, and that difference is deep and wide; yet they are at one in regarding the rule of God in both as fundamentally mystical and traditional. Grace, that is to say, is a swaying of individuals, of which the individual may be conscious, but so immediately the work of God that he may not; and its manifestation in history is merely the handing down of accumulated results of individual operations of grace, so that we are founded upon the apostles and prophets and Jesus Christ is the chief corner-stone purely by traditional guarantees, for which our moral freedom is no necessary condition.

      But in the society which embodies a gracious relationship of God to all men, in all things, at all times, the Kingdom of God is manifested religiously--or we might say apocalyptically--and ethically, and not mystically and traditionally.

      The Kingdom of God is the rule of God, and not, in any sense, mere moral progress of man. Our reliance is upon God, and not on our freedom, and there is place only for trust and gratitude, and none for merit, [152] yet the essence of God's rule is that it is not content with obedience except in the blessedness of moral independence. All His dealings with us, from first to last, concern our freedom, not, indeed, as if we were free, but always to make us free. Were we free, we should be already saved, and we axe only being saved; but what we are being saved into is the liberty of the children of God. Wherefore, God's Kingdom has come, not in so far as individuals have been made the vehicles of absolute truth or holiness, or even in so far as mankind grows in truth and righteousness, but in so far as men are willing in the day of God's power, in so far, in short, as being reconciled to God, they find in His will alone their blessedness.

      This society of the Kingdom of God is necessarily historical, but is not traditional. The blessedness of God's rule is God's most unmerited gift, introduced wholly by the finger of God, yet is so personal that even God cannot impose it except by enabling us to accept it; and the essential thing to see is that it is not less, but more God's personal gift, because it takes the trouble to pass round by way of our own personal acceptance and co-operation.. Hence this amazing, varied, suffering, joyous world, with some success but much frustrated endeavour, much knowledge laboriously won but more darkness we cannot by any effort dispel, and much gladness of living but ever arrested by pain and shadowed by death. And hence also the supreme significance of those who, in fellowship, have, from age to age, interpreted to their brethren the Divine rule it displays--the prophets who, since the world began, have been preparing for the fullness of the time when it might be perfectly manifested in teaching and service and poverty and all the agony and contumely which could increase the terror of death. Finally, hence also the need why we should be founded on the apostles [153] and prophets and have Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone of our lives, to be built upon not in slavish subjection to the past, but in the freedom of God's children, who are also themselves apostles and prophets.

      Instead of regarding the rest of experience as mere scenery for operations of grace which are canalised in special channels, whether priest or evangelist, we see that nothing less than our whole varied experience can since for making souls truly in God's image, free and not restrained, knowing as He knows, loving as He loves, choosing as He chooses, blessed as He is blessed, sons and not subjects. If that be the high goal, we can understand the necessity of the labyrinthine by-ways towards truth, with blind alleys that admonish us to seek anew the true road, with agonies and disasters to warn us of our mistakes and our sins, with the necessity of bitter penitence and sympathy evoked by suffering. Then the Church, if it be interpreting to mankind this mind of God, has its convincing place, however small it be, or however divided on other matters. But, otherwise, what is life but a mockery and a despair, and what is the largest, most united church, as a mere refuge in the midst of it, save a poor kind of device at best, wholly inadequate as the work of a goodness which, with the resources of omnipotence, can compel man as it will?

      Mankind is often weary of the long and arduous and circuitous way, and constantly takes shorter cuts than God's way of personal faith and moral freedom. Often the Church which should stand only for God's order, is inveigled into the service of organised compulsion and becomes the most eager and successful advocate of mental pupilage and moral subjection; and, then, men are put back under the discipline of what the Apostle calls the Law. Yet God is not weary and soon He burns up the wood and hay and stubble with which men build, [154] often in vast calamities and desolating conflicts, till men are taught that a mere order of subjection is, in the last issue, mere anarchy, and that the Divine way of the insight of our own faith and the consecration of our own wills, through our own recognition that in all things God is gracious, is alone the abiding order of reality, which evil can neither tempt nor terrorise.

[GAP 84-154]