WE ARE to covet earnestly the best gifts, yet, if we covet only the gift and pay no heed to the giving, we shall repeat, even in spiritual things, the old Roman story of Tarpeia, who, thinking only of a gift and ignoring the hostility and contempt with which it would be given, demanded from the enemy what they carried on their left arms, and found it not the golden bracelets she expected, but a weight of shields which crushed her to death, and which her greed had overlooked.

      Material wealth as mere gift, without affection in the giving, may be more shield than bracelet, as everyone in his more penetrating moments would admit. Education, concerned only with what is imparted and careless of how it is given and received, is at least as obvious a dead weight upon the mind. The cost and toil may witness to individual care, but if devoted to mere informing and not to a sympathy of understanding which shall truly teach, it is lumber, not education. And impersonal moral help is still more mere flinging of shields upon a victim. Moral precepts and religious dogmas are impressed upon the child as though he were wax. [156] He is shielded and directed, and, if unfortunately he stumble, he is wiped like a doll and set back in his place, till a moral catastrophe too grave to be so amended may be not too costly, if it enable him to save his own personal sense of truth and righteousness from being crushed by this load of individual, but impersonal supervision.

      The true test of a father's aid is the responsibility, freedom and independence of his son; and we speak of God as Father, not merely because He gives good gifts, but because He knows how to give them that they may secure us in freedom and not merely in fortune. The most liberal domination on God's 'side and the most indebted subjection on ours will never make us sons of God, but only puppets of His pleasure.

      If grace as direct power, which proves itself omnipotent as it is irresistible, is God's only adequate way of working, the manifest sins and errors of mankind would seem to show that He is as parsimonious in his exercise of it as the Pope of his infallibility. Why, if it is only a matter of God moulding us to His will by the word of His power, should there be difficulty so great and failure so deplorable?

      Our will obviously must have some place, if only to explain error and evil. But when we seek, alongside of grace as direct power, room for will as another direct power, we find ourselves trying to conceive that God makes us free by compulsion, while, yet, we are free only as we are not compelled, that God, by the might of His hand, shapes our thinking to truth, our feeling to purity and our wills to good, while, yet, except as we see for ourselves nothing is true, except as our own hearts reverence nothing is pure, except as our own purpose is consecrated nothing is good.

      When our doing and God's doing thus become irreconcilable mechanical opposites, and we find ourselves, [157] not only in conflict with experience, but introducing absurdities into it, we ought surely to realise that we have missed our way.

      Yet it is followed blindly and persistently, partly from the mechanical nature of our thinking, which tends to reduce all explanations to the appearance of a law of motion, even in the personal sphere where it is wholly misleading, and partly from the lack of practical harmony in our whole dealing with experience, whereby our faiths and our purposes are actually in continual conflict. We constantly look at life religiously and morally, as through a binocular out of focus. At best we dimly feel these worlds are one, though we cannot help seeing them apart even when we look with both eyes; at worst we shut one eye and look morally, and then open that and shut the other and look religiously. Then we say very sagely, room must be found for both worlds. Life, we say, is not a circle but an ellipse with two foci. God is grace, but He is also power--as if the whole question were not whether the ultimate power is gracious; or God reveals Himself in Christ, but also in Nature--as if the whole question of Christ were not how Nature is to be interpreted by the purpose of God; or God is love, but He is also justice--as if the whole question of the government of God did not concern a righteous love; or God speaks in His Word, but also in conscience--as if there were any word of God not manifested to every man's conscience or any conscience apart from the manifestation of the mind of God; or there is the problem of the individual, but there is also the problem of the Kingdom of God, meaning by that, compromises and adjustments between the claims of institutions and the vagaries of their members--as though the whole issue of religion did not concern social persons who only find their own kingdom as they discover God's. [158]

      The task of theology is not to effect some kind of working compromise between the two tubes of the ocular, but to find their proper adjustment to one clear field of vision, so that we shall not be moral and religious, but shall so depend upon God as to have in all things moral independence, till our religion becomes morality and our morality religion.

      God is not concerned first with good gifts, but with right giving as measured by right receiving. Grace, that means, is never a mere direct line of power, passing through us with impersonal directness, as light through window-glass, but is a curve of patient, personal wisdom, encircling and embracing us and all our concerns. And with that curve a true theology is wholly occupied.

      Grace has always a convex side towards God, and a concave side towards man. Taken separately, they axe contradictory and opposite, but, united, they are as perfectly one as the convex and concave sides in one line. As acts of grace and acts of will, they are sheer conflicting forces; in the gracious relation to us of the Father of our spirits, their harmony is the essential expression of our fellowship. Yet, the harmony of love, not of absorption, of personal agreement, not of pantheistic oneness, can be won only as we realise the contradiction and see how God overcomes it, by accepting it.

      Every right doctrine of grace, therefore, starts from the conflict between us and God as individuals which, just because it belongs to our power as persons to maintain, God's indirect personal dealing with us alone can overcome.

      Religious and moral positions, being opposed mechanically, admit of no solution, but, being combined personally, they admit of no conflict. The way of the working of God's gracious personal relation to His children is shown precisely in that reconciliation, [159] which, being on His side, the succour of our freedom, and, on ours, the liberty of His children, is not religious in one aspect and moral in another, but is moral because it is religious and religious because it is moral.

      Yet this truly personal harmony can be achieved only through contradictions, which are not mere intellectual puzzles to which we might find some clever answer, but are actual practical opposites which arise from the fact that man is one person and God another. As we can, being persons, maintain our separateness from God, they admit only of a religious solution, a solution by finding our true freedom in the will of God as the gracious, wise and religious regard for His children which we express as love.

      A right relation to God is at once moral and religious--inseparably one, yet our dependence and our independence cannot be brought into unity by any process of resolving the moral into the religious or the religious into the moral. In a relation in which the moral is resolved into the religious, man is not one person and God another, but man is overridden in his course and his end is to be absorbed, and God acts as a pantheistic Absolute and not as a Father; while, in a relation in which the religious is resolved into the moral, the truly personal is also lost, man becoming a mere self-enclosed individual and God a remote Deistic Maker and moral Potentate, and no Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being, in whom and unto whom and through whom are all things.

      But, man being a person, can maintain his separateness from God, and, God's relation to us being personal, He cannot overcome it merely by a grace which irresistibly removes it. His acceptance of it, is on the contrary the basis of all His dealing with us, so that He cannot succeed, by withdrawing our responsibility, but only by making us more perfectly responsible, till we discover [160] our true freedom in making His righteous and holy will our own. That is not attainable by the highest might of omnipotence even guided by omniscience, but only by the patient and wise regard for His children we call love. As love must, from its nature, desire our worth to be in ourselves and not merely to force us, by any means, to be worthy, it must accept the practical contradictions which arise when our wills are set in one direction and its purpose of good for us in another. Nor has it any other way of overcoming them than the personal persuasion which would enable us to discover that we are true to ourselves only as we seek the highest love appoints for us, and find ourselves only as we lose ourselves for love's sake.

      All doctrines of grace, being doctrines of love, and not of power, must accept these mechanical opposites, which are there so long as our will is set in one direction and God's in another. They may neither be ignored nor overridden, but, on the contrary, it is of the essence of a gracious personal relation to be wholly determined by them. It may not take the easy road of might, for, then, instead of being rid of the mechanical opposition, the relation between God and man becomes wholly mechanical, as between forces not persons. The very business of a doctrine of grace, on the contrary, is to show how grace steadfastly maintains a relation between God and His children, wherein we remain persons even as He is a person, and have moral independence even as He has, an independence which we only perfectly achieve, as we attain a perfect trust in our Father, whereby we can serve Him joyously, as love can alone be served, in His children.

      An account of the way of the working of God's gracious relation to us, therefore, is just an account of these opposites, which, so long as they are opposed mechanically, are irreconcilable contradictions, and of [161] how love overcomes them by a personal dealing which turns them into the perfect harmony of unbroken peace and unceasing purpose of good. The problem is how to set forth the doctrines of grace, so that salvation shall not be either God's working or our own, or, in part, God's gift, and, in part, our own achievement, but, from its beginning in penitence to its completion in the possession of eternal life, be, all of it, at once of God's giving and of our own achieving, at once of God's working in us the willing and the doing, and of our working out our own salvation with a fear and trembling which is at once a recognition of a reality and the imperfection of our task, and a trust in God's as alone making it perfect and secure.

FAITH IS not, as is often affirmed, trying to believe things on a venture, yet, only as we can do no other than venture, have we faith. When, as often happens, men say in effect, This is true, but I don't hold with it; this is trustworthy, but I am not so simple as to entrust myself to it; this is God's way, but I won't risk taking it, they are merely deceived by words. What you hold with is your real truth; what you entrust yourself to your real faith; the power whose way you take your real God.

      Moral goodness, in ourselves no less than in God, must, in that case, be fundamental for all right faith in any relation to us of God the graciousness of which is more than mere benignity. To benignity sentiment might be a sufficient response; but who can imagine [162] that mere benignity can explain this world, either its worst or its best, or sentiment be an enduring link with anything that could sustain us throughout life's weary day? A good God, adequate to experience, can only be a God whose love is manifested in conscience and whose power is manifested in love, in whom, therefore, no one can have faith without measuring life by goodness in the moral sense.

      Our faith in God is a saving faith, because, faith being this practical trust, to believe in God is identical with committing to Him our salvation; and we show what manner of belief we have in Him by the kind of salvation we expect. An expectation of ease from distress of body or conflict of soul, though sought by way of the hardest asceticism, merely means that we hope, after breaking through the hard shell of life, to find the sweet kernel of beneficence. Only the expectation of a moral victory from which sin could neither draw us nor drive us, marks a true faith in the goodness of God. But that hope is manifestly unreal and perverse and hypocritical, if divorced from moral purpose.

      The succour of faith in God through Jesus Christ, so far from replacing that moral requirement, most intensifies and deepens it, unless we evade its appeal by separating belief in Christ from belief in everything for which He stood. Without that separation, we could not look on the one perfect manifestation of our true moral relation to God and man and see in it the one unblurred mirror of God's gracious relation to His children, without an overwhelming sense of its moral requirement. To call Jesus Saviour--if we really trust that to which we entrust our salvation--is in the same breath to call Him Lord; and to say we believe in Him without standing for what He stood for and forsaking the opposing possessions and devices by which men seek to safeguard their lives, is merely to use [163] Jesus, as we can most easily misuse the highest, to deceive ourselves.

      Nevertheless, grace is grace precisely because, though wholly concerned with moral goodness, it does not at all depend on how moral we are.

      That is the indirect way which Phariseeism in all ages has failed to grasp, with disastrous results both for its religion and for its ethics. And, so long as we relate faith and works directly, we escape a Pharisaic salvation for the visibly righteous only to run into an Antinomian salvation unrelated to righteousness.

      Yet the true situation is perfectly simple as soon as we realise the personal nature of the grace whereby we are saved. While moral attainment is the object of God's gracious relation to us, only moral sincerity is the condition; and nothing could more defeat the purpose of grace than to make our moral goodness its starting point and not its goal. In short, the condition of faith is penitence, and not any form of self-satisfaction, however well founded.

      As soon as this fact comes home to us, it is only too common to conclude that our first duty must be to work up a sense of being miserable offenders. The most approved means is to employ the darkest superlatives in confession, which, however, no sensible person is ever to dream of turning into even moderately unpleasant concrete instances. The result is seldom real spiritual abasement. More frequently it reinforces spiritual pride by making our self-acquired moral humiliation, at the cost of nothing that really humiliates, appear our easiest, yet most meritorious attainment.

      Not carefully manufactured self-depreciation, but sincerity with ourselves in the light of reality, is the condition of true penitence. Towards that we do not advance by a "voluntary humility," a purposeful persuading of ourselves to think ourselves other than [164] we are. To deprecate any hold we have on truth, to make light of any self-discipline we have won, to undervalue any capacity we have for moral, tasks, particularly if it mean excusing ourselves from their performance, is false, not true humility. An unreal emotion about his own depravity would not have improved the young ruler who had kept all the commandments from his youth; and when Jesus loved him for such obedience, He was neither lowering His standard of righteousness nor altering His conception of sin.

      No depreciatory estimate of our moral state will give true penitence, but only a wholly different estimate of ourselves in respect even of our highest attainments. Yet that estimate must be wholly of simple truth; for truth requires no working up, nothing except to see things as they really are.

      To see things as they are, however, is to see all our privileges as responsibilities; whereas the essence of hypocrisy is to regard them as merits. The beam of hypocrisy which perverts all our judgment of ourselves and of others, is nothing other than the identification of privilege with merit and not with responsibility.

      By that confusion of issues, moral comfort and self-approval can be won from events utterly irrelevant to any element of character. Thus a man feels his moral consequence increased and his moral responsibility diminished, because an event, so independent of him as the death of a relative, has put money in his purse, self-esteem is made easier through the esteem of others, and life less of a responsibility through deliverance from the pressure of need. Ability, training, even dull acceptance of good form, nay mere terror of social reprobation, may all be mistaken in this way for moral worth. After that fashion of taking appearance for reality all conventional moral judgments are formed. [165] But, with conventional moral judgment, there can be no true penitence, because, being the beam which clouds our moral vision and leaves us in an utterly unreal moral world, it perverts God's whole testimony to us through reality.

      Could that beam be removed, penitence would need no manufacturing, but would come, as truth can alone come, by being seen. As soon as we see our privileges as of God's goodness, and in no way of ours, our virtues turn out to be simply the goodness and long-suffering of God, which have shielded us from ourselves and hedged us round with restraining influences. Though these privileges have so often been little valued and ill-used that, under our care, the moral attainments they make possible constantly go astray, the idea of merit in connection with them continues to be the root of all self-deception. Instead of employing the goodness of God for its proper end of making us more sensitive to His true judgment of us, we use our privileges to create for ourselves an armour of self-esteem to ward it off.

      To be without that mail of proof is necessarily to be penitent, for it is to be without protection from the assaults of conscience. The language about being poor and miserable and blind and naked, and about all our righteousness being filthy rags, may still not come naturally to our lips, and it is vain to attempt self-hypnotising by superlatives. Little of it, however, will seem mere hyperbole, so soon as we see how our good opinion of ourselves has been formed in a world of perverted moral issues, where we can turn even the privileges, which, having been misused, are our chief condemnation, into our own merit. Except in that unreal moral world, in which our own consciousness of truth, our own conscience of right, our own sense of responsibility have no chance of straight speech with [166] us, no one can maintain a steady self-approval; but there we can divert attention from our true characters, which constantly resist the truth in unrighteousness, to the outward respectability, which permits us to esteem ourselves through reflecting the opinions of others, who cannot look upon our hearts. Unprotected by this superficial and external estimate, we should be exposed to the judgment from which Jesus alone never wavered, that hypocrisy is our supreme error and spiritual hindrance, in comparison with which even a gross vice is a small obstacle. Once delivered from that blindness, we should have no need to exaggerate our sins and shortcomings; for only by its aid cart we cherish the vanity and folly which allow us to judge God's goodness as though it were our own. Nothing is needed except to escape from it, in order to discover that there never could be any good news of God which depended on our goodness or which was capable of being good news at all, unless it were preached to the poor, preached simply to man's moral need.

      To repent, therefore, is nothing else than to see ourselves as we are in the real moral world, apart from the hypocrisy which refracts our vision till we can esteem our privileges, however misused, as requiring even the God who gave them to regard us with approbation. Without that repentance faith cannot give blessedness in face of all reality, seeing the most important of all, moral reality, is both perverted and evaded.

      But, if penitence is only another name for moral sincerity, it is plain that we cannot repent merely on demand, and by mere moral effort, and as a preliminary condition for having faith. If we were' utterly sincere, we should, of course, be wholly open to the testimony of reality to itself and so necessarily believe the truth and the truth alone. The whole difficulty regarding God's [167] gracious relation to us lies in our refusal to face reality, for its victory would be won, were that effected.

      Thus repentance is not a preliminary to faith, but an integral part of it. To see a gracious personal relation of God to us is as necessary for true penitence, as penitence for seeing that God is gracious. "Repent and believe" does not mean repent first and afterwards believe. In the real movement of the moral personality there is no such before and after. Each is necessary to each, so that no one can lay himself open to reality without faith or have faith without laying himself open to reality.

      That living union of repentance and faith is what finds itself succoured in Jesus Christ, who alone perfectly sets our failure in the light of our possibilities as children of God.

      Whether He was without sin is a universal negative only omniscience could prove beyond cavil; and whether His moral interests were beyond all limitation from His situation or His age involves a universal affirmation which must always be at the mercy of private judgment. But it is not dubious that wheresoever men meet Him, in Scripture or in His true followers, conventional moral judgments are overturned, as our responsibilities clearly rise for us out of our privileges and moral compromises lose their appearance of wisdom and present themselves as purblind foolishness. Then our sense of our amazing moral failure is only equalled by our sense of our amazing moral possibilities.

      In His presence men realise that they are of unclean lips and dwell amid a people of unclean lips, even as the prophet did who saw God in His temple, because, in the presence of Christ, penitence and the vision of God are one inseparable experience.

      With whatever critical questions of text or narrative the life of Christ may be beset, that effect abides, and [168] not always least with those who realise those difficulties most, and not always greatest with those whose relation to Him has the completest, most formal ecclesiastical expression. Nothing in history is more certain and nothing in experience more impressive than His influence in enabling men to estimate themselves with true humility, not by making them resolve to be penitent and abased, but simply by setting them before the great spiritual realities. Where that effect fails men do not lay themselves open to believe on Him, even though, according to all the orthodoxies, they accept the doctrines regarding Him, and according to all the organised traditions, are counted His followers and called by His name. But, where it is present, He is a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins, not apart and in succession, but in identity and intimate interaction.

FAITH IN God as gracious, it has been maintained, does not require for its exercise moral attainment. The sick, and not the whole, need a physician; and, the better the physician, the worse the cases that can make bold to go to him for cure. Precisely because God is gracious, He asks no minimum of good behaviour before He will aid. The supreme triumph of the Gospel is to seek and save the lost, to admit publicans and sinners into the Kingdom of God; while moral attainment as a pre-requisite for faith is legal and Pharisaic, and not evangelical and Christian.

      Yet God's salvation, it has also been maintained, is [169] moral attainment, by which alone the working of all things for good is to be measured. But salvation of that quality could have no value except to moral sincerity. Hypocrisy no reality can teach, and least of all moral reality. With hypocrisy, therefore, we can have no faith in God of a kind that would reconcile us with God in all He appoints to make us perfect as He is perfect, for how can we approve of the road, when we are not truly desiring its goal?

      But, if, as has been maintained, hypocrisy is inseparable from sin, moral sincerity would not appear to be any more within our reach than moral perfection. Are we not for ever condemned to the treadmill round of sin and self-deception, and self-deception and sin? Unchanging guilt and irremediable remorse we cannot face for ever; and, if we cannot alter the facts, are we not certain to try to deceive ourselves regarding them? Then, being left despairing and self-deceived, are we not certain to be further tempted?

      Till that vicious circle is broken, it is plain that we can neither have moral independence nor dependence upon God. Some way of escape, therefore, must be sought. But, the more earnestly we face the moral and the religious situation, the more we seem shut up within adamantine walls.

      I. The moral situation is that to grow in insight, to extend our idea of responsibility, to pass from action to motive, is to enlarge remorse till the pain leads us to curb our thoughts and to moderate our expectations. Who can escape that cultivation of hypocrisy, if, the more intensely and seriously moral a man is, the more bitterly he must feel that his morality only "shuts him up to disobedience"?

      Most manifestly this would seem to be the outcome of a conscience, no longer exercising a hard, external, [170] legal judgment, but hungering and thirsting after righteousness, a conscience which nothing less can measure than the infinite claim of love. The moral problem is simply larger and more insoluble than ever; and we are more than ever in the toils of that hypocrisy with which we can have no right relation to truth either in faith or penitence. Thus shut up in the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy and hypocrisy and sin, what can man do save cry out with the Apostle, "Who shall deliver me from this body of death?" And of purely moral answer there is none, the purely moral judgment allowing no place of repentance, though sought carefully with tears.

      2. But can any better success await a religious trust? A right deliverance from remorse might break the vicious circle and afford us room to be sincere, but, when we speak of pardon, what moral reality does it stand for which would give us a right to forgive ourselves? What is it save a legal fiction, farther away than ever, not only from moral sincerity, but from every form of spiritual reality?

      The difficulty springs from the inmost nature of the moral person, for, without imputation of our doings to, ourselves, personality would have no existence. In all else we may change and become wholly different individuals; but the sense of responsibility abides, linking inexperienced youth and intrepid manhood and decrepit age into one, and insisting that, throughout all the change, we remain unchangeably our own selves. Nor, without this imputation, could we have any permanent basis for the self of our consciousness, the growth of our ideals, or the formation of our character. The word imputation has fallen into disrepute through keeping doubtful company, but the thing itself is the life-nerve of moral personality; and if the gracious relation of God we have spoken of plays fast and loose [171] with the imputation of our own doings to our own selves, it would be more deadly fox everything that is of moral significance in us than even to be overridden occasionally by the direct force of omnipotent grace.

      Here is a legal situation, directly determined by the sense of duty and obligation, and, therefore, not to be ignored; but no progress can be made with it till we realise that from it there is no legal deliverance. The endeavours after such a way of escape are ancient and numerous, but we may reduce them to two--the way of Compromise and the way of Composition.

      The way of Compromise introduces God's pardon purely to patch up the rents in human morality.

      The first and simplest view is that we can ourselves attain so much more merit in the future than the bare legal demands of the future will require, that it will compensate in God's eyes for falling below the bare legal demands of the past.

      There we have the legalistic, moralistic spirit at its shallowest, to which the noble and austere form even of a legal morality has not truly appeared, and which has not even dreamt of a morality which demands the whole devotion of a perfect love to God and man. It has no consciousness of life's varied opportunity, no infinite standard of its demands, nothing save the most mechanical conception of character. Yet, mostly unconfessed, but not, therefore, less operative, this view dominates much theory and still more practice. More or less consciously, it directs such religious doings as penance and masses, and it can determine almost any religious observance; but there are many people neither obviously Catholic nor aggressively Protestant, nor, for that matter, of any markedly religious character, also possessed by the idea of so acting as to compensate for the past and have its evil condoned, and who are [172] thereby made unable to meet their present duty simply "'because it is their present duty, and whose whole course of life, though concerned only with law and morality, is too often made strangely arbitrary and only vaguely moral.

      The legal morality which, if it ceased to impute our doings to ourselves, would have no business to do upon the earth, cannot touch the imputation of wrong, or, when we face the moral reality with unaverted eyes, afford us any prospect save the bitter irremediable past. If we are to be saved from self-deception or despair, must we not, then, comfort ourselves with the hope that we can do something to make up for the past, and that God will overlook the rest? If morality is a legal requirement and every breach of it legal guilt, and nothing can alter the past which is past for ever, or make it other than our own, is any better, any other possible way of comfort open?

      In that case, and if that is all, the comfort is not great, for such condonation deals efficiently neither with the past nor the future; and least of all is it adequate to the needs of the present. It may be better thus to lighten the burden of the past than to ignore it, but there is no real power in the hope of acquittal on good behaviour to remove it from our shoulders. As our future can never be determined apart from our past, it is better to bring our past to bear upon the future in this way than not at all, but it is no right attitude to the future to see ourselves in its vistas creatures of transcendent merit, even though our past should need all conceivable future merit to cover its deficiencies. Above all, though our present task comes out of the past, and a very important part of it may be to face the consequences of past transgression, our service is in the present; and the service of the present never leaves us anything but debtors to its calls, so that, after we [173] have done all we can, we remain unprofitable servants, with no merit in our best devotion to good, and much less superfluous merit to meet the demerit of past devotion to evil.

      The other legal solution is the way of Composition. Something other than our own righteousness, usually the merit of another person better than ourselves, is suffered by God to compensate for our deficiencies. This may be merely the transference of the merits of the saints, or it may be the more definite and comprehensive conception of a substitute who takes our place.

      The feeling by which this theory survives doubtless comes down to us from the days when the person was still submerged in the clan or city. When moral interests were communal and individual responsibility only vaguely defined, such transference of merit or guilt may not have been morally forbidding and may even at times have been morally impressive: but, as a theory of pardon which is to work legally in a legal situation, the essence of which is the ascription of guilt to the individual, it comes to shipwreck, not merely on details, like the difficulty of seeing how any one's merit could be transferred to another and also remain his own to secure him a higher place in the hierarchy of the saints, but because it fails completely to fulfil the legal conditions of the very legal difficulty it exists to remove.

      It is proposed as a remedy at once for the distressed conscience of the individual and for the violated law of the universe; but, in respect of both, it remains an arbitrary solution which no subtlety can make moral. With respect to the individual the heart of the legal situation is that the, guilt is ours, ours only, and ours always, that, in that aspect, the moral personality is quite isolated and impenetrable; while, if we take a wider view, and regard sin as a wrong done to the [174] moral government of the world, a Moral Governor who suffered the transference of guilt from the guilty to the innocent, would not, according to an enlightened conscience, be a Moral Governor at all, and would, moreover, have played such havoc with responsibility, that there would no longer be any moral order to safeguard.

      Nor is the theory more religious than moral, for it would not explain to us, in any way, what is meant by calling God Father, or make it plainer to us, in any way, how our relationship to Him is wholly of love. God would not be dealing with us as with sons, but, at best, He would be giving us some kind of State condonation for a cause foreign to ourselves and foreign to our filial relation to Him. To the name of forgiveness, as a true restoration of fellowship, it could have no kind of claim.

      If pardon is to break the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy, and hypocrisy and sin, in which we find ourselves imprisoned, it must neither be a compromise nor a composition, nor any device of condonation whatsoever, but must deal with the actual moral situation by means of moral realities, and the issue must be power to look the whole moral situation straight in the face. It must not mean palliating, or ignoring, or transferring, but courage to open all cupboards, assured of finding no skeletons. To be forgiven ought to mean that all need has gone from us to think anything, either in ourselves or in our situation, other than it is. The essence of being justified ought to be emancipation from moral juggling with ourselves by giving us power to look all reality in the face. As a mere legal fiction, justification would only be another illusion, and could do nothing to deliver us from hypocrisy. A peace of moral insincerity we can too easily attain, but from that it is the very business of justification to set us free. [175] Yet it will avail nothing to that end unless it so deal with our actual moral situation that we can, at one and the same time, have utter sincerity and peace.

      "Blessed," says the Psalmist, "is the man to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, in whose spirit there is no guile." The absence of guile, the absence of all desire to shield oneself in any way from falsehood or derive profit from anything save sincerity and truth, is here at once the condition and the consequence of forgiveness. But condonation for a reason wholly outside of our responsibility would only complete our self-deception by taking the most profoundly personal element, the imputation of our sin to ourselves, out of our lives; and the result, instead of being our deliverance, would be our spiritual annihilation.

      Yet, if the Lord is not a legal fiction, if He is, on the contrary, only another name for reality, if the one thing He must do is to impute to every man exactly what he is, how, except under some illusion or by some device, can we ever have any blessed sense of pardon? From the practical moral standpoint, the problem of all forgiveness arises precisely from this close partnership of sin with unreality. We cannot be forgiven without spiritual death so long as there is guile; and we cannot be rid of guile till we look out upon forgiveness. This is the legal situation which we may not ignore, yet the antagonism in it can never by any legal device be overcome.

      Here we come upon another of the indirect personal ways of grace, grace sets right our legal relation to God, but only by making it cease to be legal. That the essential quality of grace is not to be legal is, indeed, the reason why it is not a straight line of force passing direct through our personality, but a curve of personal succour, encircling and embracing it. [176]

      The essence of this deliverance from legal device is that we are justified by faith.

      But, it may be asked, is there any phrase in the whole theological vocabulary which stirs a deeper feeling of unreality? Surely it is far less truly ethical, far more arbitrary, to suppose that God justifies us because we have accepted certain beliefs, than that He does it on signs of amendment ox in view of the moral elevation He foresees we shall attain?

      So certain does this conclusion seem that when, in deference to Apostolic language, we are said to be justified by faith, the meaning imported into the phrase is either that God condones the past because faith in the Church's creed guarantees the future by introducing us to the outward operations of grace which will complete our good resolve with love and holy works, or that faith as an inward grace is the germ of all God approves, and that, through the secure working of His omnipotence, He is able to accept it as though it were already the full fruition. But both explanations lead us back to the old legal solution, which turns out again to be nothing beyond the old legal fiction which makes God's judgment one thing and moral reality another. Faith, so conceived, becomes a condition for a legal acquittal simply because, as a mental state, it is plastic to the operations of omnipotence. When so much is made to depend on faith as a mental state, we must try to maintain it as a sort of tension or self-hypnotising; and then, as it becomes an object of effort, a distressing and morally calamitous conflict arises between faith and intellectual honesty, and even between faith and moral sincerity.

      But we are justified by faith because faith is a discernment of God's mind, and not because it is a specially meritorious state of our minds. The issue does not depend upon the nature of faith, but on the world of [177] spiritual reality in which, on its own witness to itself, we believe. We are justified because by faith we enter the world of a gracious God, out of which the old hard legal requirements, with the old hard boundaries of our personality and the old self-regarding claim of rights, have disappeared, a world which is the household of our Father and where order and power and ultimate reality are of love and not of law.

      In that world atonement is a veritable experience and not a legal fiction, in that world and not in any other. There the sacrifice and service of Jesus Christ are no longer the moral absurdity of taking so absolutely personal a thing as guilt and transferring it to the shoulders of another, an innocent person, but are the manifestation of our deepest and holiest relation both to God and man in a world, the meaning of which, in spite of everything that appears to the contrary, is love. They form the holy of holies of a new world with new and healing moral conditions, where legal ideas of meeting God's judgment fall away from us, and God's service rises upon our spirits, not with legal demands and threats, but as a Divine righteousness which we shall ever rejoice to pursue yet always rejoice to know is ever beyond us, a world even at the portal of which we may leave behind us all self-delusion and have courage to look upon ourselves as we actually are, seeing forgiveness has become a reality and deliverance, because the whole moral order of our life is transformed.

      In that world alone is atonement ever preached by any writer of the New Testament.

      In a certain logical sense moral sincerity is still the preliminary demand. To be free from guile is a condition as well as a consequence. When Paul went to the outside world, he preached that men should repent and turn to God and do works meet for repentance. [178] Only in the writings which he wrote out of the community for the community itself, and interpreted by the spirit of its fellowship, did he speak of being justified by faith; and, even thus, it was only in that marvellous setting of personal devotion in the service of love which, as the filling up of the sufferings of Christ for his body's sake, was at once the outcome and the interpretation of his faith.

      John's order is equally illuminating. "But, if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanseth us from all sin." Again to walk in the light as He is in the light, to be morally sincere, to have no guile is the condition, but only because that is the nature of God, even as Paul says in one breath, Repent and turn to God. Then the outcome of that world of light is to have fellowship one with another; and only thus, in bearing and forbearing with one another, have we the fellowship of Christ's sufferings, and enter into the sphere where Christ's blood, meaning His service and suffering, cleanses from us all sin.

      As the Cross speaks to us within the family of God, the 'old world of moral actions for legal reward is crucified to us, and our self-regarding performance of moral actions is crucified to it. Then sincerity and peace are joined in such inseparable unity that penitence is made the way to peace, and peace the way to a truer penitence; and the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy and hypocrisy and sin is turned into the emancipating way of sincerity and inward liberty and inward liberty and sincerity. In the Cross, therefore, above all else, we discern the gracious relation of our Father towards us, because there, as nowhere else, is the utter service of our brethren, unconditioned by our merit, shown to be the essential spirit of His family. The true meaning and power of the Cross we discover only as we have [179] that spirit, and love becomes for us the fulfilling of the whole law, and the spirit of mere legal judgment so leaves us that it would seem even less brotherly to refuse to share our brother's shame and help him to live it down, than to refuse to share with him in his undeserved poverty or affliction.

      The sole moral demand is sincerity, for no restoration is possible till we come to ourselves, and arise and go to our Father and say we have sinned, but it is vain to demand sincerity unless, when we go to our Father, we find more than condonation. Only because faith in Christ is the discovery of something more, does it justify. In itself, and merely as an inward grace, faith, no more than any other state of mind, effects pardon by legal merit. Not faith, but the love of God it trusts, speaks peace; and it does so, because faith in it is not of ourselves, but is the gift of God, the manifestation of what we may call an atoning order, understood by the sufferings of Christ and our partaking of them.

      It is justification because it deals with sin itself, and not merely with its consequences, because it is not condonation, but the forgiveness that waits long and gives freely, and which has ready the kiss of welcome and the robe and the feast, being forgiveness precisely because it puts itself to the trouble and cost of restoring us thus abundantly to our Father and the fellowship of our home. Were it only a letter from the father to the prodigal, saying, Come home and nothing will be said about the past, the past would not require to have anything said about it, for its own voice would be loud enough. True forgiveness demands positive manifestation of a love which will triumph over the evil past and silence its voice. The Father must say by His whole bearing towards us, My son, let us share the sorrow and live down the shame together. And that is the meaning of the Cross. It works peace, not as an isolated event in [180] the history of the world, but because it is the supreme manifestation of a redeeming love which works every day and in every event of every day. It is the high altar of sacrifice because it shows that the whole world is its temple.

      If the theory of substitution, legally interpreted, has, as it doubtless has, brought peace to burdened souls; if it has not hardened them in self-love, but has given them deliverance from self as well as sin, the reason is not that the theory is capable of some subtler legal interpretation which makes it truly meet some need of conscience, or that it is capable of some more comprehensive legal application which removes some difficulty in the government of God. The true reason is that the Cross of Christ has, in spite of the theory, interpreted and displayed to burdened souls the new world in which hard legal conditions do not obtain, but where these legal frontiers of our moral personality have been lost in a deeper moral fellowship with our Father and our brethren. There they have realised that the bearing of each other's burdens, whether of sorrow or of sin, is the surest of all realities, and that the bearing of sin in particular is the very heart of God's gracious relation to us which is love.

      Though the theory of substitution, legally interpreted, is at best a legal evasion, it has, for many, broken the sense of being shut up in the vicious circle of sin and hypocrisy and hypocrisy and sin long enough to lay hold on the true deliverance; yet how much greater ought to be the appeal of a gospel which shows us that we are self-enclosed within its walls, only because we isolate ourselves from the whole gracious mind of our Father.

      But, though essentially a gospel to the sinful, the opening of the prison to them that are bound, it is not a gospel to them that call good evil and evil good. [181] To the son who will go into the far country the father divides his living, and he goes. No force alters the substance of his soul or hedges in his career. Only by bitter experience does he come to himself. And it is not a new self, but his own true self he has so long repressed and wronged. Nor is it less a teaching of God because it is a teaching of life. Not till we are thus taught of God, Jesus says, do we come to Him. But, then, there are no conditions, no compromises, no compositions, no legal dealing with the past in any way, but simply arising and going to our Father and finding, in Christ, every manifestation of love which makes pardon a perfect restoration to a fellowship which, on God's side, has never been broken, but has always been a waiting and a longing, ready to see us on our return a long way off and to anticipate our confession with every token of forgiveness. Moral sincerity alone it asks, and makes no inquiry regarding moral attainment, yet it so displays the mind of God as to take away every reason for being insincere, and furnishes every reason for being open and manifest in His sight, and for putting away every hidden thing of shame, which means every secret deed and thought which shame would hide.

JUSTIFICATION, as we have conceived it, does not ignore or condone or compound our sins, but, on the contrary, enables us to face them in the assurance that they no more interrupt our fellowship with the Father of our spirits; does not modify our legal relations by special acts of grace, but manifests God as gracious to us in all His [182] Ways does not condone offences, like pardon by the State, but is the assurance of a love which can be pained, though never alienated, and which, out of its pain, charges itself with the task of commending itself to us, so as to restore us to our place in the family and household of God, where, in forgiving, we learn the blessedness of being forgiven.

      Yet it may still not be clear how such a justification really justifies. If sin is forgiven merely by taking us out of the circle of legal morality into the circle of God's family, the consequences of sin would seem to remain, and, with them, our guilty fears, the spring of all our moral juggling. But if the consequences of our sins still follow us as certainly as our shadows, the past is not delivered from despair nor the future from dread, and we cannot cherish the spirit of peace and find it to be the spirit of truth.

      A justification which condoned our guilt and assured us of escape from punishment on the day when God judges the secrets of the quick and the dead, may not have covered all our need, but at least it set a term to our fears. Its operation might be external, but the consequences of sin also are external. Precisely because they are now utterly outside of us, they are entirely beyond our amending from within. A Day of judgment may be a metaphor, but if there is an absolute justice, it represents the tremendous reality of a final equivalence o? sin and sorrow. As sin has a way of springing its consequences upon us at unexpected times, even a day when it will spring all its consequences upon us may not unreasonably be feared. Without provision against so great a fear, what right have we to cast off anxiety or what possibility have we of peace? To dispose of this fear as self-regard is no answer. Self-regard also has its due place, it being of the nature of vice, and not of virtue, to enjoy the present forgetful of the past and [183] heedless of the future. And, if grave concern for ourselves ever could be justified, it would be by a danger looming vast and threatening through the haze of eternity. Least of all may a view of religion which starts from sincerity and ends with blessedness, ignore any consequences of sin in this world or the next, for to turn our eyes from the shadow of disaster is not to be sincere, and to steel our hearts is not to be blessed.

      This is the fear which all legal treatment of guilt is designed to diminish. But, were the immediate fear wholly removed, a wrong way of escape does not avoid the danger which should be feared. The legal way does not morally and according to the nature of things separate the future from the past, and, therefore, does not truly secure the future from the consequences of the past.

      In the first place, a succour wholly postponed to a remote, unknown day of judgment, would be an ill-tested security even against that day. With God the same and ourselves the same, why should the conditions of that day be different from this? Only if we are living down our past now, have we a well-grounded confidence of not meeting it again as an enemy in our path at any later time. In another life, where no secrets are hid and all things appear what they are, the consequences of sin may be evident as they are not here, but if the consequences which are evident are not met, what assurance have we against those that are unknown?

      In the second place, so long as our sins work harm in the lives of others or enslave our own souls, we may not try to escape their consequences. While they trouble the lives of others, may they leave ours untroubled? While habit establishes character both in good and evil, how can we be acquitted if, in our own characters, it still persists as evil? We may not seek to wash our hands o£ sins which continue to work evil without and [184] within, so long as moral sensitiveness or perception of our moral continuity remains. And a deeper sense of God can only deepen the certainty of both, and make us see more clearly the evil we have done and feel more keenly both our guilt and our responsibility.

      Nothing can ever make past evil as though it had never been, or restore to us the years the locusts have eaten, or prevent the year of weeds being the proverbial seven years of seeds. Nay, did the past never remind us of its existence again, either in this life or another, we could not be true to ourselves--without which we cannot be true either to God or our fellow-men--and take advantage of the immunity to cultivate oblivion.

      A true forgiveness, so far from offering us this way of escape, evokes a keener sensitiveness to the evil we have done in the world and to the evil we have planted in our own hearts; and to desire to escape the moral distress which arises from an evil past merely shows that God's pardon has not really touched us. Would we ignore the consequences of our sin which still work evil in the world, we have merely, in a selfish spirit, accepted legal condonation for a Father's pardon which wins us from self; would we overlook them while they still work evil in ourselves, we have merely accepted the succour of power which ignores our true nature and our true need, in place of the succour of love which concerns itself with nothing else. Neither God's pardon, nor any succour of love our highest faith might conceive--not though it afforded the clearest vision of life's blessedness and stirred every chord in our hearts--could, after that direct and immediate way, blot out the heritage of sin. To deal with this moral situation morally is beyond any operation of might, even though it were omnipotent.

      Once more God's gracious personal dealing with us is [185] indirect and through ourselves, and not direct and by almighty fiat.

      Grace deals with all the consequences of sin, in ourselves and in the world, in the present and in the future, but only by first enabling us to accept them.

      To be at peace with God is to be at peace with all He appoints. But our sins were not appointed of God, and were not designed, by us or by anyone else, to work for His purpose, in accord with which alone all things can work for good, and love be seen, even in a glass darkly, to be the meaning of experience. God is reality, and reality is against all who would interpret life by self-love and self-will. Sin is the attempt to get out of life what God has not put into it. Necessarily it is a hopeless and calamitous warfare, in which the blows are not light and the falls not soft. To deny this is vapid sentiment and self-delusion. As God's rule must, in the nature of things, be against everyone who, with the purpose of evil, would counter His purpose of good, the experience of God's wrath is overwhelmingly calamitous, not as anger, outside of the moral order, but as the essential nature of its, working.

      That experience of evil to him who works evil causes men to think that God needs to be reconciled to man, and not man to God. It is only the shadow of our misunderstanding, as if, fleeing from a friend in the dark, we meet disaster as though he were a foe; and, as our friend only needs to show his face, we need only truly to see God's face to be succoured. But to show Himself is difficult, precisely because we are fleeing from Him in the dark. To Him belongeth mercy, because He rendereth to everyone according to his deeds, but His equal rule can only mean that to Him belongeth wrath, so long as we are merely seeking to shun the evil consequences of our iniquities.

      To be reconciled is to be forgiven, and to be forgiven [186] Is to be reconciled, yet Christ's whole manifestation of the Father depends on putting reconciliation first in our thoughts. We are not reconciled when, upon conditions, God has forgiven us, but we are forgiven when we know that He is waiting to be gracious. No word of religious insight says we need to beseech God to be reconciled to us. On the contrary, the Apostle conceived his own task and the task of the whole religious fellowship to be that, through them, God besought men to reconciled to Him. But, before we can hearken, we must learn how all life, and more particularly the sternest experiences in it, suffering and death and corruption, is His pleading not to accept the world at its face value, but to seek farther for His purpose and our peace.

      That is impossible till we have recognised the evil of our sins and accepted their consequences, for they are the reason why He must plead so often in severity and disaster. Deliverance from the guilt and power of sin must be central and dominant in all His dealing with us, for He can have no purpose with which they are in accord. The consequences of sin, therefore, determine most of our discipline and much of our duty, yet, so long as we are merely seeking to escape its consequences, sin is the last explanation of their hardness we would admit. As, in that case,, we can do no other than err in all our attempts to understand life, we can do no other than be at enmity with it and with the God who appoints it. Even punishment for our sins is not something to be escaped by any device, but it is rather true, as Luther says, that true penitence and sorrow seek and love it. This does not mean that we find it other than grievous or that we love it for its own sake; but it does mean that it also may be included by God among the things which work for good, and that sorrow is not associated by God with sin for any other reason. [187]

      No reconciliation to God which accepts the duty and discipline of life is possible without accepting the consequences of our sin by which duty and discipline are so largely determined. As He deals with us as with sons, He cannot, without disaster, overcome them save by moral means. Yet, precisely because we are sons in the household of God, our individual tasks and trials are not to be regarded as necessarily the direct consequences of our particular sins or as a specially designed individual course of medicine. Not in that isolated way are the consequences of sin overcome, but only in finding sin and all its consequences taken up into a world where love suffers and atones. Life is what it is because the consequences of sin are what they are, but we can only judge that to be of God's goodness as we realise our place in the whole family of God, and not as we take life to be our mere private concern. God is not a supreme director of souls appointing each particular life as the special regimen designed exclusively for each person's particular ailment, as though his household were a hospital, but He is a Father, treating us all as His family where His children are as unable as He is to keep themselves apart from each other's sins and failures. Precisely by the common regimen we come to health. By helping each other's infirmities and sharing, according to the whole measure of our opportunity, and not in the restricted measure of our own responsibility, in the sufferings and toils by which, in the family of God, evil is changed to good, we discover that, when we accept the consequences of sin and meet them in humility, everything in life works for their undoing. And if God condescend to use us as instruments to that end, so far from shrinking from the sorrow and the shame, we shall accept them willingly from the hands of God's love, which cannot do other than make large demands from us, because it would not be love were it not also wise. [188] Life then becomes a sacrament of redeeming love, the one supreme Divine sacrament of which all others are symbols and interpretations.

      A symbol might be described as an interpretation to the heart; and because that is the only adequate interpretation if love is greater than all its gifts, symbols are the deepest and holiest things in life. When we speak contemptuously of mere symbols and insist that sacraments axe special operations of grace, vehicles and not symbols, we are merely setting the working of omnipotence above the gracious personal love of our Father, which is the same as measuring a token of love by its material value.

      The sacrament of the broken body and shed blood of One who surrendered Himself to shame and agony and death, to the utmost evil life could impose, not in Stoic resignation, but for the sake of His brethren and in accord with the will of His Father, is the crown and consummation, because it manifests the most awful demands of actual defeat, desertion, contempt, despair and agony and death as all included in the gracious dealing of the Father with His children for victory over all the consequences of sin, without and within. It is the high altar of sacrifice, revealing to us that the whole world is God's temple, wherein all our common life, and all our dealings with our brethren, amid all the wickedness of man and even the fears and agonies and corruptions of death, are the ministers of God for the deliverance of His children. In the Cross of One who did no sin and deserved none of its evil consequences, love makes its highest claim to trust and its largest demand for loyalty. Fox that reason it is the inmost sanctuary of pardon and reconciliation, where we can take up our discipline and duty, assured of finding them the way of victory, because we have learned the mind of Him who appoints them, and would ourselves also be [189] partakers in the sacrifice and service by which sin and all its consequences must be overcome.

      To call us thus to be His fellow-workers is the crowning evidence that God deals with us as His children at one with Him in our choice and steadfast purpose, and never on any lower platform of mere subjects and dependents. Our duty and discipline are then changed from trials and tasks into a service of a love which is not a mere emotion, but is esteem for us as moral persons, from whom no sacrifice is too great to demand, if it enable, not ourselves alone, but also our brethren, to live in the Kingdom of the Father.

      To be justified, then, is not to have the consequences of sin condoned or even obliterated, but so to be reconciled to God in spite of sin, that we can face all evil with confident assurance of final victory over it, and by God's succour transform all its consequences, whether the evil be natural or moral, the outcome of our own sin, or from our necessary fellowship with others in His family.

THAT RIGHTEOUSNESS cannot come by the law would be oftener denied, did it not usually seem too remote from any immediate issue to be worth denying. The law is thought of as ritual precepts no sensible person would think of disinterring from the unreadable parts of the Old Testament, and righteousness as a theological notion which may well be left even more deeply buried under the ashes of burned out controversies.

      But the more righteousness is devotion to a positive and inspiring ideal, the less it can come by any form [190] of imperative. Universal commands of practical reason and even momentary injunctions of conscience as inevitably fail as formulated decalogues, because the failure is due to the nature of law, and not merely to some defect in its form. Nor is the failure only a matter of theory. It is no more an abstraction than an antiquity, but brings into our lives a problem of sorrowful practical moment.

      The first cause of the inadequacy of the moral law righteousness is its direction of attention to the worth of our moral selves. Nor is there any kind of moral imperative which can deliver us from that dangerous moral attitude.

      Every moral law, whatsoever its form, is the law of our moral worth; and, the more strictly ethically we speak, the more we disallow any motive save reverence for our moral worth. When we extend that reverence to other persons and treat them always as ends and never as means only to other ends, we might seem to find in the service of others an object in which we may forget ourselves. But, if we esteem others as persons because we first esteem ourselves as persons, reverencing them for what we ourselves ought to be, we are not truly forgetting ourselves; and inevitably we are Drought back to the idea of our own worth and even of our own moral progress.

      Yet, under no guise is self-reverence the right moral motive or self-development the right moral end. Our task is to concern ourselves about doing good, and never about being good, and we must do good for the sake of the good itself and never for our own moral improvement. Here we have an insistent moral contradiction which is by no means confined to theory, for, what causes more practical distress than' the way in which mere moral effort leaves us with our eyes directed towards ourselves in self-satisfaction at our own virtue, [191] yet, at the same moment, stirs in us a conviction that our eye should be upon our duty, in utter forgetfulness of the whole question of our merit or our perfection?

      And the worst of this conflicting moral state is that, on merely moral grounds, we must not so much as try to escape from it, because it is the only shadow to prevent a consciously moral person from sunning himself in his own righteousness. Yet the protection is as little secure as it is pleasant, for, being a cold shadow, we axe always tempted to escape from it, and the effort to hold ourselves to our place can itself be made a ground for self-satisfaction.

      The second cause of the inadequacy of the law for righteousness is that law deals in negatives. Decalogues only say, "Thou shalt not"; abstract schemes of universal laws only mean, "Do nothing in this case not applicable to every similar case"; even conscience, like the daimon of Socrates, is active mainly in prohibitions. But this negative attitude reinforces the forementioned danger of self-complacency, because merit exists only on a negative standard and self-righteousness can be fed only by thinking of the evil deeds we have not done. A merely moral attitude towards life can thus he put on as blinkers to make us walk in a narrow beaten path, with the whole vast horizon of life's possibilities hidden from our eyes. We are satisfied when we have not actively committed any wrong, and we fail to recognise that the supreme sin is to be deaf to life's calls and blind to its opportunities, to recognise no suffering which does not cry in our ears, and see no duty which does not point along the accepted, formulated track. A dull and prudent common-sense, so long as its rather bleared eyes see in us neither gross self-indulgence nor obvious sophistry, may approve, but, even to true moral insight emancipated from conventionality, the soul is lost which sees no visions and dreams no dreams of life's [192] measureless possibilities. We are left in the distressful situation of being only moral as we walk by rule, while yet we know--the more certainly as our morality really moral and not merely respectable--that no rule can show us the highest way.

      A righteousness, therefore, which is by the law, cannot escape being negative and self-righteous, with the result that, in a merely moral frame, the spirit cannot, in self-forgetfulness, respond, like a harp with many strings, to life's varied moods. Life is full of joy and sadness, tenderness and pathos, admiration and just anger. It can be ludicrous, and, to him who can see, it hardly ever fails to be sublime. But string after string breaks, as interest after interest dies. From the saddest of all life's failures, which is to be left with one wailing note of peevish anxiety, any kind of moral purpose should save us; yet, if the only note which drowns it is from the hard chord of formal conscientiousness, it also is no divine music. If it has no hell in its experience, it also has no heaven; if it has no agony of failure and despair, it also speaks to no heart of the beauty of goodness and the divine joy of living; and, if there is heard in it none of the pessimism of the disenchanted, neither is there any echo of the triumph of the redeemed. It lacks the child-like soul which, through much tribulation, enters the Kingdom, the soul for which the formulation of goodness is nothing and self-forgetfulness in pursuit of it everything. Upon no morality of imperatives can that spirit nourish itself. It needs a blessed, that is a religious morality, a morality of reconciliation to the moral goal and not merely of rules about the moral road, a morality, in short, which is a joyful discovery of God's gracious will with us and all His children.

      Neither direct resolution on our part, nor direct moulding of our wills on God's part, could remove contradiction from a morality which is based on reverence [193] for our moral worth, yet denies that the promotion of our moral worth is a right moral end. Yet, only as these opposites are at once recognised and harmonised, are we set free from the danger of self-righteousness, with its eye upon itself and the measure of its service in prohibitions.

      But that is impossible either for a grace which works directly on us or a will which works directly in us; and is possible only for an indirect personal relation, which works on us by persuading the will which works on us. Then we best seek what we least pursue. This result we may thus formulate. As our moral worth is made secure in God's valuation of us, and our moral progress in being the end of all His dealing with us, God's will alone is the measure and the end of our duty, to the exclusion of all consideration of our moral worth or any task of our moral progress.

      I. While reverence for our moral selves has a manifestation beyond any merely moral valuation, attention is turned from ourselves as it never is by any merely moral imperative. Precisely because it is wholly concerned with our moral worth, God's relation to us is gracious; and because it would find no worth moral unless it were of our own achievement, it is personal, yet God's relation to us being of that nature our concern is exclusively with His will, and never with our own moral state or our own moral improvement.

      God's relation to us is gracious altogether because it is wholly occupied with our salvation, which can only mean our moral worth; and it cannot be conceived as gracious on any other ground, such as the satisfaction of God's benevolent mind by seeing His children happy. To deliver the soul from the sin which is its ruin and bestow on it the holiness which is its health and peace, is the end of all God's. dealings with His children; and precisely because He cannot merely give, but must enable [194] us to attain it ourselves, if we are really to have the liberty of His children, the way He must take is long and arduous. Thus the love of the Father, in our Lord's teaching, just because it means simply an infinite value set on the possible worth of every moral person, never for a moment means any sparing of the trials or tasks by which evil is undone or good achieved. Yet, knowing this austerity to be love, we can trust God to have a worthy purpose in the most trivial events and a measured care in the most appalling calamities, so that, whether He counts our hairs or crumbles our states, He is alike gracious. Similarly the Kingdom of God is perfect blessedness in the perfect rule of love, the very essence of it being that every soul is there as an end and not as a means merely to another end: yet, being the rule of love in freedom, we enter it only as we realise our true kingdom in its rule. Towards that we cannot be driven merely by overriding even our evil wills; yet we are ever called to reflection by finding that any other rule is no light disaster.

      The Kingdom of the Father, therefore, is a realm into which we enter only as we discern it to be our own right rule, so that, if anyone could be used for any end except his own moral worth, were that end the promotion of the Kingdom of God itself, there would not be, in Christ's sense, any Kingdom of God to enter. To enter the Kingdom, nevertheless, is to be concerned with God's rule and not with ourselves, and for the very reason that our salvation is so exclusively God's end that His will alone need be our end. We are to seek the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, leaving all the rest to be added. And because salvation, being the central issue, is most surely added, it may no more be a right object of anxiety than our raiment. The Apostle so little regarded his own salvation as the direct end of his own striving that he could desire to [195] be anathema for his brethren's sake. Seeing we are saved as self loses its dominion and love rules, that disregard was the highest proof of God's success, for God only succeeds as attention is withdrawn from ourselves, and not least from anxious feeling of our spiritual pulse and valetudinarian anxiety about our spiritual health.

      The solution of this apparent contradiction is found in the essential nature of the righteousness of the Kingdom of God, which is to be altogether a righteousness of God.

      But what are we to understand by a righteousness of God, if both a forensic righteousness--a righteousness into which, on certain revealed conditions, God admits us, and a sacramental righteousness--a righteousness which, by certain appointed means, God imports into us, have been set aside as impersonal, even though they be individual, operations of power, arbitrary and not ethical in their working? In what other way can God confer His righteousness? And if a righteousness of God is not a righteousness God confers, can it be more than a righteousness He demands? But, would not a righteousness God demands simply be a righteousness of larger moral requirement? And if our own righteousness is already a great deal more than we can fulfil, what gain could accrue from finding one still larger?

      Understood in that external way, neither a righteousness God demands nor a righteousness He confers could deliver us from self-righteousness. On the contrary, nothing helps to delude us into self-approval more than spacious ideals, the contemplation of which seems to suffice without the weary and discouraging task of seeking to realise them, except it be our skill in appropriating righteousness which does not belong to us. There is nothing great or good in the world with which we can in any way associate ourselves but we seek to reflect upon [196] ourselves some of its glory, and the greatest of all moral illusions would be to transfer thus externally to ourselves the righteousness of God.

      Yet a righteousness of God is both a righteousness He demands and a righteousness He confers. God's righteousness is, in the first place, a righteousness He demands. It is a righteousness beyond that of the Scribes, beyond the austerest human prescription--a righteousness, not finite at all, but infinite. And in the second place, it is also a righteousness He confers. In a new world where love both bears and forbears, all our worth is of God and not of ourselves.

      But it would be no deliverance in either, were it not also a righteousness God looks after. We can face larger demands and find them freedom and not slavery, we can feel the terrors of a guilty conscience disappear from our lives and find the result not licence but obligation, because we are dealing with a righteousness which every duty. God requires and every discipline He appoints are designed to forward, so that our whole life, in its most casual relationships as well as in the friendships which have struck their roots into the depths of our being, in its most trivial happenings as well as in its brightest glories and its darkest catastrophes, in its pain of broken endeavour as well as in its triumph of successful enterprise, is one, infinitely varied, uninterrupted means of grace.

      In that case, all ways of salvation by personally appointed discipline and, still more, by publicly arranged rule, by contract with ourselves or with others, spring from lack of faith to commit our salvation to Him who alone can know either what our full salvation is or the right means for its advancement.

      Even when we make use of what we specially call the means of grace, it should not be with the direct object of forwarding our salvation. They are special [197] means only for enlightening us regarding the true means of grace, which is life, and for enabling us to make a diviner use of life in humbler service. The public use of such means of interpreting and rightly using life, above all, may not be neglected, because no one can understand God's meaning in life in isolation, but only in the fellowship of the saints; yet no use of them is in itself religion, however vitally necessary their right use may be for religion.

      If God alone can look after our righteousness, no room is left for us to act upon the idea of ourselves at all, not even upon the idea of ourselves as examples. However frequently that motive is urged in the name of religion, it is no more a right religious motive than the idea of commending ourselves to God by our visible observances. We may not cause our brother to offend, but whatsoever is required of us to that end should be because it is our own immediate task of loving service, which it would not be anything other than right for us to do on its own account, and not as a work of consciously shining example. Action for the mere purpose of example is both morally futile and morally dangerous. It is futile because, were its motive recognised, no one would be influenced, at least for good, and it is readily betrayed by the externality and formality of the action; and it is dangerous because, the figure we shall make in it being our object, we cannot help sunning ourselves in our own approval, which the more certainly involves us in self-righteousness that we seem to be doing more than the requirement of our own duty.

      All real faith in God ought to teach us that no one can look after our righteousness except God. As it is God's righteousness for us, it must be too far above our knowing to be our own direct aim, and too wide-reaching in its application to be our own self-imposed [198] task. Therefore, it must be God's aim, not ours, the object of God's care, and not of ours.

      The one object of our care is then the will of God, because, if it is the will of God for our salvation, our salvation ceases to be an object for our own wills, and God's will, which, by caring for our salvation, proves itself the will of love, becomes our sole right object. Because our highest good is utterly secure in it, we can forget ourselves altogether and set before ourselves, as our one end, what God will have us do. Then, and then only, the insistent problem of self-love and self-forgetfulness is solved for us, and our moral selves are saved, in the only way they can be saved, by being delivered from self-regard.

      II. The indirect personal way of God's dealing with us meets the danger of self-righteousness which arises from the necessarily negative nature of a legal morality, because, though it directs attention away from our own salvation towards the will of God, the positive requirements of God's will of love alone show us the greatness of our salvation.

      Lack of clearness in our thinking leads to ambiguity in our terms, which again re-acts to the further confusion of our thinking. Among such ambiguous terms we ought to reckon "self-love," for it may be used with every shade of meaning, from abject selfishness to the highest and most self-denying moral reverence for ourselves. As Butler has consecrated its use for the latter, we may follow his example. To Butler it is one of the two regulative rational principles of life, conscience being the other, so far from selfishness that as few people are guided by a reasonable self-love as by conscience. By imposing a little more precision upon language than can be looked for in ordinary speech, we might use selfishness for attention to self without [199] heed to others or to the moral nature of things; self-regard for a direct but not blind prudence; and self-love for the search for true blessedness among our fellows and in face of all reality. Such self-love would be essentially concerned with our salvation, and the quality of our self-love would be determined by the kind of salvation we seek.

      Much anger against persons who are distressed about their souls is mere thoughtless worldliness, which is also seeking its salvation in equally self-regarding ways. Many cherish it merely because they do not wish to have their ideas of salvation by worldly success troubled by such questions as, Whose shall these things be when thy soul is required of thee?

      Yet dislike to anxiety about one's soul is not all for material reasons. There is also a feeling that one might be anxious about his soul in this way till the soul was lost in seeking to save itself. Nor is there deliverance in merely committing our salvation to God. The prayer, "Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation," was originally only against mortal enemies, who were to be as chaff before the wind, the angel of the Lord driving them on. The long history of revelation is mainly the history of the fellowship which, by the slow training of God's ordinary dealings illumined by conspicuous manifestations of His will, taught us to put a deeper meaning into that prayer, though a time of great individual, and still more of national material stress, is apt to show that the lesson has even yet been very imperfectly learned. Seeking first material deliverance, men set their own negative goodness against the enormities committed against them; and the issue is a self-righteousness which, however much we may trust in it ourselves, we never approve in others.

      It is not as though even material deliverance did not concern us, or as though, did it mean the well-being [200] of our souls, in time or eternity, we could be content to save ourselves as best we might, without seeking God's salvation. Yet there is a right feeling, even in not very spiritual people, that to be anxious about God saving us in that material way assumes an individual, or, at most, a national God, from whom we seek special favours such as a true ruler of the world cannot grant, and on arbitrary conditions such as a really moral governor can never have laid down, and that it fosters a very negative and self-righteous kind of self-regard.

      There is only one right way of escaping anxiety for our salvation. We must discover that, because it is God's concern, it is not ours. We commit it to Him by committing ourselves wholly to His will of love, by committing our "souls, in well-doing, unto a faithful Creator." Then only can we discern the large demands which at once teach us humility and exalt our hopes.

      The vital positive issue is that God's will of love is, as love must always be, love to others. To say that God is love, and to say that He cannot be served except through His children, is to say the same thing. In respect of our relation to God, as well as to man, "He that loveth his brother abideth in light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him." To love our brother is to discern, amid all mental perplexities, the real meaning and issues of life for all that concerns our faith in God, and to find amid all practical difficulties the right guidance of God's will, so that we shall neither lead ourselves astray nor fail anyone whom God has made our neighbour. In this reverence for man as man we have a discernment of the measureless positive requirement of God's will of love beyond what any might of reasoning or any force of practical ability could provide, before which we realise the vanity of trust in our own righteousness and enlarge our conception of God's salvation. [201]

      Only as we come to it thus round about through the love for whose sake we would be ever worthier, the love which brings out of us our best and, without whose succour, our best would never be known to exist, can we discern the nature of our true worth and reverence it in humility and not self-esteem. For that love our salvation must be the vital issue, and it can only be concerned with what, in our inmost souls, we really are, for love seeks in us its own worth, and cares nothing for doings apart from the spirit in which they are done, and cannot regard any fruit as really good which is not from a good tree. God, therefore, cannot be satisfied with anything done by us, unless it is both of our own purposing and performing, or deem anything, less to be for our salvation.

      Yet as God alone knows our full salvation and how it is to be wrought out, it is no part of our task to set up our own ideal of our saved selves, or to fashion our hearts into the likeness of it. Our true salvation we realise and work out only as we follow all the positive behests of God's love to serve Him by loving our brethren as our brethren in Christ. By therein discovering what is vital and ridding ourselves of what is accidental and extraneous, we arrive at positive, though never final, knowledge of what God would have in His children and in ourselves in particular, in such a way that we are set free from all merely negative fears of defilement, and lay ourselves open to the infinite demands of love, which at once humble us in respect of our own efforts and, for the very same reason, exalt us in respect of God's.

      To love our brother, in this moral sense, is not sentiment, which is mostly a substitute for real feeling, not even emotion which must ever vary towards different persons, but esteem for every individual according to his value to himself and His heavenly Father. Because [202] he is our brother, we must never look upon him as one of the masses, and never wish him to be wise only with our wisdom, or to be ruled only by our conscience; but we must ever realise how he stands alone in his own kingdom, for the sublime reason that he can be conscious of God's own reality, feel in his heart God's own ideal, and, above all, have in his keeping a choice of good or evil of eternal consequence. To love man as our brother, and for no other reason, is to reverence him simply because consciousness of truth, conscience of right and consecration of will are the true objects of esteem, though no robe of office adorn their possessor, no station set him on a pedestal, no, wealth give him power, no learning add to his merit.

      Apart from reverence for man as man, religion becomes an appanage of the leisured, guarded by scholars, directed by ecclesiastics, providing comfort mainly for the well-to-do. Thereupon it degenerates into a convention to hide reality from us and shelter us from its rude attacks, a convention, moreover, capable of little more than prohibitions. But, with this reverence, we discover the religion, without which the richest are poor, and with which the poorest are rich, which saves the soul itself, by showing us through our brethren the love of the Father, the religion which is not merely another wrapping to hide from us the strange, disturbing, far-reaching fact that we stand alone in the world, solitary, naked, exposed, but which truly unites us to God and man, by consciousness of truth, conscience of right and choice of good, the only truly personal ties.

      Till we have discovered that this union greatly matters and that, in the last issue, nothing else does, we reach at best Phariseeism and never the religion of Jesus Christ. It may prophesy in His name, or even in His name do many wonderful works, yet nothing can be more certain about His ministry than His repudiation of a religion [203] which only the learned could understand, only its professional representatives maintain, and only the leisured practise, and His demand from the fisher-folk and the day-labourers of a better righteousness.

      Nor is it enough to say that the day-labourer can succeed where the scribe and the priest fail, because the better righteousness is moral and not ritual. The deeper reason is that it is positive and not negative. As Stevenson tersely puts it, in the Gospels no one is damned for what he does, but for what he does not do. The highest is to love much because we have been forgiven much, and the nearest to God's perfection is ourselves to forgive. We have already seen how we are approved as we discern Christ in our brethren, serving them under all conditions. And it does not stop with esteem for good men in indifference to their trappings. Truly to love Christ is to be enabled to reverence man as man, man as God yearns over him and has hope of him in his worst estate.

      The result is necessarily a positive righteousness, because a love, which turns us away from all kinds of self-regard, even regard to our own salvation, lays us open to every appeal of need. Then we have a salvation God's care is ever enlarging as well as safe-guarding, because, when we never lack a heart to feel or a hand to help, we shall never soften life's discipline to what we cannot evade or limit life's duties to the avoidance of transgression. Otherwise the most blessed trials cannot touch us and the holiest duties never rise above our horizon, till we may come at length to live unscathed except by individual loss, and undirected except by external prohibitions. But prudence and prohibitions concern neither the truly moral nor the truly religious. They regard merely the respectable, and can issue in a salvation only from the discreditable, with self-approval for all else. [204]

      With the growing and ever more positive claims of love upon our sympathy and our service, our moral imperatives lose all limits. As love calls us, we reach out to infinity and discern that we never can come to an end of what it appoints for us; but, as we also discern that it is love which demands, and that we love only because God first loved us, we find therein also the measurelessness of our own Divine possibilities, and are no more tempted to wish to come to an end. On the contrary, we learn how small a mistake every other failure may be, compared with shutting our ears, in self-satisfaction with our own poor negative rulings, to the only voice which, by calling us to the true service of life, can at once save us from missing its divinest uses and deliver us from mere moral stress into the joy of the Lord, which is strength as well as peace.

      A salvation which God thus immeasurably enlarges for us, as we realise ever more fully the measureless positive claim of the service of love, will ever humble us by the sense that we have not yet laid hold of that for which the love of God has laid hold of us, yet will always sustain us by the sense of the high end towards which it directs and upholds our going. By forgetting ourselves in service, we shall thus find ourselves again in the love that requires it, and humbly yet joyfully know that love values nothing we do except as it springs from what we are.

      That is the experience which makes all casuistries a crime both against our moral personality and God's grace, a crime against God and His children, or we might say against love, as the moral esteem which comprehends both. In the same spirit in which they have sought to enclose the Divine mind within dogmas to be imposed from without on the human mind, worldly men, using religion to exalt the visible institution of the Church in which they exercise dominion, have [205] sought to formulate the Divine will in systems of casuistry to be imposed as external rules of conduct. In both cases they turn into finite rule what ought to be a growing vision of infinity, but the moral danger of the confessional is the greater because it can do no other than work with a system of negations, turn pardon into political condonation, and sap the insight as well as the courage by which we could learn to forget man and regard God alone, and so to be free with the liberty of His children.

      But the danger does not end with the confessional. All churches are in danger of measuring by a standard of visible respectability which may be even clumsier and less penetrating and which has not even the poor excuse of being an attempt to guide the erring. How worthless this negative and parasitic morality is we see when the conditions which sustain it are changed and the external judgment which guides it is removed. Possibly the chief Divine end of great upheavals, overthrowing all conventional standards and accepted beliefs, may be to demand of us what we, of our own insight, know to be true, and, of our own conscience, discern to be right. At all events, in morals and in doctrine alike, the more we are intent on reality and disregard mere appearance, the more we look out on what has not entered into the heart of man otherwise to conceive, and the more we are confident that they are the things which God has prepared for them that love Him.

      The practical issue of reconciliation to God is thus to find ourselves in an order of love which is our succour, so far beyond our own contriving and for ends so far above our own conceiving, that we have no concern except to serve in it. Practically, as well as theoretically, we, thereby, attain such a perfect unity of morality and religion that we can only be absolutely dependent upon [206] God as we are absolutely independent in our own souls, and only absolutely independent in our souls as we are absolutely dependent on God. A saved soul, in other words, is a soul true to itself because, with its mind on God's will of love and not on itself, it stands in God's world unbribable and undismayed, having freedom as has piety and piety as it is free.

      Instead of being hostile to our trust in God, as at first appeared, our independence is the last proof of our utter dependence, being complete only when we have a faith in God which would so deliver us from self-regard, the mother of all base compliances, that we could stand alone against the world. Only as we do what we veritably see to be right, do we prove that we believe what we veritably see to be true; and without both, nothing has either religious or moral value. By the mere fact that an action is what Kant calls heteronymous--the verdict of other people's consciences--it is made morally worthless, however much it may be visibly moral, even as what is not of our own insight into a reality worthy of our trust is thereby made religiously worthless, however much it may be, in mere statement, sound doctrine.

      We serve God as we are true to our own souls, and we are true to our own souls only as we serve God. Neither is possible without the other: for what are our own consciousness of truth, our own moral ideals, our own personal resolve and consecration save in a world the ultimate reality of which is to be sought in personal moral relations; and how shall that be known except as, by means of it, we find the liberty of the children of God?

      If to be saved is to be wholly in accord with God's will of love, to be saved in spite of ourselves is as impossible as to be saved by ourselves, for except by our own truth, our own ideal and our own intent, there is no accord. Yet, towards that end we are in no way [207] forwarded by aiming at our own well-being, either for time or for eternity, even while no other end than truth and righteousness is our true well-being. Nor is there any solution except to find in grace the will of love which has a right to ask us to deny the self that opposes its service, because it is a true fellowship of persons which maintains both the separateness and the intimateness of a moral, as opposed to a mere material surrender.

EXCEPT BY the will of God, it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps amid life's measureless possibilities or to have any confidence in dealing with them which is not vanity. Yet even God's will gives insight and courage only as it is our own law of liberty. As a rule from without, even a perfect standard of it would leave our souls barren, our lives routine, our world bounded by prison-walls, our moral horizon the visible respectabilities. Being followed from a regard to God, it might deliver us from the worldly prudences for worldly success, which above all other causes deny us the noble uses of the world, but it would still leave our world a place of straight-ruled highways, dusty with many anxieties, with routine worship added to routine duty. To be our true guidance, the will of God must be the perfect law of liberty. We are free in it when we discern it to be wholly personal, wholly concerned with our own insight and reverence and purpose of good.

      Yet it is never merely individual. We are not free as we are Ishmaelites. In isolation from the inspiration of human achievement and the influence of our fellows [208] we have no scope in any sphere, and least of all in the highest. A conscience judging God's will by tradition or common opinion is corrupt, but a conscience repudiating all guidance except its own constitution is barren. In the sense of a rule plain to each individual, in every age and social condition, and independent of all the ideas which are the measure of human progress, there is no more a natural morality than, in independence of the increasing insight of prophetic souls, there is a natural religion.

      We have no width of moral outlook except from the summit of mankind's highest ideals, and every ideal has a history, and without the influence of those who have before us seen life's opportunities, few duties would intrude upon our privacy. Except as we live in sympathy with the thoughts, are inspired by the lives, are strengthened by the fellowship of those who, by willing to do God's will in the actual tasks life has imposed upon them, have discerned its guidance and, with whatsoever outward defeat, won its victories in their own souls, conscience is an empty word.

      This heritage from the task of those who have been open to receive and do the will of God and this fellowship with their spirit of victory and peace create the true Communion of Saints; and it is a first essential task of our true liberty to take our right place in the midst of it. When that is won, we shall not need to trouble ourselves about its precise frontiers. Many societies professing to represent exclusively that august body may not have been conspicuously either communions or saints; and the immense zeal spent in discussing their claims is mainly waste. When we ourselves belong to the Communion of Saints so as to find our freedom among them, we shall not fail to discover our kindred.

      This situation involves another antagonism which, [209] being mechanically opposed, must be for ever in conflict, but which a truly personal relation, not working directly on us, but indirectly through us, turns into perfect harmony. The result may once again be expressed in summary form. God's will of love cannot be known apart from those who have discerned its guidance and cherished its fellowship, yet use cannot know it either by copying their example or by being absorbed into their company, but only by realising our own freedom in the midst of it.

      The first wrong way of belonging to the Communion of Saints which makes it impossible to know the will of God as our own will, is by tradition--the leaning upon the past which makes void God's living word.

      The prevalence of this misconception of the use of its heritage from the past explains the zeal with which all dependence upon the Communion of Saints has been repudiated, for it seems to mean the imposition by an external authority of standards of belief and action in a way to repress all true moral independence. Naturally this resentment is not diminished when superior persons insist on this subjection to external authority as the only state for which the bulk of mankind is fitted. In particular when its Head is set up as a standard to which we ought so directly to conform as to make it a sin to go round by the way of our own discernment of duty, He is vehemently rejected as the heaviest of all impositions on our freedom. As it is the chief rock of offence, we may confine our attention to the question of our dependence on that Supreme Example.

      As men have sought to deduce from the sayings of Jesus a whole and rounded scheme of the Divine mind, without themselves needing to have the mind that was in Him for its interpretation, so they have tried to solve all life's practical problems by asking the one question, [210] What, inferring from what Jesus did, would Jesus here do?

      No view of what His life was can make that other than a searching test, a test so searching that it might well seem nothing could go deeper. Nevertheless, to attach God's rule, in that external way, to Christ's example only obscures and misrepresents the significance of His perfect Sonship for making us sons of God. Except as we see as He sees, He is no revelation; and except as we determine our lives as He determined His, He is no reconciliation.

      To depend on Jesus as an external authority for the will of God is not, as is so often maintained, a right conclusion from the belief that He is pre-eminently the Word of God. On the contrary the proof of His Divine commission is in setting us free from the slavery which hinders us from being our true selves, living our own life, and dealing with God's world as our true heritage; while, to remain a mere pattern to be copied would mark His failure to establish a living relation of God's children to their Father. The reason for the belief that God was in Him perfectly reconciling the world to Himself and that the Spirit was not given by measure unto Him is, on the contrary, the way in which He sets us free. Did He rule from without, He would fall into the rank of mere human teachers, whose authority fades as they remove into the past. But He lives eternally in the present because God's will of love is so perfectly manifested in Him that it needs no appeal except to the hearts of those who are willing to lay themselves open to be convinced. Faith in any truth He never needs to ask except by showing us how to look at it so as to know it to be true; nor obedience to any command except by manifesting the spirit in which we shall discern it to be our duty. Only what speaks to the image of God in us has a right to be called a word of [211] God; and only what thus speaks to the image of God alone, and has no need of extraneous aid, has a right to be called His absolute Word.

      To-day, as in the past, no one can come near Him, in sincerity, without having new depths of sympathy and humility stirred by being made to feel more deeply life's real suffering and see more largely life's real service, and without being enabled thereby more adequately to interpret the world as God's by a worthier discipline and a nobler duty.

      No imitative life, nevertheless, is inspired, and no inspired life is imitative: and the mere imitation of Christ is so far from being an exception that it is beset by special limitations.

      First, this method of directly copying Christ's example can be employed only for immense problems and striking situations; whereas in His own life, the greatest issues constantly arose out of meeting ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Though He never said or did anything except what everyone should have said or done in the circumstances--apart, at least, from His special vocation as the Messiah--even in the same circumstances nothing but the same power of dealing with their moral possibilities would have discovered any moral possibilities. The chief question is how to discover the great in the small, the mind of Christ in matters so ordinary that we should never be arrested so as to ask ourselves what Jesus would do.

      Second, no one ever does encounter the same conditions as another; and, even if we could successfully apply His example to our situation, the exactest imitation would only be lifeless, unedifying mimicry. The quality of all He said and did was derived straight from His amazing insight, which was just perfect love. Though echoed to the letter, therefore, the soul of it would still be wanting, and would no more be His example [212] than a death-mask a living face. Our life also, if it is really to be living, must, like His, follow our own insight. As His own understanding of God's love was the fulfilment of His law, so our own understanding of it alone can be the fulfilment of ours.

      Finally, this external use of Christ's example does not help us to overcome our worst moral failure. The supreme moral defect is not the lack of a good conscience, but the limitation of our insight, especially into the claims of our own vocation, which makes it so extremely easy to have a good conscience. The comfort of that limitation explains the readiness to impose rules, and; even when they are hard, to accept them, because we seem to know where we are and when we can stop. Even when rules are found insufficient, it may seem possible to find an external standard in an example; and, in a state of pupilage, pattern is much greater than precept and much longer of profit. Thus the Apostle could say to his recent converts from heathenism, "Be ye followers of me," though even then he indicated that it was no mere copying, by adding, "as I also am of Christ Jesus." But, when we imagine that we can finally direct our lives by mere imitation of the life of Christ, we fall into a misleading and distracting encyclopaedic estimate both of Christ's life and our own. How, we are asked, can the life of Jesus have been perfect? Was He interested in art? Did He concern Himself about public service? Are we in our complex time to have no other interests than sufficed for His simpler age? And then we find that many interests which have nourished themselves from His spirit, are ruled out by His example. And His example, moreover, being thus tabulated according to interests, becomes a mere catalogue of doings, amid which the spirit which dominated His real life and made it at once so large and effective, is lost sight of. He also had His special vocation as Messiah, [213] dominating all His interests, and it was part of His true perfection to restrict Himself to its performance and not to engage in all conceivable human activities. But, when we follow Him in a mere spirit of imitation, we are led to conceive our own duties as the overtaking of a great number of tasks, leading generally to doing many things in a spirit of restlessness, and not as the fulfilment of our own vocation, complete only in its place in God's general purpose. Not till we abandon the hope of having a conscience satisfied that it has overtaken all possible duties, and learn to live with one never satisfied, even though concerned only with our own task, does the example of Christ become an inspiration to enable us to see our own service, and cease to be a pattern to enable us to blindly copy His.

      True conscientiousness does not arrest itself at infallibility, even under the guidance of Christ's example. It is not determined by undeniable duties, but by steadfastly following the light, however dim; and it is seldom faced by questions of right and wrong at all, but is constantly faced by better or worse, wherein it must ever choose the things that excel. Only in that way does man truly do God's will, so as ever to be advancing in the knowledge of it.

      The influence, therefore, of Christ's example is not to be directly our pattern, but to inspire and succour the faith which sees love to be life's final meaning and last word of power, and so to enable us to discern for ourselves its guidance and to set our hope unwaveringly on its victory. Instead of saying, Look on me and I will show you the exact life which is adequate to the will of God, Jesus says, Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavily laden seeking to meet these external standards, for I am meek and lowly in heart. That means a heart ready to accept what God imposes upon it, and only what God imposes. For that reason His yoke is easy [214] His burden light, and we find rest for our souls. The ease is not because the task is small or because we deal lightly with its obligation. To deny self and take up our cross is not easy. But if the spirit of our following is meekness and lowliness of heart, we find that the will of God is the will of love and so is the perfect law of liberty, which is the realisation of our own souls, as well as the consummation of all things.

      The second wrong way of belonging to the Communion of Saints which makes it impossible to know the will of God as our own will, is mystical.

      Mysticism is here used in the sense already explained of impersonal absorption and not in the sense of the mysterious depths of life which are inseparable from everything truly personal. Nothing passes so far beyond the senses as those personal relations which evoke the finer sympathies. So far do they pass with the living into the unseen, that it may well be that those who, after they had served their generation, fell asleep, have left more behind them than their achievements and their example. Most of all the Captain of our salvation has been included, with a warm sense of trust and companionship, in the most enduring part of living fellowship.

      That sense of touching through experience the deeper things which give experience meaning, may be called mystical, but it is not the mysticism here meant, unless it is a direct impress, which has no use fox experience but works by a corporate oneness, which is effective as we merge our personal will in it till absorption mechanically effects agreement.

      Many vague ideas of that kind probably are always floating in the public mind. Being survivals of tribal ideas, in few of us are they extinct, but, in times of great national crisis, they well up with special force, [215] and we have much talk of the State or the Church as super-personalities. At most they could be only super-individuals, but, so conceived, they would still be only Brocken shadows of the misty tribal mass morality up through which mankind has slowly and painfully climbed, and which, when the storms lift it, again surges round our heads. What they lack is precisely the moral fellowship which alone is personal, wherein we are free as we axe more perfectly directed by love, and loyalty to others and loyalty to ourselves confirm each other and are never in conflict, and fellowship is an emancipation and never a subjection.

      As all social combinations are a mixture of tribal and ethical bonds, we must expect the revival of such ideas respecting them, and we may even have to admit their utility for a time. But the essential quality of the Communion of Saints is to be ethical and not tribal. Wherefore, such ideas in connection with it work only confusion of mind and perversion of spiritual issues, till the insight and courage of the saints to hear and do only what God demands may become an offence.

      Instead of spending time on considering this mystical relation to the body, we can deal with the problem more concretely and by way of pre-eminence by again considering the true relation of the members to the Head.

      When this mystical way is taken, salvation is separated from His teaching and example and made to depend directly on His person. So hard a distinction has sometimes been drawn between His person and all that ever manifested it, as to make it appear that we could depend upon Him for salvation, though nothing He ever said or did found any echo in our hearts or made any demand upon our lives, till His person became a mysterious vehicle of forces, effective as they do not work through truly personal moral relations either with God or man, [216] but directly and overwhelmingly by forces of omnipotence, which have no relation to Jesus that even suggests the dealing of men with Him in the Gospels, and which reduces His life to little more than an interesting relic of antiquity.

      The essence of the Gospel appeal is humble, patient, suffering love, among us as one that serveth and not as one that sitteth at meat, but such an appeal is in no way necessary for a mystical communication of spiritual force.

      By many the doctrine of the Resurrection has been cherished chiefly for the reason that it seems to end this humility of appeal. He who humbled Himself was exalted. He who came as a country, workman in mean garments, comes as the Son of Man with glory on the clouds of Heaven. What can that mean if not the close of the rule of meekness and the opening of the rule of might? After a short and fruitless attempt at saving men by service and sacrifice, God, it would seem, went back to domination and compulsion, overriding when He had failed to persuade and fashioning subjects when He had not succeeded in winning sons. Thus the life of Christ becomes a temporary episode in God's dealing, and ceases to be an eternal revelation of His mind concerning what is truly coming from above with power. By that interpretation men's practical application, as well as their theory of Christianity, has been unconsciously so changed that they have no hesitation about claiming the Christian name, while they repudiate the whole method of Christ as shown in His actual life and death and in the nature of the demands He made and of the blessedness He offered. And, as an interpretation of our own experience, it turns the Jesus of the Gospels into a mere cause of confusion.

      The joyous spirit of His followers, so downcast before, shows that in some sense they took the Resurrection to mean that all power was given to their Lord [217] in Heaven and in Earth, but it was because His method had been vindicated, and not because it had been changed. To Peter it meant that He was a man approved of God, His method, which seemed to be defeat, being shown to be God's way of victory. To Paul it declares Him to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness, the spirit He manifested in meekness and lowliness. For both the Resurrection merely made plain the meaning of the life and death of Jesus, that the moral order of love is the will of God, the last, the Divinest issue of all experience, the natural, the all-prevailing, the irresistible dominion, such as is given to no overriding might; and it called them to like service in the assurance of like victory, not because God had substituted power for love, but because He had shown them that love in the end alone is power. As Pascal says, we touch the risen Christ only through His wounds, and when we try to sink ourselves in His glory or try to absorb ourselves in the Church as though it were His glorified body, and not His body only as we in our mortal conflict manifest the spirit which brought Him to the cross, we merely substitute for reconciliation in our whole personal life to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, a vast shining abstraction of power, which does not transform but wrongly removes the burden of the world. It would spare us the conflict and not send us forth with high hearts to the battle in which we must win our souls as the children of God.

      The end of our whole relation to the Communion of Saints is not to save us from.personal struggle, but by showing us that persons are the only storehouses of God's purpose which do not pass away, to inspire in us ever deeper devotion to the personal values which are life's meaning and goal, and the only unchanging end of this ceaselessly changing world, for the sake of which we can endure all things as well as hope all things. [218]

THE WILL of God which can claim all our concern, to the exclusion of anxiety even for our own salvation, is not alone the expression of love as the highest sentiment in Heaven, but is the rule of Heaven on the earth, which makes all things work for good to those who accept it. God's love is not merely a benevolent emotion existing in His heart and nowhere else, and requiring no response beyond a kindred emotion in ours, but is, in spite of all that appears to the contrary, the final order of the world, so that, if we are in accord with it, all right uses of the world are assured, and, if we are in conflict with it, there can be no use of it which will not work disaster.

      In the last issue, it is a question of how the world is made and governed. It concerns the nature of reality in such a way as to leave us no choice between finding God's will of love, as interpreted by the moral requirement, the last word of power, the final reality, or an utterly baseless dream, the fondest illusion.

      The absolute obligation of righteousness can have no rational basis, except as final reality is of that nature. Because obligation has been wrongly related to religion by means of infinite reward and punishment, what should be above all calculations of prudence is degraded into a mere extended regard to our own happiness. For that reason, in spite of the fact that, throughout all human history, the basis of morals has been religious, moralists have sought to derive it entirely from the peculiar nature of conscience, without any reference to [219] religion. Even when God is introduced as a compendious name for the validity of the moral order, the absoluteness of moral obligation has still been derived from some kind of infallibility of conscience. But conscience is no more infallible than any other human authority. The absolute nature of its requirements depends on no inerrancy in its verdicts, but on the absolute rule which, in so far as it is conscience of right, conscience reveals and we ought to esteem all conscientiousness, not because it cannot be mistaken, but because there is no way of knowing better the true rule of righteousness, which is absolute, except by being more conscientious.

      As soon as we ignore this dependence on the rule of God and the moral nature of things, and seek to derive the authority from conscience itself, we are certain to reduce conscience to some kind of blind social instinct. And, if our selfish good is the rational view of ourselves and the individual struggle for existence the rational view of the world, we can only hope that conscience will continue to act blindly and never become rational. Yet it is a vain hope, for how can conscience impose absolute obligation on those who are sufficiently enlightened to discern that it is a mere instinct of the herd? How can we be loyal at all costs to mere irrational instincts knowledge must outgrow?

      Till conscience of right stand above all prudences, there is no beginning with any kingdom of God, yet till the Kingdom of God is the meaning and purpose of all that is without, there is no true beginning with conscience of right. No one ever stood up, especially if it were against the whole world, and said this is right and this alone, without being assured that the ultimate nature of things was on his side. That no other soul accepts it in no way shakes his confidence. The efficiency of Touchstone, "I will bandy with thee in faction; I will o'er-run thee with policy: I will kill thee a hundred [220] and fifty ways," is for him only the faith of the simple fool, even though he be highly placed, subtly skilled and abundantly equipped. God's world, he knows, is not built that way. The natural order of it is the love which is the fulfilling of the law, and not the selfishness which knows no law except its own direct advantage; and the blessings which make rich and add no sorrow are truth and beauty and goodness, and not place and wealth and outward fame. God is not mocked. The name of the wicked shall rot, the noisiest clamour of self-assertion die down, the kingdoms of violence be self-destructive.

      Yet, from first to last, it is necessary to affirm, and not merely to admit, that God's Kingdom does not exist anywhere as a rule which imposes itself otherwise than by our own insight into truth, conscience of right and purpose of good. Conformity to outward rule is, at best, manners and never morals. Only what is seen in its own light to be true is rational, and only what is submitted to on its own claim is righteous. Yet we can find neither by merely reflecting the world around us. As an inference from the way the world rules us and from the visible order of life and society, we might as readily speak of a Kingdom of Satan as of a Kingdom of God.

      The contrast between the absolute nature of the rule of God and its limited operation may again be set forth as a harmony of opposites. The rule of God is an order which is outside of us, but it exists only as it is imposed from within.

      The Kingdom of God exists as an objective reality in the strict sense the only existing order of the world. Yet, as a gracious personal rule, all its characteristics are determined by its limitation. It cannot operate except as it is received as our own rule. To that personal nature of God's rule are due all the contradictions which have met us, and which not only seem to exist, but [221] actually do exist, while that rule is not received. Though the ultimate reality, except as the perfect law of liberty, it is wholly inoperative; though the measure of all that is final, except as it is our own end, it measures nothing in the world. But, for the very reason that God's Kingdom imposes itself from within and only from within, as the law of our liberty and only as the law of our liberty, as the realm of moral esteem and only as the realm of moral esteem, is it the final, the rational, as well as the righteous order of the world.

      If the issue of this forbearance, however, is that the whole world lieth in the Evil One, in what sense is God's rule a reality which makes any practical difference in the world for any mortal?

      To that there is only one answer. It can be known to exist without as we receive it from within. The prophetic method of discovering that God's rule is not only reality but the final reality, by accepting it and finding that, by it, we can rule our own world, is the sole way; and we can only approach the question aright as we consider what the fellowship of prophetic souls, in the long conflict of the ages with sorrow and sin, has made of it.

      All prophetic knowledge of God, being moral and not metaphysical, has concentrated its interest on this problem of God's rule in an evil world. It has been pondered through many centuries and in application to all kinds of overwhelming conditions; and the result, though so burning a practical interest is necessarily interwoven with the temporal and local, is so astonishingly agreed, that, in the absence of all other dependence, we can explain the result only by insight into the nature of reality.

      The prophets all travelled the same hard road and met the same strange antagonisms in their own thoughts. As nothing else illustrates so clearly the nature of their [222] faith, we cannot do better than make the most important if these antagonisms the heads of our study.

      I. We must pass through the sense that God's rule is small and oppressed to the discovery that it is universal and triumphant.

      The prophets never think of the spiritual conflict as relative and due to irregularity of development, but always as the absolute opposition of an organised kingdom of evil to the one indivisible Kingdom of God.

      That conception is usually dismissed lightly as in conflict with the theory of evolution. Yet the Apostle Paul, at least, was somewhat of an, evolutionist, for whom the physical--the natural and instinctive, was first, and the spiritual--the rational and moral, was later. No one, nevertheless, held more strongly the absolute contradiction between what he called the Tyranny of Darkness and the Kingdom of the Son of God's love.

      The true explanation is not the absence of an idea of development, but the presence of deep insight into he nature of the moral struggle and the social significance of good and evil. At the stage of natural instinct, when the family is a blood and bread grouping and all wider tribal associations mere extensions of the family, there is no issue beyond social development. These ties are individual, but they are not personal, not, therefore, moral, but, at best, the material out of which, as it is personally, employed, goodness and badness may be made. The moment we enter on that personal use all is changed. We are face to face with the family as a moral fellowship, and no more as a mere instinctive association, a moral fellowship in which we rightly take our place only by reverence for all its members. Instinct of race may still appropriate the name of the family [223] with a selfishness never before possible, but, in doing so, it denies all a family ought to mean.

      To the prophets the spiritual task is just to turn all society into the moral family of God. In that case, the moment we pass from instinctive ties to personal relations, we pass from lower and higher stages which shale into each other, to conflicting principles, or, more accurately, conflicting reverences. Forthwith we find ourselves between antagonistic religions, or, as the prophets viewed it, between religion and idolatry, between esteeming God, by love towards His children, and setting up in self-love an idol of His gifts, to which we sacrifice His children.

      These principles of regard for men as ends and material things as means, and of regard for material things as ends and men as merely means, are not only in hard contradiction, but they organise their adherents in opposing camps.

      That sense of a deadly conflict in our earthly state is not confined to the prophets. In days of great stress it has given Ahriman as large a place in men's fears as Ormuzd in their hopes, and made Satan cast the shadow of terror on the love of God. The doctrine of evolution, turning attention to origins and away from issues, and wrongly interpreted by organisms and not by the purposes of living creatures, only seemed to heal the breach because long years of unparalleled abundance never challenged its conclusions. Now that we are once more being made to pass through the Valley of Decision, there are not wanting signs that all the pleasant chiaroscuro is vanishing and that we are in danger of returning to the prophetic sense of a world of absolute conflict between good and evil, without being able to attain the prophetic assurance that, nevertheless, it is of God.

      The ascription of the world to God, in spite of all its [224] evil, was the essential prophetic achievement. Along with the most pessimistic view of the might of the Kingdom of Darkness, in intimate connection with it and even by means of it, there was the conviction that this is God's world, with the only final might in it His Kingdom, which is always about to come, yea, in some effective sense is already present, so that it is possible now to live in it and manage our present experience by means of it.

      The amazing thing is the way this optimism always rises out of what might seem the depths of despair. The Kingdom of Evil has annexed the heart's allegiance as well as the whole outward life of man. No satire that ever was written gives so black a picture of men and society as the dirge prophet after prophet chants. Yet ever over this morass tower the walls of the city of God. Isaiah confesses himself a man of unclean lips, dwelling amid a people of unclean lips, a people untruthful and determined to be deceived, their morals utterly corrupt, their religion mere trampling of God's courts. Yet from their polluted capital is to go forth the law in righteousness and the word of the Lord in truth. Then the perfect reign of peace will replace all the base idolatries with all their murderous strifes. And, as we find at the beginning of Revelation, so we find at the close. The world is sunk in calamity, hatred of good, crime and, above all, idolatry, yet over it the New Jerusalem is coming down from God out of Heaven. Most pessimistic of all is the teaching of Jesus. The highest morality turns out to be mere respectability, the purest religion mere formalism, and the insincerity is such that the Prince of this world is the Father of Lies. Nowhere, nevertheless, is the Kingdom so real or so near.

      The reason for this pessimistic judgment is the same as the reason for the hope that rises out of it. The reason for both is the conception of evil as in its root idolatry, [225] or, as our Lord, going back still farther, finds it, hypocrisy. It is self-delusion over against God's reality and truth. The Kingdom of Evil is idolatry, so organised by hypocrisy that it is able to set itself up as the true order of the world. Loving its neighbour only for itself, it makes possession the end and man the means, and turns the whole world into a temple for its idol, where it worships with all its mind and with all its heart and with all its strength. By the dazzling liturgy of all the worldly interests which appeal to selfish desire it blinds its own eyes as well as the eyes of others, till its idol is accepted as the only true might in the world, over against which a rule of love seems mere fantasy and cloud-land. Nor did this idolatry ever erect a ritual so imposing as the material conquests of the present order of competition with its vast mechanical equipment; nor was it ever so much taken at its face value as when thus enormously staged; nor has society ever been set by it on a more selfish foundation or been so robbed of the true uses of the world; nor has it ever issued in vaster destruction.

      This radical judgment of evil as a vast organised idolatry, repudiating all the personal values God's grace affirms, and calling good evil and evil good, and employing all the resources of civilisation to embellish the temple of its hypocrisy, is vital to the whole prophetic outlook; and the dull view of human nature, as never very good or very bad, is fatal to all its hopes.

      As the prophets reached this judgment of sin as idolatry, they rid themselves of all particularist notions of a God concerned only with the welfare of their own people; and, as they abandoned the expectation of secure human progress, they reached out to a glorious triumph of God.

      Their experience, even if we could give no ground for it, is confirmed by our own. A half and half morality always means a hopeless view of humanity; whereas a [226] view of man as involved in a widely organised and radical corruption, always means a high estimate of his possibilities and a universal sense of the moral significance of life. But it is also within our power to discover reasons. The bearing of this view of sin as idolatry, springing from selfishness and organised by hypocrisy, upon the universality of God's Kingdom is simplest. When a nation thinks of itself as God's chosen people, not for high service but for high privilege, proclaims its virtue and, its innocency and appropriates God for its own domination, its judgment of good and evil must be external and negative. If it has any conception of this arraying of world powers, it can neither be so sure of its acquittal nor so sure of the necessity of its material superiority for the purpose of God. Only as we see that all our battles are inside that great world conflict of worship and idolatry, are we ever truly delivered from a particularist conceptions of God.

      To discern how the prophets pass through this pessimistic view to their large optimism, to their discovery of a triumphant Divine Rule, we must see how, having traced evil to one root of illusion, they could trust that some day it might be cut as it were by one stroke. They felt like the physician who, having gone behind the fever to the malaria and behind the malaria to the one prolific form of life that permeates everywhere, never ceases to dream that it may, being one, suffer one annihilation.

      Being concerned with principles and not with visible progress, their expectation is not that all earthly imperfection and limitation will pass, but that idolatry will no longer delude, will, indeed, cease as the dominating order of the world. The result would be no Utopia, with wealth fairly distributed and society justly organised, but merely a new worship which places the children of God above the gifts of God. Yet, as God's [227] rule is the true order of the world, unless we are in accord with it, through the heart's true reverence, so that we esteem God in His children, we never can rightly organise or distribute anything; and, when we are in such accord, all experience will teach us. The expectation, in short, is not that God will amend our morality, for then our sense of His failure would increase with our sense of the world's corruption, but that His wisdom will succeed in showing us the secret of a blessed morality, out of which all our amendment must proceed.

      The expectation of the manifestation of God's rule, not by effort and slow moral progress, but by illumination and the working of God, leads to the second point.

      II. We must pass through the sense that God's rule is not even beneficent to the discovery that it is love.

      The prophets were all men, who, being of tender hearts and large sympathy, had tried hard to understand the world on principles of general benevolence, and who had been driven, by stern experience, to see that God's rule could not mean that He wished to see all enjoying themselves, taking care that none should be hurt, and glad to keep us from error for any reason and from evil for any motive, so long as our feet were kept from falling and our eyes from tears. Their need for religion was overwhelming and their thought was directed specially to the question of God's rule, because they could not pass by that way, yet were determined to press through to victory over the ills of life and not be content with a withdrawal, either ascetic or emotional.

      As little as the prophets, can we interpret the world by benevolent sentiment. If God's love mean the will to prevent everyone from being hurt and to keep us all within safe domestic rules and the household amenities, it is not, at this moment, playing a very successful role in the world; and it takes a great deal of blind, [228] self-satisfied prosperity to have much regard for its efficiency even in the happiest times. Interpreting even by our own poor willing to do God's will, we cannot help seeing that to be a saint is no guarantee of prosperity, while, if we interpret by the cross of shame and agony as the sign of victory, we discern that progress always has blood "on its garment and on its thigh." As between the millionaires and the martyrs, we can find no sort of guidance through life at all on mere principles of beneficence.

      Their own sufferings caused the prophets less perplexity than the sufferings of their nation. The central religious conviction of their time was that God could not suffer any great disaster to befall the only nation which worshipped Him; and when they discerned the folly of that hope, they had won their victory, for they had made the discovery that love is not beneficence, but is a moral value set on man as made in God's image. Then they discerned that the supreme disaster, so universal, so calamitous, was strong delusion to believe a lie, that under its tyranny nothing can profit, and that for deliverance from it, no price is too high.

      Starting from their own austere reverence towards their own responsibilities, they were freed from all sentimentalism and made solemnly conscious of the tremendous issues of human choice. To love their neighbour meant to hold him in the same high and serious reverence, a reverence which was rooted in the conviction that, though nothing should be spared to help him, every man's destiny lay in his own hand, and could not in the nature of things be in the hand of another. And, as they conceived that their own relation to men should be without isolation yet without intrusion, without hardness yet without softness, with large forbearance yet also with high demands, so they conceived God's. The essence of God's rule lay in respect [229] for what was in a man's own heart. With that His salvation was alone concerned, and, therefore, in the sense of overriding him, God Himself could not determine man's destiny. To be kept right was nothing; to he right of his own insight and choice everything. For that reason, God could not constrain; but also, for that reason, He could not spare any pain or conflict or arresting experience which might open men's eyes to the vanity of the idol they worshipped. Thus, by the hard road of learning that, as mere pleasant experience, life is mostly toil and trouble, or as the Preacher, in days when men were seeking an easier way than the prophetic faith, sums it up, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity," the prophets arrived at the discovery that love is not kindly emotion, but moral esteem.

      The Kingdom of God was thus a moral rule only to be introduced by moral means. Yet it does not come by the slow moral progress of the race, but is of God's manifesting and not of man's achieving. The prophetic hope is in a Day of the Lord, and not in a steady, if slow, success in reforming the world, because, being concerned with the central reverence of our hearts, the issue is enlightenment and not amendment.

      This Day of the Lord is always connected either with the actual experience or, more often, the well-grounded anticipation of times of great conflict and distress. Though the supreme blessing of God's Kingdom is a peace which includes nature as well as society, so little is it concerned with the subjugation of nature or the establishing of political guarantees that it always seems nearest when faith in both is most broken.

      Isaiah, speaking from the midst of a people, idolatrous, self-deceived, utterly corrupt, sees the leopard lying down with the kid as well as men beating their swords into ploughshares. The splendour of his ideal requires for its description all the resources of poetry. But he [230] looks at it through disasters only to be described by a mythology of doom, after he has exhausted every figure of God's wrath and man's desolation, disasters, moreover, which cannot end while everyone continues to be a hypocrite as well as an evil-doer. With Jesus the Kingdom is still nearer and is more impressively and comprehensively described as simply the rule of the Father, but the catastrophe which is to usher it in is the more terrible that He employs no figures and says simply, there would be such tribulation as had not been since the world began, yet it was only the beginning of sorrows.

      The reason for that mixture of boundless terror and boundless hope is that the Kingdom of Evil which is to be overcome is delusion and not imperfection, and the Kingdom of God which is to come is reverence for God through His children and not higher development or better organisation. Its ground is the austere reverence which, being free from sentimentalism, is solemnly conscious of the tremendous issues of human choice.

      In the nature of things, the Kingdom of Evil is a vast illusion and has, in its whole order, nothing save calamity both for individuals and for societies. Against all resistance to the truth in unrighteousness, the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven, as it works out from the heart through the intellect to the body, till the Kingdom of the Father of Lies finally displays itself as the mere tyranny of darkness, which issues in chaotic conflict and self-destruction. That is the natural effect of the idolatry and self-deception of the human heart, and would always be the result but for the restraining hand of God. At times, however, He suffers this rule of falsehood to let loose all its natural confusion and agony, to the blotting out of the possessions and organisations by which man had hoped to safeguard himself. Yet, as this giving place to wrath is the work of love and not of anger, we may have confidence that it is not permitted [231] without the knowledge that it will serve to disillusion man, and that a time of special trial may also be the dawning of new and nobler reverences. Because man's real hope is in truth and righteousness, it may derive new strength from the destructive forces of error and evil.

      In our present case it is easier to see the elements of evil than the elements of hope. In so far as we had not met life's austerity by mere kindliness, we had met it by hardness, which was worse. Only mockery could describe our system of competition as

      Efficiency was power to override others, a wholly brutal thing which quite naturally ended in being a wholly murderous thing. Still less was competition contention to make life just and noble and worthy of the true dignity of man, or efficiency power to produce any wisdom or beauty or goodness. And if so, what gain could come to our mortal state, what right uses of nature or what blessedness of fellowship, by suffering apparent success to increase the illusion that it was the true, the only possible order of the world?

      Yet, on the other hand, what would be the gain of disaster unless there were other and Diviner elements in our hearts and even in our society, and, especially, unless there were among us those who, of their own insight, faith and courage, were committed to a quite different ordering of life?

      Because the permission of evil is of love and not of anger, calamity means that the world is ripe for judgment in both senses of needing it and being able to profit by it. The burning up of the wood and hay and stubble would merely render us homeless were there no gold, silver and precious stone to be displayed by the conflagration. Thus, if the end is disillusionment, and if we [232] cannot doubt the riches of God's "goodness and forbearance and long-suffering," we cannot doubt that God sees His way to the new before He suffers the destruction of the old, even though we know that the new must be a moral order, and, therefore, be of our own insight morally received.

      III. We must pass through the sense that the rule of God is not even just to the discovery that it is atoning.

      Most of us, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, have to learn by stern experience, which is sometimes bitter with remorse as well as disappointment, that we cannot travel through life by the way of mere beneficence, but, unless we are wilfully obdurate and blind, we learn young; and prophetic souls, if they do not learn without pain, usually learn without delay.

      To discern that we can no more pass by the way of justice than by the way of beneficence required, even for them, a longer and sterner lesson. Like the friends of Job, their people hoped to resolve their perplexing thoughts about the inequalities of reward by looking deeper into the hearts of men and waiting longer to see the issues of their lives. Obvious calamities were thought to be the result of hidden crimes, and obvious crimes were punished, if not in a man's own life, in the lives of his descendants, while a good man was never forsaken and his seed never begged bread. Devout souls were readily content to forgo approval and reward for themselves, and they even learned in time to bear "the defaming of many and terror on every side," yet the sufferings of the righteous, their blood shed like water, their name a hissing and a reproach, remained long an agonising mystery.

      Yet the prophets wrestled with it till it blessed them with the supreme discovery that here was love's highest victory, and not, as they had feared, its deepest failure. [233] Indignation at wrong as the spring of unblessed sorrow did not die and opposition to it rose to new heights of daring, but indignation became itself a pity and opposition a peace.

      The supreme union of condemnation and commiseration is in Him who was so in the Father and the Father in Him, that He never seems to have taken any other way than this of suffering for sin as well as from it. Where is there denunciation so terrible as what He said to the hypocrites who cloaked oppression and injustice with religion, yet what comes throbbing from the heart of God's compassion like the lament over Jerusalem, the city of these same hypocrites, ending, however, still more terribly than any denunciation, with, "But ye would not"?

      In this hot indignation and uncompromising opposition, which is yet pitiful and gentle, we have the highest interpretation of life, at once by man's responsibility and God's love; and in it we see finally the means whereby God limits Himself to a success to be won from within and not to be imposed from without, yet is able to establish His rule by a better way even than justice.

      This better way is an atoning rule, a Kingdom of the Family of God, where there is no claim of rights and no nice balancing of merit and reward, but where we succour the erring only as we bear with them and for them. That is the glory of God which is seen in the face of Him who bore our sins and carried our sorrows. But it is no substitute for man's responsibility. On the contrary, it is love's sole way, because our responsibility is love's first care. Love suffers and does not compel, to make us members of God's family, in the only way we can truly belong to it--in the liberty of God's children.

      An atoning rule which suffers all things to maintain our responsibility, has also a right to allow us to suffer, to the same end, and especially to permit evil to destroy [234] itself. The Day of the Lord, though the manifestation God's victory in the earth, the breaking in of His rule, shows itself by winnowing out a holy remnant and, by no means, by obvious expansion of good influences and the inclusion of multitudes; and, though the description of its blessings are vocal with the melodies of peace, its effect is to create a sharper cleavage and set the battle more definitely in array. In that, the only song of triumph ever truly sung in the earth, these strangely conflicting strains of universal dominion and a very little remnant, of utter peace and intensified conflict, ever mingle, and they harmonise into a song of final triumph because God's victory is by the sacrificial service of love, and not by the crushing weight of power.

      Poetry has never touched a more pathetic theme. "Except the Lord had left to us a very small remnant we should have been as Sodom, we should have been like unto Gomorrah." Then, smaller still, "I and the children whom God hath given me." Finally, Jeremiah alone in the stocks of what passed as God's House, opening, in the solitary anguish of his heart, his cause unto God, appearing as the forerunner of Him who trod the wine-press alone, whose disciples forsook Him and fled, while the people, for whom He gave His life a ransom, passed by reviling and wagging their heads. But, even thus, was the arm of the Lord revealed. The fleeting and futile nature of all that denies His truth and conflicts with His will is made manifest, and "a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of God's people Israel" is set up in a dark and erring world.

      With this discovery of redemptive service the conception of the issue of the conflict also changes. At first God's judgments are in the world purely to purge. "The Light of Israel shall be for a fire, and His Holy One for a flame." Only a remnant shall return, and from it directly the holy nation shall spring. As the [235] hope grew beyond the nation, the means for realising it grew beyond destruction. The remnant becomes a redemptive priesthood and not merely a selected strain, a transforming and not merely a destroying ferment. Finally, as it is embodied in Him who gave His life a ransom for many, the Kingdom of the Father has a heaven where the angels rejoice over the one sinner who repents. And, as we share in that joy, we have blessedness in sorrow, peace in conflict, and find ourselves on the side of what is unassailable by outward defeat or death or any mortal power.

      Henceforward we have no more temptation to avenge the wrongs out of which are to come the rights of humanity, and no distress at the denial of our wages and the payment in defamation and persecution whereby the conflicts of God's world shall be turned from a curse into a blessing.

      Christ's followers still come, not bringing peace but a sword. From the ferment of freedom they have started in the world, actual wars have sprung: and perhaps in all wars of Christian peoples sacrifices are maintained by ideals and emotions this thought of redemption by service has created. Whether that kind of conflict is right or not cannot be determined merely by regard for life, for, till the issues of freedom stand above fear of them that kill the body, they have no real existence. Nor can the question be settled merely on grounds of non-resistance, because what we are not to resist is our own wrongs, so that we shall not waste our lives in futile resentments, to the repudiating of our positive task of reconciling service, while we are to resist the organisation of evil in the world with all our might. Yet there must ever be, as the world advances to the possibility of better ways, more doubt whether war is the way to fight with all our might. Moreover, it will be increasingly difficult to find a war in which [236] to engage, when our hopes move from flying down on the shoulders of the Philistines and spoiling the children of the East, and we obey more than tribal impulses and seek more than material ends.

      But, if atoning rule is the Divine method, it must be able to show, even for society, that it is providing a more excellent way, a way more heroic and more effective. Therefore, its true conflicts are sharper and its victories such that even victory in war might be far indeed from being their guarantee. The battle it has to set in array is between the use of men for means and means for men; and that is the only war which will ever end war. True conquests of nature and effective political guarantees may come out of victory in that warfare, but they cannot give it. Nor is it even to be won by suppression of vice and the establishment of good customs, or even the imposing of sound doctrines. The winnowing of an age of conflict is, on the contrary, to destroy our possessions, weaken guarantees, overthrow moral conventions and depose mere orthodoxies. Its real gain is to strip men of their wrappings, to shake their outward safeguards, to force them to ask what they truly believe and upon what issue they are prepared to stake their lives. Most people live by parasitic faiths and are directed by conventional morals, but in a time of conflict these are ruthlessly cut down. The first result is disaster. Even what is true, but not truly held, is denied, and what is right, but not rightly done, is rejected. The foundations are shaken and institutions totter and the individual is homeless. But parasitic faiths and conventional morals can be shaken only because they are not on the true foundation. God's rule never is a question of good customs but always of men resolute to follow what they see to be true and right, heedless of man and mindful only of God. Wherefore, what seems disaster may be only winnowing. [237]

      The real power of the atoning Kingdom of God appears not in any mass movements, but in those who see on which side true strength lies, and what is mankind's real and abiding gain, because they have discerned the final blessed order of the world. As citizens of God's Kingdom they go forth into the world, their souls waiting only upon God, made able to live their life and die their death in peace, no power on earth strong enough to hinder them from doing their task and realising their own blessedness in it, turning poverty into riches, defeat into victory, and discovering, as they serve God, not for themselves alone but also for their brethren, that God's will of love can be done on earth as in heaven. If, to the impatience of our little day, the road before them seems long, still they have seen the goal, and the goal alone matters; and if the length of the journey speaks of the patience of God's method, it speaks also of the magnitude and perfection of His purpose, for which He also bears, as well as forbears.

      By this conception of God's Kingdom as the rule of love, not as sentiment but as moral esteem, being introduced by His hand, and not merely by human effort, our whole moral attitude should be determined.

      This Kingdom, however much its personal rule in freedom may expose it to positive failure and not merely to limitation of success, is yet the only reality; it may rule only the loyal few, while over against them still stands the vast organisation of the deluded many. To all appearance evil may possess the kingdoms of this world, yet the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. The situation is not that the earth is one--let us trust--of God's few failures, but that God's Kingdom cannot be the order of the world, without limit or suspension, like the law of gravitation, because it is of the nature of love to endure restriction and even rejection, seeing [238] it has respect for persons with their responsibilities in the world they create for themselves, and cannot be content with any lower success than the acceptance of its rule as blessedness and freedom. Yet it alone has might and dominion. God's Kingdom, being real and, by God's operation, always at hand, we live in it, and not merely for it, so that we can afford to be gentle towards all men and do our tasks positively and in the spirit of peace, and cease to strive and cry.

      As taught in the Gospels, this attitude towards life has been called an interim morality, and there is no other true morality. Moralities which accept the Father of Lies as for ever the Prince of this world, are always compromises, agreements with Hell to be at peace with it, yet, even with that seeming lightening of their task, are anxious, distressed, negative, denunciatory, querulous, and never the possession of one's soul in patience. Genuine morality is, in a sense, always apocalyptic, always confident that the thing it sees to be right has the might of the universe on its side. For it the equinoctial gales are the herald of the spring, and sowing of its seed in the bitter March weather is cheerful with the promise of the summer and the harvest.

      That type of service alone has ever counted in the moral history of mankind; and, for our own lives also, it is what we may call the apocalyptic moments which are the times of vision and courage, when the mists clear, and truth and beauty seem the nearest, most real, mightiest of all things, and compromises with evil mere folly, and the highest demands alone sure guidance, and querulousness and all sense of our wrongs and all scheming to restrain evil mere waste of effort, and pity for wrong-doing as folly takes at least an equal place in our hearts with indignation at its criminal purpose and its injurious success.

A LIFE, EVERY event of which was directed to its chief good, would be a blessed life on the one condition that it could not be cut off before its good were realised. But the hope is not blessed which is illusion; and, if in this life only we have hope, it cannot long be cherished even as illusion. We have spoken also of reconciliation to our lives; and to be reconciled to anything is just to find it good. But, the larger our sympathies and the higher our aspirations, the more we realise that our days are few and evil; and it is always the blindness of worldliness, and never the insight of faith, which reconciles us to the world as it is. Such contentment is sensual and thoughtless and far from divine, and, even when the soul has been fed into abeyance, endures for, at best, a few sunny years of health and youth and prosperous ease. The shadow of failure and struggle and sickness soon falls on it; and, if, by great good fortune, they are escaped, all face death's gloomy portal. Worldliness, therefore, under no condition, is long justified in her children, and the sunniest worldly face always ends in being clouded and peevish. As for the life that is of faith, must it not, from start to finish, be insight into the vanity of man's whole mortal state?

      If, therefore, as God's appointment, we can be reconciled to our lives, it can only be because He has a purpose in them stretching far beyond our uncertain and troubled years upon earth, and, especially, that [240] He has some sunnier garden for the tender plant of our affections which has sprung up in the shadow of our mortality. Would it not, therefore, have been the most obvious requirement of a right method to have begun with this question of a future life? And, if we could have found its proof in one incontrovertible argument for immortality, such as the indissoluble unity of the soul, or better still in some indisputable fact, such as the return of a traveller from the unseen or intercourse with the spirits of the departed, would not religion have had something much surer to go upon and the task of faith have been greatly lightened?

      In reply, let us say that, if there are arguments, they should be weighed; and, if there are facts, they should be investigated. Both may at least help to meet objections. Nor may that be a small service; for hopes which do not rest on intellectual grounds, may still hampered by intellectual difficulties. But can either arguments or facts afford us the kind of assurance which could enable us better to depend on God or be freer in ourselves? Would they not, as the main ground of our hope, rather increase the old danger of making the future life and our prospects in it our direct aim and business in such a way as to corrupt both morality and religion? Could they do other than reinforce a religion which derives its moral sanction from bliss and woe in anther world, which we know, becomes in effect merely other-worldly. Its morals are a mere extension of worldly prudence, utilitarian and hedonistic, disanguished only from the non-religious type by having a longer arm to reward and punish. Religion becomes a kind of police magistrate who would fall into desuetude, if people would learn to behave themselves without needing to have the fear of him before their eyes. Utilitarian morality, so guaranteed, has ever been regarded as the foundation-stone of religion; and the [241] attempt to show that goodness has its own law and its own motive has been denounced as the most subtle of all attempts to prove religion unnecessary and baseless. The significance of this way of making men moral by religion, regarded mainly as the guarantee of well-being in a future life, appears in its nakedness when some bluff, worldly person, more interested in the rates than in religion, defends religion as a cheaper and more effective way than prisons and work-houses of keeping men honest, law-abiding and industrious.

      Thus conceived, heaven and hell are pure appeals to a selfish self-regard; and, as that is more effective as it is more material, heaven is apt to be a place of very material bliss and hell of very material misery. But, even when these rewards and punishments are more spiritually conceived, if they are still sought in the same self-regarding way as material blessings, there is no real deliverance from the worldly temper. In practice, a life even of ascetic devotion, lived for another life, is not so unworldly as its outward form might lead us to suppose. A truly unworldly life must be lived not for our own benefit, material or spiritual, either here or hereafter, but for God's purposes now.

      Argument may always be too immaterial and doubtful to stake upon in that way of worldly investment in the future, but, if a convincing material demonstration of a future life could be produced, would not the effect be still more other-worldly and utilitarian? Such walking by sight, at all events, would never do anything to enable us, in any spiritual and inspiring and self-forgetting sense, to walk by faith.

      Can it be supposed that the grim silence of the grave has not itself a religious meaning? Theologies in abundance have invaded its mystery, and religions have followed them, but have they followed religiously? Is religion concerned with another life in that direct and [242] external way? Is not its true business within this world and amid the life in which God has immediately placed us? In respect of eternity as well as time the evil of the day is sufficient, and we are not to take thought for the morrow. No more are we to be merely prospective saints in glory and not mortals doing our best with this life such as it is, than a child is to be merely a prospective man and not a child. The ignorance which cuts off the child from the tasks of manhood, by enabling him to attend to the tasks of childhood, not only prepares him better for the future, but allows him to live at the same time his own true life. Similarly we should give ourselves to the tasks of this life, as sons of the Kingdom, citizens of the Realm of God now, grateful that a thick veil prevents us from being distracted by the more glorious activities of another. As the sense of his manhood is rightly there for the child, not in the direct aim at being a man, but only in the presentiment of the responsibility of his maturity as he rightly discharges the duties of his childhood, so should we be sobered and encouraged by our hope only as it blossoms out of right living of our present life. May it not be that one at least of the reasons why religion fails to touch so many of the most genuinely religious souls, more especially at the time of life when they most willingly respond to generous impulses, is the absence from the common religious teaching of the assurance that religion is blessedness in our present life? Success with prudent, worldly people, who, having made a competency for this life, are warned by declining, years of the advantage of securing a further competence in the world to come, is but poor compensation for that failure. Young and generous souls are, and ought to be, intensely conscious of life. Nothing could convince them, nothing should convince them, that life is not their immediate and urgent concern. When, therefore. [243] persons, who, in spite of their chilled blood, are manifestly as tenacious of life as ever, exhort those standing on life's threshold, with all life's glorious possibilities before them, to say with an aged, imprisoned saint, "It is better to depart and to be with Christ," the result is merely a sense both of unreality and of dismay, as though religion, finding no meaning of any sort in this life, had, in desperation, to fling itself upon another. Weakness, captivity and old age have a right to be weary of life; youth and vigour under the open sky have not. Even in Paul the aged the mood is only of nature, and not of grace. The true religious note is his triumph over that natural impulse, the glorious assurance that this life, to its last dregs, would have meaning and value. This note of eternal youth is the true hope of immortality, which delivers from the abject fear of poverty, from warping cares, from cramping personal ambitions, from the paralysing sense of failing powers and of life's narrowing opportunity,, and enables us to tread God's own high road, which, because it carries us over time's crude, material dominion, affords an outlook upon eternity, not at the end only, but throughout all the journey of life.

      The only truly religious hope of immortality so lives with God now as to know that God is not the God of the dead but of the living. It does not say, Let us live for the life to come, but, Now we have eternal life. Instead of having us miserable now to be happy hereafter, it would give us present possession of a blessedness of such a quality that we know it cannot end. By having already in it victory over mortal terrors, it gives us a right to be assured of victory over the last enemy, death.

      Only by finding a blessed and endless purpose in this life, can we have a triumphant hope larger than this life can contain. The hope of another life connected [244] with this, at most, by some link of responsibility, a link which must not be too firmly riveted if that future life is not to be as miserable as this appears to be, never can be more than a dubious hypothesis, without power to act upon us except as a consideration of prudence. And to many it seems very dubious indeed. How should their present unsuccoured evil state afford an encouraging prospect of being compensated for in the world to come? This transference of all good to another life seems like an empty promise to silence their immediate just demands; for is there not cause to fear that a blank cheque upon the future, upon which nothing can be raised for our present necessities, may never at any time be honoured?

      For that reason the first object of religion is not to demonstrate the reality of a future life, but to reconcile us to God in this. Though we cannot be reconciled to life if there is nothing beyond it, reconciliation to God does not mean that, though evil in itself, this life can be tolerated without being angry with God, because of the compensation waiting for us in another life. We should not be reconciled to God because we believe in another life, but we should believe in another life because, being reconciled to God, we find a meaning in life which is ever expanding and a purpose death cannot end. We are reconciled to God by finding in our present life, and not merely hoping for it in another, that God's real meaning is a rule of love, by accepting which we discover an eternal purpose, for the realisation of which every event is working. Being no less than the infinite goal of holy love, it can give us nothing less than the assurance of eternal approximation to itself; and as that is the goal, of which every appointment for us of discipline and duty, being of God's love, gives us assurance, we have a life blessed in a hope which is eternally fulfilling itself. Thus we rightly and religiously [245] believe in another life, because we are serving the purpose of a love for which this life is too small.

      Such a hope is the power of an endless life, and not merely the expectation of an ulterior reward, which, by making us serve God only because He has heaven to bestow, corrupts the very assurance of love by which all hope in God lives. Not till, by accepting His will of love as, in spite of all our failure to be worthy of it, our own law of liberty, we already know that its perfect rule would be the only heaven in which our souls could ever be perfectly blessed, can the hope of heaven be at once a glorious personal hope and deliverance from the dominion of selfish desires.

      The hope of another life without which all realisation of the ends of goodness is for ever beyond our reach, and living fox it as an end by which the service of goodness for its own sake is turned into service of it for ulterior reward, are contraries impossible to bring into harmony either in theory or in practice by any direct method. But a reconciliation wrought by God's gracious relation to us, with its truly personal, and therefore indirect ways, finally manifests its full significance by providing an eternal assurance which does not corrupt morality by religion, but gives it a religious basis without which it never can realise its own nature, and on which it can rest only as it is pure.

      The result once again admits of a summary statement. While blessedness in another life cannot be either a direct gift from God or a direct object for our own attainment without corrupting morals by religion or religion by morals, the possession of eternal life, which we have by reconciliation to God's eternal purpose, gives us a right relation to ourselves, to our neighbours, and to God, and, therefore, an adequate moral subject, an adequate moral sphere, and an adequate moral order. Only as we see how religion provides these for us, do we understand the true dependence of morals on religion, [246] and are no more tempted to make morals wrongly and a selfishly dependent on religious motive, or to make religion a mere appendage to morality, or to keep religion and morality in separate compartments.

      First, grace, by reconciling us to this life in such a way as to show us in it the issues of another, puts us in aright relation to ourselves, and so provides an adequate moral subject.

      Without that succour of religion morality ends in an insoluble conflict of interests. A moral subject must be an end in himself, the laws he announces being the laws of his own freedom, and the reference by which he obeys them being reverence for himself as a moral person. Both would cease, were the moral subject regarded merely as a means to an end, even were that end the race or the Kingdom of God. But, on the other hand, self-realisation is not the moral end, and, except for the higher service we can thereby render, it may not be made any part of the moral end. A true morality does not keep its eye on beautiful motives or a beautiful character, but simply on doing right. Morality is thus faced by a problem it cannot solve--the eternal and infinite significance of the moral subject for all he does, along with the unceasing requirement to forget himself in his moral task. It never can say how the moral subject is the sole final end, yet how a true moral attitude makes our tasks alone, and never ourselves, our conscious object.

      But neither can religion find the solution merely in the hope of immortality. Without a hope beyond the grave, we are rather things than persons, with the strange addition that we resent our real goal, which is corruption. A moral subject, therefore, as an end in himself, would not seem to exist at all without some enduring value. To deny ourselves is not indifference [247] to that issue, but is a victory over time, and not a disregard to eternity. The secret of not living to ourselves is a reverence for ourselves which, even now, knows the power of an endless life. self-denial is not self-annihilation. How can we not live to ourselves, if we altogether cease to live? self-denial, moreover, is not, in itself, a moral end at all, but is good only as it is a necessary means to a moral end. Yet, while it is thus true that the denial of self is wrongly conceived when it is thought to raise us above the hope of immortality, a mere hope of immortality would leave us in the immoral position of making our moral end the perfection of our immortal souls, which, if it did not require us to live to ourselves, would leave us still living for ourselves.

      We cannot have a true moral subject, his morality at once springing from his own worth and blessedness, yet forgetful of both and mindful only of call and opportunity, unless, by reconciliation to God in a world which serves our eternal good, we have the power of an endless life wherein law and love are one. Not till we have won that victory, have we a subject who is at once utterly loyal to himself and utterly forgetful of himself. But, in that position, the least perfect can be an adequate moral subject, as the highest and holiest cannot be by any merely moral achievement.

      Second, grace, by reconciling us to this life so as to show us in it the issues of another, puts us in a right relation to others, and so provides us with an adequate moral sphere.

      The ethical meaning of love is to treat every man as an end in himself, reverencing him, not for what he is, but for what he ought to become. Yet, how are we to continue to say what he ought to be, when, if the whole story end at the grave, we know it is what he never [248] will be? Our reverence, no doubt, derives a tenderness from the sense that all our relations are at the mercy of change and death, but would it continue if we placed behind them total evanescence and lost all sense that the frail vessel of our mortality has an immortal content? If we have to serve our fellow-men in view only of their possibilities in their few earthly years, not as promise but as achievement, how can we reverence man simply as man or confidently set his worth above his pleasure, especially when he affords us small ground, in his attainments or character, for esteem? Without that reverence for man as man, no one ever stands with effectiveness for any deep and revolutionary justice, anything beyond the most superficial judgment of rights and purely traditional views of possession. Many, no doubt, have had this deep sense of justice who would not have admitted that they were influenced by any consideration of an immortal soul, but, partly, heroisms are often nourished by faiths which have suffered intellectual eclipse, and, partly, the belief in immortality has been regarded as a mere argument about the future and not as a sense of a for ever and for ever in human relations. As long as we regard this life as all that belongs to man, we shall always have a society that is a mere welter of struggle for right, where the first duty of the strong will seem the defence of his own, a state which, however it be regulated from without, will always be moral chaos. Only as a society of immortals can we ever hope to base order upon a righteousness in whose regard the last may be first and weakness and need a greater claim than attainment and possession.

      But, again, that can never be helped forward by the mere expectation that another life will be linked to this by the tie of merit and reward. Trust in legal equity, according to which every man, at some time or another, shall meet the reward of his deeds, is one of the commonest [249] and strongest causes of hard indifference to sin and suffering. The assurance that, for every soul of man, there is, even in this imperfect world, the eternal working of the eternal Father, that the soul's true good is His end and things but means, alone can nourish in us that love which reverences man for the possibilities of the image of God in him and make us prompt to succour and slow to condemn. And what else can provide for us a right moral sphere except that sympathetic reverence?

      Lastly, grace, by so reconciling us to this life as to show us in it the issues of another, provides an adequate moral order.

      Because the moral order is valid though not yet realised, it does not follow that it would still be valid though it were never to be realised. Morality is not a castle in the air, or, as Huxley conceived it, a precarious and short-lived revolt against the cosmic order. It is life's ultimate meaning or nothing. And, if the ultimate meaning is a moral order which is love, it is absurd to say that it could be valid though the final actual order were death.

      Love is self-abnegation, not self-regard, but it is not self-destruction or self-disregard. To be saved is to be delivered from self, but that is only because, in the last issue, the world is so constituted that to be delivered from self is to be saved. Only the assurance that love is itself our best self-realisation, confers on love this right to avert our gaze from ourselves.

      The distinction between utilitarianism and a right moral esteem for ourselves here appears. Utilitarianism says, conscience is only self-love carried to its final issue on the ground of what really pleases it; while a true morality says, a right self-love is only conscience carried to its final issue on the ground of what is worthy [250] of God's image in it, and which is blessed because of God's order in which He has placed it.

      This moral order, however, cannot be provided by a mere belief in another life, linked to this only by moral retribution. That belief is rather the bankruptcy of a moral order, a confession of trust only in motives which are not moral at all but material, because, however they be spiritualised, they still work upon the self in the same way as material advantage. An order of love which is at once self-sacrifice and self-realisation, which does not work by promises, but is full of promise in all its working, which has not a foot of earth in it above which there is not the whole expanse of heaven, alone will avail. It avails because it can say, For great is your reward in Heaven, because its heaven is just its own perfect rule, so that, living in it, we do not need to reach beyond it for its reward.

      Here we see the true succour of morality by religion. "Nothing," as has been said, "should be done for religion, but everything with religion." But in that succour mere formality should rejoice to lose itself, because it finds the love which is immeasurably more than the fulfilling of its law. When that is seen, religion will again make good its claim to be the heart of life's business, and not, as it has been, even for many professedly religious people, something that may be good business on its own account, but the last thing that could be imagined profitable for the business of life, the essence of which still remains to fight for our own hand. Then the lives which, without religion, are both self-indulgent and miserable, will at once become both austere and blessed.

[GAP 156-251]