A
REASONED
FAITH:
COLLECTED ADDRESSES by
JOHN BAILLIE
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
New York
©1963
CONTENTS
1. A Point of Law: Who is my Neighbour?
2. The Unity of Mankind
3. Hope and Disenchantment
4. Rewards
5. Unacknowledged Influence
6. The Shema
7. Truth and Love
PART II: CHRIST AND HUMAN DISCUSSION
8. Christ and Human Discussion
9. The Wholesomeness of Belief
10. Religion and Reality
11. A University Sermon
12. Man's Dominion over Nature
13. Whitewash
14. Pascal and St. Paul
PART III: THE SUBSTANCE OF THE FAITH
15. The Meaning of the Incarnation
16. Tiberius and John
17. God in Three Tenses
18. Jesus Christ the Same
19. The Necessity of the Cross
20. None Other Name
21. The Resurrection
FOREWORD
This collection of Addresses by my late husband is published in order that
those who have read his previous writings can have access to further
thoughts of his on the fundamentals of the faith. The Christian's interpretation
of history, the application of his faith to society, and other Christian
doctrines are here dealt with.
The Addresses were written over a large number of years, and for a wide variety of occasions, but on issues that do not change with time. They represent the writer's mature mind on these subjects and were left in their finished form at the time of his death. But, because a few of them were written some years ago, it seemed best to make one or two very minor changes in the text. In no case did these alter the meaning of the writer in the least, as they were only concerned with incidents which illustrated his thought but which, however, dated the Addresses.
He did not write them with a view to publication, but friends who knew of their existence were persistent in urging that they be printed.
Once again, as in the case of the two earlier posthumous publications, it was Dr. John McIntyre who so generously gave of his time in selecting these Addresses from a great number left by my husband, and in arranging them according to their contents in suitable groupings for this volume. I am deeply indebted to him for all his kindness in the preparation, editing, and proofreading of this book in readiness for the Press.
I would like also to acknowledge the help extended to me by members of both Oxford University Press and Charles Scribner's Sons during the process of publication.
F.J. Baillie
1. A POINT OF LAW: WHO IS MY NEIGHBOUR?
But
he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
St. Luke 10:29
How very like a lawyer! we say. We think we could have guessed that the man who asked that question was a lawyer, even if we had not been told. Anybody else would have found the word neighbour plain and clear enough, but lawyers seem to find nothing clear until they have decked it out in long rigmaroles which for all who are not lawyers only serve to make it ten times more obscure. In the book of the law it stood written, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Christ had made that law His own, saying, "This do and thou shalt live." But the lawyer, before doing it, first demanded a definition of the word neighbour. How like a lawyer!
Ah yes, but that is not the whole of the story. For behind this question there was something more than the over-scrupulosity and pernicketiness of a lawyer's mind. There was a much shabbier and more generally human motive. He wanted, we are told, to justify himself. "But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?" Moffatt's version gives, "Anxious to make an excuse for himself"—which is exactly the meaning. Plainly the lawyer's pedantry was on this occasion drawn into the service of an uneasy conscience. He may not have known precisely all that was involved in loving one's neighbour as oneself, but he had an uneasy feeling that it involved something difficult for which he was not prepared. So he wanted the word neighbour to be an obscure word; he wanted it to be difficult to decide exactly to whom it was supposed to apply. At this point, then, we begin to recognise ourselves and to wonder whether after all this is simply a story against a lawyer. I think the truth is that we can all be lawyers when it suits us. When we are anxious to justify ourselves, you and I seem to know all there is to know about justice and we can spin out long rigmaroles enough. We can beat any jurist at periphrasis when we are anxious to get round our duty. It was Punch who said recently that "Many of us employ all our creative ability in thinking out words for those qualities in ourselves which we call by their usual names in others." If a commandment is unsavoury to us, we are almost sure to persuade ourselves that its meaning is obscure and its terms of reference uncertain. That we should, generally speaking, love our neighbours as ourselves we find it impossible to deny, but if there is some particular neighbour whom we do not want to love, then it is a great help to be able to boggle about the exact definition of the word. Oh no, this is not a story against lawyers, it is a story against you and me!
But you may say that none of us, and nobody ever again, can be in the position of the lawyer who asked this question, because his asking the question led at once to the answer being given for all time. Our Lord did not evade the lawyer's question, disingenuous though it may have been, but supplied the necessary definition, and supplied it in the way that lawyers love, by giving judgment in a particular case—the case of a certain criminal assault on the Jerusalem-Jericho road.
That is quite true. The word neighbour has been defined for us by our Lord's teaching, and not least by this parable, in a way that it had never been defined before. That lawyer may have been able to say with some degree of truthfulness that it was uncertain who were supposed to be included among one's neighbours, but now you and I can never say that again. Neighbour literally means a person who is nearest you; it is simply "nighboor"—the boor or fellow who is nigh you; and the question in this lawyer's mind was as to how near to you a man must be in order to be a neighbour and come within the terms of this law. Must a neighbour be a fellow-countryman, for instance, or was a Samaritan a neighbour to a Jew? This wonderful story told by Jesus supplies the answer. "Which now of these three was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him." My neighbour, then, is whoever needs my help. There is nobody who may not be my neighbour. The Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans, yet in this case the Samaritan was neighbour to the Jew.
That was our Lord's reply and it was in Iine with all His teaching. Indeed one might say that the more precise definition, and in fact the extension, of neighbourliness was our Lord's one constant concern in His declaration of the Father's will. Man is by nature a social animal, and the love of his neighbour is in some sense natural to him. No normal human being is a pure individualist. Everyone of us has his own circle of cronies to whom he is attached by certain ties of fellowship. Or rather he has several concentric circles. There is first the inmost circle of my own family, and to that my attachment is greatest of all. But I have also a wider circle of friends who mean a very great deal to me, and especially, I think, the friends of my youth —"the men who were boys when I was a boy"; I do not need to be commanded to love them. And then I have a strong fellow-feeling for a much wider circle—for the men of my own race and blood, for Scotsmen in general and indeed for all good citizens of the British Commonwealth. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"; yet most of us would lay down our lives without hesitation for our country and fellow-countrymen. Oh yes, if the word neighbour be taken in its ordinary common-sense meaning, then most of us can say with truth that we love our neighbours; and, if willingness to die for them be taken as the acid test, many of us can say with truth that we love them even as ourselves.
And yet all this did not satisfy Jesus Christ. To it all He would only say, Do not even the Gentiles the same? His desire was to lead us on from this mere natural neighbourliness to something altogether higher and more difficult, to what can only be called a supernatural neighbourliness. Indeed we might say, translating a phrase of Friedrich Nietzsche's, that He so reinterpreted the word neighbour as to make it include not only the nigh boor, the man who is nearest to us, but also the far boor, the man who is furthest away from us. He did this in at least three ways. First, He insisted that, if we are to possess the highest Christian neighbourliness, we must be prepared to transcend the principle according to which our inmost circle consists of our own next of kin. "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Secondly, as in this parable of the Good Samaritan, He taught that not only our fellow-countrymen are our neighbours, but men of other countries too, and all men everywhere who have need of our help. Thirdly, He taught that the word neighbour in its Christian meaning must include our enemies quite as much as our friends, and those whom we naturally dislike and who dislike us quite as much as those whom we naturally like and who like us. "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies . . . For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?" "Sinners also love those that love them."
Such, then, is the supernatural ideal of neighbourliness which Christ set before His followers. And that this ideal has powerfully influenced the Christian conscience, there can be no doubt whatever. You and I are aware of our duty towards those who are far from us in a way that would have seemed impossible to the men among whom our Lord lived, and we feel a friendliness towards them that would then have been hardly imaginable. We have broken down the old barriers of race and colour. We have developed a new sympathy towards oppressed races and oppressed classes. How our hearts, for instance, went out towards the conquered people, and how the hearts of many of us go out towards the poor and underprivileged of our own land! How eager we are to help them! And again, how the attitude of many of us has changed towards our enemies! Many of us are Christian pacifists, and even those who are not pacifists in the full and extreme sense of the word have—or think we have—a very different feeling in the matter from the old warlike temper. When we read in the Scotsman of wars and rumours of wars, most of us are genuinely distressed and horrified, where our fighting forefathers would rather have been stimulated to bellicose mutterings. So that we think we have learned this lesson of Christian neighbourliness. We think we come off pretty well when judged by our Lord's standard. We think that this most testing of all Christ's commandments is a test that we are well able to meet.
But ah! if we think thus, it is because we do not understand the exceeding deceitfulness of sin and do not know the wickedness of our own hearts. We think we are fulfilling Christ's commandment because we feel no enmity towards those who are far away from us. Yet that, after all, is not where the rub comes. It is really quite easy to feel friendly towards those who are far away and with whom we stand in no active relationship. The Jews hated the Samaritans, not because they were far away, but because, being different in race and religion, they were so inconveniently near at hand. After all, then, the high and difficult neighbourliness which our Lord demanded of His followers was not that they should love those who are far away but that they should love those who, while far away from them in natural sympathy and relationship, were near them in responsibility and duty. And which of us can give a good account of himself when it comes to that?
Take for instance Christ's command to love our enemies. What did Christ mean by enemies? We think perhaps of some sinister figure, some "smiler with a knife under his cloak," who goes about seeking our life in payment of some ancient grudge; and we feel that our consciences are quite clear, for we have no such enemies. Or perhaps we think of some foreign nation that threatens the security of these shores; and some of us will feel virtuous even then, because we refuse to feel belligerent towards any foreign nation. But when Jesus spoke of enemies, He meant rather those with whom we actually find it most difficult to get on. Perhaps if every time I find the word enemy in the Gospels, I read instead "he who is temperamentally most incompatible with me," I would really be reading the passage as it ought to be read; and then do you think my conscience would be clear? Loving one's enemies is something infinitely more difficult than just the profession of pacifist principles.
Or take again Christ's command to love all men. We think we do that when we call ourselves humanitarians. But, after all, humanity is fairly easy to get on with in the abstract, and surprisingly difficult to get on with in the concrete. There have been many great believers in the brotherhood of man who were remarkably bad brothers inside their own homes. There have been many great lovers of humanity with a big H who have sadly failed to love the particular specimen of humanity with a little h that decorated their own firesides. There have been champions of the rights of womanhood who have denied the most ordinary politeness to their own wives. There are some men who are horrified to read of the persecution of the Jews and who are nevertheless persecuting their own next of kin. This is the acid test before which even so great a man and so great a humanitarian as Tolstoy seems to have failed. Here is one among the many passages I might quote from that unpleasantly revealing document, his wife's diary: "I am bored at always being left alone. He expresses his love for me by automatically kissing my hand, and by doing me good instead of evil. . . . He disgusts me with his People. I feel he must choose between me and his beloved People." Well, the great reformer of society didn't manage very well the little bit of society that was nearest him, did he? That is perhaps why it is said that no man is a hero to his valet. What is the use of professing noble sentiments for great causes and distant objects when we withhold even the most elementary courtesies from our own wives and husbands? "He was an English gentleman," I read the other day in a novel, "and as such had obligations. But these obligations, like those of many English gentlemen, ceased at his own fireside. He, like many of us, was apt to forget that wife, sister and daughter are nevertheless ladies to whom deference is due." [Merriman, From One Generation to Another] I suppose the classical example of this in English literature is that of Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens' Bleak House. Mrs. Jellyby, you will remember, devoted her whole life and energy to the education of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger in Central Africa. She had never seen a native of Borrioboola-Gha; she managed the charitable enterprise from her house in London which also contained Mr. Jellyby and a whole brood of young Jellybys whom she had brought into the world. But while the natives of Borrioboola-Gha were being educated, the young Jellybys were not being educated, they were not even being washed, they received no upbringing. The house in Hatton Garden was a pigsty littered with papers, the children were little savages and Mr. Jellyby was a forlorn and broken-spirited man. When Caddy Jellyby, her daughter, became engaged to be married to young Turveydrop, and wished to bring the young man to see her mother, "Caddy, Caddy," said Mrs. Jellyby, quite weary of such little matters, "then you must bring him some evening which is not a Parent Society night, or a Branch night, or a Ramification night. . . . When I tell you that I have fifty-eight new letters from manufacturing families anxious to understand the details of the Native and Coffee Cultivation question, this morning, I need not apologize for having very little leisure." And Caddy went out, weeping bitterly.
In this way, then, there are at the same time revealed to us the exceeding highness of Christ's commandment and the exceeding wickedness and deceitfulness of our human hearts. If Christ tells us that the Samaritan is our neigh bour, then we shall exercise charity towards the Samaritan and straightway withhold it from those of our own household. And when the sinfulness of this is pointed out to us in turn, then we shall be tempted to tell ourselves that charity not only begins at home but may after all safely end there, and the Samaritans—and the natives of Borrioboola-Gha—will once more be forgotten. Yet it was the same Lord who, when His mother and brothers desired to speak with Him, said, "Who is my mother? and who are my brethren? . .. . Whosoever shall do the will of my Father . . . , the same is my brother, and sister, and mother"; and who nevertheless in His last agony, as He hung on the Cross, took thought for His own mother's welfare, and commended the care of the blessed Lady to His beloved disciple, saying to His mother, "Woman, behold thy son!" and to the disciple "Behold, thy mother!" He was but acting on His own principle. "These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone."
"But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?" And Jesus' reply was that any man is my neighbour, be he Jew or Samaritan, be he near at hand or far away, if he has any need of any help that I can give. The late Bishop Gore once said a beautiful thing. He said that Christian love meant reading statistics with compassion. Let each of us then search his own heart that he may know his own unneighbourliness, and let us all pray God for grace to make us better neighbours than we have ever been before. "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."
Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou host sent me. And the glory which thou gayest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one: and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
St. John 17: 20-23.
IN the list of Christian doctrines there is one which does not often explicitly
appear, namely the doctrine of the unity of mankind. Nevertheless this
is one of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian religion, one of the
fundamental conceptions which Christianity has contributed to the process
of human thought. All the world knows that Christianity teaches the unity
of God, but the world does not so clearly understand that it teaches at
the same time the unity of man. Yet in truth the two doctrines are as closely
interdependent as it is possible for two doctrines to be. The unity of
man can neither be established in theory save as a corollary of the unity
of God, nor be realised in practice save on the basis of a common worship.
And on the other hand, the unity of God can never be properly understood,
but must remain as a remote and speculative dogma, until it is brought
into intimate relation to this other thought of the unity of the human
race.
The Christian teaching, in this as in other things, rests very clearly upon the foundation of the Old Testament. Everybody knows how largely we owe to the Old Testament the thought of divine unity, which we call monotheism, but not all realise how largely the thought of human unity derives from the same source. The Hebrews conceived of the whole human race as a single family, symbolising this conception in their legend of all mankind being the progeny of a single original pair, Adam and Eve. There were the Semites, the Hamites and the sons of Japheth, but the ancestors of these were brothers in a single household. "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech." "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language"—until confusion of tongues overtook them in the building of the Tower of Babel. This confusion of tongues, and the division of humanity which it symbolised, was always regarded by the Hebrews as a most tragic situation which could never be set right until, when all men again united in the worship of the one true God, the broken unity should once more be restored.
This does not mean, of course, that the Hebrews were the only people who had any feeling for the unity of the human race. I do not think they would have claimed this for themselves. There is no reason why they should not have allowed that some recollection of mankind's original unity had persisted in the minds of the sons of Ham and of Japheth as well as among their own particular branch of the sons of Shem. Actually, I suppose the fullest realisation of the unity of mankind found anywhere outside the Hebrew tradition was among the Stoics of Greece and Rome; and it is remarkable that there also it appeared as a corollary, not certainly of a true monotheism—because the Stoics continued to speak of the gods in the plural—but at least of a certain impersonal unity in the divine ordering of things. The Stoics liked to describe the universe as "one great city of gods and men."
On the other hand, it is true that not even the Old Testament has the last word to say either about the unity of God or about human unity. For that the world had to wait for the New Testament. So often in the Old Testament we seem to have what scholars call monolatry rather than monotheism, that is, rather the concentration of worship on a single God than the conviction that there is no God but one. And while in the second half of Isaiah and elsewhere there is a clear looking-forward to the restoration of mankind's broken unity in the worship of the one true God, yet it is only in the New Testament that this outlook becomes dominant and a way opened up towards its realisation in practice.
If in the New Testament we seek for a single passage which might serve us, by itself alone, as the charter of human unity, I think we shall find it in these words of St. John's Gospel which I have taken as my text. They are part of the great prayer of consecration which our Lord offered at the conclusion of His Last Supper with His disciples, and before setting out for Gethsemane and Calvary. In that prayer He prays first for Himself, then for the little band of His original disciples whom He was now about to leave, and finally He adds, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word." In this third part of His prayer Jesus was therefore praying for all of us, for you and me, and for all the men of later days whom, through His first disciples and through you and me, His words would reach.
And what is His prayer? It is that we all may be one. In this final hour before His passion that is the concern lying most heavily on Christ's heart for those who should come after. He prays the Father that the lost unity of mankind may be restored in the fellowship of His own followers down the ages. And we should pay particular attention to the reason which He attaches, repeating it twice. It is "that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." This means that the new unity which Christ brings to mankind, the unity realised in the Christian fellowship, is the most convincing evidence the world can have of the divine character of Christ's mission. And has it not in fact been so? Has not the life of the Christian fellowship been in every age the principal advertisement of the truth of the Christian faith? Aye, but at the same time, and by the same token, has not its defectiveness been the principal stumbling-block? It is becoming clearer every day that in the eyes of the world nothing is more damaging to Christ's cause than the lack of unity within His Church. More and more does our denominationalism become a millstone round our necks. Yet even more damaging than our unhappy denominational divisions are the secular divisions, the barriers of nationality and race and class and party, which we allow to invade the Christian fellowship, making a mockery of the unity it professes to enjoy.
It was the Apostle Paul who, "as one born out of due season," realised the full implications of this Christian unity more fully than any of the original Twelve. To his mind it was clear, as it was not to some of the others, that the first great barrier to be overcome was the Jewish exclusion of the Gentiles. Addressing the Gentiles in Ephesus he writes: "But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who bath made both one, and bath broken down the middle wall of partition between us . . . . that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby; and came and preached peace to you which were far off, and to them that were nigh [that is, the Jews]. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father."
It is, I believe, impossible to overestimate the influence which this newfound unity in Christ has exercised upon the development of human thought within the last two thousand years. It has often been pointed out by historians that the unity of Western civilisation, which perhaps reached its first complete expression in the mind of Charlemagne, was a direct derivative from the unity of the Church catholic; but it is equally clear that the unity of the Church was a direct derivative from the idea of the unity of God. This means that such ideas as we now possess of the unity of mankind have their basis in monotheism, and that no such ideas could have arisen within a polytheistic culture. The same thing I believe to be true of the modern idea of the unity of nature which lies at the root of Western science; though that does not concern us here.
Yet it is equally important to realise that these results did not flow, and could not have flowed, from Hebrew monotheism until it had been revitalised in the light of Christ's advent. The Jews did indeed clearly know that mankind was one in the divine intention, but until Christ came they found no way to make it one again. I take it as plain historical fact that such hope of a recovered unity as our Western world has entertained derives not from the Jewish idea of the unity of God, but from the Christian idea of His triunity. "That they all may be one," Christ says in His prayer, "as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us"; and again, "that they may be one, even as we are one; I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." This is the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and at the same time the participation of Christians in that unity. This is the new kind of unity which, after their Lord's departure from their earthly company, the first disciples experienced in the Up-per Room at Pentecost. This is the unity which St. Paul preached to the whole known world when he proclaimed that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor freeman, there is neither male nor female; but all are one in Christ Jesus." It is that unity of the Spirit which again he described so eloquently as "one body, and one spirit . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all."
Since the idea of the unity of mankind was reintroduced by Christianity into the Western mind, other patterns of unity have been entertained and experimented with, especially within the last century and a half. Other cementing agencies have been proposed, other centres of convergence than the common worship of the Triune God. Even when it has been realised that a common life must find its centre in a common worship, it has been felt that some fusion of all mankind's various creeds and worships provided a more reasonable basis of unity than the demand that all should find their way to Bethlehem and Calvary, and to that Upper Room in Jerusalem where on the first Pentecost "all they who believed were together" and "were baptized" and "de-voted themselves to the teaching of the apostles, and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to the prayers." For the modern mind, which has its own preconceptions as to the course which history should follow, is very loath to believe that the enlightenment and salvation of the whole world should be by means of a revelation vouchsafed to a single obscure people in an outlying part of the world at one particular time in what is now the distant past. This is the loathness which the philosopher expressed when he wrote that "The Absolute loves not to pour the whole of its essence into a single instance."
Not only, however, were it better that we should take history as we find it, but the strategy implicit in this divine ordering of things is not wholly hidden from us. Had God willed to reveal His salvation separately to each individual, or to each separate race or nation, then all could have found God without at the same time finding one another; and the broken unity of the race would thus not have been re-stored. But since He has so ordained things that men can find salvation only by betaking themselves to one place; by listening to the same old, old story; by being received into the one fellowship; by reading in the same book; by praying the self-same prayers in the self-same Name; by being baptized with the same baptism and partaking of the same sacred Meal—"all made to drink into one Spirit," as St. Paul has it; and by drawing their whole spiritual sustenance from the same unbroken tradition handed down from age to age and across from one nation to another; in so ordaining things God has done all He could do, short of altogether abrogating the freedom of human choice, to bring us together again in the restored unity of the human family.
"All they that believed were together," we read of the first little company of Christians in the Upper Room; and "they devoted themselves . . . to the breaking of the bread," in repetition of the Supper which the Lord had eaten with His disciples before praying this prayer. "All made to drink into one Spirit," says St. Paul. Throughout all ages this eucharistic action has been the solemn seal and symbol of Christian unity, and I believe it to be literal truth that it has done more than anything else for the cause of human reunion generally. And our Lord Himself willed that it should be so. "Do this," He commanded, "in remembrance of me." And now, in closing, I shall take leave to read you a page from a recent work of English scholarship:
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain So-and-So, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc;—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
To those who know a little of Christian history, probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves—and sins and temptations and prayers—once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the eucharist and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew—just as really and pathetically as I do these things. . . . The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought. (All that going with one to the altar every morning!) [Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy. Dacre Press: A. & C. Black, Ltd., London, 1945, p. 744 f. Used with permission]
The lost unity of mankind; is there any hope of restoring it in another way than this?
When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
Acts 1:6-8.
THE outlook of our Western nations is at the present wavering in the most uncertain way between hope and despair. In the time of my youth we were all cheerful optimists who believed that everything was getting better and better all the time. Eagerly we
dipt
into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonders
that would be . . .
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-
flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
And passionately we believed that
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
We regarded human history as a tale of continuous progress, and we believed that in our own twentieth century the tempo of this progress was going to be marvellously stepped up, so that the brave new world of our dreams was now very near at hand. Today there are still many among us who cling to this belief. They are impressed by the vast increase of power which advancing science is putting into the hands of mankind, and they feel assured that mankind has sufficient good sense and sufficient good will to employ this power in the service of the highest ends. Yet there are as many or even more who now feel quite differently. It may be that our remaining Utopians are only the rear-guard of the nineteenth century, representing the last flickerings of the fire that still burned so brightly in my youth. This seems to be evidenced by the fact that there are more of them among my own grey-haired contemporaries than there are in the younger generation, and more also among the intellectually second-rate than among the leaders of thought. But among the youth of our Western nations, and in the books of many of our most penetrating writers, optimism has largely given way to disenchantment. The gloomiest forebodings are now in fashion, and in many quarters a spirit of hopelessness has begun to take possession of men's minds.
In these circumstances it is well that Christians should consider what guidance their Christian religion has to give them in this whole matter of hope and despair. And this guidance is nowhere more clearly indicated than in the words I have just read from the Acts of the Apostles. We are here told by St. Luke that when Jesus appeared to His apostles after His death, they put this question to Him: "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" That was the form which hope had long taken among the Jews. They looked forward to the establishment of an independent Israelite monarchy after being delivered from the foreign yoke. The restoration of the kingdom was understood by many in a political sense, as it is among the Zionist Jews to this day. But it was always understood in a spiritual sense also; and in the teaching of the great prophets the political aspiration had largely given place to a spiritual one. The promised king was to be no mere earthly ruler, but the Messiah sent by God for the final salvation of His people and through them of the whole world. The apostles were convinced that Jesus Christ was this promised Messiah. Their hopes had indeed been severely shaken by His cruel death on the Cross, but when after three days He appeared to them again, hope rose once more so high as to prompt the question whether the Kingdom of God was not now to appear in its full glory without further delay, whether Christ was not at this time to restore the kingdom to Israel.
John Calvin writes in his commentary that this question has as many errors in it as words—totidem errores quot verba. He thinks the apostles were still conceiving the Kingdom of God in a political sense, and the phrasing of their question certainly gives us this impression. But even if the restoration they had in mind was no merely nationalist one but the dawning of an era of final blessedness for all mankind, their question showed how little they had taken to heart what their Lord had been at pains to teach them during the years of His ministry. So in the answer He now gives them, He reminds them what that teaching was.
His answer is as follows: "It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has kept within His own authority. But you shall receive power and you shall be my witnesses. . . ." You will notice that this answer is in two parts. In the first part is a warning against false hopes, in the second against an equally false despondency.
Let us take the two parts separately.
Jesus had again and again warned His disciples that they must not attempt to assign any date for the appearance of the promised Kingdom of God. He said He did not know the date Himself. "But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only." And this He now repeats when He tells them that it is not for them to know the times and the appointed seasons, which the Father has kept within His own authority. That was the answer the first Christians got when they wanted to forecast the course of future history, and that answer is as valid for us today as it was for them long ago. It is not given to you and me to know the long-term strategy of God. He has kept that within His own authority. The final end of history is indeed assured to us. Its end is in a glorious consummation such as eye has not seen nor ear heard neither has entered into the heart of man to conceive. The end of history will be the glory of God. But when it will come about, or in what manner, or by what stages, or if indeed at all by stages, we are not informed. Any forecasts we make are made at our own risk and peril, and the exigency in which the mind of our Western nations now finds itself is largely due to the fact that for many generations past it has been fond of taking this risk, which has now turned out to be a bad one. It has made belief in the almost automatic progress of mankind into a central article of its faith. It has been full of Utopian illusions about the promise of the future. Frequently it has been lured by promises that the Golden Age was very close at hand, just round the next turning as it were, and capable of being established, some said by swift and sudden revolution, others by a somewhat more slowly evolving legislative reform.
In one of his books Jacques Maritain expresses his amazement at discovering how much the nineteenth century, which at first sight seemed to be an age of positive knowledge, was really an age of prophesying. And somewhere else I recently read the remark that our own age puts the palmiest days of Ahab quite in the shade for the number of false prophets it has produced. We have for long been accustomed to laugh at those who from time to time have claimed foreknowledge of the date of the end of the world and of Christ's second coming. We have rightly judged them to be the victims of superstitious ignorance. Yet we ourselves have often been superstitious in another way, putting an equally superstitious trust in the gradual evolution of human nature, in the omnipotence of science, and the salvation of mankind by the advance of scientific knowledge. Therefore no less than the quaint folk who watched the skies for Christ's second coming, we need to be reminded that it is not for us to know the times and the seasons. We too need to be told that the time is not yet, that we are living in an evil world in which we are nevertheless called upon to do our daily duty in obedience to our Lord's command, while we wait in hope for that which is to come.
But now let us attend to the second part of Christ's answer to the apostles' question: "But ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me. . . . unto the uttermost parts of the earth." I have said that the intemperate optimism in which we had so long indulged is now taking its revenge upon us. The tide of events in our own lifetime has expelled these false hopes from the minds of large numbers of our contemporaries, and especially from the minds of the rising generation, and often leaves literally nothing in their place. The belief in inevitable progress was an ill-founded belief, yet it is sad to see it disappear when it leaves men without any spiritual anchorage at all. How many young men and women in how many countries of Europe today are literally without hope! I spoke to many such during my visits to Germany after the end of the War. Hitler had promised them his tausendjdhriges Reich, his grand new order that was to last for a thousand years. They know now how utterly without substance that promise was, and they were left with nothing to live for, with no belief in the future, with nothing before them but dull despair. Among ourselves things are not so bad as that, but they are bad enough. There is a growing uncertainty of direction, a growing fear of the future, a growing lack of confidence and trustfulness as we face the business of living.
What we need then is to listen to the second part of Christ's answer, the part introduced by the word "But." "It is not for you to know the times and the seasons, but ye shall receive power . . . . and ye shall be my witnesses. . . . ." This promise of power was the promise of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and the rest of the chapter shows us that the promise was redeemed without delay. The disciples found that after their Lord's disappearance from their midst, they still had to go on living in the same old evil world, and today we are still living in it. They had still to wait, and to wait indefinitely, for the glory that was to be. But they were not left in despondency. They were not left in despair. They were not left to let their hands hang idly and listlessly by their sides. On the contrary they were filled with zest. They were filled with hope. They were filled with joy—and with faith and love. Are there any books in the world so full of hope, so full of joy, so full of faith and love, as the books of the New Testament, which were written by these same men and their immediate associates? And the reason was that they had received power—the power of the Pentecostal Spirit —and they proceeded at once to rely upon this power and to use it to the glory of God.
Now what I so often find wrong with our mind and mood today, what I find wrong with so many of the books being written by those who are influencing the mind of youth, is that they lack this New Testament sense of the power of the Spirit. It is as if, being disenchanted of our Utopian illusions, we were now ready enough to accept the first half of our Lord's sentence, but had not yet stayed to listen to the second half of it. Yet if that should be true of us, then our last state is worse than our first.
When I turn from such books as these to the New Testament, two things impress themselves upon my mind. On the one hand the New Testament writers have their eyes wide open to the limitations of our human situation in the present evil world. They know the desperate corruption of the human heart. They know that the powers of evil are still rampant in the world about them. They cherish no illusions about human perfectibility or inevitable progress. They never confuse Christ's eternal Kingdom with the kingdoms of this world. But on the other hand they all declare that the advent of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost have marked the dawn of a new age, a glorious age, an age in which all sorts of things are going to be possible that were not possible before; and they enter into this new age with eagerness and confidence and with a wonderful sense of the power now at their disposal. This, they felt, was a time in which it was good to be alive. "Blessed are the eyes which see the things which ye see," Jesus had said; "For I tell you that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them." "The darkness is passing," writes St. John, "and the true light is already shining." "We are being transfigured from glory to glory," writes St. Paul, "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, it is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
That was the temper of St. Paul as he set about to cover the whole known world on his missionary journeys. None understood better than he how corrupt was the heart of man, and how powerful the forces of evil in the world in which he had to live. None was ever further from cherishing any illusions about the forward march of mankind. But he had been given a work to do, and power to do it. And such a work too! Christ had said here: "Ye shall be my witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth." St. Paul took that command quite literally, and believed that the power of Christ was sufficient for its accomplishment. He even seems to have believed that the whole known world might be evangelised within his own generation, the leaven of the Spirit of Christ penetrating even to the pillars of Hercules and the gates of the Western seas.
The condition of the world today is indeed not such as to justify any light-hearted Utopian expectations, yet in many respects it is a far better world than that in which the first disciples found themselves, when their Lord was taken up out of their sight. The doors of Christian opportunity are far more widely open to us than they were to them. Christ had then only a few score of possible witnesses in the world, but now, apparently, He has over eight hundred million—for that, according to responsible sources, is the number of people who now profess and call themselves Christians. How bright a prospect would then be ours, if we Christians of today were as ready to use the resources at our disposal as was that first brave little band, realizing as they did the power that had been given them, and showing a like eagerness in our witness! Then indeed we might be able to sing with truth:
Uplifted
are the gates of brass;
The bars of iron yield;
Behold the King of Glory pass!
The Cross hath won the field!
Verily
I say unto you, They have their reward.
St. Matthew 6:2
THIS phrase appears three times in this chapter of our Lord's discourse. It
is here in verse two, and it is repeated in verse five and again in verse
sixteen. It is a saying to which perhaps we have never given sufficient
attention, and I propose that we should think of it today.
Jesus is here instructing His disciples in the practice of piety. He speaks separately of three aspects of that practice —almsgiving, prayer and fasting—but He makes the same point with reference to them all. When you give alms, He says, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do, so that men may praise them. They have their reward. No, when you give alms, do not so much as let your left hand know what is in your right hand to give. Keep your almsgiving secret, and God who sees what is done in secret will give you your reward. Again, when you say your prayers, don't do it at the street corners, as the hypocrites do in order that men may see them at their devotions. They have their reward. You go into your room and shut the door, where men will not hear you. But God will hear you, and you shall have your reward from Him. Finally, when you fast—that is, when you have decided to discipline yourself in some way for a season—don't look dismal like the hypocrites who go so far as to disfigure their faces, so that men may notice they are fasting. It is enough that God knows it. He will see to your reward.
"They have their reward," says Jesus in all three cases. That is to say, they have got what they wanted, what they set out to get. When the hypocrite paraded the streets, distributing his largesse and trumpeting his progress as he went, it was not really the poor he was thinking of, but his own reputation as a benefactor. When he said his prayers, he was seeking not so much a response from God as a response from men. What he wanted was the reputation of being a devout person. And again when he fasted, it was for the sake of making a good impression. Well, says Jesus, no doubt he did make a good impression. No doubt he did gain a wide repute as a devout person and as a philanthropist. In all three cases he got what he wanted. His account is settled. "He's had it," as we say in our contemporary slang. And nothing more is coming to him. "Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them; otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven." Had the man's real concern been for the glory of God and the granting of the graces for which he prayed, he would have got these things. God who sees in secret would have given them to him, as He will give them to all who seek them with their whole hearts.
You may perhaps think the picture of the hypocrite somewhat overdrawn. Most men's motives are mixed. The philanthropist has some real concern for the poor but he wants the reputation too. Many people go to Church both in order to satisfy public opinion, or perhaps as an example to their children, and in order to devote themselves to better things. Even so, however, our Lord's warning might still stand. Our getting will be according to our seeking. If we only half want to draw near to God, we cannot expect to get very close to Him. If we only half want His peace in our hearts, we cannot expect to have much of it. Nevertheless we must be very careful not to cheat our consciences in this matter. It is in this very context, in this very chapter, that Jesus says, "If your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. . . . No man can serve two masters. . . . Ye cannot serve God and mammon." When the worldly motive is present at all, it has a terribly corrupting influence upon the heavenly one. So often it is the worldly motive alone that is really effective to action; so that I have to ask myself, for instance, "Would I really have gone to Church this morning if somebody else's opinion of me did not at all come into account?" If not, then I must admit that my neighbour's good opinion is my sufficient reward.
Now I have myself often been struck by the fact that so many people get what they want or something very like it. There are of course also many people who seem to get nothing. There are large numbers of men and women in the world today whose overmastering desire is only for a handful of rice and who cannot even get that; and everywhere there are those who, by reason of ill-health or accident or, it may be, a native deficiency of wit, are denied even the paltriest of the goods for which they seek. Nevertheless I am impressed by the number of people who succeed in the things into which they have really thrown their energy. The voluptuary who wants a life of sensual satisfaction can usually get it. How many men have wanted money before everything else and, just because they have given their whole minds to it, have amassed a fortune! Others have wanted only power, and have succeeded in ruling their little roost, whatever else they may have missed. 'While still others have concentrated, like the hypocritical Pharisee of whom Jesus speaks, on being well spoken of, and men have indeed spoken well of them. But the word which our Lord speaks about them all is a terribly tragic one. "They have their reward." They've had it. Greek scholars have pointed out that the word Jesus here uses .... the word commonly used in New Testament times on forms of receipt. It is as if these men were made to sign a receipt saying: "Paid in full. I have received all that is due me. My account is settled." There is nothing more coming to them. Not for them the "purer light" or the "calm and heavenly frame." Not for them the secret recompense or the joys of the heavenly Kingdom. Nor can they possibly complain. "Seek, and ye shall find," said Jesus; "Everyone that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Well, they have found what they sought; the doors at which they knocked have opened up before them. But the doors at which they have not knocked remain eternally closed. "And age comes on, uncheered by faith and hope." It is indeed a tragic sentence!
I am reminded here of some of the proposals Plato makes in his famous dialogue, The Republic, for the reform of society. He believes that society may be divided roughly into three classes of men corresponding to the three classes of people who were present at the great Olympic games. There were many who looked upon the games as a sort of fair or market; they came to buy and sell, and their motive was gain. Then there were the athletes who took part in the games, and their motive was to win honour and fame and reputation. Finally, there were the spectators who sought neither gain nor honour, but were content to con-template the human scene below. Now Plato's proposal was that the Republic should avail itself of this manifest difference of motive and interest that existed, and was likely always to exist, between different groups of its citizens. He believed that a stable and peaceful order of society could be obtained only if each of these classes was allowed to have what it wanted. Our modern ideas of social reform are largely concerned with the question of wealth, and they all tend towards the equal distribution of wealth over the whole of society. But Plato's strange proposal is that the men who want wealth should be given it. They would (in reasonable division among themselves) have all material property in their hands. By their buying and selling they would be supplying the economic needs of the common-wealth; but at the same time they would be getting what they sought; they should have their reward. Similarly with the ambitious class of citizens—the lovers of honour. They should not be allowed to possess property or wealth, nor should they on the other hand be given a voice in the ultimate affairs of government. They should form rather the civil service and the standing army. It is in these spheres that honours and decorations are won, so that they too will get what they want and have their reward. But the ultimate control of the ship of state should be, Plato thinks, in the hands of the third class, the contemplative class, the sages, who are indifferent alike to wealth and honour, being concerned only for the good of the commonwealth as a whole. They are to possess no property and, as to honours and decorations, it is to be a condition of their appointment that they should not want them. According to the Catholic tradition a bishop, before being consecrated, is required to say the words "Nolo episcopari"—"I do not want to be made a bishop." Similarly, to Plato, no man who wanted power was fit to be entrusted with it. The sages who governed would indeed have their reward, but it would be no worldly one; it would be the reward of a good conscience towards God and their neighbours.
I have reminded you of this teaching of Plato, not of course because I think his solution of the political problem is a workable one, but only because of its bearing on this matter of rewards. Plato believed that, within limits, men should be allowed to get what they want. Our Lord's point is rather that, in the providence of God, so often they do seem to get it. Therefore the question with which I am confronted as I read this page of the Gospels is, "What do I really want? What is it that I am really seeking?" Any observer of our human scene must have the impression that we are all bent on something, and seeking it with a most feverish desire. "We pine for what is not."
There
is not any hour complete,
Nor any season satisfied.
There is no lack of zest and zeal among us, no lack of energy and eager action. There is hardly any limit to what men will do and endure, or to the sacrifices they are ready to make, scorning other delights and living laborious days, in order to get the things on which their hearts are most set. But I fear the impartial observer would be forced to conclude that most of this feverish desire was directed towards worldly wealth and worldly place and worldly power and the satisfactions of the flesh.
Well, there is an Observer. There is an impartial Observer. There is one who not only sees what is done in the market-place, at the street corners and in the synagogue, but who "sees in secret." What does He observe in me? What is my heart's secret dream? What is the guiding thread through all my thoughts? What is the real animating motive of all I do? Do I seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, or do I, while not altogether indifferent to these nobler rewards, give the first place to something else? You remember the young man in the Gospels who thought he could have both kinds of reward at once. He came to Jesus seeking the heavenly treasure. Jesus told him how to attain it: "Sell what you possess, and give it to the poor; and come, follow me." But "when the young man heard this, he went away sorrowful." And Jesus, looking after him, might well have said to him, "Verily I say unto you, You have your reward." For "he had great possessions" and he was going to keep them, and that apparently was what he really wanted. His account was closed. He could expect nothing more. Not for him the "solid joys and lasting treasure" which "none but Zion's children know."
But the Observer is not merely an observer, He is also a Giver; and to those who truly set their hearts on them, these solid joys and this lasting treasure are securely promised. Where your treasure is, Jesus goes on immediately to say, there shall your heart be also; and God who sees into your heart's secret will surely give you this reward. Some may perhaps be inclined to object that "virtue is its own reward"—that the man who has eschewed worldly prizes should be quite content with the consciousness of his own integrity, and needs no Father in heaven to give him some further prize. That, however, is rather a Stoic sentiment than a Christian one. The Stoic was content with virtue, but Jesus wanted men to have something more. He wanted them to have joy—solid joys and, as another hymn says, "social joys"—in the communion of saints and in the fellowship of God.
What
social joys are there,
What radiancy of glory,
What light beyond compare!
Some of you will remember that the philosopher Immanuel Kant had a strong strain of Stoicism in him, and came very near to saying, as the Stoics did, that virtue itself was enough, that nothing was worth having or seeking save the dutiful will. But his Christian inheritance got the better of him in the end, making him realise that there could be no final satisfaction until to virtue was added something like joy.
It is not enough that we should set our hearts on the attainment of virtue, or on keeping the commandments. "All these things have I kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?" You see, the young man knew he lacked something. "Concerning the righteousness which is of the law," said St. Paul, "I was blameless. But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. . . . that I may win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith; that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." These are the things with which the Father, who sees in secret, will reward them that diligently seek Him.
Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee, Take up thy bed and walk? And he that was healed wist not who it was.
St. John 5:12-13
I HAVE heard sermons on unconscious influence, that is, on influence that men unwittingly exert; but now I wish to speak on unacknowledged influence, that is, on influence that men unwittingly receive. Here was a man whose limbs had been paralysed for thirty-eight years, so paralysed that he could not even lift himself from his pallet into the healing waters within a few feet of where he lay. Jesus, taking compassion on his distress, bade him take up his pallet and walk. This he did, and was quite cured of his infirmity. Who is the man that cured you? they asked him; but "he that was healed wist not who it was."
In this incident I find a parable of the situation in which humanity stands today. The man in this story is contemporary man, who is all the time reaping benefits of which Christ is the source but without realising who it is to whom he owes them. We who profess our faith in Christ and take our full part in the ordinances of worship do indeed constantly render thanks to Him for all His benefits, but so often we do this in very general terms and do not stop to think how many and how great these benefits are, so that very much of our debt remains in fact unrealised and unacknowledged. In spite of the weakness of its verse and of its music, we might well learn from that popular hymn which bids us:
Count
your blessings,
Name them every one,
And it will surprise you
What the Lord hath done.
But if this is true of the professed and observant disciples of Christ, how much more true is it of the world at large! For it was the world at large that Christ came to save. His mission was to the whole of humanity. Scripture does not say, "God so loved the Church" but "God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son." Nor can there be any doubt that the world at large has reaped countless benefits from that mission. Think first of the kind of benefit with which this incident is particularly concerned—the healing of disease. Think of the tender care that has been lavished on sick folk, on lepers, on old folk, on undernourished children all over the world, and on Christians and non-Christians alike, under the banner of Christ's Cross and because He sent out His disciples to do these very things! Think how much of the development of the whole hospital system owes to Christian enterprise, and how different it would all be today if Christ had not devoted a large share of His time to the cure of disease, and infected the world's conscience with something of His own compassion for the sick, the halt, the maimed and the blind. The two earliest of the great modern hospitals in Britain are called by the names of two of Christ's disciples—St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew. Is it not true of many who have been cured in these hospitals that "they wist not who it was"? And do all the war-blinded service-men at St. Dunstan's remember that their patron was a follower of Him through whom many blind men of long ago were given back their sight? Did all those who were picked up from the battlefields of the recent wars know that the red cross on the ambulance was Christ's Cross? Must it not be said of many of these that they "wist not who it was"?
Yet it is not only on the sick folk among us that Christ confers these unacknowledged benefits. It is, for instance, only when we travel to parts of the world which Christian influence has not yet effectively reached that we realise how much He has done for the recognition of the proper dignity of women. Think of that most precious of all our national institutions—the family life of the home circle. What do you think ordinary family life would be like today if St. Columba and St. Ninian had never carried the Gospel to our Scottish shores? We do not perhaps regard Charles Dickens as a particularly Christian writer, and yet how essentially Christian is his feeling for family life! Could the pictures he draws of it in the Christmas Carol be anything like what they are, if Christ had never lived and never died? We have recently so secularised the Christmas feast that Punch made somebody exclaim, when he heard a Christmas service spoken about, "I don't know what we are coming to. They are even bringing religion into Christmas nowadays." All, poor man, he wanted his Christmas, and he enjoyed his Christmas, but "he wist not who it was" that had given it to him.
I might speak also of how much we owe to Christ for the familiar embellishment of life in the arts that most delight us, but I shall confine myself to a single example—the example of music. Do we realise that the first beginnings of polyphonic music in our Western world were in the singing of the Christian liturgy—that it is entirely due to the influence of Christian music that we possess any harmony, any part-singing, or anything but simple melody.
But what I really want to speak of, because it is most significant of all, is the influence Christ has exercised upon our common conscience and our accepted standard of moral values. I number among my own friends and acquaintances many men and women who do not confess the name of Christ or acknowledge His Lordship, and yet whose consciences, whose feelings, whose instinctive responses, and whose treatment of their neighbours, are conditioned by generations and centuries of Christian tradition. I do not mean, of course, that the cast of their minds or the conduct of their lives is truly Christian. That could not be, while they lacked the Christian grace of faith, for faith is the very foundation and source of the true Christian temper. Nevertheless the temper they do exhibit is such as it could not possibly have been had the culture into which they were born, and in which they have been reared, remained a pagan one—whether Nordic pagan or Roman pagan or anything else.
It was said, for example, of the Cambridge philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, who was not a professing Christian, that "he exhibited every Christian virtue except faith." How many men I have known of whom I have been tempted to say just that! And yet one is constantly overcome by the fear that such vestigial Christianity can at best be only a temporary phenomenon. Men like Sidgwick were themselves brought up in the Christian faith and in the Christian Church, and, though they have forsaken the faith, they continue to enjoy some taste of its fruits. But can they pass on this taste to their children, if they are no longer brought up within the faith? How long will the Christian temper survive among us, when it no longer receives nourishment from its original source, which was a whole-hearted commitment in love and obedience to Him who loved us and gave Himself for us, even Jesus Christ our Lord? How long will the healing influence survive after it shall come to be said that they "wist not who it was" that had healed them?
Consider also the influence Christ has exercised upon the public conscience of the Western family of nations. Unfortunately, one cannot say with any conviction that this influence has yet gone very far towards making the nations act in accordance with their conscience, but it has at least made their consciences uneasy. If the races and nations do not behave towards one another as they ought, they can no longer say that it is because they do not know how they ought to behave; and if they do know how they ought to behave, it is very largely from Christ that they have learned it. Would they know this if it had not been true that, as St. Paul says, Christ broke down the middle wall of partition (or, as we might translate it, the iron curtain); so that there is neither Jew nor Greek, Barbarian nor Scythian, slave or freeman, but all are one in Him? Would we have the same uneasy conscience about our present interracial relations as now disturbs us, if it were not for Him? Or the same uneasy conscience about war?
Alas, that so often it is only an uneasiness that we have, and not what St. Paul calls "the godly sorrow that worketh repentance"! Alas, that the pain in our minds is so often the wrong sort of pain! But such as it is, we Church folk have also to admit to our very great shame and confusion that very often this uneasiness, which derives from Christ, has led to more imaginative and resolute action at the hands of those outside the Church than at the hands of those within it. That is true of many movements in our history for the welfare even of those classes to whom our Lord gave special thought and care—the poor and underprivileged, prisoners and slaves and refugees (whom the New Testament calls "strangers within the gate"). That should be deeply humbling to us. But it is glorifying to our Lord. These indeed do not acknowledge His glory, but we should acknowledge that His glory is through them enhanced. These are they who will ask in surprise, "Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee? or thirsty and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?" And perhaps the Lord will answer, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." They did what He commanded, though they "wist not who it was."
Yet we may ask how this can be? How can Christ acknowledge as His own, services which have not been rendered in His name? St. Paul says, "Whatever is not of faith is sin." Can we say then that those who do the deeds of Christ without acknowledging His name, as we Church people acknowledge His name, have any kind of faith? I think perhaps St. James would reply for them, "Yea, a man may say, Thou bast faith, and I have works; show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works." Can a man have faith without knowing it? Did perhaps even Henry Sidgwick have faith without knowing that he had it? I think myself that we must allow something like this to be true, remembering the emphatic words of our Lord Himself, "Ye shall know them by their fruits." Faith as a disposition of the soul is something far deeper than intellectual assent, though where that assent is lacking it must be gravely compromised and have little power of continuance. I think then that men can have faith without knowing that they have it. Yet let me remember one thing. If I speak thus of unconscious faith, I must speak of it, not in excuse for my own unbelief, but in charity towards my neighbour's. As was most truly said by John Ker, the great Scottish preacher of last century, "There is such a thing as unconscious faith, but those who plead it in their own behalf do not possess it. With them it is conscious unbelief."
But as for you and me, we cannot say that we "wist not who it was." You and I do know, don't we, that we owe everything to Christ? When I think of my own upbringing, the love and care that were lavished on me in my youth, the kind of home into which I was born, the community in which I was reared, the gracious influences that were brought to bear on me, the examples that were held up before me, the kind of teaching I was given, the signposts that awaited me at every turn of the road, the fences that were set to keep me wandering from the way, the warnings that were given me against every pitfall, the words in season so often spoken to me:—when I think of all these things, and in spite of my shame for having so little profited from them, I must indeed prostrate myself in gratitude before the memory of my parents, my teachers, my wonderful friends, and those who wrote the books I was given to read, who rendered me this inestimable service. Yet I know that they themselves had it all from Christ. Nothing of it would have been there, if Christ had not come to seek and to save that which was lost. I cannot say that I wot not who it was. And I think that none of you can say that ye wot not who it was. Yet I fear that we still accept many things from His hand without ever stopping to thank Him. So perhaps after all I cannot better end my sermon than by saying to you again, and this time with no apologies:
Count
your blessings,
Name them every one,
And it will surprise you
What the Lord hath done.
Hear, 0 Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thine house, and on thy gates.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
MAN is a talking animal. A poet, watching the swallows gathering in the sky,
may write that "The pilgrims of the year waxed very loud, in multitudinous
chatterings," but no other animal is such a chatterbox as man. Sometimes,
when travelling in a country whose language I did not understand, I have
sat in an inn or railway compartment or wandered through a crowded market-place,
when every tongue seemed to be going at lightning speed, everybody apparently
trying to talk everybody else down; and I've wondered what on earth they
could possibly be finding to say to one another. And it would seem that
the more primitive the community, the more unimpeded is the flow of words.
Savages chatter almost unceasingly. Silence is not primitive, but rather
a characteristic of complex and sophisticated civilizations, being due
either to diplomacy, as in the case of Count Moltke who was said to have
the gift of being "silent in seven languages," or to social embarrassment—though
in this case we can always, in this country at least, save the situation
by falling back upon our changeable weather.
What do we talk about, you and I, when we sit at table or by the fireside with our families, or when we go out walking with them? We always find something to say, and perhaps we are inclined to think that it does not very much matter what it is. Conversation is a social function which keeps us in friendly touch with each other, no matter what may be the topics discussed. It may only be sport or the increased cost of living or the day's news or the latest movie or, as George Crabbe put it long ago,
Intrigues
half-gathered, conversation-scraps,
Kitchen-cabals, and nursery-mishaps,
but it all helps, as it were, to lubricate our human and family relationships and keep them sweet, if it is carried on pleasantly and with good humour.
Yes, but the first question I want to put is whether conversation really can be kept sweet, if it remains on that superficial level. It is remarkable how easy we human beings find it to pick a quarrel with one another. Even the smallest of small talk will provide plenty of opportunity for it. Some little devil always seems to be listening in at even our most casual conversations, and it is seldom very long before he finds an opportunity of sowing discord. And to allow one devil in is to allow a whole crowd of them—the devils of bitterness and malice and jealousy, the devils of untruthfulness and slander and back-biting. St. Paul knew all about it when he wrote to Timothy about "strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, perverse disputings."
I am sure that if we are honest with ourselves we shall all have to confess to the very great difficulty in keeping these devils at bay. The first little devil makes his entry so unobtrusively that we are far from suspecting the legion at his heels. What is it another poet says?
"Who
knocks so loud?" "A little lonely sin."
"
Enter," I answered; and all hell was in.
We just can't resist that barbed word, that little dig. It is such a little dig, but if it pricks and is resented, then we can't help remarking that apparently "the cap fits"; and that lets in a whole crowd of demons at a rush. While our own shortcomings are hidden from us, the shortcomings of others stand out so clearly that we can't help drawing their attention to them. Of course they pay back in kind, and since it is even more difficult to refrain from self-defence than it originally was to refrain from launching the attack, we soon find ourselves in the thick of battle.
It is in this way that family relations are poisoned. Our sentimentalities about the joys of the fireside circle and "home, sweet home" are apt to be considerably chastened by a study of the Divorce Court proceedings, and yet the vast majority of these family tragedies seem to take their rise in just such trivial bickerings. But what is true of the family is true of every other kind of social group. Nor must I, as one whose whole life has been spent in colleges, exempt the Senior Common Rooms of our universities; for I am ashamed to confess that even the shabbiest of household devils seem to find no special difficulty in slipping into them. And what of the wider circles of community? What above all of the family of nations? Don't some of the disputes at the council tables of the United Nations read exactly like the disputes round the dinner table in many a private household? It is not a different set of devils, but precisely the same set, that builds so many barriers between husbands and wives, and that forged the "iron curtain" now dividing Eastern Europe from the West.
What then can we do about it? How are we to keep these devils out? The answer is that they cannot be kept out while our relationships with one another, our walk and conversation with one another, remain on that superficial level. Our human predicament is so desperately serious, and our human nature so desperately prone to wickedness, that common life cannot be kept sweet so long as it remains trivial. It is only by going deep down to the heart of things that we can find a solidarity strong enough to overcome the surface tensions; and the deep heart of things is God. Only by together laying hold of the divine unity, only by grounding ourselves on the knowledge that "the Lord our God is one Lord," can we ever master the things that divide us. We can never shut the little devils out unless we let the great God in.
Now listen again to our text. Remember that these are the words which, according to the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses spoke to the Israelites as they were about to enter the promised land of Canaan after their long desert wanderings. They were going to adjust themselves now to the hum-drum of a steady pastoral existence after the unsettled nomadic life to which for so long they had been used, and their society would now be open to new temptations. So Moses said to them:
Hear, 0 Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thy heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou hest down and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thine house, and on thy gates.
When you read that, do you wonder that even in this modern day we must continue to go back to the ancient East, to these rude tribesmen of three thousand years ago, and to these ancient Hebrew scriptures, for the solution of our most urgent problems? How these words touch the very heart of the matter! The only way, so these rude tribes-men are told, to keep their life sweet in their new surroundings, the only way to keep the legion of Canaanite devils out, is constantly to stay themselves upon the unity of God, and to love the one God with all their heart and soul and might. And you will notice that they are given specific guidance as to their conversation: "thou shalt talk of these things when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up"—not just in an occasional theological de-bate, which is so apt to become academic and unreal, but in the ordinary small talk of every day. "And thou shalt teach them diligently to thy children"—ah! that was a very important part of it. It makes us ask ourselves what kind of upbringing the little ones are receiving in many homes today. What teaching are they getting, and above all what example are they being shown? What is being laid up in their young hearts? What things have their young ears sometimes to listen to?
"And thou shalt bind these words for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thine house, and on thy gates." The Hebrew people came to take these instructions very literally—probably more literally than was originally meant. "Hear, 0 Israel": the Hebrew word for "hear" is shema; so the words which follow came to be known as the Shema, which to this day is recited as part of the service in every Jewish synagogue. And at morning and evening prayer every Jewish male still wears the two phylacteries, as they came to be called, one between his eyebrows and the other tied round his left arm, with these words written on them; and every observant Jewish house has a little box, containing a scrap of parchment inscribed with the same words, fixed to the post of the door.
The Shema is the very centre of Jewish piety, and goes far to explain the marvellous strength of Hebrew family life and the solidarity of the Hebrew community through-out the ages. There is more in our Christian creed than the Shema, but the Shema is a vital part of it; and we Scots, no less than the Hebrews, owe the strength of our family and community life to its having been anciently built on this foundation. What was the talk like in the Christian homes of Scotland's past? What was it like in the household of my own youth and in the other households I used to visit? We talked of fun and games and books and the happy trivialities of school and home; yes, but it was always against the background of something sterner and more profound. Our parents diligently taught us the commandments of God, often leading us back to them as we sat in the house or walked by the way, and always—always—when we lay down or when we rose up. Though not literally, yet none the less truly, they were bound for a sign upon our hands and as frontlets between our eyes; and they were written upon the posts and on the gates of the house where I was born. What after all would our history have been apart from this? What has Scottish history to show the world that was really independent of it? We have other reasons for reading the history of Greece and of Rome, but what other reason have we for reading either the history of Israel or the history of Scotland? I think Scotland must confess with St. Paul, "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." When walking in the island of Lewis a few years ago, I happened to stop for a moment at the open window of a shed where herrings were being packed. Immediately inside the window was a machine that seemed to split and clean the herrings, and pack them into cases, all in a single operation. A young woman was tending the machine, and when she looked at me I said, "That is a wonderful machine." "Aye, sir," she answered, "the works of man are wonderful, but not so wonderful as the works of God!" Well, when I want to boast about Scotland, I tell a few stories like that; for not in every part of the world would I have received such an answer.
Are we doing for our children of the rising generation what our fathers and mothers did for us? Are we keeping this tradition green? Times change, and the superficialities of life change with them. The topics of conversation round the dinner-table are now very different from what they were in my youth. But the ultimate issues of life remain quite unchanged. "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Most of us know that, under God, we owe everything to the influences that were brought to bear on us in early life. I have heard a man of my own generation exclaim in the course of a discussion, "Whatever you may say about Christianity, it made my mother what she was." Will our children be likely to say a thing like that about us? I can imagine no greater service we could render to Christ than that twenty or thirty years hence our children should be fortified in their allegiance to Him as often as they remember how we were enabled by His grace.
Yet let us not think in this matter of Scotland only. The old national frontiers count for so much less than they used to do. The world, whether we like it or not, is more and more developing into a single interdependent community; and the failure to recognise this, or the attempt to erect any kind of iron curtain between the nations, can only lead to disaster. Moreover, I believe this to be a cause for Christian rejoicing. The world is destined to become one just because God is one—because, as the Shema says, "The Lord our God is one Lord." Yet I think we all know that this one world will prove quite unmanageably large and cumbrous, if it does not ground itself also on the rest of the Shema, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and soul and might." The great peril of our time lies in the fact that the secular unity of our world is threatening to outstrip its spiritual unity. If no single nation has ever succeeded in holding together on the basis of merely economic or utilitarian interest, if every stable society known to history has owed its stability to the presence among its members of some common spiritual outlook, what hope is there for our United Nations, if it is to have no profound basis of that kind at all? That is why you and I must cease to be parochial, and give at least as much thought and prayer, as much time and as much money, to the task of world-evangelisation as to the maintenance of the Christian traditions of our own beloved land.
That
we henceforth be no more children.
But [that we] speaking the truth in love, may grow up into
him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.
Ephesians
4:14-15
PERHAPS this should be translated, not "speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him," but "speaking the truth, may in love grow up into him." The words "in love" may go with the second phrase instead of with the first. Either way the main point of the Apostle's advice is the same. Truth and love, he says, are both necessary, if we are to grow up into Christ. Love without truth won't do it, and neither will truth without love. Truth provides the light and love provides the heat, and both are needed for any healthy development into Christian manhood. Love will mislead us unless it be enlightened by truth, and truth will mislead us unless it be warmed by love. The reason for this is that truth is one of God's attributes and love is another, and we can only worship God aright if we worship Him under all His attributes and in the whole fulness of His Godhead. You know how often the Old Testament couples together God's truth and His mercy—and mercy is just the Old Testament way of saying love.
The
whole paths of the Lord
Are truth and mercy sure
To those that do his cov'nant keep
And testimonies pure.
One might say that all false religion consists in worship-ping some of God's attributes to the exclusion of others. All idolatrous forms of worship grasp something of the nature of the true God but also leave something out, and so turn the true God into an idol of man's own making. And of course false worship leads inevitably to false living. Love without truth leads inevitably to sentimentality and insincerity. It is what St. Paul calls love with dissimulation and not love unfeigned. But truth without love may lead to equally grievous errors, and it is about these that I would speak now.
To you and me today truth may well seem the most precious of all possessions, and like all precious things there is very little of it about. If the Devil is the Father of Lies, then he would seem to be more rampant in the world today then he has ever been before, going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it. In many parts of the world men are now being fed on deliberate lies, and truth (like some other things) is a strictly rationed commodity. Adolf Hitler in his notorious book elaborately and eloquently defends systematic lying as one of the most important instruments of totalitarian warfare, and those who have ever listened to Lord Haw-Haw know that he is putting this weapon to its fullest and most skilful use. When I was crossing the Atlantic, the ship's wireless operator one day retailed to me a preposterous piece of so-called news which he had just heard on the air from Italy; and when I asked him if he really believed it, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Honestly I've come to the point where I don't know what to believe." The propaganda, you see, was beginning to take effect. Not knowing what to believe is but a stage on the way to believing whatever is proclaimed most loudly and brazenly.
Speaking the truth, then, may well seem the virtue to be cherished above all others. It is one of the things we are fighting for, isn't it? We want to put truth back on its ancient throne, restoring it to its proper place in the relation between the peoples of the world. And because truth is our goal, truth must also be our weapon. We must, as St. Paul says, have our loins girt about with truth. Our hope is that if, as a nation, we go on speaking the truth to other peoples and feeding ourselves only on the truth, we shall prevail over all lying propaganda in the end.
And yet the Apostle would tell us that speaking the truth is not enough. We must speak it in love. Perhaps truth itself is not strong enough to defeat falsehood, unless it be warmly clothed in love and mercy. That is what the psalm says, "Surely his salvation is nigh unto them that fear him; that glory may dwell in our land. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other."
The ineffectiveness of truth without love and mercy may be illustrated from many spheres. To speak the truth to others is indeed our bounden duty, but it can be a most dangerous thing if it is separated from other equally bounden duties. There are different ways of speaking the truth, and some of them are quite disastrous, and some of them are positively wicked. I remember a man saying to me, "I met our friend So-and-So this morning and I gave him some home truths." Well, what he said may have been true, but it was certainly not said in love. It was said in anger, and I think with a spice of malice. But truth spoken in malice is little likely to convince, and that for the very good reason that it can never even be quite true. The malice must always taint and corrupt the truth, so that only truth spoken in love can ever be quite true.
Good manners consist very largely in the proper combination of sincerity and tactfulness. If I meet an acquaintance on the street who has some obvious untidiness about his dress, it may in some circumstances be my duty to call his attention to it, but obviously I must be very careful how I do it. I don't say, "You have on your waistcoat either some of yesterday's soup or some of this morning's porridge"—although that indeed may be an exact scientific description of the facts as known to me. Here is a region in which something more is required of us than scientific accuracy. But this is not only an affair of manners, it is also an affair of morals. Any action done without love is sinful, and speaking the truth without wrapping it about with love may often be very sinful indeed. Few things can work more havoc in human relationships than candour without kindliness. How many marriages are embittered by the husband who insists on telling his wife the whole truth about herself, or by the wife's devastatingly faithful and tiresomely persistent recital of her husband's shortcomings. There are a great many true things known to you and me about which we must forever keep silent, because we have not grace enough to speak them in the way in which they must alone be spoken. It is a good rule: Never speak the truth until you have learned how to speak it in love. You remember Tom Pinch's little untruth in Martin Chuzzlewit and what Dickens says about it:
There are some falsehoods, Tom, on which men mount, as on light wings, towards heaven. There are some truths—cold, bitter, taunting truths—wherein your worldly scholars are very apt and punctual, which bind men down to earth with leaden chains. Who would not rather have to fan him in his dying hour, the lightest feather of a falsehood such as thine, than all the quills that have been plucked from the sharp porcupine, reproachful truth, since time began?
I remember once being much impressed by a passage in one of the published letters of that great writer and most spiritually-minded man, the late Baron von Hugel, in which he spoke of the rule he kept before himself in criticising and reviewing other people's books. He said he always tried to begin his criticism by saying what he could in praise of the book, then he voiced his doubts and objections, and finally returned again to the book's good points in his closing sentences. It is a good rule, and one which I have since tried to follow in my own reviewings. Von Hugel, you see, was anxious to wrap round his candour with kindliness. He knew that mere hostile criticism would be little likely to have the desired effect. A man of spirit will bridle up against hostile criticism, and a man of no spirit will only succumb to a feeling of inferiority which will hinder rather than help him. Either way more harm is done than good. That is why so many controversies are both endless and fruitless. Mere polemic seldom does anything but stiffen the adversary's resistance. That is what is wrong, for instance, with most of the controversy between the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches—or for that matter between any two churches. We speak truth with intent to wound rather than to reconcile and to heal.
The same thing holds when we come to speak the most important truth of all—when we come to preach the Christian Gospel to them that are without. "Is it not unspeakably sad," writes one of the finest Roman Catholic spirits of our day, Karl Adam of Tubingen, "that we Catholics are no longer, as formerly, recognized by our love, that no longer faith and love, but faith alone is our distinguishing mark? Why are we in the works of our love no proof of the spirit and strength of the victoriousness of the Catholic faith? Why do we rather take refuge in cheap speech and in dead books to testify to our faith, whereas the only overwhelming and effective apologia for the living reality is that of the glowing heart, of active devoted love?" It is a question which Protestants also would do well to put to themselves. Have we learned to preach the Gospel in the only way in which it is likely to be received? Have we learned that faith without love is as dead in its power of testimony as in its power unto salvation? Let the words we speak be never so true, their truth is little likely to be recognised unless they are lovingly administered, and unless the truth of them is seen to bear the fruit of love in the lives of those who speak. For what is the truth which Christianity preaches? It is that God is love, and that the duty of man is to love God in loving his neighbour as himself. The Christian truth is that love is the greatest thing in the world, the essence of Godhead and the sum of human duty; but how can you expect men to believe that if it is preached to them in a loveless way or if those who preach it fail to show by their lives that they really believe what they say? I remember hearing of a Manchukuo woman—a sick woman carrying a baby—who was converted to Christianity through being offered a seat in a bus by a young missionary of our church. That missionary was not even speaking the truth in love—he could not do that because he had not yet learned the language; he was allowing his love to speak the truth for him!
Or let me return for a moment to the case of Germany today. The Germans, I have said, are being systematically fed on lies, and one of the objects of our policy is to let them know the truth. We are doing all we can to disillusion them now—to get something of the truth through to them; and we look forward to a day when the people of Germany will be finally disillusioned, and see Hitler for what he is, and turn their backs upon him and all his works. Well, let us not suppose that this is going to be an easy task. People don't like hearing the truth about themselves from the mouths of their enemies. How are we to overcome their distrust, their very natural suspicions? We can do it only by speaking the truth in love. We must show them that we are concerned not to harm them but to save them. I believe that after the victory our most important task, more important even than setting the occupied territories on their feet again, will be the task of setting a defeated Germany on its feet again, and restoring to the people something of their self-respect. The greatest menace of the post-war period would be a chaotic and despairing Germany. That would be a most dangerous canker right in the middle of Europe. We do not want to drive the German people, the most numerous race in Europe, into anarchy and bolshevism. Oh, it will be so tempting to let the Germans hear some home truths at the end of this war! I feel the urge to do it in myself! But it is certain that the home truths will not go home unless they are spoken in love and kindliness. It must be Christian truth that we speak to them. It must be truth not intended to crush but to evangelise. Otherwise there will be no hope of a restored order in Europe.
For we must remember once again that behind all this that I have tried to say about what we should do and should not do, there lies the very nature of the Gospel itself. Christ did not come to earth merely to tell us the truth, and if He had come only to do that, then His coming would have been of none effect. He spake as never yet man spake, yet not even His speaking would have been listened to, if He had done nothing else than speak. Our Lord came to earth, not to tell us what to do, but to do something for us. He did not come to give us a piece of His mind. He did not come to give us good advice. Thank God for that! Advice is cheap. The world has always been full of good advice. In some ways there is too much of it floating about these days rather than too little. But the world has always been short of loving action, and it was to engage in loving action for our sakes that our Lord came to earth. He spoke the truth indeed, but He spoke it to us from the heart of a love that suffered and died for our sakes.
In the modern world, by which I mean the world that we are trying to defend against the threat of Nazidom, the quest of truth has played a large part and occupied a very honoured place. Modern science and philosophy are in-formed with a most determined zeal to see things as they are—to look the facts in the face, wearing no blinkers. Why is it, then, that the quest for truth has so often seemed to lead modern man away from God instead of towards Him? I am sure it is because it has so often been pursued in isolation from other quests that are of equal importance. "Truth for truth's sake," men say; yet truth for truth's sake is not enough, any more than "art for art's sake" of which we used to hear so much. When the love of truth is artificially separated from other loves, it becomes what is called pure scientific curiosity, and pure scientific curiosity is not a thing that has any right to exist by itself. A doctor cannot be a good doctor without scientific curiosity, but he is a very bad doctor indeed if he has nothing else to mingle with it. And a philosopher cannot be a good philosopher unless the love of truth is mingled in his heart with the love of love. And the reason for this is, as I said at the beginning, that truth is only one of God's attributes, while love is another, and that we cannot be saved from an idolatrous corruption of one attribute except by loving Him and worshipping Him under His other attributes too. When the love of truth is pursued in abstraction from the other claims that life makes on us, it is more than likely to degenerate into the love of error. God in His own indivisible nature is the only reality that must be sought and loved for its own sake alone. And only in the love of God is there salvation for you and me, and for the peoples of the earth.
To
them that fear him surely near
is his salvation,
That glory in our land may have
her habitation.
Truth
met with mercy, righteousness
and peace kiss'd mutually.
Truth springs from earth, and righteousness
looks down from heaven high.
Yea,
what is good the Lord shall give;
our land shall yield increase.
Justice, to set us in his steps,
shall go before his face.
PART II: CHRIST AND HUMAN DISCUSSION
8. CHRIST AND HUMAN DISCUSSION
And he came to Capernaum: and being in the house he asked them, What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way? But they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among themselves, who should be the greatest. And he sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If any man desire to be the first, the same shall be the last of all, and the servant of all. And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when he had taken him in his arms, he said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me.
St. Mark 9:33-37
IT Is often said that we are living today in a post-Christian situation. By this two things are meant; first, that Christianity was the chief formative influence of our traditional cultural background; and second, that, however much the world has now disengaged itself from this tradition, it can never again return to its pre-Christian state, or be as though Christ had never lived. And both these things are true. Other influences besides the Christian Gospel have gone