Part 8

When Christ stood before Pilate, the Kingdom of God was in appearance, at least, undergoing judgment at the hands of the kingdom of this world; but it is not merely a contrast of good with evil. It is a contrast of the perfect with the very imperfect, but yet not merely evil, power. Pilate is not Satan; and the Lord Himself, in the moment of His trial, recognises that the authority by which He is condemned is an authority that is derived from God--"Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above." The kingdoms of this world, which are to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ, are not simply something evil. The contrast of Church and World is not the contrast between good and evil; but it is the contrast between two stages in the work which God is accomplishing in history, and those two may often come into conflict.

Let us then ask what is the central principle of God's guidance of His people, so far as it may be deduced from the tiny fragment of history that we really know. In that fragment at least, we may say, I think, with little hesitation, that its method and its aim is spiritual growth, or, if you like to put it an expansion and enrichment of personality.

We are sometimes inclined to think our own personality is something that is given to us from the outset, and entirely belongs to us; but that idea will not stand examination for a moment. Individual personality is a social product. It can only be developed under social influences. A man may be born with many great talents, but if his environment does not encourage their development, these talents will remain for the most part undeveloped and unknown--either to himself or to anybody else. Indeed the greater the talent with which a man is endowed, the more difference is made to him by the kind of surroundings in which he is put. A man of very few gifts and little natural capacity will be much the same, whether he has abundant opportunity for mental and spiritual growth or little opportunity; but the man of great capacities, needing for their development the encouragement of surroundings, is an entirely different being according as those surroundings are favourable or the reverse; and so we reach the curious result that the greatest personality, while no doubt he must have brought into the world something given to him by God that was capable of development, is yet more entirely dependent upon the society in which he is living than people with a less wide range of gifts.

Again, it is only within a society which has developed some character for itself, which has indeed a personality of its own, that individual personality can reach very much development. You cannot have genius in a savage tribe. Genius is the focal expression of the personality of a whole people. It is that people coming to life, and possessed of voice; and you do not find it where there is little social development. It is only as the tribe or the nation begins to have some definite character of its own that it is itself sufficiently organised to develop from its own individual member those gifts, and elicit those activities, which are the signs of genius.

We find then, that individual personality, or spiritual life, is dependent upon the spiritual life of society; and we need to notice that this society has every mark by which we distinguish personality in the individual. It has aspirations: it has a predominant character; it has claims, and it has duties. It has in fact, in the literal sense of the word, corporate personality, and just as the many instincts and impulses which are to be found in human nature, and may be very discordant with one another, are welded together to make up the single life of a human being, so the whole gifts and instincts and ambitions and aspirations of all the individual citizens are welded together, to make up the personality of the whole society.

Moreover, every nation is in itself not only the combination of individual citizens, but also of minor groups within itself, all of which have these same marks, and all of which are in the real genuine sense persons, spiritual individuals with a life of their own.

Now, as we look over the history of the development which thus goes on side by side in the individual and in society, we find that its principle in the fragment of history that we really know has been that isolated excellences should be brought to perfection first; and after something like perfection has been reached in the separate departments taken singly, the combination of them is brought about, in order that the richer and fuller life may be perfected, in which all of them find a place.

European history derives its whole life from Palestine, Greece and Rome; and in each of those three peoples, some one excellence was developed to a peculiar degree. Rome perfected and has bequeathed to us the instincts for social order, as embodied in law. The history of the Roman people is of significance, precisely because one may there trace the growth and working out of this instinct for social or political life. There has never been anything to rival it in history. No modern nation has shown the same extraordinary political sense and sanity. The Romans were not great political philosophers. They did not think very much about the principles on which they acted; but simply because of their peculiar gift in this direction they welded together a social order which lasted throughout their Empire in a wonderful way; and to this day the law of Europe is to an enormous extent the law of ancient Rome.

To ancient Greece, it is hard to say what we do not owe. Her peculiar characteristic is intellectual passion; a passion for reaching perfection in just what the intellect is particularly qualified to grasp, truth and beauty. No doubt the ancient Greeks themselves thought a great deal about their ordinary politics and their military activities, and the wars between the various States; but these matter very little. The Greek people are significant for evermore not because of the Athenian trireme or the Macedonian phalanx, but because Aeschylus stood in astonished awe before the operation of the Divine Justice; because Sophocles reflected the whole of human life, even its ugliest manifestations, in the mirror of a soul so calm and pure, that as we look at that reflection all life seems bathed in peace and beauty; because Euripides entered into the sorrows of simple folk; because Thucydides, with a still unrivalled zeal for the genuine truth of history, said the wise word about nearly every political condition that has arisen since his time; because Plato dreamed "a Vision of all time and all existence," proclaimed that it can never be just to do harm to any man whatever harm he may have done to us; proclaimed also that "God is in no way unrighteous, but in all ways absolutely righteous, nor is anything more like to God than whosoever among men shall become perfectly righteous;" foreseeing also that if a perfectly righteous man should come on earth he would die, scourged and crucified.[#] There is nowhere before the New Testament anything that comes nearer to its own highest truths, not in the Old Testament itself, than what you will find in Plato.

[#] _Republic_ i. 335*d*; _Theaetetus_ 176*c*; _Republic_ ii. 361*e*.

This influence,--the influence of this intellectual passion--has been the driving force in nearly all the movements since that time. It has been said there is nothing in the world which moves that is not Greek in origin, and it is almost true; it is from the Greeks that we have learnt "the use of reason to modify experience" and they derived it from the intellectual passion for truth and beauty.

To Palestine we owe the inspiring and governing faith of which I have already spoken--the one faith that can give real significance to these other two, faith in the Holy God at work in history.

It is noticeable that each of these countries was conspicuously weak in those other qualities which were not especially entrusted to it. Ancient Rome was not at all specially religious and was conspicuously unintellectual. The people of Greece again are not conspicuously religious, though in their cults there is a haunting beauty; and they were not at all politically successful; the history of Athens, the flower of Greece, is the history of a State in which almost every generation threw up a supreme genius who proceeded to change the constitution in accordance with his magnificent ideas; the result was political instability of an appalling character.[#] And Palestine has contributed very little to us as regards social organisation, and is markedly lacking in the scientific and artistic gifts. We have only to consider the great images that are set before us, let us say in the Book of Ezekiel, or again in the Book of Revelation, to see that there is no attempt in these efforts of the imagination to achieve a beautiful or harmonious whole. The symbolic elements are added one to another because of the value of their meaning; but there is no effort to visualise the whole; and if we try to make it, we quickly find that such a thing was never intended.

[#] It is of course true that the Greek genius gave us what we now mean by civilisation, namely, the combination of political unity and personal freedom. On this see the admirable first chapter of Mr. Edwyn Bevan's _The House of Seleucus_. But it remains true that the race from whose intellectual genius this whole product sprang had not in any considerable degree the capacity for controlling their own invention.

Each of these then reached a genuine supremacy in its own department; and the history of Europe is to an enormous extent the history of the inter-action of these three forces as they mingle and combine in the polities of the barbarian invaders who wrecked the Roman Empire. We watch the periods of domination of each successively. Christianity grew up within the Roman Empire, and the fascination of that great Empire cast a glamour about it in the minds even of those who destroyed it, so that the life which emerges out of chaos in the Middle Ages is predominantly very Latin. The Renaissance is precisely the invasion of Greek influence, and the Reformation is very largely the rediscovery of the Hebrew.

For a while the three new forces worked together, carrying men's thought and action forward; and then in the 18th century it would seem that there was, in England at any rate, a torpor due to their exhaustion; when revival came it was because Wesley and his friends revived the Hebrew element in our life, because Newman and Pusey with their friends revived the Latin element, and because F. D. Maurice and the Broad Church movement revived the Hellenistic, and this, with its passion for more adequate comprehension and expression, is the dominant force of our time. We watch these three influences still at work; but as they interact upon one another and within the persons of the new races, a new product is gradually being produced, and in those corporate personalities which we call nations, we see a character being born which is something that history has not known before.

The first requirement of personality is always freedom--freedom as we have already said in its two senses, that conduct is not dictated from without but is governed by the whole person, and not by isolated elements; and the corporate persons need freedom just as much as the individual; hence the need, the vital and absolute need, for political sovereignty in any State which is conscious of itself as a person, that is as having a single spiritual life.

But that life and freedom are exercised only in the citizens who are members of the State. We cannot surely assert that the corporate person is immortal, as the individual is; and therefore, to destroy a State is to inflict a more irreparable loss than to kill a man, which is one reason at least, perhaps the chief reason, why a man should die for the political freedom of his country, and even, if need be, kill for it; but, as freedom is the first requirement of personality, fellowship is its first duty, for it is true of corporate personalities quite as much as of individuals that they only find themselves and fulfil themselves in their inter-action upon one another, and the nations of the world do in fact need one another, and need one another's full life.

In economics we found out long ago that in order to be wealthy, a country needs rich neighbours who may afford good markets. It is so in every other department. We need the gifts of the other peoples. We need that they shall be free and vigorous. Indeed the chief lesson which the world at this time needs to learn is just this--that all the nations of the world need one another, each needing also that the others should be free, in order that they may bring their contributions to the common life in which all share.

But we should, I think, be reading the signs of the times amiss if we did not also take account of the fact that there has been growing up lately a new type of corporate personality, not known to history before, and exemplified by your own United States and by the British Empire; the conception of sovereign States linked together in a single life, and exercising therein a joint sovereignty in dealing with those who lie outside the federation, is something of which history bears no record; and we need to try to understand its principle, and see what it is capable of contributing to the life of men in order that we may not fail to use our opportunity, and bring our contribution.[#]

[#] See Appendix V. _On Providence in History_.

There is our outline sketch of the way in which the history of our own civilisation has grown, within which the Church and Nation are at work. We are members of both. What duty falls upon us as the result of that dual membership? The Christian citizen is called of necessity to fulfil one of three functions--prophet, priest and king.

The prophet is one who is called to testify to the ideal unflinchingly, not considering consequences, not perhaps considering ways and means of reaching the ideal, but simply insisting on its nature and calling men and nations to penitence so far as they fail to reach it. It may require more courage than the office of the king or statesman, and yet in itself it is the easiest, because it is relatively simple.

In all modern nations, and more so in the degree in which they are democratic, every citizen partakes of the duty of kingship. He has some share in determining how his nation shall act, either in the management of its own internal affairs or in its dealings with other people, and one who has this responsibility and is also a Christian, is involved in the absolute duty of trying to think, and to think with genuine effort, how he may be actually guiding his nation toward the ideal. He must not be content with pious platitudes leading to no action, nor content to consider only his own country's welfare; but as a member of the Church of Christ which embraces all mankind, he is called to think out and, having thought, to pursue in act the methods by which his nation may genuinely be doing its part to build up the one great Temple of God--His Holy City.

The priest is prophet and statesman, both at once. He, as minister of the Word of God, must perpetually insist upon the true ideal, and bid men to guard against all self-contentment so far as they fail to reach it; and yet he must be ready to take his stand by the side of every individual or group of individuals, even of the nation itself, nerving each to do the best of which it then and there in the circumstances of the day is capable. And meanwhile he is a wretched human being like the rest, terribly liable to pride if he upholds an ideal higher than is usually recognised; terribly liable to worldliness, alike in his own soul and in his teaching, if for a single moment he forsakes the Divine Presence; and uniquely exposed to the deadliest of all temptations; for while we preach what neither we nor anybody else can practise, we are sorely tempted to be content with spiritual mediocrity ourselves.

But above all, at this time the necessity, I think, is for a clear testimony concerning the purpose of God for His people, and His kingdom that shall surely come. We have made our precepts so tame; our efforts for peace and fellowship have been so much less exhilarating than other men's efforts for war; we have been very mild; and that is not the spirit of Christ, or of His Kingdom. The spirit of Christ is the spirit of all heroism in all ages.

In 1848, a little republic was founded in Rome to stand for justice and purity of government amid the corrupt States all round. It was attacked by those States, and at last it yielded; on the day when the capitulation was signed masses of people were gathered together in the great Piazza outside St. Peter's, and there rode among them the man whose faith and heroism had sustained that siege for more weeks than the wiseacres thought it could last days. When the cheering had subsided, he made no acknowledgment, but simply said:

"I am going out from Rome. I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death. Let him who loves his country with his heart not with his lips only follow me."

And they streamed out after him into the hills. His name was Garibaldi; and because of his heroism and theirs the kingdom of Italy is in the world to-day.

But the invitation of Christ is in exactly that spirit--"I offer neither quarters, nor provisions, nor wages. I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, death." "If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me."

The cross, when our Lord spoke those words, was quite a real thing. To take up the cross did not mean bearing life's little inconveniences with equanimity. It meant literally to put the rope round one's neck, and be ready simply for anything that might come. That is the spirit in which we are summoned to work for Christ. Can we rise to it? The Prince of Peace was not a "mild man." This is the vision that His disciple had of Him:

"His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire; and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice as the voice of many waters. And He had in His right hand seven stars: and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength. And when I saw Him, I fell at His feet as one dead."

Can we present the figure of Christ as endowed with anything like that compelling power? If so, we are worthy ministers. It not, we are making dull the one great adventure of the world.

There is only one way in which we can succeed. It is that we cling to faith in God, the Author of the drama, in which we play our part; God, Himself the Guide along the path we are to follow; God, not only the Guide, but the very Way in which we are to walk; God, not only the Guide and Way, but the Strengthener within our souls, enabling us to follow; and God the Guide, the Way, the Strengthener, Himself also the Goal to which we would come. "For in Him we move and live and have our being."

Yea thro' life, death, thro' sorrow and thro' sinning He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed; Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning, Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ.

_I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty._

*APPENDIX I*

*ON THE APOCALYPTIC CONSCIOUSNESS*

It is very difficult for the modern reader to recover the frame of mind in which Apocalypse has its origin, but we may do this more easily if we look for parallels outside the field of religious history. It has been well said that the mediaeval man looked upwards and downwards--to Hell and to Heaven; his view of the world is on a vertical plane; the modern man has a horizontal view, looking to the past and future--the past as it has existed, and the future as it shall exist, in the history of human society upon this earth. We need if possible to combine these two, but it is a very difficult achievement. With our point of view we inevitably read Apocalypse as if it were a literal history of the future written before the event; but this is not its primary significance. The religious consciousness from which it springs was highly indifferent to the lapse of time: very likely the seer expected the speedy realisation of his vision so far as he thought about things in that way at all, but this was not his primary concern. Let us take a parallel, as was suggested a moment ago, from another field. The socialistic movement in its early days seemed committed to an immediate expectation of the millennium following upon a catastrophic change in the structure of human society. The arrival of the millennium now seems postponed indefinitely and evolution has taken the place of revolution as a method, and yet a socialist who is really in the movement does not feel any breach of continuity; he knows that he is one in spirit with the earlier writers and that they were never mainly concerned either with the date at which the millennium would come or the means by which they imagined it brought about, but precisely with the contrast between the ideal as they conceived it and the actual as they saw it.

We may take another instance from a slightly different department of thought. Dante imagined that the Mount of Purgatory was the immediate antipodes of the Hill of Zion, but if some traveller had gone round the world and assured him that the Mount of Purgatory was not there, it would not in the smallest degree have affected his doctrine of Purgatory. So it is with the apocalyptists; there is an immense amount of machinery provided by which this world is to be abruptly changed into the Kingdom of God, and because that Kingdom is so present to the consciousness of the writer, he can speak of it as even now about to appear upon the earth. But this is not what chiefly interests him: his point of view is vertical, not horizontal; all time-spans are foreshortened into a moment, because his whole interest is in the contrast between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world; we therefore do him wrong in supposing that the postponement of his hope is any grievous disappointment, or any proof of real error. The date of its fulfilment was never a matter of much concern to him.