Part 9

So we may, I think, reverently believe that our Lord Himself passes through the experience of the apocalyptists at moments of great exultation, as, for example, when the seventy return and say that the devils are made subject to them, or when He realises the imminence of the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore the removal of the chief barrier to His Kingdom's progress. All time is foreshortened; Satan falls from Heaven and the Son of Man appears in glory; but this is no forecast of history as we understand history. One evangelist tells us of a parable which He uttered precisely because of His perception that the disciples erroneously supposed "that the Kingdom of God was immediately to appear." All His insistence upon the coming Kingdom is focussed in the Passion, as has been shown in the text. When the revelation of God's inmost nature was completed in the completion of His own self-sacrifice, this brought with it the power that could change the kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ. From then onwards "He cometh with the clouds"; but the completion of His Kingdom when "every eye shall see Him, and they which pierced Him," lies still in the future. The contrast of tenses in this passage can hardly be accidental; from the moment when He was lifted up from the earth in the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension (which are the revelation in successive phases of the one unchanging glory of God) His coming is a present fact; but our perception of His coming is something still growing as His Spirit guides us into all the truth, until at last we know even as we are known.

*APPENDIX II*

*ON MORAL AND SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY*

It may be objected that the Church should never in any circumstances employ force--at any rate, physical force. But I believe the objection is due, partly to a latent Manichaeism which holds that matter is always evil, or at least "unspiritual," and partly to a very just fear that force may be wrongly used if its use is permitted at all. Yet there are some cases where the Church would plainly be not only at liberty, but morally bound, to use force.

Suppose a clergyman begins to give teaching that is absolutely at variance with the doctrine of the Church, the Church may appeal to his better feelings and ask him to resign; but if he will not, the Church must assuredly have the right to turn him out, and that, if necessary, by force.

No doubt in a civilised country what the Church does as a rule is to ask the State to act against the man, on the ground that he has broken contract and holds his position on false pretences. This is what the Mediaeval Church called "handing the offender over to the secular arm."

But let us imagine the situation in a Mission Church where a convert has, for penance, been excluded from attendance at public worship for a period. Suppose he insists upon coming; then certainly the congregation would be right forcibly to remove him. Again, supposing the use of force as discipline may be of advantage to moral development (and up to a certain stage I am sure it may), and supposing there is no civilised State to employ it, the Church will be right to do what is best for the character of those for whom it is concerned. But no doubt all this is purely preparatory to the positive spiritual work of the Church, which must always take the form of appeal and not of force.

There is, however, so much confusion on the subject of moral and spiritual authority in general, that it may not be out of place to add here some remarks upon it.

The word "authority" is derived from a Latin word which may perhaps be best translated by "weight."

When we speak of a man of weight, or an opinion that carries weight, we have something very near the original meaning of the term authority. Sometimes we are inclined to think of authority as best represented by the political ruler, or the military commander. But these are not really typical kinds of authority. They are very special cases where authority is clothed with compelling force. But in the spheres of which we are thinking there is not necessarily present any compelling force at all. When we think of authority in religion, in its connection with morals and such questions, there is no force, at any rate necessarily, present at all, and the Church's authority in the true sense is not any the less because it does not practise the methods of the Inquisition: nor was it any greater in the days when to its own proper authority it added coercive power, appealing to people in the name of what is in itself not authority strictly speaking, at all. For if I believe just because the Church is an assembly of the saints of God and its formularies are summaries of their experience, then I am believing on the ground of the Church's authority. But if I believe because an officer of the Church threatens me with the rack in the case of disbelief, I am believing not because the Church has authority, but because I dislike physical pain.

So authority always in the end means weight--what carries weight with our judgment. We can weigh one authority against another; we may weigh the authority of one theologian with that of another by considering which has shown the greater knowledge of the subject in question and the sounder judgment in dealing with it. In moral questions we do as a matter of fact perpetually come back to the man of moral weight. And what constitutes his weight is to begin with a certain uprightness in his own character, and then a certain sympathy and insight which enables him to understand how he would apply to the circumstances of other people the principles by which he lives in his own. So, for example, Aristotle in the end determines all moral questions by reference to the standard which the man of moral sense would use; everything in the last resort is determined simply by his judgment. Virtue, he says, resides in a mean between two vicious extremes, and the mean is to be determined by a principle which the man of moral sense would use. Later on, after an interlude of two or three books wisely interpolated, he comes to ask, Who is the man of moral sense? and he turns out to be the man who has the right principle enabling him to determine the mean between vicious extremes; that is to say, that his standard of judgment in the end is simply the good, sensible man, and for practical purposes that does well enough, because for practical purposes we do know whose judgment we value, we do know who it is whose approval we should care to win, whose approval would of itself assure us that our conduct was right, and whose disapproval would of itself go far at least to assure us that our conduct was wrong, or at any rate that the matter needed careful reconsideration.

There is indeed another method than this of reliance upon the authority of a wise man, and it is represented by the other great thinker of Greece, by Plato. Plato's ideal method in moral questions was to try to determine the purpose of the whole universe and then determine how in any given circumstances a man may serve that purpose. The basis of his morals, in other words, was what we should call theological; and so far as we are able to apply this, it is the only finally satisfactory method; so far as we can say that the principles of Christianity imperatively demand some particular action or attitude of mind, we shall not care how little other authority we can quote, but shall say that we can see quite clearly that our allegiance to Christ and His religion involves a certain point of view for us; and if no one else has taken that point of view, provided we can find no flaw in our reasoning, we shall say none the less, This is the point of view which we, as Christians, are bound to take.

That has been the method by which, as a matter of fact, most Christian reforms have been carried out. That was the way by which, in an instance to which I shall return in a moment, slavery was abolished. Slavery had been tolerated by the Christian Church for centuries. The authority of the Christian Church might therefore have been quoted as substantially in favour of it. A very large number of Christians did, in fact, favour retaining it, because, of course, the abolition of the slave trade was an interference with property, and heartrending appeals were made in the name of "the unfortunate widow with a few strong blacks," as in our day appeals are made against legislation in the name of the widow who has shares in breweries. But Wilberforce's point of view was simply this, that whatever the Church may have said through all these centuries, when you look at the Christian principle of the right way to treat human beings it condemns slavery; and if all the Christians in all the ages had denied that, it would not have altered the fact that, as we see it--so Wilberforce and his friends would have urged--as we see it, slavery is condemned; that is enough for us; we go forward in the certainty that we are carrying out the will of God. Wilberforce brought people round to his point of view; now you will hardly find a Christian to defend slavery as an institution. Some day, perhaps, it will be the same with war.

But in most moral questions the authority to which we appeal is not that of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other. That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give any argument--an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it, even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.

But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is something more than any convention or social growth about the distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.

But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time to time to train children in which it would not be well to train grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development, spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and absolutely fundamental and invariable.

Now, how is it that in society progress is actually made in morals? The appeal to authority can always be made in two ways. It can be made in the most obvious form in the interest of mere stagnation, by saying, "What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us," a thing nobody ever does say; or by saying, "What is good enough for us is good enough for our children," a thing which numbers of people say. While the first form may be some safeguard against wild experiments--and wild experiments in morals are more dangerous than wild experiments anywhere else in life, for a reason I will mention in a moment--yet the tendency of this appeal is to pure stagnation. But the right appeal is to ask, not what the great men of the past actually did, but what were the principles upon which they acted. What we want to be doing with the prophets of the last generation is not saying again, like parrots, just what they said, but finding out the principles and spirit of their life and applying that same spirit to circumstances which are changed just because those prophets lived and wrought. They would not have been prophets, they would not have been great men, if they had not changed in some degree the world they lived in. Then just because they have changed the world their action may no longer be appropriate; it is not the action which they themselves would now take if they were still alive and retained their power of development. What we do then is to appeal, not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle to the particular problem of slavery.

In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive. It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the ages has built up. But the wisest man of all is surely he who, rejoicing in that great inheritance, can still appeal not to its outward form, but to its indwelling, living spirit, and carry forward the work which the past has done. The ages in the past that we value are not those in which people were mainly concerned to praise their predecessors, but those in which men were agreed to press forward to whatever new life God has in store. So it must be here: if we would be true to the great men of the past, to the authority of those who have built up our moral life, it will not be by standing still, but by moving on in the direction to which they point.

The appeal to authority, then, will not be an appeal to practice, but always an appeal to principle; and so we shall be saved from that danger of moral experiment, a danger that is so immensely great because the individual who has made the experiment has thereby very often spoilt himself. One cannot experiment in the moral life with the detachment that we use in science. I may try mixing a couple of fluids together to see what happens, and I can regard the result quite accurately; but I cannot try the experiment of stealing, or of murder, in order to see what the real moral value of the thing is, because in the process of doing the act I shall vitiate my own soul; here the material in which we experiment is itself the instrument by which we have to judge; and the man who has once done an evil thing himself, very seldom has the same clearness of vision concerning its good and evil as the man who has kept true to some lofty purpose. The mere experiment, the mere trying what it feels like to be a murderer--not that anyone would take so extreme an instance as that--is always a method condemned in advance to futility, because in the process of making the experiment we destroy our power of judging the result. We want therefore to rely upon some authority; being unable to experiment for ourselves, we must follow the general rule that I have stated; the authority to which we appeal must be an authority of principle and not of practice.

But what of the authority of our Lord Himself? To us who have accepted it, or who are trying to accept it, it is final; yet still, surely, in the spirit rather than in the letter. Why did He teach by a series of amazing paradoxes if it was not to prevent us setting up a code of rules as His legislation, if it was not to force us back upon the spirit of His teaching, behind the detailed regulations in which that spirit was embodied? Even here it is still true that the appeal is to the authority of His Spirit and not to that of detailed action or individual precept.

And beyond all this, it is certain that He Himself wins His authority by first submitting Himself to the moral judgment of His people. He rejects, in the second and third of the Messianic temptations after His baptism, the method of coercion. He rejects this, and stands before men submitting Himself to their moral judgment, to their conscience, to their capacity to understand pure goodness and love, as that capacity has grown through the civilisation which God Himself had guided as the preparation for His final revelation in His Son. So He submits Himself first of all to our moral judgment; and thus our conscience, coming down to us, as it does, out of the Divinely-guided history of the past, is the supreme authority; if we choose Him to be the Guide of our life it is because our conscience has first pronounced Him to be the highest and the holiest, which we must needs love when we see it.

*APPENDIX III*

*ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION*

As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true liberty.

As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless, when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both. The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.

But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object, must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact, one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself; appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually conscious of its truth.

The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test for a degree is "residence"--that is, an adequate share in a general life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some knowledge--not very much, it is true--but it never asks where or how he got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."

At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those who represent the system's success, and they are the great majority, though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or instinctive; but the action is right all the same.