Chapter 6

From whatever cause, whether as a reaction against the mode in which this great truth has been at times presented, there have been, and there are, attempts to supersede Christianity because of its narrowness. Religion must not be identified with any one name: God manifests Himself to all, and no Mediator is needed. Theism, therefore, the worship of the One Almighty and Eternal Being, not Christianity, in which a Human Name is associated with the Divine Name, can alone pretend to be the Universal Religion, the {139} Religion of all Mankind. It is not the first time that such an attempt to do without Christianity and to do away with it has been made. In the eighteenth century there was a similar movement. To this day at Ferney, near Geneva, is preserved the chapel which Voltaire erected for the worship of God, of God as distinguished from Christ as Divine or as Mediator between God and man. Voltaire thought that he could overthrow and crush the Faith of Christ, but he none the less erected a temple to God. The Deists upheld what they called the Religion of Nature and repudiated Revelation. _Christianity not Mysterious; Christianity as old as the Creation_, were among the works issued to show the superiority of Natural Religion, its freedom from difficulties, its agreement with reason, its universality. The most enduring memorial of the controversy is Bishop Butler's _Analogy of Religion to the Constitution and Course of Nature_, {140} in which it was argued that the Natural Religion of the Deists was beset by as many difficulties as the Revelation of the Christians, that those who were not hindered from believing in God by the problems which Nature presented need not be staggered by the problems which were presented by Christianity. Bishop Butler's argument was directed against a special set of antagonists, an argument, it may be said, of little avail against the scepticism of the present day. The argument seems to have been unanswerable by those to whom it was addressed. The grounds on which they rejected the Revelation of Christ were shown to be inadequate. When they accepted this or that article of Natural Religion, they had accepted what was as difficult of belief as this or that part of the Revelation which they rejected. The mysteries which existed in the religion with which they would have nothing to do were in harmony with the {141} mysteries which existed in the religion which they declared to be necessary for the welfare of society. That retort may be made with even more effect to those who so far occupy that same ground to-day. They rejoice to believe that there is a God, that He is not far off, that He communicates Himself to their souls, that the love which we bear to one another is but a faint image of the love which He bears to us, that the noblest qualities which exist in us exist more purely, more gloriously in Him, that we are in very deed His children and are called to manifest His likeness. It is by prayer, both in public and in private, both in congregations and alone with the Alone, that His Love and His Help can be comprehended and used. He is no absent God: His Ear is not heavy that it cannot hear, nor His arm shortened that it cannot save. With this belief we, as Christians, have no dispute: we gladly go along with Theists in asserting it: we {142} only wonder at their unwillingness to go along with us a little further. For if God be such as they glowingly depict Him, if our relations to Him be such as they esteem it our greatest dignity to know, there is nothing antecedently impossible in the thought that One Man has heard His Voice more clearly, has surrendered to His Will more entirely, than any other in the history of the ages and the races of mankind: nothing antecedently impossible in the thought that to One Man His Truth has been conveyed more brightly, more fully than to any other; that in One Man the lineaments of the Divine Image may be seen more distinctly than in any other. If God be such, and if our relations to God be such, as Theists describe, why should they shrink with distrust or with antipathy from a Son of Man Who has borne witness to those truths in His Life and in His Death with a steadfastness of conviction which none other has ever surpassed; Who, according {143} to the records which we possess of Him, habitually lived to do the Father's Will and died commending His Spirit into the Father's Hands: a Son of Man Who could truly be said to be in heaven while He was on earth? If God be such, and our relations to God be such, as Theists describe, would not that Son of Man be the confirmation of their thoughts? Would not His testimony be of infinite value on their side? Would He Himself not be the radiant illustration, the eagerly longed for proof of the truth for which they contend? They believe in God: why should it, on their own showing, be so hard to believe in Christ?

III

The Theism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is in some respects different from the Deism of the eighteenth. It is not so cold, the God in whom it believes is not so distant from His creatures. But it is not {144} less vehement in its depreciation of Christianity as a needless and even harmful addition to the Religion of Nature. Conspicuous among the advocates of this modern Theism have been Francis William Newman, Miss Frances Power Cobbe, and the Rev. Charles Voysey.

Francis Newman, in his youth, belonged, like his brother the famous Cardinal, to the strictest sect of Evangelicals, but, like the Cardinal also, drifted away from them, though in a totally different direction.[4] As he found the untenableness of certain views which he had cherished, the insufficiency of certain arguments which he had employed, he came with much anguish of mind to the conclusion that the whole fabric of historical Christianity was built upon the sand. He rapidly renounced belief after belief, and caused widespread distress and dismay by a crude attack upon the moral perfection of {145} our Lord. His conviction that Christianity had nothing special to say for itself, and that one religion was as good as another, seems to have been mainly brought about by a discussion which he had with a Mohammedan carpenter at Aleppo. 'Among other matters, I was particularly desirous of disabusing him of the current notion of his people that our Gospels are spurious narratives of late date. I found great difficulty of expression, but the man listened to me with much attention, and I was encouraged to exert myself. He waited patiently till I had done and then spoke to the following effect: "I will tell you, sir, how the case stands. God has given to you English many good gifts. You make fine ships, and sharp penknives, and good cloth and cottons, and you have rich nobles and brave soldiers; and you write and print many learned books (dictionaries and grammars): all this is of God. But there is one thing that God has withheld {146} from you and has revealed to us; and that is the knowledge of the true religion by which one may be saved."'[5]

But although Newman was led to give up Christianity, and practically to hold that one religion was as good as another, he clung tenaciously to what he supposed to be common to all religions, belief in God, a belief deep and ardent. The rationalism of the Deists did not approve itself to him. 'Our Deists of past centuries tried to make religion a matter of the pure intellect, and thereby halted at the very frontier of the inward life: they cut themselves off even from all acquaintance with the experience of spiritual men.'[6] He nourished his soul with psalms and hymns: he sought communion with God. He saw the weakness of Morality without the inspiring power of Religion. 'Morals can seldom gain living energy without the impulsive force derived from Spirituals.... However {147} much Plato and Cicero may talk of the surpassing beauty of virtue, still virtue is an abstraction, a set of wise rules, not a Person, and cannot call out affection as an existence exterior to the soul does. On the contrary, God is a Person; and the love of Him is of all affections by far the most energetic in exciting us to make good our highest ideals of moral excellence and in clearing the moral sight, so that that ideal may keep rising. Other things being equal (a condition not to be forgotten) a spiritual man will hold a higher and purer morality than a mere moralist. Not only does Duty manifest itself to him as an ever-expanding principle, but since a larger and larger part of Duty becomes pleasant and easy when performed under the stimulus of Love, the Will is enabled to concentrate itself more on that which remains difficult and greater power of performance is attained.'[7] Where shall we find a more {148} vivid or more spiritual description of the rise and progress of devotion in the soul than in the words of this man, who placed himself beyond the pale of every Christian communion? 'One who begins to realise God's majestic beauty and eternity and feels in contrast how little and transitory man is, how dependent and feeble, longs to lean upon him for support. But He is _outside_ of the heart, like a beautiful sunset, and seems to have nothing to do with it: there is no getting into contact with Him, to press against Him. Yet where rather should the weak rest than on the strong, the creature of the day than on the Eternal, the imperfect than on the Centre of Perfection? And where else should God dwell than in the human heart? for if God is in the universe, among things inanimate and unmoral, how much more ought He to dwell with our souls! and they, too, seem to be infinite in their cravings: who but He can satisfy them? Thus a restless {149} instinct agitates the soul, guiding it dimly to feel that it was made for some definite but unknown relation towards God. The sense of emptiness increases to positive uneasiness, until there is an inward yearning, if not shaped in words, yet in substance not alien from that ancient strain, "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God; my soul is athirst for God, even for the Living God."'[8]

Mr. Newman, in his later days, we understand, had modified the bitterness of his opposition to historical Christianity and was ready to avow himself as a disciple of Christ.

Miss Frances Power Cobbe was another devout spirit who, with less violence but equal decisiveness, accepted Theism as apart from Christianity. In her case, even more visibly than in Mr. Newman's, it was not Christianity which she rejected, but sundry distortions of it with which it had in her mind become {150} identified. She wrote not a few articles so permeated with the Christian spirit and imbued with the Christian hope that the most ardent believer in Christ could read them with entire approval and own himself their debtor. She took an active part in many philanthropic movements, and she was an earnest and eloquent advocate of faith in the Divine Ordering of the world and in human immortality.

'Theism,' she said, 'is not Christianity _minus_ Christ, nor Judaism _minus_ the miraculous legation of Moses, nor any other creed whatsoever merely stripped of its supernatural element. It is before all things the positive affirmation of the Absolute Goodness of God: and if it be in antagonism to other creeds, it is principally because of, and in proportion to, their failure to assert that Goodness in its infinite and all-embracing completeness.'[9] 'God is over us, and heaven {151} is waiting for us all the same, even though all the men of science in Europe unite to tell us there is only matter in the universe and only corruption in the grave. Atheism may prevail for a night, but faith cometh in the morning. Theism is "bound to win" at last: not necessarily that special type of Theism which our poor thoughts in this generation have striven to define: but that great fundamental faith, the needful substruction of every other possible religious faith, the faith in a Righteous and Loving God, and in a Life of man beyond the tomb.'[10]

'All the monitions of conscience, all the guidance and rebukes and consolations of the Divine Spirit, all the holy words of the living, and all the sacred books of the dead, these are our primary Evidences of Religion. In a word, the first article of our creed is "I BELIEVE IN GOD THE HOLY GHOST." After this fundamental dogma, we accept {152} with joy and comfort the faith in the Creator and Orderer of the physical universe, and believe in GOD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY, MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. And lastly we rejoice in the knowledge that (in no mystic Athanasian sense, but in simple fact) "_these two are One_." The God of Love and Justice Who speaks in conscience, and Whom our inmost hearts adore, is the same God Who rolls the suns and guides the issues of life and death.'[11]

In an able paper, _A Faithless World_, in which Miss Cobbe combated the assertion of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, that the disappearance of belief in God and Immortality would be unattended with any serious consequences to the material, intellectual, or moral well-being of mankind, she forcibly said, 'I confess at starting on this inquiry, that the problem, "Is religion of use, or can we do as well without it?" seems to me {153} almost as grotesque as the old story of the woman who said that we owe vast obligations to the moon, which affords us light on dark nights, whereas we are under no such debt to the sun, who only shines by day, _when there is always light_. Religion has been to us so diffused a light that it is quite possible to forget how we came by the general illumination, save when now and then it has blazed out with special brightness.' The comment is eminently just, but does it not apply with equal force to Miss Cobbe herself? The Theism which she professed was the direct outcome of Christianity, could never have existed but for Christianity, was, in all its best features, simply Christianity under a different name.

That Theism, as a separate organisation, gives little evidence of conquering the world is shown by the fact that, after many years, it boasts of only one congregation, that of the Theistic Church, Swallow Street, Piccadilly, {154} of which the Rev. Charles Voysey is minister. Mr. Voysey was at one time vicar of a parish in Yorkshire, where he issued, under the title of _The Sling and the Stone_, sermons attacking the commonly accepted doctrines of the Church of England, and was in consequence deprived of his living. He is distinctly anti-Christian in his teaching; strongly prejudiced against anything that bears the Christian name: criticising the sayings and doings of our Lord in a fashion which indicates either the most astonishing misconception or the most melancholy perversion. But his sincerity and fervour on behalf of Theism are unmistakable. He describes it as _Religion for all mankind, based on facts which are never in Dispute_. The book which is called by that title is written for the help and comfort of all his fellowmen, 'chiefly for those who have doubted and discarded the Christian Religion, and in consequence have become Agnostics or {155} Pessimists.' It is prefaced by a dedication, which is also a touching confession of personal faith: 'In all humility I dedicate this book to my God Who made me and all mankind, Who loves us all alike with an everlasting love, Who of His very faithfulness causeth us to be troubled, Who punishes us justly for every sin, not in anger or vengeance, but only to cleanse, to heal, and to bless, in Whose Everlasting Arms we lie now and to all eternity.'[12]

Mr. Voysey has compiled a Prayer Book for the use of his congregation. The ordinary service is practically the morning or evening service of the Book of Common Prayer, with all references to our Lord carefully eliminated. The hymn _Jesus, Lover of my Soul_ is changed to _Father, Refuge of my Soul_; and the hymn

Just as I am without one plea, But that Thy blood was shed for me, And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O Lamb of God, I come,

{156} is rendered:

Just as I am without one plea, But that Thy lore is seeking me, And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, O loving God, I come.

The service respecting our duty, and the service of supplication have merits of their own, but, except for the wanton omission of the Name which is above every name, there is nothing in them which does not bear a Christian impress. 'Christianity _minus_ Christ' would seem to be no unfair definition of their standpoint: and without Christ they could not have been what they are. The Father Who is set forth as the Object of worship and of trust is the Father Whom Christ declared, the Father Who, but for the manifestation of Christ, would never have been known. Far be it from us to deny that the Father has been found by those who have sought Him beyond the limits of the Church: this only we affirm that those by whom He {157} has been found, have, consciously or unconsciously, drawn near to Him by the way of Christ. Nothing of value in modern Theism is incompatible with Christianity: nothing of value which would not be strengthened by faith in Him Who said, 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.'

IV

The strange objection to faith in Christ is sometimes made that it interferes with faith in the Father. The notion of mediation is regarded as derogatory alike to God and to man. There is no need for any one to come between: no need for God to depute another to bear witness of Him: no need for us to depute Another to secure His favour, as from all eternity He is Love. The assumption, the groundless assumption, underlying this conception is that the Mediator is a barrier between man and God, a hindrance not a help to fellowship with the Divine: that one {158} goes to the Mediator because access to God is debarred. Whatever may occasionally have been the unguarded statements of representatives of Christianity, it is surely plain that no such doctrine is taught, that the very opposite of such doctrine is taught, in the New Testament. 'We do not,' says M. Sabatier, 'address ourselves to Jesus by way of dispensing ourselves from going to the Father. Far from this, we go to Christ and abide in Him, precisely that we may find the Father. We abide in Him that His filial consciousness may become our own; that the Spirit may become our spirit, and that God may dwell immediately in us as He dwells in Him. Nothing in all this carries us outside of the religion of the Spirit: on the contrary, it is its seal and confirmation.'[13]

The whole object of the work of Christ, as proclaimed by Himself, or as interpreted {159} by His Apostles, was to show the Father, to bring men to the Father. 'Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of Myself: but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.' He 'came and preached peace to you which were afar off and to them that were nigh. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.' To argue that to come to Christ is a substitute for coming to God, is an inducement to halt upon the way, is an absolute travesty and perversion. To refuse to see the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ is not to bring God near: it is to remove Him further from our vision. That God should come to us, that we should go to God, through a mediator, is only in accordance with a universal law. 'Why,' says one, who might be expected from his theological training to speak otherwise, 'Why, _all_ knowledge is "mediated" even of {160} the simplest objects, even of the most obvious facts: there is no such thing in the world as immediate knowledge, and shall we demur when we are told that the knowledge of God the Father also must pass, in order to reach us at its best and purest, through the medium of "that Son of God and Son of Man in Whom was the fulness of the prophetic spirit and the filial life?" ... Of this at least I feel convinced, that where faith in the Father has grown blurred and vague in our days, and finally flickered out, the cause must in many instances be sought--I will not say in the wilful rejection, but--in the careless letting go of the message and Personality of the Son.'[14] So far from the thought of the Father being ignored or set aside by the thought of Christ, we may rather say with S. John, 'Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.' 'He {161} that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.'

The homage that we render Thee Is still our Father's own; Nor jealous claim or rivalry Divides the Cross and Throne.[15]

V

The notion that Theism as contrasted with Christianity is a mark of progress and of spirituality is a pure imagination. 'More spiritual it may be than the traditional Christianity which consists in rigid and stereotyped forms of practice, of ceremonial, of observance, of dogma: but not more spiritual than the teaching of Christ Himself, the end and completion of Whose work was to bring men to the Father, to teach them that God is a Spirit, and to send the Spirit of the Father into the hearts of the disciples. It would be a strange perversity if men should reject Christ in the name of spiritual {162} religion when it is to Christ, and to Him alone, that they owe the conception of what spiritual religion is.'[16] To preach the doctrines of Theism without reference to Christ is to deprive them of their most sublime illustration, their most inspiring force, and their most convincing proof.

It is as Christ is known that God is believed in. The attempt to create enthusiasm for God while banishing the Gospel of Christ meets with astonishingly small response. The 'Religion for all Mankind' makes but little progress, is, in spite of the labours of five-and-thirty years, confined, as we have seen, almost to a solitary moderately sized congregation. And whether or not the 'facts' on which the religion is based 'are never in dispute,' the religion itself is often-times disputed very keenly. Modern assaults upon religious faith are, as a rule, directed quite as much against Theism as {163} against Christianity.[17] It is the Love, or even the existence, of the Living God, it is human responsibility, it is life beyond the grave, that are called in question as frequently as the Resurrection of Christ. The assurance that God at sundry times and in divers manners has spoken by prophets renders it not more but less improbable that He should speak by a Son: the assurance that there is life beyond the grave for all renders it not more but less improbable that Jesus rose from the dead. Conversely those who believe in Jesus believe with a double intensity in Him Whom He revealed. 'Ye believe in God,' said Christ, 'believe also in Me.' For many of us now, it is because we believe in Christ that we believe also in God. The Almighty and Eternal is beyond our ken: the grace and truth of Jesus Christ come home to our hearts. The Word that was in the beginning with God and was God, {164} is wrapt in impenetrable mystery: the Word made Flesh can be seen and handled: has

wrought With human hands the Creed of Creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought.[18]

And however it may be in a few exceptional cases, where people nominally renouncing Christ desperately cleave to a fragment of the faith of their childhood, the fact remains that, where He ceases to be acknowledged, faith in the Father Whom He manifested tends, gradually or speedily, to vanish.

VI