-
FROM-THE- LIBRARY OF TRINITYCOLLEGE TORONTO
PRESENTED
. oanon F,H. Mason
of
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
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ING THEOLCH
BY
EDWARD WHITE
SECOND EDITION
St. KM
LIVING THEOLOG\
7
BY
EDWARD WHITE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
SECOND EDITION
LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY
LIMITED
St. ffiunstan's ffiaust FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.G.
1893
,64 US
LONDON 5
PRINTED DY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITEL. STAMKOKU STREKT AND CHARING CROSS.
78478
JUN 2 0 1968
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
LIVING THEOLOGY.
i
"That ye. ... may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height ; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge." — EPH. iii. 18, 19
Wells Cathedral, funeb, 1878, at the Triennial Festival of the Theological College.
THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY.
These were more noble ... in that they received the Word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily whether these things were so." — ACTS xvii. n ... ... 19
St. Mary's, Southampton, August 27, 1882, to the British Association.
THE TEACHER'S FREEDOM.
' He that teacheth let him give himself to his teaching."
ROM. xii. 7 ... ... ... ... ... 35
Saltley, December I, 1885, at the Anniversary of Worcester, Lichfield and Hereford Training Colleges.
VI CONTENTS.
POWERFUL RICH AND POWERFUL POOR.
I'ACJE
" Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread ? and
your labour for that which satisfieth not?" — ISA. Iv. 2 ... 51
St. Mary's, Nottingham, October 12, 1871, at the Church Congress.
LOVE'S DEBT.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one an other."— i ST. JOHN iv. 1 1 ... ... ... ... 71
Great St. Mary's, Cambridge, June 8, 1890, before the University.
THE CHURCH OF THE NEW WORLD.
DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP.
Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation . . . that the congregation of the Lord be- not as sheep which have no shepherd." — NUMB, xxvii. 16, 17 87 St. PauFs, November 14, 1884, at the Centenary of Bishop Seabury's Consecration.
NEW-BORN CHURCHES.
1 The things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also." — 2 TIM. ii. 2 ... ... ... 109
St. Bride's, Fleet Street, May 3, 1886, to the Church Missionary Society.
GROWING UNITY.
In due season we shall reap if we faint not." — GAL. vi. 9 ... 129 Truro Cathedral, November^, 1887, at its Consecration.
CONTENTS. Vli
BOOK II.
CONCEIT AND HUMILITY.
PAGE
" I say, through the grace of God given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think ; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith." — ROM. xii. 3 149 Lichfield Cathedra^ February 7, 1876.
POPULAR AND UNPOPULAR SELFISHNESS.
" So long as thou doest well unto thyself, men will speak good of
thee."— Ps. xlix. 18 .... ... ... ... ... 163
Lincoln Cathedral, Third Sunday in Lent, 1875.
PERSEVERANCE.
" They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil." — MATT. xxv. 3 ... ... ... ... ... 175
Lincoln Cathedral, Second Sunday in Advent, 1875.
CHRIST'S CRUCIFIXION AN ALL IN ALL.
" I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus
Christ and Him crucified."— I COR. ii. 2 ... ... 191
Lincoln Cathedral, Good Friday, 1875.
GOD'S PEACE.
" The peace of God . . . shall keep your hearts and minds in
Christ Jesus."— PHIL. iv. 7 ... ... ... ... 2n
Canterbury Cathedral, June 8, 1884.
BOOK I.
B— I
'-
LIVING THEOLOGY.
LIVING THEOLOGY.
Wells Cathedral, June 6, 1878, at the Triennial Festival of the Theological College.
" That ye .... may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height ; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge." — EPH. iii. 18, 19.
ANY reader accustomed to think while he reads, would at once say that if "length and breadth and depth and height " were nothing more than a long way of expression, merely equivalent to " greatness," we had here a mode very unlike S. Paul's. There would be a hungry grandiloquence, if that were the only meaning, strange to his weighty and powerful letters.
Again, those who recommend us to look on the phrase as " only meaning greatness " are at fault and at variance, in discovering what the object is of which the dimensions are thus stated. The apostle utters the most fervent of prayers that his converts "may have full strength1 to grasp for themselves what is the length and breadth and depth and height, and to recognise the recognition-surpassing love of the Christ." It cannot be the love of Christ which they are thus in length, breadth, height, and depth to comprehend ; for there is a different and more appropriate verb 2 expressing their insight into Christ's love ; an insight real so far as it reaches, though inadequate to the ever-
6 LIVING THEOLOGY.
growing beauty and tenderness and fulness which they find in that love. And it is just this balance of deep, meaningful clauses which above all forbids our attributing to our great author an irreverent verbiage. He is telling how he prays ; his prayer at this point becomes twofold and parallel ; he prays that they may have a great access of spiritual strength, and that that .spiritual strength may be spent upon —
1. Grasping the length and breadth and depth and height ;
2. Gaining insight into Christ's love.
It seems evident then (whatever be the interpretation of each word) that S. Paul here contemplated depth, height, and the rest, as substantive realities someway imaged in these abstract terms : something which he could really in no other way express : something surely awe-inspiring, when the only image which can render them is beyond imaging — Height — Depth ; and when that which is put side by side with it, as the only greater object of knowledge, is Christ's own vast love eternal.
That this is really his true meaning, we may gather still more from marking that elsewhere the apostle speaks of such Height and Depth as creatures of God — as energizing ideas in His creation ; as things so appalling as to threaten a possibility of their being able to detach us from that same love ; yet as being so completely under God's control, that for this reason, though for this reason only, we need not fear them. Mark with whom and with what he ranks the power of what he calls Height and Depth : " I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
LIVING THEOLOGY. '
How could depth, how could height separate^ or be con ceived of as likely to separate, us from the love of Christ ? So that he has had to persuade himself they will not ? Thus. If there is a depth which each human spirit will, in the course of its history, be obliged to descend into ; a deep in its own existence, into which it will be recalled, away from all the development, all the evolution which has characterized its progress hitherto ; a deep in which, all motion ceasing, all alone, it may see what itself is ; after having first with new eyes of judgment recognised what it has made of itself, and what it has done with its earthly time and probation and experiences, and what of falsehood or of truth it has burnt into its own substance : then, in so deep -a deep, in the first break and dash of the sea of eternity upon the soul, awe and terror may well invest it lest it should be lost to God in that deep, and parted from Him : then S. Paul may well pray for us that even here we may grasp for ourselves what that depth is, and know for ourselves that love which will be with us even there.
Again, what we here can know or conceive of the heights of God may be to us like an infinite mountain-peak, eternally ascending above the highest-winged flight of created holi ness and power — so that angel and archangel to Him are but like eagle or bright-winged insect which behold the snowy heights, still fixedly soaring, where their pinions and their very atmosphere fail. And yet if such a parable must be dwarfed into nothingness when once our parted spirits have caught one glimpse of God as He is; then, again, S. Paul may well pray that even here we may be able to grasp something for ourselves of what that height of God is, lest we should ever exclaim — " He is beyond my utmost conception; and so I never can know Him, never can love
8 LIVING THEOLOGY.
what is so separate from me. He is to me unknowable, unthinkable. He is to me as if He were not." Lest Height should thus separate our souls from Him, He makes us know that His high Eternity is summed up, and shortly rendered in His Love ; and that love, though it be only ours, has a right to know love, though it be God's ; a right to appropriate it, a right to dwell in Him, and in Him to advance for ever.
But if we are right in thus apprehending the meaning of the apostle as to the awful experiences which lie before all, even the saints of God, we ought also perhaps to expect to read in him expressly that our Saviour, the sharer of all our experiences, had Himself entered that almost abysmal deep of the existence of human souls, and made Himself felt even there; just as the entrance of His Humanity upon the height of heights is our hourly comfort in the thought of His intercession at God's right hand. And we do thus read what we should expect to read — " Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is Himself also He that ascended far above all the heavens that He may fill the All." Freed, as we shall be freed, from the limiting of the body, subject only to the limiting of the created spirit, He passed into that great deep — there too still to minister to the spirits of individual men.
Another apostle tells us not only of His proclamation to the spirits of the earliest race of man, with whom the whole race so nearly passed away; he tells us, too, how there was a Gospel preached to the dead, in order that, though the flesh had died under judgment, a divine life might be continued in the spirit. And, surely, if the preaching of the Gospel by Himself on earth has left here
LIVING THEOLOGY. 9
still permanent effect — must we think He left no Gospel behind Him there? The preaching of our Gospel by our Lord was infinitesimal in its effect during His own Presence, as compared with its effect ever-enduring, ever-growing since. Must we think that from that deep, where spirits surely unlearn many a bias, many a self-wrought blindness, many a heedless error by simply being turned back and down in their own innermost centre, He took away again, after three days, all the Heavenly Light which the vision of Him bore thither ?
We may not linger, straining baffled eyes to shores which no space measures, and where no time pulses. It is enough. We know that one day will cease to be a day with us ; and that then we shall be there, and find that a crucified Christ has been there before us.
We must now return to where we tread, not perhaps more safely, but at least more familiarly. " The length and breadth," which S. Paul prays that we may comprehend, is nearer home. It is the familiar expression for that which spreads all about us. The region of extension in which takes place all the motion that we can follow or make — the region of motion and space, and time, and history : the region of humanity between birth and death, of all nature that comes within our observation.
This also we must give ourselves to comprehend, and in it also we must daily enlighten our understandings with that love of Christ which is to stand us in stead for ever. If we know not what really goes on upon earth, if here we mistake shadows for realities, what can we expect to know of heavenly things, or how escape fancying their realities to be shadows ? How significant in this connection is S. Paul's earnest request to Timothy, that he would direct his saving
10 LIVING THEOLOGY.
ministry with some specialness to the help of those who are " wealthy in the present world : " using an expression whose very intensity had caused it to disappear before a more ordinary substitute in our Bibles ; " that they may lay hold upon the-really-life " 1 — close their fingers firm round that which is really life : not vaguely nor feebly catch at a colour able spectre of life.
How significant in itself ! Yet out of many phantasmal likenesses of life, that raised by property or " ownership," as we vainly call it, is only one. Upon this vast world's stage, this " length and breadth," as S. Paul calls it, count less combinations of infinite possibilities of circumstance have been grouped already, each of them the experience of a man ; and there remain infinite more combinations to be acted out, each to be a man's experience too, and every such life has had its shadow which seemed a reality, and every true messenger from God has had this for his charge, coming to him as Timothy's comes from Paul in the very climax of his commission — " Charge them—charge them, to lay hold on the-really-life."
Dear friends, what is before us ? what is around us ? O blessed life of those who, from early manhood to old age, vow themselves and give themselves body and soul so to help Christians and others that they may have S. Paul's prayer fulfilled in them ! — to help man and woman to com prehend, as all the saints do, what is the breadth, length, depth, and height of our fields of action, of our lonely spirits, and of the Majesty of God. No man is sufficient for those things, and yet every man is sufficient ; for our sufficiency is of God, and He asks but absolute sincerity and integrity in answer to His call, and then He will enable us
1 rfjj ovr
LIVING THEOLOGY. II
for the ministry into which He puts us, making His strength perfect in our weakness.
Do I mean that He is satisfied with a weakness which is satisfied with itself? Do I mean that He makes sufficient for His work any poor creature who, through circumstances, or easiness, or ambition, covets the apostleship ? No more than He enabled Simon the Magian. But what I say is, let us really through self-knowledge attain to simple self- surrender, then to a fixed devotion to learn all that He can teach us through men, through books, through experi ence, and carry through all a plain-hearted humility, un conscious of self : and then God may and must teach any thing through us.
For, indeed, He requires us to know and to think as well as to love. He requires fuel for the fire of love to feed on. " Know ye not this parable, and how then will ye know all the parables 1 " says Christ, — as if it must be self-evident, that to know all possible parables would be the obvious necessity for His disciples and others* teachers. And so that world-famous Mr. Interpreter, who gives Christian his early lessons about Passion, about Patience, about Despair, shows him first and foremost the " brave picture," of " the only man whom the Lord of the place whither thou art going hath authorised to be thy guide in all difficult places." And "this was the fashion of it — a very grave person, eyes lifted up, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth written upon his lips, the world behind his back ; he stood as if he pleaded with men."
So ever must it be — The world left intelligently ; The- really-life contemplated ; The book mastered ; grave thought ; frank lips — so must we plead with men.
And never more than now. " How will ye know all the
12 LIVING THEOLOGY.
parables?" Century by century, yes, decade by decade, there come out new parables and riddles, bearing each its answer in its own bosom, to those that can take and read it. What a grand answer did they find in their own time to the riddles of their time, who thought, and imagined, and laboured, till this glorious house was ended : Home then of conceptions, of organizations, of industries, of theories, and of practices, which did their work and passed, leaving us ashamed that we can so little measure them; leaving many men not ill-pleased, alas, that they can exclaim, " That they became corrupt," as if we were not ourselves on our way to corruption the very moment we begin to stagnate : as if indifference to noble calls, and inability to call nobly to other men, were not a worse cor ruption in itself than a condition which produced mightiest fruits of thought and work, even whilst great evils were gathering thick upon it.
From the mighty memorials of the human past (though that which remains be but the shell of that which has been), from the thought of the majestic movement of which we are yet a living part on the length and breadth of the world — from the thought of that awful deep of spiritual insight and discipline into which we are one day to plunge, where Christ Himself descended — from the thought of the eternity of God in which we are ever to rise, never forsaken by God's love, any more than our fathers were, who have told us of the noble works He wrought in their days and in the old time before them — let us try to make THREE things at any rate our own : Our life must think. Our thought mtist live. Our life and thought must be at one.
Our life must think. Be the traditions we have received ever so good, we must go beyond them. They will not
LIVING TIIKOLOGY. 13
suffice. To go on living and working ever so zealously, in the exact patterns we have received, will avail nothing. We must think what new difficulties and what new lights have arisen. We must overcome what our fathers could know nothing of, and not reject helps of which they were ignorant; and we must know that through this thinking labour the hopeless ideals of one generation may become the practical machines of the next.
It is an obvious enough fact that the social changes which are everywhere massing men into square miles of neat houses, and leagues of mean houses, and leaving once populous country parishes disintegrated hamlets, tenanted by a residuum of people less able, less capable, less spirited than those that are gone away, must make ministrations to each not only more difficult, but extremely different in all their conditions and relations. But how natural, almost dutiful it seems, when we have received one fair and sacred order from the past to consider little but how to force the same organizations without development, without accretions, without any organic self-supplementing, round and round entirely altered or fast altering curves. Yet that is how machines get broken. Is it not ?
It is easier to work detail than principle — letter than spirit. And the priest who is really called upon to multiply himself by saving himself; to discover how he can distribute work ; how he can at once elevate and employ the ablest spirits and minds about him in caring for the humbler and less active and cultured, too often fears and shrinks from those more inquiring men who should be his chief charge and main workers. It is in fact easier to starve ourselves, and work and wear ourselves to the bone, than it is to devise, to combine, to persuade, to introduce the least new
14 LIVING THEOLOGY,
thing to new people. And, meanwhile, do not Burnley and Blackburn teach us this — that there is some power at work not only to deChristianize but to decivilise our peoples; that it has prevailed to turn self-reliance into deafness and blindness; that they, whom we thought the keen-sighted artisans, are suddenly seen to be " vacant of our glorious gains " : that they are found utterly to have unlearnt some principles which we always supposed to be assumed into their very systems. Have we not looked on our manufac turing prosperity, and "thought ourselves wise; and have we not become fools " ? But, dear fathers and brothers, the forgotten principles are those which the Church is sup posed to teach. And their forgetting shows that in teach ing we have not attained the most important thing of all, the immediate application. More than ever our life must think. There are new studies of which we cannot Chris- tianly be ignorant ; new organizings which we must conceive and adopt.
Our thought must live. Knowledge and thought may cloister themselves, and be very happy and very wise, and radiate a holy influence. That will not do for us any more. Thought must pass into life : be born into an actual active world. And it must do this, as all material becomes living material by passing through an already living organ ism. We must work, not in fancy schemes, either old or new, but by carrying thought into the recent work and the life of the Church as it is now. We must humbly and patiently learn what the Church is as it is ; what her parishes are as they are; what, and how extensive, and how operative her methods of instruction, of benevolence, of co-operation, even of worship are, as they are ; and how they became what they are; and we must be prepared to
LIVING THEOLOGY. 1 5
enlarge and enrich every one of all these as circumstances demand — not to sacrifice them, not to substitute ; but to keep and to expand. Before we can do this we must appreciate the old. We must appreciate what is always somehow less interesting — the recent. But when we ap preciate most we shall not rest in it, but learn with precision exactly where and how to extend or to adapt — ever to say to it "Grow on, grow on." Invention has never been perfectly fresh discovery. True invention is sagacious improvement.
Then, lastly — Thought and life must be one. This follows from the two last maxims. You and we, students and clergy, are tempted terribly, first to disunion of life and reading, and then of life and writing. How dreadful to read sublimities and to live vulgarities. How fatal to teach holiness and to live selfishness. There is no lowness so low as what I have somewhere seen called " the vulgarity of the sacristan " — the coldblooded familiarity with shrines and altars.
O how serious a thought is " Theological College." Theological. S. John is the true type of what the ancient Church recognised as the Theologus. Christianity is called the Passion of Humanity. Without denying that, we in clude it in a higher term. It is the Vera Passio Dei, There is nothing else but a Love like S. John's which will per fectly blend Thought and Life together. To comprehend the length, and breadth, and depth, and height, might stand alone. It would be appalling wickedness if it did. To know the love of God, which passeth all knowledge, is the only power which can sweeten and save even the know ledge of mysteries.
We should, indeed, hate to hear the place that is so
16 LIVING THEOLOGY.
dear to so many of us called a "Clerical College." But how difficult it is always not to sink to the lower thing, while we cherish the higher name. When we consider how great names are accommodated by degrees to lower and less exacting ideas; how " Cathedral" itself little conveys the notion of authoritative teaching ; how little a capitulum retains of the thought of church deliberations ; how " Minster " no more means a Church of Ascetics ; how sadly the word clerical has lost its sense of " God's portion " ; let us try, teachers and taught alike, to preserve this title- comparatively new in the Church — " Theological College," from all risk of lowered associations. How happily you are circumstanced for this, not only in the thrice venerable associations of this place, but still more in the living, visible love of old alumni, themselves revered in the land, them selves working in foremost ranks of work, and themselves clinging to the fresh memories of saints who have not so long since gone to the Lord. Most readily for you may that unity of thought, and love, and life, which alone is worth calling Theology, be set always before us, the Vera Scientia, Vera Passio Dei.
As the noblest woman of the Revolution was led to the scaffold, she, poor soul, filled with the passion of humanity, though only nurtured on the hungry Gospel of Nature, as Nature was then conceived, asked for and was refused pen and paper, " that she might write down the strange thoughts that were rising in her."1 Faithful ever to her light and holy therein, she was meeting, half way, the strange revela tions of the great deep. She could not articulate them. Yet who will not believe that she was on her way to know Him whom the world of her age had partly veiled from 1 Carlyle, "French Revolution," book v. chap. ii.
LIVING THEOLOGY. 1 7
her? What student will not thank Him that such "strange thoughts " from Him arise in himself daily ? What clergy man will not thank Him who sets him to make "strange thoughts " familiar to all before their last hour strikes.
" Students," (does not that mean " Zealots " ?) Students of Theology, that is, " of the love-knowledge of God," — how differently do the needs of humanity speak to us now from the way in which they could speak a century ago to those who felt the passion of humanity. Through church life, through church works, through church voices, through church order and church ardours, ever freshly dawning and burning, God Himself calls us to minister to those needs. Let us see to it that we (I will not say) refuse not Him that speaketh — but let us not follow Him by halves. In breadth and length and depth and height let us trust Him.
You know the hymn which S. Patrick made and sang as he stepped on to his great work of converting and organiz ing. It is a mighty rendering of all we would fain try to say to you to-day.
The first strophe is the secret of our confidence, and the sum of our knowledge. It is the Christian's passion for his God.
" Christ with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ in me.
Christ below me. Christ above me.
Christ at my right. Christ at my left.
Christ in breadth. Christ in length. Christ in height."
And the second strophe is the firm utterance of charities, which I fear we all have not learnt — yet must somehow learn, and understand that without it our work for man would be hopeless. S. Patrick sang it to a horde of heathen men. It is the Christian's Passion for Man.
c— i
1 8 LIVING THEOLOGY.
" Christ in the heart of every one who thinks of inc. Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks to me. Christ in every eye that sees me. Christ in every ear that hears me."
Only believe these things. Really believe in them, and then your life will think- — your thought will live — and life and thought will be at one.
THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY
THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY.
St. Mary's, Southampton, August 27, 1882, to the British Association.
11 These were more noble ... in that they received the Word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily whether these things were so." — ACTS xvii. 1 1.
THE nobility of mind here praised plainly does not consist in the choice of the subject examined — (although that subject is the Scriptures) — but in the open-mindedness, and in the earnest toilsomeness of the examining. " More nolle" in that they listened to new views "with all readiness of mind" and "examined daily" into their consistency with facts.
When the antient magistracy, the clergy, all the churches, all the citizens of a great centre of our imperial activity welcome with all their honours this progressive Association and its President, they are setting their seal to the necessity and the nobleness of the Spirit of Enquiry.
St. John in a vision once saw seven burning lamps, shedding a radiating, ever-renewed light on God's own throne, and from the throne over all else. These (said he) were the seven spirits of God. Such a seven (or perfect number) of spiritual powers opened on man is often named in Scripture. Of these the second is called the " spirit of understanding," or the " spirit of intelligence." So long as
22 THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY.
anything remains not yet intelligently known, the activity of that intelligence will be the Spirit of Enquiry.
The Spirit of Enquiry then is God's Spirit working in capable men, to enlarge the measure and the fulness of man's capacity — or, from the human side, it is man's spirit being attracted ever nearer to the All Wise and All Knowing.
With every great capacity goes great duty, great pain, great reward. No pain sorer than that of a high intelligence denied its freedom ; no consolation for almost any ill purer than fruitful research.
Although minute methods of enquiry as yet were not, and could not be, yet how striking it is to see in the Book of Job the spirit of man recovering its balance, restored out of anguish and doubt to its true bearings by passing through a detailed contemplation of the facts of nature, and reasoning about them — a contemplation of nature, and of giant forms of life, from which some would have expected the tormented yet reverent spirit almost to shrink, either through fear of materialism or through fear of idolatry.
If by the breadth and depth of capacity with which some souls are, enlarged— a capacity hungering more, the more it is replenished — God has intensified the duty of Enquiry, He has set over against the duty, in more than answering magnificence, the work which it has to accomplish, that so the brightest of intelligences may have no excuse for losing its humility.
If the optician, perfecting his instruments, may one day show us the multitudes of heaven, coming out till they shine, no more like " patines of bright gold," but as it were one gold-mailed sphere ; if the physicist bids us conceive the tiniest fragment of mist to be infinite, infinitesimal watery
THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY. 23
globes bounding and rebounding in every direction with incredible velocity ; if the prince of observers tells of every leaf-tip and of every fibrous root-point as describing its ellipses with ceaseless accuracy day and night in the air and under the earth ; and if such things are but petty popular fragments of fact which even such as I can apprehend, and are nothing in the world to the revelations dawning on the man of science, what wonder if the magnificence of the field which corresponds to the necessity of enquiry should, as being " practically limitless," apparently everlasting, tempt us to treat it as if it were really eternal and adequate to all thought.
And yet it cannot be so. There is a sum of created things, and therefore a real end (however far off) to what can be known of them. Though what is known compared to what is not known is like the tiniest islet of the Pacific, nay like a coral branchlet, a microscopic shell, compared to the Pacific itself, yet pass a little way into space, and the whole Pacific and the globe itself is rounded and summed into a speck.
Though " practically limitless " and " apparently ever lasting" are large words, yet, that the knowledge of things material is only (( practically " and not absolutely limitless, and apparently but not scientifically eternal, — this does make a difference to the soul. The soul has every reason to believe itself absolutely eternal, and theoretically progres sive without limit — to know itself greater than all that cannot be so qualified.
But if the duty, if the subject-matter, of enquiry be so vast, then how great is the duty of rigour in announcement of results : for if error be made, how great is that error.
Again, just when we have realised the duty of rigour
24 THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY.
and precision, then we feel the edge of a new temptation — we cannot but feel tempted to set aside whatever does not yield to our enquiry — to disregard, almost to disbelieve in, what cannot be stated with rigour, nor subjected to measurements of precision. The finite alone seems ad missible ; and its exclusive rights present themselves in all their force just when we have been tempted, almost driven, to conceive of it as going on for ever.
Again, how strong the temptations which arise from such apparent limitlessness to minds trained imperfectly, or educated in one groove — the temptation to forget that the apparent limitlessness which we speak of is apparent in one direction only; viz. the detection of causes more and more remote in the one region of force and matter. The temptation amid conceptions of them, ever new, and startling in their newness, to forget that men have con ceptions equally worthy of investigation in other directions — that though material observation cannot by its nature pursue these, that there must be something underlying this universal consciousness that force and matter only float in the eternal thought of which we all know ourselves in some degree partakers ; to forget that creative power itself (and much more its products) forms but one among many realities which thought conceives.
It is then both strange and true that temptations arising from the duty of rigour actually concur with temptations arising from apparent limitlessness. They tempt us into negations only. Yet they exceedingly tempt us to assume the office of the prophet. It seems to us but a small thing to be called to know no more than we know. We have at once a more exact knowledge and a greater field than all men. Who so fit to prophesy to them?
THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY. 25
Yet the real prophet is one who foretells what will happen out of what he knows already. The false temptation is to declare what we shall know hereafter before we do know it.
Still such temptations pass away more perfectly than any other temptations pass, if we forewarn ourselves not to consider the one plane of observation as if it were the whole sphere of thought. The temptation passes if creation presents itself to us as but one among many mysteries ; if we remember that we have long ago launched on deeps of mysteries ; that it is no fancied voice men hear in their souls, though it does not vibrate on the tympanum ; that there is a consciousness of and a sensitiveness to the presence of One who treads the deep very near, not according to laws which they had known; that He has said " It is I," and they have received Him, and im mediately their ship has been at the land where they would be. The temptation passes; and instead of either the hard effrontery of narrowness, or the easily revived soft nature-worship of our Aryan fathers, we see the Spirit of Enquiry unblencht, undazzled, clothed with the perfections of exactitude and patience and humility.
This is that moral grandeur with which the Spirit of Enquiry has glorified her noblest — all those who have left no tarnish of presumption on their boldest speculations, no smirch of vanity on their personal greatness. For to enquire sincerely involves that we await the answer, and it is as true of the enquirer's faith as it is of the believer's, that " by our patience we shall win our souls."
It is thus that the Spirit of Enquiry keeps its watch, ever content yet ever yearning. It is the power in us through which the outer world can work its work upon the
26 THE SPIRIT OF ENQUIRY.
inner. It is ever making something new its own out of that unmeasured, though not infinite, created whole, which yet seems part of some completer whole, not hopelessly inaccessible ; whose cause indeed, more remote still, can perhaps not be known but by spontaneous revelation of itself.
It is thus that the Spirit of Enquiry exercises and forms one portion of the inward intellectual moral being which (itself thus answering to the outer world) is a complete whole of Life.
And that Life suggests its own cause. For one form of life, our own kind of life, human life, exhibits one phenomenon which is as marked and as markworthy in its operation and its accumulations as the labours of any other worms. One form of life only. In it that phenomenon is as certainly present, as it is certainly absent from the most sagacious eye, and the most docile habit of every other creature.
It is that phenomenon which universally exhibits these characteristics : — the sense of sin incurred ; the sense of virtue to be attained ; the anticipation of life after death ; the desire to approach God ; the sense of needed help in doing so ; the confidence in the adequacy of certain help.
This phenomenon has created gigantic systems in the shadow of which there has been for awhile something of peace ; yet none have been fully worked out ; some have destroyed themselves, some have disappeared in growing light. For a little while each has swayed art, and law, and life. But one among them claims an origin and author, which none need have anticipated, yet many did. One only has that outward character of simplicity and natural-
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ness, together with all that inner variety and complexity of detail, all that exactness of relations within itself, which belong characteristically to all known truths. It claims to exhibit the first evolution of manhood into God, in one perfect type to be afterwards repeated innumerably.
This phenomenon in humanity suggests the cause of all else ; suggests that He toward whom humanity feels such a longing and such a conscience is none other than the Author of All. And the longing and the conscience are infinitely satisfied, and not surprised, when first they learn that He too has longed and yearned toward us, and has satisfied His yearning by becoming among us the Light of this world's mysteries and the Hope of eternity. Within the range of His teaching, — the forgiveness, the prayer, the trust, the hopefulness, the lovingness, — within all that domain, it is as possible to observe facts as it is in nature, and to obtain results equally certain and convincing.
True religion itself is a science, and viewed as a science it is at present the one science in which the effects lead without a break up to the Cause. The cause is the interest taken, the interest shown by the Author of All in that one highest phenomenon which marks the one highest form of life we spoke of : the interest of God in the most interesting of developments — in the progress of the human will, its growth, its fluctuations, its crises, its regeneration and its perfecting.
The Spirit of Enquiry has in nothing more verified itself, its method, and its subject, than in that it has advanced this one religion, has cleared and justified it : has demon strated that the " tolerance " which marked its earliest teachings is essential to human progress : has, in marking the boundaries between faith and law, crumbled away
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much of the materialism with which faith had been in- crusted : has indicated to our apprehension something of new worlds to which, long before we had guessed where they might be found, the atoning efficacy had been already declared to extend : l has given deeper meanings to our mysteries by showing that it is not in religious mysteries alone that the embracement of logical opposites is the only possible way of expressing truth ; that the law of polarity which had always reigned in religion was a constant law in nature : has shown us how even in morals, while one religion is self-condemned by its pride, another by its sensuality, another by its limitation to the oligarchy of intellect, Christianity alone possesses the scientific temper of rigorousness with compassion, of certainty with reverence, of confidence in what has been attained, together with that perfect worshipfulness of heart which waits on a far greater future.
Meanwhile before the Spirit of Enquiry every other religion fades fast away. Of