With God in the World: A Series of Papers

And spiritual work is as wide as human activity. The tendency to make religion a department of life instead of the Christian synonym for the whole of life, has given rise to such a redundancy as "applied Christianity." The life of common activities, social and industrial, is as truly the sphere of religion as the sanctuary. The natural is not the antithesis but the foundation of the spiritual. First that which is natural and afterward that which is spiritual – by transformation, not by substitution. The Resurrection of Christ is a parable as well as a fact. And it is for the layman, whether he be the thinker in his study or the labourer in his ditch, to exercise his priesthood in the sphere of his occupation, lifting to God for His transforming touch each transaction in which he is engaged, recognizing that all life is divine, and all business God's business. It is for the layman to enter into the bent of his age and train it to God, not holding aloof from popular movements and ambitions, but laying hold of them and labouring for their conversion and sanctification. Thus will the natural become the spiritual. The witness that the world of to-day is most in need of is that which will testify that if God is the God of the supernatural and extraordinary, just as really is He the God of the natural and ordinary, revealing Himself through and using common things as the general rule, turning to what is uncommon as the exception. Who can bear this witness so well as the layman in the home and in the market? Certain it is that until this is done and theology has become much more than now part of the web and woof of common life among common men, theological assent or ecclesiastical unity will accomplish but little toward unifying life in Christ in any worthy sense.

This, then, is the ordinary duty of a Christian layman. It is not something optional, to be assumed or not as we prefer. It is what we must accept as our responsibility, if we accept Christ and look for acceptance in Him. The Church of to-day is coming to recognize this more and more, and is settling down to the work before her with wisdom and zeal. Even beneath the reaction against "organized Christianity," which has appeared of late, and partially explanatory of it, is moral earnestness, an earnestness that deprecates that conventional religion which, narrow in both its vision and methods, fails to touch life with a hand of power. Men of action wish a Christianity which is weighted with responsibilities. Here and there one finds a nerveless Amiel who can speak fine phrases, but who shrinks from responsibility. And here and there, too, is a doctrinaire philosopher or an idle onlooker who croaks of degeneration and declares that life lacks inspiration. But all the while the workers, with eyes gleaming with hope, plunge into the most hopeless problems, and reap their inspiration from their toil.

Appendix

Where God Dwells 43

There is no truth so thrilling as that which speaks of God's abiding presence, not merely with but in His creation, though He is neither limited by nor dependent upon it. Having created, He sustains, sustains from within, so that the most recent manifestation of energy, whether in the radiance of a sunrise or the smile on a child's face, is not the reflection of a far-off movement of God, but an indication of His present working. God is behind the world of things, controlling and using all that is visible, so that the voiceless speaks and the lifeless lives and imparts life. But His delight is among the sons of men. He dwells in men, making their bodies His temple and their souls His throne. He dwells in nature because He dwells in man, as well as dwelling in man because man is part of nature. What will help a man to honour his own body and to reverence the bodies of others, more than the thought that the Spirit of God fills the human frame as light fills the room, leaving no part untouched? It is not sufficient to think of God as being in some organ of the body – the most worthy part, such as the heart or the brain. God's Spirit fills His temple with His glory and His power, making the least comely parts noble. He sanctifies each member in the fulfillment of its proper function. To misuse or abuse any power or faculty, is to drive the Spirit of God from His chosen resting-place; whereas to surrender the members of the body and the faculties of the soul to His influence, is to lift up the whole man into increasing glory and beauty.

But it is not difficult to accept the truth that God lives within His wonderful creation. The earliest dawn of religion perceived Him in His works of beauty and majesty, – the sun, the stars, the river, the tempest. And if He is immanent in that which is less, it is only logic to say that He must of necessity be in that which is greater – if in the world of things, much more then in the world of men, in the individual and in society. But so deep is man's instinctive reverence, so abiding his sense of unworthiness, that it needed the Incarnation to convince man that he was destined to become the heaven of God. Yes, the heaven of God, for heaven is where God is rather than God where heaven is.

All this has become an elementary truth of religion. Only it has to be expressed in new terms from time to time. The thought has to be recoined as the edges of language wear smooth, that its force and value may be recognized. The immanence of God, as thus considered, is not difficult for men to accept, unless indeed they wander into the barren wastes of a deistic thought, which banishes God from life as we know it, and makes Him a transcendent unreality.

What does stagger men is the existence in a world in which God dwells, of the dark mysteries from which none can escape, – the disastrous storms, the difficulties, the pains of life. If, they argue, God dwells in the world, why does He not sweep away these heavy shadows, this over-much grief? There is only one answer, and it is this: God does not annihilate these things because He has a high use for them; He cannot destroy that which He can inhabit; God dwells in the dark places, in the wilderness, in the storms; He has taken possession of them, and they are His just as much as the sunshine and the fertile land. In short, God dwells in everything short of sin, even in the fiercest, gloomiest penalty of sin. The angel of vengeance is the angel of God's blessing for all penitents who will accept him as such.

When our Lord came in the flesh, He entered into every human experience to abide in it all the days. He invested temptation, so that temptation is henceforth man's highest opportunity. He seized upon difficulty, and behold, it becomes a revelation. He invested responsibility till it became inspiration, duty till it became privilege. He wrapped Himself in sorrow, and sorrow is turned into joy. He explored the darkest recesses of death, and death is the gate to life immortal. And these transformations are for all time.

It is a process of transformation, let it be noted, which these mysteries undergo. It is not that the temptation in time is swept away and an opportunity substituted in its place; but the temptation becomes an opportunity, and man mounts upon it to a higher level of self-sacrifice, or purity or honour. It is not that the difficulty is burned up by God's fire and a revelation comes gliding in as a sunbeam athwart the ashes of the difficulty; but the difficulty itself becomes the revelation. The pain of Rebekah in child-birth as the children struggled in her womb, made her inquire of the Lord, and God flashed back the reply from the heart of her difficulty: "Two nations are in thy womb." Joseph brooded over the condition of Mary, his espoused wife, until, in the night vision, the angel of the Lord appeared, and said: "That Which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." His difficulty became a revelation. Similarly the dominant feature of responsibility becomes not its weight but its inspiration, of duty not its 'ought' but its 'may.' And so it is with sickness, and sorrow, and death. S. Paul's sickness, whether it was a malady of the eyes or Asiatic malaria is of little consequence, became to him spiritual health and power; "My grace is sufficient for thee; my strength is made perfect in weakness." As for sorrow, it is turned into joy, – the very thing that caused tears becoming the spring of smiles. And death, the king of shadows, is shorn of its horrors and becomes the entrance chamber to introduce into the presence of the King of Light.

The Bible is full of phrases (in the Old Testament, of course, they are prophetic, pointing to Messianic days) that tell of God's transforming power. Darkness shall be turned into light; the desert shall blossom as a rose; the barren shall be a mother of children; the glowing sand shall become a pool; and the thirsty ground, springs of water; the deaf shall hear, and the blind see; defeat becomes victory; and the instrument of shame and torture, the symbol of glory and joy. And all this, which, through the Incarnation, has become a fact in common life, is a revelation of God's power, not to say love, which far exceeds in wonder whatever we knew before. It is appalling to think of a power so strong that it can annihilate with the irresistible force of its grinding heel; but it is inspiring to consider an Almightiness that transforms the works of evil into the hand-maidens of righteousness and converts the sinner into the saint. And it is this latter power which eternal Love possesses and exhibits. He persistently dwells in the sinner until the sinner wakes up in His likeness and is satisfied with it; He enters into the shadows and holds them until they become first as the morning clouds fingered by the earliest rays of the rising sun, and eventually as the brightness of the noonday light.

But men must not accept this as a mere poetic fancy, beautiful but not of practical value. It is nothing, if not a source of power. We must experiment with our own difficulties, sickness, sorrows – yes, and our own death. There are those, Christian scientists and others, that espouse a false idealism, who meet the grim realities of life with a courage that is born of a lie. They deny the existence of everything they do not like, saying that sorrow and sin and death are not, that they are phantoms. They are not unlike the silly bird, which, finding itself hard pressed, buries its head in the nearest bush, and being unable to see its pursuers, deceives itself into thinking that it is not pursued. But "things and actions are what they are," so why should we desire to deceive ourselves? The Christian's course of action is to say that these dark mysteries are real, but the Spirit of God in us will enable us to find the Spirit of God in them.

Our Lord on the Mount of the Transfiguration, and later on in the Passion, tells the whole story. Calmly contemplating His own approaching death, which He had just foretold, and bringing it before the Father in prayer, He sees the transfiguration of the king of terrors, and, in a blaze of spiritual exaltation, speaks of His own decease so soon to be accomplished. Then afterward in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the way of sorrow, and upon the Cross, He was in every detail the victor. These final experiences of life did not seize upon Him; it was He who seized them; He wrung them dry of all that they had to give and for ever changed their character. Frowning monarchs they can never be to the followers of our Lord, but, on the contrary, powerful servants. Christ's victory was not in the Resurrection any more completely than in the Passion. It was in the former because it had been in the latter. Good desires brought to good effect, as the Easter Collect puts it, end in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Victory is not only a thing of to-morrow; it belongs to to-day. The Christian's life is victory all along the line.

Let men, then, take their own hard, grim, specific pain or difficulty, and face it fearlessly and expectantly, and they will find that the "worst turns the best to the brave." Let them throw their arms about it, and say with Jacob: "I will not let Thee go except Thou bless me." And, lo! they will find that their arms are about God and His about them. If we pray God to sanctify our sickness, it is not that we expect Him to touch it from without. No, we look for more than that, much more. We expect Him to reveal Himself out of the depths of the suffering, so that the more earnestly we look at it the more clearly shall we see Him and His Face of Love. Men who have done this with the lesser of the dark mysteries will be quite ready when the time comes to act in the same way toward death, and say triumphantly: "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory."

What is true of personal difficulties, perplexities and sorrows, is equally true of the sorrows of a world. Let men remember that those who hold back timidly or discouraged from hand-to-hand conflict with social, political and industrial difficulties, are forfeiting their share in the largest kind of revelation. God dwells there, in corporate sorrows, as well as in those of the individual experience, and, if one may say so, in a fuller measure. The world needs brave men to-day, men who are determined to see God wherever He is, and He is in everything, everything short of actual sin. There is no philosophy so false to facts as pessimism, except perhaps cheap and unthinking optimism. It is only the Christian philosophy that is equal to the situation, a philosophy which ignores nothing, howsoever gruesome, but which sees God master of His world, and nowhere in such complete possession as in its darkest corners.

When God's storms come sweeping along, it is the Christian alone who can lift his head, look up, and stand erect as they enshroud him, for a Christian cannot fear where God is. Elijah could not find God in the storm that swept by him. But the youngest Christian can do what the stern prophet of old could not; he can find God in all storms, for all storms are God's.

LAUS DEO

1

On Prayer as a form of Physical Energy.

2

Maturin.

3

Works: Vol. i. 72.

4

Ps. lv: 17.

5

Charles Kingsley.

6

For thou wert not thyself, but a mere phantom, and my error was my God. Confessions, Bk. iv. 7.

7

St. Mark xi: 24.

8

Cf. Liddon, Advent in St. Paul's, p. 22.

9

I suppose that a constant vision of God would be an injury to almost all men, – that there are periods when even utter scepticism is the sign of God's mercy, and the necessary condition of moral restoration. – R. H. Hutton, Theological Essays, p. 7.

10

Collect for Twelfth Sunday after Trinity.

11

Walter Pater.

12

Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism.

13

H. Scott Holland.

14

That is called a thing to which no event can be imputed as an action. Hence every object devoid of freedom is regarded as a thing. – Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics.

15

Cf. Browning's verses in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, where the result of false culture, or the abuse of culture, is referred to: —

Man is made in sympathy with manAt outset of existence, so to speak;But in dissociation, more and more,Man from his fellow, as their lives advanceIn culture; still humanity, that's bornA mass, keeps flying off, fining awayEver into a multitude of points,And ends in isolation, each from each.

16

Gore on Ephesians, p. 189.

17

Works: Vol. vii. 624.

18

Canon Gore.

19

The writer does not hesitate to advise persons who are temporarily residing, as is often the case during the summer, where there is no Episcopal Church, to attend public worship, once a Sunday at least, at the representative Evangelical place of worship of the community. Reading the Church service at home by one's self is no substitute for public worship.

20

As e. g. in Rev. v: 11-14.

21

See p. 7.

22

Works: Vol. viii. p. 8.

23

It is not easy to be understood, it is not lightly to be received; it is not much opened in the writings of the New Testament, but still left in its mysterious nature; it is too much untwisted and nicely handled by the writings of the doctors; and by them made more mysterious, and like a doctrine of philosophy made intricate by explications, and difficult by the apperture and dissolution of distinctions. – Jeremy Taylor, Works, vol. viii, p. 8.

24

Milne.

25

2 Cor. viii: 9.

26

See a valuable little book, Some Titles and Aspects of the Eucharist, by E. S. Talbot, D. D. (Bishop of Rochester). Rivington, Percival & Co., London.

27

Bp. Alexander.

28

Cf. 1 Cor. x: 17. – "We, who are many, are one loaf." The one serious objection to the otherwise convenient custom of using unleavened bread in the shape of wafers is that the symbolism of the common loaf is lost, and the point of contact with common life is somewhat obscured.

29

Our Church, by the title adopted, by the form of service used, by the spirit of her rubrics where they touch upon the subject, plainly declares it to be her intention that the Holy Communion should always be celebrated so as to be a social act. The priest is not a mere representative of the congregation, doing things for them, but a leader acting with them. For the priest to act without the congregation is only less anomalous than for the congregation to act without the priest. Not that the whole congregation present should necessarily receive at any given celebration of the Holy Communion, though in the judgment of the present writer the ideal would be reached only thus.

30

Cf. Philemon 16.

31

Ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

32

St. Matt. xxviii: 19.

33

St. Matt. xxviii: 19, 20.

34

The following remarkable phrase occurs in Bp. Andrewes' Devotions: – Who [i. e., Christ] hath manifested in every place the savour of His knowledge … by the incredible conversion of the world to the Faith, without assistance of authority, without intervention of persuasion.

35

The Brotherhood of S. Andrew is nothing more than an organized effort to fulfil a common Christian duty.

36

Cf. Emerson's verses on unconscious influence:

Little thinks, in the field, yon red cloaked clownOf thee from the hill-top looking down;The heifer that lows in the upland farm,Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,Deems not that great NapoleonStops his horse, and lists with delight,Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;Nor knowest thou what argumentThy life to thy neighbour's creed has lent.

37

1 John v: 4.

38

See Appendix.

39

See Prof. William James in, Is Life Worth Living? "Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life." [The Will to Believe and other Essays.]

40

See Dr. John Fiske in his recently published, Through Nature to God, where in a study of the Mystery of Evil, he developes this thought most admirably, though making the unnecessary deduction that God is the creator of moral evil.

41

St. John xvii.

42

See Moberly's Ministerial Priesthood, chap. ii.

43

The Bishop of Ripon, under the title of "Seeking and Finding," gives the following text and exquisite little poem as a Diocesan Motto for 1899:

Master, where dwellest Thou? – St. John i: 38The QuestO Master of my soul, where dwellest Thou?For but one Sovereign doth love allow,And if I find not Thee, quite lost am I;Tell me Thy dwelling place: this is my cry.No travel will I shrink, no danger dread,If to Thy home, where'er it be, I may be led:Not where the world displays its golden pride,Only with Him, Who is the King, would I abide.The FindingNay, not in far distant lands, but ever near,Near as the heart that hopes or beats with fear;My Home is in the heaven, and yet I dwellWith every human heart that loveth well.Not where proud perils are I place My throne,But with the true of heart, and these alone;So where the contrite soul breathes a true sigh,And where kind deeds are done, even there dwell I.And those who live by love need never ask,They find my dwelling place in every task;Vainly they seek who all impatient roam;If brave and good thy heart, there is My home.