Book: Religious Reality

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The books of the New Testament are the classical literature of
Christianity in a much fuller and more obvious sense. Here, again,
there is much that apart from the use of a good commentary will be
found hardly intelligible: but the greater part of the New Testament,
and especially the Gospels, can be read with profit by the ordinary
man apart from any extraneous aids. It is well to remember that S.
Paul's Epistles were written at an earlier date than any of the
Gospels, and that they represent the occasional correspondence of a
hard-worked missionary. Of the Gospels the first three have much in
common, and the Gospels of S. Matthew and S. Luke are based partly
upon that of S. Mark. S. Mark is said to have been the companion of S.
Peter, and is probably the author of the Gospel which bears his name.
It may be taken to represent his reminiscences of S. Peter's
preaching. The Gospel now known as that according to S. Matthew
appears to be the work of a compiler who fitted into the framework of
S. Mark's story a considerable amount of additional matter, drawn
chiefly from a collection of "sayings of Jesus" which an early
Christian writer declares to have been made by S. Matthew in Aramaic.
S. Matthew's name, it is thought, was subsequently attached to the
resulting document, since it contained a large preponderance of
material derived from his book on our Lord's sayings. The name of the
actual compiler of the first Gospel has not survived.

S. Luke's Gospel is a compilation made upon somewhat similar lines,
and is based, in large measure, upon the same two sources: but the
author's researches extended also more widely, and his Gospel contains
a large proportion of matter peculiar to itself, which critics
commonly regard as being of high historical value. The author of the
book was a Greek doctor who attended upon S. Paul, accompanying the
latter in his travels, and writing the Acts of the Apostles as a
second volume in continuation of his Gospel. The Acts is partly based
upon a kind of diary which S. Luke kept of his experiences as S.
Paul's companion and physician.

It is probable that both the first and the third of our four Gospels
were in existence shortly before, or at the latest very shortly after,
the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. The
second Gospel, since they both drew upon it, must be even earlier.

The Gospel according to S. John is of a somewhat later date, and bears
a different character. It is reflective and meditative, and is
penetrated throughout by a mystical symbolism. In many ways it
suggests rather a spiritual interpretation of the significance of
Jesus than a literal portrait of Him. Again, it is the product of a
Greek rather than of a Jewish atmosphere, though its narrative
presents so many touches of extraordinary vividness, and the author
shows so exact a knowledge of Jewish institutions and conditions of
life in Palestine, that it is difficult not to think that the book
must have been written by a Jew who knew Judaism before its downfall.
It is supposed that the writing dates from the closing years of the
first century, and tradition declares that the author was S. John in
old age at Ephesus. This statement is, however, in dispute, and the
authorship of the Gospel is uncertain. In point of fact, it does not
matter who the writer was. There is no one of the interpreters of
Jesus who had drunk more deeply of His Spirit than had he: nor is
there any of the books of the New Testament which brings Jesus closer
to us than the Gospel according to S. John, or speaks home with
greater power to the heart and affections of the simplest Christian.




PART II

THE PRACTICE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION


CHAPTER I

THE CHRISTIAN AIM


Christianity in practice means the dedication of life to the unselfish
service of GOD and man, in the light of the ideals of Jesus Christ,
and in the power of an inward spiritual life which is hid with Christ
in GOD. The Christian, renouncing such merely worldly ideals as self-
advancement, personal or family ambition, the accumulation of money,
or the enjoyment, for their own sake, of the things which money can
buy, is called to seek first and in all things GOD'S Kingdom and His
righteousness, in the assurance that whatever may be really necessary
for the advancement of this aim will in due course be added unto him.

He is not to expect to find the practice of his religion to be, in a
worldly sense, profitable; and the practice of his religion is to
cover the whole of life. The desperate attempt to combine the service
of GOD with that of Mammon is therefore to be abandoned. If riches
increase, he is not to set his heart upon them. If poverty be his lot,
he is to embrace poverty as a bride. The aim and object of his life is
not to be to get his own will done, but to discover what for him is
the will of GOD, and to do it. He is to be the slave of GOD in Christ,
a living instrument in the hands of Another, called to co-operate in a
purpose not his own, though a purpose which he is to embrace, and to
_make_ his own, in a spirit of loyal sonship.

This means, among other things, that life is to be interpreted in
terms of vocation. It means that for every man there is a "calling," a
particular line of life which GOD intends him to follow, a specific
piece of service to GOD and to his neighbour which he is called upon
to render. The motto of a Christian's life is to be the motto of his
Master--"My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to
accomplish His work." Gifts and capacities, aptitudes for any special
work, are therefore "talents," to be used in accordance with the will
and purpose of the Giver. Opportunities and endowments, whatsoever
they may be, are opportunities and endowments for service.

It does not necessarily follow from this that a realization of the
truth of Christianity, and an awakening to the claims of religion,
will lead to any outward change or radical alteration in the general
conception of a man's life-work. It may or it may not do so. There are
indubitably cases in which a man is called upon to abandon his
previous career--to forsake prospects, however promising, or to
renounce wealth and possessions, however entangling--in order to
become (for example) a minister of the Church or a missionary of the
Gospel, or to enter a religious order. Our Lord's command to the rich
young ruler, that he should give up all that he had, in order to
follow Christ along the paths of homelessness and poverty, is a call
which sounds still with a literal force in the ears of a certain
number of His disciples. The inner spirit, moreover, of detachment
from the world and from the things of the world, the readiness to
abandon wealth and worldly position if need so require, and the
refusal to be ensnared by them, are in any case demanded of all. The
vocation, however, of the majority of men is already determined by
their circumstances, or by their training and general aptitudes. It is
only the few, comparatively speaking, who are called to become monks
or missionaries, or priests devoid of "prospects." The majority will
best serve GOD and their neighbour by "carrying on" in their existing
occupations: and in most cases they are incidentally called also,
sooner or later, to matrimony.

But GOD calls no man to idleness. It is the duty of every Christian,
rich as well as poor, unless he be incapacitated by bodily sickness or
infirmity, to be engaged in some work of general service to the
community: and a man who proposes seriously to practise the Christian
religion needs to ask himself, with regard to the work or occupation
in which he is engaged, or by which he earns his bread, whether he can
say truly that he believes it to be the work which his Father has
given him to do: whether it can be interpreted, not simply as a means
of livelihood, but as a service rendered in Christ's name to society
at large. If it cannot so be interpreted, then plainly it is no work
which a Christian should be doing. There are ways of making a living
which, are definitely unchristian. The work of a shoe-black or of a
tradesman or of an actor may be as true a piece of Christian service
as that of a doctor or a bishop. The work of a burglar or of a
bookmaker could not be so regarded.

Christianity--it cannot be too strongly insisted--means the
Christianization of life as a whole. It is in the daily round and the
common task that Christ is most chiefly to be served. "Whatsoever ye
do in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving
thanks to GOD and the Father by Him." Religion is a wider thing than
piety, and it is a false pietism which would regard it as consisting
mainly of pious practices. The cultivation of the inner spiritual life
by means of the practices of Christian devotion is indeed essential in
its place and its degree. The life of the spirit languishes if it is
not fed. But except these things issue in the practical service of
Christ in daily life they are worse than futile. They degenerate
either into formalism and hypocrisy, or into spiritual self-
indulgence. "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit."
"By their fruits ye shall know them." And the "fruits" of Christian
living are to be discovered, not in the hours spent in devotion, but
in the manifestation amid the activities of the market-place of that
temper of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, and that
spirit of unselfish service, which should be their normal product.

What is needed is a wider conception of Churchmanship and a truer
doctrine of vocation. All honest work in which a Christian can
lawfully engage should be regarded as an expression of his
Churchmanship--as truly work done for the Church of GOD in obedience
to a vocation from on high as is the work of a priest or a teacher of
religion. It is at least partly because the majority of laymen do not
so interpret their work in life that in so many cases they are
discovered to be in effect living for the sake of their leisure and
regarding their daily work as uninteresting drudgery, with the result
that life as a whole comes to be for them dreary and profitless and
stale. A Christian man's life-work ought not to have the character of
drudgery, but of sheer delight in GOD'S service.

But is such an ideal really practicable? It is literally practicable
to a greater extent than most men think. It ought to be practicable
universally. At the same time there is no disguising the fact that
large numbers of men to-day find themselves in circumstances to which
such a doctrine cannot without palpable unreality be applied. The
structure of existing society under modern industrial conditions
forces multitudes, by an evil economic pressure, into mechanical,
uncongenial, and soul-destroying occupations: and the conditions of
some men's labour in the world as it is are such that it would be
sheer blasphemy to regard them as a product of the will of GOD. The
problem of the Christianization of the social order is one of the
greatest of the tasks confronting the Christian Church. Its solution
has hardly yet begun to be attempted. In the meantime the mass of
Christian people, in virtue of their acquiescence, are accomplices in
the denial to the disinherited classes of the conditions and
opportunities which make life worth living for themselves. So long as
it continues to be possible for a man who genuinely desires to learn
and labour truly to get his own living to starve in the midst of
plenty: so long as multitudes are constrained to work under conditions
which rob their labour of all interest, of all idealism, and of all
hope: so long as sweating, and destitution, and such conditions of
life as obtain in the more densely crowded areas of our great towns
continue to exist: so long will it be the duty of every Christian to
be a social reformer, and to have a conscience permanently troubled
with regard to wealth and social advantage. [Footnote: Mr. George
Lansbury's _Your Part in Poverty_ (George Alien and Unwin, Ltd., Is.)
is a book worth reading in this particular connexion.]

Meanwhile the Christian ideal of life stands. It is the ideal of
consecration to service. It means discipleship in Christ's school of
unselfishness, both individual and corporate: for there is a
selfishness of the family, of the class, or of the nation, which bears
as bitter fruit in the world as does the selfishness of the
individual. Christianity, in a word, means the carrying out into daily
practice of the ideal of the _Imitatio Christi_, the imitation of
Jesus Christ, in the spirit if not in the letter. It means that as He
was, so are we to be in the world. It means that all things,
whatsoever we do, are to be done in His Spirit and to His glory: that
our every thought is to be led captive under the obedience of Christ.
It means that we are to love GOD because GOD first loved us, and to
love men because they are our brothers in the family of GOD: because
love is of GOD, and every one that loveth is born of GOD and knoweth
GOD. It means that we are to consecrate all comradeship and loyalty
and friendship, all sorrow and all joy, by looking upon them as
friendship and loyalty and comradeship in Christ, as sorrow and joy in
Him. It means that we are to live glad, strong, free, clean lives as
sons of GOD in our Father's House.

It means also struggle and hardship. It means truceless war against
the spirit of selfishness, against everything that tends to drag us
down, against the law of sin in our own members. It means a truceless
war against low ideals and tolerated evils in the world about us. It
means soldiership in the eternal crusade of Christ against whatsoever
things are false and dishonest and unjust and foul and ugly and of
evil report.

It is an ideal which, considered in isolation from the Christian
Gospel of redemption and the power of the Holy Spirit, could only
terrify and daunt a man who had a spark of honesty in his composition:
and for this reason the mass of men refuses to take it seriously. It
is an ideal which, in the case of all who do take it seriously,
convinces them of sin.

Nevertheless to lower the ideal, to abate one jot of its severity, to
compromise, on the score of human weakness, though it were but in a
single particular, the flawless perfection of its standard, were to
prove false to all that is highest within us, and traitor to the cause
of Christ.

"Never, O Christ--so stay me from relenting--Shall there be truce
betwixt my flesh and soul."




CHAPTER II

THE WAY OF THE WORLD


The three traditional enemies of the Christian life are symbolized
under the headings of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and the
classification has a certain convenience. The "World" stands in this
connexion for human society in so far as it is organized apart from
Christ. It is obvious that "the way of the world," as represented by
the general outlook of conventional society, is in many respects in
manifest conflict with the principles of the Gospel. The existing
social order is the product of a compromise between inherited
influences and standards which are in a certain sense broadly
Christian, and the natural man's instinctive selfishness in matters
both individual and social. The conflict against the spirit of
worldliness which should be one of the marks of a genuine Christian
life is beset by peculiar difficulties, precisely because in a society
which is in some respects partially Christian the issues are confused.
Public opinion indubitably tolerates many things which should not be
tolerated, and condones others which should not be condoned. But
public opinion approves much that is good, and does lip-service to a
variety of Christian ideals, even while reserving the reality of its
devotion for the worship of success and material comfort.

Perhaps it may be said that the most fundamental characteristic of
essentially "worldly" opinion is absence of idealism. Worldliness is
the principle of contentment with things as they are. Against
worldliness, so defined, the Christian is committed to a conflict all
along the line, since even in those regions of life and conduct in
which the standards recognized by the world are right and good so far
as they go, "the good is the enemy of the best." To rest content at
any point with what has already been attained is fatal to all
spiritual advance. It is, in effect, the death of the soul.

Mr. William Temple has remarked that in the conflict of Christians
against the Devil and the Flesh the public opinion of the Church, as
visibly organized, is on their side, but that in their conflict with
the World it is decidedly against them. That is an over-statement, but
it conveys a truth. Undoubtedly the Church has made compromises with
the World, a fact which arises partly as the result of the inclusion
within her fold of a large proportion of merely nominal members whose
Christianity is no more than an inherited or conventional tradition. A
further point of importance is this. Two thousand years is not a long
period in relation to the scale of the world's history as a whole, and
Christianity is still a comparatively young religion. The problem of
worldliness is mainly a problem of the relation of the Church to the
social order; and there are reasons why it was natural that the
working out of the Christian ideal of conduct should first have been
developed in relation to the affairs of private and domestic life.

Christians in the early days were a "little flock," surrounded by a
society whose standards and conventions and beliefs were frankly pagan
and hostile. So long as these conditions obtained the issues were
plain: the contrast in ideals between Church and World stood out sharp
and clear. The world, it was held, was ready to perish, and destined
at no distant date to do so. "The whole world," writes S. John, "lieth
in wickedness." The Church stood apart as the spiritual brotherhood of
GOD'S elect who were called to assist at the obsequies of a world
which was in process of passing away. "The world passeth away, and the
lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of GOD abideth for ever."

The words contain an eternal truth: but in their literal sense they
expressed a mistaken judgment. The world--that is, secular society--
did not pass away. It is with us still. For a period of some three
hundred years it persecuted the Church. At the end of that period it
accepted baptism, but not its implications. The Church has been
engaged ever since in the task of attempting to Christianize the
heathen within her own borders.

The Church was outwardly secularized: and the minority who could not
tolerate the secularization of her ideals took refuge in the hermit's
cell or in the cloister. In these retreats was developed the practice
of Christianity as an art or science of individual sanctity, but at
the cost of a certain aloofness from the rough and tumble of workaday
life. The Christianity of the Middle Ages was fertilized from the
cloister, with the result that the spiritual ideals even of those
Christians who remained "in the world" tended to be coloured by the
monastic tradition. The Christian man of the world who took seriously
the practice of his religion aimed at reproducing at second hand the
Christianity of the monk. The salvation of the individual soul tended
to be regarded as the supreme end of Christian endeavour, rather than
the service of the brethren.

The Reformation, when it came, did nothing to diminish this
individualism of the religious outlook, but rather accentuated it. The
whole emphasis of Protestantism was thrown upon the life of the
individual soul in relation to GOD, to the comparative neglect of the
importance of the conception of membership in the Church. To the
ordinary worldling the advent of Protestantism meant simply that he
need no longer trouble to go to Mass or to Confession. The Protestant
who took his religion seriously became a Puritan, a type resembling
the monk of Catholicism in his attempted isolation from the world, yet
lacking the peculiar otherworldly mysticism of the monkish character
at its best, and having a peculiar knack of making religion appear
repellent to the ordinary man.

The emergence of the ideal of a genuinely social Christianity, aiming
not at escape from the world by way of flight, but at the deliberate
conquest of the world for Christ by the resolute application of
Christian standards to the ordinary life of men in society, is of
comparatively recent date. It began in this country with the writings
of Kingsley and Maurice, and various living teachers both in England
and in America have carried on their work. It is one of the
misfortunes of Germany that she has had no corresponding movement. As
a consequence we are confronted at the present time with the spectacle
of various leaders of religious thought in Germany, too honest not to
perceive the glaring contrasts between the way of the world and the
precepts of the Gospel, deliberately maintaining the position that
Christianity is solely adapted to be a religion of private life, and
that Christian standards and ideals have no application as between
class and class, or as between nation and nation. To adopt such an
attitude is to abandon all hope of the redemption of society. It is to
condemn the world in perpetuity to a fate of which the present war is
the appropriate symbol.

The war is, in effect, a kind of sacrament of the power of Antichrist.
It is the outward and visible sign of the inward character and essence
of a civilisation founded upon principles which are the opposite of
those of the Gospel. Neither men nor nations, in the world as we have
known it, have been wont to love their neighbours as themselves. The
way of the world is, and has been, the way of selfishness.

This is not any the less true because the world's selfishness has been
to a considerable extent unconscious, and has arisen rather from
absence of thought than from deliberate badness of heart. The world
does not always realize how cruel are its ways towards the weak and
the socially unfortunate, or towards those who, for whatever reason,
transgress its code. For the world _has_ a code of its own, both in
manners and in morals, though the basis of its code is convention, and
its standard respectability rather than virtue. The world is very apt
to show itself implacable towards those whom it regards as being
beyond its pale, and to exhibit, in effect, the spirit and temper
which, when manifested in the religious sphere, we know and loathe as
Pharisaism. Pharisaism, like worldliness, has penetrated to an
alarming extent into the Church of England.

Parallel and proportionate to the world's selfishness is its cynicism.
This also is largely unconscious. Lacking any true insight into
spiritual realities, the world lacks vision and lacks hope. It
presumes always that "the thing which has been, it is that which shall
be." It beholds the evil that is done under the sun, and pronounces it
inevitable. It fails to understand that to pronounce any evil
inevitable is to be guilty of blasphemy against the GOD of heaven.

Against the spirit of the worldly world, its selfishness and cynicism,
its conventional judgments and shallowness of mind, the Christian is
called deliberately to make war. The Church exists to be to the world
and its ways a permanent challenge: to be the champion in all
circumstances and times of righteousness and truth; to insist upon
bringing to bear on human life in all its relationships, both
corporate and individual, the spirit of brotherhood, which is the
Spirit of Christ. It was a true instinct which led S. Ignatius Loyola
to pray on behalf of the Order which he founded that it might be hated
by the world. "Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.... If
ye were of the world, the world would love his own." If the world does
not hate the Church it is not because the world has become Christian,
but because worldliness has taken possession of the Church. The world
to-day regards the Church as not worth hating, as a negligible
quantity. When the Church is once more ready to be crucified, then the
opposition of the world will be revived, and the Church will suffer
martyrdom afresh.




CHAPTER III

THE SPIRIT AND THE FLESH


Sins of the flesh include all forms of slackness and bodily self-
indulgence. A Christian is called to assert the supremacy of the
spirit over the flesh by controlling his bodily impulses and
disciplining his desires. There is, therefore, a true Christian
asceticism. But asceticism, in so far as it is genuinely Christian, is
never an end in itself. It is a discipline which promotes efficiency.
It is to be compared to an athlete's training, not to the self-
mutilation of a fakir. There is in Christianity no doctrine of the
unlawfulness of bodily pleasures in themselves. "The Son of Man came
eating and drinking." For Christianity every creature of GOD in itself
is good, and a man's bodily impulses are God-given endowments of his
nature. What is essential is that their exercise should be controlled
and subordinated to the higher purposes of the spirit, that they
should be directed to their proper ends, and that they should not be
allowed to get out of hand. Christians are not meant to be Puritans,
but they are meant to be pure. The battle against fleshliness in all
its forms is a battle which has to be fought and won in every
Christian's life.

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