that ultimately Man, being redeemed and led by Christ and saved from
death by him, would be reconciled with God the Father.* And this
great adventurer out of the hearts of man that we here call God,
they would present as the same with that teacher from Galilee who
was crucified at Jerusalem.
* This probably was the conception of Spinoza. Christ for him is
the wisdom of God manifested in all things, and chiefly in the mind
of man. Through him we reach the blessedness of an intuitive
knowledge of God. Salvation is an escape from the “inadequate”
ideas of the mortal human personality to the “adequate” and timeless
ideas of God.
Now we of the modern way would offer the following criticisms upon
this apparent compromise between our faith and the current religion.
Firstly, we do not presume to theorise about the nature of the
veiled being nor about that being’s relations to God and to Life.
We do not recognise any consistent sympathetic possibilities between
these outer beings and our God. Our God is, we feel, like
Prometheus, a rebel. He is unfilial. And the accepted figure of
Jesus, instinct with meek submission, is not in the tone of our
worship. It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by
fighting. Incidentally our God dies a million deaths, but the thing
that matters is not the deaths but the immortality. It may be he
cannot escape in this person or that person being nailed to a cross
or chained to be torn by vultures on a rock. These may be necessary
sufferings, like hunger and thirst in a campaign; they do not in
themselves bring victory. They may be necessary, but they are not
glorious. The symbol of the crucifixion, the drooping, pain-drenched figure of Christ, the sorrowful cry to his Father, “My God,
my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” these things jar with our
spirit. We little men may well fail and repent, but it is our faith
that our God does not fail us nor himself. We cannot accept the
Christian’s crucifix, or pray to a pitiful God. We cannot accept
the Resurrection as though it were an after-thought to a bitterly
felt death. Our crucifix, if you must have a crucifix, would show
God with a hand or a foot already torn away from its nail, and with
eyes not downcast but resolute against the sky; a face without pain,
pain lost and forgotten in the surpassing glory of the struggle and
the inflexible will to live and prevail… .
But we do not care how long the thorns are drawn, nor how terrible
the wounds, so long as he does not droop. God is courage. God is
courage beyond any conceivable suffering.
But when all this has been said, it is well to add that it concerns
the figure of Christ only in so far as that professes to be the
figure of God, and the crucifix only so far as that stands for
divine action. The figure of Christ crucified, so soon as we think
of it as being no more than the tragic memorial of Jesus, of the man
who proclaimed the loving-kindness of God and the supremacy of God’s
kingdom over the individual life, and who, in the extreme agony of
his pain and exhaustion, cried out that he was deserted, becomes
something altogether distinct from a theological symbol.
Immediately that we cease to worship, we can begin to love and pity.
Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great
courage, of the utmost tolerance and the subtlest sympathy, a saint
of non-resistance… .
We of the new faith repudiate the teaching of non-resistance. We
are the militant followers of and participators in a militant God.
We can appreciate and admire the greatness of Christ, this gentle
being upon whose nobility the theologians trade. But submission is
the remotest quality of all from our God, and a moribund figure is
the completest inversion of his likeness as we know him. A
Christianity which shows, for its daily symbol, Christ risen and
trampling victoriously upon a broken cross, would be far more in the
spirit of our worship.*
* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter
written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinacious
correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost exactly the same
sentiments I have here expressed. “If I could fill the Crucifix
with life as you do,” he says, “I would gladly look on it, but the
fallen Head and the closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of
glorified humanity. The Christ to whom we are led is One who ‘hath
been crucified,’ who hath passed the trial victoriously and borne
the fruits to heaven. I dare not then rest on this side of the
glory.”
I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit
in a tract, “The Call of the Kingdom,” by that very able and subtle,
Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the
vitalising stresses of the war we are winning “faith in Christ as an
heroic leader. We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle
that there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which
His disciple had of Him: ‘His head and His hair were white, as white
wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire: and His
feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a
furnace; and His voice was as the voice of many waters. And He had
in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a
sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in
its strength.’”
These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how
clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.
4. THE PRIMARY DUTIES
Now it follows very directly from the conception of God as a finite
intelligence of boundless courage and limitless possibilities of
growth and victory, who has pitted himself against death, who stands
close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and use us, to rescue
us from the chagrins of egotism and take us into his immortal
adventure, that we who have realised him and given ourselves
joyfully to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to give our
energies to the task we share with him, to do our utmost to increase
knowledge, to increase order and clearness, to fight against
indolence, waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of his and
our enemy, death, first and chiefest in ourselves but also in all
mankind, and to bring about the establishment of his real and
visible kingdom throughout the world.
And that idea of God as the Invisible King of the whole world means
not merely that God is to be made and declared the head of the
world, but that the kingdom of God is to be present throughout the
whole fabric of the world, that the Kingdom of God is to be in the
teaching at the village school, in the planning of the railway
siding of the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at the
building of the workman’s house. It means that ultimately no effigy
of intrusive king or emperor is to disfigure our coins and stamps
any more; God himself and no delegate is to be represented wherever
men buy or sell, on our letters and our receipts, a perpetual
witness, a perpetual reminder. There is no act altogether without
significance, no power so humble that it may not be used for or
against God, no life but can orient itself to him. To realise God
in one’s heart is to be filled with the desire to serve him, and the
way of his service is neither to pull up one’s life by the roots nor
to continue it in all its essentials unchanged, but to turn it
about, to turn everything that there is in it round into his way.
The outward duty of those who serve God must vary greatly with the
abilities they possess and the positions in which they find
themselves, but for all there are certain fundamental duties; a
constant attempt to be utterly truthful with oneself, a constant
sedulousness to keep oneself fit and bright for God’s service, and
to increase one’s knowledge and powers, and a hidden persistent
watchfulness of one’s baser motives, a watch against fear and
indolence, against vanity, against greed and lust, against envy,
malice, and uncharitableness. To have found God truly does in
itself make God’s service one’s essential motive, but these evils
lurk in the shadows, in the lassitudes and unwary moments. No one
escapes them altogether, there is no need for tragic moods on
account of imperfections. We can no more serve God without blunders
and set-backs than we can win battles without losing men. But the