with the third instead of the second Person of the Trinity, and
another distinguished Catholic apologist declare his indifference to
the “historical Jesus.” Within most of the Christian communions one
may believe anything or nothing, provided only that one does not
call too public an attention to one’s eccentricity. The late Rev.
Charles Voysey, for example, preached plainly in his church at
Healaugh against the divinity of Christ, unhindered. It was only
when he published his sermons under the provocative title of “The
Sling and the Stone,” and caused an outcry beyond the limits of his
congregation, that he was indicted and deprived.
Now the reasons why these men do not leave the ministry or
priesthood in which they find themselves are often very plausible.
It is probable that in very few cases is the retention of stipend or
incumbency a conscious dishonesty. At the worst it is mitigated by
thought for wife or child. It has only been during very exceptional
phases of religious development and controversy that beliefs have
been really sharp. A creed, like a coin, it may be argued, loses
little in practical value because it is worn, or bears the image of
a vanished king. The religious life is a reality that has clothed
itself in many garments, and the concern of the priest or minister
is with the religious life and not with the poor symbols that may
indeed pretend to express, but do as a matter of fact no more than
indicate, its direction. It is quite possible to maintain that the
church and not the creed is the real and valuable instrument of
religion, that the religious life is sustained not by its
propositions but by its routines. Anyone who seeks the intimate
discussion of spiritual things with professional divines, will find
this is the substance of the case for the ecclesiastical sceptic.
His church, he will admit, mumbles its statement of truth, but where
else is truth? What better formulae are to be found for ineffable
things? And meanwhile—he does good.
That may be a valid defence before a man finds God. But we who
profess the worship and fellowship of the living God deny that
religion is a matter of ineffable things. The way of God is plain
and simple and easy to understand.
Therewith the whole position of the conforming sceptic is changed.
If a professional religious has any justification at all for his
professionalism it is surely that he proclaims the nearness and
greatness of God. And these creeds and articles and orthodoxies are
not proclamations but curtains, they are a darkening and confusion
of what should be crystal clear. What compensatory good can a
priest pretend to do when his primary business is the truth and his
method a lie? The oaths and incidental conformities of men who wish
to serve God in the state are on a different footing altogether from
the falsehood and mischief of one who knows the true God and yet
recites to a trustful congregation, foists upon a trustful
congregation, a misleading and ill-phrased Levantine creed.
Such is the line of thought which will impose the renunciation of
his temporalities and a complete cessation of services upon every
ordained priest and minister as his first act of faith. Once that
he has truly realised God, it becomes impossible for him ever to
repeat his creed again. His course seems plain and clear. It
becomes him to stand up before the flock he has led in error, and to
proclaim the being and nature of the one true God. He must be
explicit to the utmost of his powers. Then he may await his
expulsion. It may be doubted whether it is sufficient for him to go
away silently, making false excuses or none at all for his retreat.
He has to atone for the implicit acquiescences of his conforming
years.
10. THE UNIVERSALISM OF GOD
Are any sorts of people shut off as if by inherent necessity from
God?
This is, so to speak, one of the standing questions of theology; it
reappears with slight changes of form at every period of religious
interest, it is for example the chief issue between the Arminian and
the Calvinist. From its very opening proposition modern religion
sweeps past and far ahead of the old Arminian teachings of Wesleyans
and Methodists, in its insistence upon the entirely finite nature of
God. Arminians seem merely to have insisted that God has
conditioned himself, and by his own free act left men free to accept
or reject salvation. To the realist type of mind—here as always I
use “realist” in its proper sense as the opposite of nominalist—to
the old-fashioned, over-exact and over-accentuating type of mind,
such ways of thinking seem vague and unsatisfying. Just as it
distresses the more downright kind of intelligence with a feeling of
disloyalty to admit that God is not Almighty, so it troubles the
same sort of intelligence to hear that there is no clear line to be
drawn between the saved and the lost. Realists like an exclusive
flavour in their faith. Moreover, it is a natural weakness of
humanity to be forced into extreme positions by argument. It is
probable, as I have already suggested, that the absolute attributes
of God were forced upon Christianity under the stresses of
propaganda, and it is probable that the theory of a super-human
obstinancy beyond salvation arose out of the irritations natural to
theological debate. It is but a step from the realisation that
there are people absolutely unable or absolutely unwilling to see
God as we see him, to the conviction that they are therefore shut
off from God by an invincible soul blindness.
It is very easy to believe that other people are essentially damned.
Beyond the little world of our sympathies and comprehension there
are those who seem inaccessible to God by any means within our
experience. They are people answering to the “hard-hearted,” to the
“stiff-necked generation” of the Hebrew prophets. They betray and
even confess to standards that seem hopelessly base to us. They
show themselves incapable of any disinterested enthusiasm for beauty
or truth or goodness. They are altogether remote from intelligent
sacrifice. To every test they betray vileness of texture; they are
mean, cold, wicked. There are people who seem to cheat with a
private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel
things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and
for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize
upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to
torment it on the altars of some joyless vice. We cannot do with
such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to
step from that persuasion to the belief that God has no use for
them.
And besides these base people there are the stupid people and the
people with minds so poor in texture that they cannot even grasp the
few broad and simple ideas that seem necessary to the salvation we
experience, who lapse helplessly into fetishistic and fearful
conceptions of God, and are apparently quite incapable of
distinguishing between what is practically and what is spiritually
good.
It is an easy thing to conclude that the only way to God is our way
to God, that he is the privilege of a finer and better sort to which
we of course belong; that he is no more the God of the card-sharper
or the pickpocket or the “smart” woman or the loan-monger or the
village oaf than he is of the swine in the sty. But are we
justified in thus limiting God to the measure of our moral and
intellectual understandings? Because some people seem to me
steadfastly and consistently base or hopelessly and incurably dull
and confused, does it follow that there are not phases, albeit I
have never chanced to see them, of exaltation in the one case and
illumination in the other? And may I not be a little restricting my
perception of Good? While I have been ready enough to pronounce
this or that person as being, so far as I was concerned, thoroughly
damnable or utterly dull, I find a curious reluctance to admit the
general proposition which is necessary for these instances. It is
possible that the difference between Arminian and Calvinist is a
difference of essential intellectual temperament rather than of
theoretical conviction. I am temperamentally Arminian as I am
temperamentally Nominalist. I feel that it must be in the nature of
God to attempt all souls. There must be accessibilities I can only
suspect, and accessibilities of which I know nothing.
Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way. If you
think, as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and
damned, then I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other
people can be damned. But that is not to believe that there are
people damned at the outset by their moral and intellectual