Part 5 (1/2)

+The increasing Atonement.+--But the Atonement to be effective has to be repeated on the altar of human hearts, and so it is, to a far greater extent than most people stop to think. The same spirit that was in Jesus and governed His whole career was the spirit of the true humanity, ”The light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The spirit of Jesus was the spirit of Christ, the ideal or divine manhood as it exists eternally in G.o.d. But that ideal or divine manhood, that Christ nature, is also potentially present in every human being. What needs to be done is to get it manifested or brought forth into conscious activity. The immediate effect of the life and death of Jesus upon His followers was to make them more or less like Him, and to fill them with a similar desire to get men to live the life of love which is the life of G.o.d. They felt themselves inspired by the same spirit, the Holy Spirit of truth and love, and exalted above all fear for their own safety and all desire to live for themselves alone. They loved their Lord so much that their lives became one with His in the work of saving the world. They could see no difference between serving their Master and serving mankind. This love force of theirs, this intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, the redeeming thing in the life of mankind. There is not and never has been any other Atonement.

The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, and transforming human desires in accordance with the eternal truth of things, is the spirit of self-sacrificing love. It is but a step from sinner to saviour. To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. To escape from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to become a power in the hand of G.o.d for the uplifting and ingathering of mankind to Himself; this is the Atonement.

Ask yourself whether this is not so. What other force for good is there in the world to-day than the spirit which governed the whole life of Jesus and rendered Him willing to brave the worst that evil could do in His desire to get men to realise the true life? There is no other.

If you want to see the Atonement at work, go wherever love is ministering to human necessity and you see the very same spirit which was in Jesus, the spirit which heals and saves. Dogma is doing nothing to save the world; the gospel of self-sacrifice is doing everything.

Show me a Christlike life and I will show you a part of the Atonement of Christ. Show me a n.o.ble deed and I will show you something worthy of Jesus. His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke in human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a c.u.mulative a.s.sertion that in the presence of need love can never do anything other than give itself until the need is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a possibility of subst.i.tution here. Vicarious suffering willingly accepted becomes irresistible in the long run as a means of lifting a transgressor out of the mire of selfishness. Many a n.o.ble wife has saved her husband by remaining at his side and patiently accepting the disabilities caused by his wrong-doing. It is even possible in such a case for the saviour to bear more than the sinner, and for the sinner to be relieved of some of the consequences of his sin; he would have to suffer more if there were no loving helper to stand by him. But to speak of one as bearing another's punishment is untrue; such a thing cannot be. All that love can do is to share to the uttermost in the painful consequences of sin and by so doing break their power What other Atonement is needed than this? It requires no defence, and a child could understand it. Everyone already believes in it, whether he stops to think about it or not. While I am writing these words a fierce storm is raging outside. This is the second day we have had of it, and there seems likely to be some loss of life on the dangerous rocks outside the bar which forms the entrance to the bay below. A visitor has just been telling me of a wilder storm in this same bay some years ago, and of which he says to-day's gale reminds him. On that previous occasion three s.h.i.+ps were wrecked together within a few yards of this house. It must have been a dreadful, awe-inspiring scene. No boat could live on the surf, so every survivor had to be dragged ash.o.r.e with ropes fastened to the cliffs and hauled by willing hands. Hundreds of townspeople and fisher folk came pouring over from St. Ives and all the hamlets round about in order to take part in the work of rescue. According to my informant the scene was enough to stir any heart, and even grown men were crying with excitement and compa.s.sion as some of the poor fellows in the rigging of the doomed vessels were washed away before they could be got ash.o.r.e. The few who were actually s.n.a.t.c.hed from the jaws of death found no lack of willing helpers as one by one they were pa.s.sed insensible into the kind keeping of the many who stood waiting for an opportunity to be of service. No one grudged anything; every home and every bed would have been cheerfully placed at the disposal of the s.h.i.+pwrecked mariners if they had been wanted. Brave women, the wives and daughters of men who were risking their lives on the sea every day, willingly encouraged their husbands and sons in battling against the tempest in the endeavour to save other husbands and sons whom they had never seen or heard of until that hour of distress and need. And what a fight it was to be sure!

Never was a braver. Again and again these humble Cornish heroes dashed into the raging billows to grasp and guide the ropes that bore a flickering human life, and every time they returned with their helpless burden a cheer went up from the watchers that drowned for a moment the violence of the blast. No one thought of enquiring into the theology of saviours or survivors. No doubt there were some among the former who were oftener to be found at the public-house bar than at church, but no one could have distinguished them from the orthodox Christians who fought the waves shoulder to shoulder beside them; they were there to save life, and in doing so their deeper manhood shone out with divine splendour. But the most of the rescuers were good sound, earnest Methodists who perhaps believed, or thought they believed, in the eternal d.a.m.nation of the unregenerate. But what became of their doctrine in the face of an urgent human need and the call for self-sacrifice to supply that need? It was utterly forgotten. There is both humour and pathos in the fact that these convinced believers tugged and tore at the ropes, and freely jeopardised their own lives in a magnificent endeavour to save peris.h.i.+ng bodies from temporal water.

There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life and the recognition that the G.o.dlike thing is to seek to deliver life from the clutch of death.

+All men instinctively believe in the Atonement.+--This is the deepest and truest impulse of the human heart, as all men already know if they would only trust their better nature to tell them what G.o.d wants from his children. Here is an explosion in a coal-mine, and forthwith every mother's son above ground volunteers to go down into the choke-damp to s.n.a.t.c.h his buried comrades from the sleep of death. A few months ago one such disaster took place in a Durham colliery. Most of my readers will remember that in the newspaper reports of the incidents that took place at the pit mouth were the following: A father who was brought to the surface was asked whether he lost hope during the long hours of his imprisonment below without food or light. ”No,” was the reply, ”for I knew my boy would be in the rescue party, and that nothing would turn him back until he found his father, dead or alive.” The suffragan bishop of the diocese, along with a number of other clergymen and nonconformist ministers, remained all night amid the scene of sorrow at the pit mouth, doing his best to comfort the mourners as their loved ones were brought up dead. As morning broke he mounted a heap of cinders and, without making any attempt to conceal his emotion, spoke a few manly words of brotherly exhortation and Christian love to his deeply moved congregation of toilers and sufferers. One poor woman, with unconscious irony, exclaimed to the bystanders: ”He doesn't seem like a bishop! He is just like one of ourselves.” That servant of G.o.d has never preached the Atonement more effectually in all his life--by getting together of man and man, and man and G.o.d, through the spirit of self-sacrifice. He stands in the true apostolic succession, the succession of men like Saul of Tarsus, the erstwhile persecutor, who, under the inspiration of the love of Jesus, lived to say, ”Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?”

Go into any home where the spirit of self-sacrificing love is trying to do anything to supply a need or save a transgressor, and you see the Atonement. Follow that Salvation la.s.sie to the slums, and listen to her as she tries to persuade a drunken husband and father to give up the soul-destroying habit which is such a curse to wife and child, and you see the Atonement. Go with J. Keir Hardie to the House of Commons and listen to his pleading for justice to his order and you see the Atonement. Hear the prayer of mother-love for the erring, wandering son, and you have the Atonement. See that grey-haired father patiently pleading with selfish, hot-headed youth, or yielding up his own hard-won possessions to pay the gambler's debts and save the family name, and you have the Atonement. Nothing can stir the human heart so much. All the great deeds of history derived their inspiration from it; all the little heroisms of our common everyday life are the declaration of it. There is not a single one of all our thoughts and activities but has some relation to it; we are either living for ourselves individually and separately or we are living for the whole.

If the former, we are the servants of sin; if the latter, our lives are already part of the Atonement.

+Jesus and the Atonement.+--It is easy to see how much the world owes to Jesus in this regard. I cannot tell what the world might have been if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own, the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become sacrifice, the life of Atonement. In a sinful world that life had to come to a Calvary, but in so doing in refusing to s.h.i.+eld and save itself it became the greatest moral power and the greatest revelation of G.o.d that the world has ever known. What we succeed in doing some of the time, Jesus did all the time; when all men are able to do it all the time the Atonement will have become complete and love divine shall be all in all. ”Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!” cried Julian the apostate; and Christian faith can reverently add--

”Jesus is worthy to receive Honour and power divine; And blessings more than we can give Be, Lord, forever thine.”

Faith in Jesus is faith in the Atonement and faith in our own Christhood. It means the upraising of the true life, the eternal life, within our own souls. Until His spirit becomes our spirit, His Atonement has done nothing for us, and when it does we, like Him, become saviours of the race. It must be so, for the spirit of love is the same both in G.o.d and man; in the presence of need, no matter what the need may be, that spirit must continue to give itself without stint until the need is supplied and all that would tend to separate between the individual soul and the eternal perfect whole is done away.

But then, someone will say, what has the death of Jesus effected in the unseen so as to make it possible for G.o.d to forgive us? Nothing whatever, and nothing was ever needed. G.o.d is not a fiend but a Father, the source and sustenance of our being and the goal of all our aspirations. Why should we require to be saved from Him?

+Divine satisfaction in Atonement.+--But in what sense is the death of Jesus a satisfaction to the Father? In no sense at all, except that the sacrifice of Jesus is the highest expression of the innermost of G.o.d that has ever been made. If it affords an artist satisfaction to express himself in a beautiful picture, or a great thinker to express his n.o.ble thought in a book, surely the highest satisfaction that G.o.d can know must be his self-expression in the self-sacrifice of his children. At its best, the intensest joy that can be known is the joy of giving one's self for the good of the whole. In everything grand and good in human thought and achievement G.o.d is doing just this. It is the satisfaction he receives from the Atonement and the only one.

CHAPTER XI

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

+Atonement and New Testament language.+--It will have been observed that in my examination of the subject of the Atonement I have said almost nothing about the New Testament evidence for the doctrine.

This, I admit, is an entire departure from the method usually followed by those who write upon it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my whole argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for I am convinced that New Testament language about the Atonement, especially the language of St. Paul, has been, and still is, the prolific source of most of the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist in the religious mind. To an extent this is the same with the Old Testament, but to a far less degree, for the language of the Old Testament is only liable to misapprehension when interpreted by the New. In a previous chapter I have endeavoured to show the imperishable truths which underlie Old Testament symbolism in regard to the Atonement, and I trust I have shown that these truths are as fresh and indispensable to-day, and play as great a part in human affairs as they ever did.

But before I proceed to say anything about the New Testament symbolism, which has been largely derived from the Old, let us consider the question of the authority of scripture as a whole.

+Tendency to bow to external authority.+--There is always a tendency in the ordinary mind to rely upon some form of external authority in religious as in other matters. With one man it is the authority of an infallible church; with another the authority of an infallible book; with another the authority of some infallible statement of belief which ought to hold good for all time, but never does. At the best, external authority is only a crutch, and at the worst it may become a rigid fetter upon the expanding soul. The true seat of authority is within, not without, the human soul. We are so const.i.tuted as to be able to recognise, little by little, the truth of G.o.d as it comes to us. It may come from any one of a thousand different quarters, but to be recognised and felt as truth it must awaken an echo within the individual soul. If it does not awaken such a response, it is of no effect so far as the growth of the soul is concerned. What is true in this book will not be received as true by the readers merely because I say it, but because they feel it to be true and cannot get away from it. Why should we be afraid of trusting the human soul to recognise and respond to its own truth? All truth is one, and all earnest truth-seekers are converging upon one goal. It is the divine self within everyone of us which enables us to discern the truth best fitted to our needs, and this divine self is, as has already been pointed out, fundamentally one with the source of all truth, which is G.o.d.

If men could only come to see this more clearly and to trust their own divine nature to enable them to follow and express the truth as well as to receive it, they would not suffer themselves to be hampered by formal and literal statements of belief whether in the church, the Bible, or anywhere else. But this is what they seldom do. Your devout Anglican or Roman Catholic will tell you that the church teaches this or the church teaches that: as though that fact ever permanently settled anything. One cannot really begin to appreciate the value of united continuous church testimony until one is able to stand apart from it, so to speak, and ask whether it rings true to the reason and the moral sense. Suppose the Christian church enjoined or permitted rape and murder, would the devout Catholic believe and obey? ”But it is inconceivable that the church could ever do that,” he might answer.

Yes, but suppose it did, would he obey? If not, why not? He would not obey because he would know quite well that the higher law within his heart would forbid and render impossible any such obedience. That is all the answer I want. Why should we not apply it all the way round?

The real test of truth is to be found in the response it awakens within the soul.

+The supposed authority of the letter a great hindrance to truth.+--Now one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of the letter of scripture. When a good man hears some inspiring or common-sense statement of truth,--for instance, that of universal salvation,--he often replies in some such way as the following: ”Yes, I know it seems very plausible, and my heart desires to believe it; but then, you know, it says in the scripture, 'These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' I cannot get behind that.” He will go on stringing together, pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage, often without the slightest suspicion that the original meaning had nothing whatever to do with the subject under discussion; as, for example, that well-known sentence in Ezekiel, ”The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” Whatever Ezekiel originally meant by that saying,--and it is well worth examination,--he was not thinking of a modern revival meeting. The plain, average, level-headed business man of religious temperament will sometimes bother himself in this way until he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The letter of scripture often seems to say one thing and the Christlike human heart another. Take, as one example out of many, that pungent pa.s.sage in Psalm cx.x.xvii, ”Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” That pa.s.sage does not breathe the spirit of Jesus, nor is it true to the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus wants to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even to do justice to a pa.s.sage of this kind we have to get into intellectual and moral sympathy with the man who wrote it. It was written by one of the poor Jewish prisoners carried away captive into Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar six centuries or more before Jesus was born. Try and picture the scene. Across eight hundred miles of desert that melancholy procession winds its way, leaving the highland home behind and going into slavery in the cruel city of the plain. One by one the weakest fall and die; and where a baby is left without a mother, or the mother cannot walk with the weight of the helpless child, the cruel Babylonian ruffians riding at the side will s.n.a.t.c.h it from the anguished bosom and dash its brains out against the rocks. Should we be likely to forget that if we had ever formed part of such a procession of prisoners of war? Hence when Psalm cx.x.xvii came to be written by some poor suffering father who had lost maybe both wife and child, he gave vent to his feelings in one of the most plaintive patriotic songs ever sung:--

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down--yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.... O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones!

One can feel deep sympathy with this unknown poet and his suffering people without adopting the absurd view that this pa.s.sage represents G.o.d's word to our souls. It is a cry of suffering mingled with a desire for vengeance, and that is all. But when a preacher declares that he takes his stand and bases his gospel on the infallible Book, he is either a fool or--a rhetorician.

+Belief in the infallible Book impossible.+--There are many good people who maintain that they believe the Bible from cover to cover, and they seem to think that this is something to be proud of. But they credit themselves with an impossible feat; no one can believe contradictions, in the sense of accepting them, whether intellectual or moral. The very same people who will read with unction the most sanguinary exhortations from scripture are usually people who themselves would not hurt a fly. The Bible is not like a parliamentary blue book, an exact and literal statement of facts; it represents for the most part what earnest men belonging to a particular nationality in a bygone age thought about life in relation to G.o.d. Many good people talk as though the Bible were written by the finger of G.o.d Himself and let down from heaven; on the other hand there are those who think that when they have shown the inconsistencies of scripture, they have destroyed its value.

But they are both mistaken. The Bible is not one book, but a collection of books, a slow growth extending over centuries. It has come to be reverenced not because of any supernormal attestations of its authority, but because we have found it helps us more than any other book. The fact that the best part of it was written by good and serious men, men who were living for the highest they were able to see, does not necessarily give binding authority to the opinions of these men. I question whether we should ever have heard of the Old Testament if it had not been for Jesus, and the New is only a statement of what some good men thought about Jesus and his gospel at the beginning of Christian history. Jesus knew and loved the Old Testament scriptures, but whenever He found a statement therein that jarred upon His moral sense, He rejected it in the name of the higher truth declared by the Spirit of Truth within His own soul: ”Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause”--and even ”without a cause”

seems to have been interpolated in later days--”shall be in danger of the judgment.” ”Again ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. But I say unto you, Swear not at all, neither by the heavens, for it is G.o.d's throne, nor by the earth, for it is His footstool. Let your communication be Yea, yea, nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” ”Ye hath heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thine neighbour and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.” Jesus knew what He was doing. In all these instances He was quoting from the Old Testament, and deliberately superseding in the name of truth certain prescriptions of the very law which He said He had come to fulfil. Everyone was taken by surprise at His daring to do this. Matthew vii. 28, 29, says, ”And it came to pa.s.s, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one having (in Himself) authority, and not as the scribes.” No doubt some people would say to-day that this authority came from His G.o.dhead. But the people on the hillsides of Galilee knew nothing about the G.o.dhead of Jesus. To them He was a heaven-sent teacher, a great and inspiring master, whose words carried weight. His authority, therefore, must have been self-evident in contradistinction to that of the scribes, who always began their discourses by saying, ”It is written.” They never seem to have thought of appealing to anything else than the authority of the letter. But we see that Jesus, notwithstanding His reverence for the scripture, handled it with perfect freedom. His authority was that of the Spirit of G.o.d speaking within His own soul, the only authority that has ever mattered in the history of religious thought.

He did not deny the authority of Scripture, but He claimed to be able to see when it rang true to His own inner experience and when it did not.