We are now in a position to understand more clearly the nature of prophecy. It announces estimates of the true worth of things which are not yet clearly realised. Jesus began His preaching by declaring the advent of whole classes of men-the meek, the poor, the persecuted-to consideration and power throughout the world, just as Cromwell brought to view the worth of the middle classes in England. He did not prescribe one form of political constitution rather than another; and historically the Christian religion is reconcilable with many forms of polity. For example, the conversion of India to Christianity, supposing it to be carried out, would not necessarily fit the peoples of India for self-government. And it is not certain that the Russian Government is mistaken in its extreme suspicion and hostility towards western ideas. The political element in Protestant forms of Church government makes the Protestant churches the allies of freedom in free countries. It is an interesting problem to enquire how far they are adapted to introduce the Christian religion to savage or to subject races. The missionary efforts of the present are not comparable in success to the conversion of the Franks, the Celts, the Teutons, the Slavs, by a church which spoke with the accents of dogmatic authority and offered a visible system of sacramental grace. And, on the other hand, the religious life among the Christianised negroes of North America falls far short of the hopes that missionary enterprise

suggests. Evangelical Protestantism speaks as man to man, and assumes, therefore, that a great part of its work has already been done for it. But there are peoples who need tutelage, and cannot walk alone. The constitution of the Roman Church, then, which is really the absolutism of a government like that of Russia translated into terms of religion, may be more suited to peoples which have not yet passed beyond the absolute form of government, and are still in the condition of tutelage. For before conscience can be paramount in the individual life it must already be realised in part in social institutions, and in most cases finds an external form in the opinion of the Christian society. It is questionable whether the converts to Christianity among savage races can enter upon the moral life without the support of this opinion as interpreted for them by a recognised and authoritative teacher.

What, then, is required for the conversion of India or of Africa is not merely the presentation of the Christian religion in the social and political guise in which it is adapted to the most civilised nations in the world, but the use of means which answer to and express the character of those to whom it is offered. Miss Kingsley has pointed out the danger of treating the natives of Africa from the standpoint of modern Europe.

1 I am not speaking now of dogma.

Note. For the subject-matter of this chapter, see Vaughan, Stones from the Quarry, Sermon V.

CHAPTER XI

ILLUMINATION AND PROGRESS

Metaphor in religious definitions-Legal metaphor supplemented by the mystics-Will, as natural process (i)-As more than natural process (ii)-Individual will and will of society-Self-culture a contradiction-Progress a social fact—Conversion and progress -Evangelical idea too narrow-Imitation of enthusiasm by spasmodic conversion-Sin inevitable-Detachment and solitude-Use of asceticism-Scientific knowledge and theological progress.

N

EARLY all the language of religious definition and description consists of metaphors, comparisons, thrown out at certain elusive and sometimes inscrutable experiences. The relation of the soul to God has been viewed mainly in two ways. The one way is to compare Him with There are many

light illumining an object. traces of this in the older Jewish literature; and when Jewish and Greek thought flowed together in one stream, the famous figure in the Republic of Plato, where the Idea of the Good is compared with the sun in the visible world, reinforced the language of the Jewish hymn-writers and seers. The other way is to view the relation between God and the soul through the analogies of the law court. God is either the judge or the prosecutor or the plaintiff, and the soul is the

prisoner at the bar. It is to the legal bent of the mind of St Paul that the forensic turn of so much Christian theology is due, and thousands of writers have occupied themselves in rabbinical disquisitions upon justification without contributing one new thought either to religion or to law. The reason is not far to seek. The soul stands over against God as a personality which is at the same time dependent. And theologians have been engaged on the impossible task of reducing all the intimacies which grow out of this relationship to a single type. The good citizen moves through life in a well-ordered state without entering the precincts of the law court, at any rate as a criminal. And theologians have treated the whole human race as if it were simply criminal, and nothing more. The same genius for law which built up the Roman code threw itself upon the analogous aspect of the religious life. It is worthy of notice that "the doctrines of reconciliation and justification are precisely those which have found their development exclusively in (the western) portion of the Church,"1 that is to say, in that part where Roman, as opposed to Greek, influences have prevailed. Again, it is precisely upon these doctrines that the first distinctly Protestant theology was directed. Even the kingdom of God becomes in the theology of Calvin a huge system of arbitrary police, of which the government of Geneva offered the earthly type.

1 Ritschl, History of Justification and Reconciliation, 21.

Compare with this monotonous harping on one string the celestial harmony of the parables of Jesus, in which mankind is figured as the husbandman in a field; the returning prodigal; the housewife looking for the lost coin; the seeker after hidden treasure; the petitioner of an unjust judge; while the more gloomy comparisons seem to have been directed not so much against the whole world as against the nation that rejected Him.

Mystical writers, by their comparisons, have supplemented and enriched the arid method of more formal theologians, and Ritschl fails to do them justice when he says that "the so-called mystical form of religious ideas is wont to rest upon the reduction of relations which pertain to the will, to the forms of a natural process." 1 The Song of Songs, with its glowing human passion, does not fall under Ritschl's condemnation, and it has been largely used by the mystics in their descriptions. God is portrayed by them under the form of a lover as worthily as under the form of a barrister at the criminal bar. And then as to the rest of Ritschl's statement, there is a twofold aspect of the will which requires to be brought out by two corresponding modes of expression. While the relations which pertain to the will must be capable of reduction to the forms of a natural process, this does not exhaust the meaning of "will." On the one side, the will is conditioned by, or rather enters into, a chain of cause and effect, and is thus

1 Ritschl, History of Justification and Reconciliation, 8.