Sides of the Almighty, of the Invisible, the Eternal-aspects inconceivable to man-never could be revealed through man's nature. God overlaps Jesus. "My Father," he says, "is greater than I."'1 'I call your attention to the way in which our Lord spoke of and described His own Divinity. So very different is it, I think, from the language of the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds. . . . Take Christ's words simply without preconceived definitions, and they explain themselves; nay, they need no explanation. He is in the Father: yes, as representing man before God. The Father is in Him: yes, when He reveals God to man.' 2 ""Christ and Him crucified," that was to be the beginning and the end; or, in other words, Paul's text was the life and death of One outwardly humiliated (crucified), yet who towered into Deity by the force of righteousness and the majesty of love! That was to be a parable for all time. There was to be found an imperium in imperio -the Christian Church; its life the open secret of the cross, "Victory by the life within." Yes, evermore this and only this-Jesus Christ and Him crucified.' 3 'The Buddha had touched his highest spiritual level when he abolished sacrifice, and taught that remission of sin was without shedding of blood. It was a point reached in moments by the spiritual Jew also, but it was never adopted as a sound and orthodox doctrine. On the one side stood the Priests and Levites, and the ceremonial law with its bloody sacrifices by which they lived. On the other side stood the seer and singer, prophet and psalmist, David and Isaiah, before whose inspired gaze the formal sacrifices vanished away, leaving nothing but the pure Buddhist doctrine behind them. "Sacrifice and burnt offering and offering for sin hast thou not required ; then said I, Lo, I come to do Thy Will, O God." It was a glimpse, like most of our inspired moments, no sooner reached than lost.' 'He who came to lift the world out of this very notion that any sacrifice but that of the heart was demanded by God, to teach men that purely spiritual conception of sacrifice, of which, first, the barbarous holocaust, and second, the blood of goats and calves, were the carnal symbols, even He has been confounded in that loving sacrifice of Himself with the vicarious victim of the carnally-minded Jewish theologian. We can now see what Paul had to contend with. We can almost sympathize with the extent to which he uses the sacrificial language of accommodation. First, there was the Substitution Theory of the carnal Jewish Christian. Secondly, there was the theory of the enlightened Gentile Christian-Paul's own; and, lastly, there is the Appropriation Theory, also grandly emphasized by St. Paul, and quite indispensable to the effective religion of Jew and Gentile alike. The Substitution Theory is absolutely false. The Representation Theory is absolutely true. It was taught by Christ when He called Himself the Son of Man-" one who stands where we stand; for as 1 The Picture of Jesus, 11-14. 2 Ibid. 179, 180. He is, so are we in this world." He has done for us in our human nature what each is bound to do. Even as He washed the disciples' feet "for us" as our Example, not "instead of us." And, lastly, there is the Appropriation Theory of Sacrifice; absolutely true. His death was as representative as His life, and both can only avail us in so far as both are absorbed, appropriated by us in act or in aspiration.' We feel that we owe our readers an apology for occupying their time with quotations like these. It is not that Mr. Haweis is a formidable heretic. He seems incapable of understanding the responsibilities of intelligible speech, not to mention the obligations of his own position. If we were speaking to a man for whom the language of common men appeared to have a meaning, we should say to him: You refuse to define further. But you have defined further when you solemnly made your assent to the creeds of the Church; and you renew that assent every time that you repeat them before your God and His congregation. The Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, which you here contrast with the teaching of Christ, you have adopted as the utterance of your belief far more solemnly and deliberately than these random, half-considered sentences which drop from you. That theory of the pre-natal union of the divine and human in Christ which you depreciate as accepted only by those who can also adopt a belief on future punishment which you regard as utterly untrue, has been solemnly accepted by yourself. There are sects and schools of thought about you which hold the theory that you prefer; but you leave them to fight the battle of your faith alone, and class yourself among their foes when you are their friend. 1 Picture of Paul, 261-66. It is hardly necessary to remind readers acquainted with Mr. McLeod Campbell's masterly book on the Atonement that Mr. Haweis's analysis of the possible views of the doctrine of sacrifice is wholly imperfect. It is possible to reject as strongly as he does the doctrine of Substitution, and yet not so to contradict all the history of religion, not to speak of the obligations of Christian belief, as to consider Buddhism, which has no sacrifice because it has no God, to be the highest expression of truth upon the point. We can believe in God's absolute power and will to forgive sins, and at the same time hold that, in order to make this forgiveness available for men, they must have that abhorrence of the evil of sin, and that strong adherence to God which shall enable Him to reverse what sin has wrought in their nature. And we can believe that the Lord Jesus furnishes for man before God what man unaided proves unable to provide for himself, namely, the hatred of sin and adherence to God, which are the essential elements of perfect repentance and make God's forgiveness available. Through union with the Son of Man sinners become partakers of this perfect repentance, which removes the impediment that bars their return to a forgiving and a loving Father. Buddhism leaves the soul without a help which it cannot dispense with so long as its feeling of sin and separation from God is more than a name. We know what Mr. Haweis would answer to this: 'All religious reformers are obliged to act as Paul acted when he shaved his head at Cenchrea because he had a vow, or refused to eat meat offered to idols. A burden become intolerable can only be lifted by being borne patiently for a time without abatement or reserve.' St. Paul, we need not say, was on these occasions doing something perfectly voluntary and entirely conscientious. But that does not hinder our perception of Mr. Haweis's intimation that he himself is bearing a burden which has become intolerable. We do not comprehend any reason why he should not shake himself free of it whenever he pleases. If any one were to trouble himself to indict Mr. Haweis before a court for some of these utterances, we can quite well imagine his counsel pleading successfully for him that there is not one of his contradictions either of the creeds or the scriptures which is roundly stated without alternatives or verbal ambiguities, or licence given to believe if you like. But that this sort of thing should be presented to us in the name of superior truthfulness is truly grotesque. Could any mind, except that of Mr. Haweis himself, fail to notice the ambiguity of his primary statement of the nature of the revelation in the person of our Lord? In Him, it seems, the human side of God is revealed so far as we are able to grasp it, and we must not define further. Now God is revealed in His works, as speaks St. Paul: 'that which may be known of God is clearly seen, being understood by the things which are made.' Is it then as a peculiarly excellent creation of God that the Person of Christ reveals Him? For, if so, this kind of revelation furnishes no warrant for worshipping the instrument of revelation. St. Paul, a very few verses afterwards, denounces the heathen for worshipping those very creatures by which he has just said God may be known. In which of these two ways does Christ reveal God? And if we could conceive any one in genuine spiritual difficulty seeking counsel of Mr. Haweis, he would demand, but demand in vain, an answer to this primary question of the soul: Can I come in contact with Christ as a real ever-present being here and now? He says, 'Believe in God, believe also in Me. Lo, I am with you alway.' His apostles and saints and His whole Church from then till now respond by praying to Him, trusting Him, living in Him as one in whom God is revealed, not because He is God's creature, but because he is God. And when Mr. Haweis is asked whether this faith has foundation or has 1 The Story of the Four, 63. none, he answers, I refuse to define. What kind of persons can be satisfied with this species of fencing we do not know, but we are sure they will not be the persons who demand plain speaking and clear thinking either in science or life or religion. The treatment which miracles receive from Mr. Haweis is just what we might expect. We have permission to believe in the ordinary view which Christian people hold—that we have in them examples of the exercise of the will of God not more direct nor yet more powerful than those which meet us in His constant work in the world, but to our eyes of a different outward character from the ordinary, and therefore leading us more directly to Him. If you are satisfied with the divine fiat theory,' remarks Mr. Haweis, 'I have nothing to say.' But in every particular miracle which he mentions we are furnished with a natural explanation, which we are pretty clearly invited to adopt. In the narrative of Luke iii. 3-23 'the student of history sees nothing unusual or necessarily unhistorical. Even the shining dove and the heavenly voice need not disturb us, since most persons gifted with common sense, following St. Jerome and Theodoret, explain that we need suppose nothing more than a light—probably a sunbeam-through a cloud, which to the spiritual eye was the holy dove, and a peal of thunder from the cloud, which to the spiritual ear was the heavenly voice.' 2 Therefore we clearly understand that if there had been a literally miraculous appearance, the incident would have been necessarily unhistorical.' Of the turning of the water into wine a natural explanation is suggested, this to wit, that in our Lord's command, ‘Fill the water-pots with water,' we have only to leave out the words with water, and understand that He filled them with wine, which with a loving thoughtfulness He had brought and kept outside.3 The feeble body of the palsied man may have been mesmerically restored by the 'virtue,' as Jesus called it-perchance magnetic emanations, which at times. Jesus said He felt streaming out of Him. And so in like manner of the casting out of devils—such cases are familiar to all students of mesmerism and spiritualism.1 was natural that the dear people who took Saul into their 1 The Picture of Jesus, 56. It 2 Ibid. 30. What St. Jerome and Theodoret say is really something quite different, viz. that the vision of the dove was granted to St. John's spiritual sight, like the visions of the prophets.-Meyer, Kommenter, vol. i. p. 106. 4 Ibid. 67, 68. 3 Ibid. 59. houses should speak to him of sending for Ananias: is it wonderful that upon their doing so he should dream that Ananias came in? It was natural, on the other hand, that Christians should speak to Ananias about Saul, and that he in turn should have his vision marking out Saul as the next person on whom he was to exercise his beneficent mesmeric, magnetic power. Both Elymas and Paul were what we should call temperamentally mediumistic.2 In the night of St. Paul's imprisonment at Philippi, 'one of those volcanic upheavals which during the first and second centuries visited the bed of the Mediterranean, shook the prison where Paul and Silas sang, and burst open the prison doors. In the confusion, chains, stocks, cells, furniture, prisoners, everything seems to have got mixed and shaken up. . . . Paul behaves with the exact balance and propriety of a perfect gentleman.'3 'That principle of order, "proportion of faith," striking good sense, arrangement of "gifts" and "graces," that control over the "Prince of the Power of the Air," is just what separated Paul from those who were physically mediumistic like himself, akin to him temperamentally, but far as the Poles (sic) apart from him spiritually.' And so on and so on. 4 But the most painful example of Mr. Haweis's treatment of the miraculous is found in the Resurrection. We are told that there are ten discrepancies-irreconcilable statements— in the accounts of the Lord's reappearance, an assertion which certainly would not have been made if we had been intended to receive literally the proposition which follows, namely, that the fact of His reappearance is certain. Accordingly we speedily find the question raised—what does that certainty amount to? The answer is, 'Why may he not have "reappeared" in accordance with some occult law of human nature, as a Son of Man, even as others are said upon evidence at least as strong to have reappeared?' 'No one who has even a rudimentary acquaintance with the annals of the Catholic Church in the past, or with what is called psychical research in the present, can fail to have noticed that the evidence for the reappearances of some who have been passed away is logically as strong, perhaps stronger, than the evidence attainable for any of the New Testament miracles, including the reappearance of the Saviour.' 5 We confess that we, at all events, have failed to notice it. When we take into account the number of witnesses, the 1 The Picture of Paul, 46. 3 Ibid. 103. 5 The Picture of Jesus, 264–70. VOL. XXV.-NO. XLIX. 2 Ibid. 73. E |