Painted Windows / Studies in Religious Personality

ords connected with the several chapters the publishe

RE

SSOR KIR

d in the presentation of some of the English religious leaders by "A Gentleman with a Duster" especially if, like myself, he have some p

Nor is it because they are voices uttering strange announcements in the wilderness; if they have a fault it is rather that they have so little to announce. The defect which is disclosed by the pictures giv

st. Different branches of the Christian church emphasised one or the other, but the three formed in themselves an indivisible trinity. Nor did the laity doubt that this presentation was correct. The clergy were the professional and expert exponents of an infallible revelation which they had studied deepl

official sermons during the war. This does not mean that men and women within or without the Church do not admire and venerate the teaching of Jesus and regard him as the best teacher whom they know. But they are not willing to accept all his teaching; they have been forced to admit that it is sometimes lawful to resist evil by force; they doubt whether he is to appear as the Judge of the living and the dead; they accept much of his teaching and try to follow it because they believe that it is true, but they do not believe that it is true because i

ir own souls; not because they are indifferent or unbelieving, but because they believe that if our lives are continued after death it will be a natural and not a supernatural phenomenon, of which no details can be known. They have relegated the whole apparatus of Heaven and Hell to the limbo of forgotten mythologies. The continuance of life to which they look forward is progressive and educational, n

y that such men deserve every adjective of approbation in the dictionary; but they are not Christian. If Christianity means a fixed set of opinions, "a faith once delivered to the saints," Father Knox

ls that such men would have been accepted by Jesus as his disciples, and therefore he believes that the Church can and ought to be reformed so as t

s in glaring contradiction to the facts of modern science[1]. Nor is it conceivable that belief can be fixed so as to be unalterable. In

d the whole scientific concept of life is unbiblical, t

f the Church, but the friction and pressure of life always bring with them many impurities, the swell of passion, the blindness of temper, and the thrust of desire, which a mere appe

d erring human beings call from the depths, the helping hand of grace is stretched out from the unknown. The origin and nature of grace is a metaphysical and theological p

s to preserve the institutional life of the Church as a valuable inheritance. To him it is clear that Christians who in one generation invented the theology, the sacraments

t is really fiction. Those who belong to it are sometimes driven out by official pressure, and more often are compelled to yield to the practical necessities of ecclesiastical life, but their influence is greater than their nu

"reinterpreting," and by a sufficient amount of "reinterpreting" all the articles of the creed (or indeed anything else) can be given whatever meaning is desired. The statement that God created the heavens and the earth becomes in this way an affirmation of evolution; the Virgin Birth affirms the reality of Christ's human nature; and the Resurrection of the Flesh affirms the Immortality of the Soul. Performed with skill, this dialectical legerdemain is very soothing to a not unduly intelligen

en, the desire of the church leaders whose portraits he paints is to preserve the Church through a period of transiti

ith the future. It may conciliate those who have power to make trouble in the present; but it is only the young who are now silently abandoning the Church, that have the power to give life in the future. It is always safer to agree wi

DGE, U

ary 5

TO THE AMER

n to American students of theology: almost all of them, I think, represent schoo

me will find in the United States as many readers as T

I hope for much

d in these pages which will outrival in its eventual effect on the destinies of the human race the

s something Greek about the American. He is always young, as Greece was young in the time of Themistocles and ?schylus. He is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new paths, of dawning hopes and un

quickly than any other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of the present day which definitely mak

t in the living world and not in the documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope to be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all

peless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ which have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw off all

ODUC

these pages to discover a reason for the present rather

y of growth, and to see whether in the condition of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of the Church to impress humanity with what

eader to bear in mind that the present disordered state

to subdue those trivial and unworthy forces within his own breast-envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness-which make for world anarchy. He has never been able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the mo

s neighbour, justifies the presumption that divine help, if ever given, that an Incarnation of the Divine Will, if ever vouchsafed, must surely have had for its chief mercy the teaching

has been the cause of so much tyranny and bloodshed in the past, and which even now so willingly lends itself t

tween High Church and Low Church still obtained in his diocese. "Oh, de

arrive in our conclusion at a unifying principle which will at least help the Church to turn its moral earnestness, its manifold self-sacrifice, and its g

t perilous to error, and, secondly, in the words of Dr. Kirsopp Lake, "After all, Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of con

ction betwe

ppears whe

that betwe

n reason is

the danger

cians, the ot

on popular

sopp

NT