REV. J. LLEWELYN DAVrES ON ORDER AND GROWTH.* THIS little
volume consists in the main, Mr. Llewelyn Davies tells us, of the Hulsean Lectures delivered at Cambridge in 1890, and he tells us also that, in his opinion, the utility of the book will depend chiefly on the account it gives of the Church and of Justice. No doubt Mr. Llewelyn Davies is right. His main assumption seems to be that social order is inherent in the very nature of God, and that the Gospel consists in the revelation of that order as the true basis of human society as it was manifested in the life and teaching of Christ. He has no diffi- culty in showing that Christ looked upon society at large as requiring regeneration, that he had no idea of acting exclusively on the individual mind and conscience, that, on the contrary, the regeneration of the individual could only be accomplished by treating him as an organic element of a society which needed to be regenerated as a whole. Mr.
Davies insists that the Gospel of Christ was regarded by the first Churches as a key to the purpose of God in the creation of the world, and as explaining the course of human history. Christ's teaching was designated, he shows us, simply as "the way" of salvation ; and he com- ments very impressively on the term "the way" as a succinct expression for that new light and insight into the scope and meaning of human society which the Gospelgave. The difference between Christians and non-Christians, was, he remarks, that the former had a key to the method of the world which the latter had not. And he maintains that this must still be so, that Christians now should find their Gospel a clue to the signi- ficance of human order and growth, which those who do not accept the Gospel have not got. Christians should be quite willing, he thinks, to consider all that is urged by those who are not Christians as to the true order of human society, for Christians will have very great advantages in appreciating the criticism of those who are not Christians at its true value, while those who are not Christians will not have any such help in apprehending the views of those who are :—
"We shall be in a rivalry with them, for which if we are right we have great advantages orer them. And while we shall want success to justify us in bringing our theology to bear upon social relations and duties, success—the power, I mean, to explain the actual world and to show the best way of dealing with it—will abundantly justify us. The world is before us, with its changing conditions. Never was there freer scope for all who have either philosophies or remedies to try upon the life of mankind. Words still have power, but it is upon the condition that effects shall follow them. 'Thoughts are but dreams,' as Shakespeare has said, 'till their effects be tried.' And it might not be a bad thing if Christians were to lay aside argumentative defence and assaults upon the weak places of rival systems, and to resolve to put their whole apologetic force into practical guidance and construction. It seems clear that such a course would be in harmony with the original work of the envoys of Christ in publishing the Gospel and founding the Church. The aim of the Apostles was to bring men out of darkness into light, and to build up pure and happy and progressive societies. And we, like the Apostles, are wor- shippers of him who shows to men that are in error the light of his truth, to the intent that they may return into the way of righteousness and may walk happily therein. Our success will lie in putting men into the right relations with the things around them, in suggesting to them how they may conquer the hindrances which confuse and weaken them, and in helping them to walk with hope as those who see their way and the goat towards which they are tending. The goal, indeed, best defines the way : Lord,' said Thomas to his Master, ` we know not whither Thou goest : how know we the way ? ' They who see a goal, however dimly, before them, will understand that they have to walk directly towards it, helping and cheering one another amidst the difficulties and wearinesses of the way. That was a significant title, indeed,—the Way,—that was given to their religion by the first Christians. Saul, if he found any of the way 'at Damascus, was to bring them bound to Jerusalem. It was an abbreviated form of several equivalent phrases, by which Christianity was described. These men proclaim unto you the way of salvation.' Apollos had been instructed in the way of the Lord.' But it was a fine instinct that felt that the new religion might characteristically be named by this one word : it recognised that Christians were to regard themselves as called to walk in a certain way towards a goal which was shown to them."
Accepting this attitude, therefore, towards the democratic movement of the present day, Mr. Davies asks what the craving for equality in modern democracy really means, and what explanation Christian principle gives us of that craving. He shows us that while the Gospel does not itself warrant • Order and Growth as Involved in the Spiritual Constitution of Society. By the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, M.A., Chaplain to the Queen, Vicar of Kirkby Lonwlale, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London: Mac- millan. 189I.
this hankering after an unreal equality which can never exist, while, indeed, equality is neither the starting-point nor the goal of human life according to the Christian conception, the Gospel is full of the teaching that a unity which is far better than equality,—and which counteracts all the evil, while bringing out all the good, consequences of inequality, and especially subverting the bad passions which inequality en- genders,—ought to be produced, and will be produced, by the hearty acceptance of the Gospel.
Mr. Llewelyn Davies seems to us, indeed, not to do full justice to the truth which there is in the doctrine of demo- cratic equality, and which is hinted at in the saying of St. James, that in divine worship "the rich and the poor meet together, the Lord is the maker of them all." The gifts and endowments of men are, indeed, not equal, but exceedingly unequal, and meant to be unequal, and to fit into each other so as to produce harmony, and not monotony. But neverthe- less it is surely true that, as it is the greatest possible injustice to administer the same law "with respect of persons,"—that is, showing favour to one and bearing hardly on another,—so there is an equal way of judging even the unequal gifts and characters of men, and that this is the kind of equal justice which we expect from the divine mind. The Parable of the Talents is meant apparently to teach us this equal way of judging the use of unequal gifts. The servant who received two talents receives the same praise as the ser- vant who received ten, because he had striven as hard to improve his two talents as the other to improve his ten ; and so even the Ildahomnaedan idea of justice is that, the law once given, the spirit in which it should be administered to powerful and weak alike should be absolutely the same, the rulers being expected to account quite as strictly for their great trust, as the beggar is for his petty trust. Justice does no doubt consist, as Mr. Davies so powerfully urges, in recognising fully, and gradually developing, the principles of order which the divine mind has established in the world ; but even this may be done in a just or unjust fashion, so far as the same principles are applied unswervingly to the judging of different characters, and one and the same measure is meted out to the testing of great opportunities and small.
If we differ at all from Mr. Davies, it is in relation to his rather questionable use of the doctrine that our minds can grasp so inadequately the true bearing even of spiritual principles, that we must often modify our first conceptions of the explicit teaching of the Gospel, by looking to experience. He seems to us to teach a rather questionable spiritual opportunism, for instance, in the following passage on the ethics of the family :—
" How to make the best of the family is one of the problems upon which opinion and legislation are in all advancing countries constrained to exercise themselves. Christian opinion is reasonably and rightly jealous of any innovation in custom or law which threatens to lower the relations of the home and to impair their vitality. But Christian opinion is not always wise ; it is seldom as free to learn as a stronger faith would enable it to be. And it is often very difficult for any one to know for certain what the effect of an innovation upon the family or home would be. The most emphatic and obtrusive Christian opinion is generally content to stand by tradition, and has thus been sometimes in opposition to changes which experience has ultimately proved to be beneficial. Many questions which are more or less pendent in these days of ours have their chief interest in their bearing upon the home. Compul- sory education, education by the State, public and charitable relief of poverty, the concession to women of instruction and public duties, the enfranchisement of wives, liberty to marry a deceased wife's sister, legal divorce, are of this class. If any measure or custom promoted under one or other of these heads could be demonstrated to be on the whole and in the long run injurious to the family. Christian feeling ought to be against it, and wise statesmanship would shrink from advocating it. But it is a fact to be borne in mind, that the removal of obstructions which have been excusably defended as necessary safeguards has often been the means of promoting a higher, because a freer, moral life. The aim to be kept in view is not a carefully fettered home, but a growth of the higher kind of spiritual or personal relations. Whatever convic- tions and customs and laws will most effectually build up the perfect family,—these will not only be best for each family, but will on that account be of the highest value to human society in general."
That means, we suppose, that what Moses, for "the hardness of the hearts" of the people of Israel, sanctioned amongst the Jews, Christians should be not unwilling to sanction as the outcome of Christian feeling and Christian teaching, in Christian communities,—surely a questionable assumption. If we have to choose between ignoring the true Christian ideal of marriage as the law of social civilisation, and causing a certain excess of suffering in those families in which the ideal has been ignored and set at naught, is it not the true Christian principle that the latter alternative is the better of the two ? It cannot be right to transgress the Christian law for the sake of attenuating the sufferings of those who do not recognise it. Is not that exactly a case in which Christ's saying, "Let the dead bury their dead," applies ? Granted that it may be pernicious to punish breaches of the law as the Puritans did, amongst those who do not recognise the law. Still, that should not encourage those who do recognise the law to give all the religious sanctions of marriage to a contract which Christ would not have admitted to be marriage at all. We do not fully understand whether Mr. Davies does or does not mean that merely "legal divorce" should receive the sanction of Christian Churches. But if he does, he seems to us to carry spiritual opportunism to a dangerous extent.
It may be true, it certainly is true, that in many respects we do not learn to understand the spiritual order that is at the basis of true society till we have received all the light upon it which long experience alone gives. As Mr. Davies says, the law of parental authority, for instance, has been greatly modified since we learnt to enter more perfectly into the limits to which it is subject,—since, indeed, we learnt to see that there is so much of the child in the father and mother, as well as so much of the father and mother in the child. But modifications of this kind in the prin- ciples of law, modifications made as the consequences of a larger experience, though they show us how easy it is to im- prove the general principles under which each society is governed, can hardly be allowed to have any bearing on the Christian ideal of law. And when we come to giving a religious sanction to the lowering of a Christian ideal, we touch, surely, quite new ground. We are not asserting that Mr. Davies intends to say that the Christian Church should sanction any lower ideal of marriage than Christ's own law, which is a very different thing from saying what civil contract the civil law may properly legalise. But if Mr. Davies intended to imply that Christian Churches as such should give their sanction to concessions made for the hardness of men's hearts, we should regard it as pushing opportunism into a spiritual region into which opportunism has no right of entry. The book, however, as a whole, is liable to no criticism that fairly lays itself open to the charge of opportunism. All Mr. Davies teaches is, that before we can fully understand the spiritual order which God has established in the world, we must live under and try to embody it fully in our own lives, and that if we do so, we shall often see that we had taken up a narrow and obstinate stand on what we supposed to be a spiritual principle, when it really tended to counteract the working of the very spirit for what we supposed ourselves to be making a stand. Order and Growth is the production of a very wise and thoughtful mind.
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