THE REPROACH OF THE GOSPEL.•
" THE influence of Christianity on mankind at large is, and has been, strangely disproportionate alike to its high claims, and to the reasonable expectation of those who saw its beginnings." What is the cause, and what the remedy? This
conviction and these questions form the subject of the exceedingly interesting Bampton Lectures which Professor Peile has published in book form, to the great advantage of the general public. Professor Peile seeks for an answer in the region of morals. Christianity has been believed ; it has not been carried out :-
" The great majority of mankind have for centuries done every- thing with the Moral Rule of the Gospel except obey it. They have read it aloud in their churches and their homes; they have enshrined it in a magnificent system of worship; they have glossed and commented it, till it bears a suspicious resemblance to the code which they find most profitable."
" The world," Bishop Westcott declared, " got into the Church in the fourth century, and we have never been able to get it out since." Our author inclines to agree with him ; indeed, he re-echoes his sentiment in yet more decisive form. " The cunning Spirit of the World," he says, " takes the ferment which worked such radical changes in the constitution of the human soul, and by inoculating Society at large with a very
dilute and attenuated serum, secures for it a measure of immunity from violent and inconvenient attacks." " The normal religious experience of the individual," he goes on, " is
a very mild and manageable form of the fever which consumed St. Paul." All the great religious revivals have been, he maintains, in their origin and purpose moral and religious rather than dogmatic. He quotes the Reformation as the most salient instance of his doctrine. " The movement which led to the break-away of Northern Europe from the Papacy did not turn on the ninety-five theses which Luther nailed on the church-door at Wittenberg, but on the unsatisfactory lives of priests and monks." Great religious revivals depend upon the mind of the average man. "A World-faith can never spring from the travailing of self-conscious intellect." In Professor Peile's opinion, a Christian life " is the only argument that unconverted Humanity will attend to"; and, he adds, "I think unconverted Humanity is right." If the Church is ever to convert the world, Professor Peile believes, sbe must do so by example. For her the secret of success lies " in absolute unqualified obedience to Christ's plain teaching as He spoke it. That teaching, as we find it in the Gospels, is a small body of positive precept; it seems to me perfectly clear in meaning, and almost wholly ethical, laying stress on character and on conduct as the necessary test of character." Shirking no difficulty, our author begins by demanding unqualified obedience to the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, first, however, declaring his opinion that they are not all of general application. Now surely this is a very serious "qualification." It may be perfectly legitimate and perfectly true, but it can hardly be laid down as a certainty by one who demands absolute obedience. Our Lord—in His human nature—was a Galilean peasant, and it is likely, upon the face of it, that He spoke to individuals rather than to collections of individuals. On the other hand, if He was, humanly speaking, a peasant, He was no less a Jew deeply versed in Hebrew literature; and the difference between the individual and the body politic was one which the Jews were unaccustomed to accentuate. It is at least possible that He meant His words, not as an absolute rule for any, but as an aim for all. The power of multiple application to reverse a moral law is not easy to uphold. The theory that the object of Christ was to arouse an infinite moral ambition spreading from individuals to collections of individuals, and not to propound a code of laws at all, is certainly not more difficult of defence.
In his chapter upon " War and Trade" the lecturer takes to task those who, in their determination—a determination which he shares—to obey absolutely the moral rules of the Gospel, deny that war can by those rules be justified. In a
good cause it is, he thinks, justifiable and inevitable, though it has been in the past too often " the mistress of Princes," and is now in danger of becoming "the handmaid of Commerce." We are not concerned to contradict his con- clusion, but when he asks those who, on the same ground • The Reproach of the Gospel : being the Pompton Lectures for the Year 196?. By the Bev. James H. F. Peile, M.A. London : Longinans and Co. [5e. 6d, net.] of "absolute unqualified obedience," maintain the reverse whether they are really moved by Christian feeling, whether the fear of death and the doubt of immortality do not enter largely into their creed in this matter, we feel that he is not fighting quite fairly. The fear of death, he argues, is not Christian. But surely, if we read the Gospel in its plain sense, the fear of death is not so illegitimate. How we lead our lives and how we leave them seem matters of tremendous moment, if we are to believe the Gospel,—matters upon which a com- fortable certainty of immortality for ourselves and others may not unreasonably depend. A man is not prohibited from having a correct opinion upon the meaning of Christ's teaching because he fears death, nor yet because, like St. Paul, he fears lest he himself " should be a castaway."
Agan, on the subject of commerce Professor Peile pro- pounds a great many questions to which he gives no satisfactory answer. It is, alas ! true that commercial morality is not Christian morality. For this fact he blames not so much the commercials as the public. "Most. of the tricks and immoralities of trade are due to the increasing stress of competition," he says, and " it is the ordinary consumer who is largely to blame for this excessive competition, through the prevailing passion for cheap bargains." To say this is to open an economic question, but not to conclude a moral one. We cannot reform the commercial world by a determination to buy in the dearest market. That reform is needed in social and industrial con- ditions we are all agreed, and it is impossible to deny Professor Peile's contention that Christianity is and was in some sense a revolutionary force. " The Gospel I am trying to preach is nineteen centuries old; the way to its fulfilment is long and laborious, and we have almost forgotten that it is heroic." Pliny and Trajan may have been right in thinking that if the Roman Imperial system was to be maintained Christianity could not be tolerated ; but precisely in what manner Professor Peile thinks that the world of to-day could profit- ably be turned upside down it is not easy to gather. He believes that it is "class distinctions, which do not seem to grow fainter with the advance of political democracy," which "are the great barrier to Christian work," but he does not tell us bow to get rid of them. He believes that we are on the verge of " one more great Religious Movement, perhaps the greatest the world has known. The principle which inspires it comes, on the intellectual side, from our old enemy and helper Science in the doctrine of the Unity of all Life and Force ; on the social side, it appears in the reaction against that exaggerated individualism which, like Cain of old, denies corporate responsibility : its religious aspect is a quickened belief in the brotherhood of all men in Christ." This religious movement is to have an immense social effect,—but of what nature we do not clearly gather. His words do not seem to imply Socialism in any form, though we read : " We have no right for their sake, or for our own, to preach contentment to the poor, or bribe them into acquiescence, until we have given them the elementary justice of an equal opportunity of living the life which God intended for them." Later on the following sentence forbids a Socialistic conclusion : " It is idle to rail at economic laws, it is ruinous to disregard or trans- gress them; because, so long as men are governed by the principle of selfishness, economic laws are the correct formula for recording and foretelling their mutual relations." All the same, he thinks that these laws will not have the last word. "I believe the Miracle which can alone deliver us from the inexorable tyranny of economic laws is the influence of Christ upon Human character."
Professor Peile tells us that the true object of his lectures was to make his hearers think, and in this be has succeeded. How far be has helped them to any decision is another matter. In this connexion, however, we may not forget that the aim of the Gospel is to rouse the conscience, rather than to allay the curiosity or bias the intellectual conclusions, of men.
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