PRINCIPAL LAIRD ON FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIANITY .*
M. SABATIER has said with great truth that no one thing is more needed than a restatement in modern terms of the fundamental creed of Christianity. The pure stream of the Christian religion, sparkling in the sunlight and making glad the solitary places through which its channel took its course, has been the depositary of non-Christian and alien sub- stances—Roman, Greek, Jewish, mediaeval, and sectarian— until the old words of love and hope have almost lost their meaning and have become, as Holmes said, polarised. The substance of the Christian gospel will remain, under the accumulation of ages. The crystal stream still flows on; but the present condition of Christendom is evidence that the Christian idea in its essence and fulness has for a time lost its intense • The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity. By John Galrd, D.D., LLD. WW1 a Memoir by Edward Caird, D.C.L., LL.D., Master of Bellied. 2 vols. Glasgow : James Maelehose and Sons. [12s. net.] bold over the Christian nations. Agnosticism, pessimism, practical materialism, are widespread; a loss of faith, of hope, the all-pervading rage for secular gain and enjoyment, are too palpable. How meet this condition of things; but by a restatement in modern terms and with a reference to modern needs and thought of the gospel of Christ ? This is the idea which has taken hold of some of the best minds of our time, and this is the idea embodied in the remarkable works on religion which we owe to the late Principal Caird. We scarcely know of any modern thinker more capable of presenting a reasonable Christianityto reasonable men. Not that Dr. Caird's work is to be regarded as mere rationalising, or that recon- ciling of religion with the demands of the pure intellect of which we have had perhaps more than enough. These volumes, while powerful on the purely intellectual side, are aglow with religious passion, are lighted up with the gleam of that idealism without which philosophy is a caput mortwunz and religion a "rhapsody of words." We recognise, in short, in these Gifford Lectures on Christianity a very noble and powerful design to open up to us the very heart of the Christian religion; not of conventional Christianity, indeed, with its phrases, its pagan survivals, its mere routine side, but of the faith with which Jesus Christ endowed mankind.
What is the essence of Christianity, as Dr. Caird views it ? Can we state, in a word, the fundamental idea ? We think that, in so far as this can be done. Dr. Caird finds that essence in the great truth of the unity of God and man. This truth has many implications ; we can discover it permeating all thought, revolutionising all life, we can state it in various ways, we can reduce it to terms of Greek logic, as it was reduced in the schools of Alexandria, we can state it in the emotional terms of a street-preacher who knows nothing of logic, but whose heart is aflame with love for his suffering fellow-men. But, however we state this truth, it remains that the great fundamental thought of Christ is the unity of God and man. That unity, implicit in man's nature and dimly perceived by the loftiest natures of the ancient world, was revealed by Christ. In him the divine and the human elements overflowed into one another, and the true redemption process began. No part of Dr. Caird's work is more valuable and suggestive, in our judgment, than that in which he shows, if we may use the words, what the Incarnation meant to God. The Christian world has dwelt almost exclusively on the human side of this great idea, on the new dignity given to man, on the redemption it guarantees to the world. But Dr. Caird also dwells on the new experience, as it were, which this fact imparted to the mind of God. We have no longer a lonely Deity, self-centred, self-contained, but a God entering into new relations, sharing, if we may say so, a wider and more intense life, or, at least, making those relations with his human family real, actual, and explicit which were formerly veiled, imperfect, potential, and implicit. Thus a true con- ception of Christianity does give us, as it were, a new God to whom the word "father" can be applied with an intensity and depth of meaning never felt or guessed at before.
The comparison of the Pantheist, Deist, and Christian conceptions of God elaborated by Dr. Caird is suggestive. He takes these as being practically the only three categories of belief open to thinking men. The first, identifying God with the whole cosmos, levels all distinctions, especially all moral distinctions, doing away with the vital difference be- tween right and wrong, and fosters a " fatalistic contentment with things as they are." The second creates a dualism, in which God stands on one side, man on the other, with no bridge across the gulf, with no common nature, and, there- fore, with no real possibility of approach. Man, on this hypothesis, may obey God, but his obedience, always imper- fect on account of the finitude of his nature, is merely the obedience of a slave to an external command. But in Christianity, while God is immanent in the world, he is nevertheless conceived as spirit distinct from it, and so the moral results of Pantheism are avoided. On the other hand. as the divine and human are embraced in a real unity revealed in a perfect person who submitted himself to the sufferings of a life in space and time, we escape the dualism of the second creed. The " moralische Gesetz " which thinkers like Kant impose as an imperative command becomes a law from within, and the human being not only obeys his Creator, but finds in the divine law the very breath of his own moral being. Such are the chief implications of the great fundamental idea of Christianity,—the unity of God and man. In the light of this truth the Christian doctrines of the origin and exist- ence of evil, the Atonement, the Incarnation, and the kingdom of the Spirit, are considered, and there are two chapters on the Future Life which are admirable, and which may be commended alike to the conventional believer with his con- ventional heaven, and to the Positivist with his absolute " altruism," who thinks that we can be content with doing our duty and then passing out of being. On the whole, we are inclined to regard the treatment of the problem of evil as least satisfactory ; but even here the chapter on the concep- tion of evil as merely privative or negative is full of sugges- tive power. We feel justified in saying that the work in general forms a statement of Christianity (or shall we say the religion of Christ ? to quote Lessing's distinction) which has not been surpassed for suggestive power and spiritual insight in our time.
The memoir of his brother by the Master of Balliol makes us feel not merely respect for the intellect, but real affection for the character, of Principal Caird, whose practical philan- thropy and sincere modesty are the outcome of the creed which he professed and which he has expounded with such imaginative power.
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