PROFESSOR JOWETT'S QUESTION.
PROFESSOR, JOWETT concluded his Sunday evening lecture at Westminster Abbey on Robert Browning and Professor Hatch by the remark : " If asked where, among all the Christian Churches of the age, the Gospel was
to be found, he would answer, Where it always has been found, in the Christian life." That this is a large part of the answer is perfectly true ; that it is the whole of the answer is certainly false. It always has been true, and always will be true, that the "good news" of the most thoroughly Christian life actually lived in this world is the tidings best adapted to spread in the world the fascination of the Christian life ; but it is certainly not true that the Christian life could be actually lived without the help of any other tidings to sustain it except the tidings of other lives actually so lived. One might almost as well say that the life of a plant which is propagated by the dropping of its own seed, is dependent on nothing -else for its propagation except the formation of its own seed. Now, we know perfectly well that a plant which thrives and flourishes in the most luxu- riant manner in one soil and one climate, will dwindle to the poorest and most meagre vegetation in another soil and another climate, and will absolutely die off and vanish altogether in a third. The inherent vitality of the plant is enormous under one set of conditions, feeble under another, and completely disappears under a third; and yet it is no less true that even under the conditions under which it flourishes best, the growth of the plant is needed to spread the plant, and that it will be impossible to spread it except from a living germ of its own kind. Just so it is, we take it, with the Christian life : without the Christian life, the Christian life will not spread ; but under one set of conditions the Christian life will spread itself freely and rapidly, and under other sets of conditions the Christian life will spread itself slowly and meagrely, and under other sets of conditions again, it will not spread itself at all, but will die out altogether. Now the Gospel has usually been taken as the name of those good tidings which promote its growth and vitality most, apart from the inherent force of its own organic structure. It is quite as true that until you get a germ of Christian life there can be no propagation of that germ, as it is that until you get a germ of physical life there can be no propagation of that germ. But even when you have got a germ of physical life, there is no free or luxuriant reproduction of that germ without favourable conditions, and this is equally true of the spiritual life of Christianity. As Christ himself said, you may strew it on the hard ground, where it lies perfectly un- fruitful till it is carried off by some accident ; or you may strew it on a light and stony soil, where it cannot make root enough to grow; or you may strew it amongst thorns, where it is choked by the greater vitality of the thorns ; or you may strew it on good ground, and yet even on the good ground there will be differences of condition which show themselves in the rate of fertility, some bringing forth thirty, some sixty, some a hundred-fold. It has been usual to regard the Gospel, " the good news," as describing not so much the Christian life itself, as the revelation of truths which tend to foster and guard and stimulate the Christian life; and it seems to us a great mistake to suggest that there are no such intellectual and spiritual conditions without the general acceptance of which the Christian life will cease to spread at all events with any freedom and luxuriance, even if it does not vanish altogether. We must remember that the Christian life, in a very limited and maimed sense, is the subject of enthusiastic praise even among the Positivists. The late Mr. Cotter Morison, in his book on " The Service of Man," spoke with the utmost appreciation and admiration of the highest type of character which Christianity had produced, though he thought that it had'failed in greatly raising the level of the character of the average Christian. He held that the conditions under which the saintly character had been nourished, involved the acceptance of a series of spiritual and intellectual illusions which tended, however, to foster a high kind of idealism in the finer and more sensitive natures, though they failed to impress deeply the coarser and tougher specimens of human nature. Yet even Mr. Cotter Morison did not, so far as we can judge from his book, imagine that the spiritual type of the Christian saint could have been fostered and developed merely through the charm which it exerted,—which it exerted, indeed, even on those who regarded the faith under the influence of which it was produced as a mere dream. Nothing in the world is more certain than that the Christian saint could never have existed at all without the Christian faith and hope on which his character was nourished, —that his detachment from worldly motives, for instance, and his heartfelt exultation in suffering for his devotion to Christ, would have been utterly inconceivable without his absolute belief in the " things above," where his heart " was hid with Christ in God." Some fragments and scraps of the Christian morality might, indeed, reproduce and multiply themselves without the belief. Apparently there is something in what is now affectedly called the " altruistic " doctrine that fascinates men on its own account, and without relation to the beliefs and hopes with which it is connected in the minds of Christians. But the altruistic agnostic is separated by as wide a chasm from the Christian saint, as the Buddhist or the Pantheist. The life of worship is for him a folly; the inward scrutiny and purification of motive is a waste of power ; the humility, the submission, the obedience, the gratitude, the patience, the aspiration, are all unmeaning to him. If he spends himself in labour and care for others, it is with a rest- less heat and urgency which are not trained to await God's slow and sure processes of preparation. Not working for God, but for man, he cannot see beyond the bitter disappointments which work for man too certainly involves ; he cannot escape the pessimism, the cynicism, the despon- dency, the exhaustion which fruitless work for a finite creature who seldom understands, and hardly ever repays it, almost inevitably produces. If the Christian life itself is the whole Gospel, then the Christian life must include the Christian creed as part and parcel of the Christian secret of success in living it. You might as well plant in your vineyard the wild vine in place of the vine which has been cultivated for cen- turies, and then expect grapes from which you could distil a fine wine, as plant mere altruism for Christianity, and look for Christian fruits. Matthew Arnold tried to show that the wild grape and the cultivated are essentially the same ; that we might get rid of the very idea of God and yet possess "the secret of Jesus ;" but he failed lamentably, and left in the world to which he appealed a strange impression of spiritual Quixotism applied to a field in which he had no real experience, and had, of course, never attained even a partial success.
And nothing can be plainer than that the Gospel, as it was originally preached, was a message which put new power and life into man, by enabling him to believe in a new power and life outside him. It was the proclamation of a kingdom,—of a king who could enable the blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the dead to live, which was the gospel preached to the poor. Without the proclamation of a new kingdom, there would have been no springing of a new life. It was the advent of a new power in the world, and the belief in that new power, that constituted the conditions of the new life. The announce- ment that both the outward and the inward man was subject to the new power, that sin could be forgiven by him who could command the palsied limbs to rise and walk, was of the very essence of the new life. What account does St. Paul give of the Gospel ?—" I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." So St. Peter blesses God for having inspired in him "a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." And St. John makes the new power to consist in the belief that " Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," and that whatever he commanded, man has the power through faith in him to do. Nothing can be plainer than that the answer to Professor Jowett's question in the first age of the Church was something more than Professor Jowett's answer to it now. The early Church did not deny that the Gospel was to be found "where it always has been found, in the Christian life," but it did proclaim that what rendered the Christian life possible, what alone rendered it possible, was a new belief as to the power by which it was sustained, as to the divine nature which had revealed itself in the order and prin- ciples of that life. And what was true of the earliest age of Christianity is quite as true of the latest. The Christian life is not sufficient to itself now, any more than it was then. It is a life which can only be lived by those who have living faith in the divine strength which supports it. Its intrinsic beauty, its intrinsic fascination, are not enough, because its intrinsic beauty and fascination depend on its reality, and there is no reality in it, unless the promise of spiritual support from within is a true promise, a promise that can be verified by the actual experience of life. There never was a time in which a genuine belief in spiritual aid to live the Christian life was more needed than it is now. There is a sort of nihilism in the air which shows itself nowhere more plainly than in the desire to represent the Christian life as its own strength no less than its own witness, whereas nothing is more certain than that the Christian faith has always, and from the first, repu- diated the notion that the Christian life is its own strength, and has exulted in reiterating with St. Paul, that when we are weak, when we trust ourselves least, then we are strongest, and have most reason to hope the very best. The Christian life is its own witness, but what it witnesses is that the power which sustains it comes from beyond itself, and that the whole faith is a delusion of delusions, unless such power flows freely into the soul from beyond.
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