To-day Manchester College, the seat of Unitarianism, stands on this same dissenting road, and thither the ladies of Oxford go up in great numbers to listen to the beautiful music which distinguishes the chapel service, the chapel itself already beautiful enough with windows by Burne-Jones.
On the altar-cloth of this chapel are embroidered the words, G.o.d IS LOVE. No tables of stone flank that gentle altar, and no panelled creeds on the walls challenge the visitor to define his definitions. The atmosphere of the place is worship. The greatest of all Christ"s affirmations is reckoned enough. G.o.d is love. No need, then, to add--Therefore with Angels, and Archangels, and all the Company of Heaven ...
The Princ.i.p.al of Manchester College is Dr. L.P. Jacks, the Editor of _The Hibbert Journal_, the biographer of Stopford Brooke and Charles Hargrove, author of _Mad Shepherds_, _Legends of Smokeover_, and other books which have won the affection of many readers and the praise of no few scholars. He is a man of letters, a man of nature, and a mystic.
His face bears a strange resemblance to the unforgettable face of that great Unitarian, James Martineau, whom Morley calls "the most brilliant English apologist of our day"; it lacks the marvellous sweetness of Martineau"s expression, but has a greater strength; it does not bear witness to so sure a triumph of serenity, but shows the marks of a fiercer battle, and the scars of deeper wounds. It is the masculine of the other"s feminine.
Like Martineau"s the head with its crown of white hair is n.o.bly sculptured, and like Martineau"s the ivory coloured face is ploughed up and furrowed by mental strife; but whereas Martineau"s is eminently the indoors face of a student, this is the face of a man who has lived out of doors, a mountaineer and a seafarer. Under the dense bone of the forehead which overhangs them like the eave of a roof, the pale blue eyes look out at you with a deep inner radiance of the spirit, but from the midst of a face which has been stricken and has winced.
Something of the resolution, the deliberateness, the stern power, and the enduring strength of his spirit shows itself, I think, in the short thickset body, with its heavy shoulders, its deep chest, its broad firm upright neck, and its slow movements, the movements as it were of a peasant. Always there is about him the feeling of the fields, the sense of nature"s presence in his life, the atmosphere of distances. Nothing in his appearance suggests either the smear or the burnish of a town existence.
It is not without significance that he has gone farther afield from Oxford City than any other of its academic citizens, building for himself a home on a hill two miles and more from Magdalen Bridge, with a garden about it kept largely wild, and seats placed where the eye can travel farthest.
This man, who is so unpushing and self-effacing, makes a contribution to the Christian religion which deserves, I think, the thoughtful attention of his contemporaries. It can be set forth in a few words, for his faith is fastened in the conviction that the universe is far simpler than science--for the moment--would allow us to think.
Let me explain at the outset that Unitarianism admits of a certain diversity of faith. There are Unitarians who think and speak only of G.o.d. There are others who lay their insistence on the humanity of Jesus, exalting Him solely as the chief est of teachers. There are others who choose to dwell on the uniqueness of Jesus, who feel in Him some precious but quite inexpressible, certainly quite indefinable, spell of divinity, and who love to lose themselves in mystical meditations concerning His continual presence in the human spirit. Dr. Jacks, I think, is to be numbered among these last. But, like all other Unitarians, he makes no credal demands on mankind, save only the one affirmation of their common faith, with its inevitable ergo: G.o.d is Love, and therefore to be worshipped.
Robert Hall said to a Unitarian minister who always baptised "in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," attaching a very sacred meaning to the words, "Why, sir, as I understand you, you must consider that you baptise in the name of an abstraction, a man, and a metaphor." More simple was the interpretation of a j.a.panese who, after listening with a corrugated brow to the painful exposition of a recent Duke of Argyll concerning the Trinity in Unity, and the Unity in Trinity, suddenly exclaimed with radiant face, "Ah, yes, I see, a Committee."
Dr. Jacks leaves these perplexities alone. For him, G.o.d is the Universal Spirit, the Absolute Reality immanent in all phenomena, the Love which reason finds in Goodness and intuition discovers in Beauty, the Father of men, the End and the very Spirit of Evolution. And Jesus, so far as human thought can reach into the infinite, is the Messenger of G.o.d, the Revealer both of G.o.d"s Personality and man"s immortality, the great Teacher of liberty. What else He may be we do not know, but may discover in other phases of our ascent. Enough for the moment of duration which we can human life to know that He unlocks the door of our prison-house, reveals to us the character of our Father which is in Heaven, and the nature of the universe in which we move and have our being.
If this should appear vague to the dogmatist who finds it impossible either to love G.o.d or to do the will of Christ without going into the arithmetic of Athanasius, and reciting an unintelligible creed, and celebrating in Christian forms the rites of those mystery religions which competed with each other for the superst.i.tion of the Greco-Roman world in the third century, he will find no vagueness at all in Dr.
Jacks"s interpretation of the teaching of Jesus. He may perhaps find in that interpretation a simplicity, a clarity, and a directness which are not wholly convenient to his idea of a G.o.d Who repents, is angry, and can be mollified.
Whether Jesus was born of a Virgin or not, whether He raised dead bodies to life or not, whether He Himself rose from the grave with His physical body or not, certain is it, and beyond all dispute of every conceivable kind, that He taught men a way of life, that He brought them a message, that He Himself regarded His message as good news.
How carelessly men may think in this matter is shown to us rather strikingly in a page of _Some Loose Stones_, a book to which reference has already been made. After writing about dogma, and endeavouring to show that the traditionalist is on firmer ground than the modernist, because he can say, "Here is the Truth," while the modernist can only say, "We will tell you what the truth is when we have found it,"
suddenly, with scarcely a draw of his breath, Father Knox exclaims:
The real trouble is that they (the modernists) have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, that they have radically misconceived the whole nature of the Christian message, which is, to be one for all minds, for all places, for all times.
Note that word _message_. What confusion of thought!
The message of Christ is one thing; paganised dogma concerning Christ is another. The message of Christ does indeed remain for all minds, for all places, for all times, inexhaustible in its meaning, unalterable in its nature; the dogmas of theology, on the other hand, demand Councils of the Church for their definition, and an infallible Pope for their interpretation. They change, have changed even in the unchangeable Catholic Church, and will change with every advance of the positive sciences and with every ascent of philosophy towards reality; but the message stands, plain to the understanding of a child, yet still rejected by the world. Christianity, as Dr. Jacks says, has been more studied than practised.
How far quarrelling theologians and uncharitable Churches are responsible for that rejection, let the conscience of the traditionalist (if he happen to know history) decide.
As for the message, here is a reading of it by a Unitarian--a reading, I venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times--a reading which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its profundity, is a message for the simple as well as for the learned.
Christianity is man"s pa.s.sport from illusion into reality. It reveals to him that he is not in the world to set the world right, but to see it right. He is not a criminal and earth is not a Borstal Inst.i.tution.
Nature is the handiwork of a Father. Look deeply into that handiwork and it reveals a threefold tendency--the tendency towards goodness, the tendency towards beauty, the tendency towards truth. Ally yourself with these tendencies, make yourself a growing and developing intelligence, and you inhabit spiritual reality.
Study the manner of Jesus, His att.i.tude to the simplest and most domestic matters, the love He manifested, and the objects for which He manifested that love. These things have "a deeper significance than our pensive theologies have dared to find in them... . They belong not to the fringe of Christianity but to its essence." Christ loved the world.
His religion, which has come to stand for repression founded on an almost angry distrust of human nature, is in fact "the most encouraging, the most joyous, the least repressive, and the least forbidding of all the religions of the world." It does not fear the world, it masters it.
It does not seek to escape from life, it develops a truer and more abundant life. It places itself at the head of evolution.
There are points on its path where it enters the shadows and even descends into h.e.l.l, for it is a religion of redemption, the religion of the shepherd seeking the lost sheep, but "the end of it all is a resurrection and not a burial, a festival and not a funeral, an ascent into the heights and not a lingering in the depths."
Nowhere else is the genius of the Christian Religion so poignantly revealed than in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins in the minor key and gradually rises to the major, until it culminates in a great merry-making, to the surprise of the Elder Son, who thinks the majesty of the moral law will be compromised by the music and dancing, and has to be reminded that these joyous sounds are the keynotes of the spiritual world.
Dr. Jacks well says that we should be nearer the truth if, instead of thinking how we can adapt this religion to the minds of the young, we regarded it as "originally a religion of the young which has lost some of its savour by being adapted to the minds of the old."
Then he reminds us that it was "in the form of a person that the radiance of Christianity made its first appearance and its first impression on the world." A Light came into the world.
The Jesus of history drew men to Him by an inward beauty. His serenity gave the sick and the suffering an almost riotous confidence that He could heal them. His radiance attracted children to His side. He was fond of choosing a child for the sublimest of teachings. He made it clear that entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven is easiest to those who are least deluded or enchained by appearances, and hardest to those whose hearts lie in their possessions. The Kingdom of Heaven signifies freedom.
He was the great teacher of the poverty of riches, and the wealth of nothingness. He knew as no other had ever known, and saw as no other had ever seen, the symbolism of nature. Always His vision pierced behind the appearance to the thing in itself. He loved "the reality that abides beyond the shadows." He directed our spiritual vision to this reality, telling us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The materialist is in prison.
He did not condemn the earth; He taught that its true loveliness is to be discerned only by the spiritual eye. For Him the earth was a symbol, and the whole realm of nature a parable.
I cannot but think that we are never further from the genius of the Christian religion than when we treat this luminous atmosphere as though it were a foreign envelope, of little account so long as the substance it enshrines is retained intact. Without it, the substance, no matter how simple or how complex, becomes a dry formula, dead as the moon.
Losing the radiance we lose at the same time the central light from which the radiance springs, and our religion, instead of transforming the corruptible world into its incorruptible equivalents, reverts to the type it was intended to supersede and becomes a mere safeguard to the moral law.
Nothing can allay our present discords and the long confusions of the world, short of "those radiant conceptions of G.o.d, of man, of the universe, which are the life and essence of Christianity."
"Liberty," says Edouard Le Roy, "is rare; many live and die and have never known it." And Bergson says, "We are free when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work."
This, I think, is what Dr. Jacks means when he speaks of Christianity bestowing liberty--a new mastery over fate and circ.u.mstance. It calls forth not only the affection of a man, and not only the intelligence of a man, but the whole of his intuitions as well. The entire personality, the entire field of consciousness, the entire mystery of the ego, is bidden to throw itself upon the universe with confidence, with grat.i.tude, with love unspeakable, recognising there the act of a Fatherhood of which, in its highest moments, the soul is conscious in itself.
Thus is man made free of illusion. No longer can the outside of things deceive him, or the defeats of the higher by the lower deject, much less overwhelm him. He sees the reality behind the appearance. He dwells with powers which are invisible and eternal--with justice, with virtue, with beauty, with truth, with love, with excellence. More to him than any house built with hands, more, much more even than the habitation of his own soul, is the invisible life of that soul, its delight in beauty, its immediate response to truth and goodness, its longing for the flight of the One to the One, its almost athletic sense of spiritual fitness.
Dr. Jacks will have no element of fear in this religion. He finds no room in the universe for an offended G.o.d. Belief in G.o.d can mean nothing else but love of G.o.d. All our troubles have come upon us from the failure of the Church to live in the radiant atmosphere of this belief, to make belief a life, a life that needs no dogmas and expresses itself by love.
But this was not to be. The Church cultivated fear of G.o.d, and could not bring itself to trust human nature.
Belief pa.s.sed into dogma; the mind of man was put in fetters as well as his body; the Church built one prison and the State another... . All this was closely connected with the idea of the _potentate_ G.o.d which Church and State, in consequence of their political alliance, had restored, against the martyr protest of Jesus Christ.
But how should man be treated? Here it is that Dr. Jacks makes a most valuable suggestion:
Treat man, after the mind of Christ, as a being whose first need is for Light, and whose second need is for government, and you will find that as his need for light is progressively satisfied, his need for government will progressively diminish.
Is it not a significant fact that while the churches are complaining of emptiness, the schools, the colleges, the universities, are packed to overflowing?
Dr. Jacks has asked quite recently a Frenchman, a Swede, a Dutchman, an American, a Chinaman, and a j.a.panese, "What is the leading interest in your country? What do your people really believe in?" The answer in each case was, "Education."
When he varied his question, and asked, "What have you learnt from the war?" the answer came, "We have learnt our need of education."
Some would prefer them to have said: "We have learnt our need of Christianity." But is it not the same thing? In grasping the vast potentialities of the human spirit, and that is what this hunger for education means, have they not grasped an essential characteristic of the Christian religion and placed themselves at its very growing point?
Education is Light, and Light is from G.o.d.
Dr. Jacks believes that a movement has begun which, "if it develops according to promise, will grow into the most impa.s.sioned enterprise so far undertaken by man."
The struggle for _light_, with its wide fellowships and high enthusiasms, will displace the struggle for _power_, with its mean pa.s.sions, its monstrous illusions, and its contemptible ideals.
The struggle for power will end, not, as some predict, in universal revolution, which would merely set it going again in another form, but by being submerged, lost sight of, snowed under, by the greater interests that centre round the struggle for light.