38. Glover. The Christian Tradition and its Verification
By. T. R. Glover. New York: The Macmillan Company.
1913. (Being the Eighth Course of the Angus Lectures, 1912.) The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society. By T. R.
Glover. Third Edition. London: Headley Brothers. 1912.
(Being the Fifth of the Swarthmore Lectures, 1912.) 1 nder the title of "Life and Letters in the Fourth Century," Mr.
U Glover published some dozen or more years ago (1901) fifteen studies of typical figures and movements in the literature of that century in which heathenism was dying and the Church was advancing to take its place as the governing force of the Roman world. It is a delightful volume full of insight and marked by great delicacy of touch and it gave us great pleasure to say as much, in reviewing the book in The Presbyterian and Reformed Review (xiii. 1902, pp. 664–666). When, a few years later (1907),
he was called upon to deliver the Dale Lectures in Mansfield College, Oxford, Mr. Glover was well advised to adopt for them the same method of treatment which he had so successfully used in his earlier volume. The subject he chose was "The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman
Empire," and the resulting volume (1909) contains ten graphic studies of the various forms of religion which jostled each other in the opening centuries of the Christian era, presented, as he says, "not in the abstract, but as they show themselves in character and personality." This too is a delightful volume, vivid and illuminating. There are essays on the Roman
Religion, the Stoics, and Plutarch; on Celsus and Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian; on the Conflict of Christian and Jew and the struggle between "Gods and Atoms." In the midst of them there stand essays also on "Jesus of Nazareth" and "The Followers of Jesus." These are not the best essays in the book. Mr. Glover is essentially a humanist; his interest lies in literature and the expression of personality in literature; his charm consists in his lightness of touch, the daintiness of his handling of his material, a certain fastidious humor which is poured over all. These are not the qualities which fit one best to deal with Jesus of Nazareth or those first missionaries of the cross who, "in deaths oft," broke a way through the ingrained prejudices of the old world's life and thought for the entrance of Christianity. Nor are Harnack and von Dobschütz and Weinel, Wernle and Pfleiderer, Wellhausen and Bousset, nor even Prof. Burkitt, and certainly not Mr. Conybeare, the best guides to the understanding of the beginnings of Christianity or the person of its founder.
Not that Mr. Glover fails in appreciation of the human personality of Jesus, or of the new spirit which animated His followers. He only fails to appreciate that there was anything more than a human personality in Jesus or that His followers were animated by any other spirit than may be summed up in the immense impression made upon them by Jesus' human
personality. In his attempt to portray this human personality he says many fine and beautiful things about Jesus; many of the traits which really characterized Him he catches and knows how to throw vividly forward. He understands His uniqueness and the uniqueness of the religion He founded, and has such things as this to say about it: "As its opponents were quick to point out,—and they still find a curious pleasure in rediscovering it—there was little new in Christian teaching. Men had been monotheists before, they had worshipped, they had loved their neighbors, they had displayed the virtues of Christians—what was there peculiar in Christianity? Plato, says Celsus, had taught long ago everything of the least value in the Christian scheme of things. The Talmud, according to the modern Jew, contains a parallel to everything that Jesus said—('and how much else!' adds Wellhausen). What was new in the new religion, in this
'third race' of men? The Christians had their answer ready. In clear speech, and in aphasia, they indicated their founder. He was new" (p. 116). But of the real uniqueness of Jesus Christ and of the religion which He founded— of the redemption of the world in His blood ("the blood of God," Paul calls it), of the regeneration of the world by His Spirit ("the Spirit of Jesus" is, with Mr. Glover, but His influence, His character "repeating itself in the lives of men and women": pp. 139–140), Mr. Glover has no sense. And therefore his chapters on "Jesus of Nazareth" and "the Followers of Jesus" flat dreadfully among the more sympathetic studies which otherwise fill the volume. Jesus Christ is too high for him: he cannot attain to Him.
Accordingly there creeps over one as he reads these chapters something of the feeling of unreality and insufficiency, though happily in indefinably less degree, that assaults the soul as we read the pages of, say, Renan. As an expounder of the color and movement of life in the ages of transition from heathenism to Christianity, Mr. Glover moves with firm step and shows
unending skill: when he passes to expound Jesus Christ and His gospel he has got beyond his métier.
It seemed to be needful to say some such things as these about a volume which we are not now reviewing, because we may thus be enabled to make clear, in the fewest possible words, the exact nature and character of the volumes which we are reviewing. In them Mr. Glover turns aside from the portrayal of the ideas and personalities of the later classical period to undertake the exposition and defense of fundamental Christianity and of its function in the world. It will scarcely be necessary for us to say that these volumes are therefore of indefinitely less value than the former ones. Of course, in these too Mr. Glover writes interestingly: probably he could not write uninterestingly if he tried. He writes here, it is true, with what seems almost exaggerated simplicity of diction. It would appear that he is determined to be thoroughly understood by "the general." But all the old brightness is here. Indeed, many of the old bright sayings are here, for Mr.
Glover has permitted himself in perhaps an unusual measure to treat his former (Dale) Lectures as a mine from which to derive gems for the ornamentation of the plainer pages of his later (Angus and Swarthmore)
Lectures. The reader of the former volume, at all events, continually meets in the pages of the later ones fine turns of speech which are already familiar to him; mingled, no doubt, with others which are here new, derived from other fields of learned and loving research. Here, too, Mr. Glover, as is natural, writes largely en historien. This is his point of view. He has swept the wide horizon with widely opened eye and stands forward to tell his less fortunate brethren, as simply as may be, how Christianity appears to him and what seems to him to be its function in the world. We are bound to say also that the "reduced" view of the Person of Christ and of the essence of His work as an atoning sacrifice, which was thrown clearly, if even then prudently, up to observation in the more scientific Dale Lectures, retires
into the background in the more popular Angus and Swarthmore Lectures; or perhaps we may even say recedes out of sight. It is doubtful if the cursory reader of these Lectures, while he might feel that not always all was said that might well be said, would detect any tendency to transpose the great music of Christ and His gospel into a lower key. The whole treatment is instinct with reverence for Christ, and that not merely as the historical source of the whole movement which we call Christianity but as its moving factor still; everywhere there is evident the most complete dependence on the Holy
Spirit; and the fervor of Christian love glows on every page.
Behind the deep devotion to the person of Jesus which is everywhere manifest, we do not easily see that, after all, this Jesus is to Mr. Glover no more than a good man, who was not a "mediator between God and man, making atonement" in His blood ("Conflict," p. 156); whose death on the cross was only "a pledge of His truth," "making possible our reconciliation with God" (p. 139); and whose entire function it has been to reveal to us with new poignancy the great fact that God is our Father (p. 142). Who could imagine that beneath the constant references to the Holy Spirit as the power of a new life in Christians, there lies nothing but a reference to the "influence of Jesus" "repeating itself in the lives of men and women" (p.
140), which though Paul may call it "the holy spirit" (note the lower-case initials) we may speak of perhaps as "the Christian instinct" (p. 150)? And certainly when we read the appeals to the Great Commission we are hardly prepared to understand that it is extremely doubtful ("Conflict," p. 114) whether this Commission is allowed by Mr. Glover, we will not say merely to be an utterance of our Lord's, but even to be a genuine portion of Matthew's Gospel. We read at the end of his Swarthmore Lecture these moving words: "We have found the nature and purpose of a Christian
Society, and we can sum it up in familiar words: 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature'; and, if we obey, we in our turn
shall be able to speak of 'the Lord working with us, and confirming the word with the signs following' " (p. 85). It is not likely that Mr. Glover attaches any authority to either text which he here cites: it is not likely that he believes either to be a genuine part of the Gospel in which it is now found. His bringing them together in this solemn passage may help us to form an estimate of how much significance we may attach to his citation of the Great Commission as if it were of importance to Christians; and also of his method of dealing with his audiences. Clearly in these Lectures Mr.
Glover has not wished to wound the sensibilities of his hearers by any suggestion of critical hesitations, or of doctrinal doubts. He has wished to speak to them on the basis of whatever of Christian belief—and more, of whatever of Christian sentiment—remained common to him and them.
No doubt his justification of this course would be that Christianity after all is a life, not a dogma: and no doubt this justification is valid—to a certain extent. Thus, at all events, the Lectures gain immensely in usefulness as addressed to Christian audiences: they may be read with profit by all. But they lose equally in significance—unless we are to read them as signs of the decay of Christianity as a doctrine and of its persistence merely as a traditional sentiment, seeking still to justify itself as such by its fruits. We wonder if Mr. Glover does not feel as he delivers such Lectures much as he portrays Plutarch as feeling as he argued for the old religion which he looked out upon with saddened eyes in its decay—that "delightful man of letters," as Mr. Glover describes him, "so full of charm, so warm with the love of all that is beautiful, so closely knit to the tender emotions of ancestral piety—and," Mr. Glover adds, comparing him with Seneca, "so unspeakably inferior in essential truthfulness" ("Conflict," p. 111).
It was highly appropriate that the distinguished son of Dr. Richard Glover should be called upon to deliver a course of the Angus Lectures; and the general tone of the Lectures which he has delivered on that Baptist
foundation is a testimony to the Christian training which he received in the Baptist manse at Bristol in which he was bred. The subject chosen—"The Christian Tradition and its Verification"—gives large opportunity for the manifestation of a Christian heart, and the opportunity is taken. The verification of the Christian tradition is sought in experience; and the effort of the lecturer is to give to his hearers some sense of the immense mass of experience the Church of Jesus Christ has accumulated of Him; with the hope that by its contemplation they will be led on to experiment and by experiment to the discovery of "what life in Truth is." The Lectures are six in number and are entitled in their order: The Challenge to Verification, the Use of Tradition, the Significance of the Christian Church, the Experience of the Early Church, Jesus in the Christian Centuries, and the Criticism of Jesus Christ. The practical note is everywhere dominant, but it is no unintellectual Christianity that Mr. Glover recommends. As he elsewhere expresses it ("Conflict," p. 125): "It is only the sentimentalism of the Church that supposes the flabby-minded to be at home in the Kingdom of God: Jesus did not." What Mr. Glover aims at is the consecration of all human powers to the service of Christ: "action," he says, "is impossible without some working theory, and this very fact drives earnest men into speculation" (p. 37). He suggests, indeed, in a somewhat Sphinx-like saying, that "Jesus Christ is not a teacher to be quoted" (p. 31); but what he seems to mean is that His words are not to be repeated merely but lived. If he gives too secondary a place in the Christian life to the life of the mind (which is emphasized in the declaration that we must love the Lord our God, as with our whole "heart" and "soul," so also therefore of course with our whole
"mind"—"the whole understanding, all the powers of thought and will," as Meyer explains it), he yet insists on the life of the mind. And he places
Christ at the center. "The plain fact is that, in the long run, despair is at the heart of every religion without Christ; and if man or woman is to get
through the world at all, it must be by the hardening or deadening of the more sensitive parts of human nature. Marcus Aurelius' Diary is a sort of breviary of despair" (p. 63). "One thing has always stood out clearly sooner or later. Whenever the Church at large, or any church in particular, has committed itself to any scheme of thought that has lessened the significance of Jesus Christ, it has declined. Error always tells; and the error of overestimating Jesus Christ ought to have told by now, but the experience of the Church so far suggests that it has no real reason to dread any danger from over-estimating Him, but rather that the danger has always come from obscuring or abating His significance. It is, I think, worth while to reflect upon what this involves. The faith has been tested in every compromise that Christians have attempted, and if it is still held, it is with some warrant" (pp. 86–87). Good apologetics, that! Can we have read Mr.
Glover wrong, when we have read him as "obscuring and abating the significance of Christ," both in His Person and in His work? We could wish he had known "Jesus Christ and Him as crucified" better, and Wilhelm
Herrmann less well!
The Swarthmore Lecture runs somewhat on the lines of the third of the Angus series. Its leading topic is the significance of the Christian
Church, and its keynote is perhaps struck in some such words as these: "We do not enough value the fact that the story of the Christian religion is the story of personality influenced by personality—re-birth constantly the product of the influence of the re-born" (p. 27). There may be an echo of Wilhelm Herrmann in this and we are glad therefore to read on the next page: "The blessing comes from a higher source, but the broken bread is given by human hands"—followed by some illuminating remarks. We do not wonder that surprise has been felt that this particular topic was chosen for a lecture addressed to Friends. Mr. Glover defends his choice of topic in an interesting Preface, the upshot of it being (if we understand him) that
Friends especially need instruction on the Church. This is probably true; at all events it is instruction on the Church that Mr. Glover gives them—and he does it very well. Beginning with the inheritance we have in the Christian
Church, he ends with the duty of the Church to the world, while between the two he expounds the relation of the individual to the Church. In the center of all, here too he sets Jesus Christ. "From the very beginning and ever onwards right in the centre of all their thoughts, the Christian communities have had Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom God was, reconciling the world unto Himself. He has been the leaven within the Church, disruptive, propulsive, recreating and stirring, the permanent life, the guarantee and promise of a future that shall progressively transcend the past— No dead fact stranded on the shore Of the oblivious years, but the living Christ, always recognized, and owned and loved by the Church. The great function of the Church has been to witness to Him, and to bring the world face to face with Him" (pp. 42–43). We ask again,
Can we have misread Mr. Glover when we read him as holding to a "reduced" Christ? For the rest, we call attention to two small points. One is the comma, in the first sentence we have quoted, after the phrase "in whom
God was." This gives a particular interpretation to 2 Cor. 5:19—an interpretation which, indeed, is wrong, but which seems notable on Mr.
Glover's lips. The other concerns the allusion to the Parable of the Leaven, in which an interpretation of that Parable which Mr. Glover repeats in more than one of his series of Lectures, is adverted to. This interpretation conceives that Parable as teaching not so much, as it has been customary to
expound it, the hidden, pervasive growth of the Kingdom in the world, as the seething fermentation of life which takes place in the Church of Christ
—in the individual man and in the community. The leaven, says Mr.
Glover, works; and in its working bubble after bubble breaks; the breaking of the bubbles is not an indication that the end has come, but that there is life at work behind them. The interpretation again is wrong; but again it is not without its significance on Mr. Glover's lips.
We must not close without pointing to a passage in each of the Lecturecourses which has pleased us vastly. In the Swarthmore Lecture we point to the section on "Grace" (pp. 33–37)—" 'the greatest of all the Catholic doctrines,' Renan said" (p. 33). In the Angus Lectures we point to the passage on the phrase "From the foundation of the World" (pp. 135–140),
—in which is enshrined "the great fact of God's love as antecedent to all things—of Christ as the embodiment of purposeful love—of the universe itself in all its range as a Cosmos indeed, inspired and achieved by love, and subservient in its last detail to love" (p. 139).
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, xii. 1914, pp. 277–283.