The New Heroism
XI.
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WE found in the last chapter that Christianity brought into the world a new form of energy.
We found that the old force men called love was here transformed so radically as almost to become a distinct creation.
We found that in this form of Christian transformation it was the source of four new powers of the heart of man—a power of faith in human nature as long as human nature was not known to be false, a power of forgiveness when it was known to be false, a power of hope by which the first faith might be restored, and a power of permanence by which the realisation of the hope could be waited on long and patiently.
We have now to see in what manner these new powers of the heart have influenced the world as a world, in other words, have moulded the secular life of men.
That they have influenced and moulded the secular life of men is denied by none.
'That in point of fact they have transformed ancient thought into modern thought, is now one of the commonplaces of history.
But it is by no means at first sight so
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clear how the change has been effected.
It is of course easy to say that it has been wrought by a spiritual regeneration.
No doubt it has in what is called the Church, ¢.e., the body of men that are spiritually regenerated.
But what of the world, what of the masses that have not received what is called Christian regeneration?
It cannot be denied that to some extent, at least, they have received Christian civilisation ; it cannot be doubted that those who do not possess the powers of Christian love try to imitate their possession.
The question is, what is that influence which has produced this tendency to imitate the product of a new culture, to simulate by artificial means the growth of a spirit which is as yet foreign to the nature ?
To estimate this influence we must bear in mind the fact that the religion of Christ has addressed itself not merely to the heart but to the imagination.
It has not only inaugurated a new life but a new heroism.
Itis to the transformation in the world's ilea of glory that we chiefly owe the transition from the old culture into the new.
Let us consider, at the outset, the effect of the mere discovery that the heart has powers.
To the ancient standard of heroism the heart was a passive thing.
Some despised it as a source of weakness, some tolerated it as a necessary evil; none looked upon it as an actual citadel of man.
The most moral of all ancient systems—that of Buddhism, is itself the very best illustration; it sought the goal of per-
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fection in the extinction of desire.
If systems of religion and philosophy thought thus, it was much more natural that common men should think so.
Religion and philosophy might affect to despise any love of glory, but common men could not.
Some standard of glory they must have, and where were they to get it?
The heights of the intellect were beyond them, the desires of the heart were said to be beneath them; there remained for them only the world of the senses.
That world accordingly they chose.
They laid their ideal of glory in the objects of sight and sound—in the glitter of arms and the thunders of war.
The great man became to them identical with the strong man, and the strong man with the man of muscular force.
'That there was a strength which did not manifest itself by beating down, was a thought which had not yet entered their minds.
That the softness of the human heart might itself attain the strength of adamant was an idea they could not comprehend.
| And so they wove the chaplet for the warrior's brow, and kept the laurel for him who slew the foe; the courage of the beast of the field became their type of heroic virtue.
At the very root of the type the new ideal struck.
The religion of Christ declared that the greatest power in the world, the only power that never failed, was the power of love.
Such a declaration ran right in the face of the old world's philosophy and practice.
Love is a form of desire,
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and the philosophy of the East counted desire a weakness.
Love is a form of feeling, and the philosophy of the West had called feeling a defect.
The religion of Christ opposed both.
It declared love to be potentially divine, and in so doing it placed the highest possibilities of humanity in the desires and feelings of the heart.
The first and immediate effect of this was to magnify human life itself.
In the old world the glory of a man's life lay in something outside itself.
To the popular mind its glory lay in its material enrichment ; to the philosopher and the religious devotee, its greatness consisted in its material impoverishment.
To the faith of Christ the life of a man was valuable, neither on account of what it had, nor yet by reason of what it had not, but simply and solely in virtue of what it was.
And the test of what it was, was the heart.
The index to the man was the state of his desires; where his heart was, there his treasure was to be sought.
Now the point for us to observe is that this was really an exaltation of the idea of life itself.
Christianity neither advocated material agerandisement on the one hand, nor material asceticism on the other; it merely said that man's true riches lay within, and in so saying it proclaimed to the world the inherent grandeur of being a living soul.
The most direct influence of this new revelation was that exerted upon the idea of suicide; it transformed it from a noble into an ignoble death.
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To die by one's own hand was with the Roman an act of courage ; it is with the Christian a deed of the deepest cowardice.
The reason lies in the fact that to the Christian the greatest power is heartpower—power to bear.
In his view it needs more courage to live than to die.
The highest strength _of which the Christian knows is the love which can support trial.
The doctrine of the Cross itself is the proclamation of a new kind of glory.
The heroism of the Son of Man is the heroism of one who has power to yield up his will to the Universal Will, to whom living and dying are alike forms of life—that life of love that bears the burdens of the universe.
In such a standard of heroism there is no place for suicide.
To die by the will of God, and in acceptance of the will of God, is a form of life because it is a form of love ; it is a voluntary submission to the established order of the world; it is to say, Thy will be done.
But to die by one's own hand is to resist the established order; it is to say, My will be done!
It is to fly from a burden one fears to face ; it is to confess one's inability to bear.
It is thus that to the eye of Christianity that which was the greatest proof of courage has become the highest evidence of cowardice.
The death of the suicide was once applauded ; it is now mentioned with bated breath, and that which Pagan Rome referred to magnanimity of soul is explained by Christian charity as the result of mental weakness.
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And the same principle which made it more heroic in a man to bear his own infirmities, made it more heroic in him to bear the infirmities of others.
If Christianity threw a stigma over the idea of suicide, it cast a yet deeper stigma on the practice of infanticide.
That practice originated in the Pagan ideal of greatness.
If a man's life consisted in the abundance of the material things he possessed, a man was potentially great in proportion as he evinced the likelihood of possession.
Hence the strongest lives were the most carefully preserved; it was to these the nation looked for the achievement of its conquests and of its glory.
But the weak, the frail, the deformed, the lives that came into the world with a defect either of body or of mind, were from this point of view not worth preserving.
They had no prospect of contributing anything to the national glory, no likelihood of ever being saluted as the conquerors of Rome's enemies.
'They were more likely to be themselves a burden on their country and a retardation of the nation's life.
And so Rome thought that the best thing she could do with them was to destroy them at their birth.
So far from being consciously inhumane in this act, she was prompted to the act to. some extent by the very impulse of humanity.
If a deformed Roman could have got his choice in infancy, whether he should die or live, he would without hesitation have preferred the former alternative ; in condemning weak infants to exposure
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he only did as he would have been done by, if in similar circumstances he had received the right to choose.
The fault of the Roman was not his inhumanity; it was his false ideal of humanity.
He thought he was doing good service both to the State and to the child by cutting short a life that should never develop into a fighting man.
But Christianity said, Let the child live.
In So Saying, it was not actuated merely by humanity ; it was guided by a process of reasoning.
It differed from Paganism, not so much in being more humane as in having a higher view of what constituted humanity.
To Paganism, the most ignoble service in life was burden-bearing, and therefore to free a life from burden-bearing was the purest clemency.
But to Christianity the service of burden-bearing was of all others the noblest.
The very symbol of Christian glory was the carrying of a cross.
It was a symbol not of weakness, but of power—the power of love.
The great agent of power in the old world had been hate; it was this which had nerved men for the scenes of the battlefield.
But here was a power that could enable men to be courageous without a battlefield.
Here was a power which literally could make a man strong in the midst of weakness, which could give the life-long invalid a place among the heroes of the universe.
The religion of Christ proclaimed that there was an order of heroism which the Roman Senate had
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never yet honoured with a triumph—the heroism that belongs to the patience in tribulation; for those who had passed through this fiery furnace it claimed the laurel crown.
And just because it deemed the bearing of weakness to be a field of glory, it would not rob the decrepit infant of its prospective triumph.
It would not cut short at birth a life with such possibilities of hervism before it.
It would not deprive the child of the chance of that golden crown which the new civilisation was to place on the brows of those who should be perfect through suffering.
A still wider social influence of the new heroism was the change it effected in the position of woman.
Before the advent of the Cross the feminine nature, as a rule, was not appreciated.
It had not sufficient power of abstraction for the Platonist ; it had too much power of emotion for the Stoic; it had no point of contact with the materialistic tendencies of the popular mind.
It is hardly too much to say that the women who obtained a position either in the Pantheon or in the State obtained it in proportion to the sacrifice of the typically feminine nature.
But with the dawn of Christianity woman came to the front as woman.
She had sometimes been at the front as something else than woman—as a minister to sensuous passions or a contributor to political intrigues.
But in Christianity she appeared heroic in that which was her native garb, She came into prominence in virtue of the very type of
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character which in the old world had constituted the ground of her repression—her gentleness, her meekness, her self-restraint.
She derived her prominence from the fact that Christianity had taught men where the highest courage lay.
It had taught them that the most arduous part of the soul's battle was its struggle with itself, its effort to restrain its own passions, its power to bear.
It had made them feel that the only strength adequate to such a task was heart-strength, that in such a strife mere intellect was powerless, that love alone could support the strain.
In this apotheosis of a new and passive heroism the soul of woman was glorified.
The image of the feminine nature was lifted into the heights, and men worshipped it.
Mariolatry is the earliest worship of woman to be found in the world's annals.
Juno was not adored as woman, but as a female Jupiter; Venus was not adored as woman, but as sensuous loveliness.
Mary was worshipped as virgin purity.
And this historic act is at the same time symbolic ; it marks an universal change in the attitude of the human mind towards the feminine spirit.
It indicates that under the new regime the spirit of womanhood had become everywhere the object of reverence.
In bending the knee to the Virgin Mother, men, under the guise of a very crude symbol, were expressing their adoration of that element in human nature which had been so long despised—the restraint of passion, the limitation of self-will, the power to acquiesce in
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the surrender of sensuous aims, and to find a new joy in submission to the common good.
But perhaps the widest of all the influences exerted by the new heroism was that produced on the idea of government.
The relation of Church and State has been in all Christian ages more or less a subject of controversy.
Some have held that the State has a right to rule the Church; others that the Church has a right to dominate the State.
With this controversy we have here happily no concern.
The question with which we have to do is one that has not received so much attention :
What is the relation between the zdea of the Church and the zdea of the State?
We want to know— not why church-government has at any time dominated state-government, but why at all times since the Christian era the State itself has been gradually changing the model of its own government into closer approximation with the ideal of a Church.
In this sense it will be found that Christianity has more really absorbed the State in modern times than she ever did in the days of Hildebrand.
It is indeed no longer a physical but a moral absorption.
The Church has not engulfed the State, but the church-idea of headship has become identical with the state-idea of kinghood.
The State is more and more recognising that the true king is a servant— the servant of all.
The old idea of kinghood was what was called an absolute monarchy—a monarchy in which the will of the ruler constitutes the will of
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the people.
The new thought, the thought to which every day the governments of the earth are approximating, is that of a monarchy in which the will of the people constitutes the will of the ruler.
In the ancient regime the law descends from the heights to the valleys; in the modern it ascends from the valleys to the heights.
In the former the king is creat because he utters the earliest voice; in the | latter he is great because he utters the latest voice of all, and sums up in his verdict the average sentiment of the nation.
Now, what we have to remark is, that this latter and more modern view of state-government is the Christian ideal of church-government.
When St.
Paul wishes to emphasise the fact that Christ is King over His Church, he calls Him the Head of the body.
Why does he use this metaphor instead of the simple and direct title of king?
It is because in the view of Paul Christ is king in a special way—by bearing the sorrows of His subjects.
The head is king over the members of the body because it bears the pains of the members.
The head of a human body is, so to speak, the latest voice of the physical constitution.
It receives its impressions from the subordinate organs ; it registers the movements of the common life.
Its empire, in short, is constituted by its power to feel what the members feel; remove that power, and its reign is over.
In the ideal of the Christian Church the metaphor is justified.
Here the least
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in the kingdom is always the greatest.
"He that would be chief among you, let him be your minister," are the words in which is expressed the Christian view of sovereignty.
The man who would be the head of the body of new believers must be the man who is most weighed down by the sins and sorrows of that body.
He must be that man whose heart is most knit to the united membership, so knit that he feels its pains and struggles as if they were his own.
That is the man who is in the Christian sense king.
He is the king because he is the head, and he is the head because he bears the life-burden of all.
The power by which he sways others is the power that first conquered his own soul—love.
Such is the idea which, after taking possession of the Christian consciousness, has gradually passed beyond the boundaries of the religious world and effected a lodgment in the sphere of political life.
We need not say that the change it has produced and is producing within that sphere is radical.
In a constitution where the king is the voice of the people, or, in Pauline phrase, the head of the body, it is clear that the starting-point of all development must be the individual man.
The head is the sum of the bodily members, and the bodily members are the united sum of distinct individual lives.
In such a government as this the all-important element is the unit.
If the development is to begin from beneath, it must
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begin with the one, for the mass is but a congeries of atoms, and the character of each atom must determine the nature of the mass.
It follows that in the new civilisation there must rise into prominence the rights of the individual man.
The new civilisation carries Protestantism in its very bosom.
Hach man feels himself to be essential to the whole movement of humanity.
Need we say, however, that the fact of each being essential is inimical to the licence of any one.
No individual can keep his individuality by living to himself alone.
"He that loveth his life shall lose it," is an aphorism which experience has proved true,
In the world of the human heart no man is a king until he has become a priest; he can never really say I live, until he is able to say L am crucified.
The power of a human personality is in every case proportionate to its self-forgetfulness.
The man who rises to distinction is the man whose being is absorbed in some great interest.
If he would be great he must be lost in the love of something ; his empire shall be the fruit of his sacrifice.
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom," is no arbitrary beatitude ; the spiritual king is ever the spiritual priest —the man of sacrifice.
The life of an individual man is different from the individual drop of an ocean.
The drop only reveals its identity when it is separate from the ocean; restore it to the bosom of the sea, and its distinctive being disappears.
But the ee
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life of the man only reveals its distinctiveness when it is cast into the bosom of humanity.
In its isolation it has no qualities.
To bring out its qualities it needs the contact with the lives of other men, and its character will only reach its fulness and its perfection when its self-life is absorbed and overshadowed by the interests of the universal whole.
But the Christian idea of a common membership not only applies to the individual man in each state ; it has an application also to the individual states of each epoch.
'The religion of Christ contemplates as the goal of its morality the gathering of the nations.
It has been said indeed that Christianity discouraged patriotism; so it did— that special kind of patriotism which was current at the time of its appearance.
The main obstacle which the Gospel had to contend with was just the spirit of a false patriotism.
The Jew loved his country so much that he could love no other country.
His only conception of an universal love was an universal Judaism; he promised to love the whole world, when the whole world should become coextensive with the kingdom of David.
It was impossible that the religion of Christ should regard such a spirit with complacency ; it was inevitable that its precepts should take a reactionary tone.
We can catch the echo of that reaction in the bold language of a Paul: "There is neither Jew nor "Greek;" it is the utterance of a man who is wearied
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with a false patriotism.
Yet it would be erroncous to conclude that Christianity is opposed to nationality ; it is no more opposed to nationality than it is opposed to individualism.
It is in the interest of the individual that it desires him to forget his self-love, and it is in the interest of the nation that it desires the nation to forget its nationality.
So far from being opposed to a collective national life, the attainment of such a life is the very goal of its morality.
The prospective pean which it chants over its final triumph is this: The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our
God and of His Christ.
It contemplates not the abolition of national distinctions, but the interpenetration of national interests.
It looks forward to the time when the political good of one shall be seen to be identical with the political good of all, when nation shall not rise against nation, nor kingdom against kingdom, but when principalities and powers shall be subject to one ideal—the example of the Prince of Peace.
Recurring now to the new idea of state-government—the identification of kinghood with headship
—it is worth while to consider how St. Paul gives the thought a domestic as well as a national application.
He makes it apply not only to the nation, but to the household.
The relation of the parties in married life is a topic on which he descants with more than usual definiteness of detail, and it seems to us that nowhere has the tenor of his remarks
PNAS,
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been more generally mistaken.
He says in so many words that the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the Head of the Church, and that therefore the wife owes to her husband the obedience which the Church owes to Christ.
What does St. Paul mean by this statement?
Does he intend to emphasise the view that the position of woman in the household should be a subordinate
one?
If so, his teaching on this matter was a redundancy.
No one in the world of his day would have denied such a thesis; it would have met the approval of Barbarian and Roman, bond and free.
His precept would have been on the line of the universal practice, and would therefore have been acceptable to all.
But Paul wrote his epistles to correct.
He would not have deemed it worth while to pen a letter for the sake of endorsing the social customs of heathendom.
He wished to exhibit Christian morality in those features in which it was distinctive with a view to illustrate his leading position that the cross of Christ had made all things new.
Accordingly, when he delineates the Christian view of the married state, it can only be in order to show that it essentially differs from the heathen view, that woman, in respect of subordination, no longer occupies the same position in the new household which she occupied in the old.
The question is, What is the difference?
St. Paul is perfectly explicit in declaring that the wife is to be subordinate to the husband.
So far as the
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2i% terms of expression are concerned, the Christian Apostle does not seem to have transcended the level of Pagan culture.
Yet he connects this ordinance of marriage in a direct and immediate sense with the Person and work of that Christ for whom he claims distinct originality.
Wherein lies the originality of a command which seems to leave the life of woman in the same condition of depression and servitude in which she had been placed by the world of heathen antiquity ?
The originality consists in the new idea of the nature of subordination which Christianity itself introduced.
Let us look again at this remarkable passage.
We shall see that so far from being an unqualified assertion of the wife's subjection to the husband, it is really a revolt from that old doctrine.
It affirms in words the law of the ancient regime, but it gives such a meaning to the ancient terms that the new command amounts to the contradiction of the old law.
What St. Paul says is, that the husband is only head of the wife in a particular way—as Christ is Head of the Church.
Now, how was Christ to Paul the Head of the Church?
The answer to that question we have already seen.
Christ, in the view of St. Paul, is the Head because He is the Servant, the King because He is the Priest, the Ruler because he is the Bearer.
He wields the sceptre over the members just because He bears the burdens of the members; the sceptre is itself the burden.
It is in this sense, and in no
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other, that St. Paul declares the husband to be the head of the wife.
The headship which he assigns to him is the headship of ministration.
He tells him to bear the burdens of the woman, to carry her crosses, to protect her interests.
He bids him consider that she is a member of his own body, a part of his own life, a sharer in his own being, that it is impossible to separate her interest from his interest, or her burden from his burden.
"He that loveth his wife loveth himself,' are the striking words in which St. Paul expresses his sense of that essential equality which unites the parties in the marriage contract; the head is only head because it possesses within itself the life and power of ministration.
So, too, when he turns to the woman and says, "Submit yourself unto your husband as unto the Lord," his sentence is not an endorsement but a qualification of the old regime.
The submission "unto the Lord" is not an abject submission; it is a self-surrender, a joyous and voluntary service.
It is an allegiance which a member of the body gives to the head of the body, an allegiance not dictated by craven fear, but by an inward necessity of being which makes life impossible without the giving up of self.
That phrase, "as unto the Lord," instead of being an intensification of the woman's bondage, is the Magna Charta of her Christian freedom, the inscription which, for all time to come, distinguishes
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service from servitude, and marks the radical difference between ministry and slavery.
Let it be observed, however, that the difference is purely a mental one.
Ministration may submit to work outwardly more menial than that which the slave performs.
The contrast lies in the mind.
Slavery springs from command, and is therefore bondage ; ministration springs from love, and is therefore free.
The immediate aim of the religion of Christ was not so much to abolish any form of slavery from without as to transfigure it from within.
In dealing with any depressed caste, whether it were the wife or the nominal servant of a household, the first design of Christianity was to convert slavery into ministration.
Accordingly it did not inaugurate its coming by demanding that the slave should be set free; it attached too much importance to the cross to proclaim at the outset the abolition of the cross.
It proposed not so much to lift the burdens of life from the labouring and heavy-laden as to give the labouring and the heavy-laden the power to work and to endure.
It proposed to effect such a change on the zdea of labour, such a transformation on the thought of burden-bearing, that men would come to feel the yoke not only light, but glorious.
It had a voice alike for the master and for the slave, but it was as yet only an inward voice.
It told the slave that in the very discharge of his servile duties he might enter into the life of freedom, the freedom
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of a heart that has accepted its burden and its toil.
It told the master that in the very act of ruling he should feel that he was not free—that his rule was itself a headship, and therefore the bearing of a yoke.
When St. Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon, he sent him back, from his point of view, a free man.
Onesimus, in the voluntary return to the duties of his master's service, was in St. Paul's sight a grander illustration of the liberating power of the Gospel than would have been presented by the spectacle of his mere bodily enfranchisement; that would have been only a freedom of the flesh, this was a liberty of the spirit.
And let it be remembered that it was through this liberty of the spirit that the bondage of the flesh itself was broken.
Voluntary service brought the dignity of labour, and a sense of the dignity of labour dignified toiling men.
It is the new thought that has broken the old chain.
Not by might, not by power, but by spirit, has the slave been set free—the spirit of that new heroism which, by revealing the majesty of selfrestraint and the divinity of self-surrender, has placed on an equal ideal level the lives and lots of men.