Development Of The Spiritual Life
VAT
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
In the two preceding chapters we contemplated the first conscious manifestations of a new vital movement—faith, the sight of a moral ideal, and prayer, the effort of the soul to reach it.
We say, the first conscious manifestations; for in every vital movement there is something which les behind consciousness.
'The first conscious breath of the infant is itself the product of a mystery.
It comes from an underlying power of whose nature it has no knowledge.
We say, J think, J speak, J feel; and in the very act of saying so, we have made a momentous declaration.
We have expressed our conviction that behind the manifestations of thought and speech and feeling there dwells a mysterious "J"—the source and subject of them all; that these things are not the beginning of our life, but our life the beginning of these ; that we ourselves are more than we see, or hear, or touch, more than we speak, or think, or feel—a power at the back of consciousness, a life in the rear of thought.
Now, though the discussion of the subject lies
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outside of our province, it is a precisely analogous power which Christianity claims for the origin of that which is distinctive in her moral system.
She maintains that the distinctive manifestation demands and requires a distinctive life behind it as surely as the colour of the rose demands the belief in an object.
Christian faith, hope, charity, meekness, patience, mercy are only qualities; in themselves they are the colour without the rose—a mere abstraction of the thinking mind.
To give them reality they must be dwed; in other words, must have a life in which they inhere.
Their very existence as ideas demands such an origin.
Christian faith and Christian prayer are both professedly ideal; they seek that which is not yet attained by the human soul—moral perfection.
None the less are they the evidence of a life behind themselves, a life to which they owe their life.
I cannot believe in that which is good except through a power of goodness.
I cannot pray for that which is spiritually fair except by the possession of a spiritual loveliness.
I cannot ask, seek, strive for those things which are above me unless already I am "born from above ;" unless even now there be in me a spirit equal to those things.
Now, this is precisely the claim which Christianity advances to the merit of originality.
It professes to have brought a new force into the world.
It declares that since its coming men have had new desires, new aspirations, new ideals of heroism ;
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old things are passed away, and all things have become new.
It says that a renewing power must itself have novelty in it; that all things must proceed from sources that are like them in kind:
''That which is born of the flesh, is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit, is spirit."
It affirms that the revelation of the Divine morality proclaimed by the Gospel is just one which flesh and blood could not give, but which must seek its origin in a cause commensurate with itself.
That is the position of Christianity on this matter, and if you grant the premises, you will have to acknowledge it to be thoroughly philosophical.
If this religion has brought into the world a new ideal, or if it has intensified to an extraordinary degree an old ideal, and diffused it from a few souls into the mass of humanity, it can only have done so either by the putting forth of a new force into the Universe, or by modifying and transforming the forces already there.
It is probable that the latter alternative will be conceded to Christianity even by modern science.
If a pebble cast into the sea produces endless undulations, if a word spoken into the air leads to unceasing movements, if a foot struck upon the sand affects the whole physical frame of the world, what shall we say of a force which has changed the current of all history?
Rising out of the silence and the solitude, coming with no carnal weapons, appearing with no gorgeous accompaniSe weir:
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LIFE.
ments, this power may be said to have filled the habitable world.
It has touched every department of life, and everything it has touched has been transformed.
It has given a new turn to ethics.
It has given a new department to politics.
It has inaugurated a second birth for the spirit of poetry.
It has almost created painting.
It has developed the institutions of modern charity.
It has relaxed the bonds of despotism.
It has tightened the bonds of family and home.
All this, and an hundred things more, Christianity, we do not say has claimed to do, but has actually done!
Its relation. to the fabric of existing civilization is not a matter of religious belief, it is a matter of historical fact ; its religious force has been a transforming secular power; what the man of science would call a subliming of energies.
The question is, why?
That which can transform other things must surely have itself a new or transforming element.
It cannot work changes by means of the same old material which could work no changes.
It must have a cause proportionate to its effect, a power adequate to explain its own actions.
That which can effect a sublimation of the world's energies must itself surely be an energy transcendently sublime, a force which itself has been sublimated by the combined influences of universal nature.
We are able, then, even from the side of reason, in some measure to vindicate, and in still greater measure to sympathise with, the claim of Christianity
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to be a new life.
That claim it does certainly make.
It declares its Founder to have been a New Man, a second Adam; the first-fruits of a Spirit that had grafted itself afresh on the old tree of human life.
It declares that this Spirit, which in its fulness first lived in the Christian Founder, repeats itself from day to day in the lives and experiences of His followers.
It declares that alike in the Church Universal, and in the solitudes of the individual soul, there is to be seen the evidence of a life higher than the natural life—a life involving changes complete, radical, permanent; itself incapable of explanation, yet capable of explaining all other things.
It says that this life pursues in the Church Universal and in the solitudes of the individual soul, that identical order of evolution which it pursued in the experience of the Divine
Founder—a growth in wisdom and in knowledge and in favour with God and man.
The second Adam, whether in the world of history or in the world of the heart, is altogether unlike the first.
He does not spring up at once, a finished manhood, a creation which is complete in the very act of being; He submits to the condition of human existence, the condition of development.
The spirit of the new life accepts the law of the spirit of all life; it elects to grow.
It chooses the path of sacrifice, the path of struggle, the path of patience.
It begins in what may be called a spiritual germcell, in which life is hardly, if at all, distinguishable
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I4I from death.
It passes into a child-life whose main characteristic is a sense of want it does not comprehend, a vague hungering and thirsting after an object which the sequel proves to be righteousness, but which as yet is formless, nameless.
It takes up one by one the different spheres of human nature, beginning with the narrowest, and culminating in the widest.
It starts with the individual life in its unity and in its isolation, and thence it spreads itself outward to embrace the world.
It expands from sphere to sphere, from the unit to the member of a family, from the member of a family to the householder, from the householder to the citizen, from the citizen to the patriot, from the patriot to the cosmopolitan.
In a word, this life proceeds, as all life proceeds, from within to without.
It grows as the seed grows—from latency into manifestation, from weakness into streneth, from a being of isolation and solitude into a life of companionship and union.
It may be asked, why do we speak of all this in a subject so prosaic as the principles of Christian
- morality?
The reason is plain.
If the spirit of Christianity be unfolded by evolution, it follows that the precepts of the New Testament, however prosaic, are something more than a catalogue or almanac.
They can no longer be viewed as a mere set of beads tied together by a string.
They are parts of a great unity, They too have a law of development in which they move, and an order of
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arrangement in which they come.
They exist, not as dislocated fragments, by as the symmetrical stones of a sacred temple whose places are definitely determined, and whose relations are mutually adjusted.
The truth is, the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit has a literary as well as a religious significance.
It has elevated Christian morality into a Christian philosophy, and given it a place among the sciences..
It has caused that morality to be no longer a series of disconnected maxims, no longer a mere collection of proverbs and aphorisms, but the expression of an eternal law in its endless adaptations and its infinitely varied developments.
What, then, is the philosophy of Christian morality ? the order of development in which its laws are revealed?
We have said that the law of all life is a progress from within to without.
In this respect, we should say, the law of life is the converse of the law of education, which is a proeress from without to within.
When the child begins to learn, it begins with the world of sense.
Its first lesson is in the things it sees, hears, handles.
It passes from the concrete to the abstract, from the form to the idea, from the image to the thought ; and its education is complete when it has mastered the study of self; the goal of its knowledge is the germ-cell.
But with the actual life of the child it is far otherwise.
That begins within.
It is at first amere series of isolated individual feelings.
Then it becomes able to connect its impressions, and refer
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them to the fact of its own existence.
By degrees it awakes to the knowledge of existences other than its own, and embraces that knowledge in everwidening circles.
It reaches its completeness when it is furthest removed from the germ-cell, when it comes into contact with all humanity, and touches the centre of universal life.
Now, the order of Christian morality, as depicted by the New Testament itself, follows the order of universal life ; it is a process from within outwards.
We see this even in a discourse so popular as the Sermon on the Mount.
It traces the blessed life from its origin to its consummation.
Is shows us that virtue in its rise is a purely individual thing, the struggle of the inner man against himself; it is poverty of spirit, mourning for sin, the restraint of passion, and the aspiration after good.
Then comes a second stage.
'The individual enters into relation with other individuals.
He comes out of his isolation, he emerges from his solitude.
He is no longer merely the "poor in spirit;" he is the merciful spirit—the spirit that can bear the poverty of others.
He is no longer simply the ''meek;" he is the peacemaker—the man who can make others meek.
He is no longer only a being who hungers and thirsts after righteousness ; he is one who is able to be persecuted for righteousness' sake—to support the burdens of human duty in the midst of the conflict with the outward circumstances which environ him.
At last the final stage arrives.
The light of
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virtue ceases to shine through clouds of strugele ; it breaks forth spontaneously and just because it
"cannot be hid."
It ceases to be merely outward ; it becomes cosmopolitan—the "light of the world."
It is no more simply a moral power ; it has become a moral ministrant, and it shines for the sake of ministration.
It is no longer merely solicitous to be glorified through conflict; it seeks rather to glorify by contact, to make pure by being pure.
Its final law is embodied in the great command, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in Heaven."
Here, then, is the general law that regulates the development of the Christian moral life.
It proceeds from the inner to the outer, and from the outer to the outermost, while at the same time it is a progress from the unconscious to the struggling, and from the struggling to the spontaneous.
But now, can we trace any more minutely this law of Christian development?
We have seen its general operation ; can we determine its process in detail:
Does Christianity itself give any account of the moral order of its own precepts?
There is one very remarkable passage of the New Testament in which it does—a passage in which, professedly, and in so many words, it declares the philosophic sequence in which its precepts move.
We allude to 2 Peter i, 5, where it is said, "Giving all diligence, add to your faith, virtue; and to virtue,
_—_———
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knowledge ; and to knowledge, temperance ; and to temperance, patience; and to patience, vodliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, charity."
We need not say that the so much disputed Apostolic origin of the passage is here a matter of indifference.
What we wish to find is not an authority, but a representation ; not an evidence that Christian morality was inspired, but an exposition of what Christian morality was conceived to be.
Here is a document belonging unquestionably to a very early age, and giving undoubted expression to the Christian consciousness of that age, in which there is unfolded a complete theory of development from the seed to the flower.
A study of this earliest system of Christian ethics cannot be without interest.
It can be verified by a surer test than any authority —the test of universal experience.
If we should find that the earliest is also the latest consciousness, if we should arrive at the conviction that what was attested by the Christian experience of the first century is still attested by the Christian experience of the nineteenth, we shall have attained an incontestable guarantee that the New Testament order of moral development is an order based on the reality of things.
Let us look more in detail at this earliest effort to construct a philosophy of Christian morality.
It will be observed that the first stage of the process is taken for granted; it is assumed that the K
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basis of the whole is "faith."
We have already pointed out that faith, in the Christian sense, is the sight of an ideal—the vision of that which we would like to be.
It is not difficult to see that in any moral system this stage must indeed be the first.
The root of all moral being is moral aspiration; the wish is here the father, not only of the thought, but of the deed.
The beginning of a man's holiness is in every case his admiration of -holiness.
The moment he has looked into the face of moral beauty and seen it to be beautiful, he has crossed the boundary line between good and evil.
That look is what Christianity calls faith.
It is that process by which an individual sees his deformity in the light of a pure mirror.
It is at one and the same moment depression and exaltation.
Man learns his nothingness in the glory of the new vision, and falls prostrate before its blaze.
But the fall is in reality a rise.
The light which strikes him down is a light already within his own soul.
Saul of Tarsus could never have seen a Christ in the air; only an incipient Paul could do that.
The vision was the effect, and not the cause, of a conversion.
Faith—that sight of a moral ideal which for the first time reveals to the human goul the distance at which it lies from holiness, and the length of that journey it has still to travel—is, by reason of that very revelation, the beginning of that upward flight in which his youth is renewed as the eacle's.
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The first breath, then, of the moral life is faith —the sense of the contrast between what we are and what we ought to be.
It is impossible, however, that faith can be the rest of the soul.
It is its very nature to be a state of unrest.
The soul's vision of a moral beauty which as yet is not its own is, and can be, nothing else than an awakening to pain—the stimulation of that great hunger which cries for more.
Hence it is that in this passage of 2 Peter, we find almost an immediate transition to a higher step in the process of development.
'Add to your faith, virtue."
We may remark at the outset that the word "add" in our Authorised Version is unfortunate.
Addition is a process from without.
It is the increase of a thing by something which originally had no connection with it.
If I receive lessons in French one year, and in German another, I may be said to add German to French.
This is certainly one mode of progress.
It is not, however, the mode of progress suggested by the passage before us, nor the form of interpretation implied by the Greek of that passage.
The progress of which St. Paul speaks is a development from within.
It is not the impartation to a certain quality of a thing not originally there ; it is the unfolding from it of a thing which is latently there.
It is the bringing out into bloom that life of the flower which sleeps already in the bud; the expansion into meridian glory of the sunshine slumbering in the dawn.
The literal rendering of the words is—"In your
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faith supply virtue."
It is an exhortation to expand the life of the germ, to remember what possibilities are folded within the germ.
This faith, in itself so small a thing, is declared to be the seed of all other things.
It contains within its tiny compass the first and last principles of all morality, the nucleus of a life whose goal is generic humanity.
It hides within its bosom~-the treasures of all spiritual wisdom, and the sources of all spiritual acquirement ; and that which in the sequel shall issue from the heart of the man will be only the outward evolving of what is there inwardly and unconsciously implied.
Let us now try to trace this evolution, this unfolding of the germ.
Its first step is indicated in the words, "Add to your faith, virtue."
Put into modern language this means to say: Carry out the ideal into the actual.
The object of faith is at first seen only in the distant.
It is its distance that makes it an object of faith; it is not yet realised, it is simply an ideal.
But it is impossible that any ideal can take possession of the soul without struggling for realisation.
We have seen that the birth of faith is the birth of aspiration, the entrance into the heart of a new desire.
The moment such an event takes place the approach of war is heralded.
'Two lives exist in the human . personality—one, old, the other, new ; one, already in possession of human action, the other, in possession of the highest thoughts of the human heart ;
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one, strong from custom, the other, fresh with the glow of youth's enthusiasm.
Here are the elements of a conflict, and of a conflict in which the new and higher life will be the aggressor.
The ideal must prove itself to be the actual, and the effort of the ideal to prove itself the actual is what is called virtue.
Virtue is not a different quality from faith ; it is faith struggling.
It is faith hardening itself into solidity by its own movement.
It is faith losing its spontaneity, or child-like character, and becoming a force conscious of its own power.
Faith in itself is simply Eden—the unclouded sight of an ideal glory.
Faith resisting the Tempter of Eden is virtue.
Its view of paradise is broken, and it seeks to restore it.
Virtue is not so beautiful as faith, but that is because it is a higher stage of development without being yet the highest.
All intermediate stages in the development of any life are less beautiful than the first and the last.
The first has the wonder of miracle; the last has the wonder of completed law.
The intermediate stages have neither the novelty nor the completeness ; they exhibit the seeming confusion which belongs to every fabric in the act and process of construction.
Therefore it is that virtue is less beautiful than faith.
It is no longer the first breath of the morning, nor is it yet the glory of meridian day.
It is essentially a life of transition, and so of necessity a life of struggle.
Yet that which, in a comparison with faith dims its beauty, increases its
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vaiue.
It is a descent from the top of the mountain into the squalor and confinement of the villages in the valley, and as such, from the side of sense it is a fall.
But from the side of spirit it is a rise, and the only rise of which spirit is capable.
It is an approach toward the life of humanity.
The hum of human voices in the valley no longer suggests the freedom of the mountain breezes, but the very limit which they bring is to the spirit an enlargement.
It is the promise of a new knowledge—the knowledge of Man; a knowledge which can only be purchased indeed by the loss of what the world calls freedom, but which, when it is purchased, is the entrance into a larger life than the highest flight of faith ever dared to compass.
And this is the transition to the third stage of Christian development—''
Add to virtue, knowledge."
Virtue, as we have said, is the promise of knowledge.
It is in itself only a sentiment.
It is the determination to do right in all cases and against all temptations; but it is not yet the knowledge of what in all cases will be the right.
I may be animated by a horror of cruelty springing from my sight of the beautiful ideal, in other words, from my faith.
Actuated by this horror, I may lay down the resolve that in no circumstances whatever shall I be induced to give another pain.
Here is a sentiment which has its root in virtue.
Yet it is clear that if such a sentiment were to be sent forth into the world without
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I51 any further development, it would defeat its own end.
It is not too much to say that the infliction of pain is in many cases the absence of cruelty, and necessary to the soul's ultimate joy.
What is the error, then, in my benevolent resolve?
It lies, not in my virtue, but in the application of my virtue; it is a defect in knowledge, the quality which, St. Peter says, must be added to virtue.
The feeling of virtue is a sentiment, but the act of virtue is a judgment.
I may desire to make men happy, it is well; but if I have nothing more than the desire, I have no right to act upon it.
How do I know that I am not making grave clothes for those I seek to benefit?
To know that, I need something more than a heart, I want an intellect.
That which is to be added to all virtue is intellectual sympathy—the power to know what another needs.
Before I can minister to his wants I must put myself in his place; before I can put myself in his place I must learn what his place is.
The kind of knowledge which is wanted to teach me that, is essentially a worldly knowledge—a knowledge of what is in man.
It demands outward observation, keen scrutiny, long study of the human heart.
Yet after all the main organ for its acquisition will be my own heart—the virtue I have already won.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see Man, is an aphorism which is implied, though not expressed, in Christianity.
My desire to make my brother happy is
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my first step toward the unveiling of his nature, for the deepest veil that rests between me and him is just the weakness of my sympathy; the fulness of the sentiment of virtue is the dawn of sympathetic knowledge.
Let us resume the tracing of the golden chain.
We have seen that virtue is not complete until it is supplemented by practical knowledge, 7.e., by a knowledge of the world of man.
In this respect, and to this extent, the passage now under review agrees with the statement of Mr. G. H. Lewes:
"There cannot be moral relations apart from society." * What now is the effect of this social element on the development of the spiritual life ?
That is the question which next arises, and that is the question, the answer to which forms the next link of the chain.
The answer is given in the words:
'" Add to knowledge, temperance,"
2.e., self-control.
The word temperance has in modern times received a limited meaning.
It is often used as a synonym for restraint 1n a special class of excesses.
In the New Testament it has a larger acceptation.
It refers to the restraint of any excess whatever in the principle of self-love.
The idea here, therefore, is that a man's knowledge of the wants of men is a help to the control of his own individual wants.
It was the doctrine of Stoicism that all knowledge had a calming effect on the mind.
The Christian doctrine limits itself * Problems of Life and Mind, vol. i. p. 173.
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to a particular kind of knowledge.
It says: Are you perturbed by inordinate desires—individual ambition, personal covetousness, selfish lust of appropriation?
The best way to moderate these is to study the wants of humanity at large.
The best cure for self-assertion is the remembrance that you are only one member of a vast body, every one of whose members has wants equal to your own.
'The true human calmness comes from the true human knowledge.
If in the experience of sorrow I abandon myself to the impulse of a wild despair, I am in want of another fact of experience to make me calm—the fact that what happens to me has happened, and is happening, to all,
The moment I have realised this, I have, in spite of myself, arrived at the grace of temperance, that erace which exists essentially in the restraint of self.
I have no longer the sense of being wronged ; I no longer feel as if I had been singled out for suffering from the great world of humanity ; on the contrary, I know now that I am called to suffer just because I belong to that world.
The contemplation which stills the individual mind is not the contemplation of stars and systems, but the study of the human soul in history and in life.
It was this which really made the Stoic calm, though he mistook the cause of his composure.
He thought it lay in his abstract philosophy; it lay, in truth, in his concrete experience, in his experience of the world of men.
He felt his life to be only an unit
154.
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amid many lives, each regulated by the same law, each fulfilling the same destiny.
He felt that he had no right to vociferate his complaints through the universe, to ask exemption from the common law of man.
'That which came to him, came to him as amember of the universal race; he bowed to the common destiny, and was calm.
His own pulse grew still when he had measured the united beat of the pulse of humanity ; his social knowledge taught him self-control.
Yet this self-control, or temperance of views, which even with the Stoics is fostered by knowledge of the world, passes, with the , Christian, into something far more pronounced and specific.
" Add to temperance, patience," is the next command.
'There may be a self-control where the self is not resigned.
The sense that we are the subject of an inevitable law may serve to dull human effort, and even to lull the soul into a lethargic apathy.
But this is not resignation; it is no more resignation than a captive's recognition of his chained hand is resignation.
'The production of a sense of calm is not peculiar to Christianity.
There is the calm of Stoicism, which is purchased by the death of the old love ; there is the calm of Cynicism, which is purchased by a scorn of the old love; there is the calm of Buddhism, which is purchased by the despair of the old love.
In each and all of these the love of self, which is in itself a true function of the moral nature, is crucified by
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the moral will; it is salvation by annihilation.
But the calm which Christianity sends is not so purchased.
Here, unlike Stoicism, Cynicism, and Buddhism, self-control does not pass into apathy, into scorn, nor into despair; it passes into something which preserves the new restraint, while yet keeping alive the old humanity; it merges into patience.
Patience is no longer mere self-control ; it is self-resignation.
It is self not needing control, but resigned to the law of the Universe.
So far from being identical with apathy, scorn, or despair, patience has-an element of hope in it; it is a waiting for something.
Suffering is accepted as an unseen good; the soul believes that somewhere, somehow, it will issue ina joy.
It feels as if it were itself the subject of a grand problem, a problem which is being worked out in the inner chambers of its own nature, and to whose solution its experience and its life are unconsciously contributing.
Faith, that sight of the Unseen which lies at the root of all its being, which has supported its struggles into virtue, which has aided its growth into the knowledge of man, is still the power which keeps it fresh and green amidst the winter cold, and for the realising of whose vision it is content to wait.
But even patience is not the goal of Christianity ; there is a possession of the individual life, which is higher still, and whose presence is expressed in the words: 'Add to patience, godli-
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ness."
Patience, as we have said, is the waiting for an unseen good; godliness is the unseen good become visible.
The unseen good in fact is seen to be the waiting itself.
Waiting on God is at first accepted for the sake of what it will bring, and this is patience; at last it is accepted for its own sake, and this is godliness.
There comes a time when the attitude of leaning on the Divine will is felt to be the most delightful of all attitudes.
It was once a duty, a necessity, perhaps even a pain. It becomes not only a pleasure, but the only pleasure—the state of mind without which there can be no happiness.
Patience can say without murmuring, "Thy will be done;" godliness can say it, not only without murmuring, but with positive acquiescence—it does the Divine will on earth '"'as it is done in heaven."
Patience leans on God for what He can give; godliness simply for what He is.
The man of patience hopes, that if he trusts God, all things will work together for his good; to the man of godliness trust in God is itself the highest good.
Patience, in a word, is passive; it is the individual will sinking into silence before the universal Will of God.
Godliness is in the highest sense active ; it is the individual will rising up to meet the universal, and by an act of determinate choice making the universal Will its own.
This stage of godliness marks what may be called the last phase of the purely individual Christian
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life; itis here that, to use the lancuage of philosophy, egoism ends and altruism begins.
Hitherto the course of moral development has been simply a progress in the path of personal duty ; it has contemplated only what a man owes to himself.
But with the close of this period we have to witness the advent of another, in which the man is viewed no longer in what he owes to himself, but in what he owes to his fellow-man.
'The transition is marked by the words, '' Add to godliness, brotherly kindness," or, aS it ought to be rendered, "love of the brethren."
The idea is, that when a man once feels the power of godliness in his own life he will see it in the lives of others.
That which he knows to be good within himself he cannot fail to admire when it is presented to his outward eye.
Hence it is, that when a man has reached the stage of personal godliness he has already potentially got beyond this stage. or godliness is not a mere personal possession, it is a possession which I share in common with hundreds besides.
It introduces me into a brotherhood.
I cannot love that which is manifested within, and not also love that which is manifested without.
The picture which I see in my own soul is the identical picture which I find reflected in the souls of others.
I must love that picture wherever | find it; the common possession of it must constitute a common bond of friendship.
Have we not here the moral side of the table of Christian communion?
That it has also a theo-
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logical side we seek not to deny, but that which touches our province is its ethical aspect.
And its ethical aspect is assuredly that of brotherhood.
To one outside the Christian creed, the table of Christian communion presents the appearance of a number of individual beings united by one soul.
It is the mutual love of men for that in others which they feel within themselves.
It is essentially the love between brethren, for, brotherhood of thought and feeling is the condition of entrance within the sacred circle.
It is a beautiful sentiment, but is it exhaustive of love's possibilities ?
Is there no higher goal conceivable for the spirit of man?
Is this circle, sacred though it be, to be the limit out of which I cannot, dare not move?
Has Christianity no wider sphere in which to display itself, no broader circle in which to manifest its power?
Is there not a world outside the Christian world with which the Christian world has still todo?
Are there not societies of men beyond the brethren to which the brethren are yet indissolubly related ?
It is the answer to this question that has prompted the Apostolic writer to give expression to a final stage of Christian development, a stage which is indicated in the words, '''l'o love of the brethren add charity."
No words could more powerfully express at once the sense, and the supply, of the want still left by the mere love that springs from brotherhood.
Put into a paraphrased
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
form their reading is this: You profess to be animated by a love to those who cherish a kindred faith ; it is well, it is beautiful, but is it all?
To sit down at a table of communion with those who hold a belief in harmony with your own is indeed an act which bespeaks the spirit of love.
But it is not yet love in its meridian, in the splendour of its noonday.
It is only the love of brotherhood, the love of that which has manifested its agreement with your own sentiments, and stands on a common level with your own perfections.
Behold, I show you a more excellent way, because a way that enters deeper into the valley of Christian sacrifice.
To the love of the brethren add charity.
To your love of those who are like you add the love of those who are not like you—the love of the loveless,
If you would reach the perfection of the Christian life, you must pass beyond the circle of Christian brotherhood.
You must go down into that other circle which is not yet Christian.
You must be able to see the ideal where there is not yet the actual, to hope where there is no room to realise, to cherish the patience of hope when fulfilment seems long delayed, to detect the promise in the bud and the dayspring in the dawn,—that is the completion of the Christian life.
We have thus traced those stages of ethical development through which, in the view of the New Testament itself, the disciple of Christ is called to pass.
A life which has conquered all
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.
these stages and reached the top of the hill, is, of course, a complete illustration of the law of gospel morality.
We must remember, however, that between the first and the last stage there are six intermediate stages.
We must remember that the transition of the mind through these is effected, not by a leap, but by a growth.
The growth may be slow, or it may be rapid, according to the nature of the life and soil; but whether it be slow or rapid, 1t must accomplish its development by an experience of definite changes.
Take the life at any one of these preliminary stages, and what do we find?
An incomplete life, which from the standpoint of the finished whole, is an inconsistent life!
No charge is so frequently adduced against Christian morality as the inconsistency of its professors.
'The common answer to this is to plead the frailty of human nature.
The true answer we believe to lie in the nature of Christian morality.
If Christian morality were simply a law of Judaism, the charge of a prevalent inconsistency would be a reproach, as it would seem to indicate that its precepts were impracticable.
But the case is entirely different when Christianity is not a law, but a life.
Every stage of a life's growth must in some sense be inconsistent. with the completed whole.
The life of the child' would be highly inconsistent with humanity if it were lived by a man; that is to say, viewed from the top of the hill it is inconsistent.
Why
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL
LIFE.
then do we not call it so when it appears in the child?
Because childhood is by definition just so much jess manhood, and, therefore, only a stage
-on the road to manhood.
That which is unnatural to the whole is the essence and virtue of the part.
One of the best illustrations of this as regards the present field of inquiry will be found in the origin of that remarkable phase of morals which from time to time has appeared in the Christian
Church—asceticism.
Whence has it come?
Is it the legitimate fruit of the completed gospel principle? or is it the excrescence produced by another and foreign principle?
It is neither, It belongs to Christianity, indeed, but not as a fruit; itisa stage in the growth of that tree from which the fruit has come.
It has its necessary place in the erowth of New Testament morality within the individual soul, and it is not difficult to determine that place; it lies in the transition expressed in the words, '' Add to knowledge, temperance," 2¢., self-control.
Christianity has its age of Stoicism, though it is modified by the light of another sun.
Here, too, there is a time for individual repression, a repression whose end is indeed individual enJargement, but which none the less for the present is not joyous, but grievous.
The stage of selfcontrol which precedes even the strength of patience is, and can be, nothing less than a stage of pain.
'The first flush of faith is past; the final glow of love is not yet come.
The conclusion is L
DEVELOPMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL
LIFE. inevitable: there 7s in the ethics of the gospel a place for self-denial.
If we are asked—Is Christianity the religion of asceticism? we say, No!
If we are asked—Does Christianity countenance asceticism? we say, Yes—for one of its stages.
The goal of Christ's religion is not self-denial, but self-enjoyment; but the goal is won through the surrender of the individual soul.
To him who stands at the foot of the mountain-pass the gate of the spiritual life must be straight, and the way must be narrow; only he who looks down on the scene from the summit of a completed love is able to recognise the truth that the yoke after all was easy, and the-burden leht.
To that summit of the spiritual life the course of our investigation has now led us.
We have viewed, step by step, the stages of Christian development in the individual soul.
We have traced, one by one, the phases of moral thought through which the human spirit passes in its progress from the isolation of faith to the companionship of love ; from the struggle between the ideal and the actual to the time when the actual becomes itself our ideal.
The progress has in every case been the course of the seed—a erowth from within to without, from loneliness to social union, from the recesses of secrecy and silence to the voices of a great multitude.
The consideration of this final and finishing stage is the subject which now lies before us.