great mass of religious people stop short at this second stage, which the medieval Church called fides implicita, and which the German reformers called 'charcoal-burner's faith.' In the case of these simple believers the contents of their creeds-nearly the whole concrete body of their beliefs are determined by pure accident. The authority to which they pin their Faith is that under which they were brought up. It matters little that a Protestant may have a mind naturaliter Catholica; he will rarely change his profession. Somehow or other, his religious instincts will find expression in the church or denomination to which he belongs. If he has been brought up as a Catholic, he will find grace and help in the Sacraments; if as a Methodist, he will expect and generally experience the crisis which is known in those circles as sudden conversion, and which is supposed to occur usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. The means of grace suggested to men and women by their teachers may not be, and in fact are not, equally wholesome and good in all cases; there may be, and in fact is, spiritual loss in belonging to a religious body whose tenets are meagre, defective, and out of correspondence with some of the ingredients of a rich spiritual nature. But when the driving force, the religious instinct, is strong, it is able to stretch inadequate dogmatic theories to a very considerable extent. They become merely pegs on which the believer hangs his best thoughts.

Clement of Alexandria called Faith (and it was precisely this common kind of religious belief-the belief of the average church-goer-which was in his mind),' compendious knowledge' (oúvτoμos yvŵσis). It is a kind of short cut to divine knowledge, for those who have not yet had enough spiritual experience, or who have not the leisure, or the intellectual ability, to 'beat out the music' of their Faith for themselves. It is a working principle for all (Clement would say) until they have attained to philosophical truth. This is obviously true. The average Christian

possesses, in the tenets of his Church, a much richer Faith than he could have found for himself, a much more complete scheme of beliefs than individually he has any right to call his own. It is not possible for him to suspend his judgment until he has balanced the claims of rival authorities. He feels that his wisest course is to admit and accept the claims of the authority under which he finds himself, to be a divine revelation, and to make this the mould, as it were, into which he can pour the treasures of his religious experience. The treasure is in earthen vessels, no doubt, and he is very helpless if called upon to give a reason for the Faith that is in him; but he has a receptacle for his religious emotions, a rule of belief, and a rule of life.

I have now perhaps shown sufficiently the partial Justification, and the necessary limitations, of that kind of Faith which passively accepts the body of orthodox beliefs, as a man has learnt orthodoxy at school, or at his mother's knee. In my next lectures I must consider the chief historical forms which the belief in authority has taken.

CHAPTER VI

AUTHORITY AS A GROUND OF FAITH-continued

AUTHORITY in religion, as I showed in my last lecture, means Divine authority; and to rest one's Faith on Authority means to act on the belief that information about divine things has been communicated to mankind, immediately and unmistakably. I have shown that this belief is held by most religious people, and that they for the most part accept unexamined, and maintain through life, the forms of Faith which were first presented to them, refusing even to contemplate any change. I have admitted the necessity of this naïve, childlike Faith; but I have shown that its forms are determined by the accidents of early surroundings, and that by excluding self-criticism it is condemned to stationariness in the midst of a changing world.

In this lecture and the next I wish to consider the historical forms which the belief in authority has taken.

The chief of these are the theories of the Infallible Church, and of the Infallible Book. But there is another form of supernatural authority, which is historically prior to these, and which even in the history of the Christian Church comes before them. I mean belief in the supernatural inspiration of individual men, prophets, seers, visionaries, and the like. I have already mentioned this as the most typical form of religious authority properly so called.

The prophet conceives himself to be the mouthpiece of

God, and his utterances as prophet are held to convey direct information about the will and purposes of the Almighty. This is a case of belief on authority, in the true sense. It differs from the intuitivism which we discussed the other day, in that the prophet regards his message as something special and miraculous. He is merely the vehicle, not the organ of the revelation. Other men accept his utterances as coming straight from God. They have lost nothing, it is thought, by passing through a transparent medium.

In the New Testament this individual inspiration is spoken of as being filled with the Holy Ghost.' The religious instinct, which is the foundation of true Faith, was justly traced to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. But there is a right and a wrong view of individual inspiration. In St. Paul, the action of the Holy Spirit is looked for in all that goes to make up character in its widest sense, and it appears in all religious experience. The Holy Ghost is the guide of prayer, the illuminator of the intellect, the kindler of love, the inspirer of every noble deed and work. But the operation of this Spirit is not wholly miraculous, wholly foreign to their own true nature. It is, in truth, their own best nature. 'God in them is the fulfilment of the best that they have it in them to become. The higher nature begotten in them is the first-fruits of the Spirit, with promise of ever richer fruition. The groanings which cannot be uttered, with which the Spirit comes in on our behalf, are identical with the groanings which we ourselves utter in the longing for a fuller experience of God (Rom. viii. 23-27). And so the light within is the light of God, as we allow Him to become one with us.' 1 But St. Paul's contemporaries could not all rise to this conception. They traced the operation of the Spirit rather in fitful and unaccountable manifestations of religious enthusiasm. The more strange and

辱

1 Grubb, Authority and the Light Within, p. 62.

wild these were, the more sure they were that there was something divine in them. In the various charismata, especially, they found unmistakable evidence of an influx of the supernatural. The 'pneumatic' or spiritual man was one who spoke with tongues or prophesied. This undisciplined enthusiasm was discouraged, and in the end suppressed or expelled by the Catholic Church, though it lived on in a different form, in the strange belief in visions. Tertullian, writing about A.D. 200, has the startling and very significant statement that the majority of men derive their knowledge of God from visions.' In the following centuries, the visions of the monks and nuns were the chief sources of supposed information about the life after death. All the horrors of the medieval Inferno were thus guaranteed, and a great part of the terrible pictures of hell, which seem to us so grotesque and wantonly cruel, was the direct result of the supernatural authority attributed to the nightmares of holy men.

1

In our own day, the belief in directly inspired prophets among our contemporaries has practically disappeared, as it disappeared in Palestine between Malachi and John the Baptist. But the belief in supernatural guidance vouchsafed to individuals survives both in its true and in its more dubious form.

The distinguishing mark of this belief in individual illumination is the acceptance of the supposed divine communication simply and without question. A man, for instance, will hesitate about accepting an appointment until he feels a distinct leading' to say yes or no; then he will act at once, putting aside any self-questionings as to his fitness for the post.

I must try to indicate what measure of truth and error I consider to reside in this Faith in direct inspiration.

1 See the interesting note in Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. i. p. 53 (English translation).