of his experience: mine, thank God, is different. But it is plainly our duty to roll away this reproach, to which the neglect of certain Christian verities has exposed many. One Lord lives and reigns today: we worship a living Saviour, Who was dead and is alive again: in Him we invoke all Saints: we "pray as for the living, for the dead, each day"; at the altar we are one, where heaven meets earth. We, who keep Easter, need not to reinforce our faith in eternal life by what the ouija can tell us. He Who is the Resurection and the Life illumines our intellects, purifies our hearts, strengthens our wills, assuages our sorrows, by the sunshine of His presence. Let men of careful scientific training investigate psychic phenomena of every character and report to us their conclusions: that is their task, never to be attempted by persons unqualified except at a fearful risk. But when our heads are bowed with personal sorrow we have a surer consolation than any which science can afford: nor need we steal into darkened chambers, listening to whispering oracles or unvouched-for intruders. One Who is omnipotent speaks to us: "He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." And we respond humbly, joyously, confidently: "Lord, I believe: help Thou mine unbelief." CHARLES C. MARSHALL HEN the Jews asked the Son of God if it were lawful to give tribute to Caesar, the relation of th things spiritual to things material was definitely presented. The image and superscription of the tribute money represented all that "Caesar" stood for and implied. Touching it all Jesus Christ was silent. They were told to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. If it is urged that by reason of limitations in the human nature of Jesus the significance of "Caesar," the knowledge of the future and of historic cause and effect were all beyond His consciousness, it is readily shown that the same silence touching another matter of similar import is found in the episode of the woman taken in adultery. No theories can cloud the fact that Jesus knew what any intelligent Jew knew the Jewish law of marriage and divorce; and we know that He taught the sacredness of the marriage relation-that distinctly Jewish contribution to ancient life and the foundation of the moral code of the embryo 1 Three books that have lately come before the public are frequently referred to and quoted in this article: The History of Freedom and Other Essays, by Lord Acton. Macmillan and The Idea of Progress, The Romanes Lectures of 1920, by W. R. Inge, D.D. If some of the historical conclusions of Lord Acton are now questioned they are not disproved and he still remains the most just and discriminating apologist of the Roman Catholic Church. Dean Inge and Professor Bury while already the center of a storm of angry protest have not yet, at least, been disturbed in their conclusions by their critics. church. When the scribes brought the woman taken in adultery, Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. He frustrated the enforcement of the law as a civil ordinance, by suggesting that he that was without sin should cast the first stone, and revealed the sole purpose of the Incarnation in the words: "Go and sin no more." He was silent as to the law as an institution of the state and the framework of secular life. Sin in the individual life was His object of attack and the holiness of that life His only mission. The state and society were not His province, but the soul of the woman. The Jews came to tell Jesus of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, and the answer was: "Except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish." The event in its social and political aspect was regarded with silence although it was an opportunity for a discourse on the justification of revolution or on some "cosmic" principle like self-determination for all nations, great or small. The destruction of Jerusalem by a Roman Emperor was foretold-not one stone was to be left upon another-an event analogous to the bombardment of Rheims or the spoilation of Belgium, but it passed without a word touching the wrongs of the oppressed or the crimes of the oppressor. "Oh Jerusalem, if thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace." Socialism presented itself before Him, when one of the company said unto Him: "Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me," and His reply was: "Who made me a judge or a divider over you?" and then came the silence. The silence that modernism attributes to the ignorance of a Jewish carpenter, Catholic faith will still insist in re garding as the silence of the omniscient Son of God. Faith may find in that silence justification for a certain indifference toward political and secular manifestations and a certain suspicion of the Church of Christ when it permits them to take possession of her. Current events permit the inference that the alleged synthesis in historic development between the so-called "worldrenouncing ethic" of Jesus and the "world-embracing ethic" of the secularized church is something of a failure. Indeed it may be that what has been thought a synthesis of development was a miscarriage of error. There is much to support the opinion of Huxley in favor of miscarriage as nearer right than that of Harnack and Kirsopp Lake. Huxley wrote in 1889: The church founded by Jesus has not made its way, has not permeated the world, but did become extinct in the country of its birth as Nazarenism and Ebionism. The church that made its way and coalesced with the state in the fourth century had no more to do with the church founded by Jesus than Ultramontanism has with Quakerism. It is Alexandrian Judaism and neo-platonistic mystagogy and as much of the old idolatry and demonology as could be got it under new or old names.1 That sounds more like a miscarriage than a synthesis. The Church did not become extinct. Professor Huxley suffered from a hopeless spiritual myopia, but with due allowance for that his words well express the deflection of Christianity. A gentler spirit than his' has written just as trenchantly: 1 Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, Vol. II, p. 243. 2Amiel's Journal, Vol. II, p. 215. The Christian nations offer many illustrations of the law of irony. They profess the citizenship of heaven, the exclusive worship of eternal good; and never has the hungry pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this world or the thirst for conquest been stronger or more active than among these nations. Their official motto is exactly the reverse of their real aspiration. Under a false flag they play the smuggler with a droll ease of conscience. Is the fraud a conscious one? No-it is but the application of the law of irony. The deception is so common a one that the delinquent becomes unconscious of it. Every nation gives itself the lie in the course of its daily life and not one feels the ridicule of its position. A man must be a Japanese to perceive the burlesque contradictions of Christian civilization. The consideration of the question here undertaken is wholly subject to limitations confessedly Christian, and will doubtless seem to many as naive as it is admitted to be reactionary. However significant of progress our epoch, and however essential its political and social development may seem to the further progress of Christianity, it does not present an aspect differing in these respects from that of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Christian era. At that time a world unified in the Empire, racial lines obliterated in Roman citizenship, national hatreds expiring under Roman polity, the universality of the Latin tongue, the intercommunication by Roman roads, and all that vast material civilization and achievement which characterized the Empire, seemed to open the way for the spread of Christianity and to presage a vast forward movement significant of continuous progress. The intense interest and expectation that pervades human life today is but the continuation or revival of that "unparalleled intellectual excitement which followed the presence on earth of Jesus of Nazareth." It 1 Acton. 1 |