IV
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT
Strength, wisdom, firmness of action, toned by reverence and heightened here and there with the rare colours of enthusiasm—such are the gifts of God's Spirit, as they are recorded in the Church; and they leave us still with a feeling of dissatisfaction. We seem to see the fathers of the stern republic, wrapped in their togas, striding across the forum to the senate house, their brows knitted in some grim decision—to see glimpses also of ecstatic prophets speaking wildly in their temples and caverns, or riotous bacchanals in social frenzy. Wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, might—are they not all pagan, and the enthusiastic energies pagan too, or worse, savouring of the dim halls of eastern mysteries? Where are the distinctive Christian virtues? Where, for instance, are 'mercy, pity, peace, and love'?
They are here too, of course. Without them the inspired saint would be stern indeed, a man to be respected rather than beloved. Such a man, it must be admitted, is suggested in Isaiah's first picture of the inspired Deliverer, though the picture is just a little softened later on, when he is described as a hiding-place from the wind, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.[1] There are virtues which are distinctively Christian, virtues like charity and meekness, which were undefined, or scorned, or condemned outright by the pagan world; and we naturally think of Christ mostly for those qualities wherein he differed from Cato. But this has led us to import a tone of softness into the very sound of the word Jesus. In the first thousand years of Christian history the bias must have been the other way, to judge from the Fathers, and from the pictured majesty of basilican apses; but the hymns of S. Bernard are not the first examples of the melting of severity into sweetness; if the cultus of S. Mary tended again to harden the features of Christ in the popular mind, nineteenth-century sentimentalism has certainly undone any evil of that kind, while the Catholic tendency has for long been to worship Christ only in the cradle and on the cross. No doubt it will always be difficult for us to remember the two sides at once, as it is to think of strength without sternness and of love without infirmity.
There are virtues distinctively Christian, as there are qualities in the character of our Lord which were lacking in the great men before him; but the so-called pagan virtues are none the less Christian because they are a necessary part of all lofty natures. Christianity agrees with the best ancient thought in the importance attached to the fundamental great qualities; but it adds something else. It even recognizes through S. Paul the existence of important gifts of enthusiasm; though these gifts, as we have seen, it prizes only in proportion to their social utility. But it declares further that, in addition to being like Aristides or Marcus Aurelius, a good Christian must also have the grace of an intense and burning charity.
Now we are in constant danger of supposing that love, with its kindred attributes, is something that can be put in the place of the 'pagan' virtues. To use another question-begging and untrue epithet, we think of it as 'feminine', in contradistinction to the masculine gifts; and, regarding the two as mutually exclusive, we have come to think of the feminine quality as peculiarly the gift of the Spirit. A man is accounted religious for being affectionate rather than forcible; and, in reaction partly against the harshness of Puritanism, we tolerate an inordinate amount of imbecility in our tender little saints, and prefer what is amiable to what is admirable. The favourite images in popular hagiology abroad display their hearts, or carry bouquets; and the air is heavy with the scent of their lilies. In all this, popular Christianity has drifted behind Muhammedanism, which with all its faults has seldom ceased to be virile. The truth is that love is the greatest thing in the world, and the pre-eminently Christian virtue, but that love to be the real Christian agapè must spring from the strongest possible roots. S. Paul who first proclaimed charity as greater than all the wonderful talents of the Spirit, greater even than faith or hope, and saw quite clearly that without it he would be nothing was certain also as to the fundamental importance of wisdom, knowledge, and might; and he gave us the true view of the whole matter when he told the Galatian Church that love, joy, peace, long-suffering, graciousness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-restraint, are not the roots but the fruits of the Spirit. There is a sense, of course, in which love is at once the first cause and the crowning effect of our spiritual life, because God is love; but this does not affect our point of view, since all is from Love, and in Love, and to Love.
We have only to think of these Nine Fruits of the Spirit to realize that they are of quite a different quality when exhibited by a strong or passionate nature. They can all exist in a kindly weak person, but they are then as different as a crab-apple is from a pippin.
If we compare the Fruits of the Spirit with the Gifts of the Spirit, the Talents, and the Gifts of Office and Service, we find no correspondence except the purely verbal πίστις, used here with a different meaning, 'faithfulness'[2]. But it may be interesting also to compare S. Paul's list with that given some ninety years later in the Shepherd of Hermas, where four 'strong maidens, who stand at the corners of the Tower', are described, and eight 'others who stand between them': the four are Faith, Temperance (Self-control), Power, Long-suffering; the eight, Simplicity, Guilelessness, Holiness, Hilarity (ἱλαρότης), Truth, Understanding, Concord, Love[3]—some corresponding with qualities in our other lists while some are new:
| Fruits of the Spirit (R.V.) | Maidens of Hermas. | Gifts of the Spirit. | Talents of the Spirit. |
| Love | Love | ||
| Joy | Hilarity | ||
| Peace | |||
| Long-suffering | Long-suffering | ||
| Kindness | Concord | ||
| Goodness | |||
| Faithfulness | |||
| Meekness | |||
| Temperance | Temperance | ||
| Truth | Knowledge | Knowledge | |
| Understanding | Understanding | Wisdom | |
| Power | Power | Powers | |
| Faith | Faith | ||
| Simplicity | |||
| Guilelessness | |||
| Holiness |
Hermas, it will be noticed, adds some of the strong gifts—truth, understanding, power, as well as faith; and so, in this fundamental matter, all our primitive authors and sources are at one, including Justin Martyr, who also gives Understanding and Might. Hermas does not, however, include any of the Gifts of Office or of Service, or any of the Talents of the Spirit, except Faith, and that not in the intenser sense of the charismata.[4]
Unfortunately the words of S. Paul were not well rendered in the Authorized Version, and the Revisers, after their wont, did singularly little to improve matters. The meaning will perhaps be best brought out in a table on the next page. We will give Dr. Moff at the central position, which is well deserved, only venturing on two additional epithets to his 'Good Temper' and 'Generosity', which, excellent as they are, seem to need a little strengthening. Weymouth's renderings suffer, like the Authorized Version, from indistinctness—'Good Faith' is his best. Lightfoot is helpful; though I cannot think that his classification into three general habits of mind, three qualities affecting intercourse with neighbours, and three general principles of a Christian's conduct, quite exhausts the possibilities.
In the rendering of the first three, it will be noticed, all our translators are agreed.
It is interesting to notice how William James, approaching the subject of Saintliness from a psychological point of view, arrives at a definition which closely corresponds with S. Paul's connotation, although he clearly has not noticed the resemblance.
There is, he says,[5] 'a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of
| General Conditions | ||||||
| Greek | A.V. | R.V. | Moffat. | (Suggested Alternatives.) | Weymouth | Lightfoot. |
| Ἀγάπη | — | — | Love | — | — | |
| χαρά | — | — | Joy | — | — | |
| εἰρήνη | — | — | Peace | — | — | |
| Social Qualities | ||||||
| μακροθυμία | Long-suffering | ← | Good Temper | or Forbearance | Patience | Patient endurance |
| χρηστότης | Gentleness | Kindness | Kindliness | Kindness | Kindly disposition | |
| ἀγαθωσύνη | Goodness | ← | Generosity | or Beneficence | Benevolence | Beneficence |
| πίστις | Faith | Faithfulness | Fidelity | Good Faith | Honesty, trustworthiness | |
| πραΰτης | Meekness | ← | Gentleness | Meekness | Gentleness, meekness | |
| Individual Constraining Qualities | ||||||
| ἐγκράτεια | Temperance | ← | Self-Control | Self-restraint | Temperance | |
'1. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's selfish little interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal Power. … [Love.]
'2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control. [Peace.]
'3. An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the containing selfhood melt down. [Joy.]
'4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections, towards "yes, yes", and away from "no", where the claims of the non-ego are concerned. [The five Social Qualities.]'
He adds that these fundamental inner conditions have characteristic practical consequences, viz. (a) Asceticism, (b) Strength of Soul, (c) Purity, and (d) Charity. These all come under the one individual Constraining Quality—Self-control, except Charity, which is implicit in the whole of S. Paul's list, and which he analyses in the most famous of his panegyrics.
That analysis is so well done by James that it leaves comparatively little to be said about the meaning of the harvest of the Spirit.
Love, I take it, does begin with that 'feeling of being in a wider life', love both to God and to Man; and for the rest love cannot be defined—it can only be sung about. The general character of S. Paul's list suggests that it is not so much love to God that is here meant, as a state of Charity, springing from love to God, dwelling in it, and extending itself to all living creatures. The heart is melted and the heart is on fire. The barriers of self are broken down, and we have an absorbing interest in, and an intense affection for, all that is outside self—supremely for God. The emotional aspects of love vary much, but sacrifice is the test of its reality: where a mother will die for her child, a man for his friend, a martyr for his faith, or a boy for his country, there at least is love, since there is death. Love is the nature of God, and his very Being, the explanation of his Person, the cause of creation, the key to all mysteries, and the test of all action. Love is the beginning, and love is the end, the source of all life, and the meaning of life. Love is energy, as love is the supreme personality, but love is before everything a condition; and we can only enter into it by loving our fellow men, for till we love the divine in them we cannot love the God whom we have not seen, but when we dwell in love, we dwell in God.
As for Joy, one could almost wish S. Paul had used Hermas's word—'hilarity', so much has common religious usage spoilt the 'immense elation' of real joy: long afterwards, indeed, S. Bernard told his monks to be ‘semper Hilares, gaudentes in Domino’. Joy has sometimes come to be a cant term from which the suggestion of cheerfulness has withdrawn; and I am afraid that most people associate 'joy' in religious language with something rather wry-mouthed, or at best with the ecstatic, melancholy smile of the cheap prints. There is also a long tradition of gloom and harshness, which predominated in many religious circles not so long ago, and of which the memory is bitter and hateful in men's minds to-day: what sensible men thought of it can be readily seen in the novelists of the last century—in Butler's Way of All Flesh, in Thackeray, and George Eliot, and in some of Dickens's blackest characters—Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, Murdstone in David Copperfield, or Esther's godmother in Bleak House, where the gloom is as many can remember that it once was—associated with a grim heartlessness and with much positive cruelty. In the home of the Pilgrim Fathers I need not dwell upon this, except to say that the unpopularity of professional religious folk, which still exists, is not without well-remembered justification. Joyousness has not been a special characteristic of the 'black-coated gentry', nor indeed have the Social Qualities which we shall touch on again in a moment. Now joy carries with it good temper, generosity, and kindliness of heart: it also is greater than mere cheerfulness, and includes it; therefore where we do not find cheerfulness, hilarity, gaiety, we may suspect that joy is absent too. Joy includes them all, being itself the highest; and it is the source, Coleridge says, of the poet's and artist's Understanding:
'Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud—
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.
Peace, the sense of friendly continuity between our own life and the Power beyond, has also been lamentably missing among many who professed to have found it. A good Christian is never disturbed or fearful, he does not fret or worry. (Oddly enough, as I wrote the last word a telegram arrived which announced that a registered manuscript had taken six days instead of twelve hours to arrive at the publisher's, thus effectually destroying my plans and breaking up my morning's work.) Well, a Christian must never worry, and the gentle 'Bother!' is just as much out of place on his lips as the other more pronounced and more theological expletive. We owe a great debt to the 'Don't-worry Movement', which has changed the ways of whole sections of people in America, and is spreading beneficently to the more highly-strung citizens of the Old World. This does not mean that we have merely to go through life with a 'higher-thought smile'; but it does mean that much of our unhappiness, and the unhappiness we make around us, is caused by our exaggeration—and our manufacture—of small troubles and small anxieties: the good Christian does not worry, because he sees things in their right proportion, relating them to the greatness of God and not to his own self. Nor does the inner peace mean that we are to take no thought for the morrow, as the unfortunate translation of the Authorized Version suggests, but only that we are not to be anxious—not to be troubled—about the morrow; for the Fruits of the Spirit are not cheap substitutes for the Gifts: the man who does not worry must at the same time practise forethought, since underneath the grace of Peace lie the gifts of Counsel and Might. And all this because we have at once to trust in God, and to help him—to be fellow workers with him in whom our whole life is hidden and held. La sua volontade, say Dante's angels— and Gladstone thought the saying was the finest line in all literature—la sua volontade è nostra pace.
Peace, like love and joy, branches out inevitably in social directions, and so we come to the five Social Qualities—Good Temper, Kindliness, Generosity, Fidelity, Gentleness. Of these we need say little: every one understands them and loves them; and all that is needed is to replace the terms in the Authorized Version—none too exact, and worn down a little by cant usage—with the fresh rendering we have taken from Dr. Moffat.
First the passive quality of Good Temper, in the sense of forbearance, 'patient endurance under injuries inflicted by others'. Next the—inert or at least not necessarily active quality of Kindliness, 'a kindly disposition towards one's neighbours'— benignity, or benevolence. Then, in the ascending scale, the active, practical quality—more than mere Generosity—'goodness, Beneficence as an energetic principle,' rather than the bonitas of the Vulgate. These three are stiffened by Fidelity—the context showing that by πίστις is here meant good faith— that a man's amiability is not the mere result of an easy-going disposition, that he can be depended on to keep his word and be loyal, that he is just as well as generous. 'Trustworthiness, fidelity, honesty' explains Lightfoot,[6] with a suggestion that the idea of 'trustfulness' is there too—which may well be, since those who win trust are also prone to give it.
The last of the Social Qualities is Gentleness, which seems placed here to show the manner in which the social acts are to be exercised: a man should preach social reform, for instance, or vindicate international honesty, or help his unfortunate neighbour, or organize poor relief, with gentleness. He should show charity even when he is charitable.
A feminine virtue perhaps! Christ had all the feminine virtues as well as the masculine, because he was perfect man; and the saint is like him: so the qualities, which we in a very haphazard and mistaken way are apt to differentiate between the sexes, are blended in the harvest of the Spirit. The Christian character is a marriage of the male and female virtues.
Common, too, to the best women and the best men is the Constraining Quality, which governs them all, Self-control. I need not remind you of how the meaning of 'temperance' has been narrowed till in popular usage it means only one form of this many-sided virtue.
Such is Holiness, the harvest of the Spirit. If a man is not amiable and cheerful, and good-tempered, and equable and strong, he falls very far short of holiness. Yet the so-called religious world has not on the whole made this kind of impression on the world at large. People are not in the habit of saying, 'I'm sure that man must be a very holy man, because he's so jolly!' There is, and has been for centuries, a widespread impression that religious people are negative; rather depressed, very easily shocked, much given to faction and intolerance; combining a somewhat abject profession of self-abasement towards God with a pretension to superiority over their secular fellow man, and a still greater contempt and exclusiveness towards the members of other Churches; showing also a marked tendency to tabu, and tending to mark themselves off, sometimes by inhuman asceticism, sometimes by forbidding to marry, sometimes by the condemnation of wine or of tobacco, or of the drama; interested almost exclusively in individual salvation, often from the purely selfish point of view, and curiously indifferent to the salvation of the poor and the oppressed from misery and vice—for the desire of social service is only now becoming a characteristic of strictly religious circles, an encouraging sign that religious people are becoming more Christian.
Has not some such impression as this been fairly universal in Christendom? And has it been without justification? Public opinion has been just enough in giving religious folk credit for avoiding the grosser sins. Has it not been just here also in its criticism?
Yet if religious people showed the characteristic fruits of the Spirit, how popular they would be!
The truth is that Christianity is very difficult for us all. 'How very hard it is', wrote Browning in a burst of simplicity, 'to be a Christian!' So far from being an old-fashioned religion, it is so blazingly modern that we have only begun to touch it here and there. We are still the Primitive Church; we have not even as yet arrived at the simplest system of organization which can hold us all together. We have not yet formed a society; but are still tearing through history like robber-bands, intent on capture, and firing at one another. The world takes up arms occasionally; the Church fights all the time.
Still less have we arrived at the practice of the Christian virtues. The Sermon on the Mount is, as an English bishop once frankly proclaimed, impracticable in Christendom, if not undesirable. Not many years later, the best representative of the dominant German theology, Dr. Harnack, in his famous lectures on Christianity,[7] while definitely asserting that 'the Gospel is a social message, the proclamation of solidarity and brotherliness', denied that it could be incorporated into the laws and ordered customs of nations; because 'Jesus was no social reformer', and forbade 'all direct and formal interference of religion in worldly affairs'. Let us struggle, Harnack says, to get justice for the oppressed, 'but do not let us expect the Gospel to afford us any direct help', for 'the Gospel is above all questions of mundane development'. So he leaves the State to go its own way; and can suggest no more practicable ideal than a nationalist anarchism—'a nation of brothers, in which justice is done, no longer by the aid of force, but by free obedience to the good, and which is united not by legal regulations but by the ministry of love'. And this he bases on two texts, 'My kingdom is not of this world', which was, after all, only directed against militarism;[8] and 'The poor ye have always with you'—words which he misconceives only because he misses their sad irony. Why had our learned exegetes so rarely a sense of humour?
We have revered the Christian virtues in the letter, but humanity is still so unregenerate that we have consistently debased them. Nothing shows this more clearly than our inability to keep any definite nomenclature for manifestations of Christian love. We can only get people to realize the love of God by using a fresher but much weaker word like 'friendliness'. 'Is God friendly to me?' they say, 'what a beautiful idea!' It seems a new idea, because 'the love of God' has become to us something cold and austere, or even cruel. In the same way, if we tell people that they ought to try and like their neighbours, they are surprised at the novelty of the idea, and often are delighted with it.
'Charity' was invented by S. Jerome, as a rendering of the Greek agapè, which had been coined, it is supposed, by the translators of the Septuagint—it is not found in any pagan writer—because there was no Greek word pure enough or intense enough—ἔρως meant the sexual passion. Greeks and Romans had no word, because they had not the thing. Christians were given the thing, found new words, and then lost them. Charity, instead of meaning the love of God and man, came to mean mere kindly disposition and tolerance, then to be a synonym for almsgiving. So we begin with Wyclif, writing 'God is charite', and end with the 'Charity Organization Society', and the unemployed carrying banners with the words 'We want Justice, and not Charity'. And the Revised Version completes the process by taking the word clean out of the Bible.
So the special word agapè, coined because the existing Greek words were sensual or inadequate, and used one hundred and seventeen times in the New Testament, has now no English equivalent, except the word which we use also of the passion of a man for his mistress. We have worked back to paganism: the very word Caritas which the Vulgate uses (with dilectio), because of the erotic associations of amor, has been deprived of its meaning during the last few centuries. Our only consolation is that the meaning of the word 'love' has certainly been greatly extended and heightened in the process. But we have no proper word for the love between God and man, and no word for the love of humanity —unless we can agree to recover 'charity' by a rigid refusal to use it of 'almsgiving' except 'philanthropy', a word the mere savour of which shows what we have made of it. And neither of these has a verb! A Christian has two duties—to love God and to love his neighbour—but he has not yet invented a proper verb to describe either action.
Now S. Paul has the reputation of being less the Apostle of Love than S. John, mainly because Agapè was translated one way for the Evangelist and another when S. Paul wrote about love. The famous thirteenth chapter comes in the closest connexion with the Talents and the Gifts of Office; and is itself the finest exposition of the Fruits of the Spirit. Let us then read it, so as to get a fresh impression, in Dr. Moffat's modern English—vowing nevertheless that this is the last time we will use 'charity' to mean 'almsgiving'! S. Paul has been saying that it is better to be an apostle than to heal (a point in which our modern postulants for the episcopate have very generally agreed with him), better to be a teacher than to work 'powers', better to be a useful helper than to speak with 'tongues', and so on. 'Set your hearts earnestly on the greater gifts. And yet show I unto you a more excellent way', he says, and continues:
'I may speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but if I have no love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal; I may prophesy, fathom all mysteries and secret lore, I may have such absolute faith that I can move hills from their place, but if I have no love, I count for nothing; I may distribute all I possess in charity, I may give up my body to be burnt, but if I have no love, I make nothing of it. Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no jealousy; love makes no parade, gives itself no airs, is never rude, never selfish, never irritated, never resentful; love is never glad when others go wrong, love is gladdened by goodness, always slow to expose, always eager to believe the best, always hopeful, always patient.' Then he goes on to say that prophesying, and glossolaly, and knowledge will be superseded when that which is perfect comes; for we are still but as children, but one day we shall understand. So faith and hope and love endure, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Therefore, he concludes, make love your aim, and then set your heart on the Talents of the Spirit.
The effect of God's Spirit upon man, then, is not only to produce power—intellectual breadth, scientific acuteness, aesthetic insight, firmness and decision, reverence, nor merely to elicit those enhanced mental and psychic faculties due to intense enthusiasm, some of which appear to be in strange contrast to the six princely gifts, though they all fall under natural laws and spring from the same source. Without charity they are nothing worth.
The Fruits of the Spirit, the plenitude of Charity, are the test of the Christian; for a strong man may have the princely virtues in an exceptional degree, and be a pagan; he may have most of them, as Muhammed had, and be an Antichrist, or many of the most remarkable as Napoleon or Bismarck had, and carry on the work of Antichrist.
Yet the gentle fruits themselves include the masterful quality of self-control; and they are not genuine unless they are begotten in wisdom and developed in strength. Only, do they modify all the strong virtues of which we have already said so much. Wisdom cannot be cold, knowledge cannot be hard, understanding cannot be sharp, counsel cannot be cruel, nor might relentless, neither can reverence be infected with any breath of terror, in the man who has the charity of the Spirit.
I think William James may be brought in again to help us in his useful dispassionate way:[9] The saint, he is saying, is a success, no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be; and, after mentioning a dozen examples of saints, which show that with all his impartiality he was at heart not far from New England, he proceeds:
'They show themselves, and there is no question; every one perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things, their passion, their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge their outlines while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere and background; and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of this world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of stone or brickbats'
The genial Fruits of the Spirit, then, in their totality form the distinctively Christian character, and are then rightly called by the high name of Charity. When religious circles are not unmistakably marked by them, those circles may be devoted to, religion and show fruits of religion, but it is not the Christian religion that they are devoted to, for the fruits are not the Christian fruits. There are many other religions in the world which do good work, keeping men out of savagery and leading them to think of God, and these also produce characteristic results, such as the virile pugnacity of Islam or the patient pessimism of Hinduism and Buddhism, or the heroic loyalty of Shinto: such religions produce saints, for the saints are all orthodox, and are all near together, whatever their starting-place, because they have come near to God. There have been also, and still are, many phases and fashions of Christianity which are harsh and ugly, and cruel, narrow, and anxious, and therefore are not really Christian at all: from them also saints move out towards Heaven, and become Christian. But the object of Christ is not merely to produce saints, since his love is to all men, and not only to exceptional men. The exceptional men can take care of themselves; they will become saints in spite of what the ministers of their religions may have taught them: but the interest of Christ is chiefly in the ordinary people, even most of all, and most actively, in those who are lost, who have dropped out and been forgotten, and have missed their way. We often say that Christianity can be proved to be the best religion by the exceptional saints it produces. But this is not true. Christianity can only be proved to be the best religion by its sinners.
It is by what Christianity does for the ordinary man that it must be tested—nay, by its impress also upon the customs of ordinary society, by the extent to which it gets its principles of brotherhood and charity incorporated into laws and methods of government, and compulsory social practice, into international practice and the law of nations. So Harnack was wrong; and with him all Germany was wrong. For all law and all world-policy, however wide, are concerned in the end with the fate of individual men, women, and children; and settle for the peasants who live in the hills and valleys and plains of each spot upon the map— be it South Slavia or Armenia, India, or Russia or Germany—whether their lives shall be happy or base; and all law and all world-policy will be good or bad in so far as the people who make the social laws, or treaties, or leagues of nations are inspired with charity or with cynicism.
For the Christian religion is catholic. It is a fellowship, and because it is a real fellowship it is not afraid to desire the perfect organization of fellowship in all departments of life, because fellowship without organization is a mockery which cannot endure. As yet it has not succeeded in organizing itself, except in disunited fragments; but the Christian spirit has set itself from the beginning against the anarchic principle of mere individual salvation and self-culture; it has always struggled hard for the ideal, and has made magnificent experiments, which have almost succeeded, and the fruit of which is not lost. At this moment it is with the organization of the world that we are all concerned—intensely concerned, and not unhopefully, to achieve what has hitherto-been considered impossible; and it may be that the Spirit of Christ will order the world in the ways of peace and co-operation, before it achieves the ordering of the Church universal. But in any case, whether it be through Christendom or through a union of the Churches of Christendom, the Holy Ghost will work through fellowship, for he is the Love of God the Father, and he is the Spirit of Liberty, and men are inspired corporately as well as individually. We have seen men go mad in crowds: we shall also see men go wise in crowds. For there is such a thing and this was the supreme truth which Protestantism missed—as corporate inspiration. Christianity is indeed intensely individualistic; every man is infinitely precious, and every body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. But it is not less intensely social: the Spirit was promised to the church, given to the church on her birthday at Pentecost, working through the church, and dividing to every man severally as he will.
The conviction of the Church in every age has been that it is inspired: as soon as Christianity is content to save the individual, it fails, because it ceases, so far, to be Christian; and the individual is the first to suffer. 'I believe in the Church' follows the profession of belief in the Spirit, because the inspiration of the Church is the highest work of the Spirit, as it is the most difficult of accomplishment. We need not be afraid of becoming too ecclesiastical; our fault is that we are never ecclesiastical enough, but are content to say in our hearts that we believe in our own church, and some cognate organizations, instead of in that universal brotherhood and kingdom which is the mother of us all.
The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of holy individualism, the Spirit of Liberty, moving men to struggle against both secular and ecclesiastical domination, whether it works by persecution or by bribery. The Holy Ghost is also the Spirit of holy fellowship, the Spirit of Charity, which moves men to love one another— and for that end, to get to know one another not only within their own fragments of the broken body of Christ, but among those also which are alien to them. Our modern era has seen the Liberty of the Spirit spreading over the world; and now, after four centuries of struggle, we know ourselves to be at the beginning of a movement towards a new Fellowship of the Spirit. Only on these spiritual bases can an order arise that is in truth such a 'holy order' as the Church has proclaimed and tried for ages to establish throughout the world.
This corporate inspiration of the community that was destined to battle its way through the centuries, seems to have been S. Paul's crowning belief in the work of the Spirit. Every member of the society has his own gift and his own function, but all are organically united in the Church which is the body of Christ, 'the fullness of him who is being fulfilled, all things in all[10].' All are brought, however far they may have come, to be fellow citizens with the saints, and are built together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
The Church does not exist to be in opposition, or even in contrast to the world, which already is half with her; she is the core of the world, or to use the better because dynamic image of our Lord, the leaven. She exists not only to realize brotherhood within her own borders, which she has yet to do; but to promote the brotherhood of all mankind, which she has done from the beginning, and is still doing—till to-day we dream, and hardly dare to dream, that the first stage of her task is being accomplished. So the Spirit of God, with sighs that cannot be uttered, will not rest till the World is the Church, and all the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdom of Christ, and the whole world is mighty and wise, and tender with charity.
We used to be much exercised with little Scripture proofs about the personality of the Holy Spirit. We do not need them: he is God. What concerns us men always is his work in our midst, and how we use the gift that is in us.
And to-day what concerns us, most vitally, beyond words, is that after so many centuries of tragic and shameful failure, both in Church and State, we should now begin to realize the Unity of the Spirit.
- ↑ 1 Is. 32 2.
- ↑ S. Paul's Fruits of the Spirit in Gal. 5 22-3 are thus described: ὁ δὲ καρπὸς τοῦ πνεύματός ἐστιν ἀγάπη, χαρά, εἰρήνη, μακροθυμία, χρηστότης, ἀγαθωσύνη, πραΰτης, ἐγκράτεια· κατὰ τῶν τοιούτων οὐκ ἔστιν νόμος.
- ↑ Hermas, who was said to be brother to Pius, who was bishop of Rome c. 148, described his Maidens (Shepherd of Hermas, Sim. ix. 15, ed. Kirsopp Lake, p. 259): ἡ μὲν πρώτη Πίστις, ἡ δὲ δέυτερα Ἐγκράτεια, ἡ δὲ τρίτη Δύναμις, ἡ δὲ τετάρτη Μακροθυμία· αἱ δὲ ἕτεραι ἀνὰ μέσον τούτων σταθεῖσαι ταῦτα ἔχουσι τὰ ὀνόματα· Ἁπλότης, Ἀκακία, Ἁγνεία, Ἱλαρότης, Άλήθεια, Σύνεσις, Ὁμόνοια, Ἀγάπη.
- ↑ See p. 61.
- ↑ Varieties of Religious Experience, 1904, pp. 271-4.
- ↑ Commentary on the Epistle. The words in quotation marks in this paragraph are from Lightfoot.
- ↑ What is Christianity?, English translation, pp. 106, 110, 121, 124, 125.
- ↑ 'My kingdom is not derived from this world (ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου); if my kingdom were from this world, then would my officers fight': John 18 36.
- ↑ Varieties of Religious Experience, 1904, p. 376.
- ↑ Eph. 1 23 τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσι πληρουμένου. The next sentence is from the second chapter, but the whole Epistle, of course, is full of the thought.