SECULAR CHRISTIANITY.*
'THERE are many signs that the chief religions controversy of the immediate future will be concerned, not with the questions
of the existence of God, of design, or even of immortality, but with the great and singularly difficult subject of Personality. Among the really educated, sheer atheism hardly exists ; and even Agnostics will generally own that there is a God, if only because there must be a First Cause. But there comes in the fundamental difference,—Is your God personal, or is He not? The -difference is fundamental, for in the belief in the personality of God there seems to be involved the belief in our own personality, and therefore in our own personal immortality. And it is this gulf that men are making the most earnest efforts to bridge -over, or rather to conceal. The author of Ecce Homo leaves the study of the historical person of Christ to manufacture a Natural Religion which shall be accessible to all ; and he makes it accessible by shrouding the personality of God in a convenient vagueness, and by making admiration, not love, the foundation -of religion. And just as Theists and Agnostics are invited to join in a common admiration of a God who need not be personal, so Christians and non-Christians are every day being called upon to unite in a common reverence and " sympathy " for a Lord whose present personal existence need not be believed or maintained. Christians will have to define their thoughts and phraseology more strictly than they have hitherto for the most part done, if they wish to preserve that which seems to us to be the very central point of their religion, a personal union to a personal Saviour.
These thoughts have recurred to us on reading Mr. Fremantle's -earnest and vigorous and often lofty attempt to widen the -common conception of Christianity, so as to make it include all secular life. Pat shortly, the whole volume is a development of the idea that sacred and secular are one. Faith, he declares, is the great uniting power that brings together those whom Churches and creeds have separated, because faith is "a deep moral principle," and no mere belief in dogmas, and therefore faith can be the moving force in every department of life. There is no separate sphere for worship, but Christianity is a social state, and in that social state true worship, the true religious life, is carried on, through the spirit of Christ. Christ is shown to be supreme over the whole field of life, over education, trade, literature, art, natural science, politics. The work of establishing this supremacy is common to all, and religious privileges only mean pre-eminence in this work. Of course, therefore, Mr. Fremantle is led to lay stress on the universal Christian priesthood, and to minimize any clerical or sacerdotal claims ; of course, also, he bases these conclusions on what he calls the "immanence of God," the doctrine that" God is a Spirit;" and finally, he uses this doctrine of the Holy Spirit to prove that progress is the law of the Church, by the quickening influence of the Spirit of Christ.
We feel it difficult, in criticising a book of this kind, to avoid giving a wholly incorrect impression of our own position on the subject it deals with. It is hard not to be one-sided in discussing a book which seems to us so true and lofty in its positive assertions, but so deficient and untrue in what it denies. We are compelled to lay stress on the deficiencies, and therefore to run the risk of seeming indifferent or hostile to the positive merits. And the difficulty is increased by the fact that Mr. Fremantle only leaves us to infer his defects, for there are few negative passages in the book. And yet we suppose he would hardly deny that in identifying the secular and the sacred, in making so prominent the work of the Church on the common life of men, he really intends, though he does not say so, to obscure and put into the background the function of " worship " and the supernatural aspect of the Church. Now, we may say most strongly that in much that he lays down we heartily agree with Mr. Fremantle. We hold with him that "Christians should be interested in and should foster all that is excellent in science, or art, or political life." We agree with nearly the whole of the third sermon, in which he claims for the Spirit of Christ "supremacy over the whole range of the secular life," especially with the admirable passage on trade. (pp. 98-101.) We should echo much of what he says on religious privilege, even though we could by no means say, with him and in his sense, that it is "simply the opportunity of doing good." And. we need not say that we fully appreciate the fine eagerness for the elevation and improvement of the world that Mr. Fremantle consistently displays throughout these sermons. But, with these qualifications, we cannot but take great exception to the omissions and negations of his theories, and, above all, to the fandamental vagueness on the great question of Personality.
We admit that Mr. Fremantle begins by laying down that "Faith is trust in a person ;" and that he safeguards his doctrine of the immanence of God. by premising that "whatever the supreme power is, He cannot be thought of as destitute of mind and love." But these passages are, more or less, isolated. and peculiar ; the tone of the whole book is against them. Mr. Fremantle's tendency is to make of God not a righteous and loving person, but Righteousness and Love ; Christ is an image of abstract qualities, rather than a living Person. What else can we make of such passages as this ?—" Whether the strict monotheistic tendency be maintained, or whether that more spiritual tendency prevail which tends to trace out the divine in the evolving forces of nature and of mankind, the image of Christ remains ever before us," &c. The words we have italicised apparently mean that, in Mr. Fremantle's opinion, Pantheism is more spiritual than Theism ; and, at all events, he seems to contemplate with equanimity the possible transformation of " personal " religion into what can surely be nothing but Pantheism. Again, in the statement (p. 198), "we are no longer to think of the Divine as confined within the personality of a man," Mr. Fremantle seems to go counter to either one or other of two Christian truths, both of which, we suppose, he would acknowledge. Either he means that God once existed only in the Person of Christ, which contradicts even the vaguest form of the doctrine of the Trinity ; or he holds that the human personality of Christ no longer exists since the Ascension, which surely destroys all that is most elevating in the doctrine of the Incarnation. The qualification, indeed, on the previous page, that the personality of Christ "has passed away from the earth," would partly evade this dilemma; but throughout the
book, nevertheless, there seems to run an indistinct notion that the " personality " or the Person of-Christ has passed away altogether, and left us with only "the image of Christ," to which (p. 43) we are united by faith, and which (p. 59) is at the root of our religion. Now, we cannot help asking as we read, whether Mr. Fremantle really thinks he can bring all Christians to unite in this amorphous belief. Is a God who is spoken of as " the divine" to be "traced out in the evolving forces of nature and of mankind," and a Christ who has become nothing but an "image," a recollection, to take the place of the Christian Father of souls, of the Christian Lord and Saviour to whom, and not to whose image, every Christian is now united ? We are not quibbling on a word or a definition ; we hold that the essence of Christianity is personal union to a personal Saviour, and we see underlying all the vagueness of Mr. Fremantle's writing about the image of Christ, the futile modern tendency to substitute a recollection and an example for the abiding presence of Christ in us and in the world. Whether we misrepresent these sermons our readers may judge from such a passage as this :—" The faith which is strongest, and which unites men together is not primarily the belief in the Church or the sacraments, in the miraculdus birth of Christ or his bodily resurrection, nor even that which we call, perhaps with too much confidence and strictness, the Personality of God. These are the supports and guarantees, the external fences or the outgrowths of faith. But the faith which saves and which makes us true to our Lord is that which welcomes truth and goodness, and treasures them up ; for these are the very nature of God. Let the heart be filled with the image of Christ ; and this will lead you on to life and immortality, to a fuller view of God, and to the filling-up of the outlines of the life of Christ." All this may be very good and true, but Christianity is surely something more; and it is that something more that Mr. Fremantle has, to our mind, failed to grasp, or at least to display.
As he falls short in his doctrine of the personality of God and of our Lord, so he seems to us to misrepresent faith. Faith, he says, "has suffered much more from over-definition than from indistinctness in its object." This struck us as strange, for though it may be true to say that the life of the Church has, historically speaking, suffered froin over-definition, we do not see how it can be held that faith, the means by which we apprehend God, can fail to benefit by whatever makes the character of God clearer to the mind, and it is a mere pet itio .2»-incipii to say that definitions of faith fail to do this. But our difficulty was removed by the next sentence :—" Certainly, the greatest quarrels among Christians have arisen from the attempt to define what might well have been left indefinite" (p. 43), for then we recollected that what Mr. Fremantle calls faith is "a deep moral principle," a "sympathy with divine goodness
a communion of service rendered to mankind, an ' aspiration for a goodness unseen, unrealised." He may well say that no one "can refuse to admit" faith of that kind (p. 134), but whether there is any advantage in confusing faith with every other spiritual faculty, with love, with hope, and with admiration, we may well doubt ; and this doubt becomes certainty when we find him, in the passage above quoted, identifying " quarrels among Christians" with the " suffering " of faith.
In order to fuse sacred and secular things, Mr. Fremantle devotes one whole sermon and many incidental remarks to attacking the principle of worship. Of course, this is not openly, perhaps not consciously done. In the prefatory essay, he simply sets worship aside, as out of his scope, and as well provided for by existing organisations, and directed by "com
petent men." It is not necessary," he says, "to disparage the ordinary work of the Church." (p. 8.) But in his second sermon he sets himself to prove nothing less than that the Apocalypse presents us with an ideal Church, in which "the appliances of worship are completely absent." This remarkable assertion is based, in the bad fashion of preachers which we should have thought Mr. Fremantle would have scorned, upon one text, "And I saw no temple therein." Surely, no one can read the Apocalypse without recognising there the ideal, the almost exaggerated ideal, of a life which is all worship, in the technical sense of the word. And though the harps, and the incense, and the golden crowns, and the altar are not mentioned in the description of the New Jerusalem, yet the reference to them in the earlier part of the Apocalypse should at least prevent the inference that "it is not a system of
worship that Christianity came to bring to mankind." Quite true, in one sense ; Christianity came to bring much more than this, and it did not promulgate any very definite system of worship ; but it is a great misrepresentation to say that "the ideal of the Primitive Church was one not of worship, but of a life pervaded by the Spirit of God." (p. (4.) Mr. Fremantle here falls into the common fallacy of opposing two perfectly compatible things, and he is led into it by his calm assumption that worship, as generally understood, is a thing "abstracted from the common life of men." "Faith is not best promoted when men try to realise it in a system of religious worship and teaching which is kept separate from the general aims of human life." (p. 70.) We do not deny that this has been, and is, perhaps, still a danger ; but it is a danger not to be avoided by disregarding worship altogether, or by trying to prove that our Lord " ignored " the ceremonial law and the Temple services. His practical example must in this matter be taken with his teaching, and in his practice there was certainly no ignoring of the ceremonial law. Christianity maintains a system of worship because of the very necessity that Mr. Fremantle emphasises so much, the necessity of consecrating the common routine of life. This is to be done not by waiting till we find God in our "trivial round," but by bringing Him into it from the special moments of communion and intercourse with Him in acts of prayer and worship. The difference between a religious life and a life of high morality is the difference between a life coloured and transformed by periods of devotion, and a life which is one dead-level of duties, with no special points of intercourse with God. Perhaps Mr. Fremantle would agree with us, but if so, it is a pity that his sermons leave so partial an impression on the mind.
A few separate matters of criticism we may shortly notice. The statement that the "distinction between things sacred and things secular was unknown to the early Church" cannot be maintained, in the face of the appointment of the seven Deacons to look after those matters which were considered toosecular for the Apostles. What does Mr. Fremantle (p. 73) mean by saying that "the arrangements for the serving of tables was (sic) in the hands of the Apostles ?" There can scarcely be a clearer refutation of his view than Acts vi., 2.4, where the "serving of tables" is opposed to "prayer and the ministry of the Word," which were to be the special occupations of the Apostles.
There is a most misleading reference on p. 22 to Dr. Westcott's Gospel of the Resurrection, as justifying the statement that "the Resurrection itself is to be viewed rather as a disclosure of another state of existence, than as belonging to the order of events with which physical science is conversant." It is enough to say that in the introduction to that work Dr. Westcott deals exhaustively with the whole subject of miracles and law, in order to justify the Resurrection of our Lord as an historical fact.
Lastly, we would remark that Mr. Fremantle, in his anxiety to abolish Sacerdotalism, is led into some very wild statementsabout its results in England. (pp. 52-3.) No one who knows. whatRitualism, as distinguished from the other sections of the English Church, has done, will be inclined to agree with any one of his charges. It is "alienating class after class of men." "We are no nearer to union with any of the forms of so-called Catholicism." "Religion is being gradually eliminated from common life," and Christianity, under this influence, becomes" the foe of human progress." Whatever the faults of modern English sacerdotalism may be, and we shall not be suspected of ignoring them, it often strikes us as strange that it is so commonly and closely linked with Radicalism in politics, and that it has shown itself so powerful to win back at least one class,. the working-class, which Evangelicalism and the high-and-dry school had effectually "alienated." Such charges too faithfully reflect the one-sided character of Mr. Fremantle's sermons. In his generous desire to be just to secularists, he misrepresents his own fellow-believers ; and in his energetic zeal to Christianise secular life, he succeeds only in secularising Christianity.
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