Part 66

Canon SCOTT HOLLAND.

The Meaning of Religion

SEPTEMBER 17

"The meaning of religion is a rule of life; it is an obligation to do well; if that rule, that obligation, is not seen, your thousand texts will be to you like the thousand lanterns to the blind man. As he goes about the house in the night of his blindness, he will only break the glass and burn his feet and fingers: and so you, as you go through life in the night of your ignorance, will only break and hurt yourselves on broken laws.

"Before Christ came, the Jewish religion had forbidden many evil things; it was a religion that a man could fulfil, I had almost said, in idleness; all he had to do was to pray and to sing psalms, and to refrain from things forbidden. Do not deceive yourselves; when Christ came, all was changed. The injunction was then laid upon us not to refrain from doing, but to do. At the last day He is to ask us not what sins we have avoided, but what righteousness we have done, what we have done for others, how we have helped good and hindered evil: what difference has it made to this world and to our country and our family and our friends, that we have lived. The man who has been only pious and not useful will stand with a long face on that great day, when Christ puts to him His questions.

"But this is not all that we must learn: we must beware everywhere of the letter that kills, seek everywhere for the spirit that makes glad and strong. For example, these questions that we have just read are again only the letter. We must study what they mean, not what they are. We are told to visit them that are in prison. A good thing, but it were better if we could save them going there. We are told to visit the sick; it were better still, and we should so better have fulfilled the law, if we could have saved some of them from falling sick."

The Life of R. L. Stevenson, GRAHAM BALFOUR.

Pure Religion

SEPTEMBER 18

"Righteousness in the Old Testament is not a theological, but an ethical word, and has to do not with a person's creed, but with a person's character."

Dr. JOHN WATSON.

"In those days men were working their passage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfil the whole law.... Love is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keeping all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life."

The Greatest Thing in the World, HENRY DRUMMOND.

"Pure religion as taught by Jesus Christ is a life, a growth, a divine spirit within, coming out in love and sympathy, and helpfulness to our fellow-men."

H. W. THOMAS.

The Christian Law

SEPTEMBER 19

"We are often reminded that Christ left no code of commandments. It is in Him--in His Person and His work--the Law lies. He has given indeed for our instruction some applications of the negative precepts of the Decalogue to the New Order. He has added some illustrations of positive duties, almsgiving, prayer, fasting. He has set up an ideal and a motive for life; and, at the same time, He has endowed His Church with spiritual power, and has promised that the Paraclete, sent in His Name, shall guide it into all the Truth.

(The fundamental principle of the Christian Social Union is "to claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.")

"The Christian Law, then, is the embodiment of the Truth for action in forms answering to the conditions of society from age to age. The embodiment takes place slowly, and it can never be complete. It is impossible for us to rest indolently in the conclusions of the past. In each generation the obligation is laid on Christians to bring new problems of conduct and duty into the Divine light, and to find their solution under the teaching of the Spirit. The unceasing effort to fulfil the obligation establishes the highest prerogative of man, and manifests the life of the Church. From this effort there can be no release; and the effort itself becomes more difficult as human relations grow fuller, wider, more complex."

Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop WESTCOTT.

The Christian Law

SEPTEMBER 20

"The sanction of this Law (the Christian Law) is not fear of punishment, but that self-surrender to an ever-present Lord, of those who are His slaves at once and His friends, which is perfect freedom. This Law animates the heart of him who receives it with the invigorating truth that character is formed rather by what we do than by what we refrain from doing. It requires that every personal gift and possession should minister to the common welfare, not in the way of ransom, or as a forced loan, but as an offering of love. It reaches to the springs of action, and gives to the most mechanical toil the dignity of a divine service. It makes the strong arm co-operate in one work with the warm heart and the creative brain. It constrains the poet and the artist to concentrate their magnificent powers on things lovely and of good report, to introduce us to characters whom to know is a purifying discipline, and to fill the souls of common men with visions of hidden beauty and memories of heroic deeds. It enables us to lift up our eyes to a pattern of human society which we have not yet dared to contemplate, a pattern which answers to the constitution of man as he was made in the Divine image to gain the Divine likeness. It forbids us to seek repose till, as far as lies in us, all labour is seen to be not a provision for living, but a true human life; all education a preparation for the vision of God here and hereafter; all political enterprise a conscious hastening of the time when the many nations shall walk in the light of the holy city, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it."

Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop WESTCOTT.

Trustees

SEPTEMBER 21

"For the Christian there can be but one ideal, the perfect development of every man for the occupation of his appointed place, for the fulfilment of his peculiar office in the 'Body of Christ'; and as a first step towards this, we are all bound as Christians to bring to our country the offering of our individual service in return for the opportunities of culture and labour which we receive from its organisation. We are all as Christians trustees and stewards of everything which we possess, of our time, our intellect, our influence, no less than of our riches. We ourselves are not our own: still less can we say of that which we inherit or acquire, 'It is my own.' We all belong, in the fulness of life 'in Christ,' to our fellow-citizens, and our nation belongs to mankind. What we hold for a time is to be administered for the relief of distresses, and for the elevation of those among whom we are placed. Personal and social egoism are equally at variance with this conception of humanity. The repression of individuality and the individual appropriation of the fruits of special vigour and insight equally tend to impoverish the race. Service always ready to become sacrifice is the condition of our growth, and the condition of our joy."