The Potter and the Clay

by Arthur F. Winnington Ingram

II. It is clear then that we who stand for religion, and especially those of us who stand for the Christian religion, have got our work cut out for us to-day to answer these accusations. I want the men and women whose work lies largely in other spheres to enter into our difficulties. We are asking people not only to pray, but to pray more earnestly and with greater faith and hope; we are not sitting down with Buddhist resignation under the inevitable. "If it rains, it rains, and if it doesn't rain, it doesn't rain," was represented to me as the philosophy of the Indian troops whom I had the honour of entertaining for a week in my grounds at the Coronation of King Edward VII. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a great National Mission of Repentance and Hope; we have the fullest intention of winning the nation to God; we are adopting as our text the saying of that grand old man, Lord Roberts, "We have the guns now, and the men and the ammunition; what we want now is a nation on its knees."

We have indeed our task cut out for us, and I hope that it may at least be of some intellectual interest, if not some spiritual profit, to the thinking men and women here to hear the arguments upon which we rely.

(1) In the first place, we definitely repudiate the picture of God as the arbitrary ruler who can do exactly what He likes; at least we repudiate this as the revealed picture of the way in which He has willed to act in His relation to mankind.

Probably the passage in the Bible which has given the greatest colour to this idea, and which certainly is largely responsible for the distortion of Christianity which is associated with the name of Calvin, is the picture of the Potter and the Clay. "Shall the thing formed say to him that made it, why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the Potter power over the clay, to make one vessel unto honour and one into dishonour?" This is the passage from St. Paul's writings which is most widely quoted in this connection. At the first blush this seems to confirm our worst fears; but when we trace this illustration of the Potter to the original passage in Jeremiah we find an absolutely different picture; the potter is a patient, resourceful person who, so far from having arbitrary powers over the clay, is being defeated at every moment by the refractoriness of the clay with which he has to deal. He attempts to make, let us say, a porcelain vase, but the clay will not respond to his efforts; there is a flaw in the material, or the clay is not of the kind to make such a design possible; he starts again with his "Gospel of the second best," and this time he succeeds in making a humbler but useful bowl. Or again, in the course of his work, something goes wrong, and "the vessel becomes marred in the hands of the potter"; but even now he is not defeated; he tries again—to use the words of Jeremiah—"he makes it again another vessel, as it seems good to the potter to make it." This is the real picture of the potter, and it is a touching picture when you consider that it is meant for all ages to describe the dealings of God with the human race, of which we ourselves are members.

Of course, the question entirely hinges upon what God meant mankind to be. We used to discuss this question in East London Sunday after Sunday—"Did He mean mankind to be like clocks, bound to go right, like puppets who would dance to the strings which He pulled; or did He mean them to be what we call human fallible men, who might go right or wrong, but who in any case had the freewill to do either?"

And it is a striking testimony to the common sense of a great working-class audience that, while they started with a predilection in favour of being made to go right, after an afternoon's discussion they invariably came to the conclusion that with all its risks it was better to be men and women; that forced goodness was no goodness at all, and that if God did wish to have as His companions in eternity companions worth having, He could have done nothing less than endow them with freewill.

Now, if this is so, it is obvious that the metaphor of the Potter and the Clay has a great bearing on the question of "The War and Religion."

Let us assume, as we are bound to do, that the first design of the Great Potter was a porcelain vase of universal Peace. He made men of one blood in every nation of the earth; he loves to make men "of one mind in a house." Work and trial were to be part of man's lot, but not War. The idea that War is in itself a glorious thing may be the doctrine of Treitschke or Bernhardi, but cannot, I believe, be found in the Bible.