The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

My dear ——,

I have been thinking over your objection that my notions are “vague;” feeling that there is some truth in it, but that your words do not quite express your probable meaning. I think you mean, not that the “notions” are vague, but that the proofs are vague. The “notions” are in the Creeds, if you interpret the Creeds spiritually: and I do not think that the Creeds are more “vague” when interpreted spiritually than when interpreted literally. The spiritual Resurrection of Christ, for example—is it more vague than the material Resurrection? If you admit that there is a spirit in man, and that this spirit is made apparently powerless by death, is it “vague” to say that the spirit of Jesus, after passing through this state of death, manifested itself to the disciples in greater power than ever? Even those who maintain the material Resurrection admit that it would be a mere mockery without the spiritual Resurrection, and that the latter is the essence of the act: so that to declare the statement of the spiritual Resurrection of Jesus to be “vague,” appears to be equivalent to declaring that any statement of the essential Resurrection of Jesus is “vague.” Again, redemption from sin is a spiritual notion, redemption from the flames of a material hell is a material notion; but is the former more “vague” than the latter? If so, then we are led to this conclusion, that all spiritual notions are more vague than material notions; and the vagueness which you censure is a necessary characteristic of every religion that approaches God as He ought to be approached, I mean, as a Spirit and through the medium of spiritual conceptions. But to my mind you are not justified in thus using the word “vague,” which ought rather to be applied to notions wanderingly and shiftingly defined; as for example, if I defined the Resurrection of Jesus as being at one time the rising of His body, at another the rising of His Spirit; or if I spoke of redemption, now as deliverance from sin, and now as deliverance from punishment. Convict me of such inconsistencies, and I will submit to be called “vague;” but at present I plead, “Not guilty.”

However I think you meant that the proofs, and not the notions were vague; and here, although you should not have used the word “vague,” I will admit that you would have been right if you had said that they were “complex” and “more easy to feel than to define.” No doubt the proof of Christ’s divinity from the material Resurrection is simple and straightforward enough: “It is impossible that a man’s body could have arisen from the grave, and that the man could have afterwards lived with his friends on earth for several days, and then have ascended into heaven, if he had not been under the express protection of God; and such a man we are prepared to believe, if he tells us that he is the Son of God.” That certainly would seem to a large number of minds a very plain and straightforward argument—as plain as Paley’s Evidences. No trust, no faith, no affection, is here requisite: nothing is needed except that rough and ready assumption—in which we are all disposed to acquiesce—that any altogether exceptional and startling power must come from God. It must be admitted that this sort of proof would be cogent as well as direct. Let a man rise from the dead to-morrow, and transport his body through closed doors, and say that he is Christ, and then mount up to the clouds and disappear; and I doubt not many of those who saw him would cry “This must be the Christ,” without so much as enquiring what manner of man he was. But cogent and popular and delightfully simple though it may be, this is not the kind of proof on which Jesus appears to have relied, or by which Jesus has produced a spiritual change in the hearts of mankind. The very fact that no trust or faith or affection is needed in such a demonstration, unfits it for spiritual purposes. In order to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, a man needs the testimony of all his powers, emotional as well as intellectual, trust and love as well as reason; and I have endeavoured to shew above that the whole of the training of the human Imagination, and all the mysterious natural provisions which have stimulated the eye of the mind to see what the eye of the body cannot see, have contributed to bring about the faith in the risen Saviour. As we are to love God with our strength and with our mind as well as with our heart and our soul, so are we to believe in Christ with the same collective energy. The proof therefore of Christ’s Resurrection and of Christ’s divinity is intended to be, in a certain sense, complex, because it is intended to appeal to our every faculty and to be based upon our every experience.

But “this form of Christianity can never commend itself to the masses.” Objection in the shape of prophecy is always difficult to meet, and not often worth meeting. However, this prophecy has so specious a sound that it deserves some reply. But first let me ask, Does the present form of Christianity commend itself to the masses? Surely not to the very poor, that is to say, not to the class to whom Christ appears to have specially addressed Himself. And even among the classes which retain the tradition of worshipping Christ, has Christianity been such as would commend itself to Christ? Has not our religion been too often divorced from morality? Has there been dominant among us that habit of mutual helpfulness—“comforting one another,” as St. Paul calls it—which is the criterion of a truly Christian nation? Have not the laws in almost all cases, until the French Revolution, been made in the interests of the rich, rather than in the interests of the poor; and where the poor have been considered, has not the consideration arisen largely from the fear of violence and revolution? There has been a certain amount of alms-giving, or legacy-leaving, on the part of the minority who have laid themselves out to lead religious lives; and there has always been a still more select minority who have been imbued with a truly Christian enthusiasm for their fellow-creatures, a passionate desire to do something for Christ, and to leave the world a little better for their having lived: but the great unheeding mass of men in Christian countries has rolled on in its selfish path, less selfish certainly, less brutishly intent on present pleasure than the masses of heathendom, and indirectly humanized and leavened by a thousand Christian influences, but still not more than superficially Christian. The reason for this comparative failure has been, in part, that Christ has not been rightly presented to the hearts of the people. Too often it has not been Christ at all—it has been but a lifeless semblance of Christianity—to which they have given their adhesion. The fear of hell, the hope of heaven—these have been often the chief motives of religion; and alms-giving, church-going, Bible-reading, and the use of the sacraments, have been the means by which men have thought they could escape the one and secure the other. Asking still further the cause for this perversion, by which Christ has been converted into a second Law, we find that in some cases and more especially in recent times, it appears to have arisen in part from the miraculous element in our religion. This has made Christ unreal to some of us by taking Him out of the reach of our sympathies and affection; this also has artificialized our religious conceptions and divorced our religion from morality by making us think that God will suspend the laws of spiritual nature for us, as He has suspended the laws of material nature for Christ and Christ’s Apostles. Hence has arisen too often a pitiable and preposterous reversal of the Pauline theology. We have “died” unto Christ, and “risen again” unto the Law. “Grace” has fled away, and, with it, all natural and harmonious morality; and the whole duty of a Christian man has been degraded to a routine of “works.”

It is for this cause that the morality of Agnostics frequently surpasses the morality of professing Christians. The philanthropy of the former, so far as it goes, is at all events perfectly natural. They do not love their brother man in order to obey the Gospel or save their own souls; they love because they must love. Christ’s heaven is often in their hearts without any of the corruptions of a conventional Christianity. They do not believe in a capricious Heaven and Hell, but they are drawn towards goodness, kindness, justice and mutual helpfulness, whenever and wherever they see them; and such worship as they have, they give to these qualities. Hence also in foreign politics the working people and the Agnostics often manifest a much purer and more Christian feeling than church-goers. For the Hyper-orthodox, foreign politics lie outside the Bible; and whatsoever lies outside the Bible lies, for them, outside morality: but the Agnostic makes no such distinction; he does not believe that the laws of right and wrong can be miraculously suspended in favour of his own country. The disbelief in a future Heaven makes the poor indisposed to tolerate present remediable miseries in the hope of coming compensation. Hence they shew a much stronger determination not to put up with a state of things in which the happiness and prosperity of a whole nation are purchased by the misery of one class. They are willing enough individually to make sacrifices for one another, and, in bad times the working people have sometimes collectively borne considerable burdens with an admirable patience; but that the unwilling wretchedness of some should form the basis of the prosperity of the rest, and that the rest should be content to have it so—this they cannot endure; and sooner than this, they would prefer to see every class in the nation pulled down two or three degrees in wealth and refinement, if thereby the lowest class could be raised a single degree.

Rich church-goers are far more ready to acquiesce in present inequalities, sometimes consoling themselves with the thought that in heaven all these evils will be redressed, sometimes fortifying their acquiescence in the inevitable with a text of Scripture. But the poor declaim passionately against the Bible, when thus quoted—as being a mere instrument in the hands of the rich, and the priests their accomplices, to keep the miserable in a state of contentment with their misery. It is a pity that the poor should be embittered by misrepresentations against that which is pre-eminently the poor man’s Book; for no tribune or democrat more persistently than the Bible takes the side of the oppressed, or more emphatically declares that it is part of God’s method to raise up the poor from the dung-hill and to fill the hungry with good things, while He casts down the princes and sends the rich empty away. But the fact remains that, even when he raves against his own Book, the poor man is raving in the spirit of the Book. It is not in accordance with the Bible—and still less in accordance with the spirit of the New Testament and of Christ—that any nation should tolerate and perpetuate the misery of a class in order that the whole nation may prosper. Indeed in such a nation permanent prosperity—in any sense, and much more in the Christian sense—is quite impossible. Even though they may suppress rebellion and escape revolution for the time, the governing classes cannot escape the spiritual evils that must ultimately spring from that comfortable acquiescence in the wretchedness of others to which they may give the name of resignation but to which Christ would have given the name of hypocrisy. Material misery may imply the immorality of those who are forced to endure it; but it must imply the immorality and spiritual degradation of those who acquiesce in it because it does not come nigh them, and because “the Bible says it must be so.” Let but such Pharisaism continue for a generation, and it will have gone far to extinguish the purest of religions and to prepare the way for revolutionary strife.

It appears then that what is called “socialism” is really nothing but a narrow and unwise form of Christianity; narrow because it excludes the rich from its sympathies, and unwise because, instead of going to the root of evils, it simply aims at the branches; capable also, of course, (like every other theory) of being made to appear immoral, when adopted for self-interested or vindictive purposes—yet nevertheless containing much more of the Spirit of Christ than that selfish form of Christianity which has for its sole object the salvation of the individual. Socialism owes all that is good in it to Christ.

The gigantic evil of slavery (which is antagonistic to all true socialism) after a contest of eighteen centuries, has succumbed at last in Christian countries to Christ’s Spirit and to no other champion. Do you suppose that it perished owing to the “march of intellect,” or the discoveries of science, or the general refinement and rise in the standard of comfort and happiness among mankind? There is no reason at all for thinking so. The Law of Moses, as you know, recognized, though it controlled and mitigated, the institution of slavery. The race that gave birth to Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy, was unable so much as to conceive of a state of society where slavery should not exist: civilization appeared to them to require the servitude of the masses as its necessary foundation. It was not cruelty or callousness that prompted Aristotle to divide “tools” into two classes, “lifeless” and “living”—under which latter head came slaves: it was want of faith in human nature. “Who would do the scullion-work in the great household of humanity if there were no slaves?” Such was the question which perplexed the great philosophers of antiquity and which Christ came to answer by making Himself the slave of mankind and classing Himself among the scullions. How strangely dull and unappreciative do those words of Renan sound, that, if you deduct from what Christ taught, what other people have taught before Him, little will be left that is original! “Taught!” It was not the teaching, it was the doing. Nay, it was not the doing, it was the in-breathing into mankind of a new Spirit, by means of doing, that ultimately destroyed slavery. “Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many”—the Spirit that dictated these words, dictated also the death upon the Cross; and this Spirit has destroyed slavery and will establish true socialism upon earth.

“But this Spirit of Christ has never been fully obeyed or even understood by His followers: even St. Paul does not seem to have understood that Christianity was incompatible with slavery.” You are quite right. The Spirit of Christ has never yet been fully obeyed, and, when we thus obey it, life will be heaven. Do you not see that your objection ignores the fact that we are not yet in heaven, and that Christianity is to be a gradual growth? Are you not a little like the child who sows his mustard-seed at night and comes down next morning expecting to see the great tree in which the birds of the air ought to have built their nests? The important question is whether the Christian Spirit so far as it has been obeyed, has worked well; so that we may trust it to lead us still further forward into practical ameliorations of our existence, whether individual or national. But to expect it to do everything in eighteen hundred years, is to forget all the teaching of history, astronomy, and geology, three voices that unite in proclaiming that the Hand of God works slowly.

And further, as to your objection that even St. Paul did not realize the incompatibility between Christianity and slavery, what follows from that? Nothing I suppose except a confirmation of the words in the Fourth Gospel, that the followers of Christ must not depend entirely upon St. Paul, but upon that Spirit which shall “guide us into all truth.” To my mind it is refreshing and delightful to confess—as I am sure St. Paul himself would have been the first to confess—that he had not fully realized all the consequences to which the Spirit of Christ would lead posterity. I believe that St. Paul wished slaves to take every lawful opportunity of becoming free, but that he would by no means have encouraged slaves to run away or to rise violently against their masters. If he had encouraged them, and if he had universally succeeded, he would have caused the whole Empire, all civilized society, to collapse at once. Was he wrong in not causing this? I am not prepared to say so. I think he shewed more statesmanlike and Christian intuition in doing nothing of the kind. But he did much. He had no slaves of his own, you may be sure; he worked like a slave all night, that he might preach all day; he bore fetters like a slave, and was proud to call himself a slave for the sake of Christ; he inveighed against the spirit of slavery, declaring that in Christ “there is neither bond nor free;” and on the only occasion that we know of, when he had to mediate in a practical way between an angry master and a runaway slave, he sent the man back to his master without conditions or stipulations, but with a letter that was equivalent to an emancipation: “For perhaps he was therefore parted from thee for a season that thou shouldest have him for ever; no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much rather to thee, both in the flesh and in the Lord. If then thou countest me a partner, receive him as myself.” Was not this, practically and morally, more efficacious than if the Apostle had fulminated against the master Philemon fiery utterances about the rights of man and the incompatibility between Christianity and slavery? Was not Onesimus more sure of being emancipated by the quiet apostolic method? Was not Philemon likely to feel a quickened sense of new and higher duty when the Spirit of Christ was breathed into his heart by these touching and affectionate words, than if a Pauline edict had confronted him with a “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not”? St. Paul’s method has been the method of the Spirit of Christ: for eighteen centuries Christ has been saying to men, not “All slavery is unlawful,” but to each master about each individual slave, “If then thou countest Me a partner, receive him as Myself.” Hence by degrees has been shaped a conviction that slavery in itself is against the will of God.