2. Answers to the above difficulties.
We evidently must, in the first instance, guard against any attempt at doing a doctrinaire violence to the undeniable facts of our consciousness or of its docile analysis, by explaining all our knowledge, or only even all our knowledge of any single thing, as either of purely subjective or of purely objective provenance; for everywhere and always these two elements co-exist in all human apprehension, reason, feeling, will, and faith. We find, throughout, an organization, an indissoluble organism, of subjective and objective, hence a unity in diversity, which is indeed so great that (for our own experience and with respect to our own minds at all events), the Subjective does not and cannot exist without the Objective, nor the Objective without the Subjective.
In the next place, we must beware against exalting the Objective against the Subjective, or the Subjective against the Objective, as if Life, Reality, and Truth consisted in the one rather than the other. Because the subjective element is, on the first showing, a work of our own minds, it does not follow (as we shall see more clearly when studying the ultimate problems) that its operations are bereft of correspondence with reality, or, at least, that they are further from reality than are our sense-perceptions. For just as the degree of worth represented by these sense-perceptions can range from the crudest delusion to a stimulation of primary importance and exquisite precision, so also our mental and emotional reaction and penetration represent almost any and every degree of accuracy and value.
And, above all, as already implied, the true priority and superiority lies, not with one of these constituents against the other, but with the total subjective-objective interaction and resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place and worth to, those ever interdependent parts.
Now, in the general human experience, the Objective element is constituted, in the first instance and for clear and ready analysis, by the sense-stimulations; and, after some mental response to and elaboration of these, by the larger psychic moods; and later still, by the examples of great spiritual attitudes and of great personalities offered by other souls to the soul that keeps itself open to such impressions. And though the sense of Reality (as contrasted with Appearance), of the Abiding and Infinite (as different from the Passing and the Finite), are doubtless awakened, however faintly and inarticulately, in the human soul from the first, as the background and presupposition of the foreground and the middle-distances of its total world of perceptions and aspirations: yet all these middle-distances, as well as that great background and groundwork, would remain unawakened but for those humble little sense-perceptions on the one hand, and intercourse with human fellow-creatures on the other. And in such intercourse with the minds and souls, or with the literary remains and other monuments of souls, either still living here or gone hence some two thousand years or more, a mass of mental and moral impressions and stimulations, which, in those souls, were largely their own elaborations, offer themselves to any one human mind, or to the minds of a whole generation or country, with the apparent homogeneity of a purely objective, as it were a sense-impression.
Especially in Religion the Historical and Institutional (as Religion’s manifestation in space and time), come down to us thus from the past and surround us in the present, and either press in upon us with a painful weight, or support us with a comforting solidity, thus giving them many of the qualities of things physically seen and touched, say, a mystery play or a vast cathedral. And, on the other hand, the Rational, (whether Analytic or Synthetic,) and the Emotional and Volitional Elements, whenever they are at all preponderant or relatively independent of the other, more objective ones, are liable, in Religion, to look quite exceptionally subjective,—and this in the unfavourable sense of the word, as though either superfluous and fantastic, or as dangerous and destructive.—And yet both that look of the objective elements being, in Religion, more self-sufficing than they appear to be in the ordinary psychic, or the artistic, or social, or scientific life; and that impression conveyed by the subjective elements in Religion, as being there less necessary or more dangerous than elsewhere, are doubtless deceptive. These impressions are simply caused by two very certain facts. Religion is the deepest and most inclusive of all the soul’s energizings and experiences, and hence all its constituents reveal a difference, at least in amount and degree, when compared with the corresponding constituents of the more superficial and more partial activities of the soul; and Religion, just because of this, requires the fullest action and co-operation, the most perfect unity, in and through diversity, of all the soul’s powers, and all mere non-use of any of these forces, even any restriction to the use of but one or two, is here, more readily and extensively than elsewhere, detrimental both to the non-exercised and to the exercised forces, and, above all, is impoverishing to the soul itself and to its religion.
Hence, here as elsewhere, but more than anywhere, our ideal standard will be the greatest possible development of, and inter-stimulation between, each and all of the religious elements, with the greatest possible unity in the resulting organism. And yet,—in view of the very greatness of the result aimed at, and of the fact that its even approximate attainment can, even for any one age of the world, be reasonably expected only from the co-operation of the differently endowed and attracted races and nations, social and moral grades, sexes, ages and individuals that make up mankind,—we shall not only be very tolerant of, we shall positively encourage, largely one-sided developments, provided that each keeps some touch with the elements which itself knows not how to develop in abundance, and that it considers its own self, and works out its own special gift and attrait, as but one out of many variously gifted and apportioned fellow-servants in the Kingdom,—as only one of the countless, mutually complementary, individually ever imperfect, part-expressions of the manifold greatness, of the rich unity of spiritual humanity as willed by God, and of God Himself.
3. Partial developments of the full Gospel Ideal.
Now in the New Testament we have a most instructive, at first sight puzzling phenomenon, illustrative of the positions just taken up. For here it is clear that, with regard to the distinction between richly many-sided but as yet unarticulated religion, and comparatively one-sided and limited but profoundly developed religion, we have two considerably contrasted types of spiritual tone and teaching. We get the predominantly “Objective” strand of life and doctrine, in the pre-Pauline parts and in their non-Pauline echoes, i.e. in the substance of the Synoptic tradition, and in the Epistles of St. James and of St. Peter; and we find the predominantly “Subjective” strain in the “Pauline” parts, St. Paul’s Epistles and the Joannine Gospel and Letters.—And it has become more and more clear that it is the pre-Pauline parts which give us the most immediately and literally faithful, and especially the most complete and many-sided, picture of Our Lord’s precise words and actions; whereas the Pauline parts give us rather what some of these great creative forces were and became for the first generations of Christians and for the most penetrating of Christ’s early disciples and lovers. And yet it is the latter documents which, at first sight, appear to be the deeper, the wider, and the more profoundly spiritual; whereas the former look more superficial, more temporal and local, and more simply popular and material.
And yet,—though this first impression has been held to be finally true by large masses of Christians; although the Greek Fathers predominantly, and, in the West, the great soul of an Augustine, and the powerful but one-sided personalities of a Luther and a Calvin have, in various degrees and ways, helped to articulate and all but finally fix it for the general Christian consciousness: this view is yielding, somewhat slowly but none the less surely, to the sense that it is the Synoptic, the pre-Pauline tradition which contains the fuller arsenal of the spiritual forces which have transfigured and which still inspire the world of souls. This, of course, does not mean that the Pauline-Joannine developments were not necessary, or are not abiding elements towards the understanding of the Christian spirit.