The New Theology

by R. J. Campbell

In human history the antithesis is even more plainly marked. From one point of view, history is little else than the story of the crimes and follies of mankind. If it were entirely that, the study would be too saddening to enter upon; but it is not all of that character, and yet it is sufficiently so to cast a shadow over the optimism of any man who investigates human evolution as told in song and story. The principle that "they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can" has ruled in human concerns from the dawn of history until to-day. It is strong enough in our midst even now. Out industrial system is founded upon it, and is essentially unchristian. Commercialism is saturated with it; all men suffer from it, but often they know not how to get free from it. Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, and the identity in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless passers-by to rob them of their possessions and their lives. To-day the successful financial magnate does the same by effecting corners in corn and such like. The great writer adds, with characteristic irony, "I prefer the crag baron to the bag baron." Yet with all this we see at work in history another tendency which we can recognise as plainly as the former, but which fills us with great hope for the future of humanity,—it is that which is summed up in the one word "Christ." That word stands all the world over for the things that make for more abundant life. Just as in the text the word "thief" stands for everything that makes for separateness, selfhood, cruelty, so the word "Christ" stands for everything that makes for union, mutual helpfulness, brotherly kindness. The thief stands for the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and the Christ stands for the tendency to give, and live outward. The former tendency is what I call the deathward—deathward for all else but itself; and the Christ is the lifeward, life for all else but itself. Yet—curious inversion of earlier experience—the deathward tendency results in death to itself in the spiritual region, and the lifeward tendency results in life to him who gives life. "I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again." I want you to realise here, then, that the Christ in humanity is the life-giver of the soul. They who are possessed of the Christ spirit are they who have and can give the more abundant life.

We have briefly examined the two tendencies of which I have spoken; have you realised that in the things of the spirit the deathward tendency is what we call sin? Sin is selfishness; it is the attempt to misuse the energies of God; it is the expansion of individuality at the expense of the race. I do not know that you can arrive at a much more thorough explanation of the nature of sin than that. Men blunderingly attempt to classify virtues, and think of sin as simply the failure to attain them. It is not that, it is something deeper; sin is the attempt to minister to self at the expense of that which is outside self. It lives by death to others, or seeks to do so.

When I was away a few weeks ago I paid a visit to Monte Carlo to see what it was like, and went into the famous gambling saloon, and stood for a while looking at the faces of the players. I could not see anything very different from what I see now; the people who were engaged in that all-engrossing pursuit might have been in church, they were so quiet, so orderly, and so apparently passionless. Yet I felt—it may have been a preacher's prejudice—that the moral atmosphere of that place was one in which I did not want to remain; there was something bad there, and I think I could discern what it was. The gambler is essentially a man who is trying to get something for nothing; he is drawing to himself that which he supposes will give him more satisfying and abundant life. Let who will suffer; it is not his concern. What is lifeward for him may be deathward for them; he is willing that it should be so—that is the sin. Sin is always a mistake,—a soul's mistake; it is the carrying up into the spiritual region of that stern and terrible law of the physical world, the survival of an organism at the expense of its fellow. That law is reversed in the spiritual world; it is replaced by something else. If a soul is to gain more abundant life, it must rise above the desire to grasp and hold. The gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came fresh from the hand of God, and is at once God's life and his; he is destroying the present possibility of attaining to that higher life which is the destiny of the soul. The Christ in him can find no expression. And yet, my friends, realise this, however startling it may seem, sin itself is a quest for God—a blundering quest, but a quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last night did so because of the impulse within him to break through the barriers of his limitations, to express himself, and to realise more abundant life. His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch was a quest for life, a quest for God. Men in their sinful follies to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this dim, blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. The roué you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went out to corrupt innocence and to wallow in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in his blundering quest for God. He is looking for Him along the line of the wrong tendency; he has been gathering to himself what he took to be more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath conceived bringeth forth death"—death to the sinner as well as to his victim, death of what is deepest and truest in the soul. Yet—I repeat it—all men are seeking life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing, seeking life by the deathward road.

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
O life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller than I want."

On the following Sunday I preached a sermon entitled the "Nature of Sin," in which the same point was reëmphasised with even greater distinctness, as the following extract will show:—

I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning when I happened to remark that sin was, after all, a quest for God—a mistaken quest, but none the less a quest for God, for all that. I want to explain to you to-night somewhat more in detail what I mean by this, because the more clearly we can see the truth the more clearly we can perceive sin to be a soul's blunder. There are two tendencies discernible throughout nature and in human history. These two tendencies are essentially opposed, are ever in conflict, and ever will be until the whole world is subdued to Christ, and God is all in all. I called them last Sunday morning from the pulpit the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The terms are not very satisfactory, because the deathward tendency usually masquerades as the lifeward, and the lifeward often looks like the deathward. That is why sin is ever possible. A man thinks to get something by it, and though he finds out his mistake afterward, yet he supposes it to be for him the lifeward road. On the other hand, the utterly unselfish deed often looks as though it were a deed that would bring destruction upon the doer. Not so. Jesus Christ saw right to the heart of things when He said, "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake the same shall find it." If you substitute for the words "for My sake," "for truth's sake," or "for life's sake," you will get just the same meaning,—"he that keeps back his life shall lose it, and he that gives forth his life shall find it."

Here, then, are two tendencies sharply contrasted. Now observe their operation in nature and in human experience. You are all aware of, and frequently have been saddened, no doubt, by what you regard as the cruelty of nature. There is a tragedy under every rose leaf, there is unceasing conflict to the death going on in every hedgerow. Nature is indeed cruel. I have often watched, during this winter which is now drawing to a close, the little birds feeding outside the window of my breakfast room in the morning. Like many of you, we put out a few crumbs for these feathered friends who share the same garden with ourselves, and I have always noticed that there is a battle royal fought round those crumbs. There is enough for everyone, and yet the instinct of these little creatures is to try and grab and keep all, each one for itself. The instinct of the lower creation appears to be that a form can only preserve itself, and only expand and express itself, at the expense of other forms. It is a stern and terrible law, as you well know. Forms, by a slow, upward progress in the unfolding of the purpose to which nature exists, have become what they are at the expense of earlier and weaker forms. There is a tendency to grasp and hold, a tendency to kill and to destroy, and this, to some minds, appears to be the strongest tendency in nature or in man. I question it,—in fact, I deny it,—and I want that you and I should arrive at the same conclusion respecting it. For there is another tendency observable working from the very earliest throughout the processes of nature, too. It is that which Henry Drummond describes as the struggle for the life of others. If you like, we will call it mother-love. I saw it illustrated only yesterday. A mother sheep, standing in her place amongst the flock, was surprised with the rest at the incursion of a mongrel dog. The flock fled instantly, but the ordinarily timid mother stood her ground. The reason was not far to seek. There was a little lamb cowering behind her, and she, overcoming her natural instinct of self-preservation, turned her face to the dog to draw his attention, if possible, to herself and deflect it from her young one. Now, that instinct represents the tendency of which I speak, the antithetic tendency to the other already described. It is the stronger of the two. It indicates the goal toward which nature herself is moving. "The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," but mother-love is a prophecy of a higher yet to be. It is the forth-going instinct, the all-ward, lifeward tendency.

Now turn to humanity. I think you will agree with me that right through human history the same two tendencies are observable. The farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities. A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his wife off by main force. She become his property. He exerted his brute force, he magnified his own personality, as it were, in crushing other personalities. His children were in his hands for life and death. If he afterwards learned to love them, it was in contradistinction to the children that were not his. That which was his, so to speak, gratified his egotism; and, although a more beautiful relationship grew out of it, such was the unpromising beginning. To-day when you hear a man speaking loudly about "my country," or "my family," or "my society," as the case may be, you may be perfectly sure that he is projecting himself into his patriotism, or into his loyalty to family or society; and indeed this was the lowly beginning of what has come to be an excellent virtue. We have had to learn benevolence by concentrating unselfish attention upon the few rather than the many. The farther back you go in history, the sterner does the operation of that law appear, and the less promising the future of mankind. If people tell me the world is not getting better, I suggest that it might be worth their while to read a chapter of mediaeval or primitive history. In the "Odyssey," for instance, Homer sketches for us the career of a strong and remarkable man. His hero, supposed to be a paragon of virtue, is capable of things you would call scoundrelism to-day. He and his band of storm-tossed companions land upon an island of the Grecian Archipelago and find a city there. They promptly sack it and kill all the inhabitants—men, women, and children. It seemed to be the proper thing to do, and found its way into verse, and they boasted about such heroic exploits. It was brutal murder, and the men who were capable of it were nothing more or less than pirates. Yet that stern, terrible tendency thus illustrated is just one with that inscrutable law under which nature herself has come to be what she is. It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own.

But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own, another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency. The two have been so intertwined frequently—as I have indicated in showing where patriotism comes from—that it has been difficult to dissociate them; but they are quite distinct. Take, for instance, the magnificent devotion of Arnold von Winkelried on the field of Sempach. Switzerland has not existed as a political unit for many centuries, but during that time her roll of heroes has been large. In the formative hour of Swiss independence, when that tiny folk were struggling for their liberty against the overweening power of Austria, it must have seemed a hopeless undertaking—this group of mountaineers against the chivalry of an empire. The great battle of Sempach was fought. The Swiss, armed with nothing but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all day long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad warriors, armed with spears, through which the shepherd men could make no way. They fell before them, but could not pass through them, till Winkelried called to his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and I will make a way," and, rushing unarmed upon the spearmen of Austria, clasped in his embrace as many of them as he could and bore them to the earth. A dozen spears passed through his body, but through the gap his devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to victory. That one act made possible, humanly speaking, the Swiss independence, which is an object-lesson for us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the cherished lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of the world. Something tells us that an act like that, the giving of a life for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, was a great thing. It represented the counter tendency to what was going on at that moment. In that very battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was a man who, for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all that he had—his life. Will you tell me where to look for the focus and centre of that ideal? I know what your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one thing which, consciously or subconsciously, men have recognised in Jesus that has given Him His supreme attraction for the world, is this—He was absolutely disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His utter nobleness, His power of projecting Himself into the experience of others, and trying to lift humanity as a whole to His experience of God, that gave Him His power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed, but lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death.

Now, when we have brought the two together, you see the essential distinction between working for self and its deathward look, and working for all with its lifeward gaze. These two are antithetic, and must be in opposition until the latter absorbs the former, and God is all in all, and love reigneth world without end.