Painted Windows | Page 4

we try hard enough." With him it is never the
exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the
dawn, and every dawn a Renaissance.
Since this, in my reading, is the very spirit of the teaching of Jesus, I
feel that it must be in the destiny of America more quickly than any
other nation to recognise the features of Christ in those movements of
the present day which definitely make for the higher life of the human
race. I mean the movements of science, psychology, philosophy, and
the politics of idealism.
If I expect anywhere on the face of the globe a response to my
suggestion that a new definition of the word "Faith" is a clue to the
secret of Jesus, it is in America. If I hope for recognition of my theory
that Christ should be sought in the living world and not in the
documents of tradition, it is also to America that I look for this hope to
be realised. The work of William James, Morton Prince, and Kirsopp
Lake encourages me in this conviction; but most of all I am encouraged
by that youthful spirit of the American nation which looks backward as
seldom as possible, forward with exhilaration and confidence, that
manful spirit of hope and longing which is ever in earnest about serious

things.
Here, then, is a book which goes to America with all the highest hopes
of its author--a book which attempts to throw off all those long and
hopeless controversies of theology concerning the Person of Christ
which have ever distracted and sometimes devastated Europe, to throw
off all that, and to show that the good news of Jesus was the revelation
of a strange and mighty power which only now the world is beginning
to use.

INTRODUCTION
By means of a study in religious personality, I seek in these pages to
discover a reason for the present rather ignoble situation of the Church
in the affections of men.
My purpose is to examine the mind of modern Christianity, the only
religion of the world with which the world can never be done, because
it has the lasting quality of growth, and to see whether in the condition
of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of
the Church to impress humanity with what its documents call the Will
of God--a failure the more perplexing because of the wonderful
devotion, sincerity, and almost boundless activity of the modern
Church.
As a clue to the object of this quest, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the present disordered state of the world is by no means a
consequence of the late War.
The state of the world is one of confusion, but that confusion is
immemorial. Man has for ever been wrestling with an anarchy which
has for ever defeated him. The history of the human race is the diary of
a Bear Garden. Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august
forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and
unworthy forces within his own breast--envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness--which make for world anarchy. He has never been
able to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour.
It is in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in
the most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find
unintelligent conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder,
and a vulgar disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History
and Homicide, it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is

born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
This striking impotence of the human race to arrive at anything in the
nature of a coherent world-order, this bewildering incapacity of
individual man to live in love and charity with his neighbour, justifies
the presumption that divine help, if ever given, that an Incarnation of
the Divine Will, if ever vouchsafed, must surely have had for its chief
mercy the teaching of a science of life--a way of existence which would
bring the feet of unhappy man out of chaos, and finally make it possible
for the human race to live intelligently, and so, beautifully.
Now if this indeed were the purpose of the Incarnation, we may be
pardoned for thinking that the Church, which has been the cause of so
much tyranny and bloodshed in the past, and which even now so
willingly lends itself to bitter animosities and warlike controversies, has
missed the whole secret of its first and greatest dogma[2].
[Footnote 2: I asked a certain Dean the other day whether the old
controversy between High Church and Low Church still obtained in his
diocese. "Oh, dear, no!" he replied;