The Reconciliation of Races and Religions | Page 5

educated? It would
certainly be a loss, and not only to ourselves. Or shall we wait with
drooping head to be driven out of the Church? Such a cowardly
solution may be at once dismissed. Happily we have in the Anglican
Church virtually no excommunication. Our only course as students is to

go forward, and endeavour to expand our too narrow Church
boundaries. Modernists we are; modernists we will remain; let our only
object be to be worthy of this noble name.
But we cannot be surprised that our Church rulers are perplexed. For
consider the embarrassing state of critical investigation. Critical study
of the Gospels has shown that very little of the traditional material can
be regarded as historical; it is even very uncertain whether the Galilean
prophet really paid the supreme penalty as a supposed enemy of Rome
on the shameful cross. Even apart from the problem referred to, it is
more than doubtful whether critics have left us enough stones standing
in the life of Jesus to serve as the basis of a christology or doctrine of
the divine Redeemer. And yet one feels that a theology without a
theophany is both dry and difficult to defend. We want an avatâr, i.e. a
'descent' of God in human form; indeed, we seem to need several such
'descents,' appropriate to the changing circumstances of the ages. Did
not the author of the Fourth Gospel recognize this? Certainly his
portrait of Jesus is so widely different from that of the Synoptists that a
genuine reconciliation seems impossible. I would not infer from this
that the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel belonged to a different age from the
Jesus of the Synoptists, but I would venture to say that the Fourth
Evangelist would be easier to defend if he held this theory. The
Johannine Jesus ought to have belonged to a different aeon.
ANOTHER IMAGE OF GOD
Well, then, it is reasonable to turn for guidance and help to the East.
There was living quite lately a human being of such consummate
excellence that many think it is both permissible and inevitable even to
identify him mystically with the invisible Godhead. Let us admit, such
persons say, that Jesus was the very image of God. But he lived for his
own age and his own people; the Jesus of the critics has but little to say,
and no redemptive virtue issues from him to us. But the 'Blessed
Perfection,' as Baha'ullah used to be called, lives for our age, and offers
his spiritual feast to men of all peoples. His story, too, is liable to no
diminution at the hands of the critics, simply because the facts of his
life are certain. He has now passed from sight, but he is still in the ideal

world, a true image of God and a true lover of man, and helps forward
the reform of all those manifold abuses which hinder the firm
establishment of the kingdom of God. I shall return to this presently.
Meanwhile, suffice it to say that though I entertain the highest
reverence and love for Baha'ullah's son, Abdul Baha, whom I regard as
a Mahatma--'a great-souled one'--and look up to as one of the highest
examples in the spiritual firmament, I hold no brief for the Bahai
community, and can be as impartial in dealing with facts relating to the
Bahais as with facts which happen to concern my own beloved
mother-church, the Church of England.
I shall first of all ask, how it came to pass that so many of us are now
seeking help and guidance from the East, some from India, some from
Persia, some (which is my own case) from India and from Persia.
BAHA'ULLAH'S PRECURSORS, _e.g._ THE BAB, SUFISM, AND
SHEYKH AHMAD
So far as Persia is concerned, the reason is that its religious experience
has been no less varied than ancient. Zoroaster, Manes, Christ,
Muhammad, Dh'u-Nun (the introducer of Sufism), Sheykh Ahmad (the
forerunner of Babism), the Bab himself and Baha'ullah (the two
Manifestations), have all left an ineffaceable mark on the national life.
The Bab, it is true, again and again expresses his repugnance to the
'lies' of the Sufis, and the Babis are not behind him; but there are traces
enough of the influence of Sufism on the new Prophet and his followers.
The passion for martyrdom seems of itself to presuppose a tincture of
Sufism, for it is the most extreme form of the passion for God, and to
love God fervently but steadily in preference to all the pleasures of the
phenomenal world, is characteristically Sufite.
What is it, then, in Sufism that excites the Bab's indignation? It is not
the doctrine of the soul's oneness with God as the One Absolute Being,
and the reality of the soul's