Welsh Journals

do not help us nearly as much on the subject of Authority as the Roman Modernists do-men like Tyrrell and Laberthoniere. (3.) This book does a service in emphasizing the primacy of the ethical as compared with the ritual and ceremonial. In this it carries us back to the prophets of Isreal and the synoptic record of our Lord's teaching. The service of God is not rendered through liturgical exercises or through intellectual speculation, but by moral obedience. It is good to be reminded of all this, but how is salvation defined in this book and in other expositions of the New Theology? It is a recognition of the fact that isolation is an illusion. Our true life is not lived apart from God and other men, but it is one with theirs, and salvation is spoken of as a kind of illumin- ation by which we become aware of this fact. It is a recognition of a fact that is constantly emphasized in this book, and what is that but a species of intellectu- alism ? The fact of our unity with God is spoken of throughout as if it existed all along, and were merely waiting for formal recognition. But the New Testament is truer to its ethical emphasis in that it calls for the recognition of a duty. Its demand is for obedience to the will of God, and that implies the entry upon a new attitude, the creation of a new situation. For, in the relations between moral beings, a change of attitude on the part of one affects the character of the whole relation, and brings into being a new fact. For all its formal attempt to emphasize the ethical, the New Theology lapses into the intellectualism which it condemns loudly enough in that expression of it which is to be found in the ecclesiastical creeds of the past. (4.) The New Theology is strong in its emphasis of the doctrines of Divine immanence. In time past Man and God were so far removed from each other by the extreme emphasis of divine transcendence that nothing short of a stupendously miraculous machinery could bring them together into anything like intimate relationships. Hence the old forms of the doctrines of Incarnation, Atonement and Resur- rection. And yet there have been in all ages of Christian history some anticipations of the doctrine of immanence. It is St. Paul who is reported to have said to the Athenians that we are the offspring of God, and that therefore anthropomorphism can help us in our interpretation of the nature of God; it was an early Father who said that just as Jesus was asleep in the boat on the lake, so also Christ is asleep in every soul and only needs to be awakened; and it was Pascal who was reassured in the midst of great spiritual anxiety in that wonderful saying Thou couldst not seek Me hadst thou not already found Me." But are we to say that God is everywhere immanent, in the ugly things of nature as well as in its sunsets ? If our aesthetic distinctions between ugly and beautiful and our moral distinctions between evil and good are to have any validity, then it would seem to be impossible to predicate universal immanence. But if we only feel able to assert a limited immanence of God in Nature, Man, and History, then we are not far removed from the New Testament doctrine of divine immanence through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in those who have given God entrance into their lives. Indeed it may be confidently asserted that the New Testament doctrine does fuller justice to the worth of our moral instructions than most formulations of the New Theology. The direction in which the New Testament doctrine of divine immanence needs to be extended is that which is indicated to us by the teaching of comparative religion, with regard to those who worship God in other and less adequate ways. In them, too, God deigns to dwell, for in all nations He loves those who work righteousness, seeing that He is without respect of persons. Now the New Theology pro- fesses to emphasize the fact of divine transcendence no less than divine immanence, but when one comes to examine it what is given one is an impersonal God, for all the fine talk about His being Supra-personal. If you turn to Mr. Williams' book you will find God spoken of with the universal predicates which befit such things as light. But for all its universal diffusion, light is less worthy in my eyes than a soul I love that is more limited in space. It is moral and spiritual quality that matters, but Mr. Williams is misled by quantity and spacial universality. It is better to say that God is like my father than to say that He is like the light, and our Lord knew this. It is the sense of God's transcendence that compels worship and adoration, and that is why it is always more prominent in religion than the sense of imman- ence. Most of us will surely feel that however true and helpful the truth of immanence may be, there is more of genuine spiritual inspiration to be got from the thought of His transcendence. That is why He is always called the Almighty by those who know him best. The religious experience quoted by Mr. Williams, as belonging to the most religious man he has ever met with, strikes us as being singularly unimpressive, and that not only because of the poverty of our human language which has always to be allowed for. The New Theology is keen on psychology because it tries to emphasize experience, but it is very weak in its appreciation of history, which is the record of the collective religious experience. That is why it is weak in its statements with regard to the Church and its sacraments. Nor indeed is its psychology always