MODERNISM. 



233 



expressions as I have quoted were figurative or metaphorical, 

 or just because they were figurative or metaphorical, they 

 imphed a reahty lying behind them. The wrath of God was 

 not less an awful verity because it did not show itself in His 

 mantling cheek and His burning eyes. The figure, it is true, 

 disappeared; yet the fact remained. But, according to the 

 Modernist theory of the Virgin birth and the Ascension and the 

 Eesurrection, what does remain? Is it anything which dis- 

 tinguishes Jesus Christ from the generality of mankind or any- 

 thing which accounts for His personal influence upon His dis- 

 ciples or for the creation and diffusion of His Church? It is 

 impossible to help feeling that there is all the difference between 

 a metaphor which, like a veil, covers a solemn truth and a meta- 

 phor which covers nothing at all. The Eesurrection may 

 or may not have taken place, as it is recorded to have 

 taken place in all the Gospels; but if it did not so take 

 place, how did the earthly life of Jesus Christ differ in its end- 

 ing from the life of any other human being? The iVscension, 

 too, may or may not have taken place, as it is recorded to have 

 taken place in the Gospels; but if not, how can Jesus Christ be 

 said to be living now in any other sense than that in which all 

 men live after their deaths, and how is He able to succour His 

 Christians as He succoured St. Stephen in the hour of His 

 martyrdom? How, too, is it legitimate or possible to offer Him 

 the homage of worship and prayer? 



Yet again the Modernists must, I am afraid, be said to 

 deceive themselves, and at times to deceive other people, by an 

 unnatural use of language. They freely speak of Jesus Christ 

 as Divine ; they resent somewhat angrily, as the Dean of Carhsle 

 has resented, the imputation that they do not believe in 

 His Divinity. But when they speak of His Divinity, what do 

 they mean by it? Do they mean that He is Divine only in the 

 sense of being supremely excellent, as Eaphael may be called a 

 divine painter or Shakespeare a divine poet? Or do they mean 

 that He stood in a relation in which no uther person who has 

 lived upon earth has ever stood to Almighty God? Was He 

 in fact only a Son of God, as all men are His sons, or was He 

 in a unique sense the Son of God? 



It is here that the Modernists seem to me to occupy much 

 the same ground as the Positivists a generation ago. For the 

 Positivists, while they denied the truth of Christianity, were 

 only too eager to employ Christian formulas and Christian 

 phrases. The service which used to be conducted by the late 

 Dr. Congreve in the so-called Church of Humanity in Lamb's 

 Conduit Street in London, was almost a parody of the Liturgy 

 of the Church of England. The grace of humanity, the love 

 of humanity, and the fellowship of humanity stood instead 



