THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:

The Teachings of the Liberal

Catholic Church compared
and contrasted with
traditional catholic
teachings

By

F. W. PIGOTT
M.A. Oxon.
Regionary Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church
for Great Britain and Ireland

Edited by
C. G. Cain BA (Hons)
 FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1927
BY THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE,
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS LTD,
OF TONBRIDGE AND
LONDON

SECOND EDITION PUBLISHED 2010

BY THE ST. ALBAN PRESS,
CALIFORNIA, USA

Printed by Lulu.com in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-935461-96-5
 Original Preface
By F.W. Pigott
The papers included in this volume were written on a voy-
age from Australia to England for the comparatively few people
who read The Liberal Catholic magazine. It is in the hope that they
may reach a wider public that they are now issued in the form of a
book.
To those outside the Liberal Catholic Church, into whose hands
it is hoped that the book may find its way, it is necessary to say that
in using the term "Liberal Catholics" the author was thinking
solely of those who definitely belong to the organization known as
the Liberal Catholic Church. He is aware that there are degrees
and varieties of liberalism in religion and that the teaching outlined
in this volume represents a variety of liberalism which, though
open to all who are drawn to it, is not usually accepted, or even
known, by Liberal Catholics outside the Liberal Catholic Church.
It may be urged against this teaching that it goes far beyond a
liberal interpretation of the original Christian revelation; that it is,
in fact, an entirely new revelation. Those who assent to the
teaching will hardly be prepared to deny that it is at least new to
this age; but neither will they wish that any apology should be
made for the daring involved in presenting it to the Christian world;
for those who assent to it are probably, like the author, pro-
foundly convinced both that a new revelation is sorely needed at
the present time and that this particular revelation is profoundly
true.
The writer of these papers is only too well aware that the task
of presenting such a revelation, complete in every detail, to the
religious public is altogether beyond his powers; yet he hopes that
the outline of the teachings sketched in this small volume may in-
dicate the nature and the scope of that revelation to many to whom
it is new, and lead those who can welcome it as true, so far as it
goes, to the sources, outer and inner, whence it is derived.

F.W. Pigott
LONDON

Festival of All Saints, 1925

 Preface to the Second Edition
By C.G. Cain

It is not easy to say what the defining characteristics of post-

modernism are but they appear to include the end of any belief in
an overarching scientific rationality, the abandonment of empiri-
cist theories of truth and an emphasis on the fragmentation of ex-
perience and viewpoints.
It could be argued that barely ten years into the new Millen-
nium it is pointless to resurrect a text which could be said to sup-
port a form of religion which “flies in the face” of this theological
trend known as post-modernism; especially as the text concerns a
form of religion which has deliberately sought to be modernist.
In the terminology of postmodernism, the term ‘narrative’ or
‘story’ is used for what we might ordinarily call a ‘theory’ about
the way the world operates. Any such ‘theories’ are ordinarily
taken to be the objective ‘truth’, Pigott himself talks in terms of
‘Truth’, being trapped as most authors are in the language of their
day. Yet surprisingly it does not in any way reduce the value of
the text for those seeking to start to explore the depths of ‘Liberal
Catholicism.’ The French philosopher J.F Lyotard states that
“Grand narratives have become barely credible” (Lyotard, 1982-
1985) and to a certain extent Pigott agrees. Pigott in this book
contends that the system of theology and the understanding of
God at the time he is writing is “out of date” (p.63). To a certain
extent his contention could still be said to be true. There are of
course new and pioneering theologies being explored, but these
are still being unfolded and not yet fully developed.
There are meta-narratives found everywhere, especially in re-
ligions as they often contain these “all encompassing world be-
liefs.” The founding Bishops of Liberal Catholicism in their vari-
ous works held that that there have been a variety of ‘truths.’ As a
result, they and the Church they helped establish, have always
honored the validity of all the religions of the world. It is in that
spirit that Pigott has sought to equally ask as many questions as
he tries to answer. Quite rightly, he asks what value Liberal Ca-
tholicism has and what it can contribute.
 Despite far-reaching social and liturgical reforms which be-
gan as far back as the Reformation, continuing through and in the
wake of the Second Vatican Council, which could be said to
mark the final stages of modernization of Western Christianity,
there seems to be a tidal wave of people showing a counter-
cultural interest in the more mystical areas of the Christian tradi-
tion.
The Nicene Creed proclaims a belief in “all things visible and
invisible” and Pigott has sought to address this in explaining the
‘Liberal Catholic’ understanding of the universe. He sought to
academically articulate the beliefs and understandings expressed
by Bishops Wedgwood and Leadbeater and probably Mrs. Annie
Besant (who among other things, helped shape the Liturgy of the
church) in their various works.
This book was in fact written by Pigott, having returned from
visiting C.W. Leadbeater (at that time Presiding Bishop of ‘The
Liberal Catholic Church’) and having discussed with him at
length the need for a book of Theology for the church. Pigott
stated in ‘The Liberal Catholic Magazine’ that a book of Theol-
ogy was “handed” (cited in Leadbeater 1983) to him by Bishop
Leadbeater upon his arrival in Sydney. He felt that the volume
was inadequate stating that he advised Leadbeater that it “never
be published” (Leadbeater 1983). As a result it wasn’t published,
at least not in the form Leadbeater had intended. His work was
carefully edited and published in 1983 under the title of The
Christian Gnosis by the St Alban Press, London.
As far as possible the original text has been followed; minor
grammatical issues have been resolved as far as possible, and in
doing so care has been taken not to alter the intention of the
original author. When reading this work it is worth bearing in
mind that as it is a reproduction of an older text, it is very much
couched in the language of the day. Some of the terminology and
expressions will appear antiquated. As an editor of this text I
have struggled with what could at times be perceived as a slight
anti-Semitic flavor which appears in parts of the text. I have tried
to contextualise what Pigott has intended to say in the footnotes
at the base of the page. It is difficult when one religion evolves
out of another to explain how the evolution came about without
coming across as critical of its predecessor. Often it is the lan-
guage Pigott has used which presents the difficulty, today it
would not be seen as ‘politically correct’ and so it causes contro-
versy; however, much of it was acceptable at the time of the orig-
inal composition of this work.
Since that time there has been great upheaval within Liberal
Catholicism; during its first ninety-four years there have been
several schisms. Whilst this is not the place to explore the
schisms, it is relevant to mention that schism has happened. It is
partly due to the resulting state of affairs that it was felt that this
book should be brought back into print. At this time there are
various groups around the world all claiming to be ‘Liberal
Catholic’ in their character, and churchmanship. It would seem
that now could be a good time to go back to basics: to examine
once more what it is to be ‘Liberal Catholic’ and what the pur-
pose of the Church1 is. In this task, we are much aided by the
work of Bishop Pigott.
Historians, like Diarmaid MacCulloch of the University of
Oxford, note that Christianity is resourceful and has demon-
strated the ability to re-invent itself when it needs to. Perhaps this
small effort in reprinting this very interesting text will help ‘Lib-
eral Catholicism’ as it journeys onward on its voyage of self-
discovery.
C.G. Cain
SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND
Feast of the Epiphany, 2010

Bibliography:
Leadbeater, C.W., (1983 edition) The Christian Gnosis, London, The St Alban
Press.
Lyotard, JF, (1982-1985) Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, correspondence, Par-
is: Editions Galilée

1
I use the term “Church” here in its over-arching sense, not referring to a par-
ticular ecclesiastical body within ‘Liberalism’, but in the spirit of Pigott seeing
all Liberals as part of the same movement.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Original Preface by F. W. Pigott

Preface to the Second Edition by C.G. Cain

Chapter I. Introduction 1

Chapter II. The Deposit of Faith 9

Chapter III. The Doctrine of God 15

Chapter IV. The Doctrine of Christ 20

Chapter V. The Doctrine of Man 31

Chapter VI. The Doctrine of Atonement:

Traditionalist Understanding 39

Chapter VII. The Doctrine of the Atonement: Liberal Catholic

Understanding 48

Chapter VIII. Sin, its Cause and its Cure 58

Chapter IX. Conversion and After 68

Chapter X. Finality 80

Chapter XI. The Ultimate Authority 89

Chapter XII. The Outlook 97

Index 107
 THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

Chapter One
INTRODUCTION

LIBERALISM and Catholicism are strange companions. A

hundred, or even fifty, years ago such a combination of ideas as
those represented by these two terms would have been considered
impossible. The two ideas have until modern times been re-
garded as fundamentally opposed to one another, as mutually ex-
clusive and incommunicable. From time immemorial liberalism
has been regarded by Catholicism as its inveterate foe, with which
it could never come to terms; as something so entirely wrong and
bad that it must be resisted at all costs; friendships must be broken
and despite done to the tenderest human relationships rather than
that Catholicism should have any dealings with liberalism. So deeply
rooted in the older branches of the Catholic Church is this spirit of
antagonism to liberalism that it is doubtful, humanly speaking, if it
could now be exorcized or extracted without splitting the whole fab-
ric of the Church into innumerable fragments.
And it is not difficult to understand this feeling of antagonism,
or even, to a certain extent, to sympathize with it. It is easy to see
that it is rooted in such beautiful qualities as reverence for the past,
faithfulness to a sacred trust and, most beautiful of all, loyalty to
what is genuinely believed by traditional Catholics to be the will of
God as revealed by Our Lord and explained by the Holy Ghost.
In so far as the antagonism is due to zeal for the Lord it will
evoke the admiration and the sympathy of all people of goodwill
because of the zeal, though the same people may often doubt whether a
zeal which shows itself in such violent antagonism may not be mis-
taken.
The Catholic religion, as theologically interpreted, is an intri-
cate theory of life and a complex system of conduct; it is a vast,
elaborate and beautifully symmetrical structure. The interdepend-
ence of one part on all other parts is so close that if any part is weak-
ened, or in any way impaired, all the other parts are weakened with
it, unless the theologians can patch it up with such skill that the
flaw escapes detection. If, for instance, particular theories of Inspi-
ration are abandoned, then the whole structure will be decidedly
weakened, though not destroyed. If the science of literary criti-
cism casts doubts on the historicity of certain episodes connected,
say, with the birth or death of Our Lord, then the great fundamen-
tal doctrine of the Incarnation, as theologically interpreted, is
gravely endangered. And so it is with all the parts of this vast theo-
logical structure. It hangs together so perfectly that it can only be kept
together by the most zealous vigilance on the part of its guardians,
watching every portion of it lest by some “blast of vain doctrine”
the structure should in any part be impaired. The structure was a
thousand years, more or less, in the building; and for another thou-
sand years or so it has been constantly under repair. Who can
wonder, then, that it is guarded so zealously? Or who can fail to
feel some compassion for those Fundamentalists, who, scenting dan-
ger for their structure in the writings of the Modernists, are pre-
paring to use in its defence almost all the weapons, short of
bloodshed or physical torture, which so disgraced the Church in
the days of the Inquisition?
This structure, this theological system, means everything to
traditional Catholics and to Fundamentalists of the non- Catholic
Churches. If it goes, everything goes—so they seem to feel. It is,
or they seem to think it is, life itself to them. Who that has ever
heard that deep, subdued sigh of utter distress, not to say horror,
when some theory not quite in accord with the orthodox standard is
hinted at, can doubt how intensely important this system is to many
holy people, whether in the Catholic or Protestant Churches? Who
that has once heard that sigh or moan of distress could wish de-
liberately to cause such pain? The danger is rather in the other di-
rection, that genuine beliefs will be hidden or even denied by Lib-
erals and Modernists, rather than that acute pain should be in-
flicted on friends and relatives, or on any sensitive souls leading
blameless lives in the strength, so they suppose, supplied to them by
their belief in that system. The distress that is felt by such souls
when, say, any doubt is cast on what have always been supposed
to be the historical facts of the Gospel, is so obvious and so acute
that conversation on such points will usually be avoided lest pain

2
should be inflicted.
Now liberalism, by welcoming new revelations of Truth from
whatever quarter they may come, is continually threatening to un-
dermine this great structure. The theologians with their repairing
tools are continually at work restoring the structure when dam-
aged by liberalism. With dexterous skill they have to dive down to
the foundations and patch them up, or repair any fissures that may
occur in the superstructure as best they may. The structure being so
dear to its guardians, who can wonder that, they dislike these constant
threats to its stability? Who can wonder that traditional Catholics do
not love liberalism?
It will thus be seen that, from the point of view of traditional Ca-
tholicism, liberalism's attitude to Truth and the revelation of Truth
is wholly dangerous and mischievous. Liberalism regards Truth as
a treasure to be won by striving; it is a prize which will be re-
vealed gradually and progressively as men are able to receive it and
to bear it; it is man's business, therefore, to fit himself to receive it,
and to make himself able to bear more and more of it; the more
he strives to know the more of it will be revealed. But the revela-
tion will come in God's way, through whatever channels and by
means of whatever agents God may choose to use. The channels
of Truth and the agents of Revelation are matters about which man
may not dictate to God. Truth may be revealed in response to sci-
entific research or philosophical inquiry, as well as in response to
religious devotion. It may even happen on occasions that the
much distrusted Vox Populi is used as a channel of revelation.
So liberalism believes and teaches. It needs no Scriptural text to
support its belief; but this attitude to the revelation of Truth is,
nevertheless, in perfect accord with the principle underlying the
words of Our Lord, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye
cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of Truth, is
come, He will guide you into all truth.”
Orthodoxy or traditionalism, on the other hand, regards Truth as
a treasure carefully wrapped up and entrusted long ago for safe-
keeping to the Catholic Church. In all its fullness Truth, or "the
Faith," was “once delivered unto the saints,” and it has been one of
the proudest boasts of the Catholic Church since the earliest days that
it is the sole guardian and interpreter of Truth. To this deposit “once
delivered unto the saints” nothing can ever be added, and, so the

3
Catholic Church seems to teach, nothing can ever be unfolded
from it and delivered to the world as Truth without the approval of
the Church; and no discovery of science, no teaching of philosophy,
no alteration of a moral code or of marriage laws, in fact no new
teaching of any description which is not in complete accord with the
Faith as originally deposited in the Catholic Church, can escape the
brand of “heresy" or "sin”.
Nothing indeed can ever be added to Truth, for Truth stands
for what is. On that point liberalism and traditionalism are in perfect
agreement. But there is considerable disagreement as to whether all
the Truth was ever delivered to the Saints, whether the Saints of
any particular age could ever have understood all the Truth, and
whether the Catholic Church is the only body to which the de-
posit has been entrusted, or the only body authorised to unfold the
treasure.
The difference between these two attitudes is fundamental. It
cannot be reconciled. But it does not follow that there is a fundamen-
tal and irreconcilable difference between liberalism and Catholi-
cism. There is not. The true antithesis is not between liberalism
and Catholicism, but between liberalism and traditionalism. So
long then as liberalism exists in the world, the great structure
commonly known as the Catholic Faith, erected by traditional the-
ology, is in danger; and the more active liberalism becomes the
greater is the danger to this structure. Consequently, liberalism
must be resisted to the uttermost. Traditional Catholics can never
believe that liberalism might be the best friend of Catholicism;
that it might be used as an agent of God to strip off from their
structure accretions and additions which never really belonged to
the original deposit; that liberalism might, if they would allow it,
reveal beneath their structure another structure not made by theolo-
gians, but by God, and therefore indestructible; a structure, too,
which is far more beautiful than anything hitherto perceived by
them. Such an idea to them is unthinkable and even blasphemous,
for, to their minds the theological structure is a true copy “of the pat-
tern shown to them in the mount,” made not by man but by God, and
the only structure that God has made or, presumably, ever will
make.
Such, then, being the attitude of traditional Catholics to-
wards Truth, how is it possible for liberals ever to have a share in

4
the Divine blessings which have undoubtedly been entrusted to the
Catholic Church? It is not possible within the historic Church. So
long as the traditionalists are in possession it is quite impossible
for liberals to exist happily in the traditional Catholic Churches of
Christendom. As lay people they may with care escape detection,
and remain in, say, the Roman or Anglican Church all their lives,
but they will feel very uncomfortable; even priests of very liberal
views may in the Anglican Church manage to keep their posi-
tions, but their lives cannot be always happy, as Catholics' lives should
be; they must feel that they are not wanted, and must always know
that they are suspected. It is very largely because of this irreconcil-
able difference between the liberal and traditional views on the all-
important matter of Revelation that the Liberal Catholic Church,
under Divine guidance so its members believe, came into existence.
Had it been possible for the liberal spirit to find a home in the Ro-
man Church, or in any other branch of the Catholic Church, the Lib-
eral Catholic Church need not have arisen. But it was not possible.
The dead hand of the past lies too heavily upon the older Churches to
admit of such a wide expansion as that. The formation of the Lib-
eral Catholic Church marks distinctly a parting of the ways.
The experience of the Modernist movement within the various
parts of the Christian Church shows how necessary it is that there
should be a new form, a new Church in which liberalism may live
happily and express itself without friction. Modernism is seeking to
oust traditionalism from its strong position as sole occupant in the
older Churches. It is doubtful if it can ever be done. Moreover, it is
a question if it ought to be done, for, if it could be done, it would
involve the loss of love; and that price would be too heavy. How
plain it must be to any keen observer that the Christian graces do not
and cannot flourish in an atmosphere of controversy. Where the
Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, or the Divinity of the Lord are con-
tinually matters of keen discussion and hot debate the grace of gra-
ciousness withers and fades. It is only when people can separate
themselves from this “strife of tongues” that they can touch reality
and drink of “the well of water springing up into everlasting life.”
If Modernism continues to strive for a place within the older
Churches, where traditionalism is firmly established, love will disap-
pear from those Churches, and then, even though modernised, they
will be “nothing worth.” Modernism, which is in some respects

5
synonymous with liberalism, can never exist side by side with tradi-
tionalism. It must either oust traditionalism from the historic
Churches, or it must form new Churches for itself. The latter,
though a very difficult matter and a very serious responsibility, is
nevertheless preferable to the former. It is, in fact, the inevitable
course.
But a Church which is only liberal, or only modernist, could
not exist for a year. Liberalism in itself is only a passive quality,
not a vital force. It is an intellectual atmosphere in which some
warm and active religious impulse may root itself and blossom, but
it is not itself that impulse. Nor is Modernism in itself a religion,
nor can it ever become so. It is much less constructive than destruc-
tive, and much more negative than positive. It is essentially and
necessarily critical. That is its function, and though a necessary
purgative element in the growth and progress of any body, it is in
itself cold and uninviting. It is able to destroy, but as yet it has
never shown itself able to reconstruct. It does not profess to do
so. It tells us what the various clauses in the Creeds do not mean,
but it is not able to say what they do mean. It is not mystical
enough to be appealing, nor important enough to be arresting, nor
spiritual enough to be compelling. In Modernism alone people are
not likely to find anything to live by or to die for; at best they will
find in it something intellectually interesting. But man does not
live by intellect alone, any more than by bread alone. Neither a
Modernist nor a Liberal Church alone could hope to attract more
than a very few followers, and they would be almost entirely of
the intellectual type. It could never hope to satisfy the mystic
hunger which is so characteristic an element in the present-day re-
ligion, or to feed that desiderium amoris which always seeks to
twine itself round some sacrament or outer manifestation of Divin-
ity. Therefore, since the older Churches were not and could not be
liberal enough to contain it, and the “Modernist” movement was not
Catholic enough to satisfy it, that blend of liberalism and Catholi-
cism which is the hall-mark of so many of the Christians of this
generation had to find for itself an entirely distinct and out-
wardly independent home. Such is the Liberal Catholic Church.
But the Liberal Catholic Church, though distinct from other
parts of the Catholic Church, is not separate from that Church; it is
related to it as a part to a whole and as any other part to that

6
whole. It is, therefore, not so much a new Church as a new part
of the old Church. Similarly, it is only outwardly independent; its
outer organization and constitution is entirely independent of any
other Church, whether Orthodox Eastern, Roman, Anglican or
Nonconformist; but inwardly it is dependent for its orders, the
grace of its Sacraments, its authority and its charismata on the
same Divine source as that from which all true branches of the
Catholic Church derive their inner life and their life- giving powers.
Believing that Catholicism is too divine, too beautiful, and too pre-
cious a thing to be limited to those only who hold the traditional
view of revelation, the first group of Liberal Catholics, before
the Liberal Catholic Church as such had been detached from the
parent body, were careful to attach themselves to a body2 whose
orders came through the direct line of descent which is usually
and truly described as the Apostolical Succession; so they became a
true part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church through-
out the world.
This union in a distinct Church of such seeming contraries as
Liberalism and Catholicism marks the parting of the ways. Liberalism
claims to be Catholic. The supposed antithesis is denied. Liberal-
ism is not essentially opposed to Catholicism, but only to tradi-
tionalism. Henceforth liberals as well as traditionalists may be
Catholics, and Catholics may be liberal. People may think for
themselves and search for Truth for themselves, and yet be
Catholics. And their search may be free and unimpeded. Free
enquiry is not in any sense precluded when the conclusion is not in
any way prescribed. It is a new departure in the history of Catholi-
cism, a distinct parting of the ways; and a very necessary departure,
for it needs no special prophetic gift to foresee that Christians of the
future will be more and more of the liberal type, and less and less
of the traditional type.
It now remains to be shown for what positive teaching exactly
the Liberal Catholic Church stands, and wherein exactly its theol-
ogy differs from that of the ancient historic Churches of Christen-
dom.

2
The Old Catholic Church

7
8
 Chapter Two

THE DEPOSIT OF FAITH

An attempt was made in the previous chapter to show that the

claim of liberal Christians to seek for Truth for themselves and yet
remain Catholic is a new departure in the history of Catholicism.
The traditional theory is that Truth as a whole has been entrusted for
safe-keeping to the Catholic Church to be unfolded and distributed
only when, and as, that Church thinks fit. The liberal theory is that
Truth is a prize to be won by hard striving, and that any who by hard
striving will fit themselves to receive it will be led gradually and
progressively “into all truth.” To hold the second view and yet be a
Catholic is something so new in the world that the union of Liberal-
ism and Catholicism in the Liberal Catholic Church is in itself a very
distinct parting of the ways.
It now remains to examine that “deposit of faith” rather closely,
to discover what Liberal Catholics for the most part make of it and
where exactly their interpretation of it diverges from the well-
trodden path of traditionalism. A distinct body like the Liberal
Catholic Church must stand for something very definite in the
world. It is not enough for a Church to be merely liberal; it is not
enough that its members should be perfectly free to think for them-
selves and to seek for Truth in their own way. They must not only
be free to do it, but they must actively and positively do it, and as
they discover fragments of Truth they must make known their dis-
coveries to the world. They must be an Ecclesia Discens. Every
Church, if it is to be of real value to the human race, must have
its specific message for its own age and generation. The Liberal
Catholic Church must have a definite message which is distinc-
tively its own, even when it most emphasizes the freedom of its
members to think for themselves and to accept or reject that mes-
sage as they choose.
Being liberal, it cannot lay down any doctrine or set of doc-
trines as de fide, nor can its bishops make any ex cathedra pro-
nouncements on matters of faith. But being a Church, distinct from
other Churches, it must have its own distinctive teaching upon which
its teachers are for the most part agreed; it must have an intelligent

9
and intelligible answer to give to the question that is likely to be
asked very frequently of its members in these early days—What do
you stand for?
Thus, at the very outset of our effort to discover what exactly
the distinctive message of the Liberal Catholic Church to the
world is, we are brought face to face with the old, old problem of
freedom. The problem is too important to be ignored or shelved.
It must be faced by any body of people, whether religious, po-
litical or social, seeking to establish freedom. How is freedom to
be reconciled with discipline and order? That, in few words, is
the problem as it confronts a free or liberal Church whether
Catholic or otherwise. It is the same problem which confronts sta-
tesmen with regard to the government of nations, and the heads and
managers of schools with regard to the training of children. If
people are free, how can there be order or discipline? The
question implies, which is quite true, that people for the most
part are not yet fit for freedom. But how can they ever become fit
if no experiments are made and if they are never to be treated as
though they were ready for the experiment? The old way of auto-
cratic despotism, military law or Roman Catholic authority, is
quite simple. Under those systems no risks are taken and no ex-
periments are made. That way simply cuts the knot, but those
who believe in liberty and call themselves liberal have to untie
the knot without damaging the string. The solution of the prob-
lem is to be found in the rising flood of life, in evolution. When
people become more highly developed and understand more of co-
operation and mutual love and service they will instinctively order
themselves, and will find their perfect freedom in the glad service
of God and of their fellows. They will never then use their lib-
erty for a cloak of maliciousness. Then there will be self-
discipline, and when there is self-discipline no other form of dis-
cipline will be needed. So this, like all other perplexing problems
of human life, will be solved by evolution; solvetur ambulando.
Meanwhile risks must be taken, and that is the present condition in
the Liberal Catholic Church
The problem as it occurs in religious bodies is this: Are clergy
and teachers to be allowed to teach exactly what they like? Must
they, for instance, have liberty to teach those very doctrines
which to liberals seem most cramping and even most damaging—

10
the very teachings from which Liberal Catholics most rejoice to
be free? Must liberty be stretched to such an extent? Apparently
it must; there is no other way. At all costs a Church must be true
to its own theory, and to allow perfect liberty to the illiberal to
teach illiberally is the price that a liberal Church must be prepared
to pay, if needs be, for its own liberty. But we may hope that it
will not be necessary for the Liberal Catholic Church to pay that
price; we may hope that none who wish to confine themselves
and others within narrow and cramping limits of thought will
seek to be teachers in that Church. But that apparently is the
only solution. The risk must be taken. And it is better to run
such a risk than to fall into the old and illiberal method of formu-
lating an orthodoxy of our own. A liberal orthodoxy would in-
deed be a contradiction in terms, and an orthodox Liberal Catholic
Church the laughing stock of gods and men.
Disclaiming then any intention of forming a Liberal Catho-
lic orthodoxy we may again approach the question: For what does
the Liberal Catholic Church stand?
In the following chapters it is proposed to examine this ques-
tion under headings, which will be familiar to students of theol-
ogy and Church history, such as the doctrine of God, the doctrine of
Christ, the doctrine of Man, the doctrine of Salvation, and so forth.
An attempt will be made to discover to what extent we agree
with the old tradit ional or “orthodox” teaching of the Church
and at what points exactly we disagree. The point of divergence
or parting of the ways, if it can be discovered, marks the point where
the distinctive teaching of liberalism begins; it is also the point at
which Liberal Catholics must expect to be branded as heretics by
the older Catholics. That we must expect. If we were “ortho-
dox” in all respects we should not have formed a distinct Church.
There would have been no need for a distinct Church. But, be-
ing distinct, it is as well that we should know what is our
special distinction or “heresy.” The purpose then of this exami-
nation of doctrines is not to tell Liberal Catholic Church-people
what they ought to believe, but to show them what they
probably do believe, and wherein their beliefs are distinct
or “heretical.”
To discover what exactly is the teaching of the Christian
Church as a whole on theological fundamentals is not difficult.

11
The teaching of the undivided Church is summed up and ex-
pressed in the three Creeds or Symbols of faith commonly known
as the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed
or Quicunque Vult. 3 The date and authorship of these Symbols are
matters which cannot be determined with accuracy; but the
Symbols themselves may be taken as accurately representing the
teaching of the Church of the first four General or Ecumenical
Councils— the Councils of Nicæa, A.D. 325, Constantinople, A.D.
381, Ephesus, A.D. 431, and Chalcedon, A.D. 451. These three
Creeds, which presuppose the existence of a definite revelation,
“the deposit of faith,” are included in the liturgies of the Roman
and Anglican Churches, and they are accepted as statements of the
Christian faith by most of the Nonconformist bodies. They are de-
clared by the Church of England in her Articles of Religion to be
provable “by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.”
The teaching of the Church as a whole, then, may be said to be
embodied and summed up in the three historic Creeds, but the inter-
pretation of the Creeds and the beliefs of the various groups of
Christians—the Churches—into which Christendom is now di-
vided is an entirely different matter. The Roman Church seems to
claim to be the only Church with authority to interpret. That body
alone, so it seems to assert, can infallibly declare the Truth as it is
contained in the Creeds. In its Tridentine decrees, 1545-1563, it
has interpreted, explained, developed and, so its opponents be-
lieve, added to and distorted the fundamental truths of Christianity
as expressed in the three Creeds. The Church of England likewise
has explained and interpreted the Faith in its thirty-nine Articles of
Religion, 1562; and the Presbyterian interpretation or expression is
to be found in the Westminster Confession, Seventeenth Cen-
tury. And in addition to these expansions, developments or exten-
sions of the Creeds, to be found in almost every separate or distinct
Church in Christendom, still further expansions are to be found in
the “schools of thought” which in any particular Church mark the
different ways of interpreting the interpretations of that particular
Church; and, further still, each separate teacher or preacher will

3
The first words of the Athanasian Creed are Quicunque vult salvus esse—
Whosoever wishes to be safe.

12
have his own way of looking at a teaching which forms still an-
other interpretation; and it is probable that almost each individual
Christian, consciously or unconsciously, interprets the articles of
belief in his own way, whether he is allowed this liberty of private
interpretation by his own Church or not. The difficulty of dis-
covering what exactly is the Christian point of view or teaching on
any of the fundamentals of religion increases as we get further
and further from the age of the General Councils.
It is when we get a long way from the fountain head and are
lost in the maze of interpretations that we mostly find those crude
teachings which the opponents or critics of the Christian religion per-
sist in describing as the teaching of the Church as a whole. It is not
a fair or even an intelligent method of criticism to judge a great
religion by the teaching of its least intelligent exponents. The
Christian doctrine of God, for instance, and of God's relationship
to man is not to be found, as these critics assume, in the minds of
simple peasants, nor in the ravings of Calvinistic preachers, nor
even in the early narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures, but in the
historic Creeds of Christendom. If this very unfair method of criti-
cism could always be avoided both by Christians when estimating the
value of other great religions, and by the teachers of other faiths
when trying to understand Christianity, we should more quickly ar-
rive at the truth of each other's positions and more easily and
quickly discover the brotherhood of religions.
Liberal Christians of the present day therefore need not concern
themselves with all the interpretations of all the Churches, least of
all with those that are most crude. It is simply a waste of time to
attempt to demolish such teachings as those of the verbal inspira-
tion of Holy Scripture, original or inherited sin, predestination, eter-
nal punishment and many others. Destruction is the special work
of Modernists, not of Liberal Catholics. Modernists understand
their business and may be relied on to do it thoroughly. It is a
question if even they would not be more profitably employed on some
constructive work than in demolishing certain crude theories of
God and His dealings with men which are already obsolescent and
will soon, in the ordinary course of nature, be obsolete. Is it worth
any one's while to spend time on this class of work? The people
who can hold these theories are not likely ever to be won to the
teaching that they are likely to find in the Liberal Catholic

13
Church, and, in any case, they are not likely to surrender their
teaching before frontal attacks. If they are to be won at all they
must be won by gentle persuasion and by the “sweet savour of a
godly life” not by frontal attacks.
On the other hand, there is much sublime teaching put forth by
some of the best teachers of the orthodox Churches with which Lib-
eral Catholics would do well to make themselves acquainted. This
teaching and the doctrines of the whole Church as found in the his-
toric Creeds, and not the medieval interpretations or subsequent theo-
ries of interpretations, will be our first concern in the following
chapters. Our next concern will be to try to discover the inner
meaning of the fundamental doctrines—the Creed within the
Creeds; to go behind the Creeds to the depositum fidei presupposed
in them, behind that again to the full content of that deposit, and so
perhaps to some disciplina arcani which we have known long since
and lost awhile.

14
 Chapter Three

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

All the interpretations and expositions of the Creeds that we

find in all the Churches of Christendom are but the attempts of
Christians of various ages to discover the inner meaning of the
Christian Faith—the Creed within the Creeds. They all follow the
same principle—the principle that nothing can ever be added to the
truth proclaimed in the Creeds, but that the full meaning of those
declarations of Truth may be drawn out from age to age as men
are able to bear it. It is claimed for all articles of Religion, whether
the Tridentine Decrees, the Thirty-nine Articles, the West-
minster Confession or any other collection, that they add nothing
to the Creeds, that they do but make explicit teachings always im-
plicit within them. This is the principle of “development” gener-
ally recognised as legitimate. Following the same principle the
Liberal Catholic Church must likewise proclaim its beliefs, its par-
ticular interpretations of those same great doctrines, but without
asserting that its interpretations are de fide teachings “which ex-
cept a man believe faithfully he cannot be safe.” In so doing it may
and almost certainly will be charged with heresy, but it will be
more concerned to discover Truth than to escape ecclesiastical
censures, and it may be pardoned for believing that its heresies
will prove to be the very truths for which all the world is seek-
ing.

The Doctrine of God

On this hallowed ground liberals and traditionalists alike might

well fear to tread. But so far as they do tread on such ground they
go side by side and even hand in hand for a very long distance.
The teaching of the Church as found in the Creeds is first that
there is One God (monotheism), and next that God manifests as a
Trinity. One substance (ουσία), three hypostases or persons
(υποοτάσεις .πρόσωπα). The three persons are distinct, yet their
Godhead “is all one.” The substance (ουσία) is not to be divided,
nor are the hypostases or persons to be confounded. Of these
three hypostases “none is afore or after other, none is greater or

15
less than another.” “The whole three persons are co-eternal and
co-equal.”
That briefly is the Christian teaching about God—that and
not, as is so often supposed by the uninstructed, that God is anthro-
pomorphic (in human form) and anthropopassionate (with human
passions).
Before these sublime teachings liberals and the most reverent
traditionalists will surely bow and adore—and try to understand.
The word Substance (ουσία), as adapted at Nicæa, A.D. 325, is im-
portant and exceedingly interesting. The English equivalent of
the Greek is perhaps rather “essence” than “substance,” and per-
haps the ideas connoted by “be-ness” or “is-ness,” if we had such
words, would still more nearly convey to English-speakers the idea
contained in the Greek word. That idea is that God alone is; eve-
rything else “is not.” Between He Who is (ό υ) or That Which is
(το όυ) and that which is not (τό ούχ όυ)) there is a great gulf
fixed. Eternity then as opposed to created or derived existence (έξ
ούχ όυτωυ) is the principal attribute of God in manifestation as
found in the Christian definition. Of God alone it can be said
“there never was a time when He was not” (ούδέποτε ήυ ότε ούχ
ήυ). Of all else there was a beginning in time; of everything else it
may be said that there was a time when, as such, it was not
(ούδέποτε ήυ ότε ούχ ήυ). In the discussions of the Fourth and
Fifth Centuries about the Divinity of Our Lord the word ούσία
became the test word. This part of the subject belongs properly to
the next chapter, but as it is so very important in Christian theol-
ogy, and as it has a distinct bearing on the main subject of this chap-
ter it may be profitable to anticipate here what must be more fully
expanded in the paper on Christology. The question at issue
was: “Was Christ Divine? Did He share the very being (ούσία) of
God or was He of like being (όµοιούσιος), but not of the very same
being (όµοούσιος). Was there never a time when He was not?
Or could it be said of Him ‘there was a time when He 'was not’ (ήυ
ότε ούχ ήυ)?” That was the question. The Catholic or Athana-
sian party won the day at Nicæa. The Divinity of Christ was estab-
lished, and ever since then that doctrine has been safely and securely
preserved in the Christian Church inside that one word όµοούσιος
which is translated in the English version of the Nicene Creed of
one substance” with the Father. And there it is likely to remain

16
because it is a great Truth. The importance of this truth at the pre-
sent time is such that the subject must have at least one chapter to
itself.
The doctrine of One God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity is the
official teaching of the whole Christian Church about God. And
those, however liberal, who will examine clause by clause and
word by word the statements of the Christian Creeds which define this
primary doctrine, wherever possible using the Greek version of the
Nicene and the Latin versions of the Athanasian and Apostles'
Creeds, will probably be content, at the end of their study, to leave
well alone. They will probably not wish to alter a single word, or a
single syllable of it. This, of course, does not apply to the
“minatory” clauses of the Quicunque Vult which are not part of the
Creed proper, and which certainly are not concerned with defini-
tions of the Trinity. The words seem to have been so carefully
chosen and are always the inevitable words, and the terms and phras-
es are so terse and yet so full, that we may dare to assert that behind
the Nicene Doctors there was direct super-human guidance. It is
doubtful if even the subtlety of the Orient could have improved on
the Christian definition; but then the Orientals would probably not
have attempted any definition of God.
When we pass from the exact words and phrases of the Chris-
tian symbols to the thoughts about the being of God as revealed in
the writings and words of the most reverent exponents of Chris-
tianity to-day, Liberal Catholics will still find themselves side by
side and hand in hand with their orthodox brethren for a consid-
erable distance. The discrimination between God transcendent
(the Absolute) and God immanent in the universe, is quite gen-
erally made in the Christian Churches to-day. The teaching of
immanence has very strong scriptural support and it appeals to the
heart and to the reason of countless people outside as well as inside
the Christian Churches at the present time. God is conceived of
as being immanent within each person, the spark at the apex of
the soul that lighteth every man; and, further, He is within each
thing and each atom. The omnipresence of God is the term usually
used to convey this idea, and the recently discovered and fre-
quently quoted saying of Jesus: “Raise the stone and thou shalt
find Me, cleave the wood and I am there,” combined with the
words of Our Lord—“God is Spirit”—affords all the support of

17
the Divine authority that is needed.
So far Liberals will probably be quite at one with Tradi-
tionalists, but they will probably differ over a point which to
many Liberals seems to be a logical sequence from the idea of the
Divine immanence, and to be a necessary corollary of the post-
Copernican astronomy. In between God transcendent (the Abso-
lute) and God immanent in any individual child of God, there, must
surely be other manifestations of God. The doctrine of the Trinity
seems to be a philosophical necessity—a subject implying an ob-
ject and a mutual connection between the two, a Lover implying
a Beloved and Love binding the two together—and therefore it
may be supposed to apply at every level conceivable or inconceiv-
able. It is true of God in the Absolute sense or of God in any more
conceivable sense. The human being on this planet Earth hardly
dares or aspires to approach by thought to the level of the Abso-
lute. It is not usually of the Absolute that he thinks when he ex-
presses his belief in and directs his worship to One God in Trinity
and Trinity in Unity. God, so far as he is concerned, is the God or
Logos (Word) of the Solar System to which this planet belongs.
Man's main business as man is to worship—and by so doing to
try to make his nature one with the nature of the God of this Solar
System.4 This, of course, implies that there are other Logoi of
other solar systems, an implication which to many even of the
best and kindest of Traditionalists will savour of polytheism,
and as such be a glaring heresy. However that may be, to the
Liberal who cannot divide himself into thought-tight com-
partments it seems a necessity. If he accepts, as he must, the Co-
pernican idea of the Universe, he must suppose that there is in

4
This idea of the Solar Logos would have been understood by the audience to
whom Pigott was writing. It can still be found in older Theosophical works,
and in the work of Bishop Leadbeater. To summarize Leadbeater et al, it is a
belief that the Sun on other levels of existence is a resting place for a very high
level of spiritual consciousness (evidenced by Humanity's early Sun worship-
ping cults). It is difficult for us in the 21st Century, having ventured out into
our Solar System a little way, and having used telescopes to start mapping the
heavens, to think of a Solar Logos. To us it could be seen as limiting God.
[Ed.]

18
charge of the evolution of each solar system a Being, Who though
less than the Absolute, if we must think of greater and less at such a
level, is nevertheless so great that He is to us God in the fullest sense
of that mysterious word. To us beings of this planet Earth the
Logos of our Solar System is God, and it is of Him that we think
when in our Creeds we express our belief in the Trinity in Unity
and Unity in Trinity. The One, no doubt, is right at the back of
all, just as apparently all the Solar Systems which have existed, do
exist or ever will exist form somewhere and somehow a single unit
with a single centre; but, after all, such matters are surely too
high and too hard for most of us to exercise ourselves in at pre-
sent. It is enough for us at present to look up to and pay our hom-
age to the God or Logos of our Solar System; and it will need all
our efforts for ages still to come to make ourselves completely one
with Him.
Believing as we do in the inconceivable One behind and be-
yond the Many, we are not really guilty of an ecclesiastical “her-
esy;” and our interpretation of the doctrine of the Transcendence
and Immanence has at least as much right to a place in the Chris-
tian Church as any other; but because of a strange habit that
many intellectual people, especially theologians, have of thinking
in one way with one part of the mind and in another way with an-
other—of accepting modern astronomy and yet holding to a theory
of One God and Father of all which belonged to the pre-
Copernican age—we are likely to be regarded as heretical on this
point. Whether that be so or not, there can be little doubt that the
teaching of a Solar Logos, so far as it may be described as a distinc-
tive teaching of the Liberal Catholic Church, marks a parting of
the ways on this point.

19
 Chapter Four

T HE DOCT RINE OF CHRIST

“What think ye of Christ” “Who say ye that I am?” In

one form or another that has proved, during the 2,000 years that
have elapsed since the Lord Christ is represented to have asked it,
the most interesting, perhaps, of all theological questions, and the
most difficult to answer. It is a question for which all clergy must
always be prepared with an answer, and it is well that all communi-
cants, whether they accept the official answer of the Christian Church
or not, should know what answer has been given to the question
by the Church. To state that answer as fully and adequately as such
a subject deserves is impossible in so short a book; all that can be
attempted within such a compass is to state briefly and as concisely
as possible the results that were arrived at by the doctors of the
Church in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries of our era—the age of
definitions —and then to examine the doctrine in the light of pre-
sent day presuppositions and modern psychology and try to find a
satisfactory answer to the question that perplexes so many earnest
minds at the present time, namely: Why, if true, does not the
doctrine as stated by orthodox Christianity make a stronger appeal
to the reason of modern thinkers?
Any attempt to explain the Catholic doctrine of the Person of
Christ to modern readers who have had no special theological train-
ing is doomed to failure unless the theological background of the
Fourth and Fifth Centuries is first made plain. The doctors of the
Church of those days, who were responsible for formulating the
Church's Christology, were for the most part Greeks, or at least
men of Greek education, yet, strangely, their idea of God was al-
most entirely Jewish. By that time the Church had taken over and
adopted the Jewish idea of God and much else that was characteris-
tically Jewish teaching, although by then the Church had almost
entirely passed out of its Jewish nursery. The more characteristically
Greek or Oriental ideas which had struggled for a place in the
Church of the first three centuries, in various Gnostic sects and
schools, had in the Fourth Century almost completely disappeared.
This must be remembered by those people of the present day to

20
whom the Gnostic and Oriental ideas of God, are much more famil-
iar than the Jewish and traditional Christian conceptions; other-
wise they cannot hope to form a clear idea of the various points
at issue in the Christological controversies; it is necessary for
any understanding of those controversies that they should be
viewed against the Jewish5 background presupposed.
The Jewish idea of God was of the Almighty Creator exist-
ing from all eternity aloof and entirely distinct from all His crea-
tures. Between God the Creator and even the highest of His crea-
tures a great gulf was fixed—unfathomable and unpassable. God
the Lord is. Everything else is not. The Greek term for this is-
ness, which is God, is Ousia (ουσία), which is more or less
equivalent to the English "substance" or "essence." The question
which, more than any other in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, ex-
ercised the best minds of the Christian teachers was on which
side of that dividing line between the Creator and His Creation
the Lord Christ was to be placed. Probably the wisest teachers
shrank from making any definition of the Lord's nature; their rever-
ence would restrain them from attempting anything so calculated
to arouse that argumentative tendency to which the Greeks were
particularly prone; but the circumstances of the time made defini-
tion almost imperative. They were continually being pressed to
give an account of their beliefs, to state exactly what they
thought. And in their teaching there appeared, as was inevitable,
wide divergences of opinion; some stressed one aspect of the
Lord's nature and some another, till gradually there arose stormy
controversies and the Church, to guard itself against identification
with teachings which seemed to the majority of its bishops to be un-
true, had to state what they did not believe and so to declare what
they did believe. These positive statements of belief are found in
the Catholic Creeds, and the teachings rejected are the great here-

5
In Bp. Pigott’s time referring to a “Jewish Jehovah,” “Jewish idea of God” or
“Jewish teaching” found here and in subsequent chapters was an acceptable
use of language. Pigott was very much aware of C.W. Leadbeater’s notion that
the ‘God of Israel’ can be seen as a tribal deity calling to us from the wilder-
ness and he believed Christianity had moved beyond that. He saw the contrast
between the ‘God of Israel’ and the ‘Father God’ Jesus taught about as being
quite different in character. This is reflected by Pigott in the text. [Ed.]

21
sies of the early Church, The definitions grew out of strife and
controversy, a condition which, so long as the Greek mind with its
love of intellectual problems and metaphysical subtleties predomi-
nated in the Church, was inevitable. Their purpose was rather to
exclude error than to proclaim truth.

Arianism

The first great heresy was connected with the teaching of a

certain priest in Alexandria named Arius, a pupil of the famous Lu-
cian, a teacher of Antioch, who suffered martyrdom in the Dio-
cletian persecutions in A.D. 311. From this man the most heinous
of all the heresies has derived its distinctive name “Arianism”
Briefly his teaching was that though Christ could be called “di-
vine,” yet there was a time when He (ήυ ότε ούχ ήυ) “was not” and
so, when pressed to say on which side of the dividing line he
placed Our Lord, he quite definitely placed Him on the side of
the creatures. Arius would allow that He was of like substance
(όµοτούσιος) with God, but not that He was of the same substance
(όµοούσιος). If those readers who do not know Greek examine those
two Greek words carefully they will see that the only difference
between them is that in the middle of the former the letter ι (iota)
appears, which is missing from the other. That is the famous iota
around which all this great controversy raged. All about one let-
ter! Yes, but that one letter made all the difference, and practically
all Christians of more modern times and many other teachers, who
might not care to call themselves Christians, are agreed that “had the
Arian doctrine gained the victory it would in all probability have
completely ruined Christianity.” 6
The controversy over Arius grew to such proportions that it
alarmed the Emperor Constantine, who, hoping by means of the
Church to save the Empire, wanted above all things that there
should be peace in the Church. The Emperor, imagining that it
was merely a question of words which could be easily settled, called
a General Council of the Church consisting of all the bishops
within the Empire. The Council, over which the Emperor himself

6
T.Carlyle quoted by Froude in Carlyle's Life in London.

22
presided, met at Nicæa in the year A.D. 325, and condemned
the Arian teaching almost unanimously. To give effect to their
condemnation they adopted and adapted an already existing bap-
tismal creed introducing into it the famous word όµοούσιος (of one
substance), which from that moment has been the test word of
orthodoxy on that point. This creed differs, though not essentially,
from the later creed of the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381,
though the latter is now usually described as the Nicene Creed. A
fair translation of the original creed of Nicæa is as follows:—

We believe in One God, the Father Almighty,

Maker of all things both visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Son of God,
begotten of the Father, and only-begotten—
that is from the essence of the Father—
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God, begotten not made,
being of one essence with the Father;
by whom all things were made,
both things in heaven and things on earth,
Who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made
flesh,
Was made man, suffered and rose again the third day, Ascended into
heaven,
Cometh to judge quick and dead;
and in the Holy Spirit.

But those who say that “There was once when He was not” and “be-
fore He was begotten He was not” and “He was made of things
that were not,” or maintain that the Son of God is of a different es-
sence, or created, or subject to mortal change or alteration—these
doth the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematize.7
The English “only-begotten” does not so well express the

7
H.M. Gwatkin, The Arian Controversy, p. 29.

23
meaning of the Greek µουογευής which translates better as
“alone-begotten,” that is to say, begotten of one only and not
from a pair. The Liberal Catholic Church alone amongst the
Churches translates it “alone-born,” and in so doing comes near-
est to the meaning of the original and to the equivalent expression
found in the Quicunque Vult— “The Son is of the Father alone,
not made, nor created but begotten.”
It will be noticed that in the Nicene definition the Lord Jesus
Christ and the Son of God are identified, and the Son of God is
plainly intended to refer to the Second Person of the Blessed Tri-
nity. We must return to this point at a later stage; meanwhile the
other General Councils and the heresies condemned by them
must be considered. The Nicæan verdict was quickly won, but
for more than fifty years after the Council had met the contro-
versy continued to rage and the fate of that momentous decision
hung in the balance. Owing mainly to the influence of the great or-
thodox teacher Athanasius, the Nicæan formula was eventually
established as the official teaching of the Church, and many of
the terms descriptive of Our Lord's divine nature, so familiar to
students of Christian theology, are due to the subtle mind of
Athanasius. The English does not adequately reproduce the exact
shade of meaning of the Greek; nevertheless even in the English
the subtlety of thought can be detected. Christ, for instance, was
described as “full God;”(πλήρης θεός) “Offspring, yet not as
one among things made;” (γέυυηµα άλλ’ ούχ ώς έυ τώυ
γεγευυηµέυωυ) the Son is “without birth,” (άγέννητος) “ever be-
gotten” (άειγενής) or “un-begotten-begotten.” (άγεννητογενής)

Apollinarianism

Then came a reaction. The pendulum swung to the other ex-

treme. Some of those who, in opposition to Arianism, vigorously
and earnestly contended for the divinity of Christ, used words
which certainly implied a denial of His true humanity. One of the
most zealous of these, and perhaps the ablest, was a certain Apolli-
narius, bishop of Laodicea, who, in his eagerness to combat Ari-
anism, was led to deny the existence of a human will or reason
(νοϋς) in Christ's human nature, this being replaced by the infalli-
ble reason of the Word or Son of God. The orthodox contention

24
was that Christ assumed human nature in its entirety, including
the νοϋς, or “reasonable soul,” for only so could He be example
and redeemer. The teaching of Apollinarius and his followers was
condemned at the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381, as definitely
as the teaching of Arius had been rejected at Nicæa, but Apolli-
narianism lingered on for long after its formal condemnation, and
has constantly recurred throughout the subsequent centuries. Its
most important recurrence was in the heresy known as Mono-
physitism (one nature) which flourished in the Fifth and Sixth
Centuries. At the present time, when the most orthodox of Catholic
teachers are at times led rashly to accuse other teachers of denying the
divinity of the Lord, the retort naturally, and sometimes actually, is
that they (the orthodox) are identifying themselves with the heresy of
Apollinarius—denying that Christ was verus homo. So difficult is
it to tread the razor's edge of orthodoxy, to affirm the divinity
without denying the humanity and vice versa, when God is
thought of as quite distinct from and wholly other than man.

Nestorianism 8

Again the pendulum swung in the direction of Arianism.

There was at Antioch a school or group of influential theologians,
already referred to, who, following the tradition of their master,
Lucian, were particularly zealous for the reality of the manhood
of Christ. They were naturally strongly and even vehemently
opposed to the teaching of the Apollinarians and, just as the Apol-
linarian heresy arose from excessive anti-Arian zeal, so Nestori-
anism was a result of, and a reaction from, excessive zeal in the
condemnation of Apollinarianism and the general tendency of the
Alexandrian school. The historical rivalry between the two
schools of Antioch and Alexandria also added fuel to this very
heated controversy, Cyril, that very bitter arch-hunter of heretics,
happened at the time to be Archbishop of Alexandria, and he, with
his usual keen scent for heresies, detected some false teaching in the
refusal of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, to apply the term

8
An excellent work on this part of the subject J. F. Bethune Baker's Nestorius and his
Teaching

25
“mother of God” (θεοτόκος)9 to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The
term had come to be used without implying any denial of the per-
fect manhood of the Lord; its use was strictly in accordance with
the generally allowed process of thought and speech by which the
terms appropriate to one Person of the Blessed Trinity or to one of
the natures in the Person of Christ were transferred to another.
The terms were by general consent interchangeable. This process
was known as the communicatio idiomatum. But Nestorius, or
rather, his chaplain, Anastasius, forbade its use, and from that
moment one of the fiercest and most disgraceful of all the contro-
versies of the Christian Church arose.
The followers of Nestorius claimed that by the use of the term
“Mother” or “Bearer of God” the human nature of our Lord was
denied. Cyril and his followers retorted that by refusing the title
the Nestorians taught two Christs, two persons—one Divine and
the other human. Another Council was held, this time at Ephe-
sus, in the year 431. Nestorius was emphatically condemned and
the use of the term “Bearer of God” was made obligatory on all
teachers of the Church. Cyril as usual won the day, but because
of the bitterness of his too zealous defence of the faith the
Church has reason to be ashamed rather than proud of this great
champion of orthodoxy
Nestorianism is an elusive heresy. It is difficult to discover ex-
actly what it was since its emphasis seems to have been so fre-
quently shifted. But broadly speaking it came to this: was the
Lord Christ to be regarded as from eternity Son of God or as one
who gradually became God, rather in the Hellenic sense of a dei-
fied man? No doubt Nestorius was entirely free from any inten-
tion of denying the eternal Divinity, nor in fact did he ever, like
Arius, actually deny it; recent research seems even to exonerate
him from any complicity whatever in the teaching which has
been called by his name. His difficulty was entirely a difficulty of
terms. But if his objection to the use of the word “Bearer of God”
had been allowed it would have opened the door to the teaching
which the Church all along had been anxious to exclude, the
teaching of the deification as opposed to the eternal Sonship of

9
Theotokos. [Ed.]

26
the Lord.
Once more the whole difficulty was due ultimately to the Jewish
idea of God presupposed. Nestorians and Catholics alike are trying
to build on a false basis.

Eutychianism

Then again there followed the inevitable reaction.

Eutyches, an old monk of Constantinople and a keen supporter of
Cyril, overbalanced in his eagerness to stress the unity of person in
the Lord Christ. He admitted that generally Godhead and manhood
were entirely distinct, but that in the particular Person of the Lord
the manhood was swallowed up or absorbed in the Godhead. The
simile usually attributed to him is that the manhood became to the
Godhead as a drop of vinegar in the ocean. This again was perhaps
not so much a denial of the two natures in the one Person as an
opening of the door to the possibility of such a denial. He was not
very far from a profound truth, and would have been still nearer
to that truth if, retaining the simile attributed to him of the drop in
the ocean, he had insisted that, though the manhood was thus
merged in the Godhead, it did not cease to be true manhood; that
the “taking of the manhood into God” involved also the coming of
the Godhead into complete possession of the manhood. The drop falls
into the ocean and simultaneously the ocean pours its fullness into the
drop—an impossibility physically, but a fact at a very exalted spiri-
tual level. It cannot, however, be claimed for Eutyches that he
used the simile in that sense, and, without that qualification, his teaching
did seem to invite denials of the Lord's true manhood.
Against Eutyches, the great Leo, bishop of Rome, threw all
the weight of his learning and influence, and at the Council of Chal-
cedon in A.D. 451 the last of the great definitions was formulated. It
was affirmed that Christ is one Person with two natures—one,
divine from all eternity, the other, human and voluntarily assumed
at birth. The Chalcedonian definitions cannot be better expressed
than in the words of the Quicunque Vult, commonly known as the
Athanasian Creed: “God of the substance of the Father, begotten
before the worlds: and Man of the substance of His Mother, born
in the world, Who although He be God and Man yet He is not two,
but one Christ.”

27
 This was the last of the definitions. A century later in opposi-
tion to the Monophysite (one nature) and Monothelite (one will)
tendencies of thought it was found necessary to affirm the Chal-
cedonian definition, but that was a reaffirmation and not a new defi-
nition.
The result of the four Councils may perhaps be fairly
summed up thus: Christ was declared to be Perfect God and Perfect
Man, as opposed respectively to Arianism and Apollinarianism;
and One Person—two natures, as opposed to Nestorianism and Eu-
tychianism.
The question now, in view of these definitions, is “What think
ye (Liberal Catholics) of Christ?” Who say ye that He is?
A modern Churchman has said that the Chalcedonian formula
marks the bankruptcy of Greek philosophy. Is that a true estimate
of the result of all the mental and spiritual exercises involved in ar-
riving at the final Chalcedonian conclusion?
It is true if the two natures are thought of as somehow in juxtapo-
sition, which would indeed be a very unphilosophical proposition;
but plainly the Chalcedonian doctors thought of them not as in
juxtaposition but as related as higher to lower. And it is perhaps
true in the sense that the attempt to fit Greek philosophy on to a
Jewish idea was impossible. The Greeks were naturally philoso-
phical; the Jews were not. And so it was a misfit, but in no other
sense is the indictment true. Eliminate from the Christian Creed
the Jewish idea presupposed but not stated, and substitute a more phi-
losophical idea of God and it becomes evident that within and behind
the definitions are profound truths which Liberal Catholics for the
most part will not be likely to deny. The main truth is greater than
either the Catholics of the time saw or the traditional Catholics of
the present day will allow. The early theologians builded better than
they knew. Their Christology was perfectly true but it was not the
whole truth; so far as it went it was a magnificent exposition in phi-
losophical terms of a profound truth, but it was only half the truth.
They could go no further because of the Jewish background; they
were bound by their frame of reference. By removing that back-
ground and substituting some more gracious Divinity (such as the
God of the New Testament) for the Old Testament Jehovah we can
complete the unfinished work of the Greek theologians and state the
truth in all its fullness and splendour. The other half of the truth is

28
the divinity of all mankind collectively and of each individual par-
ticularly. The Fourth Century established the doctrine of the Divin-
ity of Christ; the Twentieth Century promises to establish the doc-
trine of the divinity of all men; but at present this excess of ortho-
doxy is regarded by the older Catholic Churches as dangerous and
mischievous, if not actually heretical, for in it is scented a danger to
that half of the truth (to them the whole truth) which they have pro-
claimed so consistently and defended so vigorously throughout
the Christian ages. It is in the affirmation of the divinity of man-
kind and not in any denial of Christ's divinity that Liberal Catho-
lics may expect to be regarded as unsound by their Traditionalist
brethren. That is the parting of the ways, and a point which will
need some close examination in another chapter.

29
 Chapter Five
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN

If it be asked for what especially the Liberal Catholic Church

stands, it can be answered unhesitatingly that doctrinally it stands
for the doctrine of the divinity of humanity. There is nothing new in
this teaching of the oneness of God and man. It is quite familiar
teaching to all who have made any study of Eastern religions and
philosophies. It is also quite commonly believed by many Chris-
tians outside the Churches and by not a few within them. However,
it is not the official teaching of the Catholic Church. The Church
has never attempted to define the nature of man as it has defined the
nature of Christ and the Three in One in the Godhead, unless it be
claimed as a negative definition that by accepting or presupposing
the Jewish idea of God, with its sharp distinction between Godhead
and manhood, the Church excluded the teaching that all are di-
vine. It is a moot point. But though the teaching is not new it is
certainly a very new thing in the history of Catholic Christianity that
a true branch of the Catholic Church should not merely allow but en-
courage and even take for granted a teaching hitherto confined to
the East, a teaching which can best be summed up in the words of
an Eastern Scripture: “Never did I not exist, nor you, nor these
rulers of men; nor will any of us hereafter cease to be.” Bhagavad
Gita.
The teaching of the immanence of divinity has always been al-
lowed in the Church and never was such teaching more beautifully
drawn than by some of the mystical teachers of the present day.
But immanence is a very different teaching from identity. The
best thinkers and teachers in the Church of all ages speak fre-
quently of God or Christ or the Holy Spirit as immanent in man.
He dwells in us, reigns in us, tabernacles among us, is the “light
that lighteth every man,” and, following St. Paul, the human body is
referred to as the temple of the Holy Ghost. But theologians, even
of such liberal Churches as the Anglican Broad Church party and the
Congregationalists, rarely if ever identify the innermost in man
with God. That is the special distinction of the teaching of the
Liberal Catholic Church. At that point Liberal Catholics part

30
company with even the most liberal thinkers and teachers of any of
the older Churches of Catholic Christendom. For in the older Catho-
lic Churches, in the Roman and High Anglican Churches espe-
cially, there is an idea deeply rooted that if all men are divine then
Christ must somehow be less divine than if He alone of mankind is
divine in origin. Whether or not such a contention is supported by
any high ecclesiastical authority is a disputable question, but the
idea is certainly so deeply rooted that there is no chance at present
of any body of people, holding the view that all men are divine,
being recognized as Catholic, still less as orthodox, by the Tradi-
tionalists.
Yet to Liberal Catholics that teaching is so much the key to
the whole situation that without it there seems to be little hope of
the great Catholic religion making any effectual appeal to the high-
est intelligence of the present and succeeding generations. It
seems to Liberal Catholics to contain the answer to the great ques-
tion: the whence, the how and the whither of mankind. It is the lost
word, the lost half of the great truth, for want of which man stum-
bles and fights in his progress, and in the light of which alone he
can hope to realise his brotherhood with all men and escape from
the delusion of separateness. It is, therefore, the function of the Lib-
eral Catholic Church to proclaim this truth and not only to pro-
claim it but to proclaim it boldly and even aggressively as a
Catholic teaching, as implied and involved in the conciliar defini-
tions of the doctrine of Christ; to proclaim that people, therefore,
not only may, but should hold such a teaching about mankind and
remain in the Catholic Church, sharers with the Traditionalists in
all its benefits, partakers of all its treasures.
What, then, is this teaching, stated in terms of the conciliar
definitions? It is that God and man are One. It is not necessary to
define God beyond the conciliar definition that He is One in Three
and Three in One and beyond saying that the God whom we
mean is the God whom the Lord Christ revealed and described as
the Father—not the Jewish Jehovah but the God or Logos of the
System and ultimately the Absolute One. As opposed to the
Arians we wholeheartedly believe that Christ and all men are “of one
substance with the Father,” not in the popular Hellenic sense that
man may attain to divinity or be deified, or in the sense in which
the Greek theologians sometimes speak of Christians, in Christ,

31
being made God but in the sense in which Athanasius and his fol-
lowers declared that Christ was “of one substance with the Father.”
Of Christ and of the real self of every man, of the ego ipse, it can be
said “there never was a time when he was not.” That self, that spark,
which is the divine-in-man, inhering in the Christos, the Son of
God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, has, in the Son, is-
sued from the Father or been “begotten of the Father before all
eons” in time; but from eternity that spark has existed, with the Son,
in the bosom of the Father. It never was not.
With the Catholics as opposed to the Apollinarians we can say
of Christ and of every man that he was “true” or “perfect man”
(verus homo) with a human body, feelings and mind, “of a reason-
able soul and human flesh subsisting.” Of every man as of Christ it
can be said, as opposed to the Nestorians, that he is in his inner-
most self “Son of God” from eternity to eternity, and that there-
fore every mother may truly be described as bearer of
God"(θεοτόκος) inasmuch as she is the bearer of a body which is
to be used for the time being by one whose innermost self is di-
vine, however much obscured that innermost self may be. And, as
opposed to the Eutychians, the Monophysites and Monothelites, we
can say that in Christ and in every person are two natures—a higher
and a lower—the higher being divine and the lower human; that in
the Lord Christ the lower was and is completely in accord with the
higher so that He knew no sin, but that in others the lower is to
some extent out of accord with the higher, hence the continual
strife between the flesh and the spirit, which, until the condition
of complete accord is reached, are “contrary the one to the oth-
er.” But whether the two natures are in accord, as in the Lord Christ,
or out of accord, as in ourselves, they are as the Catholic teaching
maintains, two natures and two wills, not, as the Eutychians, Mono-
physites and Monothelites taught, one nature and one will.
What, then, on this theory, is the difference between Our Lord
and ourselves, and mankind in general? The answer has been
hinted at above in considering the Catholic or orthodox, as op-
posed to the Eutychian or heretical, teaching of the two natures, but
the question is so very important and fundamental that the answer
must be more fully expanded. So far as the Godhead is concerned
there is no difference. There is only one God. The God who was
incarnate in Christ is also incarnate in all mankind. We, like

32
Christ, are “equal to the Father as touching the Godhead.” But so
far as the manhood is concerned there is a very vast difference. In
all the ages, hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of years,
that mankind has existed on this and possibly on other planets, the
Lord Christ has made perfect His manhood. He has lifted it into the
Godhead where it ever remains as perfect manhood. He has real-
ized His true nature, His essential divinity, “by taking of the
Manhood into God.” We have not done so; some of us have not
nearly done so. He is conscious of that oneness as we are not.
Therefore, speaking of the Lord Christ as incarnate in Palestine
and present at every Catholic Eucharist, we can say of Him that
He was truly God the Son, because of His consciousness, as man,
of that oneness. For the same reason He could say, as we as yet
cannot, “I and the Father are one thing.”(έν) We also are one
with the Father, but, as incarnate human beings, not yet con-
sciously so.
That is the difference, and a very great difference it is. In all
those prehistoric ages, in life after life—for the Orientals are un-
doubtedly right in their teaching of successive incarnations—He has
gone through all our experiences, yes, even sin. There is no ex-
perience known to us that He has not, in far past ages, also known.
Experiences of old age as of young manhood, youth and childhood;
experiences of domestic and family life as of the celibate condi-
tion; experiences in female as in male incarnations, in all races
and classes, He has known them all. And so He is very really
and truly human; in very truth our brother “tempted like as we
are” yet, so far as the Palestinian manifestation is concerned, quite
“without sin.” Long before that incarnation He had reached a level
of evolution at which sin is impossible. The human will, long be-
fore then, had become so completely one with the Divine will that
He could not will to sin and so He could not sin; for sin is, after all
and in the last analysis, caused by a want of accord between the
human and divine wills, and when this want of accord is tran-
scended and the possibility of it passed, then sin is impossible.
So also in that His last earthly manifestation He was free from
ignorance. Those Catholics who stumble at the teaching, claimed by
its exponents as orthodox, of the “emptying” (κένωσς) of divine
knowledge before the incarnation of Our Lord are right to pause
before they accept such teaching as true. There was no ignorance

33
in Him then, however much such teaching may seem to be sup-
ported by Holy Scripture. Long before then He had taken the man-
hood into God, and the taking of the manhood into God involved
the coming of the Godhead into the manhood. There was nothing
concerning us men and our evolution, nothing of the plan of God,
so far as that plan is concerned with the evolution of life within
our solar system, that He did not know; beyond that it does not con-
cern us to know or even to guess what He knew. It can be truly said
that as in the Palestinian incarnation He was without sin, so also
He was without ignorance. The kenotic Christ, as taught by some
leading Anglicans, is too reduced to be convincing or inspiring.
Such a Christ could not throughout the ages have towered high
above all others.
The Lord's purpose in coming to us two thousand years ago
was, on this theory as on the traditionalist theory, to help us to
climb to the height at which He is, to save us from the sins which
hinder our evolution and delay our upward progress “to the
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” He, as man, is
consciously God. We, in our innermost natures, are God, but, as
men, are not conscious of our divinity. His human nature is so com-
pletely subdued to the divine nature that there is now no gulf be-
tween the two. His humanity, though divine humanity, is still hu-
manity. We as men, that is in our lower natures, are not conscious
of our divinity because those lower natures are not yet subdued to,
and in accord with, the higher natures. Not yet are all things in
subjection to the divine-in-us. We are capable of becoming what we
are, capable of bringing the lower into complete accord with the
higher and of becoming consciously divine. Such is the divine will
and the divine plan for all men, but not yet; and Christ's mission
two thousand years ago was to help us to become what God has
willed that we shall become, to help us to become what He has al-
ready become: human beings who are consciously divine, super-
human beings. His mission is so to help us that our human na-
tures may become one with His nature and so one with the Father,
and to be one with the Father is to be perfectly natural and per-
fectly human. That is what is meant by the expression
“coming to God through Christ.” How He helps us to rise to that
height belongs to the doctrine of Salvation rather than to the doc-
trine of Man and must be considered in another chapter.

34
 Those who claim thus to interpret the Catholic religion in terms
of Eastern psychology must expect to be asked by what authority they
do this thing and who gave them their authority. It is a reasonable
request and the answer is also reasonable though it is not likely to
satisfy those who demand that all teachings must be capable of
proof by “most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.” The answer is
that the outer authority on which Liberal Catholicism relies is not
likely to be regarded as sufficient authority by more than a com-
paratively few people who will discover it for themselves, but
that the real authority for this as for every proposition is not outer
but inner; it is the authority of the spirit of truth within man, and it
is on the authority of that spirit that Liberal Catholics must
mainly rely to justify their special teaching to the world. They
must proclaim their teachings in the confident hope that the spirit
of truth within inquiring man will, more and more, set to its seal
that those teachings are true. That after all is the highest and best
and the only satisfactory authority that anyone can either demand or
find for any teaching. If a teaching is true its own truth will
eventually prove it, and if it is not true no amount of scriptural proof
can ever make it true. So the truth of our teaching will before long
prove it. It will commend itself, by the light that it casts on many
otherwise dark problems of life. Yet those who by constant thinking
in terms of the divinity of mankind and of man's evolution through
successive incarnations to the measure of the Stature of Christ's full-
ness, those who make themselves familiar with the teaching of panen-
theism, as such teaching may be called if a label is needed, and then
turn again to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, reading them
afresh in this light, will be surprised to find how much support the
teaching gets from that quarter. But it is not the way of Liberals
to rely on scriptural texts, or quotations from the patristic writ-
ings, for proof of their beliefs. The only test for them is: does the
teaching ring true? Does it cast light on the difficult problems of
life? Does its own truth prove it? Is it in itself inherently prob-
able?
And now at last we may turn to the question: why, if true, does
not the Christian religion as theologically explained, whether by
Catholics or by Protestants, make a stronger appeal to inquiring
man? May it not be because that teaching is always based on Jew-
ish conceptions which do not seem to square with post-Copernican

35
science? From first to last, from the Fall to the Final Redemption,
theology always has in the background presuppositions which are
too local, too small, too narrow, too Jewish to be convincing. The
traditional teaching carries no weight because it does not tell man
what he wants to know, but something else in which he is not in-
terested. Somewhere, he believes, there is an infallible teaching, a
divine plan of evolution, an explanation of the great riddle of life,
and it is that plan that inquiring man seeks to discover, or at least
that a corner of the veil that hides it shall be lifted. But the theo-
logians only tell him of an estrangement between himself and God
which he does not believe, of propitiation and blood-sacrifice which
he cannot understand, and of an atonement in which he is not inter-
ested. It is all too Jewish. It is not enough for man's needs.
Even the Lord Christ, as theologically explained, is not
enough. That explanation releases no amazement, no awe, no
adoration. To explain Him by stating that He is God or Son of God
cannot satisfy, even when the statement is supported and more fully
explained by the conciliar definitions. For either, on that explana-
tion, He is so de-humanized as to seem to be of little use as example
or as Redeemer, or the difference between Him and the rest of man-
kind is not apparent, according as whether the Jewish or the East-
ern idea of God is predominant in the minds of the inquirers. If the
Jewish, then Christ seems to be altogether removed from man, for
however much it may be stated that He was perfect man as well as
perfect God, it is almost impossible for any but specially con-
structed minds to understand how a Being can be both God (in the
Jewish sense) and man. The two ideas are mutually exclusive. Or,
if the Eastern idea predominates, then, without the correlative idea
of evolution by re-births, it is difficult to see that more is said of
Christ when it is stated that He is Son of God than can be said of
every man. Even when it is declared that He is God the Son, the
Second Person in the Blessed Trinity, no more seems to be said of
Him than can be said in some degree of any other person, for it is
obvious that the cosmic functions of the Second Person of the
Trinity were not suspended during the time that Christ was incar-
nate, and therefore that incarnation could only have been a partial
manifestation of God the Son. If it is not explained in what degree
He more fully manifested the life and consciousness of God the Son
than other people, it is not a satisfactory explanation of His great-

36
ness to say that He was the Second Person in the Blessed Trinity.
Man looks for something else, for some better thing than the
Churches give him, and he seems to be disappointed in, though not
always resentful towards, the Churches because they do not give
him what he seeks. Theological Christianity makes so little appeal
because it does not dig deep enough. What it says may be true but
the truth is deeper and grander than the theologians perceive. And
so inquiring man is, in the presence of the theologians, as a deaf
man who stoppeth his ears, “which refuseth to hear the voice” of
the theologians, “charm they never so wisely.”
It may perhaps be the proud distinction of the Liberal Catholic
Church that it has been sent into the world to reveal some part of
that deeper teaching which the inquiring mind of man seeks. It
may also in time be its function to say more and more, as men are
“able to bear it,” about the great Teachers of Whose existence the
Churches of Christendom are at present completely unaware.

37
 Chapter Six

THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT

Traditionalist

There is some reason for believing that the teaching, Oriental

rather than Semitic, of the divinity of all men and of man's con-
tinual progress or evolution through countless ages of time from the
One to the One, had its place in the Christian teaching in the first
few centuries of our era. It was the teaching promulgated by some
of the Gnostic teachers, and to some extent by such teachers as Ori-
gen and Clement of Alexandria, though little of this teaching has
survived in documentary form.
In Alexandria in those days there was a regular welter of teach-
ings, philosophies, theologies, and theosophies, and in this welter
were many types or brands of Gnosticism so-called. Some of these
Gnostics were very extravagant in their teaching of the nature and
function of angels; there is in the epistle to the Colossians a distinct
reference to this kind of teaching which is there strongly opposed.
Others were extravagant to the point of wildness in their ideas of
the nature of matter, which they regarded as essentially evil. The re-
sult of this teaching about matter was that the followers of the
teaching either went to extremes of asceticism, hoping in this way to
escape from contact with that which was, and always must be, es-
sentially and incurably evil; or, in other cases, they went to the op-
posite extreme of licence, holding that the pure spirit of man was
so essentially divine that it could never have any contact with a
thing so evil as matter, and that therefore the spirit remained un-
touched and uncorrupted and altogether unaffected however de-
graded the material body might become. The Catholics rightly re-
jected teachings which, however unintentionally, led to such dis-
astrous results. But, unfortunately though perhaps naturally in
such a welter, they lacked discrimination and in their zeal to
eliminate the Gnosis or Scientia “falsely so-called” they covered up
or drove under the true Gnosis, for want of which the Church has
suffered ever since, and never more than at the present time. The
Gnostics truly so-called seem to have had the light of the true
knowledge, the deeper teaching already referred to, and, when ex-

38
cluded from the Church, the Gnostic tradition seems to have been
handed on, somewhat furtively because of persecutions, from gen-
eration to generation in such seas as the Albigenses, Knights
Templars, Rosicrucians and others. They were generally perse-
cuted by the Catholics but, even in the days of bitterest persecu-
tion, the light was never finally extinguished throughout the dark
and the middle ages. Much of the Gnosis was also embodied in the
noble Neo-platonic philosophy of Plotinus in the Third Century and
his successors Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus and was handed
on through Dionysius and St. Thomas Aquinas to the Christian
Mystics. Even in the Church itself, there have usually been some
teachers in every generation who have known the esoteric teaching,
but their voices have rarely been heard above the din of those
theological controversies from which the Church since its first
beginnings has never been entirely free. It is, perhaps in the provi-
dence of God, one of the functions of the Liberal Catholic Church
to recover the lost Gnosis, and to establish it in its rightful place as
true teaching and, therefore, essential to the Catholic religion—the
original depositum, perhaps; the Creed within the Creeds and the
Gospel within the Gospels.
Never is the need for the rescue of the glorious Catholic religion
from its Jewish fetters and the recovery of a larger view of God
more plainly seen than when we contemplate the desperate efforts
of theologians throughout the centuries to square both the beautiful
Christian teaching of the loving Father and the splendour of the
divine Master with the essentially Jewish ideas of the Fall, the
wrath of God, original sin, blood-sacrifice, propitiation and
atonement. Some of the more mystical efforts have been beauti-
ful and spiritual, but others of the legalistic type have been of such
a character as to bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of most
Christians of the present day; but, however refined, scholarly and
spiritual the suggested theories may be, they seem rather to spoil
the Christian deposit and very greatly to narrow and localise it;
and when Christianity can be viewed in a true perspective as a
great esoteric world religion, detached from, and altogether larger
than, its Jewish setting, all the efforts of theologians to Christianize
the Jewish idea of atonement are seen to be wholly unnecessary.
It is not really necessary to suppose that Our Lord intended His
religion to be a medium for the broadcasting of Judaism throughout

39
the world; nor need we think it necessary not only that every
Christian doctrine should be “according to the scriptures” but that
every Jewish conception, however narrow or even gross, must be
incorporated in the Christian Faith “that the Scriptures may be
fulfilled.” Why this tyranny of the written word? Oh, the pity of
it—that the beautiful light of truth, which is the heart of Christi-
anity, should have been for so many centuries, not extinguished, for
that can never be, but hidden and obscured by veils of Jewish theolo-
gies!
It is probably at this point, where the doctrine of the Atonement
comes into the Catholic Faith, where most Liberal Catholics
will find that their views differ most widely from those of Tradi-
tionalist Catholics. But the difference on this point is from one
point of view of less moment than almost any other doctrinal dif-
ference, because on the subject of the Atonement there is no official
Church teaching and therefore no orthodoxy. In the Nicene Creed
it is stated that “for us and for our salvation” the Son of God
“came down from heaven and was incarnate,” but how man's sal-
vation has been effected or from what exactly he needs to be saved,
the Church as such has never defined. Many Churchmen, including
some of its most illustrious saints and scholars, have from age to age
propounded theories of Atonement, but the Church as such has never
committed itself to any particular theory but only to the fact. There-
fore, short of a direct denial of the fact, heresy on such a point is
hardly possible unless it be by implication. The Fall and its Re-
versal are like two poles around the connecting axis of which al-
most all the theology of the Christian Church revolves; all the points
are theologically so closely linked together that a modern Cyril,
with his prototype's keen scent for a heresy, might detect, lurking in
some unusual teaching of Atonement, a heresy on another point
which might seem to be wholly unconnected with it; for instance,
in any view the Atonement is founded on the Incarnation and thus an
unusual teaching on the Atonement, though in itself blameless,
might be attacked as a heresy on the ground that it involved hereti-
cal views on the Incarnation. But, in itself, any theory of the Atone-
ment is ecclesiastically blameless, though it may be, as some theories
actually have been, morally wrong, blasphemous and intellectually
impossible.

40
 The doctrine of the Atonement has a long history. It can be
traced in the Scriptures, Christian and Hebrew, far back almost to
the beginnings of Hebrew thought. It is bound up with the doctrine
of the Fall of Man. It starts from the teaching that by a deliberate
act of disobedience to a divine prohibition Adam and Eve “fell”
from a condition of innocence. As a result of the Fall all the de-
scendants of Adam and Eve, that is to say all human beings, have ever
since been tainted with sin; for it must be remembered that until com-
paratively modern times the human race was thought of as springing
from a single pair of progenitors. The entail, so the orthodox
teaching runs, has been transmitted from the progenitors of the
race through all intervening ages to the present day, so that all hu-
man beings throughout the world's history have been “born in sin,”
estranged from God and subjected to His wrath.
No extended attention need be given here to the material idea
of Hell as a place of punishment for sinners, whether original or
actual, current to this day amongst simple and primitive Christians
in common with simple people of many other religions. This idea is
now practically obsolete amongst the cultured classes in the
Churches, and though it still lingers in a certain type of Roman
Church and in Nonconformist bodies of the Calvinistic variety it is
rarely mentioned in the pulpits of those Churches where preachers
and congregations are educated. And in the best modern theo-
logical works, even of theologians considered to be strictly ortho-
dox, the ideas connected with the terms Hell and Satan are rarely
mentioned.
Nor need we consider such a very extravagant view of the effects
of the Fall as that which at one time found expression in the saying
that “an Aristotle was but the rudiments of an Adam, and Athens
but the rubbish heap of Eden.” Such a view could find no sup-
porters at the present day. The ordinary view is that man fell not
from a condition of perfection, mental and moral, but from a condi-
tion of uprightness and innocence, so that ever since the Fall every
son of man has from birth been biased in the direction of evil.
The attempt of the Jewish religion to provide the remedy for
the disease of sin whereby, by means of sacrifices and “works
of the law,” man might be restored from the fallen to the upright
condition has, according to the Pauline and subsequent traditional
teaching, completely failed. But the Lord Christ, born of a

41
sinless Virgin who was herself “immaculately conceived” so
that by a special arrangement the entail of sin was cut off before the
birth of the Mother of Jesus and no taint of birth-sin ever reached
the Divine Redeemer Himself, did what the Jewish religion
with its sacrifices and its Law of Moses failed to do. It has been
the task of Christian theologians from very early times to try to ex-
plain how exactly the life and the willing death of Christ, combined
with the subsequent work of the Holy Spirit in the Church, has re-
deemed or saved man from the effects of the Fall; how the es-
trangement between man and God, consequent upon man's sin,
original and actual, has been healed, and how reconciliation or
Atonement has been effected. The various theories of Atonement
that have been suggested, together with the ramifications of the sub-
ject, constitute that elaborate and wonderfully intricate theologi-
cal structure commonly known as the Catholic Faith. It will be
sufficient for our purpose to state in barest outline a few of the most
important theories, ancient and modern, from which a general view
of the whole vast structure can be gained, without going at length
into all the theories that have been propounded from Origen and Leo,
through Anselm and Abelard down to Dale, McLeod Campbell,
Moberly and Rashdall. It is interesting to note in passing that the
various theories of the Atonement have been established on their
own merit and have in no case been due, as in the case of the doc-
trine of the Incarnation, to the stress of controversy with heretics.
The theory which held the field for many centuries was that
which taught that Christ by His death had ransomed man from his
bondage to Satan. It is strange that a teaching so crude should
have swayed the minds of men, many of whom were in other re-
spects distinctly enlightened, for so long a time. Yet so it was,
and it was not until the age of Anselm (Twelfth Century) that the
theory of ransom completely broke down. English people may well
be proud of that very distinguished Archbishop of Canterbury,
Anselm, who by his little book Cur Deus Homo? (Why did God
become man?) completely revolutionized thought on the subject
of the Atonement. By this time revolution was long over-due, for
the theory of the Son of God paying a ransom to Satan for the
release of man from the bondage of sin, death and Hell, had been a
scandal to many good Catholics long before Anselm suggested a
more moral theory.

42
 Anselm's theory was that sin needs satisfaction and that by sin
man had incurred a debt, not to Satan, but to divine justice. The
debt was far greater than man could pay, because in any case
all the service that man could possibly give was due to God, so
that there could not be a surplus by which the old debt of mankind
could be paid. Nor would it be sufficient for an Angel to pay it, for
in that case man would be placed under an obligation of service to
a mere creature. God only could pay the debt which man only had
incurred. Therefore God must become man in order to pay the
debt for man. Christ was God incarnate whose death, being far
more than was due from Him, was sufficient to pay the debt; for
that act alone outweighed all the sins of mankind. It was an in-
genious and a reverent theory and marks a distinct advance on
the old theory of ransom.
Then came Abelard, who was partly contemporary with
Anselm, with whose theory that no ransom was needed he agreed;
but he went beyond Anselm in teaching that no satisfaction was
needed either. God, he urged, could have pardoned man without
any satisfaction being made for sin. The reason for the incarna-
tion of the Son of God was the pure love of God for man, for only
by such an incarnation could man be turned from sin and moved
to love God, and so abandon sin. Abelard was rather vehemently
attacked by St. Bernard, but in the end St. Bernard's view did not
differ very considerably from Abelard's. “Perhaps,” said St.
Bernard somewhat wistfully, as though his mind and his pure
spirit had seen “some better thing” which he could not quite re-
call, “perhaps that method were best whereby in a land of for-
getfulness and sloth we might be more powerfully and vividly
reminded of our fall through the so great and so manifold suf-
ferings of Him who repaired it.”
The view which ultimately prevailed and, we may say, still
very widely prevails in Catholic theology, was a combination of the
opinions of Anselm and Abelard.
The most interesting and perhaps the most spiritual of modern
theories is that of Dr. Moberly, an Anglican theologian and
Oxford professor (d. 1903), who in his great work Atonement
and Personality introduced the idea that only a perfect man could
experience perfect penitence, and that without perfect penitence
man's sin was unforgivable. Christ was such a perfect vicarious

43
penitent and by His perfect penitence and perfect obedience man-
kind as a whole, whose manhood (without sin) Christ shared, was
made forgivable. The forgiveness and the reconciliation thus
secured are made applicable to man by man's sacramental union
with the Lord. The theory is interesting and the refined spirit of
the book makes a strong appeal, but the idea of vicarious peni-
tence does not appear to be very strongly supported by the Gos-
pel story. Nevertheless this theory, perhaps more than any other
modern theory, has fashioned recent Anglican theology on this
point. It is, however, always necessary to speak with caution of An-
glican theology, for, in that very comprehensive body, it is never
possible to say what distinctive theology is common to all the
parties in the Ecclesia Anglicana.
It is not, however, unfair to summarize the Catholic
(whether Roman, orthodox Eastern or Anglican) teaching current
at the present day in some such way as this:—
All men, because of their descent from Adam and Eve, or
because of the solidarity of the human race, however de-
scended, are morally diseased. The disease “original sin”
is handed on from generation to generation. Christ was a
sinless man, who, in some way which has never yet been
quite satisfactorily explained, and which, indeed, baffles
thought and defies explanation, by His perfect life and will-
ingness to die paid a debt owing by mankind as a whole ei-
ther to God or, impersonally, to divine justice. The effects
of this sacrifice are reaped by such people as attach them-
selves to Christ by faith, prayer and good works (Protestant)
and especially by a sacramental and very real union with
Him (Catholic). By this sacramental and very real union
man is grafted on to another and sinless stock, and so gets a
new start. In such a state of grace he is regarded by God
as righteous because he is in such a state that, if he will, he
can become so; whereas apart from union with Christ he is
so much diseased by nature that he cannot become righteous.
It is in this sense that the scriptural description of Christ as
“the second Adam” is interpreted.
What man needs to be saved from is sin and its con-
sequence, sorrow. The greatest of all sorrows and the cause
of all lesser sorrows is alienation or estrangement, in some

44
 degree, from God. Man can only be saved by union with
Christ; but when once that union has been effected by bap-
tism, wherein and whereby original sin is counteracted, it
can be constantly renewed and strengthened by commun-
ion; and the stains of actual sin can be constantly effaced by
absolution following confession.
In this way, here in the Church militant on earth and
subsequently in the Church expectant in Purgatory, man
may become actually what, since baptism, he has been po-
tentially, perfectly righteous and, therefore, fit to be ad-
mitted into that condition known as full membership, with
all the rights and privileges of sonship, in God's King-
dom, which is the Church triumphant in heaven.
Such briefly but, it is hoped, not unfairly represents the teaching
of Atonement generally taught and held by Catholics to-day. The old
idea of Hell, as the thing to be saved from, may still linger amongst
the illiterate, but the principle of salvation or atonement is the same
whether it is from Hell, or from sin and sorrow, that man needs to be
saved. Such is the teaching whose inspiration keeps so many Chris-
tians faithful to their altars and to their penitential “duties.”
We need not criticise the details of the idea for, because of its
emphasis on the sacramental union with Christ, it is so very admirable,
however obscure it may be as to how the reconciliation is made or
why any reconciliation is considered necessary. But the scheme as a
whole seems just a little small. It does not explain how the count-
less millions of people who died before the Incarnation and so
died “out of grace” or “in sin” are made partakers of the benefits
secured by Christ. A scheme which only applies to a small minor-
ity of human beings during a very small period of man's tenancy
of this planet, however beautiful it may be, is, after all, not such
very “good news.” Various theories have from time to time
been suggested to remedy this very serious defect in the scheme,
but they are, frankly, too farfetched to be worthy of notice.
In the next two chapters we must consider the very different the-
ory which the Liberal Catholicism of the Liberal Catholic Church
sets over against the traditional Catholic theory.

45
 Chapter Seven

THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT

Liberal

In the preceding chapter an attempt was made to explain the

orthodox or traditional doctrine of the Atonement to Liberal
Catholics. In the present and, to some extent, in the next succeed-
ing chapter an attempt will be made to explain to Traditionalists
what Liberal Catholics think about that fundamental Christian doc-
trine.
In the first place it must be boldly stated that, as in the case of
the doctrine of the Incarnation so in the doctrine of the Atonement,
Liberal Catholics usually reject the Jewish background. They do not
see the need for any reconciliation or atonement in the sense in
which that need is stressed by Catholics and Protestants alike.
Primitive man's despairing cry for salvation, though it may be
found widespread outside the Jewish nation and religion, is par-
ticularly a Jewish idea, and is based on a theory of God and man
which Liberal Catholics in common with an increasing number
of people in the West, as always in the East, find it very difficult
to accept. The Fall, whatever it was, did not produce such dire con-
sequences as Christian theologians, following in the steps of their
Jewish forefathers, have believed. The Fall was at worst, as a mod-
ern scientist has explained, a fall on the upward step of evolution—a
stumbling when man, emerging from a condition of animal inno-
cence and being endowed with a further spiritual outpouring or
breathing from God, first became “a living soul,” a self-
conscious entity. That is all. There is no estrangement from God,
and, therefore, no need of reconciliation; there is no original sin of
such a nature as to fix a great gulf, made all the wider by actual sin,
between God and man; and, therefore, there is no need for a bridge,
there is no need to atone by blood sacrifice for the sins of those
who, however base their sin and foul the shame of their sinning, have
never ceased to be inwardly at one with the Father in Heaven.
Consequently neither in the sinless life nor in the willing death
of Jesus need we look for that obscure and elusive principle
which constitutes the essence of the Atonement. Whatever the

46
purpose of that marvellous life and tragic death, it was not to “make
atonement” according to the Jewish scriptures. There is no wonder
that even the most learned of theologians of all the ages have failed
to discover that principle. It is not there, so it cannot be discov-
ered. And yet there is a great truth in the doctrine of Atonement.
It has often been pointed out, and with great truth, that every
heresy represents some fragment of neglected truth. It is equally
true that there is in every orthodoxy, however obsolescent or obso-
lete, some great truth which has kept the teaching alive. In the Jew-
ish idea of God, for instance, whether it be the primitive idea of
the tribal deity or the later and nobler conception taught by the
prophets, that which is central to the idea is the aloofness of Jeho-
vah—“coldly sublime, intolerably just.” This idea, which is still so
widely diffused as an orthodox teaching in the Christian Churches
that it cannot be described as either obsolete or obsolescent, but is,
nevertheless, losing its hold in the Churches and is generally re-
jected by Liberals, has within it a very great truth. It is that God,
though incarnate in all mankind and consequently not aloof or de-
tached from any man, does, nevertheless, utterly transcend that
fragment of His being which represents, and which is, His crea-
tive activity; He ensouls universes and sustains them in being. So
utterly transcendent is He that those fragments of Himself, which
are ourselves, will as they evolve find that He ever recedes; and
though those fragments of God, who share His being, may and will
eventually become one with Him outwardly and self-
consciously, as they ever are inwardly and subconsciously, they
will never reach Him; they will “enter the light but will never
touch the Flame.” That probably was the great truth for which the
Jewish religion stood, however imperfectly the Jews of Our Lord's
day and before could grasp it.
And behind the Christian-Jewish idea of Atonement there is
also a profoundly important truth. It is the truth of the larger In-
carnation; the truth that before all ages God sent forth from Him-
self that part or fragment of Himself which is described as His Son,
alone-begotten, to ensoul matter and fashion it into forms or things
when it had been already “quickened” or made living by the Holy
Ghost the Life-Giver. The matter at every grade, which must
be conceived of as having itself in some unimaginable way come
forth from God, was at first and before the outpouring of the Holy

47
breath or spirit, lifeless and barren or virgin. Then came the Ho-
ly Ghost brooding over this sea (mare) of virgin matter; “the spirit
of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Thus matter when
impregnated by Spirit became living matter but still formless
matter; “the earth was without form and void.” Then came the
Logos or Son of God, the Christos-principle, involving Himself in
this sea of living matter, multiplying and differentiating in His de-
scent, and arranging the live matter into living forms, visible and
invisible. He it is Who, in all living forms from the highest to the
lowest, is the Son of God, incarnate of the union of the Holy Ghost
and the virgin matter; but especially in man and in super-man, for
when the human stage is reached there is still a third outpouring
from the Father, another breathing from God, by virtue of which
man becomes a living soul in the image of God, as distinct from sub-
human beings which are more like ingredients in a mixture than
living persons or souls. It is thus the Second Person in the
Blessed Trinity, God the Son, “by Whom all things were made;”
He, too, is the indwelling Light Whose wisdom “mightily and
sweetly ordereth all things;” He the Sustainer, by Whose strength all
creation is upheld; He, too, the divine Beauty which, veiled or
unveiled, shines through the whole universe. This incarnation
of God the Son and this becoming man is the age-long sacrifice of
the Son of God, described in the Apocalypse as “the lamb slain from
the foundation of the world.” This is the inner meaning of the cru-
cifixion story—the Son of God bound and fettered to a cross of
matter; God slain in every form. It is, too, to the incarnation of
the Son of God in this larger sense, and not to any nescience in
Jesus Christ that we must look for the true meaning of the striking
passage in Philippians ii. 6, where it is stated that “being in the
form of God He did not think it a prize to be grasped to be equal
with God, but emptied (έκένωσε) Himself, taking the form of a
servant, being made in the likeness of men.” Surely this is the
meaning of this famous passage and, if so, the solution of the per-
plexing kenosis problem.
In this fact also is to be found the true interpretation of the Res-
urrection and Ascension dramas. For as it is true that in all crea-
tive evolution up to regenerate man the Son of God is imprisoned,
crucified, dead and buried, so it is equally true that in such a One
as the Lord Christ and in all who, following Him, have subdued the

48
flesh to the spirit, the lower to the higher: in all who have rolled
away the encumbrance of the lower, material, self-seeking self and
emerged from the tomb and from the death of sin and selfishness to
the new life of transcendent righteousness and self-consciousness
of divinity, and so of oneness with the Father and with all living
things—in the Lord pre-eminently, and in all other such—the Son of
God has “risen from the dead” and “ascended into heaven.”
The Son of God, having thus truly risen and ascended in the Lord
Christ, fittingly says through the lips of that perfect manifestation
of Himself, “I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to
do. And now, O Father, glorify me with Thine own self, with the
glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” In such a one as
the Lord Christ the incarnating Son has come to His own and
now knows Himself as one with the Father and with all that
lives. He has led captive the matter which at an earlier stage kept
the indwelling spirit in captivity. Matter in His case is now the
slave of spirit, obedient to the will of spirit, whereas matter at
lower stages of evolution is the tyrant which sways the ensouling
spirit and compels spirit to obey its least behest. And what the Son
of God has achieved in the Lord, He will also achieve, in the long
run, in every child of God.
That is the age-long sacrifice by which every man is not only
being “saved” but by virtue of which he has his very existence. It is
not only “for us men and for our salvation,” but for us men and
for our evolution that the Son of God “came down from heaven
and was made man.” The evolution of man is a fact; it is still
proceeding. The salvation of man is not yet a fact in every life,
but it is to be a fact in ourselves as in Our Lord, and all the sooner in
ourselves because of His achievement and because of His mighty aid
whereby He helps us to evolve to the great height which He Himself
has reached. It is to be a fact; every son of man shall in his time
come to Oneness with the Father, because every man is indwelt by,
and is a fragment of, the Christ-spirit —the Son of God incarnate in
the universe. In this sense the sacrifice is universal; it is for all, not
limited to just a few. It is commensurate with the human race; and
each human being, to say nothing at this point of other beings, will
evolve, life after life, in this and in other worlds, till the Christ-spirit
within is triumphant and ascends “in the twinkling of an eye” to
the glory which it had with the Father before the world was. And

49
the sacrifice is also age-long, not “once for all” on Calvary. It
lasts and will last throughout all ages until all that is material and
corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and all that is mortal
shall have put on immortality, and the death of sin shall have been
completely swallowed up in the victory of spirit.
Those who will take the trouble to read again the New Testa-
ment with this key will soon realize how many hitherto dark and
hidden places are opened out and illumined. This teaching of spiri-
tual evolution, so mystical and, by its truth, its breadth and its
beauty, so compelling, has rarely been more exquisitely expressed
than in those words of the Liberal Catholic liturgy which, though
not used at every Eucharist, are embedded in the very heart of
the Eucharistic service—“we lift our hearts in adoration to Thee,
O God the Son, consubstantial, co-eternal with the Father, who,
abiding unchangeable within Thyself, didst nevertheless in the
mystery of Thy boundless love and Thine eternal sacrifice breathe
forth Thine own divine life into Thy universe, and thus didst offer
Thyself as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, dying
in very truth that we might live….. Thou, O most dear and holy
Lord, hast in Thine ineffable wisdom deigned to ordain for us this
Blessed Sacrament of Thy love that in it we may not only com-
memorate in symbol that Thine eternal oblation, but verily take
part in it and perpetuate thereby, within the limitations of time and
space which veil our earthly eyes from the excess of Thy glory, the
enduring sacrifice by which the world is nourished and sus-
tained.”
In this teaching it matters not whether the field of evolution is
the whole Cosmos, with all its universes that are and that have
been, or just a single system within the universe; the principle and
the process in either case are the same.
To most Liberal Catholics the sacrificial death of God the Son,
or the Atoning Sacrifice, means just that. The Son of God dies
that we may live. Nothing more than that, because surely be-
yond or in addition to that nothing can be needed. Those who hold
such a view may surely be pardoned for preferring it to the Jewish
ideas of the wrath of God, estrangement, blood-sacrifice and
hardly-won atonement. Yet, strangely, the idea of the larger Incar-
nation, which is not by any means unknown to the Christian mystics
of all ages, is not considered sufficient in itself by the Catholic

50
Church. Even that teaching, so sublime and, in itself, so suffi-
cient, has to be made to fit the Jewish teaching. The greater has to
be subordinated to the less, the larger and broader idea to the smaller
and narrower; the age-long spiritual process has to be com-
pressed within the local and temporal “historical acts”—that the
scriptures may be fulfilled. Thus the inner teaching is degraded and
weakened though never lost, and those who look for no other
atonement than this, and plead no other sacrifice than this, are
often in the eyes of the Churches, regarded not merely as here-
tics, but as non-Christian.
What, on this explanation, it is often asked, becomes of the great
miracles of the Christian faith? What of the Virgin Birth and the
Empty Tomb? What of the “historical facts” which are held by
so many Christian teachers to be of fundamental importance?
Nothing becomes of them. They remain as they were, and are,
and always must be—unaltered. If they are facts they cannot be
altered; no disbelief in them can undo or alter them. And if they
are not facts no amount of belief in them can make them facts. It is
useless to discuss them as though they were alterable. But no
great religion can be built on the foundation of outer acts and his-
torical facts; or, changing the metaphor, can grow downwards from
the flower to the roots, or from the material to the spiritual plane.
Frankly, it is probable that many Liberals, Catholic as well as
Protestant, would dare to hope that the Virgin-birth of Christ was not
a historical fact. Reverence for Our Lord, Who is a very real Being,
Who really did incarnate in Palestine and does still watch over and
guide His sheep of the Christian and of every other fold, would con-
strain them to believe that His birth, however it may have been,
was otherwise than as the Traditionalists affirm, such a birth
would not have been congruous. Apart from the stigma of ille-
gitimacy, which could be attached to it, it bears too strong a resem-
blance to the legendary births of pagan demigods to be a fitting
mode of entry into this world for one so real as the Lord Christ.
But miracles such as the Virgin Birth and the Empty Tomb are,
in the view of Liberals, of no doctrinal value. A great religion must
not depend for its credentials on miraculous happenings, however
historical. In any case they prove nothing. If they happened, it
does not matter; and if they did not happen, it makes no differ-
ence. To construct spiritual doctrines on physical facts is surely

51
an inverted arrangement; it is, too, a precarious process, for the
facts may turn out not to have happened. That is the weak point,
and a very weak point, in that great structure commonly known as
the Catholic Faith. In the Liberalist view, on the other hand, the
whole scheme grows not out of “historical facts” of doubtful his-
toricity, but out of spiritual processes which, so long as man and uni-
verses exist, can never cease to happen.
That is the difference, yet Liberal Catholics are quite at one with
Traditional Catholics in their devotion both to the Lord Himself and
to the great Saint known as the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Mother
of Jesus is none the less gracious and adorable for that Her Son
was normally born, if that was the method of His birth. Such,
too, is the honour which many Liberals pay to Her that they can
and do, in perfect accord with their Traditionalist brethren, ac-
claim Her as Queen of Heaven.
And members of the Liberal Catholic Church even exceed the
Traditionalist Catholics, if that is possible, in their devotion to the
Lord really present in the Sacrament of His Love. Transubstantia-
tion is not so very far from the Liberals' conception of the truth
on this point. There is, in this belief, a distinct transubstantiation or
change of substance, though not of accidents. This discredited
philosophy is probably true. Christ is very really present in the
consecrated and transubstantiated elements. The Presence is not
dependent upon the faith of the recipient, but is an objective Pres-
ence ex opere operato dependent upon the will of the Lord and
vouchsafed whenever the Mass is celebrated by a truly ordained
priest or bishop using the appropriate words and signs of power.
But the “Body and Blood” into which the substances of bread and
wine are changed are not quite the body and blood in the rather
gross sense in which many Catholics, cultured as well as illiterate,
seem to view it. Yet they do in very deed undergo a change and
become vehicles of the Lord; the Bread and Wine after consecra-
tion are as truly a vehicle for the Lord now, as the body of Jesus was
His vehicle in Palatine two thousand years ago.
Rightly do Catholics, Liberal as well as Traditional, pay hom-
age and adoration to the Lord Christ Who showeth Himself daily
“upon a thousand altars” and yet is “one and indivisible.” There is
nothing miraculous in this if by “miraculous” is understood
something contra naturam. It is, like all the wonders of all the

52
sacraments, in accordance with law, but with such laws as are not
generally understood and are not recognized, because not yet “sci-
entifically” proved, by any but occult scientists. Starting from differ-
ent premises, Liberals of the Liberal Catholic Church and Tradi-
tionalists of other Catholic Churches arrive at the same conclusion
about the Eucharist by different but equally logical syllogisms.
And the atoning effect of Eucharistic grace on faithful com-
municants is also scientific and in accordance with law. It is cer-
tainly wonderful but not miraculous. It is mystical, but, not unsci-
entific. In order to become “perfect as the Father in heaven is per-
fect” man must first evolve until he has become sufficiently refined
and spiritual to reproduce to some extent, and then gradually to an
ever greater extent, the rapid vibrations of the Lord Christ. Then,
when he has evolved to such an extent that he can retain the vibra-
tions of the Lord, that is to say has become one with Him, he will
find that he is becoming one with the Father. Those momentary ex-
periences of ecstasy or bliss that come to him from time to time
when he makes a good communion will be permanent when he be-
comes permanently one with the Lord. Then he, too, ever “breath-
ing forth the fragrance of a holy life,” will become more and more
effectually a saviour of his fellows; and still he will grow until he
becomes a saviour of men to the fullest possible extent. No limit
can be set to his becoming, but it depends upon himself whether
he will be content to wait upon the slow and tedious process of evo-
lution, or whether he will take his evolution into his own hands
and grow rapidly from sinner to saint, and from saint to saviour;
from self-conscious man to self-conscious man, and from self-
conscious man to super-man.
The height to which man may rise is by ordinary men uni-
maginable, but the rising process is all a matter of spiritual evolution,
and spiritual evolution is all a matter of vibrations. It is very scien-
tific. To reach the Christ level will in many cases take ages and in
all cases it must involve effort; there is no substitution; nothing is,
or will be, done for us which we can do and ought to do for our-
selves. But we Catholic Christians can be, and are, enormously
helped, as the followers of other Faiths are also helped in their own
special ways, by the priceless privilege of being allowed to come
into real and close contact with Our Lord in the Sacraments. The real
and regular communicant is being gradually tuned to the pitch of

53
his Lord; he is, like the string of a musical instrument, being gradu-
ally tightened until he can sound forth perfectly the Lord's note.
That, in the Liberal Catholic view, is the purpose of the sacra-
ments. In sharp contradistinction to the views of many Modernists
and Liberal Churchmen who are not Catholics, Liberal Catholics
of the Liberal Catholic Church proclaim their belief in the Real
Presence. In it they see nothing superstitious or merely mediae-
val. They see rather a profound and fundamental truth without
which, in their view, the Christian religion would be hardly worth
defending or perpetuating. It is the extension into every age of
the Atoning work of Christ.
It is the imperishable glory of the Roman Catholic Church that
through all its vicissitudes and in spite of all the wrongs that it has
inflicted and suffered, it has never for a moment lost its hold of this
great truth. Always it has proclaimed the Real Presence of the
Lord in the Eucharist. And, though in so many doctrines the Lib-
erals differ so widely from the Traditionalists, they are at one with
them in their devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. With them they
believe that the Lord is there present; they believe it because they
can sense it and because they can see the effects of it in the lives and
characters of so many Catholic (Roman, Anglican or Eastern) com-
municants. The Christian “grace of graciousness” is unmistakable
though indefinable; it is something sui generis; where you get a pro-
found belief in the Real Presence, there, and rarely elsewhere, you
get this special quality; other qualities may be, and certainly are,
found elsewhere; but there is something exclusively Catholic in
that very beautiful “grace of graciousness” which, when seen, is
evidence to those who need evidence of the reality of the divine
Presence in the Mass. But it is not the only evidence. The Real
Presence can be, and has been explained in scientific terms,10 and it
may well be that that scientific explanation, not only of the Eucha-
ristic Presence but of the functions and services of Angels and of
much else in the mysteries of the Catholic religion, will prove in
years to come to have been the special and distinctive contribution
of Liberal Catholicism to the great treasure house of the Catholic
religion; so great and so important a contribution that it may save
the Church for future generations, guiding it safely as it passes

10
The Rt. Rev. C. W. Leadbeater, The Science of the Sacraments.

54
through the perilous transition stage from the dying age of faith to
the living age of Scientia.

55
 Chapter Eight

SIN: ITS CAUSE AND ITS CURE

It has been explained in a previous chapter that it is commonly

believed throughout Christendom, whether in Catholic
Churches or in Protestant and Nonconformist denominations,
that the whole human race is sin-stained. The whole human stock
is diseased and ipso facto every human being is tainted from birth.
That is the doctrine of original sin. In the words of the Church
of England catechism every child is “by nature born in sin” and
the child “of wrath.” Not a few of the more intellectual Chris-
tian teachers have now discarded the “Fall” explanation of the sin
phenomenon; but the human race is still regarded as diseased and,
consequently, in need of healing, by practically all the orthodox.
The whole of Catholic theology is based on the assumption or
dogma that mankind as a whole is a diseased race.
In view of the quite obvious fact of sin, and in default of a better
explanation, this is a reasonable theory; it is also logical; it
hangs together and the logic is correct; but are the premises true?
May there not be some other, and better, theory to account for the sin
phenomenon?
Let us examine the Catholic teaching once more and in greater
detail than when the doctrine of atonement was under examination,
for sin is certainly an important factor in life and in religion, and
cannot be disregarded or lightly regarded by any religious body,
new or old.
Over against the sin-diseased human stock is placed the
Catholic Church which, by virtue of its oneness with the sinless
Lord, is not diseased. The Church is the mystical Body of Christ
and, as such, it is sometimes described as the extension of the
Incarnation. Christ is the Head, the Church is the Body, and incor-
poration into the Church by baptism involves and carries with it the
counteraction of the disease and taint of birth sin. The baptized
person is a child “of grace.” Baptism is thus a regeneration or
new birth into a new stock, and the child, born naturally in sin, is
re-born baptismally and becomes the “child of grace.” A new
start in the story of man is made by the Christian Church, which

56
can be put over against the old start made by Adam and Eve; and a
life in Christ, that is a life lived in conscious fellowship and com-
munion with the new Body, the Church, whose Head is Christ, will
result here and hereafter in such progress being made that the human
perfection, originally designed, will at length be reached.
A very strong objection, if not the main objection, to this theory
is that the cure is not commensurate with the disease. The cure to
be really adequate and to be worthy of God, if, as is assumed,
mankind is diseased, must be co-extensive in its application
with the human race. The Christian Church, at most, includes
but an inconsiderable fragment of the race; if, as is usually believed
in Western countries, each human being has but one incarnation on
earth, the Christian Church, compared with all the human beings
that have been in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of years
of the existence of a human race on the planet Earth, is an almost
negligible body; and if the Christian Church is to be limited, as the
Roman Catholic Church would limit it, to that portion which owes
allegiance to the Pope, the cure becomes ludicrously inadequate.
The Church, thus limited, compared with the whole human race,
which has been and that is, is like a handful of sand taken from the
sea-shore. The cure breaks down at that point, to say nothing of
other weaknesses. If a cure is needed it must be some larger cure
than that, but it is as well to see if there is not some other expla-
nation of the “sin” phenomenon before another cure is sought.
The evolutionary theory of the cause and the cure certainly fits
the lock, that is to say it is equal in its extent to the phenomenon
itself. Briefly, it is this. In the long, long process of evolution
from the One to the One, units of consciousness, which are the
differentiated fragments11 of the Son of God incarnate in the uni-
verse, are continually descending deeper and deeper into matter.
These units are for long held captive by the unaccustomed material
environment in which they find themselves. They are “so fast in
prison that they cannot get forth.” But they have come in order to
conquer the imprisoning matter and eventually they will do so;

11
Fragments. In using this term for want of a better, it is not forgotten that God
is indivisible and cannot, strictly speaking, be thought of as broken into frag-
ments. It is realised that God is wholly present within or behind each centre of
consciousness. Totus in omnibus seems the best formula to express this truth.

57
they, like the Lord before them, will in the long run lead captivity
captive. But in the early stages of their struggle to adapt matter
to spiritual ends, they become by the struggle more and more
sharply individualized; they become less and less ingredients in a
mixture, and more and more persons; and, blinded and confused by
the matter in which they are clothed, they follow the law of material
evolution which is—each for himself. This long process contin-
ues, after the stage of individualization as human beings has been
reached, through hundreds of incarnations or periods of activity in
the flesh, with periods of rest, increasing in length as evolution pro-
ceeds, in between. These units of consciousness, it must be under-
stood, are, in the incarnate condition which is the condition of em-
bodied human beings, but fragments of fragments of the true self
which is the spirit. The differentiated spirit, which exists in Christ
in God, is the subject of evolution. Ultimately it is he who is
evolving through all the ages. He is a fragment of the Son of
God, of the Christ-Spirit incarnate in all the worlds. At a very
early stage in the process he projects from himself a portion of himself
into matter lower and denser than that which is his own habitat. This
projection or fragment of spirit is the human soul or reincarnating
ego who exists “age-long in the heavenly places;” it is he who at
intervals projects from himself a portion of himself to the physical
material world. This is the process of reincarnation. This frag-
ment of soul is the human being as we know him here on this
earth. He bears the same relation to soul as soul bears to spirit.
The larger soul or ego from which the embodied soul proceeds is
the “unconscious self” or “super-consciousness” of modern
psychology. After each incarnation the soul is enlarged by the
contribution which the returning fragment of himself brings with
him. When by repeated incarnations he has completely con-
quered matter he will cease to incarnate and will himself be with-
drawn into the spirit whence he came. Then super-human evolu-
tion begins. That is the point known in Christianity as Salvation.
Each fragment of soul may be termed the lower self or lower per-
sonality as opposed to the higher self which is, relatively to the
lower personality, the soul; though, relatively to the soul, the higher
self and highest self is the human spirit—the differentiated frag-
ment of the Son of God.
Gradually this spirit within, which is the real self of every

58
one, asserts his power over his material clothing and surroundings;
he comes to his own and begins, at first dimly and then more and
more clearly, to recognize his oneness with other spirits similarly
clothed in material envelopes. Love comes simultaneously with
recognition or, perhaps, love is mutual recognition; and where
there is love, and increasingly as love deepens its hold and
enlarges its circles, the old material self-seeking method of devel-
opment gives place to self-sacrifice—the method of spiritual
growth. Then, much later, there comes the recognition and con-
sciousness of oneness with those ahead on this long path of evolu-
tion, with the superhuman saints and Holy Ones, with the Saviour
of the world, and so with the source of all spiritual being, with the
Father, with God. Eventually the incarnate spirit triumphs com-
pletely over the imprisoning, entombing matter; he draws the soul,
filled full, back into himself; he leads captivity captive; he has
gained perfect control over matter and does what he wills with it,
for he has made it completely subservient to his will; and in the
process he himself has become clearly defined as an individual, and
godlike; he does the divine will “on earth as in heaven” and,
though a distinct being, yet he is completely one with other beings;
he lives now for ever and in the Eternal. He is now an Elder
Brother.
In the long, long process of involution and evolution there comes
sin. Sin12 is opposition, voluntary or involuntary, blind or delib-
erate, to the will and the plan of God which is evolution. This
opposition can conceivably, and, in certain cases, does actually
result in deliberate defiance of the purpose of God and of the law by
which God has designed that that purpose shall be effected. Hence
we get malignity which, as the Traditionalists rightly point out, is
certainly something more than, and different from, imperfection.
All sin, even the sin which is devilish in its malignity, is ulti-
mately due to, and caused by, the necessity of becoming definitely
individualized, distinct from mankind in the mass and more than an
ingredient in the human mixture. The individualizing process can

12
Editor’s note: Current interpretations of Sin in more liberal, particularly
Anglican and the so called “lower” church circles tend to revolve around the
notion of “missing the mark” or being “imperfect,” as opposed to a more de-
liberate action.

59
be overdone, and when and where it is overdone, and wrongly done,
there ensues “envy, hatred, malice” and all that brood of malig-
nant uncharitablenesses which has its roots in pride. Pride is over-
done individualization. The extreme cases in which defiance of
the will and of the purpose of God is deliberate, the sin against the
Holy Ghost, are happily very rare; but even in such extreme
cases the spirit within remains whole. The spirit dwells for
ever serene in the highest heaven where no evil can touch it; it is
only that portion of spirit which has descended to the soul level
and thence into incarnation that is, or can be, affected by evil. In
very extreme cases the fragment of soul, which is the human be-
ing, may become so bad that the parent soul, unable to control it, is
under the necessity of detaching it from himself. The fragment,
thus detached from its source of life, is a lost soul or, more strictly
speaking, a lost fragment of soul, and will eventually, when the
detached life-principle within it is exhausted, cease to exist. Thus
there may be a lost fragment of soul but never an eternally pun-
ished soul; and, in this way, a human spirit may suffer loss; he may
suffer the loss of a fragment of a fragment of himself eternally,
but the whole human spirit, which is the true self and which is di-
vine, can never be lost. In less extreme cases, however, the soul
within will bring back to correspondence with himself the frag-
ment of himself, the lower personality, which has "gone wrong."
He will bring it back to correspondence with himself and so
with God eventually; for the spirit within the soul is God and ab-
ides as a distinct spirit eternally in the Son of God; he is in Christ
in God; and his will is always God's will; there is, and there can
be, no conflict between the divine will and the human spirit's will:
they will alike; the human spirit is the divine will in operation.
Such conflict as there is and as we all experience frequently is be-
tween the will of that fragment of spirit, which has descended
through soul into matter and which in Christian terminology is de-
scribed as "the human soul," and the parent spirit from which it has
been put forth. That is the age-long conflict; it is the conflict be-
tween the higher and the lower self. In the course of ages the in-
carnate soul which, in the blindness of the incarnate condition, has
departed from exact correspondence with the will of the parent spi-
rit, and so of God, the soul that has sinned, will be brought back to
true correspondence ; but not without pain and in some cases only

60
after almost infinite delay. The pain, in every case being exactly
commensurate with the transgression of law, is at once a perfectly
just corrector and a perfectly just corrective leading the erring soul
to correspondence with the Christ-spirit within. But this is an
anticipation. The cause of sin must be more carefully examined
before we can satisfactorily consider its cure.
Involution into matter is, on this theory, the cause of sin. This
does not mean, as some of the Gnostics and Manichaeans taught,
that matter is essentially evil. It is not. Far from being evil matter
is God's handiwork and, like all else that God has made, it is “very
good.” But the law which governs the evolution of matter is exactly
opposite to the law which governs the evolution of spirit. The preser-
vation and reproduction of material forms depends upon acquisi-
tion; the growth and evolution of spirit upon sacrifice. These are
“contrary one to the other,” but each is right and very good in its
own sphere. Material forms could not grow by the law which gov-
erns spiritual growth, nor can spirit evolve under the material law; if
matter sacrifices, it suffers loss; and if spirit “seeks its own” it
ceases to evolve. In that contradiction and opposition of laws of
evolution, as between the material and the spiritual, is to be found the
cause and the whole cause of the confusion known as sin. Spirits
blinded by matter seek to evolve according to the law of material
evolution. Such is sin. It is well worth while reading and re-
reading Romans vii. and viii. with this key.
It was not unforeseen, nor is it a matter for hysterical alarm. Noth-
ing has gone wrong with the plan. It is in perfectly safe hands. But
until spirit, in the long course of involution into matter and evolu-
tion out of it, comes to its own, it is blinded in greater or less de-
gree by its coating of matter and follows the law which governs the
evolution of matter, the law of acquisition—each for himself. That
is sin. It is “Another law in my members warring against the law of
my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in
my members.” Sin, on this theory, is rather a matter for aban-
donment than for forgiveness. It has to be transcended and out-
grown sometime, and the sooner the better. Its punishment is
within itself.
Those are two theories, Catholic and evolutionary, of the
cause; let us now examine the two theories of the cure.
The traditional Catholic teaching of the cure of sin is that it

61
can be forgiven upon true penitence and after confession. The for-
giveness has been hardly won by Christ's death and is applied to in-
dividuals through the sacraments. On the evolutionary theory
penitence, contrition, confession, absolution and reparation may
have their place, but they should be viewed against the larger
background of evolution, as aids to evolution and not as ends in
themselves. It is a mistake to suppose that God is greatly upset by
man's sin and needs to be propitiated. Sin is almost inevitable in the
process of involution. The word “sin” having by long association
become identified with the idea of defiance and guilty disobedience
of law needs to be replaced by a new term which will fit the evo-
lutionary theory. The word needed lies somewhere between
imperfection and crime; it should connote something stronger than
mistake, but not so strong as the guilt connoted by the word
“sin.” The Greek word άµάρτηµα or άµαρτία which means
“missing the mark,” would be more satisfactory than sin if a single
English word could be found exactly to represent it. God is not
made angry by sin, nor is He hurt, nor offended. He knows what is
happening and His plan is not failing, nor can it be finally frus-
trated by sin. There is no need therefore to over-emphasize the
guilt of sin or to stress the need of man's self-humiliation.
At this point it is necessary to consider at some length the ques-
tion of the Sacrament of Penance, which holds so very important a
place in this connection in the Catholic scheme. To the Traditional-
ist Catholic penance or individual confession and absolution is
the application to the individual of the fruits of the Atonement
won for mankind by Christ's death upon the cross. It is obvious
from what has already been said that Liberals are not likely to
share this view. Still less are they likely to regard with any other
feelings than those of abhorrence all the accessories of the Sac-
rament of Penance so frequently found in Catholic Churches.
Those Liberals who have ever been to confession in one or other of
the older branches of the Catholic Church, though no doubt grateful
for the kindness of the priests and for their obvious desire to help,
must have felt that the atmosphere of the confessional and the atti-
tude of the priests towards sin were quite out of tune with reality.
Especially they must have felt that the Catholic classifications and
categories of sin were altogether misleading, determined, as they
seem to be, rather by national conventions and temporal codes of

62
expediency than by eternal standards of right and wrong. Their
categories strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. The prevailing
idea of the confessional is of a very much grieved and dis-
tinctly anthropo-passionate deity, whose grief caused by our sin
is such that only by the awful death of Christ upon the cross, re-
garded as in some way a complete fulfilment of all the Hebraic
blood-sacrifices, and as “the one true, pure immortal sacrifice”
for sin, could that grief be allayed and the penitent's guilt re-
moved. To stimulate a frame of mind in tune with this idea the
Catholics, especially of the Roman Catholic Church, where the
practice is universal, have recourse to pictures and figures of the
Lord hanging, with lacerated body and tortured features, from
the cross; or, even worse, with pierced and bleeding heart exposed
to view these simulacra, so freely scattered in Catholic churches,
and so frequently and publicly exposed to view in Catholic shops,
are in themselves, by their very ugliness, disfiguring to what are
otherwise sometimes beautiful buildings; but what is worse is
that, by the ideas they suggest, they are dishonouring to God and
degrading alike to those who direct the souls of others and to those
who are directed into that way; and, worst of all, they are exceed-
ingly insulting and offensive to the Lord Himself. Members of the
Liberal Catholic Church will undoubtedly have the sympathy of
many reverent-minded people outside all the Churches when they
express their disapproval of such grotesque images and pictures,
and boldly declare that they cannot even remotely resemble the fea-
tures and appearance of the Lord as He really is. Such aids to
penitence and devotion, together with the pitiful appeals for
mercy so frequently occurring in the liturgies of all the Churches,
whether Catholic or Protestant, are mediaeval superstitions, relics of
the worst type of Jehovah worship, dishonouring to God and de-
grading to man. Of all these the Liberal Catholic Church has
made a clean sweep: “We go by, and lo, they are gone; we seek
them, but their place can nowhere be found.”
Frankly, the God of the orthodox confessional is quite out of
date: we of the present day “have not so learned Christ:” the God of
the confessional is emphatically not the Father revealed by Our
Lord, nor is the orthodox Catholic conception of Our Lord's part
in the atoning transaction worthy of intelligent and reverent human
beings. Nevertheless the Sacrament of Penance has its place in the

63
Christian scheme as Liberal Catholics conceive it. It is a force pro-
ceeding from the Lord Himself, by means of which those spiritual
entanglements with matter which are of such frequent occurrence
at our stage of evolution are straightened out, and mental and emo-
tional disturbances calmed. It is equally effectual whether ap-
plied individually after private and personal confession, or appropri-
ated by each individual when confession and absolution occur in
the public service of the Church. On the whole the tendency in
the Liberal Catholic Church is to discourage private confession
and absolution except in special cases. The private application of
the grace of absolution is not in the Liberal Catholic Church a mat-
ter of obligation for “a state of grace.” To this extent, which is a
very considerable extent, the Liberal Catholic Church differs from
the practice and teaching of the Roman and Anglo-Catholic
Churches.
What then, to return to the former question, is the true cure of
sin? Evolution is its cure, as involution is its cause. As soon as
the incongruity of a spiritual being living according to the law and
method of material evolution is seen and appreciated as incongruous
by the unit of consciousness concerned, the turning point is
reached. That is the moment of conversion, and from that moment
the incarnate spirit sets himself to live “no longer after the law of a
carnal commandment, but by the power of an endless life;” he be-
gins to save the soul by losing and giving it. From that moment
onwards, through as many incarnations as it takes to reach human
perfection, the evolving spirit shows forth increasingly in incarnate
conditions the life of the spirit, which is the life of love and self-
sacrifice.
Up to this point his involution consisted in the continual appro-
priation of matter to satisfy the desires of the incarnate self; from
this point his evolution consists in the continual renunciation of the
material things by the incarnate self. The point of conversion or
turning marks the time when he ceases to be of the world worldly,
and becomes increasingly apart from the world and other-
worldly. He gradually disentangles himself from sin and its ef-
fects.

64
 Chapter Nine
CONVERSION AND AFTER

Shorn of its Salvation Army associations, Conversion is a

very beautiful idea, and almost the most important word in the
Christian language. It is important because it denotes a stage in
human evolution than which perhaps only the stage denoted by
the word Salvation or, in the terminology of evolutionary mysti-
cism, Initiation, is more important. Never since the evolving life-
centre emerged, ages before, from the sub-human kingdom and,
met at the threshold of humanity by a great downpouring of spiri-
tual force from the Father in Heaven, became a living soul, has an
event of such transcendent significance as Conversion occurred.
Rightly have evangelicals, both Catholic and Protestant, insisted
on the reality and on the importance of Conversion.
Conversion marks the turning-point in the age-long career of a
soul or reincarnating ego. For ages the human soul has been im-
mersed in gloom; so deeply immersed has he been that in the in-
carnate condition he has forgotten the very existence of light, and
does not know that there is anywhere anything better than gloom;
consequently he has not consciously sought the light. Then he
peeps above the surface of the sea of matter and sees a world of
spiritual life, and knows that that is his true home. At last the light
dawns; he sees at first only faint glimmerings of it, but it is light;
the soul within awakes; he knows now that he is a spirit, and not,
as he has for so long thought without thinking, a mass of disinte-
grating matter. Up to this stage he has lived his lives and gone his
way carelessly, swayed by matter, life after life, for hundreds of
lives. Until Conversion he has lived in and for the body and the sat-
isfaction of its senses; in and of the world and the enjoyment of its
pleasures; harmless, perhaps, but thoughtless, careless, mostly
selfish and a little gross. After Conversion slowly and gradually
the soul makes his presence felt, and injects more and more of him-
self into the lower personality. The man becomes gradually more
refined and more responsive to spiritual impulses.
Then there comes the complete awakening of the soul. The
soul within becomes wide awake. “Sudden in a moment” or

65
very gradually, but very distinctly, there dawns in his waking con-
sciousness the light; “faintly and dimly, hidden and afar,” he is
aware of it in the body; the consciousness of the lower personality
has linked up momentarily with the consciousness of the soul, and,
“in the twinkling of an eye” perhaps, he has become aware of the
life of spirit and of his true home in the heavenly places. He will
lose the vision, but he has seen it and can never again, in that or
in any succeeding life, forget. It will not forever after be vividly pre-
sent in his lower or brain consciousness, but henceforth that con-
sciousness will be suffused with light. His face is now set defi-
nitely homewards. Less and less does he care for the world and
the flesh; the pleasures of life and the joys of riches cease to please,
though for many lives to come these will hold him back. More and
more is he responsive to heavenly things; music or art, poetry or
philosophy, religion or altruistic service, scientific research or
handicraft, will hold his interest increasingly; gradually he becomes
bigger, better, purer, stronger.
So he evolves, and life after life the battle rages within. The
momentum of the old downward, earthward, fleshward tendency is,
for long after the turn has been made, an imperious force; the mo-
mentum of that tendency cannot be checked, held up and reversed
suddenly or even in a single life; the effect of all the lives that
have been lived in and for the body, in and of the world, and for
and to the lesser self, cannot be worked out in a short time. He must
reap what he has sown, and whilst he reaps he still sows the old bad
seed together with the good seed that he has learned since Con-
version to draw from within. It is at this stage, so bitter and so
sweet, the stage between Conversion and Salvation, that the ex-
perience so vividly described in the Pauline epistles is most keenly
felt: “The flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the
flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye do not
the things that ye would.” “The good that I would I do not, but the
evil that I would not that I do.” “I delight in the law of God after
the inward man, but I see another law in my members warring
against the law of my mind.” Romans vii, 15, 19.
It is at this stage also that religion can most help the torn soul
if he will understand it and welcome its help. At all stages of hu-
man evolution religion is designed to help progressing souls, but it
is when the conflict is most keen that its help is most effectual,

66
because then it is most needed. It was to help men to reach Salva-
tion that Christ founded the Christian Church. Through other great
faiths—Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism—the same Lord
helps others to reach the same Salvation, for there are many folds,
but one Shepherd. In the Christian religion, especially in the Catho-
lic parts of it, the “means of grace” or sacraments are especially His
means of help. Scriptures, prayers, fellowship one with another, are
useful accessories of religion, but the very essence of the Catho-
lic religion is the grace or power of the Lord Himself distributed to
us on earth through sacraments. Daily through sacraments the
Lord feeds the hungering sheep; graciously He tends those com-
municants who draw nigh to Him sacramentally; tenderly and care-
fully He watches over those who “know the things that belong unto
their peace,” and “as a hen gathers her chickens under her wing”
so He gathers His communicants into His protecting care. It is
this food and this care that are needed so specially after Conver-
sion and that are so exceedingly helpful to those who are wise
enough to receive them.
Before Conversion there was little conflict, for the vision of
reality had not then been seen; at that time the voice of the soul
was silenced, and the feeble godly motions were stifled and made
more feeble by the clamant demands of the world and the flesh. But
after Conversion a battle royal rages—the battle between the flesh
and the soul, between matter, evolving by the law of acquisi-
tion, and spirit, evolving by the law of love and sacrifice. This is
the real state of sin; the man now, when he does wrong, does it
knowing that it is wrong; the momentum is too strong for him.
Before Conversion he sinned and was selfish through blindness;
now he sins from impotence, but not in blindness. Recovery is a
long, long process; a single life would not be enough to bring
him to such a state, and not nearly enough for his recovery from
it. Life after life the struggle lasts; in each incarnation life is a
little less material, a little more spiritual, than in former lives;
there may be slippings back, but progress, in spite of occasional
“falls from grace,” is generally, after Conversion, upward and
uniform. The bodies, as evolution proceeds, become finer in pro-
portion as the lower personality becomes more spiritual. In the early
stages of evolution the bodies are gross and ugly, in the later
stages, after Conversion, they tend to be refined, more beautiful,

67
somewhat ascetic. Physical evolution proceeds side by side and
pari passu with superphysical and spiritual evolution, for they are
supplementary and complementary one to the other. In the later
stages, when “the world, the flesh and the devil” have been to a
considerable extent mastered, personal religion consists chiefly in
toning down the excrescences and protuberances of the lower per-
sonality; at every turn the excess of personality makes its pressure
felt; in look and speech and gait and mannerisms its presence is
revealed; it needs to be at-one-ed with the higher self, or soul, and
so with all other higher selves; but it will not easily renounce
what seems to be essential to its separate existence: “I am I,” it
says, “I am I and no other,” and it will not emerge from the separat-
ing mould which for ages has shaped the individuality. But
gradually as the fog scatters, the grip of the lower personality is re-
laxed. The light becomes clearer and then there comes a great lone-
liness; the things of the world and the flesh no longer attract, but
not yet is the life of spirit, with its exquisite joys, realized; the man
must live his lives in the world, but he must be lonely, for he is no
longer of the world; and yet somehow he is never less alone than
when alone. His affections are now almost wholly set on things
above—on the arts and sciences, on religious mysticism or social
idealism—but these never quite suffice; there is a vague dissatis-
faction, a vague longing for he knows not what, an undefined yearn-
ing for a fuller and an ampler existence. The soul within him sees,
but, being still in the flesh, he “sees through a glass darkly.” The
lower personality seeks the beyond, but cannot see it; wistfully he
peers into the yonder, but he cannot pierce the veil of flesh. That
is his loneliness; he feels that he does not belong here, yet he can-
not quite find his true home.
He does not belong here, but he is not yet ready for the stage
of Salvation, for he is not yet quite free from the domination of
the lower personality. He has become clearly defined, a definite in-
dividual distinct from other individuals and has quite transcended
the lower expressions of selfishness and grossness. He has con-
quered “the tiger and the ape” in himself and, we may add, the
pig and the serpent. Now the lower personality must be com-
pletely effaced; the mould by means of which he gained his de-
finiteness and individuality must be cast off and broken up. The
self emphasizing self which has grown out of the true self and

68
for ages has been so near to him, moulding him into a definite specific
shape, that it has become almost and all but part of him; this must
be sacrificed. He must detach himself from, and leave behind, his
constant companion. Ah, the difficulty! That which at one time,
long ago, was “for his wealth” has now become “an occasion of
falling,” and must be discarded. It is not his! He cannot pass on till
this mould has been shed.
He must know that, however clearly defined are his self and
other selves, the Self of all is one; there is but one spirit; he
must “know the Self as one,” and he must love and serve God
and man for naught but the love of serving. He must not strive for
the light and for the life of freedom for his own sake, but for their
sake, and he must seek them not as a separate individual, but only
as a part of the Self of all selves. He has learned to love deeply,
purely, strongly and widely, but now he must love disinterest-
edly as well. Without thought of self, without thought of any mo-
nopoly of the loved ones, without thought of any reward of love
save in the loving, or of any return of love, but solely for love's
sake, he must love and serve and sacrifice. Nor must he think of
his own salvation, though it is to that that all his lives have
tended; yet when he is least thinking of it and most thinking of the
salvation of others, he is in fact most effectually accomplishing it.
He must lose completely the separated life of lower self, and in
so doing must find and save his true life, the life of soul and of
higher personality.
At or about this stage an Elder Brother takes him in hand to
help him on the later stages—an Elder Brother who has Himself
trodden this way of the Cross and Who therefore knows every
step of the way. The Elder Brother is the Master, under Whose
guidance progress now is rapid. Soon, perhaps in the same life
in which the Master accepts the pupil, a stage is reached which is
known in Christianity as Salvation, and in evolutionary Mysti-
cism as Initiation.13 It is at this stage that the separated lower per-
sonality is drawn into oneness with the fuller and larger life of
soul, or, rather, the life of the soul floods and fills the lower per-

13
Initiation here is not a Christian term; it is equivalent to “entering into the King-
dom of Heaven,” an expression of frequent occurrence in Christian literature.

69
sonality whilst still that lower self is incarnate on earth. When this
junction has been completely effected there is no longer a higher
and lower personality; there is only one personality, which in turn
becomes, relatively to the spirit, the lower self. In the embodied
condition this junction of soul and lower personality is marked as
an expansion of consciousness. This is a very definite stage in
evolution, finally effected at a definite ceremony of Initiation,
when the disciple is out of the body during sleep. It is the “new
birth” of the disciple, a birth into the higher and larger life of
soul. It admits also to membership of the great company of Elder
Brothers and Holy Ones which is the inner government of the
world. It is salvation by anticipation, for not yet has the human
stage been completely passed through nor the super-human stage
completely reached. The disciple, now an Initiate and a brother of
the great Brotherhood, “is justified by faith” in what he must
now soon become; that is his Salvation; he is “saved by faith;”
he is regarded not as he is, but as he must soon be—a perfect man.
Between the stage of the first Initiation and the stage of actual
achievement lie four more Initiations, the last or fifth of which is
the gateway which leads out from the human into the super-human
stage of evolution. But at this point we will leave the subject of
the higher evolution for a time, to return to it in the next chapter.
This slight and imperfect sketch of a great subject will be suffi-
cient to reveal what are the ethical principles of that form of Liberal
Catholicism which interprets Christianity in this way. It is obvi-
ous from what has been said that Liberal Catholicism of this de-
scription does not think lightly of sin. It differs from orthodoxy in
not thinking hysterically or even emotionally about it, but it does
not regard sin as an unimportant matter, a side issue in evolution,
which can be ignored—far from it. Sin, in the opinion of Liberal
Catholics, should not be thought of as though it were an alien, an
intruder which has crept in unawares and spoiled God's plan; as
though it in no wise belonged to the original scheme and had not
been allowed for in that scheme; or as though it had so upset the
Creator's calculations that a remedy, involving infinite pain to the
Son of God, had to be devised by which the balance could be re-
stored and the smooth working of the scheme of human evolution
secured for the future.
It is not thus that Liberal Catholics think of sin, but they do re-

70
alize very strongly that it is a state or stage of human evolution
which, however necessary and inevitable, must be passed through
and left behind. It is not enough that sin should be forgiven; it
must be utterly forthgiven, forsaken and abandoned; men must
forsake sin as serpents slough their skins and go their way with-
out them. It is in this sense of forth-giveness that Liberal Catholics
whole-heartedly accept the clause in the creed “we believe...in
the forgiveness of sins.” And surely that is the only reasonable ex-
planation of forgiveness, and the explanation which is held by an
ever-growing number of orthodox Christians at the present time.
A forgiveness which does not carry with it a deliverance from the
offence itself, though not necessarily from its consequences, would
surely be useless.
In ethics, therefore, there is very little difference between the
teachings of the Liberal Catholic and the Traditional Catholic
Churches. Self-renunciation, service and otherworldliness are the
main principles underlying the ethical teachings of Liberals and
Traditionalists alike. And, starting from different premises, they
come to the same conclusion about sin by different but equally
logical processes. The conclusion is that sin must be counteracted,
forgiven and totally abandoned.
But, though their ethics are the same, the two systems differ
widely in their teachings of human evolution. It has already been
shown how wide is this difference in the matter of the doctrine of
the Atonement. It must also be very obvious that in two other
particulars, assumed in this and preceding chapters, there is a wide
divergence of opinion.
One of these particulars is the teaching of Reincarnation, without
which the scheme sketched in this chapter would scarcely hold to-
gether. The teaching is based partly on the knowledge of not a few
in the Liberal Catholic Church, as of others outside it, who know
reincarnation as a fact in their own evolution, and do not merely
believe it as a reasonable theory. For such that knowledge is an
all-sufficient ground of acceptance; to them Reincarnation is
not a theory, but a fact. Others, who have reason to trust those
who claim to know reincarnation as a fact, who find them trustwor-
thy teachers of other matters that are capable of verification, have
their own belief enormously strengthened by the professed know-
ledge of those who claim to know. But by the great majority of

71
those who accept it, whether within or without the Liberal
Catholic Church, the theory is believed because of its own inher-
ent reasonableness. It works. It explains so much that other-
wise would be inexplicable, and throws light on so many prob-
lems of religion and life that are otherwise obscure. It presents
immortality in an intelligible form; it shows life as an unbroken
continuity—without beginning as without end. There is so great a
literature on the subject that it would be a waste of effort to at-
tempt in this article to prove the doctrine on pragmatic or on any
other lines. The question that concerns us as a definite branch of
the Christian Church is not “Is it true?” for to that most members
of our Church have given their consent, but “Is it Christian?”
It seems to us to be a matter not so much of theology as of phi-
losophy, and its undoubted absence from the Christian Scriptures,
except in a very few passages which are easily capable of a differ-
ent interpretation, is a matter which ranks with the similar absence
from the Scriptures of any substantial support of the Copernican
astronomy. There is little or no evidence in the scriptures of the
Copernican teaching; yet that teaching is true, and it is so far
from being incompatible with the Christian revelation that, when
the Bible is put in its true place and critically interpreted, it
enlarges and explains that revelation.
So it is with Reincarnation. It is not found, except in doubt-
ful hints, in the scriptures or creeds. If, as many suppose, it did
form part of the original depositum, it dropped out or was driven
out at a very early stage in the history of the Christian Church. If
as is unlikely, it was deliberately omitted by our Lord from the
depositum we cannot tell for what reason. We might guess, as we
might guess the reason for the omission of the Copernican astron-
omy, but guesses are useless. But though, for whatever reason, it
is not found in scriptures or creeds yet, if thought out and exam-
ined without prejudice, the teaching is found to be not only com-
patible with, but the very key to, the Christian revelation as evolu-
tionists understand it.
It is in this sense of incarnating afresh in human bodies that
the lag clause of the creed must be understood and accepted. If
not in this way how else, we may wonder, can “the resurrection
of the flesh” be understood and accepted?
And the teaching is not contrary to orthodoxy. It would be

72
hard even for a modern Cyril to show that the teaching of reincarna-
tion is a heresy. It has never, so far as can be discovered, been
anathematized by any Ecumenical Council of the Church. It is
supposed by some that the second Council of Constantinople (A.D.
553), which lacked ecumenical status, rejected the teaching, but defi-
nite records of the canons of this Council are hard to come by.
Except for that one doubtful Conciliar pronouncement the teach-
ing does not seem ever to have attracted the serious attention of
the doctors and rulers of the Church. Catholic Christians therefore
who accept this teaching may continue to believe it without any
fear that in so doing they are harbouring a heresy, If ever the
Catholic Church should compel them to choose between reincar-
nation and the Church, which could hardly happen in the Liberal
Catholic Church, they will naturally choose the truth as they see
it.
The other particular in which in this connection Liberal
Catholic teaching diverges widely from the teaching of ortho-
dox Catholicism is the teaching of the Elder Brothers or Masters.
Here again the grounds of acceptance of the belief in the exis-
tence of the Elder Brothers, and of Their interest in human affairs,
and of the help They give to human disciples, are precisely the same as
in the case of Reincarnation. Some know the Elder Brothers person-
ally. Others, believing that such a claim is justified by the general
trustworthiness and goodness of those who make it, find their own
belief in the teaching enormously strengthened thereby. But the
majority of those who believe in Their existence do so because it
seems in itself to be an inherently reasonable belief and even an in-
evitable corollary of the truth, if it be true, of spiritual evolution. If
evolution be true, it follows logically that somewhere there are
super-human Beings; otherwise we are left with the almost unten-
able hypothesis that evolution climbs slowly and by a long ladder of
stages up to the human stage and then stops, and that there is no-one
in between man and God, except Christ Who is both. And if there are
superhuman Beings, it is not improbable that some of Them at
least are accessible to some human beings in the flesh who believe
in Their existence; and that, in addition to however many other
functions, some of Them have as one of Their functions the helping
and teaching of Their younger and less evolved brothers. This is
the teaching about the Elder Brethren which is commonly held

73
and taught by members of the Liberal Catholic Church.
It has often been pointed out in opposition to the evolutionary
teaching about the person of Our Lord—the teaching which, apart
from any knowledge of or belief in reincarnation, claims that He is
the highest fruitage of the human race and that others will in the
course of time reach the same level—that evolution when it reaches
a certain stage usually tends to perpetuate itself. There is only one
Christ, the objectors say, and no other since His day has, even re-
motely, approached Him. The objection is a good one if borne out
by the facts; and, in any case, the underlying assumption of the
teaching which it opposes is, in our opinion, untrue—the assumption
namely that the Christ incarnation was an incarnation such as any
human incarnation might be, and not an incarnation a special kind
and for a special purpose, and without necessity except the necessity
of love. But the objection is not borne out by the facts if, as we be-
lieve, the Elder Brothers really do exist. It may be true that no
other historical person has reached, or has come within reasonable
distance of reaching, the Christ level, but super-human evolution
and the higher stages of human evolution are not passed in the public
gaze. When men become super-men (and even in some cases before)
they usually cease to incarnate on earth; and if for reasons of Their
own They do incarnate They normally live entirely apart from all
except those few whom for special reasons They call into close
association with Themselves. And when one of Them comes out
into the outer world on a great mission of help to the human race
and becomes a historical Person, as in the case of the incarnation of
the Lord Christ 2,000 years ago, He usually takes the body of a
disciple already in the world—a body not so highly evolved that it
cannot mix in the life of the world. When an Elder Brother comes in
this way it is not under any necessity such as brings us lesser beings
back and back again to the incarnate condition, but only in order
that in such a way He may the better help His younger brethren. In
the Liberal Catholic Church, as outside it, there is at the present time
a very real and widespread belief that in such a way the Lord Christ
Himself will very soon “come again14 to judge” that is guide, the

14
Editors note: Many ecclesiastical and political leaders in the post-war years
believed that the “war to end all wars” had happened. Naturally the result was
a combination of great enthusiasm, relating to the coming of a Golden Age for

74
world.
But though They live apart from, and are normally unknown
to, lesser human beings, the Elder Brothers do exist, and through
the gates of the five great Initiations there is continually pouring
a thin stream, some in every generation, of human beings on their
way to the super-human stage and beyond; the way is not barred to
any; on the contrary, all who will are invited to enter upon this Path.
After they have become super-human or Elder Brothers They still
evolve and, by still higher Initiations, They pass on till They reach
the exalted level of the Lord Christ Himself.
This is surely a very reasonable theory, and in the Liberal Catho-
lic Church it is practically universally accepted as true. If true, it
supplies the link which, in ignorance of this truth, the orthodox
have rightly felt needed to be supplied by those who hold the evolu-
tionary theory—the link between the highest and best of men
known in history and the Lord.
There are no great gaps in evolution. From conversion, by
gradual stages, souls pass onwards and upwards in an unending
and an unbroken stream to the realization of divinity, and be-
yond.
This belief is not a heresy. It is simply the doctrine, included
in the Christian creed, of the Communion of Saints.

humanity the main feature being the return of Christ; and a tremendous sense
of loss and in some cases that Christianity had “failed”. Pigott addresses this
notion of failure in a later chapter.

75
 Chapter Ten
FINALITY

Dr. Gore, a distinguished Anglican prelate and a theolo-

gian of great influence amongst a large section of Anglo-Catholics,
writing in a recent book 15 in support of the orthodox Catholic doc-
trine of the person of Christ, says of that doctrine:—
Herein lies also the clue to the finality of the Christ. In-
tellectually considered, nothing is more essential to a full
faith in Christ than this recognition of His essential finality.
This means that He is not only the greatest prophet and the
most conspicuous saint and the noblest leader of humanity
who has ever lived: for if that were all, obviously we could
“look for another” as great as He, possibly greater than He.
And if Jesus be, as at the last analysis Nestorianism always
asserts, a human person, one among millions of human per-
sons, whom the divine Word united to Himself and even (fi-
nally) absorbed into Himself, there is no reason in the nature
of things why the process should not be repeated. It is, in
fact, only the highest example of what occurs in its meas-
ure in every good man. There may be another Christ, even
conceivably a higher and more enlightened one. There is
no real ground for asserting the finality of the Christ unless
He be personally God in manhood. Then, and then only,
must He be essentially and necessarily final. For there can
be no disclosure of God in manhood or of manhood in God
even conceivable which should be completer or fuller (at
least under the conditions of this world) than is given us in
Him who is the Word made flesh. Nor in the nature of
things can there be another such. There can be no other
such person as the only- begotten Son of God.
It is a long quotation, but in a book intended to explain the
Traditional teaching to Liberal Catholics and to compare the
teaching of Liberal Catholics with that of Traditionalists, it
seemed well to give at some length the exalt words of a represen-

15
Belief in Christ, pp 214-215 [1922 Ed.]

76
tative teacher of Traditionalist doctrine on this important
point. Dr. Gore is certainly a representative theologian—
representative especially of conservative Anglo-Catholicism and, on
this point, of the theology of a far larger number of Christians than
are included in the Anglo-Catholic circle.
Finality is not in itself an article of the Christian Creed and
need not therefore be considered as though it were a fundamental
Christian teaching binding on all who “profess and call them-
selves” members of the Church of Christ. Nevertheless it is an im-
portant point, and interesting in itself, apart from all questions of
orthodoxy and heresy.
When first confronted with the Traditionalist view so ably ex-
pressed by Dr. Gore, Catholics of the Liberal and evolutionary
mystical variety will probably be struck with amazement, for it
does not usually occur to them that finality is necessary or even
possible. Why, they will ask themselves, should there not be an-
other or others as great as Christ, or why should not He ever be-
come greater than He was at the time of His Palestinian incarna-
tion? Why should not “the process be repeated?” Why must He be
“essentially final?” Did He Himself really claim to be in any sense
final? Why should there be “no other such person as the only-
begotten Son of God?”
The desire for finality in the case of Our Lord Christ and for a
final revelation so keenly felt by Traditionalist Christians and so
clearly revealed in the above quotation brings into very sharp
contrast the orthodox-conservative-traditional views on the one
hand and liberal-evolutionist-mystical opinions on the other. The
divergence at this point is perhaps wider than at any other point;
yet can neither say to the other, “we have no need of you” in the
Catholic Church, for neither view is ecclesiastically heretical and
each view, though the reconciliation be beyond our ken, may be
complementary to the other.
The traditional Catholic teaching of the finality of Christ and of
the final and unique disclosure of God in Christ is entirely de-
pendent on the traditional idea of the Being of God. The desire
for a final revelation and for the manifestation of Godhead in
manhood in a final and complete Person could only exist side by
side with, and as the result of, that Jewish view of God which sees
Him as a static deity essentially distinct and separate from man.

77
The divergence of view on the question of finality is therefore ul-
timately the same as the divergence on the doctrine of God.
It is not easy to discover what is the traditional teaching about
finality in other respects. We might wish to know what is the tra-
ditional teaching about the purpose and end of the universe, the end
of this world and the end of man, but it is not easy to discover the
teaching because there are so many traditions; the difficulty is to
select from the many traditions any single one which is common to
all schools of thought within the Christian Church as a whole or
even within those parts of the Church which claim to be Catholic.
The Athanasian Creed declares that those who fail to “be-
lieve rightly” the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the In-
carnation will “perish everlastingly.” The Athanasian Creed,
which by the way is omitted from the Liturgy of the Liberal
Catholic Church, probably because of its minatory clauses, is cer-
tainly a Creed of the Catholic Church and might naturally be con-
sidered to be for that reason definitely the teaching of the whole
Church. But this is not so, because its negative or minatory
clauses are not regarded as part of the Creed itself but only as its
setting; and, in any case, the minatory clauses are considered by many
competent orthodox judges to “go beyond the warrant of scrip-
ture” in their prima facie meaning and so not to be universally
binding on the Church. In the Church of England and in those
Episcopal Churches which are in communion with the Church of
England much latitude is allowed about the recitation of this
Creed, the warning clauses of which are strongly objected to by
many of the clergy, including a considerable number of dignitaries.
Apart from the warnings of the Quicunque Vult some Tradi-
tionalists teach that after death comes the Judgment, then an age-
long, or everlasting, existence in either heaven or hell; others
teach that a period of purgation comes between death and judg-
ment. Some teach that the Day of Judgment will coincide with the
“end of the world,” others that it will mark the end of an age or
dispensation, in which case the judgment will be a period of guiding
and not a final discrimination between the good and the bad. Again
some may still be found to teach that heaven and hell are places
with definite geographical positions in relation to our earth, whilst
others teach that they are conditions which can be, and often are,
entered upon before death, inasmuch as being spiritual conditions

78
they are independent of physical connections. There is, thus, such
a medley of teachings that it is impossible to say that any one of
them is quite definitely taught and believed by the Christian
Church as a whole, but it would not be untrue to say that the
Catholic Church, using the term in its broadest sense, teaches
broadly a Church militant on earth, a Church expectant in purga-
tory or paradise, and a Church triumphant in heaven, and that these
three are the same Church in different conditions; individuals are
mostly free to think for themselves as to what is or what may be the
nature of the purgatorial and heavenly conditions.
Of those who die “out of grace” Catholic teachers are usually
silent and non-committal, except that Romans give the impres-
sion that they boldly teach, at least to the more ignorant, a doc-
trine which is practically identical with the medieval hell.
It is not surprising that, on these theories, there is a great deal
of anxiety amongst Christians about their future condition and, in
some cases, much real suffering when it is thought that exclusion
from heaven is likely to be the lot either of the people who ex-
perience the fear or of others dear to them; in some cases the ab-
sence of sufficient “assurance” of acceptance by God is the cause of
intense nervousness and of life-long anxiety. Death is, on all these
theories, a very solemn matter and, more often than not, its ap-
proach is viewed with dread.
Liberal Catholics on the other hand, in common with many spiri-
tualists and scientific evolutionists, regard birth and death merely as
incidents, constantly recurring, in an endless existence. To the
larger life of soul birth and death are of no more significance than
are waking and sleeping in the life of every embodied being. And
for such, because of their joyful assurance of the predestination of
all God's creatures to final bliss, the future, in spite of all the
trouble and sorrow that it may have in store before that bliss is
attained, has no terrors; for the troubles are but for the moment
whilst the bliss, which is God, is for eternity. But to return, after
so long a digression, to the question of the finality of Christ and of
a final revelation.
On the evolutionary theory there is no need for a final revela-
tion nor can there be such until the last human being of our hu-
manity, to say nothing of succeeding humanities, has wrested the last
secret of human evolution from that portion of the plan of God which

79
concerns our human evolution. And, beyond human evolution, there
can be no final revelation till the last unit of consciousness has
wrested from the Absolute One the last truth about God, the uni-
verse and himself.
We shall perhaps best appreciate the vast difference of opin-
ion on this matter of finality by clearing up for ourselves, and for
others interested in our views, our own opinions about the end of
things and persons. To do this we must consider the subject of fi-
nality as a whole and not merely in reference to the person of Our
Lord. And for this purpose we will take up again the considera-
tion of human evolution which was laid aside in the chapter on
Conversion and After.
The theory of the evolution of free spirits, taken in conjunction
with the facts of that evolution visible on all sides and always star-
ing us in the face, requires that sooner or later there shall be a time
of crisis or Day of Judgment, when the more highly evolved human
beings shall be separated from those who cannot keep pace, and,
thus unencumbered, shall be able the more rapidly to press along
their appointed course. The distance between first and last in
the human race is enormous; it is a fact of evolution that stares
us in the face; and the distance tends to be still further extended.
At one end there is the genius, the saint and the highly cultured
gentleman; at the other extreme there is the primitive savage.
It is useless to pretend that these are equal in any other sense than
that they proceed ultimately from the same source and that the
same divine spirit is at the far-back of all. They are equal in their
origin and they will be equal again in their far-off destination,
but they are not equal in their evolution in between. The human
group, in running the race that is set before it, straggles and the in-
terval between leaders and laggards increases as the race proceeds.
But they are all one, bound up with each other and dependent, to some
extent, on each other. The leaders help the laggards, but the
laggards are a drag upon, and hinder, the leaders. The time will
come, a quite definite time whose approximate date is known to
the inner Government of the world, when the advantages to be
gained to the laggards, and so to the whole, by their connection
in one group with the leaders, will be deemed to be outweighed
by the disadvantages to the leaders, and so to the whole, by the
same connection. Then there will be a separation. Those who

80
are not likely to reach a certain level of development by a cer-
tain required time will be suspended for an age, and will take
up their evolution again at the head of a subsequent wave of hu-
man evolution—at the head of what we now know as the ani-
mal kingdom which in part will then be human. The remainder,
no longer dragged back by the laggards, will evolve rapidly and
will eventually pass out of human evolution by the gateways of
the five Initiations.
For the laggards, there will be almost infinite delay whilst
the suspension lasts, and until they are caught up and carried on
by the next oncoming wave of evolution; but the time of sus-
pension will not be time wasted, for, even in that period, evolution is
at work, though slowly, so that when the suspended laggards
emerge from the period of age-long suspension or pruning
(κόλασις), because of the force of evolution, they will be much
further evolved than when they were rejected at the Day of Cri-
sis. They will be well ahead of, though they will evolve to-
gether with, those higher animals of our evolution who will
then be human persons. Except for this suspension or æonian
pruning there will be no punishment for the failures, and the
judgment or crisis will not be final. And those who succeed
will not on that account cease to evolve; they will press on per-
haps to other days of crisis. Thus neither for the successful nor
for the unsuccessful is finality to be expected at the Day of Judg-
ment. There is no final judgment.
For all practical and immediate purposes Salvation means
success at the Day of Crisis, and the evangelizing efforts of Chris-
tians should be directed, as they usually are, towards helping as
many as possible of the human race “to be saved”—that is, so to
live now that they may become sufficiently evolved in the re-
quired time to be found on the right side of the dividing line at
the Judgment Day. Who will be the Judge we cannot say, but
we may be sure that the judgment will be unerring and ex-
act—automatic rather than arbitrary.
On this theory the doctrines of Judgment to come and of ever-
lasting punishment, which, literally and correctly translated, is
nothing more than at æonian pruning, are not impossible super-
stitions but reasonable ideas and, indeed, necessities bound up
with evolution.

81
 The future of those whose progress towards predestinated
glory is not delayed by any age-long suspension, lies beyond the
experience of those who have not themselves as yet passed on to
the higher reaches. Yet we need fix no limit to that future. In
time, as we have seen, they will reach, as others have reached
and are in every generation reaching, by a series of Initiations,
the Elder Brother stage. But as Elder Brothers they will still
evolve. Not at that stage can the end be fixed. In time again they
will reach the level now held by Our Lord the Christ. But even
there evolution will not end.
Though He stands so high, yet that great height must not be
allowed to dazzle or dismay His followers. They too are to be
as He is—“perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect.” It cannot
be over-emphasized or too often stated that each of the separate
persons who collectively make up the human race, however many
they may be, is to become in wisdom, in love and in power as the
Son of God. Each is to transcend self but without loss of essen-
tial selfhood. Each is to be “as his Lord.” Throughout all ages
each, like his Lord, will keep his higher personality, his true
selfhood. The transcending of self and the casting off of the ex-
cesses of personality, as a serpent sloughs his skin: perhaps the
sloughing of many relatively lower personalities in succession
does not involve and, however many skins are sloughed, never
will involve the loss of essential selfhood. If it did so, if the
distinctions of selfhood could conceivably be lost or confused,
the whole vast process would have been in vain. If all the sepa-
rated spirits, the fruits of the age-long sacrifice of the Son of
God, were to pour back again into the undifferentiated sea of spi-
rit, losing their distinctions, then that great sacrifice would have
been to no purpose. It would indeed be a waste of effort and a
waste of sacrifice, if on emerging from imprisonment in matter,
the Son of God and all the myriads in Him were simply to slip
back into undifferentiated spirit and be as He was before manifes-
tation and multiplication began. But it is not so. The fruits of the
great sacrifice will be myriads upon myriads of persons, from all
the worlds and of all the ages, distinct yet one, in each one of
whom shall dwell “all the fullness of the Godhead” as it was in the
beginning, and before manifestation, in the Son of God. He sacri-
fices His life in order that all these may be as He is, yet remain in

82
Him; and though He pours out His life that all these may have life
more and more abundantly yet never is there, nor can there be,
any loss or diminution of life to Him. There shall be uncountable
millions of distinct persons, in each unit of whom shall dwell all the
fullness of the One.16
To evolve first from self-consciousness to un-self-consciousness
and from un-self-consciousness to Self-consciousness or Son-of-
God-consciousness is the end and aim of human evolution. Every
human being shall eventually reach God- consciousness, yet even
that is not necessarily the end of evolution.
From our level, the end, if end there be, cannot be seen. But
why should we look for or try to imagine finality? If the absence
of finality seems to involve the difficulty of a purpose eternally
frustrate, we must be content to know that the difficulty is only
apparent; that the reconciliation between everlasting, or even
eternal, evolution and final accomplishment of purpose, lies, like
the solution of other logical contradictions, somewhere beyond
our ken in the eternal.
Our Lord, Whom we worship as God because in Him
“dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead,” has not yet reached
the end of evolution. There are for Him as for us still greater
heights to be scaled. The Logos Himself, the Logos of the Solar
System, is not yet complete; He has still to draw back into Himself
that which He put forth when He set His system in motion; the
beloved Son has still to yield up all the myriad sons that are in
Him; and when “He shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God,
even the Father” the Father must logically be more complete than
He was before the Son came forth. Even when God shall be “all in
all” there may still be for Him other heights beyond that great
height. So, to our feeble reasons it seems inevitable though con-
tradictory, that even the Absolute One is not complete and so not
Absolute.
We cannot see an end nor do we understand why there should
be an end; but we can see, we think, that if there be any end it is
not where our orthodox brethren would place it. The Lord Christ
we worship as God, and Him we seek to serve; and His disciples

16
[And herein, Bp. Pigott points out an essential difference between the Bud-
dhist and Christian concepts of Union. Ed.]

83
we would be, and to be like Him we aspire; but we do not think
of Him as of one Who is “essentially and necessarily final,” nor
do we think that He thinks of Himself as such or wishes us so to
think of Him.
At this point, sorrowfully but quite definitely, we part com-
pany with those whose “full faith in Christ” involves “the rec-
ognition of His essential finality.” There is no appreciable final-
ity in evolution. Yet we do not “‘look for another’ as great as He,
possibly greater than He;” rather do we look for the same Lord
Christ but greater now than ever before.

84
 Chapter Eleven
THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY

Outside the Roman Communion the teaching of the verbal iner-

rancy of Scripture has now practically disappeared from the
Churches. It has never been definitely accepted nor, so far as we
are aware, was it ever definitely accepted by any Ecumenical
Council of the Church. A generation of clergy and ministers,
trained in the principles of literary criticism, has gradually grown
up whose exegesis of scripture is naturally in accordance with criti-
cal principles; consequently the theory of verbal inerrancy is rap-
idly dying, if it has not already died, a natural death. Twenty
years ago an Anglican dignitary, speaking at a conference of
clergy, declared in challenging and triumphant tones that not only
did he believe that a whale swallowed Jonah because “the Bible
said so” but that if it had been written in the Bible that Jonah had
swallowed a whale he would have believed it unhesitatingly. And
he would. Those who believed in verbal inerrancy believed in it
very seriously, not to say savagely, for they regarded it as the
foundation of all beliefs. Those days have now passed, but in other
forms the problem still distracts the Churches.17
The question now is concerned not so much with inerrancy or
even with inspiration as with interpretation. Are certain narratives
to be interpreted literally and regarded as historical, or is there in
the Scripture narratives a mixture of allegory and history? So far
as the Old Testament is concerned the controversy is practically
spent. There are but few now who teach that the early narratives of
the Pentateuch or even of the historical books of the Hebrew
Scriptures can be interpreted otherwise than in an allegorical
sense. But so far as the New Testament is concerned the con-
troversy is by no means spent.
The present-day battle (for in certain parts of the world it can
be described by no other term) between Modernists and Funda-
mentalists is mainly a battle about the historicity or otherwise
of incidents related in the gospels. The anxiety of the Funda-

17
[Since this was first written, Biblical inerrancy has enjoyed a revival and
continued strength among the Fundamentalist Churches in the USA.]

85
mentalists is natural for they represent that very large body of
Protestant, or at least non-Roman, Christians who base the whole
structure of their faith, not on the verbal inerrancy of scripture, but
on the historicity of the Gospel Story and of the Acts, and on the
genuineness and authenticity of the Epistles. To these Chris-
tians the historicity of the “historical facts” of the New Testa-
ment is as important as the infallibility of the Church—that is of
the Church of the papacy—is to the Roman Catholics. The ul-
timate authority is at stake. To the non-Roman the Scriptures as
history are the ultimate authority; to the Roman it is the
Church, speaking through the ex cathedra utterances of the
Pope, that is the infallible voice of authority. For the Protestant
Fundamentalists the position at the present time is very precari-
ous for, under the searchlight of literary criticism, nothing in the
Scriptures, whether in Old or New Testaments, is securely es-
tablished as historical. Creeds, it is true, precede Scriptures in
point of time; long before the Canon was drawn up, and indeed
before the New Testament scriptures, as we have them, were
written, there was some form of baptismal creed which was later
incorporated in the conciliar creed; but creeds are only ac-
cepted as an authority inasmuch as, and in so far as, they are
based on, and provable by, Scripture, and not otherwise. So that
though Scriptures come later in time than the original creed,
they, and not the creeds, are, in the Protestant and non-Roman
Catholic Churches, the ultimate and final authority. If, on this
theory, the Scriptures go, all goes. The position therefore at the
present time is exceedingly precarious, not to say tragic, for the
Fundamentalist Christians, and we cannot wonder that since to
them the historicity of the Gospel narratives is so fundamental—
so much the foundation on which the whole structure rests—they
resist the Modernists so vigorously. Nor can we wonder that so
many orthodox and semi-orthodox Anglo-Catholics, who likewise
regard the historicity of the Gospel “facts” as fundamental, fearing
for the stability of their foundation, are hurrying Romewards where
they may bury their heads in the sands of Rome and persuade them-
selves that, because the Church says that the Gospel “facts” are his-
torical and that therefore the foundations of the faith are secure,
they are secure.
What has Modernism and Liberalism, always anxious for truth

86
at all costs and never afraid of truth, to say at the present crisis? What
hope can be held out to the Fundamentalist Anglicans and to the
Protestant Churches? Modernism offers another foundation. It
says that neither in the Scriptures, nor in the Creeds, nor in the
Church must the final and ultimate authority be sought but in the
reason and the spirit of truth, which is the Spirit of God, within man.
Those who accept, as true or infallible guides, the Scriptures, the
Creeds or the Church do so, the Modernists urge, because their
reason consents that these are trustworthy guides. They may
have been told that they are trustworthy; they may have been told
that it would be rash or wrong not to accept them; that no one can
expect to reach the truth, which is God, without a guide and that
this or that guide is traditionally considered to be the best guide,
or the only guide; the necessity of having an outer guide and the
credibility of a particular guide, be it a literature or a Church,
may be presented in a thousand ways, but it is ultimately the reason
within and the spirit of truth within that accepts. Therefore in any
case reason and the spirit within man is an authority behind, and
greater than, either Scriptures, or Creeds, or Church. “Therefore”
say the Modernists, “have no fear.” Have an outer guide if you
must, and change your outer guide if you will, but always the
final authority is within. Trust the inner spirit and all will be
well. Let the spirit of truth lead whither it will, if it leads to truth
it leads where God wills. Be content, therefore, to let go the
‘historical facts’ if and as soon as the evidence is clearly against
them, and all must be well."
But the Fundamentalists resist the Modernists as dangerous and
mischievous innovators. The Fundamentalists want their founda-
tion and no other; they want the New Testament, interpreted liter-
ally, and no other foundation. Hence the controversy which, es-
pecially in America, bids fair to rend the Episcopal Church in
twain.
Meantime the Mystics of all the Churches go still further back
than the Modernists for their ultimate authority, and declare that
behind and beyond the reason that thinks and discriminates is
something else—the intuition or pure spirit that sees and knows.
They need no outer authority when they can get their religion at
first hand. The Mystic who has certitude is necessarily quite un-
moved by any question of the literal truth or otherwise of scrip-

87
ture narratives, and is indifferent as to whether or not the Church
of the Papacy declares such and such a doctrine to be true. The de-
votional Mystic is in a happy position; the waves and storms of con-
troversy pass over him and leave him untouched and unmoved;
but his knowledge, though true, is useless as an authority to any
but himself and those who can believe that he knows.
Liberal Catholics of the Liberal Catholic Church, as has been
shown, base their theological structure neither on historical
facts recorded in Scriptures nor on doctrines declared to be true
by an infallible Church, but on certain age-long spiritual proc-
esses, the teaching of which, they claim, is concealed within
both scriptures and creeds. They are consequently undisturbed by,
and but little interested in, the controversies that in so many
parts of the Christian Church now rage around the “historic facts”
of the gospels and the creeds. They suggest to their brethren in
other Churches, who are greatly disturbed by the present con-
troversy, that the spiritual basis of the Christian faith is more secure
than any facts however historical, but they cannot and would not at-
tempt to force their beliefs upon their brethren who are unable or
unwilling to accept them. They think of scriptures, whether He-
brew or Christian, as useful aids to the life of devotion and, in
some cases, as interesting documents. But they are very unequal
both in interest and in inspiration and their authenticity is so un-
certain that no doctrine either of belief or conduct can safely be
based on them or deduced from them alone. If on other grounds
there is good reason to accept a proposition of belief as true, or a
line of conduct as good, and this is supported by Scripture, well
and good; there is all the stronger reason then for accepting the
proposition or for encouraging the line of confused; but no
teaching can be accepted on the sole authority of the written
word even though the word is attributed to the Lord Christ Him-
self. The narratives are so confused that Scriptural support for any
teaching, if it is the sole support, is valueless.
It is difficult too for Liberals of this school to see any consistency
in that attitude towards the “historic facts” of the creeds and gos-
pels, which claims the liberty to interpret certain articles of the
creed in a spiritual or mystical sense, but insists on a literal and
historical interpretation of such of the articles as are concerned with
matters which come within the experience of human beings in the

88
embodied condition. In the first place it is difficult to see that any
of the “facts” mentioned in the Creed are of a sort that come nor-
mally within our experience. A virgin birth and a physical resur-
rection, one would have thought, are not matters of normal human
experience; why then are they to be believed in a literal, but the
ascension into heaven and the session at the right hand of God in a
spiritual, sense? As human experiences all these are equally ab-
normal and unusual. But, in any case, the principle of interpreta-
tion must surely be the same throughout. It is simply arbitrary to
say that certain articles may be interpreted in one way but that
others must be interpreted in another; and to say that the dividing
line must be drawn where purely spiritual experiences cease and
normal physical experiences begin, wherever that may be, is an
assumption of authority intolerable because unwarranted. Such an
argument, advanced mainly by semi-orthodox Catholics, is not
likely to hold for very long against the weight and the force of criti-
cal research.
No, the position of this semi-orthodox school—of those who al-
low a mystical or allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament but
insist on a literal or historical interpretation of the New—is impossi-
ble. The “facts” may have actually happened; there is no proof that
they did not, but until there is proof that they did, and even then, the
mystical interpretation of the whole gospel story must be al-
lowed; there cannot be different principles of interpretation for dif-
ferent portions of the scriptures. The claim that any portion of the
Scriptures must be literally interpreted was forfeited when the
historical interpretation of the Old Testament narratives had to be
abandoned, and it can never again be recovered. So far, however,
as the Liberal Catholic Church is concerned, few of its members, as
has been shown, are particularly interested in the question of the
historicity of the Gospel “facts” What is essential in these “facts” is
not that they represent physical happenings, but that they reveal age-
long super-physical processes of evolution.
In the matter of authority and infallibility, as in so many other
matters, the Liberal Catholic Church has a constructive contribution to
offer. Many, perhaps most, in that Church do most profoundly be-
lieve that there is an infallible outer authority, but it is hard to find
and is not, in normal circumstances, revealed to all, but only to
some who are very eager to know and very anxious to learn. The

89
doctrine of Infallibility is true. It contains a great truth but its
truth is other and greater than the doctrine that is proclaimed by the
Roman Church. Somewhere in the universe there is an infalli-
ble, that is a true, teaching. It is the plan of the Great Architect of
the Universe. And somewhere in the Universe are infallible Teachers
who know all that in the plan concerns us men and our evolution
for ages still to come. Whenever infallible pupils are forthcom-
ing fragments of the infallible teaching are given to them by the
infallible Teachers. To be infallible in this sense means that the
pupils must be eager to know, anxious to learn, and able to under-
stand, but not too intellectual to be humble; they must be capable
of understanding and incapable of distorting or misrepresenting.
To such as these, in proportion as they are able to understand it,
the infallible teaching is given by degrees. When the pupils are
ready the Teachers are there.
This is an external authority; yet, in a very true sense, the teach-
ing, the Teacher and the taught are all one. It is only that princi-
ple in the pupil which is akin to and one with the teaching that can
apprehend the teaching; and it is only because of His oneness
both with the teaching and with the spirit of truth in the pupil that
the Teacher is able to impact the teaching to the pupil. That is the
mystery of authority in matters of belief and conduct. That which
is without is as that which is within.
In the earlier stages of evolution human beings need some exter-
nal authority to guide them and to train the inner spirit. But the
outer authority is needed only until that in themselves which is eter-
nal has grown to such an extent that it is itself able to grasp eternal
truth. The external authority is only for a time and even in that
time, whether it be a literature, a society or a person, the authority is
only accepted as such by the pupil himself using his own best
judgment. The pupil lays hold of the teaching and becomes one
with it and accepts the authority which brings him to it. The
teaching is not in the first place accepted because the authority
proclaims it to be true; it is rather that the authority is accepted
as such because of the teaching that is given; but when once the
authority has been accepted, its, or his, teaching is accepted unhesi-
tatingly and unquestioningly.
The really infallible Teacher is one who really knows, not a
Pope. A Pope is only infallible as a Pope and in ex cathedra utter-

90
ances. An infallible Teacher is infallible in Himself and in all His
statements. The real seekers after truth need to be more sure of their
teacher than they can be of an “infallible” Pope, for an “infallible”
Pope may be wrong. Even though in his official utterances he is
guided by the Divine Spirit, he is still a fallible instrument and in
its passage through his mind and lips or pen the divine message, if
there be a divine message, may be distorted and disarranged. A really
infallible Teacher cannot be mistaken in those matters which He is
willing to explain to human pupils, nor can the teaching be distorted
or disarranged in the process.
Those who are wise seek such a Teacher, and those who seek
eagerly will in time find. Many in the Liberal Catholic Church be-
lieve that there are such Teachers, and some have actually found
Them. Those who desire to find Them must seek for themselves.
The Church can point the way and may help the pupils to reach the
Teachers, but it cannot bring the Teachers to the pupils. They, and
only They, can decide when the pupil is ready to be taught.
It is also true, we believe, that the Lord Himself, Who was the
Founder and is now, as always, the Guide of the Christian Church, is
accessible at times to those whom He calls. His mind on important
points can be ascertained by such of His followers as He calls into
this close and sacred association with Himself. On such points
His mind and His word are, of course, final and all-sufficient to
those to whom it is revealed and to such others as can believe that
these communications do occur now in the Twentieth, as, long ago,
in the First Century. It was under such guidance and direction, we
believe, that the Liberal Catholic Church came into existence
as a distinct part of His Church; a branch of the One, Holy, Catho-
lic and Apostolic Church, destined, we dare to hope, if by keeping
in close touch with Him we and our successors may guide it wise-
ly, to receive within its fold in years to come the main stream of His
followers of the Christian fold.

91
 Chapter Twelve
THE OUTLOOK

Is Christianity a failure?—is a question constantly recurring at

the Conferences of the various Churches, in books and periodicals
which cater for the religiously-minded public, and in the conversa-
tion of individuals one with another.
Never has the question been asked with deeper searchings of
spirit than since the Christian nations of Europe disturbed the peace
of the world by plunging into the bloodiest war that has ever been
fought in historical times.
Let us attempt, as so many others have attempted, to answer
the question fairly and without prejudice.
One answer that has been given to the question is that Chris-
tianity cannot be said to have failed since it has never yet been
tried. At first that sounds like a flippant argument which could
very easily be countered by the retort that that which has not been
tried after 2,000 years must be regarded as a failure. But on closer
examination a deep truth can be detected within the argument. It
is impossible to judge whether or not a religion is a failure until
and unless we know how much of it the Founder intended to be
worked out in a given time. The life of the “kingdom” as taught
in the Sermon on the Mount has not become, on any considerable
scale, the life of this world, nor has it been tried by any large body
of people such as a nation. That part of Christianity has not been
worked out yet nor even attempted, and until it has been attempted
and proved to be a failure or until it can be proved that the Founder
intended that part of the religion to be in full working order by
the middle of the Twentieth Century, it cannot be said that Chris-
tianity is a failure.18 On the other hand there is so much evidence of

18
[The notion of the “working out” of the Christian religion is clearly millini-
alist and it is typical of the time which Pigott was writing. Many believed that
the “War to end all Wars” had come and they had lived through it. What lay
ahead could only be the Second Coming. Whilst this has so far proven incor-
rect in one sense, it is true that since the middle of the twentieth century there
have been unprecedented changes across the spectrum of Christianity. Much
has indeed been “worked out” and there is still more being unfolded. It would
seem a grave mistake, however, to try and appoint time-scales to future devel-

92
the life of the “kingdom,” when tried on a small scale and between
individuals, proving a success that to that extent it may justly be
claimed that Christianity is a brilliant success. The question is real-
ly one that cannot be answered because we do not know how much
of the Christian religion ought to have been worked out by now.
There is, though, an important point in this consideration which
is often overlooked. It is that the very fact that so many now
can see the striking incongruity between the life of the “kingdom
of God” as disclosed in the Sermon on the Mount and things as
they are, is, in itself, a proof that the spirit of Christ, which is
Christianity, is very much at work in the world now, and therefore,
whether or no more ought to have been accomplished than has
been accomplished, certainly something is being accomplished at
the present time and Christianity is at least ceasing to be a fail-
ure, if it has hitherto been a failure. That is a point that the de-
spairing should consider. The ideal is now recognized as practi-
cal politics by an increasing number of practical idealists. Hitherto
the Sermon on the Mount ideal has never been taken seriously; it
has been taken as a possible ideal for certain individuals but not for
nations or even for firms. The change of outlook on this question,
as revealed for instance in the really Christian effort to establish a
League of Nations, is an indication of the way the wind is blow-
ing and should encourage all to be optimistic.
It should also be remembered that the task that Christianity had
before it, and still has before it, was and is stupendous. That it has
effected so much as it has in the face of, and in spite of, the tre-
mendous difficulties in the way, is a proof of its divine origin and
a sufficient reply to the pessimistic cry that it has been a failure.
What was its task? Briefly, and in the main, it was to keep the
spiritual flame burning in ages and in a civilization which neces-
sarily made for the eclipse of that spiritual flame. The days of its
infancy were the dying days of the old Greco-Roman civilization;
then followed the dark ages; and lastly the industrial age. Could
any conditions have been more difficult? Anything that was
gained in the early ages was lost in the dark ages in which there
could be no progressive activity. And after the revival of learning,

opments in Christianity. As Pigott rightly says, “we have no frame of reference

for when such future unfoldments will occur.” Ed.]

93
and all through the industrial age, it has been the lower or con-
crete mind that has been, in the main, in activity and in the process
of development. The civilization which we see around us now, such
as it is, is almost wholly the product of the concrete mind applied
to matter, and is the result of the control of material forces by the
scientific mind. There is, by general consent, no such “slayer of
the real” as the mind and, especially, the concrete mind. The
mind obscures reality and ipso facto emphasizes the illusion of
separateness to an alarming degree. In view of this, therefore, what
is astonishing is not that Christianity has effected so little of its pur-
pose, but that in conditions so difficult it has accomplished so much.
All through those ages, dark, middle, and industrial, the light which
is within Christianity has always burned though, at times, very
dimly. The religion of Christianity has often been fearfully distorted,
so much so, that those who love Christianity must in these days
blush for shame when they consider those distortions; yet it has sur-
vived, and all the time it has, through its saints and its finest flowers,
exercised a softening, humanizing, spiritualizing influence in ages
which were essentially and necessarily hardening and materializ-
ing.
But what of the future? The force of evolution is now carrying
us on to the next stage, to an age of philosophical and intuitional
activity and the development of the higher or abstract mind and to
the consciousness of oneness. The tendency is all in that direction,
and if that is a true forecast we may look for a much ampler fruit-
age in the future. If, when all the conditions made for separateness
and spiritual blindness, Christianity has kept men from falling irre-
coverably apart and from becoming totally blind to spiritual re-
alities, what may we not expect it to accomplish when all the
conditions shall make for oneness and the higher vision? The out-
look is indeed hopeful. But where are to be found the Churches
which will see the light and disclose it to the people? Let us exam-
ine some of the historic Churches frankly, yet fairly and charita-
bly.
The Orthodox Eastern Church is very Catholic and very sacra-
mental. It is little known in Western Europe or amongst the Euro-
pean peoples outside Europe. It presents the Catholic religion to
Eastern Europeans in a way that is most suitable to them; it must be
remembered, however, that the Russians and Greeks are not ex-

94
panding races nor do they take the lead in any form of civiliza-
tion. They are laggard rather than progressive peoples and con-
sequently their influence in the future is not likely to be weighty
nor is there any reason to suppose that their form of Christianity is
ever likely to overflow into other parts of the world. The Eastern
Church, therefore, may be expected to keep the flame burning in
Eastern Europe, but cannot be expected to take any considerable part
in handing on the flame to the nations of the future now in the
making.
The Roman Catholic Church or, as they prefer to call themselves,
the Catholic Church, has an enormous influence over white people
all the world over, especially over those of Latin extraction. We
need not now consider all those distortions of the Faith and all the
cruelties with which its name has been blackened in the past, nor all
the ills which itself has suffered; those are now things of the past.
We can, however, and we must consider those points which seem to
us to disqualify it from being a world-religion in the future. More
consistently than any other western branch of the Church it has
presented the sacramental idea to the world. On that point there
has been no division into High and Low. It has the light; it under-
stands the essence of Christianity, which is, so all Catholics be-
lieve, a sacramental relationship between the Lord and mankind.
There are no divisions in the Roman Church on this point; sacra-
mentalism is the universal teaching and has been, without any
interruption at any Reformation, from the beginning. Its main
defect is that it tends to guard and protect the light too jealously;
it tends to hide the light behind unpassable and impossible barriers
instead of throwing it out far and wide so that all may see it and
live by it. The light within it is so brilliant that the Church has
become dazzled; it has come to think of itself as the light instead of
as a medium for the light; consequently instead of flashing the light it
shuts it in within itself. It made its most fatal mistake in the year
1870, when the Vatican Council proclaimed the doctrine of Papal
Infallibility. To the Roman Church, since 1870, the Papacy has
been not merely a matter of organization and of government, it is
of the very essence of the Church. Anglicans rarely see this point
and so they miss the significance of the papal supremacy. They do not
take it seriously and do not seem to realize that the Romans take it
very seriously. All approaches from the Anglican side towards re-

95
union are unavailing, for reunion with the Church of Rome is
impossible except in terms dictated by Rome, which would in-
volve acceptance of the doctrine of infallibility as Rome under-
stands it and submission to the Pope. To the Romans the Papacy is
not merely a matter of the bene esse, but it is of the very esse of the
Church. It is as fundamental as Creeds and Orders and Sacra-
ments. The Church of Christ is, on this teaching, the Church of the
Papacy and no other. Thus the great Roman Church has shut it-
self off from the world and shut in its spiritual treasures within its own
borders. It is useless now to any except those who can accept its
extraordinary claim. The Vatican decree of 1870 was its own
death-warrant, for a Church which so shuts itself in is useless as a
world-religion, and, being useless, must sooner or later cease to ex-
ist.
It is a thoroughly Latin Church. It breathes the spirit of impe-
rial Rome. Now the spirit of imperial Rome was good and useful
in the days of imperial Rome, but these are not the days of imperial
Rome and the spirit of the new world is quite certainly not the
spirit of imperial Rome. The Church of the Papacy therefore is, so
it would seem, a disappearing Church though it may be very long
before it finally disappears. It will last as long as the Latin races
last, but it is doubtful if it will last longer. However long it may
last it may be safely trusted to keep the flame alight and to feed
with the true spiritual food of Christ such people as are not made to
stumble by its very Latin claim to infallibility. It is not likely that it
will ever grip the Anglo-Saxon races and the races descended from
them, because it has never understood, or pretended to understand,
or professed or tried to understand, freedom. Freedom is the thing
which, of all things, it most abhors; consequently it never has and
never can grip those people to whom freedom is as the breath of life.
Therefore since the Anglo-Saxon races, and not the Latin races,
seem to be the most expanding races and to be taking the lead in
preparing the way for the civilization of the future, it would
hardly seem likely that the Roman Church, in spite of all the spiri-
tual treasures with which it is so richly endowed, will be the
Church to shower those treasures on the world that is to be.
The Church of England and other Episcopal Churches in com-
munion with it, both in the United States and in the British Over-
seas Dominions may be considered together, for whether in Great

96
Britain or in America or in the Dominions its essential features are
the same. Its most striking characteristic (whether a strength or a
weakness is doubtful) is its amazing comprehensiveness; and its
strong points are its versatility, its adaptability and, especially in
England, its dignity. In England it is a very national Church. It
is thoroughly English—very dignified and very confused; it wears
that air of superiority which sits so easily on the best English people
and becomes them so well and makes them both honoured and
hated outside their own land. The Church of England has re-
tained the Apostolical Succession and, ipso facto, valid sacra-
ments; unfortunately, however, this essential mark of Catholicism
is recognized and valued by only a minority of its members. It
is thus a hybrid Church, Catholic in essence but embracing a vast
number of people who are avowedly Protestant in spirit. It consists
of many parties of which four stand out conspicuously. The An-
glo-Catholic party is thoroughly Catholic in every respect and, usu-
ally, thoroughly orthodox; if it were not so orthodox it might be of
more use as a light-bringer to the world; it differs from Rome only
on the question of infallibility and the papal supremacy. The High
Church party is perhaps the most representative party because the
most English and the most dignified. It teaches Catholic sacramen-
talism but is not so particular about ritual exactness and ceremo-
nial minutia as the Anglo-Catholics. It is to be seen at its best in
Cathedral Churches and in many Collegiate chapels. The Broad
Church party tends to be modernist and is anti-Catholic in those
points in which Catholicism seems to them to be synonymous with
medievalism. The Low Church party is always anti-Catholic, and
except for a small but very effectual group of evangelicals, gener-
ally unprogressive. This is the definitely protestant party.
The English people are not on the whole, and are not likely to
become, Catholic; partly because they are not by nature mystical or
even religious, and partly because Catholicism is commonly and
inseparably associated in the English mind with Romanism and the
Papal supremacy, which the English people detest. They are more
practical than mystical, and their function in the world is to rule, to
organize and to be dignified, rather than to be religious in the ordi-
nary sense of the word. They are, nevertheless, a world-influence
and inasmuch as their practical work of government and organization
is essential to human evolution, and inasmuch as dignity is a di-

97
vine quality, they are to that extent religious. The Church of
England is too national to become, so long as it remains so na-
tional and continues to be torn asunder by its many parties, a
world-religion except in the sense that it is the religion of a nation
that is a world-power. It has, however, in the past shown itself to
be so versatile and so adaptable that it may in the future shake itself
free from its handicapping fetters and become an important me-
dium for the distribution of the light of Christian truth to its own
descendants and throughout the new world. Its future is an
enigma.
The Old Catholic Church is an amalgam of a Dutch branch of
the Catholic Church, commonly called Jansenist, and a group of
distinguished Catholics in Central Europe who refused to accept
the Papal doctrine of infallibility in 1870. They have retained the
Apostolical Succession and so are a valid part of the Catholic
Church. Their Orders are recognized as valid by high authorities
in the Roman Church. It is from this body that the Liberal Catholic
Church is immediately descended. It is not unlikely that in the
coming decades quite a crop of new Catholic Churches may
spring up all tracing their descent from the Old Catholic Church and
all seeking in some measure to spread abroad that which Rome in
1870 tried to shut up within its own limits. Of the future of these
Churches which have sprung from Rome since 1870 it is not yet
safe to speak. The Old Catholics continue to work in Holland and
in Central Europe but show no signs of spreading beyond Europe.
The Liberal Catholic Church is young and, though not yet ten years
old, has been seriously but wrongfully defamed. It shows many
signs of becoming in the future, both in the old world and in the
new, an influential medium for the distribution of the light; for it
is not only very Catholic and very liberal, but it has also, during the
time that it has been under persecution, extended into four conti-
nents and so organized itself as to be capable of rapid expansion.
The non-episcopal Churches will probably for long continue to
minister to the special types of people who at present form their
congregations. Frankly, their theological background is a little too
old-fashioned to warrant any hope that they are at all likely to ex-
pand very far into the new world. But, though their theology is
antiquated and their religious outlook far removed from the Cath-
olic point of view, they are usually very, very good people and

98
their influence for good, amongst a peculiar type of people, is in-
calculable.

For what especially does the Liberal Catholic Church stand? This
was the question from which these theological sketches started and
which the subsequent chapters have attempted to answer. We are
now in a position to sum up the answer.
The teaching of the Liberal Catholic Church, which, let it never
be forgotten, is not a set of dogmas binding on all its members, but a
body of teaching substantially accepted by the majority of its mem-
bers, is not new. All that we believe about God, about man, about
sin, atonement and salvation has been taught by many teachers in
the past and is now believed by many peoples in the world out-
side the Liberal Catholic Church. The doctrine of Pan-entheism
is universally taught and believed in India; the doctrine of re-
incarnation is one of the oldest and best supported doctrines in the
world; the array of teachers who have in the past supported it, and
who still teach it, is, both in quantity and in quality, very formidable.
The teaching about the Elder Brothers is likewise a very familiar
teaching in India and belief in Their existence is spreading very
rapidly in the West. There is then nothing new in these distinc-
tive Liberal Catholic teachings, but as interpretations of the Chris-
tian religion they are certainly very new. The Liberal Catholic
Church, so far as it accepts these distinctive teachings, seeks to
rescue the Christian religion from its alliance with, not to say its
complete subjection to, the God of Israel, and to release Catholi-
cism from its close and intricate connection with the Holy Scrip-
tures, both Hebrew and Christian. The religion, which Christ
founded and still guides, must be free from such entanglements if
its fair beauty is to be seen in all its splendour by the present and suc-
ceeding generations of seekers after truth.
It is this attempt, of whose ultimate success we are confident, to
free the Catholic religion from its traditional fetters that constitutes
the special and distinguishing characteristic of the Liberal Catholic
Church.
And the Liberal Catholic Church alone of the Catholic
Churches offers the great spiritual treasures of the Catholic Church,
the sacramental grace which proceeds from Christ Himself and
which is His special gift to the world through the Catholic

99
Church, to the whole world and to all people irrespective of creed.
In doing this it does not sacrifice any of the traditional warmth of
colour and ceremonial so distinctive of the Catholic religion, but
is careful to present Christ's gifts to the people in all the richness of
their traditional Catholic setting. But it abolishes the conditions. It
does not make acceptance of a particular Creed, or baptism and con-
firmation, or fasting communion, confession and absolution, still less
acceptance of the papal claim of the Roman Church, conditions of ac-
ceptance, because it has no authority from Our Lord for shutting in
His sacraments behind such barriers, and it does not think it is His
wish that they should be so shut in. His gifts are not to the Church
but to the world through the Church. In His name, therefore, it of-
fers His sacraments to all who will receive them seriously and
reverently; yet it seeks no proselytes either from other Christian
Churches or from the great non-Christian religions of the East.
In the Report of the (Anglican) Archbishops' Committee on
Evangelistic work, issued in connection with, and as a result of,
the great Conference of Anglican bishops held at London in 1920,
we read that “If the Church is to preach to this generation an evan-
gel which will grip, it must come in some real sense as news;
news powerful enough to change the whole mental and spiritual
outlook.” That is a true saying. The world looks for something
that will come as news, for some new thing that will grip, for
“some better thing” that will change the outlook, and for some
fuller teaching than is given to-day by any of the historic Churches
of Christendom. The world has grown, and seeks, and is ready
for, a further unfoldment of the depositum of truth. But where,
we may wonder, outside the Liberal Catholic Church, is there to
be found a teaching which is both ancient and Catholic and will
nevertheless come as news, and will grip? We do not know.
We offer to the world a teaching which we believe is the true
interpretation of the Christian Creed—Pan-entheism, Evolution
through a series of rebirths, the Elder Brothers. We do not claim
any monopoly in this teaching for we have not invented it; but, as
Christian teaching, we are sure it is news; we believe it is true;
and we wait for it to grip.

100
 INDEX
A
Abelard, 44, 45 C
Absolute, 17, 18, 32, 84, 88 Campbell, 44
Adam, 42, 43, 46, 59 Catholic, 1, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
Albigenses, 40 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15,
Alexandria, 22, 26, 39 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 30,
Anastasius, 26 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40,
Anglican Church, 5 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 52, 53,
Anglo-Catholic, 67, 81, 102 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 64, 65,
Anselm, 44, 45 66, 68, 70, 74, 75, 76, 77,
Apollinarius, 25 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 90,
Apostolical, 7, 102, 103 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100,
Aquinas 102, 103, 104, 105, 106
Thomas Aquinas, 40 Chalcedon, 12, 28
Arianism, 22, 25, 26, 29 Christ, 1, 11, 16, 20, 21, 22,
Arians, 33 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
Aristotle, 43 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 43,
Arius, 22, 23, 25, 27 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52,
Articles, The thirty-nine, 13 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 64,
Ascension, 51 65, 66, 70, 77, 78, 79, 80,
Athanasius, 24, 33 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 92, 98,
Athens, 43 101, 105
Atonement, 1, 41, 42, 43, 44, Clement of Alexandria, 39
45, 47, 48, 49, 65, 75 Communicatio idiomatum, 26
Authority, 89 Communion of Saints, 79
Confession, 47, 64, 65, 67,
B 105
baptism, 46, 47, 58, 105 Congregationalists, 31
Bernard, 45 Constantine, 23
Brotherhood, The Great, 73

101
Constantinople, 12, 23, 25, Facts, 2, 53, 54, 78, 84, 90, 91,
26, 27, 76 92, 93
Conversion, 67, 79 Faith, 1, 3, 4, 13, 15, 41, 43,
Copernican astronomy, 18, 76 54, 100
Councils, 12, 13, 24, 28, See Fall, the, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43,
Creeds. See Nicene, Apostles, 48, 58
Athanasian Forgiveness, 45, 64, 74
Crucifixion, inner meaning of, Fragments of God, 49
50 Freedom, 9, 10, 72, 101
Cur Deus Homo, 44 Fundamentalists, 2, 89, 90, 91
Cyril of Alexandria, 26, 27,
42, 76 G
Gnostic sects, 20
D Gnostics, 39, 63
Dale, Dr, 44 God, 2, 1, 3, 4, 10, 11, 13, 14,
Day of Judgment, 83, 84, 86 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
Deposit of Faith, 9 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
Diocletian persecutions, 22 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37,
Dionysius, 40 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,
Divinity of mankind, 30, 36 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 59,
Divinity of the Lord, 5 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 69, 72,
74, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,
E 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 98, 104
Eden, 43 Gore, 80, 81
Ego, 33, 60, 68 Grace, 6, 7, 46, 47, 55, 57, 58,
Elder Brothers, 73, 77, 78, 79, 59, 67, 70, 71, 83, 105
86, 104, 106 Greek, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 24,
Empty Tomb, 5, 53, 54 29, 33, 65
Eucharist, 34, 52, 55, 57
Eutyches, 27, 28 H
Evolution, 3, 10, 19, 35, 37, Hell, 42, 44, 47
38, 39, 48, 51, 52, 53, 56, Heresy, 4, 12, 15, 19, 22, 25,
59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 26, 27, 41, 42, 49, 76, 77,
67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 79, 81
77, 78, 79, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88, 94, 99, 103 I
Iamblichus, 40
F Immaculate Conception, 43
Immanence of God, 17, 18, 31

102
Incarnation, 34, 35, 38, 45, 50, Orthodox Eastern, 46
59, 61, 62, 70, 78, 81, 104 Orthodoxy, 11, 23, 25, 27, 30,
Infallibility, 90, 94, 101, 102, 41, 49, 74, 76, 81
103 Ousia, 21
Initiation, 68, 73
P
K Pan-entheism, 37, 104, 106
Kenosis, 35, 51 Penance, 65, 66
Knights Templars, 40 Personality, 61, 63, 68, 69, 71,
72, 73, 87
L Plotinus, 40
League of Nations, 98 Pope, 59, 90, 95, 101
Leo, the Great, 28, 43 Porphyry, 40
Liberal Catholic Church, 1, 5, Presbyterian, 13
7, 9, 10, 11, 32, 56, 66, 67, Punishment, 14, 42, 64, 86
75, 77, 103, 104, 105 Purgatory, 47
Liberal Catholic Magazine, 3
Logos, The Solar, 18, 19, 32, Q
50, 88 Quicunque Vult, 12, 17, 24,
Lucian, 22, 26 28, 82

M R
Masters, 77 Rashdall, 44
Moberly, Dr, 44, 45 Real Presence, 56, 57
Modernists, 2, 14, 56, 89, 91 Rebirths, 106
Monophysites, 33 Redemption, 37
Monothelites, 33 Reincarnation, 60, 75, 76, 77
Resurrection, 76, 93
N Revelation, 1, 3, 7, 12, 76, 81,
Neo-Platonism, 40 82, 84
Nestorianism, 26, 27, 29, 80 Roman Church, 5, 12, 42, 94,
Nestorians, 27, 33 100, 101, 103, 105
Nestorius, 26, 27 Rosicrucians, The, 40
Nonconformists, 7, 12, 42, 58
S
O Sacraments, 55, 56, 64, 70,
Old Catholic Church, 103 102, 105
Origen, 39, 43 Salvation, 11, 36, 61, 68, 69,
Original Sin, 40, 46, 48, 58 70, 72, 73, 86

103
Satan, 43, 44 Traditionalism, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9
Sin, 4, 33, 34, 35, 42, 43, 44, Transubstantiation, 54
45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 58, Trinity, 15, 17, 18, 24, 26, 33,
59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 38, 50, 82
70, 74, 75, 104
Substance, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, V
23, 28, 33, 55 Vinegar, similie of drop of, 28
Super-consciousness, 60 Virgin Birth, 5, 53, 54
Super-man, 50 Virgin Mary, 26, 54

T W
Teachers, The great, 38, 94, 95 Westminster Confession, 13,
Theotokos, 26, 33 15

104