fired not.

The aimed-at moved away in trance

lipped song.

clemency;

There was Peace on earth; and Silence in the sky:

misery:

smirked 'What?

and Wrong?'

be!'

[The Hibbert Journal]

THE THEOLOGY OF THE PIL GRIM FATHERS

BY H. H. SCULLARD, M.A., D.D.

JUST now when England, Holland, and America are uniting to honor the memory of the Pilgrim Fathers, it is natural to ask again concerning the faith that was in them. How came they to be what they were? What were the things most surely believed among them, and, believing which, they were empowered so to act and suffer that three hundred years after they left these shores millions of their fellows should wish to recall their deeds? The best answer is to be found in the writings of their great teacher, John Robinson.

It is hard for some of us to appreciate the theology of the Pilgrims. We have traveled so far away from their standpoint, and the temper of the times in which we live is different. Some of us wonder how the passengers of the Mayflower succeeded in getting to the other side of the Atlantic with so much theological lumber on board. Yet, lumber or ballast, hindrance or help, they arrived at their desired haven, and became the founders of a new world. Shall we? Is our faith adequate to a venture equally heroic and to a work equally enduring?

They believed in God. Do we? We may claim to have a larger faith, but is it as firm a faith as theirs? In the things of the spirit it is quality rather than size that counts. We have a pathetic confidence in numbers and rejoice in big demonstrations. But the Pilgrims had read their New Testaments, and arrived at another conception of the methods of the Divine operation. They believed in small churches and individual effort, in the weak things of the world, which God had

chosen. It sometimes seems as if we believed in big organizations and a fair show in the flesh. They were Separatists. We are Unionists. They bore witness to the world. We try to govern it. Is it the one and the same Spirit working in them and in us?

And as to the God we believe inhow different are our conceptions from theirs! There is quite enough in popular theological writing to make us doubt whether the God of the Pilgrims is our God. John Robinson's idea of God was that of the great Egoist of the Universe. One can imagine the horror and resentment of those who have been brought up on a diet of Spencerian altruism and mistaken it for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. "That is not the God, and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,' they will exclaim, 'but the teaching of Antichrist selfishness, brute-force, Nietzscheism, diabolism, anything but a truly ethical conception of Deity.' To worship a self-centred God is in their opinion to hand over the world to perdition, so far at least as man can do so. Nevertheless, such was the God in whom these strong, patient, self-sacrificing Pilgrims believed. 'God loveth himself first and most, as the chiefest Good.' Were they right, or are we? or is it a matter of indifference what conception we form? Are we always something better or other than our creed? A gentle and pure-minded Indian, we are told, will often take a strange delight in the savage and repulsive images of Siva.

Unlike Luther and some other of the sixteenth-century reformers, Robinson was a lover of philosophy. To him the universe was a rational order, and 'nothing true in right reason, and sound philosophy, is, or can be, false in divinity.' There was little of the mys tic about him, except in the sense that vital religion is always mystical, and still less of the fanatic. Every doctrine

must justify itself in the court of Reason, or at least be accepted on rationally approved authority. And from this point of view is there not much to be said for his conception of God? If God be the first and ultimate reality, must He not be self-contained? 'Of Him and through Him and unto Him are all things.' God does not exist for any end outside Himself: He is Himself the Creator of ends. He does not exist primarily for the good of the creature: the creature exists for Him. The modern humanitarian notion that the goal of the universe is the well-being of man would have seemed to Robinson an impious inversion of the truth. God is supreme in his own dominions or He is not God. A finite God is no God at all, but a pale projection of man's fancy, creating a God in the image of self, or, as Robinson might have put it, 'making a bridge of his own shadow only to fall into the water.' The glory of God is infinitely more than the good of men. It is the cause and ground and substance of all good. How, then, can a rational God love men more than He loves Himself? The love of God for men is the love of his own work in them. God loves all good things, 'as he communicates with them, less or more, the effects of his own goodness.'

And why should we deny to God what we wish to secure for the lowliest of men, the privilege of self-realization and self-expression? If God were not always realizing Himself in the creature He would cease to be God and become as one of us. Unlimited selfrealization is the prerogative of Deity, a prerogative not laid aside at the Incarnation, but finding its supreme vindication in the Cross. But is not the essence of the Divine character selfsacrifice? I do not think Robinson would have said so. He would have scrutinized the word much more closely than we are in the habit of doing before

applying it to a holy and omnipotent God. Sacrifice is a dangerous word to use of Deity without qualification or comment. There are meanings of the word which we have no right to accept in thinking about God. 'God so loved the world that He gave his onlybegotten Son.' But love is more than sacrifice, and giving cannot impoverish God.

The 'sacrifice' of God might have meant not simply the condemnation of the world, which according to Christian theology it did, but the ruin of the world, which it was meant to avert. God loved Himself before He loved the world. Creation and redemption are alike the consequence of the Divine self-love. So the same Evangelist, who speaks of the love of God for the world, records the prayer of Jesus, which looks beyond all sacrifice and all redemption to a far-off Divine event, which is neither primarily the salvation of the world nor the perfecting of the Church, but the revelation of the glory of God -"That they may behold my glory which Thou hast given me, for Thou lovest me before the foundation of the world.' The glory of God and not the salvation of the race was the prime object of the Incarnation and the Cross.

So at least it seemed to Robinson. This was the determinative thought in all that he wrote a God glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing whatsoever He pleased in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. There were no limits to His power. The wills of men He turned whithersoever He would, but always, whether in renewing or in hardening, without doing violence to human freedom. Even sin was no obstacle, but only an occasion for the manifestation of the Divine glory. With relentless logic, shattering the distinction between 'permitting' and 'ordering'—

for how can God 'permit' what He is powerless to prevent?- he boldly asserts that 'God orders both the sin and the sinner to His own supernatural ends.' Limitations of knowledge or of power, whether proceeding from the Divine nature or from the Divine will, were derogatory to the glory of God. The Moral Governor of the Universe never for one moment, through lack of power or lack of knowledge, lost control of the vast system of discordant and conflicting wills of men. It was His all-seeing eye and all-embracing purpose which directed the whole course of human history. Nothing was done without Him. Even a limited atonement appeared to the Pilgrims more tolerable than the conception of a God powerless to achieve his ends. They believed in a strong God, and so were strong. They believed that God was free, and so became the advocates of human freedom.

But the God who was strong enough to achieve his own ends was able also to reveal his will to men. This had been done once for all in the Bible, which was a convenient summary, but not a complete transcript, of all the oracles of God. Many of the words of men inspired by the Spirit of God had not been committed to writing. What the Canonical Scriptures contained was all that was necessary for 'salvation' and 'obedience.' And these oracles are living oracles, and so, though none may add to them, they have the power of revealing more of the will of God, as men may be prepared to receive it. There is no more frequently quoted sentence in Robinson's works than the words of his parting address to the Pilgrims on leaving Holland, "The Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of His holy Word.' The Lutherans and the Calvinists had alike forgotten this, and so came to 'a period' in religion. Every

thing was being stereotyped. In England the laxer Church party was turning the Gospel into 'an easier law,' and the Puritan party into a harder law, both forgetting that the Gospel is not a law of commandments contained in ordinances, but a law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. Against this perversion of the truth Robinson protested. There were no final and infallible interpreters of the Word of God. Let every man remember that 'the Word of God neither came from him nor to him alone.' Least of all were his own interpretations a law to the Church he served. He urged the Pilgrims 'to follow him no further than he followed Christ, and if God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of his to be as ready to receive it as ever we were to receive any truth by his ministry.'

As compared with some of the utterances of his Puritan contemporaries and successors, this is the language of liberalism and of liberty. Moreover, Robinson was prepared to allow that all parts of the Bible itself were not of equal value. No word of Scripture should be neglected, but there were 'main truths,' and 'the Gospel is the more principal part of the Word.' Yet Robinson has not the boldness of some of the earlier Reformers - Luther, for example, and Tyndale-in his treatment of Scripture. The hand of Cartwright was heavy upon the men of his generation. He never worked out his idea of progressive revelation or distinguished sufficiently between the Eternal Spirit and the changing forms. The New Testament was too much of a copy book even to Robinson. But then it is given to very few, if any, of the enunciators of great principles to apply them consistently and completely in every particular. How far some of us still are, in spite of all that our New Testament scholars have

lone for us, from realizing the progresive character of New Testament reveation, and from laying hold of the Gospel beyond the gospels. We are not s advanced as Tyndale was, and the attle of the Reformation is still being ought on the field of New Testament cholarship.

But if Robinson had not the spiritual enius of Tyndale, he had great openess of mind, wide knowledge of Scripure, and much common sense in aplying it. He had discovered in it the rue note of inspiration, which is certiude "The truth of God goes not by eradventures, neither needs it any uch paper-shot as likelihoods are to ssault the adversary withal.' Probbility was not for him the very guide of life. The will of God could be nown, "To the law and to the testinony: if they do not speak according o this word surely there is no morning or them.' But the morning had come or the Pilgrims, and theirs was the onfidence of those who were walking n the light of the Lord.

It was also a great advantage to hese pioneers in religion that they knew what they meant by the Church. In the Church of England, from which hey sorrowfully withdrew, they found conflicting views as to what constituted he visible Church, and none of these eemed to them to agree with Scripture. It has always been the misfortune of the Church of England that it has had no consistent teaching regarding the visible Church, and the lack of it is one of the barriers to the reunion so many desire. Is it not possible for Christian people, who to-day, by a curious coincidence, are honoring one of the greatest of the Separatists, and thanking the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England for their attempts to reunite the Churches, to tell us plainly what the visible Church really is? The Bishops have certainly

not made it easier for us to get at the real doctrine of the Church of England by distinguishing the 'universal' from the 'Catholic' Church and assuring us that the latter does not yet exist.

The idea of the visible Church, which the Pilgrims had, may seem to some narrow, unpractical, and insufficient for the needs of our time, but it meant much to them and may not be without instruction for us. "Many men have written much about the notes and marks of the true Church, by which it is differenced and discerned from all other assemblies: and many others have sought for it, as Joseph and Mary did for Christ, with heavy hearts, (Luke ii, 48), that they might there rest under the shadow of the wings of the Almighty, enjoying the promises of his presence and power.' . . .‘I had thought the Churches and people of God should have been known by His dwelling among them, and walking there, and by Christ's presence in the midst of them.' If that sign of the visible Church is present, what other sign is necessary? If it is absent, what other will suffice? The visible Church becomes recognized by all just in the same way as an individual Christian. Labels are no more necessary in the one case than in the other.

The unity of the Church according to Robinson, perhaps with the Highpriestly prayer of Christ in mind, was qualitative and not quantitative. The visible Church was 'one' because it was one in 'kind' and one in ‘nature,' not because it had one visible head or one common external organization. 'All true Churches from the beginning to the end of the world are one in nature and essential constitution'; and that which constitutes a Church is the meeting of Christian men in the name of Christ, the actual fellowship of those who have made a public covenant with Christ to do all things to the glory of