It has been held that religion is in its essence an affair of the heart, and that theological beliefs and sacred rites had their roots in religious emotion. This view was so far favoured by the genius of language that it coined the terms Pietas and Frömmigkeit as synonyms for religion. The view is also common to a number of philosophical theories which have been grouped under the rubric of ‘the aesthetic interpretation.’ And two of these have had a large vogue in ancient and modern times. The most celebrated is the doctrine that fear is the spring of religion—which might even be reckoned the night-mare of the human race—and that its observances are the measures which man has devised with a view to protect himself against the real and the imaginary perils of his lot. It was made famous by Lucretius, it was revived by Hobbes and Hume, and Mach takes credit for having rediscovered it. His little son, the scientist tells us, brought to him a young sparrow which had fallen out of its nest, and it was resolved Bin a family council to try to bring it up. No difficulty was found in feeding it: it was offered insects, and instinct saw to it that they were devoured; and so the bird throve, and grew in size and intelligence. Then another tendency manifested itself:

By day it was very trustful and amiable, but in the evening its behaviour regularly changed. It became fearful, sought out the highest perches in the room, and only settled when it found that it was prevented by the ceiling from mounting any higher. When darkness came on, it was completely transformed. If any one approached it, its feathers bristled, and it began to sputter, and to show signs of terror and a veritable fear of goblins. This was obviously useful for a creature which in normal circumstances might expect at any moment to be swallowed by some monster. The behaviour strengthened me in the opinion that the fears which I had noticed in my children—as when in the semidarkness one could take a coal-scuttle with an open lid for a yawning dragon—were hereditary and not acquired.1

The inference drawn by Mach from these observations was that Gespensterfurcht has been the mother of the religions, and he added that it seemed to him probable that, notwithstanding the praiseworthy efforts of the Higher Criticism, a considerable time will elapse before reason proves to be a match for the instinctive fear that peoples the darkness with terrors.

The second of the ‘aesthetic’ explanations is due to Schleiermacher, who thought that the world of culture, which was unable to agree on a theological creed, might at least consent to cultivate the spirit of piety. Religion, he said, was neither metaphysical doctrine nor morality, but a feeling for the Infinite.

‘The common element,’ he says, ‘in all devout experience, and consequently the essence of piety, is that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent—i.e. as dependent on God. To seek and find the Infinite and Eternal in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all action and suffering, and only to possess and to know life itself by immediate feeling in relation to this Being—that is religion. To find the Infinite is to satisfy the longing soul, and when it hides itself the soul is in bondage and travail, distress and death.’2

There is a third theory, of a cognate type, which is entitled to more consideration than it has hitherto received. If religion be essentially a matter of feeling, and if we are to pitch on a single feeling as the spring and the soul of the religious life, a good deal can be said in support of the primacy of love. The religious instinct involves an impulse towards the Divine Being; and the instinct therefore may be interpreted as a rudimentary form of love. And this doctrine has been definitely propounded. Plotinus taught that as the soul is different from God, while yet it is derived from Him, it necessarily loves Him. ‘Every soul in its natural character,’ he says, ‘loves God and desires to be one with Him: after the manner of a maiden—the love of the Beautiful for the Beautiful.’3 ‘The first appetite of man,’ says Jeremy Taylor, ‘is to be like God, in order to which we have naturally no instrument but love and the consequents thereof.’ ‘Disobedience is contrary to the natural love we bear to God. And from this first appetite of man to be like God, and the first natural instrument of it, love, descend all the first obligations of religion.’4

On the general question it may be said that religion cannot be reduced to feeling, and that a fortiori it cannot be reduced to any single feeling. The service which was rendered by Lucretius and Schleiermacher was to draw attention to factors which have played an important part, and their mistake was to exaggerate their importance. It is unquestionable that the spirit of fear has been an inspiring and moulding principle, while the sense of dependence may not less be regarded as fundamental. But there is good ground also for holding that there has been a great deal in the religious behaviour of mankind which is most naturally explained by the theory that man can love God, and that it has been a very common thing to love God. There are types of piety in which the love of God has been a prominent feature, and others of which it has been the distinctive badge.

I

Love has been referred to as a feeling, but it is a great deal more. In popular usage the accent chiefly falls on the feeling-element, which is also known as affection, tenderness, or attachment. This is closely bound up with joy in the object, and love has even been identified with the pleasurable experience. ‘Love,’ says Spinoza, ‘is nothing but pleasure accompanying the idea of an external cause,’ and in accordance with this he defines love of God as ‘the joy which is felt when things are contemplated with the accompaniment of the idea of God as their cause.’5 But there is more in love than in joy, as there is more in the hand-clasp and the embrace than there is in the gladness that is felt in the presence of a friend. And joy may disappear, while yet love may survive as pity or compassion. Joy is in fact only one of a group of emotions which attend on love, and which take their orders from it. ‘In all love,’ says Mr. Shand, ‘there is an organisation of the lesser systems of many emotions—as those of fear, anger, joy, and sorrow. In the presence of anything we love we are disposed to feel joy, and in prolonged absence from it, sorrow, and at the suggestion of danger to feel the fear of losing it, and when it is attacked to feel anger at the assailant.’6 On the conative side love exhibits a remarkable combination of interestedness and disinterestedness. It appears to be equally possessed by the instinct of self-affirmation and by the sense of pure obligation. For it has an appropriating impulse which cherishes great ambitions for the self, and also an expropriating impulse which must lay something, and can ask to lay everything, upon the altar of sacrifice. The primary impulse of love is to seek to be united to its object. it longs for the presence of the object, and seeks to be joined with it in an intimate and enduring union. Amor non quiescit nisi in amato. The appropriating impulse may take the from of a demand for the exclusive possession of the object, but it may also be content with a special or privileged tenure. This aspect is illustrated in the jealousy of a mother’s love, in the ideal that has been formed of the bosom-friend, and above all in the imperious claims that are recognised in the bond of marriage. On the disinterested side the impulse is to give all which is needed or valued by the object beloved, and which it is in the power of loving hands to bestow.

Of these two aspects of the paradox of love, one was emphasised by Plato in the Symposium, the other by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians. In Plato’s view love was a craving for treasures of which the soul is in want; and so he said that its mother was a beggar, while its father was a king. The good for which the soul hungers is beauty. There is a sensebound love, inspired by the vulgar Aphrodite, which pursues earthly shadows and base counterfeits, and there is a spiritual love, inspired by the heavenly Aphrodite, which follows after the things divinely fair that have their seat in the eternal world. And love being desire, it followed that it would cease with fruition. It is not permitted to suppose that Paul had read the dialogue, but it is at least a curious coincidence that he was moved to compose a hymn in praise of love—as if struck by Plato’s remark that while some had written well about salt, none had written adequately of love; that he expressed his loathing of the sin against nature which is so unpleasantly prominent in Plato’s discussions; that he emphatically denied that love is destined to vanish away; and that he made the distinctive feature to be, not love’s hungry craving, but its self-forgetting and gracious ministries. Its essence is that it ‘suffereth long, and is kind—beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things’ (1 Cor. xiii. 7). If anything be missed in the immortal panegyric it is that St. Paul only dwells on the love which seeks to bless man, and says nothing of its endeavours and its joys when, as in his own experience, it enters the heavenly world and lays hold of God and His Christ.

This general pattern of love, now, has been abundantly reproduced in the web of religious experiences and activities. There are numerous and persistent phenomena of the sacred sphere concerning which it can only be said that, if they have not been inspired by love, they have at least been very successful imitations of the ways in which love is wont to utter itself. The feeling of tenderness for a divine object has found some expression even in the religions of the lower culture, while every higher religion has had its sacred literature in which fervent profession is made of devotion to the Divine Being. This divine love, next, has been true to type in that it has exemplified the organising power which the psychologist ascribes to the sentiment. It has been waited on by the customary staff of emotions, whereby its influence has been greatly extended, at the same time that the things done in its name, and especially by anger and fear, have not seldom brought it into ill repute. Further, the paradox of love has been reflected throughout the whole range of religious history. Divine love, like the earthly kind, seeketh her own, and also she seeketh not her own. Worship bears the impress of appropriating love, as the worshipper seeks to draw near to God, and to enjoy some measure of union and communion with Him. This love could be selfishly exclusive—as in the demand for a God who confines. His favours to a particular nation, or shows Himself a respecter of persons; and when the horizon and the sympathies were widened, the religious heart continued to feel that the Lord could be claimed as ‘my God’—a God who cares for the worshipper as much as if He had only one in the world to care for, and who pledges to him as the token of His reciprocal love the resources of infinite power and wisdom. Nor has love forgotten, when it was touched with piety, that it is its vocation to bless as well as its prerogative to be blessed. Ever since man found a God that he could love, he has asked himself what he might do as a fit expression of his devotion. When it was believed that divine beings had much the same wants as human beings, it was not unusual to show affection by providing them with food, raiment and shelter; and when God was known to be the author and the dispenser of all blessings, and so in need of nothing, it was still felt that gifts or services should be offered which had the use and the grace of the love-token. Man holds stiffly by his possessions; and when it appears that at one time or another he has been willing to make a surrender of everything to his God—his stuff and his gold, his health, his ease, his liberty, his nearest and dearest, yea and his own life also, we may well marvel at the strength of the motives which have been able thus to bind the strong man, and to spoil him of his goods. And while there have been other and more constant motives, it is obvious that some of the most impressive of the sacrifices have shown the signs of love’s handiwork. If on a general view of the facts of history and experience religion has been most conspicuously a venture of faith and expectation, it has also had as one of its aspects the aspiration of the human heart after communion with a God worthy of love. The religious life of the race might even be described as the thread of divine romance which runs through the long-drawn acts and the crowded scenes of the drama of human history; and though the secular historian naturally discovers the central movement in the progress of civilisation and the development of political institutions, it is not incredible that, in the intention of the divine author of the strange, eventful piece, the fundamental and unifying theme has been the history of man’s quest of God, and of God’s quest of the love, the trust and the obedience of man.

The sentiment of divine love has varied widely in the different religious systems, and especially at the different levels of spiritual experience. At the natural standpoint, represented by man as man and by the national community, the sentiment is weak; it has been prominent in the world of the disciples and converts; and it has perhaps been the most marked and constant feature of the piety of the saints. We proceed to examine it at the three principal stages of spiritual development which may be distinguished as the natural level, the regenerate level, and the saintly level.

II

Religion, as was observed, has had a place among the interests of man as man and of the natural community. And, as we have seen, the point of view of these subjects has been essentially practical—the test of a religion being its profitableness. Nevertheless both have shown that sacred objects had an in-dependent hold on their affections, and have made some response in the forms that are habitual to love.

Man as man, it is generally recognised, has some capacity for disinterested love which forms a pleasing foil to the general tenor of his behaviour. ‘While in normal individuals,’ writes Mr. Shand, ‘the great principle of self-love or the self-regarding sentiment is generally pre-eminent, this is joined in subtle and intimate ways with a variety of disinterested sentiments: as conjugal and parental love, filial affection, friendship, the sentiment for some game or sport, and in the higher characters one or other of the great impersonal sentiments, patriotism and the love for some science or art.’7 Regard for self-interest is the badge of human behaviour, but it is nevertheless found to be accompanied by a strain of disinterested affection in all human relationships, and even in lower spheres. The relations of man with the lower animals might be taken as the extreme example of the ruthless pursuit of private ends in disregard of the interests of other beings, and yet it is undeniable that man has kindly feelings towards the creatures, and that there are men and women who find an engrossing mission in the prevention of cruelty to animals. And it would be indeed surprising if man, whose family life is based on affection, who can be unselfish in friendship, can develop into an ardent patriot, and can even show genuine attachment to the animals which he hunts and enslaves and feeds for the slaughter, should be unable to think of aught but himself and his interests when he has to do with the Supreme Being. Mr. Shand does not include the love of God and divine things in his list of the disinterested sentiments, but this may have been an accidental omission from a list which was intended to be illustrative and not exhaustive. At any rate it would be as absurd as it would be uncharitable—if we may illustrate from the above list—to credit some disinterestedness to the multitude which gathers at the race meeting or the football field, and to deny it to the companies which flock to the place where prayer is wont to be made, and which on occasion join in the song:

I joy’d when to the house of God,

Go up, they said to me.

Many Englishmen have been very fond of fox-hunting and of cricket, but many of ‘the higher characters’ have also been warmly attached to the Church of England; and if some have ardently loved Art and Science for their own sake, so also have there been those in every generation who have loved God for His own sake.

The love of God which is met with on the natural level is largely implicit, and it is little vocal. In the affective aspect it has most in common with the sentiment of loyalty which the good citizen feels towards his king and country, the faithful servant towards an honoured master, and the right thinking man towards his benefactor. The felt need of giving expression to this sentiment of loving loyalty has been one of the motives of the common worship: even when large deductions are made for empty formality, ceremonial religion has still the aspect of a great demonstration of devotion; and it may be said that if any earthly monarch received ovations remotely comparable to the professions of love and gratitude which are offered week by week to God and to Jesus Christ, his name would be embalmed in history as that of the best-loved king that was ever enthroned in the affections of a people. The general religious sentiment has also included an element of filial attachment, though it may perhaps be observed that the popular mind has never been greatly impressed by the idea of God as the Heavenly Father. It may be that father-hood has been felt to be too little awe-inspiring to do justice to the majesty of the Divine Being, or else that on the average it has been too little sympathetic and friendly to be an adequate symbol of the loving-kindness of God. Of the reactions of love it is the self-affirming impulse which has been most in evidence on the natural plane. The natural man has found it easy to say, ‘my God,’ ‘my religion,’ ‘my Church.’ And he has also felt in some degree the impulse to show forth his love by doing something for his God. Since, however, it is a hard saying that the due response is obedience in life and deed to the holy and loving will, there has been a persistent tendency to substitute ceremonial observance and orthodox belief for this exacting service. It has to be added that there are grounds for holding that the sentiment of divine love is more intense and more deeply rooted than appears on the surface, inasmuch as the tender emotion is normally quiescent—its vitality and strength being only revealed in extraordinary circumstances, and notably when one loses, or is threatened with the loss of, the object beloved. The husband and father may only realise in the hour of the power of death that a wife or a child was dear to him as his own soul; a citizen may first come to know himself as a self-sacrificing patriot when his country is threatened by conquest and ruin; and in like fashion the ordeal of persecution has shown that in some of those who seemed to be common clay there slumbered the passion and the devotion of the martyr of Heaven. And similarly a godless philosophy has revealed to some on whom their religion seemed to sit lightly that the loss of their God would be felt as the blotting out of the sun of the soul, and as the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep.

The social group of the tribe or nation has shown indubitable traces of the sentiment of divine love. This was indeed flatly denied by Augustine. The distinguishing mark of the earthly state, he says, is a self-love which passes over into contempt of God, while the mark of the celestial state is a love of God which involves contempt and suppression of self. The political society, he adds, is by nature vainglorious, it lusts after dominion and spoil, it reckons temporal goods the highest, and its thoughts of God are vain imaginations.8 But while these observations are not groundless, we may hold with Hosea that a nation was given a heart wherewith to love God, and that whether it choose a noble or an ignoble object its service of its God has some of the characters of love. There has been a good deal in national religion which is to be set down to spontaneous affection for the objects of faith, and to the pleasure in holy things which is its natural accompaniment. The nation as such took much to do in earlier times with the erection and the adornment of temples and churches—to which it lavishly contributed out of its aesthetic genius as well as from its material resources; and this work was usually carried out, not in the spirit of the contractor who tries to do things cheaply, but in the spirit of the monarch who ordains that a magnificent subject shall he magnificently treated. If the nation, like the ordinary individual, finds it hard to ‘get to God’ Himself, it has at least shown considerable attachment to the things which might be called the divine appurtenances—as holy places, holy seasons, and holy customs and traditions. Sometimes it has appeared that it counted holy places among the most precious things in the world, as in the medieval Crusades, when throughout two centuries the nations of Europe poured out their treasure and their blood in the desire to vindicate the honour of Christ by wresting the Holy City out of the hands of the infidel. This sentiment would appear to have weakened much in recent times, for the medieval dream was fulfilled in the course of the great war, and did not excite very much interest. The explanation, however, may rather be that there was so much else to think of, and also that it has come to be thought that love to Christ is less appropriately shown by conquering a country in His name than by subscribing money for carrying out His commands in the evangelisation of the world and the performance of the works of mercy. Nor may it be assumed that the religious passion which could once flame out in Europe has ceased to exist. The strength of religious feeling, as was said, is not known until it is challenged, and the toleration which is the rule in civilised states has induced the quiescence of emotion that is too readily mistaken for coldness and indifference. In modern times, however, there have been two direct attacks on the faith of a nation which have put its love to a crucial test. At one stage the French Revolution was identified with the proposal to abolish Christianity; but while its principles of liberty and equality have fermented ever since in the life of the European peoples, the project of the dethronement of Christ ranks as one of the memorable historical fiascos. The challenge has been repeated in Russia in more savage form, and while the situation is obscure it is at least clear that many waters have not quenched the divine love that is native to the deep heart of the martyr-nation of Europe. And probably there is light on the political future of Russia in the text which declares that ‘every one that falleth on that stone shall be broken to pieces; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will scatter him as dust.’ (Lk. xx. 18.)

III

The sentiment of divine love has been much more marked at the regenerate level of experience which, as was said, is represented in one way by the convert, and in another by the ecclesiastical community. And this love has been of various kinds which correspond to the natural forms of affection. In Old Testament piety the characteristic kind was a transfigured form of the loyalty of the devoted subject or of the faithful servant. Christianity was a gospel of divine sonship, which fostered in the disciple the spirit of filial piety toward the reconciled God and Father. It is, however, in the form of the loving cult of a Saviour-friend that the affective type of religion has been most conspicuously developed. This has had three notable illustrations, and they are to be spoken of with reverence, for they were after the manner of the anointing by Mary of Bethany, and the world has been filled with the odour of the ointment.

1. Buddhism was made popular by summing up the requirements in loving devotion to the founder. Primitive Buddhism may be thought to have been nothing less than an outrage on the human heart, since it left man without a God to love and trust; but the heart was avenged on the system when the Buddha was rescued from annihilation, and was him-self installed as the heavenly friend of the sorrow-stricken children of men.

‘I do not stay away from him,’ said an aged disciple, ‘from Gotama of great wisdom, who taught me the Damma. I see him in my mind and with my eye, vigilant night and day. Whichever way he goes the same I am inclined. As I am worn out and feeble my body does not go there, but in my thoughts I always go there, for my mind is joined to him.’9

Conservative thinkers held that the person of the teacher had no place among the saving provisions of Buddhism, and that the doctrine was everything. To a devotee who expressed his longing to see and commune with the Exalted One, the Lord himself replied: ‘What hast thou to do with this poor frame of mine? He that seeth the norm, he it is that seeth me.’10 But it was as the gospel of the heavenly friend that Buddhism came to be generally understood and lived, and it is in this form that it is preached at this day. ‘Tell me,’ said a Buddhist prison-chaplain to a penitent murderer, ‘why you have become a Christian? Christianity is after all nothing but morals. Now Buddha receives you with love and mercy.’11

2. A similar development took place in Brahmanism, where it had a better theoretical justification. For in typical Hindu thinking God was the alpha and the omega; and if this be so, something of the divine reality appears in all finite things, and whatsoever is pre-eminent in beauty and excellence may be revered as a special manifestation of the Infinite. The object in which faith thus ‘saw the unseeable’ might be one of the ancient divinities, or a hero in whom, as in Rama and Krishna, the Supreme Being was believed to have been incarnated for a special purpose.

‘Thou didst lay thy hand,’ says a worshipper of Siva, ‘on the foolish wanderer. The Lord, who wears on his head the cassia flower, honey-sweet, sought me out and entered my soul. In bodily form he stood before me and my soul melted. He drove away my sin and filled me with sweetness.’12

In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna gives instruction in the chief articles of faith and duty, and goes on to declare that loving devotion to his own person is the fulfilling of the law, Others found in Rama the God in whom all their desire was fulfilled:

As the bride looks back to her mother’s house

And goes, but with dragging feet,

Even so it is with my soul, O Lord,

That thou and I may meet.

As a child cries out and is sore distressed

When its mother it cannot see,

As a fish that is taken from out the wave,

So ’tis, says Tuka, with me.13

3. The Christian salvation has often been concentrated into the love of Him who is at once Saviour and Friend. The craving for a divine object which shall be easily apprehensible and supremely lovable was uniquely satisfied by the vision of Jesus Christ. He was, to begin with, a real person, vouched for by those whose eyes had seen and whose hands had handled. And those who beheld the vision hastened, like the wise men of the East, to offer Him their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, being drawn to Him by the threefold cord of goodness, beauty and suffering. They felt the spell of a goodness whose like the world not seen, and of which it had scarcely dreamed until it saw it wrought out in His deeds and His sufferings. In Jesus the purity and the austerity of holiness were joined with the tenderness and compassion of one who cared not for Himself, but went about doing good, and who while loving all had a peculiar tenderness for His friends, for the little children, for the sufferers the bereaved, for the weeping Magdalenes and the returning prodigals, and for those who in their ignorance hated Him and despitefully used Him and persecuted Him. In this goodness, further, there was the spell of beauty, and Jesus was greeted as ‘the chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely.’ Above all, there was the magnetism of the Cross. Goodness and beauty can always reckon on a certain loving response, but chiefly the goodness that is oppressed, and the beauty that is marred by hatred and cruelty. And the story of the life of Christ was the unparalleled tragedy. His purpose had been to bring in a Kingdom of God in which men would love God as their Father, and one another as brethren; love to man with love to God had been the spring of His mission and of His every deed; and the earthly recompense was that a plot was formed to destroy Him, and that He was put to death with the worst insults and tortures as a blasphemer and a malefactor.

The Christianity which centres in the love of Jesus has been a perennial form of Christian piety. It had a prototype in the disciple who leaned on Jesus’ breast at supper. It was represented by many of the Fathers, especially in the West. It was both the poetry and the piety of the contemplative life of the cloister. It was favoured by the Church as being great enough to satisfy the desires of those who sought perfection, and also simple enough to become the possession and the inspiration of the good Christians of the workaday world. It is probable that the Church came to insist on the celibacy of the clergy, not merely because the system was calculated to produce servants who would serve the institution with singleness of heart, but also because it was thought that the Christ would be more devotedly loved when there was neither wife nor child to share His claim on the treasury of the affections. Among the common people the love of Jesus was fostered by the witness of the Christian Year, and by the multiplied emblems of the Passion; while the appeal for heavenly affection and trust was reinforced by the exaltation of the Blessed Virgin, who could be loved as belonging to the sphere of Godhead, while she was the symbol of all that motherhood has meant in a selfish and tragical world. The Middle Age had its developments which are not unjustly described as a revival of Judaistic and pagan elements, but it also had spiritual revivals in which there was a fresh baptism with the Holy Ghost and with fire, and the watchword of some of these movements, notably the Franciscan, was, ‘Back to the love of Jesus.’ One characteristic feature was the sorrowful and sympathetic contemplation of the events of the Passion. The other was the tender love which Bernard of Clairvaux expressed in the hymn that still ascends as incense from the rising to the setting of the sun:

Jesus, the very thought of Thee

With sweetness fills my breast;

But sweeter far Thy face to see,

And in Thy presence rest.

The same kind of piety has also flourished richly in the soil of Protestantism. The chief figures of the Reformation, indeed, while insisting on a personal relation to Christ as a vital note of true religion, deemed the Christ of the threefold office too great to be readily treated as a bosom friend, and the chief emphasis was laid, not on love, but on faith and the service of new obedience, as the essential elements of the human response. Luther was impatient, and even scornful, of the disciple who showed his love by weeping at the Cross, and being angry with Judas and the Jews, and he declared it to be much more urgent to claim the benefits of the sacrifice for sin, and to be delivered from its power.14 In the sub-Reformation period, and in the ensuing centuries, Christianity has tended to assume the simplified form of the love of Jesus in a variety of situations—notably in the heat of strife and persecution, under the reign of an unspiritual orthodoxy, in the quickening of a spiritual revival, and in the period of theological confusion and bewilderment. There were Protestants who wearied of Roman polemics and ecclesiastical politics, and whom men praised for preaching the Christ who had made them to lie down in green pastures, and who led them by the still waters. And Marion Harvey spoke for many of the martyrs, when she was led to execution from the Tol-booth: ‘I hear the voice of my Beloved saying unto me, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.”’ When Lutheran religion had run to a pugnacious and barren orthodoxy in the course of the seventeenth century, it was rebuked and refreshed by the spiritual revival embodied in Pietism. When in the eighteenth century English Protestantism had fallen to its lowest ebb, John Wesley stirred afresh the religious heart of his people. And in each case the core of the invitation was to accept Christ and to live with Him as the Saviour-friend. When Wesley visited Moravia he collected testimonies of the kind which were after his own heart. One may be quoted as typical for both schools of piety:

‘On Sunday,’ said Zacharias Neisser, ‘I went to church, and while we were singing these words, “Wir glauben auch an Jesu Christ,” I clearly saw Him as my Saviour. I wanted immediately to be alone, and to pour out my heart before Him. My soul was filled with thankfulness, and I had a full assurance that my Beloved was mine and I was His, which has continued to this day. I see by a clearer light what is pleasing to Him, and I do it continually in love. I receive from Him daily peace and joy, and I have nothing to do but praise Him.’15

The Evangelical party in the Church of England laid the same stress on the realisation of the presence of Jesus, and the cultivation of the heavenly friendship. The best known of its spokesmen was Cowper’s friend, the curate of Olney, ‘John Newton, clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, who was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy.’ The Evangelical was the trustee of the theology of the Reformation, and he could be much in polemics against the Papacy. But Newton wrote a hymn which is placed beside St. Bernard’s:

How sweet the name of Jesus sounds

In a believer’s ear!

It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,

And drives away his fear.

In more recent developments there has been a wide-spread tendency to commend Christianity in the form of loving attachment to Jesus. Modern evangelicalism does not feel entirely comfortable with the traditional scheme of doctrines, but it has still been very sure of its ground in its appeal to trust Jesus and to live in loving communion with the glorified Lord, and it has found that a large response has continued to be made to this appeal. It has also seemed to many that the best way of approach to a world lying in unbelief and half-belief was to declare that Christ is Himself the substance of the gospel, and to claim for Him the reverence and the hero-worship which the human heart is ready to accord to the greatest—and this with the hope that those who, like Thomas, company with Him and follow Him will end like the apostle by confessing, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Nor may it be doubted that the type of piety which clings to Jesus as the Saviour-friend is still a very important element in the life of the Protestant Church and of the typical congregation. It may have been declining—for there has been a reaction against sentiment of all kinds, and in any case a growing dislike to appear sentimental. But this sentiment is still very articulate. It is vocal with one manner of speech at a tumultuous revival meeting, and with another at a gracious Keswick Convention. And there are also many in wider circles who love and are silent. As St. Bernard said, it is their secret.

IV

The sentiment of divine love, which is at least implicit in the inferior religious subjects, and which has deeply coloured the piety of the religious community, has been the most conspicuous of the distinguishing marks of sainthood. Especially is this true of the Mystics narrowly so-called. ‘Le Mysticisme,’ says Joly, ‘c’est l’amour de Dieu.’ For the neo-Platonist the saint was ‘a spirit in love.’ ‘In Mystical Theology,’ says St. Francis de Sales, ‘the soul holds loving converse with God in His loving-kindness to the end that it may unite itself with Him.’16

The experience of the saints has exemplified in striking forms what we have called the pattern of love. The tenderness and the zeal have had the strength of a grand passion. And the sacred passion has combined in the most intense form the interested and the disinterested impulses of love. ‘The two spirits,’ says John of Ruysbroeck, ‘our own spirit and the spirit of God, yearn each for the other in love. Each demands of the other all that it is, and each offers to the other all that it is, and invites to all that it is. These two, God’s grasp and His gift, our craving and our giving back, these fulfil love.’17 It has boldly pressed its claim to possess its object, and laid upon it its annexing grasp. But not less has it revealed itself in its self-surrendering and self-divesting aspiration. ‘That which is best,’ says the Theologia Germanica, ‘should be the dearest of all things to us; and in our love to it neither helpfulness nor unhelpfulness, advantage nor injury, gain nor loss, honour nor dishonour, praise nor blame, nor anything of the kind should be regarded, but what is in truth the noblest and the best of all things, and that for no other cause than that it is the noblest and the best.’18 The saints have vied with one another in protestations that, though their love might be enriched by gratitude, it was not purchased by favours or dependent on promises. They could cleave to God when He hid His face from them; they could welcome every form of calamity and suffering as putting them to the proof, and making them more worthy of Him who first loved them; they declared that God was Heaven, and Heaven was God, and some were very bold and said that they would love and praise Him even in Hell. The climax of this self-renunciation has been found in the declaration of Spinoza, that ‘whoso loves God must not desire God to love him in return,’ but this striking development, sublime as it sounds, represents the suicide rather than the fulfilment of love. One type of saintly love has been akin to the sentiment of loyalty, another to filial affection, another to the tenderness of friendship, another to the romantic love of man and woman; while each type has differed from the earthly parallel by the difference which was made by the feeling that the object which had a place in the heart as king, father, friend or woman beloved was also to be adored as divine. And the zeal of this love has expressed itself in very emphatic and impressive fashion. The literature in which the love of country has been voiced by the patriot, of the friend by the friend, and of the father by the son is found to be meagre and unimpressive in comparison with that in which the saints have confessed the love which they bore to the Divine Being, and testified to the joys and the pangs which it brought in its train. The only earthly sentiment which has been more conscious of itself, and which has obtained in a fuller degree the satisfaction of self-expression in great literature, is the romantic love of the sexes.

A full treatment of the love of the saints embraces these topics:—the different aspects or characters in which the Divine Being has been loved; the kinds of divine love; the reasons of love; the rise, progress, and fulfilment of divine love after its chief kinds; the methods of confirming and advancing the loving relationship; the aspirations and satisfactions of appropriating love; the manifold workings of the communicating impulse in the forms of self-surrender and disinterested service. To some of these heads a large contribution of fresh or neglected material has been made by modern research—notably in the series of erudite and masterly studies of Mysticism.19 For the present purpose it will be sufficient to refer to the chief forms which divine love has assumed in the different theological settings.

1. The pantheistic saint has loved God fervently. The average human being finds it impossible to love an impersonal being without moral qualities, but for the saint this creed was compatible with the ecstasy of love. ‘As a man,’ said the Hindu, ‘when embraced by a beloved wife, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within, thus this person (the emancipated) when embraced by the intelligent Self (God) knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within.’20 Plotinus describes the ecstasy in similar terms: ‘It is that union of which the union of earthly lovers, who wish to blend their being with one another, was a copy.’21 The sister-parable which was used to set forth the bliss of the union was the power of the ‘wine which maketh glad the heart of man.’ ‘The spirit in love,’ said Plotinus, ‘is inebriated with nectar, in simple contentment and satisfaction; and it is better for it to be so intoxicated than to be too proud for such intoxication.’ And there have been two kinds of love corresponding to the gnostic and the agnostic forms of the pantheistic creed. When the object has been the Unknowable, the love has had the character of the fascinated or spell-bound love. There was an experience of a power that apprehended and overwhelmed rather than of a beauty and a goodness which attracted—an experience akin to the feelings of the wild animals in presence of man, and to the infatuation and the fatal passion which the Greeks explained as wrought by a certain demoniac energy. The spirit of the fascinated love in which there can be little joy, and yet great strength of passion, may be recognised in passages like this from the Upanishads:—‘That Brahman is a great terror, like a drawn sword; from terror of Brahman fire burns, from terror the sun burns, from terror Indra and Vayu, and Death, as the fifth, run away.’ The love of the pantheistic gnostic, on the other hand, has commonly had the rapturous note of the intoxicated love. It was felt by Spinoza, for whom love of God was the abounding joy of him who sees all things in the light of God and of Eternity. A testimony which gives expression to the tumult of the inebriated soul may be quoted from a Sufi poet:

He comes, a moon whose like the sky ne’er saw awake or dreaming,

Crowned with eternal flame no flood can lay.

Lo, from the flagon of Thy love, O Lord, my soul is swimming,

And ruined all my body’s house of clay.

When first the giver of the grape my lonely soul befriended,

Wine fired my bosom and my veins filled up,

But when His image all mine eye possessed, a voice descended,

Well done, O sovereign wine and peerless cup.22

The Pantheistic School had a code of rules for the attainment of the desired union with God. There were two principal methods—the ethical method of purification, and the intellectual method of abstraction. The ethical way was that a man should be virtuous, that he should transcend commonplace virtue by complete detachment from worldly aims, and that self-sacrifice should be made perfect in self-mortification. The intellectual demand was that the mind should be abstracted from all finite things and concentrated on God as the one reality. In the use of these means some had experience of the raptures of love, but doubtless also many were disappointed, and so certain alternative or supplementary methods were essayed. Gautama had been one of the disillusioned, and so he bade his disciples to be content with Nirvana in place of God, and to attain it by the practice of self-denying virtue. A less respectable method, illustrated by the Yoga practice, was to take steps to induce a hypnotic or semi-hypnotic condition, which it was possible to interpret as the highest state of religious exaltation.23 In the Bhagavad-Gita the chief prominence is given to the ethical and the intellectual rules, but great importance is also attached to the bodily exercises:

A devotee should constantly devote himself to abstraction, remaining in a secret place, alone, with his mind and self restrained, without expectations and without belongings. Fixing his seat firmly in a clean place, not too high nor too low, and covered over with a sheet of cloth, a deerskin, and blades of grass, and being seated, fixing his mind exclusively on one point, with the working of the mind and of the senses restrained, he should practise devotion for purity of self. Holding his body, head, and neck even and uncovered, remaining steady, looking at the tip of his own nose, and not looking about in all directions, with a tranquil self, devoid of fear, he should restrain his mind and (concentrate it) on me, and sit down engaged in devotion, regarding me as his final goal. Thus he attains tranquillity culminating in final emancipation and assimilation with me.24

It is easy to be cynical about the seeker who proposed to himself the mystical union with God, found that he could not attain to it by meditation and prayer, and supposed that he had succeeded when he managed to hypnotise himself. But one may rather feel the deep pathos of it. And after all it remains a possibility that the God who giveth to His beloved in sleep could make some gifts in the Yoga-trance to them who sought Him therein with a pure and a sincere heart.

2. The theistic type of divine love has its classic expression in the Old Testament literature, and its chief notes were also reproduced in the orthodox Mohammedan School. Deuteronomy, though it combined the prophetic inspiration with sacerdotal interests, put in the forefront the commandment to love the Lord as well as to serve Him with all the heart and all the soul (x. 12). The God of the prophets was, however, too majestic and awe-inspiring to be confidently approached in the character of the friend, the lover or the spouse. The friendship of the Almighty was supposed to have been the peculiar privilege of the two greatest figures of the distant past—Abraham, who was called the friend of God, and Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. For Hosea, God was the husband and Israel the faithless wife, but no prophet was so presumptuous as to call the individual soul by the name of the wooer or the bride of God. The love of the Old Testament saints had an element of filial affection which can be detected in the words of the Psalmist: ‘Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him’ (ciii. 13); but as the essence of filial piety was held to be to honour father and mother, doubtless the sense of divine sonship also carried with it more of reverence than of tenderness. The prophetic love of God was most distinctively the loyalty of the devoted subject, raised to the highest degree in contemplation of the glorious perfections and of the mighty works of the King of kings. And to such a pitch was it raised that it could approach the fascinated or the inebriated love. But the prophets of the golden and the silver ages set no great store on the ecstatic tumult of the soul. Nor does it appear that the mystical union was sought as an end in itself.

3. The Christian Church has been hospitable to many kinds of divine love. Christianity is a monotheistic religion which is also the religion of the Incarnation; and it has been open to the Christian mind to fasten its attention either on the God who was revealed in Christ or on the Christ in whom God was revealed. There have accordingly been two principal kinds of divine love, which may be distinguished as the theocentric and the Christocentric. Naturally the theocentric kind has as a rule been theistic, but there has also been a pantheistic type represented by some of the most celebrated of the mystics. The divine object, again, whether it was conceived in theistic or in pantheistic modes of thought, or as incarnate God, could be loved in the various characters which have their earthly counterparts in the king, the master, the father, the friend, the lover and the spouse.

(a) The pantheistic type of Christian mysticism has excited extraordinary interest—partly because of the sensational combination of Christian sainthood with a pagan philosophy, partly because of the strength of the passion by which it has been accompanied, and partly also because of its rarity. In the school of Christian Pantheism, as in Hinduism, there have been two varieties of divine love corresponding to the agnostic and the gnostic types of Monism. The agnostic type was represented by the pseudo-Dionysius, for whom God was finally the abyss, the darkness, the wilderness, the Being beyond being. In the teaching of the Areopagite the chief stress was laid on the method of intellectual abstraction, and as he explains it we recognise the spell-bound love of the fascinated soul:

And thou, dear Timothy, in thy intent practice of the mystical contemplations, leave behind both thy senses and thy intellectual operations, and all things known by sense and intellect, and all things which are not and which are, and set thyself, as far as may be, to unite thyself in unknowing with Him who is above all being and all knowledge, for by being purely free and absolute, out of self and of all things, thou shalt be led up to the ray of the divine darkness, stripped of all, and loosed from all.25

The gnostic form of Pantheism, and the intoxicated love which accompanies it, may be represented by the Reden of Schleiermacher, who after worshipping with the Moravians had passed through the school of Spinoza:

‘I cannot describe the experience,’ he writes, ‘and can only say that it is transient as the fragrance which the dew breathes upon flower and fruit; that it is modest and tender as the virgin’s kiss, and holy and fruitful as the conjugal embrace. And it is not only like this, but it is all this. For it is the conjunction of the universal with a particular life, and is outside of time and intangible; it is the sacred nuptials of the universe with incarnate reason to the end that they may be joined together in a creative embrace. Thou liest on the bosom of the Infinite, in that moment thou art its soul, for thou feelest all its powers and its endless life to be thine own; in that moment it is thy body, and thou penetratest its muscles and its members as if they were thine own, while its inmost nerves vibrate to thy thoughts and aspiration.’26

(b) The Christian saint has, of course, usually been a theist; and usually his love was theocentric—passing beyond the God-man to the Godhead. And this theocentric love has been of two main forms, differing considerably in content and aim, which may be called the evangelical and the mystical.

The evangelical form is represented by a succession of the Fathers and the Scholastics, and by the great personalities of the Reformation. Its chief notes were gratitude and humility—gratitude, because of the great salvation which had its source in God’s loving will, and for the great sacrifice by which it was purchased; humility, because of the sense of the tremendous gulf between the creature and the Creator. There could be much of the filial affection of those who have received the adoption of sons, but there was more of the gratitude of the redeemed soul, combined with the reverential loyalty which the Old Testament prophet had felt as the subject and the servant of the heavenly king. The love that is the soul of loyalty was specially distinctive of the piety of Calvin. If he loved God, his was a love which on the affective side was primarily reverence and godly fear. In his definition of piety, reverence for God has pride of place over love to God.27 He did not profess that his love towards the Almighty was of the nature of tender emotion: could this be fitting in A worm of the dust, when the very Cherubim in fear veil their faces with their wings? Calvin had religious passion enough, but it was chiefly a passion for glorifying the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and of seeing to it that His will was done on earth even as it is in Heaven.28 For the cultivation of the loving relationship the Reformed School deemed the ordinary means of grace sufficient, provided these were conjoined with the practice of self-denial. The modification of the mystical rules of detachment and abstraction may be illustrated from Jeremy Taylor:

Although the consideration of the divine excellences and mercies be infinitely sufficient to produce in us love to God (who is invisible, and yet not distant from us, but we feel Him in His blessings, He dwells in our hearts by faith, we feed on Him in the sacrament, and are made all one with Him in the incarnation and glorification of Jesus); yet, that we may the better enkindle and increase our love to God, the following advices are not useless: (1) Cut off all earthly and sensual loves; (2) Lay fetters upon the imaginative and fantastic part, because our fancy is usually pleased with the entertainment of shows and gauds; (3) Remove solicitude or worldly cares, and multitudes of secular businesses; (4) Do not only choose the things of God, but secure your inclinations and aptnesses for God and for religion; (5) Converse with God by frequent prayer; (6) Consider the immensity and vastness of the divine love to us in creation and conservation, and especially in giving His Son, in forgiving our sins, and in adopting us to glory. In the use of these instruments love will grow in several knots and slips, like the sugarcanes in India, according to a thousand varieties in the persons loving.29

The love of the mystical saint made a bolder venture. The impulse of love is to possess God in some real way, and the mystic aspired to possess Him in the most intimate and complete way. One degree of possession is to know God, a higher degree is to be able to call Him ‘my God’ in particular relations—as the God of Providence or of Redemption; a third is to be visited and influenced by the living God; and the highest conceivable is for a human being so to appropriate God as to become himself divine. And the desire of the mystic was so to apprehend God, or to be apprehended of Him, that he should only exist, at least in his periods of rapt experience, as a mode of the existence of the Infinite Being. Self-affirmation could surely no further go than to aspire to be deified, self-abnegation no further than to become nothing, and may be counted the supreme illustration of the paradox of love. If the evangelical saint sought to be at one with God, to the end that he might be pardoned and sanctified, the mystic rather valued forgiveness and sanctification as the conditions of being to God. The method, as in the Oriental schools, was that the mind was emptied, and the heart purified. The intellectual requirement was the abstraction of the mind from impressions, images and even ideas. ‘God is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth,’ says Albertus Magnus—that is to say, by a mind which has been stripped of all phantasmata. ‘Enter into thy closet, and shut-to the door—that is, close the door of the senses; and when all things have been shut off, then present thy desires, but silently, to the Lord thy God.’30 A statement of the recognised rules, in which special emphasis is laid on the moral purification, may be quoted from the Theologia Germanica:

Now be assured that no one can he enlightened unless he be first cleansed, and purified and stripped. So also no one can be united with God unless he be first enlightened. Thus there are three stages: first, the purification; secondly, the enlightening; thirdly, the union. The purification concerneth those who are beginning or repenting, and is brought to pass in a threefold wise: by contrition and sorrow for sin, by full confession, by hearty amendment. The enlightenment belongeth to such as are growing, and also taketh place in three ways: to wit, by the eschewal of sin, by the practice of virtue and good works, and by the willing endurance of all manner of temptation and trials. The union belongeth to such as are perfect, and also is brought to pass in three ways, to wit, by pureness and singleness of heart, by love, and by the contemplation of God, the Creator of all things.31

(c) The Christocentric type of divine love has also assumed a variety of forms. The most celebrated is that of the mystics who clave to Him with a love passing the love of women, and whose love was crowned by union with the heavenly spouse in the bonds and the joys of the spiritual marriage. Their spiritual life was a romance with the familiar features of the terrestrial parallel—the coming of love to the soul, its source in the beauties of the object or in a mysterious affinity, the course of the true love with its obstacles and vicissitudes, the doings of the lovers, the meetings and the partings, the celebration of the nuptials, and the conjugal life of the earthly bride and the heavenly spouse. The great illustration is the experience of St. Theresa, who has given an extremely minute and vivid account of the mystical experiences. In the ‘Spiritual Castle,’ she distinguishes seven mansions of the soul. The sixth was described as the place of complete union and ecstasies, accompanied by the vision of the humanity of Christ, the pangs of desire, and the wounds of love, and thence the soul passed to the highest mansion in which the heavenly marriage was celebrated. Among her sister saints there have been those who described similar experiences with a larger debt to the earthly parallel. Nor was it only saintly women who thus learned Christ, and communed with Him. A heavenly love-story is worked out in detail in the Horologium Sapientiae of Suso—one of the most attractive of the mystical classics:

He fell in love with Christ, because of what was told in Scripture of the wisdom of God: ‘She is more precious than rubies, and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.’ For a time he wavered in his allegiance, then she appeared to him in a vision, seated on an ivory throne, placed on a pillar of cloud, in resplendent beauty, and robed in cloth of gold. Later on he had another vision, in which no bodily form was seen, and he was only conscious of the sovereign and ineffable good, the most lovable, the most beautiful and the best. And now his heart was fixed. Henceforward his spiritual exercises were wholly concerned with his heavenly spouse. Aught else of good or joy that he found in the world was to this as candlelight to the light of the sun. When he heard love lays sung, he gave them a turn to suit his beloved. She bade him enter into the sanctuary of her heart which was reserved adorned for him. And just as a little babe, which cannot speak, as it lies on its mother’s lap, smiles upon her, and nods its head, so did he show his joy at the presence of his beloved. And often with the most fervid affection, his eyes streaming with the sweet odour of love, he had clasped her to his heart.

Samuel Rutherford had less incident to relate, but his feelings were as passionate as Suso’s:

I wonder that men do bide off Christ; I would esteem myself blessed if I could gather all the world that are living upon the earth, and all that shall be born to the blowing of the last trumpet, to flock round about Christ, and to stand looking, wondering, admiring and adoring His beauty and His sweetness; for His fire is hotter than any other fire, His love sweeter than common love, His beauty surpasseth all other beauty. I would not want the visitations of love, and the very breathings of Christ’s mouth when He kisseth, and my Lord’s delightsome smiles and love-embracements under my sufferings for Him, for a mountain of fine gold, nor for all the honours, court and grandeur of velvet kirkmen. Christ hath the yoke and heart of my love. ‘I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.’32

The discipline, as in other forms of Mysticism, laid the stress on moral purification and intellectual abstraction. St. Theresa distinguished degrees of prayer which had cumulative effects—meditation, recollection and quiet, unconscious co-operation of all the intellectual powers, and ecstasy. The ethical side of the method is picturesquely treated by St. Bernard in his description of the three stages of the approach to the Beloved. The first stage is to kiss His feet—which is the preparation of repentance; the second is to kiss His knees—the preparation of sanctification; and upon this follows the union—‘let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine.’33

It is not surprising that much has been heard of the romantic form of the love of Christ. It has awakened the interest which, it is said, all the world feels in a lover; and the interest was heightened by the audacity of the heavenly love-suit, and by the report made of the ineffable bliss by which it was crowned. And further it is notable that the religious experience can attain a depth and intensity that is comparable with, and can even surpass, that which is associated with the most idealistic and self-submerging of the human passions. On the other hand, it is proper to emphasise that it only represents one of several forms in which the love of the saints has been east, and that while it is undoubtedly the most sensational it is another question whether it is the most beautiful and the most seemly. The saintly experience which represents the love of the Saviour-friend at its highest, has been much commoner; and it may well be thought that this has been more beautiful as well as more becoming. The Christ of Christian faith, more-over, is prophet, priest and king, and for the saint who has clung to Christ as the victim-priest, and especially for the saint who has loved Him with self-obliterating loyalty as the King who has been exalted to be head of His Church and of the nations and Lord of his individual soul, the disciple of the Reformed Church may well feel a greater respect, and claim the highest meed of honour.

We have seen, then, that divine love has played a large part as an independent principle in religions history. The only question is as to what is its worth and its utility, and as to whether it has a solid basis in the realm of objective reality.

As to worth, it may be said to begin with that the sentiment has at least some aesthetic value. It it be a mark of refinement of soul to have a feeling for the beautiful in nature, it is equally so to have a feeling for the Infinite in the finite; and if the character be enriched when new affections spring up as fruits of friendship and marriage, it cannot be less an enrichment of the inner life to give the heart to a being clothed with the ideal qualities that are counted divine.

More important is the question as to the ethical value of the love which fixes the affections on a divine object. Has it fostered, or has it displaced, the love which man owes to his fellow-man? Undoubtedly God has been loved at the expense of man. The Hindu saint who deemed the mystic union with God to be the highest blessing could be indifferent to natural obligations, and could look on the spouse, the child, and the friend as idols. If he was permitted to love his kith and kin, it was only in the representative and apologetic way which Yagnavalkya explained to his wife when he bade her farewell:

And he said, Verily a husband is not dear that you may love the husband, but that you may love the Self (God), therefore a husband is dear. And so with a wife, and sons and cattle, and the Brahmans, and the Kshatriyas, and the worlds, and the Devas and the creatures. Verily everything is not dear that you may love everything, but that you may love the Self, therefore everything is dear.34

This attitude, which has been common in the Pantheistic School, is touchingly illustrated by the incident quoted by Mr. Nicholson from the life of a Sufi saint:

One day he had in his lap a child four years old, and chanced to give it a kiss, as is the way of fathers. The child said, ‘Father, do you love me?’ ‘Yes,’ said Fudayl. ‘Do you love God?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How many hearts have you?’ ‘One.’ ‘Then,’ asked the child, ‘how can you love two with one heart?’ Fudayl perceived that the child’s words were a divine admonition. In his zeal for God he began to beat his head and repented of his love for the child, and gave his heart wholly to God.35

In like sense another of the same school spoke of the heroes of Arabian romance as ‘afflicted with love for human beings.’

The same general attitude is met with in some of the Christian mystics, whose love of God was cast in the moulds of the divine love-story. When Suso was wooing and being wooed by the heavenly bride, the tempter whispered that he was wasting his life in seeking what he might never find, and advised him to conjoin the love of a wife with the love of the heavenly spouse. To which Wisdom replied: ‘You may have the happiness of the brutes, but at the price of sinking to the level of the brutes. And who may compare the delights? A little balsam is more precious than much vinegar. Nor may a second spouse be intruded into the heavenly union: how shall the divine love be associated with an earthly love?’36

St. Theresa feared lest in loving others much she should offend against God, and thought it wrong to set store on their affection for herself:

‘Those persons who are favoured of God,’ she says, ‘do not attach themselves to others by the love which captivates and enchains, because it seems to them that this would be to love a thing of nothing and to embrace a shadow, and they could not therefore without blushing tell God that they love Him. Though in the first instance nature makes them rejoice at seeing that they are the object of love, on recollecting themselves they recognise that this is folly, except so far as those are concerned who can contribute to their salvation by their prayers or their doctrine. All affections weary and bore them because they know that they can profit them nothing, and that they might do them harm. They recognise this affection only to the extent that they pray God to bless them.’37

But if a certain amount of energy has been diverted from social service out of fear of the jealousy of God, there has been compensation in the gentleness which has been a by-product of Oriental piety, and especially in the practice of the works of mercy which for Christian sainthood has been vital in the following of Christ. It would be difficult to overstate the difference which was made for a suffering and sorrow-stricken world by the constraint that was laid on the Christian saint by these words of Jesus: ‘I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in: naked, and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was in prison, and ye came unto Me.… Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these My brethren, even these least, ye did it unto Me’ (Matt. xxv. 35–40).

Pietism—and by implication its British equivalents of Evangelicalism and Methodism—has been rudely handled by Ritschl.38 His chief strictures were that it is Roman Catholic rather than Protestant—‘the sentimental intercourse with the Risen Lord’ being a survival of the spiritual exercises of the cloister, and the Puritanical rigour in the matter of the pleasures of this world an emasculated version of monkish asceticism; while he also held that Pietism has disintegrated Church life, and that it is chiefly responsible, by reason of its sentimentality, its narrow-mindedness and its Pharisaic self-complacency, for the religious and ecclesiastical indifference of the virile and modern elements of the Protestant nations. And in these strictures there is undeniably some substance. The pietistic experience has been unduly exalted as normative. The son who has only a sober sense of filial duty is not in the Christian Church on sufferance, or to be despised because he has not the feelings which are expressed in the sentimental hymns. It is also true that there is a type of Pietism which has overlooked the Pauline principle that every creature of God is good, and that the Christian has a title to all things. On the other hand, it must be said that the experience is one which Ritschl was not entitled to disparage because his own piety happened to be a very prosaic form of the love of trust and loyalty. The opinion of an outsider about it, as St. Bernard said, is of no value. Moreover to call Pietism a Roman Catholic survival was unfair, as its typical experience is on the lines of the testimonies of St. Paul and of the Johannine promises; and in any case, it might be thought matter for rejoicing rather than reproach that militant Protestants and Roman Catholics have found that they could be at one in loving Jesus. But perhaps the most striking feature of this sentimental school is the way in which the love of Christ has been manifested to the world as the inspiration of the loving service of man. In the Middle Ages it was the religious Orders whose badge was love of the Crucified that had compassion on the multitude, and laboured abundantly in the works both of the Evangelist and of the good Samaritan. And this has been repeated on a larger scale in Protestant times. For the love of Christ, as fostered in the Evangelical School, has been the chief motive of the colossal missionary enterprise which has carried the Christian gospel to the farthest and darkest corners of the earth, while it has also been the spring of an ethical inspiration that has brought into existence examples of every institution and agency that could be devised to help to enlighten the darkness and to alleviate the miseries of the children of men.

On a view of the whole of the phenomena it may be somewhat confidently maintained that we have to do here with a manifestation of the contact of the human spirit with the realm of reality, and of the interaction of life with life. From the scientific point of view the facts—so far as they are recognised at all—have been interpreted as reactions of the human soul with a semblance of love to a vision of historical or legendary figures, or to the personification of some particular or comprehensive ideal. But in view of the strength, the persistency and the variety of the feeling—a feeling which has been bound up with the conviction that the object is the very type of the real—there are good grounds for holding that, no less than patriotism and friendship and the other forms of human love, divine love has had for its basis and support an object which belongs to the realm of living actuality, and which similarly attests its existence in a sense of communion, and in an experience of vital and vitalising energies. The ecstatic experiences of the saints have been connected by Professor Leuba with the sexual passion, and have been diagnosed as a sublimation of the natural impulses and affections which had been repressed in the ascetic and celibate life.39 But the mystics were not all celibates, and there have been multitudes of celibate persons who did not give a thought to the attractions of a divine love. Ascetic conditions could at most have the influence of a hothouse, and the hothouse develops only the seeds and the plants which are given it, and does not attempt to promote spontaneous generation. ‘The mystic’s exaltation,’ it has been well said, ‘sweeps up into its own current whatever in the thousandfold alternate swingings of human nature moves in its own direction, not as their product, but as their master.’40

It may be objected that divine love does not imply an objective basis, seeing that similar experiences occur in all the higher religions, and it is generally agreed that some are illusory. Brahma has been loved as passionately as the God of Moses and of the prophets, the Buddhist cleaves to Buddha even as the Christian clings to his glorified Lord; and as in one case the experience is set down to hallucination, it may be thought that illusion sufficiently accounts for both. There is, however, another possibility, and that is that all love which was sincerely offered to the divine Being found its object and established communion with Him in some degree. In the human relationships which are analogous to the religious relationship love has a nearer and a more distant reference. It has an individual object, but it also has a reference, and owes much of its intensity, to the ideal that the individual represents. In the romantic love of the sexes there is more than the love of one person for another: it is in large measure love of the ideal of manhood or of womanhood of which the concrete person is a real, though it may be a very imperfect, manifestation. And in like manner we may conceive that while that which devout souls have loved in their religion may have been primarily some very inadequate object or objects that were proposed to them by the tradition and custom of their people, they have along with this addressed their tribute of love to the Divine Being, of which the object was the symbol and the manifestation. And when they have consciously found the Highest they might say that it was not all illusion, but rather, as the poet wrote of her who crowned his earthly quest:

if ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.41

• 1.

  Die Analyse der Empfindungen, 1922, p. 61.

• 2.

  Der christliche Glaube, 1821, pp. 9 ff.

• 3.

  Ennead, vi. 9, 9. So Professor A. W. Mair translates. Dean Inge renders ‘as the daughter of a noble father feels a noble love’ (op. cit., ii. p. 139).

• 4.

  Works, 1822, ii. p. xxi.

• 5.

  Ethica, iii. 13; Schol., v. 32.

• 6.

  The Foundations of Character ², 1920, p. 35.

• 7.

  Op. cit., p. 57.

• 8.

  De Civitate Dei, xiv. 28.

• 9.

  Sutta Nipata, S.B.E., x. 2.

• 10.

  Rhys Davids, E.R.E., art. ‘Love.’

• 11.

  A Gentleman in Prison, 1923, p. 88.

• 12.

  Quoted by Lehmann, Textbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 1912, P. 253.

• 13.

  From Tukārām’s Abhangas, quoted by MacNicol, E.R.E., art, ‘Hindu Mysticism.’

• 14.

  Sermon von der Betrachtung des heiligen Leidens Christi, 1519.

• 15.

  The Journal of John Wesley, 1909, ii. p. 43.

• 16.

  Traité de l’Amour de Dieu, iv. I.

• 17.

  Op. cit., p. 121.

• 18.

  (Eng. tr.), 1854, chap. vi.

• 19.

  The most important of this remarkable series are:—W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism, 1899; The Philosophy of Plotinus, 1923; Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, 1908; von Högel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 1908; Delacroix, Études d’histoire et de psychologie du Mysticisme, 1908; Evelyn Underhill, The Mystical Element of Religion, 1908, and other studies; Oman, Mystics, Ascetics and Saints of India, 1903.

• 20.

  Brih. Upanishad, iv. 3, 21.

• 21.

  Ennead, vi. 7, 34.

• 22.

  Quoted by Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, 1914, p. 106.

• 23.

  Garbe, art. ‘Yoga’ in E.R.E.

• 24.

  vi. 18.

• 25.

  Mystical Theology, i.

• 26.

  Reden, ii.

• 27.

  Institutio, ii. 2, I; i. I, 3.

• 28.

  iii. 16.

• 29.

  The Love of God: Works, 1822, iv. pp. 197 ff.

• 30.

  Liber Aureus, ii.

• 31.

  Chap. xiv.

• 32.

  Letters of Samuel Rutherford, 1867: Letter ii.

• 33.

  Sermons on the Canticles.

• 34.

  Brih. Upanishad, p. iv. 5.

• 35.

  Op. cit., pp. 105 ff.

• 36.

  Horologium Sapientiae, Lib. i.

• 37.

  Le Chemin de la Perfection, chap. vi.

• 38.

  Geschichte des Pietismus, 1880–6.

• 39.

  Revue philosophique, 1902, ii., and 1904, i.

• 40.

  Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 1912, p. 577.

• 41.

  Donne, Poems, 1912, i. 7.