Charles Gore

“ I do not believe there is any real difficulty in adjusting sufficiently the relations of religion and science as to the Fall when once the idea of sin has been admitted—that is, the idea of free, responsible action, with its correlative, the possibility of wrong action which might have been avoided. Christian and other teachers have, no doubt, often failed to see how limited human freedom is, but they have never been wrong in asserting that the reality of freedom within limits is essential to Christianity and morality. Sin is not a mere fact of nature. ”

“ Sin is not our nature, but wilfulness; sin is disobedience to the divine law, the refusal of trust in God; there is such a thing as being tempted to sin, and yielding to it, and then finding that we have been deceived, being conscience-stricken and fearing to face God; and the curse of our manhood springs from nowhere ultimately but our own evil heart. And if our sins lay us under an outward discipline, which is God's punishment, yet in the very discipline lies the hope of our recovery. God the destroyer is also the God who promises redemption. ”

“ It is so much easier to keep certain rules than to acquire and maintain a certain mind and spirit and principle of action. In the history of the Church St. Paul, we feel, would very often have been saying, 'I am afraid of you: the rules are good in themselves, but there are dangers attaching to all rules of which you seem to be quite unconscious. There is a lower sort of religion of forms and observances, and you may fall back into it as easily as the Galatians.'
But after all, rules for living religiously, private or ecclesiastical, are, we all know, invaluable, and practically necessary. ”

“ Those who keep the open ear are the 'remnant' in every age and church and nation. They are the men who refuse to 'make the word of God {91} of none effect,' because of the blinding, deadening force of social tradition. They are alive and awake to 'buy up the opportunity,' as it presents itself. And for such St. Paul's teaching, inherited from the prophets, of the function of the remnant is full of encouragement. The Bible is a book contemptuous of majorities. The mass of men, conventional, easily satisfied, self-centred, accomplish nothing, redeem and regenerate nothing. ”

“ To correspond with one's own personal gift of faith is to realize one's vocation; and, by the development of the individual points of view, inside the common 'tradition,' the fullness and richness of the corporate faith is secured.
The cohesion of the body lies in each one's realizing his own gift, and also reverencing that of others. Here is humility. Humility is not self-contempt, or cringing to others. To realize one's own gift, one's own relation to God, gives to each man a dignity, a power to stand upright and face the world. ”

“ Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge ye this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock in his brother's way, or an occasion of falling. I know, and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean of itself: save that to him who accounteth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. For if because of meat thy brother is grieved, thou walkest no longer in love. Destroy not with thy meat him for whom Christ died. Let not then your good be evil spoken of: for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Paul's mind. Faith is no true Christian faith, if it is content to receive from the Father, or from Christ, a gift which leaves it still outside the life of God. The faith which Christ inspires asks for and receives nothing less than real fellowship in His divine and human life, and that life is, in its joys as well as its sorrows, a life of self-surrender, of sacrifice. Thus the Christian only welcomes the gift of pardon through Christ's sacrifice in order to be admitted into the freedom of the dedicated life in Christ, which is the life of sacrifice. ”

“ Christianity has said to all men, However corrupted your nature, the corruption does not essentially belong to you. Give your wills to God, and, if slowly, yet surely, if not fully in this world, then beyond it, all can be set right. 'According to thy faith be it unto thee.' And the practical power of this appeal, shows its agreement with reality. ”

“ Paul's admonition is as applicable now as ever. The future of the world and of each nation and institution is precarious: things which seem solid and strong may crumble and melt; how soon God is to make plain His judgements, in part or on the whole, we do not know; when each one of us is to pass by death to the great account we do not know. There is no reasonable attitude towards the unknown coming of judgement except to be ready, and, though the darkness of the alienated and godless world is all around us, to live as children of the light eagerly expecting the dawning of the day [2] . ”

“ A theory that cannot be put into practice, or a theory that cannot account for the facts, is a false or at least inadequate theory. Now the theory of necessary determinism cannot be put into practice. To believe that our own conduct is not really under our own control—that the idea of responsibility is at bottom an illusion—is to destroy the basis of human life and education. ”

“ Nor, I have urged, can it be reasonably said that the Christian doctrine of sin and of the Fall is bound up with one particular interpretation of Genesis iii. All, then, that we must admit in the way of collision between Christianity and science is, on the one hand, that Christianity is not intended to teach men science, and that when there is any great advance in human knowledge it takes a little while for Christianity to extricate itself from the meshes of the language and ideas belonging to one stage of scientific knowledge, and to assimilate the terms and ideas of the new. ”

“ The passages quoted from Isaiah are characteristic and central. This great prophet first clearly perceived that most striking law of human history—that progress comes, not mostly through the majority of a nation, but through the faithful remnant. It is the few best through whom alone God can freely work. It is the best who in the long run determine the moral level of the nation, and either keep the mass of men around them from corruption, or, if that is impossible, provide a fresh point of departure and hope in a society now inevitably, as a whole, hastening to decay and judgement. ”

“ No writing in the New Testament has done more than the Epistle to the Romans to strengthen the sense of spiritual individuality, and to rouse the individual spirit to protest, as it protested in Luther, against spiritual tyranny. But it is a complete mistake to suppose that the epistle is individualistic in tendency. The life into which the individual's faith in Jesus admits him is the life of a community, and its virtues are the virtues of community life. The strengthened individuality is to go to enrich an organized society. ”

“ Men are by fundamental disposition, in great measure, ritualist or puritan, ecclesiastically or individually minded, disciplinarian or mystical. And the Church should lay on all a certain common law of doctrine and morals and worship, sufficient to keep them all together in one body. But, consistently with the coherence of the body, why should there not be both an ornate and a bare ritual of worship, both societies of strict observance and individual freedom, and a wide field of open questions in which we do not even expect 'decisions of doubts'? ”

“ And to be like Christ we must be in Christ, clothed with His righteousness, invested with His new nature, fighting with the weapons of His victorious manhood. The 'evil' which is in ourselves, the unregulated flesh, we can only 'overcome with good'—the good which is Jesus Himself: for it is no longer we that live in our bare selves, but Christ that liveth in us. ”

“ Evil is all around the Christian, and it is a strong man armed; but the Christian has with him the forces of good which are yet stronger, and by no passive withdrawal, but by the active exercise of good, he is to win the victory over evil.
For I say, through the grace that was given me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but so to think as to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith. ”

“ Paul in the dominance of the purpose of God in the world: in the certainty of the accomplishment of what God has predestined. If the very rejection of the Christ by the Jews was turned into an opportunity for the conversion of the Gentiles, what crime can be too great for the divine wisdom to overrule it for good? No one, on the other hand, could realize more deeply the responsibility which lies upon men: their strange power to correspond with God, or partly thwart His purpose for them and through them. ”

“ God's purpose can work, and has in history worked, through small minorities, through single individuals. They are the true representatives of their church, their nation, their class. And when the inner history of any epoch comes to be known, while the inert mass of people, 'important' or 'unimportant,' is lost in the dim background, they will be seen distinctive in the foreground: the real movement of God in history, the real witness of the truth, the real spiritual succession of the kingdom of God, will be seen to have been carried on through them for the enriching of the whole world. ”

“ Apart from sin we may suppose man would not have died; that is, he would never have had that horrible experience which he has called death. There would have been only some transition full of a glorious hope from one state of being to another.
We are again in the region of conjecture. All that I am here interested in asserting is that Christianity never has held to the position that human sin first introduced death into the world. What it has taught is that human death, as men have known it, with its horror and its misery, has represented not God's intention for man, but the curse of sin. ”

“ Paul's case bears witness to the truth of what he says by passing no censure on him—that too does not act of itself merely, but in the Spirit of the new life, the Holy Spirit of Christ, which inspires and ratifies the moral judgement, otherwise so liable to be degraded or perverted or silenced: his conscience bears witness with his word in the Holy Ghost. Here, then, is the whole secret of Christian truthfulness. The Christian is truthful because he lives and speaks in God, in Christ, in the Spirit. ”

“ Development—physical, moral, spiritual—would have been steady and glorious. Whereas there was a fall at the very root of our humanity; and the fall was repeated and reiterated and renewed, and the development of our manhood was tainted and spoiled. There was a lapse into approximately animal condition, which is dimly known to us as primitive savagery. So that the condition of savage man is a parody of what God intended man in his undeveloped stages to be, just as the condition of civilized man in London and Paris is a parody of what God intended developed man to come to. ”

“ And as to Christianity giving up what is proper to its own ground—its teaching about {235} freedom and sin and the Fall, and God's purpose for man, and the love shown in his redemption—to give up this is to give up what is the best and deepest motive of human progress, and what is most surely certificated by the witness of Christ and the spiritual experience of Christendom. Indeed all schemes of human improvement are shallow and inadequate, which do not deal with man as what, in fact, he has been proved to be, a sinful, that is a fallen, being, needing not only education but redemption. ”

“ And the Christian is to take a wide view of his obligations, and to let there be no legitimate claim upon him unfulfilled, no debt unpaid, except the one which a man ought always to be paying and still to be owing, for it is infinite—the debt of love. Here, in loving each other man with the same real regard to his personal interests as we devote to our own, is the satisfaction of the moral law. All the particular 'commandments'—those of the Second Table, and any other there may be—are comprehended in this one. For love can do no harm to any other, and can therefore break no commandment. ”

“ There is a common teaching which lies at the basis of the Church which must not be interfered with, which is strictly necessary. 'Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema [18] .' 'How say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, neither hath Christ been raised: and if Christ hath not been raised, then is our preaching vain, your faith also is vain [19] .' Plainly there is an essential fundamental creed which must not be trifled with. ”

“ Paul, we observe, lays great stress upon honesty of conscience. He wishes men, even in small matters, seriously to cultivate a conscience of what is right, as men should do who even in small things expect a divine judgement; and seriously also to cultivate the faculty of not interfering with their brother's conscience. ('Hast thou faith? Have it to thyself.' Do not parade your superior enlightenment.) He is greatly afraid of people leading others, or being led for mere agreement's sake, to do what their own conscience does not justify. ”

“ Be not wise in your own conceits. Render to no man evil for evil. Take thought for things honourable in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as in you lieth, be at peace with all men. Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance belongeth unto me; I will recompense, saith the Lord. But if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shall heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
(1) It is the idea of corporate life which dominates all this exhortation. ”

“ It is a comfort to perceive that none of the elements of permanent value, which St. Paul discerns in the Old Testament, are the least likely to be affected by reasonable criticism of its documents. Its history, critically read, does not become less truly pregnant with moral warnings or lessons of endurance. The encouragements of the prophets are in no respect reduced in force when they are brought into right relation to their own times. The whole library of books is, at least, as capable of educating and equipping the minister of Christ as ever. ”

“ For that principle of law which the Jews had come to regard as God's final word, He really intended only as a temporary discipline to be brought to an end by the coming of the Christ, and by the disclosure of the real righteousness which, in Christ, God should offer and man should simply accept in faith. Law and faith are in sharp and intelligible contrast. Under the law of works a man, as Moses says [4] , stands to preserve his life (or save his soul) according as he performs the specified requirements (as if man were an independent being who could thus stand over against God on his merits) . ”