R. J. Campbell

“ A bitter, grasping, cruel, unsympathetic spirit is sin, no matter who shows it. The scribe and the Pharisee are too much with us, and the religious ideal needs to be rescued from their blighting grasp to-day as much as ever it did. Of all forms of sin an arrogant, malignant, self-satisfied assumption of righteousness is the worst and the hardest to eradicate, as Jesus found to His cost. The terrible damning lie which is stifling religion to-day is the lie which crucified Jesus, the lie that spiritual pride can ever interpret God to a needy world. ”

“ This love force of theirs, this intense loyalty to Jesus, was, and still is, the redeeming thing in the life of mankind. There is not and never has been any other Atonement. The divine power that is breaking down selfishness, and transforming human desires in accordance with the eternal truth of things, is the spirit of self-sacrificing love. It is but a step from sinner to saviour. To cease to be a sinner is perforce to be a saviour. To escape from the dominion of selfishness is forthwith to become a power in the hand of God for the uplifting and ingathering of mankind to Himself ”

“ We cannot but recognise, for one thing, that our modern civilisation, with all its boasted advance on the past, is still un-Christian. It puts a premium upon selfishness. Modern industrialism is cruel and unjust and directly incites men to self-seeking. The weak and unfortunate have to go to the wall; little mercy is shown to the man who is not strong enough to fight his way and keep his footing in the struggle for existence. We are all the time making war upon one another,—man against man, business against business, class against class, nation against nation. ”

“ Evil is not a principle at war with good. Good is being and evil is not-being. When consciousness of being seeks further expression and finds itself hindered by its limitations, it becomes aware of evil.
A little reflection ought to convince anyone that this is the true way to look at the question of evil. Instead of asking how evil came to be in the universe, we should recognise that nothing finite can exist without it. Infinity alone can know nothing of evil because its resources are illimitable and—if I may be permitted the expression—every need is supplied before it can be felt. ”

“ There is the truth for you, the real Atonement. The heart creed is usually better than the head creed, and in great moments buries the latter out of sight. Here was the spirit of Christ, the true and eternal manhood, the spirit that seeks to save at its own cost. Here was the instinctive perception of the fundamental oneness of all life and the recognition that the godlike thing is to seek to deliver life from the clutch of death. ”

“ We must establish a social order wherein a man can be free to be his best, and to give his best to the community without crushing or destroying anyone else. In a word we want Collectivism in the place of competition; we want the kingdom of God. Charity is no remedy for our social ills and their moral outcome; the only remedy is a new social organisation on a Christian basis. I do not believe that any form of Collectivism, as a mere system superposed from without, can ever really make the world happy; it must be the expression of the spirit of brotherhood working from within. ”

“ It is time we had done with unreal talk about sin. Sin is the murder spirit in human experience. "Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Strong language, but I suppose the man who first used it must have known what he was talking about. Pomposity is sin, because it is egoism; self-complacency and contemptuousness are sin for the same reason. Cupidity is sin whether in a burglar or a Doctor of Divinity. ”

“ If a man goes under, his acquaintances will pity him for five minutes and then forget all about him. There is no help for it; they cannot do anything else, they have their own living to get. They are like soldiers in the heat of battle; they must not pause to mourn over a fallen comrade or they may soon be stretched beside him. I do not mean, of course, to make the foolish statement that present-day industrialism is unrestrainedly individualistic: thank God it is not that. But the principle of competition still exercises a sway so potent as to stamp modern social organisation as un-Christian. ”

“ There is nothing horrifying about the law of retribution, although it is inexorable in its operation. It is an evidence of our divine origin, our own true being asserting itself against the fetters of evil. But it is the Christ that saves us, not the retribution; the retribution only shows that the Christ is there, and that from the Calvary caused by sin, and from the tomb in which the true self lies buried, He will rise in glorious majesty in the soul and unite us in the bonds of love to the eternal divine humanity which is God. ”

“ You may know yourself to be a brave man, but you will know it in a higher way if you are a soldier facing the cannon's mouth; you will know it in a still different way if you have to face the hostility and prejudice of a whole community for standing by something which you believe to be right. Perhaps you have a manly little son; he, like you, may believe in his sterling good qualities. But wait till he has gone out to fight his way in life; then you will realise what he is worth, and so will he. It is one thing to know that you are a lover of truth ”

“ But do not forget that the suffering is not quite what it appears to you; it is only yours as it enters into your own consciousness and you suffer along with the actual victim. Compassion in such a case is the initial impulse toward self-offering, the desire to take the victim's place. But the suffering of the rabbit or the stag is to be measured by the consciousness of the rabbit or the stag, not by yours. In the slaughter nothing perishes but the form, the life returns to the Soul of the universe. ”

“ We are writing a Bible with our own lives to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its fulness by human eyes, but every letter of which is known and read in heaven. Every noble life is a word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish deed is a ray of eternal truth. ”

“ What kind of a universe would it be then? But that universe exists now; it is around and within us; it is God's thought about Himself, infinite and eternal. It is only finite to a finite mind, and it is more than probable that spiritual beings exist with a range of consciousness far greater than our own, to whom the universe of which we form a part must seem far more beautiful and fuller of meaning than it seems to us. Imagine a man who could only see grey hues and could only hear the note A on the keyboard. ”

“ His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch was a quest for life, a quest for God. Men in their sinful follies to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this dim, blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. ”

“ I cannot tell what the world might have been if there had never been a Jesus, but certain it is that the sacrificial life and death of Jesus have meant the inpouring of a spirit into human affairs such as had never been known in the same degree before. Here for the first time men saw a perfect manifestation of the life that is life indeed, the life that pleased not itself, the life that entered into and shared human disabilities as though they were its very own, the life that in the presence of selfishness must inevitably become sacrifice, the life of Atonement. ”

“ The word of God is to be known from the fact that it illuminates life and appeals to the deepest and truest in the soul of man. That message is here now. It is being preached, not by one man only, but the wide world over. God has spoken, and woe betide the churches if they will not hear. Religion is necessary to mankind, but churches are not. From every quarter of Christendom a new spirit of hope and confidence is rising, born of a conviction that all that is human is the evidence of God, and that Jesus held the key to the riddle of existence. ”

“ Here, then, we have the origins of the doctrine of the Fall. Right through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world as the ruins of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will. It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening influence upon hopeful endeavour for the good of the race. It is not integral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word about it and did not even allude to it indirectly. It implies a view of the nature and dealings of God with men which is unethical and untrue. ”

“ The mysterious universe is always calling, and, in some form or other, we are always answering. The artist answers by trying to express his feeling of its beauty; the scientist answers by recognising its laws and unfolding its wonders; the social reformer answers by his self-denying labours for the common good. In each and every case there is in the background of experience a conviction that the unit is the instrument of the All; religion is implied in these as in all other activities in which man aims at a higher-than-self. ”

“ Show me a Christlike life and I will show you a part of the Atonement of Christ. Show me a noble deed and I will show you something worthy of Jesus. His self-offering, and the love and devotion it awoke in human hearts, are a perpetual sacrifice, a cumulative assertion that in the presence of need love can never do anything other than give itself until the need is supplied and love is all in all. There is even a possibility of substitution here. Vicarious suffering willingly accepted becomes irresistible in the long run as a means of lifting a transgressor out of the mire of selfishness. ”

“ Why does the man of business spend so many hours in his office in the effort to make money? It is because money represents power, power that can purchase "more life and fuller." Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would otherwise possess. Analyse human action, no matter what, and it will be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or all-ward. If the former, it will shrivel the soul, it makes for death ”

“ You cannot continue to live apart from the whole, for the real you is the whole, and, do what you will, it will overcome everything within you that makes for separateness, and in the process you will have to suffer. This is what the punishment of sin means. It is life battling with death, love striving against selfishness, the deeper soul with the surface soul. It is our own spiritual nature that compels us to suffer when we sin, and there is no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, for we are so constituted that what sin does, love with toil and pain must undo. ”

“ So my God calls always to my deeper soul, and tells me I must read Him by mine own highest and best, and by the highest and best that the universe has yet produced. Thus the last word about God becomes the last word about man: it is Jesus. Materialists may tell me that the universe does not know what it is doing, that it goes on clanking and banging, age after age, without end or aim, but I shall continue to feel compelled to believe that the Power which produced Jesus must at least be equal to Jesus. ”

“ To think of all human life as a manifestation of the eternal Son, renders it sacred. Our very struggles and sufferings become full of meaning. Sin is but the failure to realise it; it is being false to ourselves and our divine origin; it is the centrifugal tendency in human nature just as love is the centripetal. There is no life, however depraved, which does not occasionally emit some sign of its kinship to Jesus and its eternal sonship to God. Wherever you see self-sacrifice at work you see the very spirit of Jesus, the spirit of the Christ incarnate. ”

“ The body is the thought-form through which the individuality finds expression on our present limited plane; the soul is a man's consciousness of himself as apart from all the rest of existence and even from God—it is the bay seeing itself as the bay and not as the ocean ”