641st ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING

HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM B

THE CENTRAL HALL, WESTMINSTER, S.W. on Monday, April 10th, 1922, at 4.30 p.m.

Dr. JAMES W. THIRTLE, M.R.A.S., in the Chair.

The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read, confirmed and signed, and the HON. SECRETARY announced the Election of the following gentlemen as Associates:-Dr. Arthur Ponsonby Moore-Anderson, the Rev. William W. Craig, D.D., the Rev. Canon Cyrill J. Wyche, and the Rev. Prof. John Gresham Machen, D.D.

The Chairman then called on Mr. Theodore Roberts to read his paper on "Seven Decisive and Suggestive Scenes in the History of the Secular Contest between Conscience and Power."

SEVEN DECISIVE AND SUGGESTIVE SCENES IN THE HISTORY OF THE SECULAR CONTEST BETWEEN CONSCIENCE AND POWER.

I remember reading in Lord Morley's Life of Gladstone how that great man expressed his concurrence with the historian Grote's view that there were only two supremely interesting subjects in the world, viz., theology and politics, with which opinion I beg leave humbly to express my entire concurrence.

As the subject which I have chosen is one which lies midway between theology and politics, it will be my own fault if I fail to make it interesting. I must, however, bear in mind the caution contained in our rules that this platform is not to be used for the purpose of forwarding any sectarian or political views. I hope, therefore, that no one will be able from a perusal of my paper to identify me with any less inclusive title than that of Christian, which is indeed, all I ever wish to be known by.

I cannot deny that some haunting reminiscence of reading Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World in my youth has led me to propose to treat the history of conscience in its contest with power in an analogous way. I have sometimes occupied my idle moments in speculating what might have been the consequence of Napoleon winning the Battle of Waterloo, and I could see no reason why he should not have firmly re-established the power of France as the first military nation and bequeathed that power to his generals as Alexander the Great did before him. So that if our great countryman had not conquered him at Waterloo, we might never have had the late war, but be still living in the same fear of French aggression as possessed our forefathers even long after the death of the great Napoleon, as witness Tennyson's “Third of February, 1852," and "Riflemen, Form!"

That which makes Creasy's Decisive Battles more interesting than battles of crows and kites is the fact that those engaged in them were beings endowed with reason and initiative and capable of appreciating things moral.

But, which ever way these military contests went, the result must be to a large extent at least materialistic, and I must, therefore, make the most of the superior interest of things moral over things material in order to make up for my own deficiencies in investing the subject I am taking with the supreme interest that it deserves.

It may be fairly objected that to place so much emphasis on particular incidents is not portraying history faithfully-that we have learned in modern times to look for the gradual evolution of great movements and principles which are not to be turned back by one event. No doubt there is much truth in this. A great movement is like a mighty river gradually gaining force, and with force both depth and width, and is not to be dammed up by any barrages. Nevertheless, such a river can at a given point by the exercise of a little ingenuity be diverted, so as to take quite a different course to that which it otherwise would.

I think it is often the same with the course of religious and political movements, and nothing interests me so profoundly as to recognize the personal effect of some great man on a crisis in human history. Nay, more, believing as I do not only in a general overruling Providence, but that God raises up and sustains men of spiritual power to stand for that part of the Christian revelation which He sees is needful to be emphasized at a particular time, I recognize that there are crises in spiritual movements where the action of God's special witnesses has decisive consequences in directing the flow of such movements into regions where they may, under God's good hand, become a source of fertility to after generations.

So far as I understand it, conscience, quite as much as reason, differentiates man from the rest of the creatures on this planet. But conscience is superior to reason in that reason is not necessarily amenable to moral considerations, as witness the great minds of Julius Cæsar and Napoleon, men wholly immoral, using that word in the widest and truest sense. Conscience is spoken of by St. Paul in his great treatise entitled "The Epistle to the Romans as that which within man bears witness to him of good and evil and leads to self-accusation or self-excuse (Chap. ii. 15), but it does not appear in the early ages of the history of mankind to have had any place given it by the philosophers.

Even the famous incident of the unjust condemnation and death of Socrates, the most attractive of all the ancient philosophers, is very far from being a question of conscience. All that Mr. Benn in his recent work on the Greek Philosophers (p. 137) can say is:-" Here, in this one cause, the real central issue between two abstract principles, the principle of authority and the principle of reason, was cleared from all adventitious circumstances, and disputed on its own intrinsic merits with the usual weapons of argument on the one side and brute force on the other."

Conscience necessarily brings in the thought of responsibility to God, and, therefore, it has been well said that while man's reason may be infidel, his conscience never is. By conscience, accordingly, I understand that intuition or voice within us which judges our actions and thoughts (and by inference the actions and words of others) as morally good or morally bad. As Wordsworth puts it—

Conscience reverenced and obeyed,

As God's most intimate presence in the soul.' For conscience, therefore, to come into opposition to power it is plain that that power must be itself morally bad and opposed to God. I use the word power " rather than "authority,' because, strictly speaking, the only true authority is that of God, and consequently cannot come into opposition with conscience. I do not limit power to what is physical, but include in the term the force of established customs and public opinion.

We may say that so long as God's ancient people Israel were maintained in any kind of outward relationship to Him, conscience and power could not, strictly speaking, come into contest at all, and this was definitely taught by the Jewish law, for the man who kept it was to prosper in everything.

The contrast between that dispensation and the Christian dispensation is summed up by the great Bacon in his sentence that "Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction.

I.

It may, therefore, seem at first sight a little strange that I can take, as the first of my seven scenes, in which conscience and power are opposed, an incident which is recorded in the Book of Daniel; but we must remember that this occurred after the Jewish people had, according to the prophet Jeremiah, been rejected on account of their sins by the Divine Governor of the world in favour of the great Gentile monarch Nebuchadnezzar.

I make no apology for treating the Book of Daniel as authentic history, in spite of the so-called Higher Critics. I am glad to be able to refer to two papers lately read from this desk by men specially competent to deal with the subject and endorsed in this room by other true experts. These papers have shown us, first, that there is nothing in the language of the Book inconsistent with its having been actually written by Daniel, and, secondly, that its references to contemporary history are borne out by the most recent archæological research.

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I might perhaps be allowed to refer to Dr. Pusey's point that the order Medes and Persians," in which these two great amalgamated nations are mentioned in Daniel vi. 8, 12, 15 and viii. 20, in contrast with the order' "Persians and Medes in the later written Book of Esther (Chapter i. 3, 18, 19), proves that Daniel must have been composed while the amalgamation was yet recent and the Persians' power had not become plainly predominant. It is inconceivable if the writer lived after the downfall of that empire, as the higher critics allege, he could have put the two names in an order which had passed out of use in the early days of the monarchy and made most of the people which had long ago lost its separate entity in the Persian nation.

The relation of miracles in the Book cannot form a difficulty for those who believe in the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we have His testimony to the fact that Daniel was the writer of the Book.

The incident I bring before you concerns those three Hebrew youths who refused to bow before the image erected by Nebuchadnezzar in the Plain of Dura, and if we consider their situation, I think we shall see that there is not to be found in all history a finer example of suffering for conscience sake.

Although of the seed royal of Judah, they had, in accordance with Isaiah's prophecy to their forefather Hezekiah, been made eunuchs in the court of the king of Babylon, whose power over them was absolute. They had witnessed the subjugation of their native country, and their own enslavement had been sealed in a

peculiarly barbarous manner. This did not prevent their refusal under Daniel's leadership of participation in the king's meat and wine, no doubt in obedience to Moses, whose law was still valid for them. They may have found it comparatively easy to follow Daniel in his protest, but in the present scene they had to stand on their own faith and with a horrible death in view as the penalty for obeying conscience.

Might I remark in passing that, if this Book had a merely human origin such as the critics contend, we should certainly have had some explanation given of the absence on this crucial occasion of Daniel, who is by the critics posed as the great hero of the Book.

There is something noble and attractive in standing for a great leader or for the worship of some venerated religious object, but it is much more difficult to be enthusiastic over a negation, and it cannot be too clearly pointed out that the witness of these three youths was entirely negative.

The image which they refused to worship was no doubt suggested by the dream which Daniel had recently first told and then interpreted to Nebuchadnezzar, and the king whose command they dared to disobey was not only the greatest monarch in the world, but the one about whom their own nation's prophet Jeremiah had said that all nations must submit to him (Chapter xxvii. 6-8). The Protestant Princes might refuse to bow to the Roman consecrated Host in later times at the Diet in Germany, but they had a large body of public opinion behind them, whereas these three youths stood absolutely alone.

Nebuchadnezzar appears to have felt some special interest in his former page-boys, for he took the trouble to offer them a second chance of obeying his command. But they tell the great king, in whose hands their lives appeared to be, that they are not careful to answer him, at once anticipating our Lord's direction in after days to His disciples. After affirming that their God could deliver them they add: "But if not, be it known unto thee, O King, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.'

I know nothing finer in all history than this answer, which heralded the entrance of a new moral force into this world, before which the mightiest monarchies were to crumble in the dust.

The same conscientious scruple led thousands of Christian martyrs to refuse to throw a little incense on the altar burning before the statue of the Roman Emperor of the day, although they knew it meant death to refuse.