1 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss,
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photographs of pictures (I think Vandyke portraits), and courteously seemed to value my father's opinion about them.1
2. At the root of all efficient evangelization there must lie this same principle of adaptation. We are fishers of men, and the fisherman uses the bait that is most likely to catch the fish, not the bait that best suits bis own palate.
If An illustration of this truth is afforded by the different characters of Gregory the Great and the missionary St. Augustine. Both were earnest, both enthusiastic, both ready to spend and to be spent, if only they might preach Christ crucified to the rude barbarians of Anglo-Saxon England. But St. Augustine from first to last was hampered by a want of elasticity, a narrowness, intellectual rather than moral, which led him to identify Christianity with that form of it with which, in his convent life at Eome, he had been familiar. St. Gregory, with that wisdom which a knowledge of many men and many minds had given, a delicate sense of the difference between essential and accidental, above all with a conviction of the necessity of " adaptation " in the preaching of Christianity, stands out as a model of wide and liberal-minded earnestness. When the collision with the old British Church came, St. Augustine with the same want of flexibility, not unmixed perhaps with a sense of his own importance as Metropolitan of England, was ready to contend to the last about the wording of a Liturgy, or the form of a tonsure, or the style of chronology. In vain St. Gregory's wise warning that he should adapt himself to national customs as far as possible, and " not value things because of places, but places for the good things they contained." With all his earnestness and missionary zeal, St. Augustine's want of versatility in the delivery of his message narrowed down his success to a small portion of the east of England, leaving the rest to be evangelized by the remnants of that very British Church with which he would not work.2
If Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him, which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work the life- and-death struggles of separate human beings.3
1 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, i. 125. 8 A. L. Moore, The Message of the Gospel, 34. 8 George Eliot, Janet's Repentance.
250 ADAPTABILITY
(1) We hear much of intellectual difficulties. How many of us attempt to qualify ourselves even to understand them far less to answer them ? Again and again grievous harm is done to those for whom, as for us, Christ died, by the way in which those who have never themselves experienced difficulties of belief put such things aside as the work of the devil, or as a wilful carping at revealed truth. To fail to throw ourselves into the different mental and moral states of our people will be to fail to deliver our message aright.
I, too, have passed through that self-same place Where you and the Dragon are face to face.
I neither vanquished nor slew him quite, But he fled away with the morning light.
Alas! so deadly the mortal fray, You cannot hearken the words I say.
And I, who remember the combat sore, Weep. I have passed that way before.1
(2) We hear much of scientific progress. The true Christian worker will meet the latest acquisitions of science, not with opposition, not with coldness, not with misgiving, but with a hearty welcome — the more hearty in proportion as his faith is the stronger — confident that in the end Divine truth can only gain by enlarging the bounds of human knowledge.
^[ Of all that elder race, he [Dean Church] was the one who most intimately followed on with the new movements and the fresh temper. He was absolutely in touch with the younger men. No brick walls blocked them out, or brought them into abrupt arrest. He did not encounter them with a challenge of suspicion, or hold them off at arm's length. He felt what was going forward ; he believed in its worth ; he took it seriously. Eight to his very last years, he caught the spirit that was abroad, and was sensitive to its necessary differences from earlier types. Thus the younger men could come to him with their vague and crude aspirations, unafraid and unchilled. They were sure of sympathetic considera- tion— of a judgment that viewed their case from inside. They felt that he saw with their eyes ; and, with that assurance, they
1 Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 46.
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could freely yield to his authority, which it was a delight to recognize.1
(3) Do we live at a time when aesthetic culture is making rapid strides ? We will not let it drift into a position of antagon- ism to Christian worship, but will rather enlist it in the service of God, careful only not to make a mistress of a handmaid, and watchful always lest artistic feeling should step into the place of devotion, or music usurp the throne of prayer.