A TWOFOLD CONVICTION UNDERLIES THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SALVATION: FIRST, THAT THE GOD OF LOVE FORGIVES MEN and receives them into fellowship; second, that God gives to men the life which he asks of them.

It is to the second question that we now turn. How deeply important it is should be evident. A real salvation must be a continuing salvation. Day by day we must receive from God the life that we need: courage, strength, endurance, the hunger and thirst for righteousness, the spirit of love for our life with men, the sense of God and the practice of fellowship with him. It is not enough to hold up the ideal and to bid men follow the way; we must show them how they may find this help of God, how they may receive the life which they are to live. The Christian life has its law, an order of God as clear and sure as the laws of nature. That law, or order, has a double aspect as related to our deeds and to God's gifts. There is a moral order for us to follow in our conduct, and there is an order of God's giving which we must know and follow if we are to receive grace from him. So we must ask as to the means of grace, or, more broadly, the ways in which God's help comes to man.

The Means of Grace

In the main, Protestant theology has concerned itself here with general principles. Roman Catholicism, with its doctrine of Church and priesthood, of penance and sacraments, has been much more specific. So in a very different way have the pietistic groups, stressing personal experience, the work of the Spirit, and specific "means of grace." Neglect here may be the reason why our churches, commonly correct in doctrine, right in ethical ideals, and with effective organization, are so often lacking in a depth of religious life which should distinguish those who have found the Christian way. We need to be clear about our basic principles here, but we need also to make plain the concrete ways in which salvation becomes effective in life, or, in other words, how God enters our life as saving presence and power.

The question has commonly been considered under the term "means of grace." As suggested earlier, the word grace has a twofold meaning. It denotes, first, what God is, the character of God as love, and particularly his attitude of mercy toward men. Second, it indicates what God gives to us, the inner spirit and enabling help by which man can live as a child of God. The latter is based upon the former and upon the conviction that all our life is from God. We need to note the wide scope of this question as well as its vital significance. The themes of prayer, worship, the Church, the sacraments, the work of the Spirit all belong here, as well as the significance of the common life as at once a sphere of God's service and a means of growth in grace. And back of all these is the question as to how we are to join man's moral freedom and responsibility with this dependence upon the help of God.

Christian thought in general agrees that God is the God of grace and that he gives the grace, or help, by which men live. But when it comes to the specific ways in which God bestows this grace, there are wide differences. These rest upon the varying conceptions of the nature of the Christian life, of salvation, and of God's way of working with man and in man. They have appeared in our study of salvation and need only brief reference here. As chief traditional forms we may note mysticism, sacramentarianism, and the idea of grace as power bestowed by direct action of the sovereign God.

In its broadest meaning mysticism is the immediate feeling-

THE WAYS OF HELP

awareness of God—what Rudolf Otto describes as the sense of the numinous, or the holy. As such it belongs to Christianity. God is more than an idea to be apprehended or an authority to be obeyed; infinitely above us, he is yet a presence with us, one whom we may know in direct personal communion. Our concern here is with extreme, or absolute, mysticism. Here the emphasis on the human side is on feeling-awareness rather than on the ethical-personal relation. God is conceived in terms of spiritual essence or substance. ¹ The I-Thou relation retreats in favor of an impersonal sharing in the divine, a union in which the self is merged in the divine substance. Mysticism is right in its search for oneness with God and its protest against separateness, self-sufficiency, and self-centeredness. Extreme mysticism fails to see that this union is to be one of persons, that dependence upon God and utter devotion to his will mean the true and full achievement of the personal self and not its loss.

The sacraments have their place in Christianity as a means of grace and will be considered later. Here our concern is with sacramentarianism, the special theory of the sacraments which is best exemplified in the Roman Catholic Church and is tied up with its doctrine of the Church and the priesthood. Here again the personal and ethical fail to come to their own. Sacramental grace does not depend upon man's answer of repentance and faith to God's gift of mercy and help. The sacraments operate of necessity, directly, ex opere operato, depending upon the legally established institution and priesthood. The divine grace itself, thus mediated, appears as divine substance rather than as a personal-spiritual reality. The error is not in the idea that the sincere worshiper sharing in the mass receives inspiration and aid; it is that the essential factor is here conceived instrumentally as ecclesiastical-sacerdotal, and in its operation as mechanical-magical. ²

A third conception as to how God brings his grace to man may be called that of direct action. It is expressed in most consistent and thoroughgoing fashion in Calvin's Institutes and follows from his total view of God and man. Dominant in the conception of God is his sovereignty, and no seeming contradiction with the ethical is allowed to alter this. What he does is right because he does it. Salvation is directly and wholly the action of God. Man is totally depraved; he has lost wholly the image of God in which he was made and has in himself no power to perceive or respond. It follows then, alike from the nature of God and of man, not simply that all is of God, but that God's action is directly and absolutely determinative. Here the personal gives way to the mechanical. In effect man is not a person, apprehending with his mind, responding in free choice; rather he is an object acted upon.

Calvin does not shrink from the implications of this position. If men are saved, it is because God has so determined; if they are damned, this too is in accordance with God's decision. Anything else, in Calvin's thought, would infringe on God's absolute sovereignty. The idea of grace remains, though his grace is not the all-encompassing love of Jesus' teaching. Man's salvation is the gracious act of God, but the operation of grace is in principle nonethical and impersonal as in sacramentarianism. It differs in that it is mechanical and not magical or mystical. God has determined from all ages, and without regard to their character or response, who is to be saved. This concept of grace as independent of free personal response and irresistible in its operation can only be described as mechanical. So in the Westminster Confession we read how God "effectually" calls the elect and how man "is altogether passive therein." ³

The ways of help by which God gives life to men rest upon the basic principles underlying the whole concept of salvation.

(1) God is personal being; in his infinite mercy he receives man into a life of personal fellowship. (2) God asks of men a life of love and righteousness, and what he asks he gives. God's grace is no mysterious substance or magical power, but his own life, his own Spirit: truth and love and goodness. (3) Life like this, personal and ethical, can be given only in personal-ethical manner, in and through fellowship with himself. (4) A personal relation is always mutual. It is a man answering God, not simply God speaking to man. Faith perceives when God reveals himself; love responds to his love. Faith and love come, indeed, from God; but the response is the free answer of person to Person, not the behavior of a thing moved upon by power, itself passive and inert. (5) The means of grace are as wide as life itself. All life should be sacramental. Offered to God in faith and obedience, it becomes the means which God uses to give life to men. Life itself is a means of grace, the door through which God comes to us with his gifts. (6) Not all means of grace are on the same level. The witness of the saints and the experience of the ages point us to ways of help which have special power to mediate to us the living God.

The Way of Prayer and Worship

The heart of religion is fellowship with God in obedience and trust; in and through this fellowship God gives himself to men. That is why prayer is so important as a means of grace. Prayer is fellowship with God coming to conscious expression. All religion involves a double movement: God coming to man, man responding to God. Only thus is man's vital union with God established. But if the fellowship is to be real and vital, if the union with God is to be carried into all man's life, then there must be this core of consciously and purposely practiced communion which we call prayer.

Prayer seems very simple; so, indeed, it is. It is the child looking up and saying "Father." Yet viewed aright, it is the highest achievement of man, demanding the whole man and calling on all his powers. Heart and mind and will, holy imagination and spiritual insight, supreme desire persistently held, and back of all the venture of faith, all these enter in. And this is clear when we see what Christian prayer comprises.

Prayer is, first of all, the soul's turning to God and waiting upon him that it may see him and know him. The world of the visible is always with us, pressing upon our attention, demanding our action. The secular mood tends to engulf our thought and life and to shut out the world of the spirit. If we are to know that world, then we must deliberately look at the things that are unseen and eternal. God, indeed, is always with us; "closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet/' But to know him in his beauty and truth, his goodness and power and holiness, this means more than casual thought or the speaking of his name. There must be quiet of soul, aspiration of heart, meditation, devotion of will. This is the meaning of prayer, not as petition absorbed in self, but as reverent worship, an offering of self, a waiting upon God, that we may know him and hear him speak to us.

And here the significance of common worship is seen, with the needed help that it brings to our dull and ofttimes laggard spirits. The quickening fellowship, the union of heart and voice in prayer and praise, the truth that comes through Scripture and sermon, the atmosphere of quiet and reverence, all these help us to see the Lord, high and lifted up, and to draw near to him. Private prayer and common worship are the open door through which we enter the presence of God and through which he can enter our hearts and lives.

Prayer is the bringing of man to God as well as of God to man. Prayer is not first of all the outstretched hand waiting to receive, but rather the bowed heart, the penitent spirit, the recognition of God's claim, the surrender of life. Religion is born when man meets that which is higher than himself and bows before the Holy One. To this God as seen in Christ man brings himself and all his life. In confession and repentance he brings his sins and failures. He sees all the good that has come to him and brings his thanksgiving. He owns God as Lord and offers himself in service. He entrusts to God his needs and cares and seeks from God the grace to live. Seeing all in the light of God, he gains the vision of the true values of life and affirms his devotion to them as life's true goal and first concern. ⁴

So far we have considered prayer as communion and worship. In common thought prayer is first of all petition. This is its literal meaning: to pray is to ask, especially to ask earnestly, to ask God. And petition has its place in Christian prayer. There is a double drive in prayer: first, our awareness of God, of the Holy One before whom we bow, of the God of power and goodness with whom there is help; second, the sense of dependence and impelling need. Rightly, worship and devotion come first: we look up to the Father in heaven; we pray that his name be hallowed, his will be done. But the petitions follow. They may be selfish; that is excluded if we begin as Jesus taught us. They may be foolish, as when we ask for wrong things, or superstitious, as when men think that there is some God-compelling power in insistent and heaped-up phrases.

But petition has its place in prayer and a vital one. True, there is a divine giving which does not wait upon man's asking: God sends his rain on the just and the unjust. But God's highest gifts wait upon the devotion and desire of man. There is a blessing that belongs to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Jesus exhorts men to ask, to seek, to knock at God's door. The way to life is through a narrow gate, the gate of decision and desire. Prayer is "dominant desire." The fault lies in wrong asking and half-hearted seeking. The province of Christian petition is first of all spiritual, the higher goods of life; and it is here that Jesus summons us to earnest and persistent search and asking.

But this does not exclude what we call the natural world: bread, health, safety, daily work, material goods, all belong in our praying. Man's life is one—body and spirit. All comes from God; all belongs to him: in it all we serve him, and for it all we may have his help. There are Christian demands to be met here: "Do not be anxious." "Your heavenly Father knows." "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" (Matt. 6:31, 32, 33). Right prayer is not demand but trust. Prayer is the expression alike of need and of confidence. Because the children are sure of the Father's love, they bring all their needs and concerns to him. That is a real part of the Christian's communion with God. But because they trust that love, they pray first, "Thy will be done," knowing that the will of God means the highest good for man's life. So the way of Christian petition may be summed up in a triple rule: bring all things to God; leave all things with God; in all things trust God.

There remains the question as to whether prayer makes any real difference in what happens in our world. Is not the physical universe wholly under the reign of law? This raises the question as to how we are to conceive God's relation to his world. Only brief comment can be made here. (1) The world is not external to God: its order expresses his reason; its forces have their being in him. (2) The order of nature is not a barrier to man's control but makes that control possible. Shall we think of the immanent, all-sustaining God as having less control of nature than man has? (3) The world of order is a single world and its order includes spiritual as well as natural forces. Human experience shows how these forces influence each other. We know how powerfully mental-emotional states may operate through the endocrine glands and what healing effects upon the body may be wrought by right attitudes of spirit. ⁵ The Christian believes that Spirit is the supreme reality and the controlling power in the world. But while we believe that all is in God's power, and while we bring all these concerns to God, it is to his wisdom and good will that we must leave all decision, recognizing that our individual need must find its place in his larger order and purpose.

The Way of the Word

Central among the means of grace is the Word. Our God is a God who speaks. He has spoken in the historic revelation to which the Scriptures witness. He speaks to us today. Our religion is our answer to the God who speaks. And mind must answer here as well as heart and will. God asks no blind obedience but insight and understanding. And this applies not merely to the beginning of the Christian life but to its continuance and growth. If that life is to be more than unthinking emotion, passive submission, or a routine of rules and ritual, then we must love the Lord our God with all our mind as well as with heart and soul and strength. Only so can God enter our life with all the richness of meaning that he should have for us. So the Word becomes a vital means of grace, the word of truth which God speaks and our response in insight, understanding, faith, meditation, and study.

By the Word we mean here not only the Bible but every word or way by which the living God makes known his living presence and his saving truth. That includes the historical revelation, consummated in Christ who is for us "the Word" and brought to us in the Bible to which we give the same name. In New Testament usage the Word meant the gospel message. For us it means all these: the Bible, Christ, and the preaching, or proclamation, in which the message is brought to men. It was one of the great services of the Reformation to restore to a central place not just the Bible but the preaching in which the gospel was proclaimed. With this went the assertion that each man for himself might read the Scripture and hear God speak, that each man might come directly to God and know him, and that every man, layman or priest, might bring the Word to others—all of which belongs to the full meaning of "the priesthood of all believers."

While the Word in the supreme sense is found in the historic revelation, there are other ways in which the truth of God comes to us. Whatever brings insight into God's ways, whatever makes clear the ideals and ways of Christian living, whatever widens our horizon, strengthens our faith, quickens imagination, and makes us more deeply aware of God, this is truth from God and a means of grace. A wide range is thus indicated for Christian reading and meditation: books which present the Bible and the Christian faith, books of devotion, as well as books of biography, history, poetry. But the way of truth becomes a means of grace for us only as we bring an open mind, a deep desire for God and his truth, the needed time for meditation and prayer, and a spirit of obedience ready to follow when the way is clear.

The Common Life as a Means of Grace

The common life is one of the chief means of grace. By this we mean life in its everyday aspects: the world of nature with its order and beauty, with its demands and its gifts; the world of our fellows, with the manifold relations of home, friendship, community, and nation; the world of work and material goods; the personal life with its temptations and struggles, its doubts and fears, its joys and satisfactions. Christian thought has treated this life in its study of ethics. Its wiser leaders have repudiated the division of man's world into sacred and secular, as did Luther, asserting that God is the Lord of all life and that all right action is served of God. ⁶ But traditional theology has in general failed to include this world in its doctrine of salvation. Meanwhile there is a rapidly multiplying literature which deals with these matters from the psychological, ethical, and religious viewpoints.

The basic Christian principles which we have been following make clear the meaning of the common life as a means of grace as well as a way of duty. Prayer, worship, the sacraments, meditation have their special place; but we do not leave God's help behind when we turn to active duty. Fellowship with God should reach out into the "common" life and make this a means of grace. What follows here is not an attempt to cover a field which is as wide as life itself, but simply to indicate concretely how certain major aspects of this common life may be a help in attaining the Christian life as well as the sphere for its expression.

1. The most important means of grace in the common life is human fellowship. Apart from such fellowship there is no human living: speech, reason, the arts, science, moral ideals, religious faith, all are achieved only in and with man's relation with fellow man. Such relations are of the most varied character and increase in number and complexity as civilization advances. There are the intimate ones of home and friendship. There are those which unite us in the deepest concerns of life—faith, ideals, devotion. Scientific, political, economic, recreational ties all enter in. At the same time this associated life is the seat of our greatest problems and hindrances. In the individual life it is the occasion of fear, jealousy, suspicion, envy, ill will, hatred. In our social life it brings all these with endless other ills, including war.

This associated life is one of the chief means of grace. It is the place where man may practice fellowship with God and God can enter with his saving help. Not only is his grace needed for this life; it is this life through which he bestows his grace. We all know the central place of fellowship, human as well as divine, in the Lord's Supper and in relation to the Church, which is as such a fellowship, a communio sanctorum. Here we apply the principle in the wider sphere.

The Christian answer, alike as to the problem and the opportunities of this associated life, is given primarily in the word love. Here again demand and gift go together. The whole requirement of God, says Jesus, is summed up in the word love—love to God, love to man. Such love is more than sentiment or emotion. It goes beyond the intimate personal relations with which we commonly associate it. It is good will, active and creative, extended to all, near and far, not determined by the worth of its object or by any response, knowing only that all men are children of God. It is the spirit which we see in Christ, revealing the inmost being of that God who is love. Hence it is only as we have this spirit, as Jesus points out, that we are children of God.

But here is where human fellowship may become a means of grace. God gives us the love which he asks of us. This is nothing less than to give himself to us, God's love is not a substance or a thing which he hands over to us. It is the gift of himself in that fellowship into which he by his mercy receives us. But the gift has its condition: we can have God's love only as we share it with others. That is the very nature of love. It is thus that fellowship becomes a means of grace, and love, our love for fellow men, a sacrament of God. These human relations, with all their problems and difficulties, are thus the means by which God, entering our life, becomes its controlling power, shapes its nature, develops its resources, so that in the practice of this love, as in its receiving, we grow up in him who is our head.

2. If God is to be found in and through all life, then work should be one of the chief sacraments of God since it plays so large a part in human life. That is quite different from the common view, even among Christians. Some, it is true, find satisfaction and joy in their work; but for the mass of men work is too often mere drudgery or at best the condition for gaining the necessities or higher satisfactions of life. Physicians, psychotherapists, and social workers, however, have come to recognize the value of work for a normal life, physically, psychically, morally, and in social adjustment. The harmful effects of idleness are just as apparent, whether seen in the voluntary idleness of the rich or the enforced idleness of the unemployed.

The Christian idea of work roots first of all in our conception of God. We believe in a God who works. "My Father is working still, and I am working" (John 5:17). Creation and redemption go together and go on continually. That follows from the thought of a living God who is a God of love. Jesus speaks of a God whose work is seen in rising sun and falling showers, in clothing flowers and feeding birds and giving bread to men, as well as in carrying out his great world purposes. Paul tells the Corinthians that they are the field which God is tilling, the house which he is building (1 Cor. 3:9).

Seen in the light of this God, our work takes a deeper meaning. Honest work, wrought in the right spirit, is service of God and a sharing in his service of men. It is a form of fellowship with God.

Rabindranath Tagore has expressed this in his Gitanjali:

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil! ⁷

The great work of God is the carrying out of his purpose of redemption in the overcoming of evil, the establishment of his kingdom, and the creation of a new humanity here on earth. And it is man's high privilege that God has called him to share in this work. "We are fellow workmen" (1 Cor. 3:9), says Paul.

Here comes in the Christian idea of life as a stewardship. God is the householder. Men are the servants to whom he has entrusted his interests. Life is a trust. To this trust belong daily work, material goods, time, talent, influence, all our activities of every kind and all the potentialities that lie within our God-given personal endowment and situation in life.

This daily life is a school for our training and an instrument of God's grace. It may become occasion and means for personal fellowship with God, as Brother Lawrence has shown in his Practise of the Presence of God. The daily task becomes for those who seek it a time for daily help. So God bestows his Spirit and creates in us loyalty, patience, integrity, self-mastery, wisdom, and strength, the fruits of his grace. The hours of rest, meditation, and worship remain for us a deep need; but we lose their gifts of grace unless we carry them over into this everyday life.

There is, of course, no mechanical or necessary operation of grace in the life of work. It must be work of the right kind, creative and socially useful. There is much work in our modern world which is little more than drudgery, and much that is evil in character, or even destructive in intent and result. And work must be in the right spirit with some vision of its meaning.

3. Joy and pain may be a means of grace. No experiences enter more constantly into our life than these. All life is marked by sensitivity; life is possible only as there is a sensitive awareness of one's world. The basic drives of life are found in the urge to avoid its evils and to seek its satisfactions. That applies to life at its highest as well as at its lower levels, and not least to religion.

In this realm of joy and pain God finds a means of speaking to men and of entering their life. Here, too, man may find means of grace for growth in life. Joy belongs to the Christian life. True, we are called to deny ourselves, but there is also the summons to joy, especially in the psalms and the New Testament. "Rejoice in the Lord." "Taste and see that the Lord is good." "In thy presence there is fullness of joy" (Pss. 33:1; 34:8; 16:11). Paul sees joy as one of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22) and summons the Philippians to "rejoice in the Lord" (4:4). And the Fourth Gospel gives Jesus* word: "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full" (John 15:11). Here joy belongs to the very spirit of Christ, and to joy or rejoice is a Christian duty.

Understanding what this Christian joy is, we can see how it becomes a means of grace. Pleasure centers in self; joy requires us to look beyond ourselves. It calls for imagination, vision, faith, appreciation, humble and glad acceptance. It asks for eyes open to the goods of life, to its beauty, its wonders. It centers, above all, in the love of God and his gift in Christ. God calls us to rejoice in his gifts; in the joy which they bring and in our rejoicing God finds a larger entrance and is able to give in larger measure.

Pain and suffering, an inescapable part of life, are also possible means of God's grace and our growth. The saints have always found them a school of the spirit. It is not that suffering necessarily works good. It may, on the contrary, bring bitterness, hardness of heart, or simply destruction of spirit. Nor is it a matter of passive endurance. But rightly met it will bring us higher insights, deeper sympathy and understanding for our fellow men, and a richer experience of God's help. And so we may share in the spirit and life of him who suffered for others, "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame" (Heb. 12:2).

1) The notable mystical work Theologia Germanica, to which Luther confessed his great indebtedness, moves close to this impersonal concept at times, as when it speaks of "the One who is neither I nor Thou, this nor that, but is above all I and Thou, this and that." Yet the author guards himself at the crucial point when he says, "All thought of self, all self-seeking, self-will, . . . must be utterly lost, . . . except in so far as they are necessary to make up a person," Ch. XLIII.

2) Dean Inge calls this "a pharmacological superstition, ... as if the consecrated elements externally introduced an incorruptible substance into our bodies." 'Personal Idealism and Mysticism, p. 78.

3) For an effective criticism of this theory as well as an able discussion of our general theme see John Oman, Grace and Personality.

4) This double aspect of prayer is well pat by Paul Sabatier in his Life of St. Francis of Assist. "To pray is to talk with God, to lift ourselves Tip to him, to converse with him that he may come down to us. It is an act of meditation, of reflection, which presupposes the effort of all that is most personal in us. With St, Francis as with Jesus, prayer has this character of effort which makes k the greatest moral act. For him as for his Master the end of prayer is communion with the heavenly Father, the accord of the divine with the human. But it is not without difficulty that the soul unites itself with God, or, if one prefers, that it finds itself. A prayer ends at last in divine communion only when it began by a struggle." Pp. 187, IBS, passim.

5) See Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown, ch. IX.

6) The influence of the old dualism lives on in the very terms that we employ. Sacred, sanctuary, sacrament, saint, as commonly used, imply that the holy (sanctus) is a world apart from the common. The "profane" is that which is outside the temple or sanctuary (pro † fanum).

7) Copyright 1913 by The Macmillan Company and used by their permission.