C I HJR.t::il ... :^ CHANOllSli:* ORi'MiR MeM^cmM^i^tmid^n/Iikwi f^walauM^n^Mt\^iimtMKtMu^^l^ilt»• filter CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY olin 3 1924 029 329 384 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029329384 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER j2^^^ THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER BY SHAILER MATHEWS PROFESSOR OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; AUTHOR OF "THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS," "THE MESSIANIC HOPE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT," ETC. THE MACMILLAN COMPANV LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. I913 AU rit;hU rmrvti Copyright, 1907, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1907. Reprinted July, 1907 ; February, igo8; September, 1909 ; April, 1913. Norfaootl W««s J, SrOaehlBg Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. CONTENTS CHAPTER I FAGZ The Crisis of the Church i The nature of the crisis. I. The church in the presence of moral issues. II. Aspects of the crisis. CHAPTER II The Church and Scholarship . . . . io The relation of the church to education. I. The dependence of theology upon the social mind. The present intellectual transition. The interpre- tative concepts and philosophies of the church derived from a pre-scientific age. — II. The extent of the breach between the church and the modern intellectual world. The new education as a source of theological unrest. The college graduate and the church. — III. The attitude of the church towards modern science, particularly evolution. — IV. The church and scientific biblical study. Shall the critic be excluded from evangelical churches? — V. The danger of resulting schisms and intoler- ance. — VI. What the new learning can do for the church. — VII. Culture and the eternal life. The unnatural divorce of the two. The evangelizing of culture. CHAPTER III The Church and the Gospel of the Risen Christ 47 The negative attitude of certain phases of schol- arship relative to historic facts. I. What is the gospel? I. In its New Testament sense. 2. Its VI CONTENTS PACK historical elements. — II. Can this gospel of fact be preached effectively to this modern world? i. The tendency to replace fact by pragmatic philosophy. 2. The Jesus of experience and the historical Jesus. 3. Specific objections to preaching this historical gospel, (a) Criticism, (Ji) miracles, (c) eschatol- ogy. — III. As to the preaching of the gospel of immortality. Objections to such preaching. Evo- lution and immortality. The real issue before the church. — IV. How shall the gospel be preached? I. With primitive insistence upon the historic ele- ments. 2. Distinguishing facts from their inter- pretation. 3. By the use of current intellectual conceptions. — V. The evangelicalism of the man who, on unhistorical grounds, beheves the gospel of the resurrection of Jesus. CHAPTER IV The Church and the Gospel of Brotherhood . 91 ■'The power of the church to emphasize generic human interest as a basis of real fraternity. I. The social content of evangelic religion, i. Religion as the expression of a unifying factor in life. 2. The gospel as a basis of fraternity. — II. The method of the church in bringing about fraternity, i. Its appeal to life not philosophy. 2. Its insistence upon the presence of God in his world. CHAPTER V The Church and Social Discontent . . .116 Alienation of the masses from the church. I. The three types of discontent, i. Economic. 2. Politi- cal. 3. Religious. — II. The real nature of social discontent, i. It is not pathological. 2. It is based upon idealism. 3. Not exclusively economic. CONTENTS VU FACE — III. The difficulties in evangelizing this discontent. I. The church as a representative of an economic class. 2. The church member and politics. 3. The suspicion of religion itself. — IV. How shall dis- content be evangelized? 1. The necessity of a social gospel. 2. Discontent not yet widespread hostility to the church. 3. The church as the representative of spiritual life. 4. The education of Christian sympathy. 5. The church not the cham- pion of passive submission. CHAPTER VI The Church and the Social Movement . . 150 What is the social movement? I. The unfriend- liness of the church and the social movement. — II. The mission of the church dynamic not legisla- tive. — III. The two indispensable services the church can render the social movement, i. It can keep social impulses law abiding. 2. It can guaran- tee sanity in reform. — IV. The method of the church as contrasted with the method of socialism. — V. The social content of Christian individualism. — VI. Will the church fece the problem? CHAPTER VII The Church and Materialism .... 182 Materialism the greatest enemy of the church. I. Philosophical materialism. — II. Materialism of wealth. Danger of overstatement. Corporate and individual ethical codes. Consequent dangers to the church. The church must oppose materialism in the labor movement as truly as in capitalism. — III. The materialization of the home. Woman as an income-earner. The question of divorce. — IV. The materialism of amusements. Athletic VIU CONTENTS sports. The theatre. — V. The materialism of gambling. —VI. Materialism in religion to be met by an insistence upon reality. The religion of the average man. — VII. The call to the church. CHAPTER VIII The Sword of the Christ The call to heroic and self-sacrificing struggle. — I. The hostility of the church to sin. The new social conscience. — II. The call to heroic leader- ship. The decrease in the number of students for the ministry. — III. The theological seminary and social leadership, i. The subsidizing of students for the ministry. 2. The problem of a theological education. — IV. The church as a social leader. — V. The modern man as an evangelical leader. — VI. The call to heroic service. — VII. Con- clusion. THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER CHAPTER I THE CRISIS OF THE CHURCH " The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Every age is apt to think itself the turning-point of history. In a sense it is. A turn of a kaleido- scope, be it never so slight, determines the combina- tions of a later adjustment of the bits of glass. But "crisis" is something more than a relative term. It describes a situation which is no ordinary member of a Une of antecedents and consequents, but one that assures radical changes in the immediate future. Such a situation is the culmination of a slow gather- ing of forces and compels a choice between sharply drawn aliematives. It is not necessarily precipitated by great issues. Quite as often it is occasioned by events unimportant in themselves, which are so related to a new social mind as to set in motion an 2 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER entire group of forces as a match kindles a huge fire when once the fuel is properly laid. The difference between a revolution and a crisis is the difference between that fire and the moment when some one with a lighted match in hand pauses to decide whether the fire shall be Ughted. An age is usually aware of its crisis. The litera- ture of the eighteenth century abounds in the opin- ions of intelhgent observers both of France and America that history was at one of its turning-points. In the same way the men of our own day are growing increasingly ahve to the fact that we are facing re- markable social changes in the immediate future. In fact, when one recalls the rapidity with which events are moving, it is apparent that those changes are already taking place. The old order is indeed changing, yielding place to new. I The church as an institution is somewhat diflacult of definition. We have a great number of churches, from the vast organization of Rome to the group of men and women in some Uttle town who are at- tempting to reproduce the democracy of primitive Christianity, but it has even been argued that the church in a generic sense does not exist. But such THE CRISIS OF THE CHURCH 3 precision is hardly justified by the ordinary usage of terms. When we speak of the church, we mean institutionaUzed Christianity, the Christian religion as represented by its organized adherents. It is as fair to speak of it in this general way as it is to speak of the state. Once let misfortime fall upon any one of its various branches and all Christendom sorrows. A massacre of missionaries in China, the death of a Pope, a struggle for religious liberty, bring up into clearest consciousness, as it were, a subliminal sense of Christian unity, which eludes our daily experience. The church of to-day is face to face with the for- mative influences which are making to-morrow. By the division of labor bom of social history it has become only one of many directive forces in society. Scholarship, business, sociahsm, popularized phi- losophy, amusements, national aggrandizement, are only a few of the agencies which are cooperating to make to-morrow very different from to-day. To an extent that escapes the superficial observer, the church is itself being affected by these forces; but far more important than this fact is the other that to-day, as at so many times in the past, the church must face the vital decision as to what part it shall have in producing the new world. 4 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER In a large way, transitions involve morals as truly as politics and economics. The breaking down of tradition and of inherited thought and standards characterizes our entire social Ufe. Pathetic enough is the perplexity of soul that results. Men have not ceased to want to do right, but they have become confused as to what really constitutes right. The growing moral sense refuses to submit to the con- trol of the past, but is not convinced as to just what course of conduct newer ideals demand. Just at present we are seeing how acute the struggle between the old and the new can become because of a de- termined effort to identify legality with morality. Laws that have been neglected are now being en- forced. Sins that have been laughed at are now being punished. But the age does not yet see its way clearly. On the one side there is the effort to maintain by law the sanctity of a competitive system, and on the other there is the tremendous if not irresistible ten- dency toward collective bargaining between con- solidated labor on the one hand and consolidated capital on the other. At the same time there is the general breakdown among Christian people of a conventional morality which resulted from the teaching of the church in a less sophisticated age. THE CRISIS OF THE CHURCH 5 A search for wealth and for creature comforts is precipitating multitudes of questions which must be answered, but which are extremely perplexing because we lack precedents in accordance with which to answer them. As never before there is need, therefore, of a sturdy insistence upon the sinfulness of sin. One of the greatest dangers that besets the church is that in some way it shall adopt a "worldly" atti- tude in moral matters ; that it shall lose its sensitive- ness to evil and look with too large tolerance upon moral lapses. It is idle to preach the gospel to people who regard it as a means of mere Hterary culture. The average man will not call a physi- cian until he is convinced that he is ill. The pulpit has partly abandoned attempts to arouse moral dis- content in the human soul and has been giving prominence to congratulatory descriptions of men as the sons of God. Admirable as this hopefulness regarding humanity may be, it will be a sad day for society if its moral teachers undertake to widen the strait gate and broaden the narrow way. The changing attitude of the church toward customs and ideals it once frankly condemned may be due to a clearer sense of the legitimacy of much that gave attractiveness to Greek culture, but it is not 6 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER sufficient to base all appeals for repentance and restitution upon the joy of living. Society needs to be convinced afresh of the elemental distinction between evil and good as redefined by the changing condition of our ever more complex life. Knowl- edge is not virtue and art is not righteousness. A social order devoted to either must be steadied by ideals that are drawn from the fundamentals of the gospel of Jesus for which the church stands. II This is the real crisis of the church, — the need that it define its attitude toward formative forces now at work. Will it move on indifferent to their existence, or will it cooperate with them, correct them, inspire them with its own ideals, and insure that their results shall insure a better to-morrow? A new age is imminent. Will the church guaran- tee that it shall be in no narrow individuaUstic way Christian ? It is no unique crisis. It is the same that has confronted the church since its beginnings. In the early centuries the church was called upon to deter- mine its attitude toward the Roman Empire and the Greek philosophy. Should it oppose them or should 't seize upon them as agents for its own growth ? In THE CRISIS OF THK CHURCH 7 the Middle Ages, face to face with the processes which gave rise to a new Europe, it had to face the question of participating as a controUing element in the mixture of races and the rise of a new imperial idealism. During the Renaissance it had to deter- mine whether it would oppose or exploit the new learning. In the Reformation, with travail of soul, it fixed its relation to the new individualism in reUgion and pohtics. In the era of revolutions it was forced to choose between a philosophy claiming the supremacy of natural rights and an all but uni- versal recognition of vested privileges. He would be a rash man who would say that in all these crises the church acted in the wisest or best fashion. It is easy enough to look across the years and see that too often it made fundamental mis- takes, the fruits of which have handicapped the progress both of itself and of society. Yet it can- not be denied that in each of these and other great critical periods of western civilization there were men like Athanasius, Augustine, Ambrose, Hildebrand, Luther, Channing, and Maurice who consciously undertook to bring the church into dynamic relation with the forces that were determining the future. Each one of these leaders was a true child of his age, but to them and to their fellows was due the splendid 8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER progress made by the church in some of its various activities. The church of the twentieth century not only owes them an incalculable debt of gratitude, but also finds in them an example. Ill The present crisis of the church is not bom of any single controlling force. It is far more com- plicated. The church must decide what shall be its attitude to a group of formative influences the final results of which no man dare forecast. The task before it is magnified by the fact that the church itself is not united. On the one extreme are aggressive conservatives, and on the other side are aggressive radicals as keen to destroy inherited tenets as were ever the Encyclopaedists. Nor are the forces themselves to be treated in precisely the same way. There are influences which the church must oppose with all possible vigor for the sake of pre- serving faith in spiritual realities; there are other influences which must be appropriated by the church as agencies with which it may beat down moral error and make Christian truth more dynamic in the new social life. Sane discrimination, a tolerance bom of conviction and Christian charity, a keen perception of that unity of experience which pre- THE CRISIS OF THE CHURCH 9 vents the divorce of men's economic life from the idealism of thought and faith, a loyalty to the essen- tial rather than to the passing elements of Christian- ity, are cognition of man's social as well as individual worth — all these are indispensable for the church of to-day if it would determine to the best advantage the position of the church of to-morrow. The relation of the church to the various intel- lectual, religious, and social phases of the crisis is more than an academic question. It is a matter of life and death for both the church and the new social order. No man who faces it honestly can treat it flippantly. He will not view it with that myopic optimism that besets the most cautious of us, but neither will he, after the fashion of religious demagogues, condemn the church as an outworn institution. Christianity is no dying faith. It is splendidly vital. The church is not moribund. It faces dangers, but they are bom of its strength quite as much as of its weakness. It is not as com- pletely in touch with its age as it should be, but it can be brought into closer union with the other forces that are making our new social order. It can be brought into such union. Shall it be ? That is a question that the church itself must answer. And that, I repeat, is the crisis the church faces. CHAPTER II THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP The church has always stood for scholarship. From the days when the apostles had Mark for a minister of the word, it has held to the necessity of training its youth. There are few institutions of higher learning in America which do not owe their foundations to the need of an educated ministry. Within later years, it is true, provision for the educa- tion of young men and women has been made by large appropriations by both federal and state govern- ments, but even in such institutions the great body of instructors are at least nominally connected with some church. Universities no longer care primarily for the training of ministers and seldom maintain theological departments, but they are none the less due in a large measure to the initial impulse which was given collegiate education by the demands of re- ligious bodies. And notwithstanding the enormous increase of enrolment in such noble institutions as the state universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, and Ohio, the probability is that the major- THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP II ity of college students are in institutions which, like Harvard and Yale, owe their inception to ecclesias- tical initiative. But however fostered, higher education presents a problem which is of vital importance to the future of the church. The struggle between traditional theology and science really exists. There may not be, as some assert, any struggle between religion and science, although it is possible that we are too opti- mistic even as regards this. However that may be, the relation of the church to our present educational tendencies really cannot be overlooked. For to understand it is to incite the church to new effort and success. I Theology as the description and expression of man's religious experience has always been to a high degree controlled by current philosophies and world- views. As every reader of church history knows, the great intellectual achievement of the second and third Christian centuries was the systematization of the gospel in accordance with a current philosophy. But even before those years of theological crystalhza- tion, the facts of Jesus' life and of Christian ex- perience had been interpreted and given theological significance by Paul. And although he rose above 12 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the trivialities of rabbinical exegesis, Paul was the product of the rabbinical schools, and his thought was to no small degree controlled by the concepts of current Judaism. In a very true sense it may be said, therefore, that the New Testament teaching and historic orthodoxy as formulated by the ecumenical councils are both alike to a high degree controlled by the philosophical concepts of the Grasco-Roman age. Similarly in the case of the confessional statements which resulted from the struggle of the Reformation period. They, too, were made by men who, however learned in ancient literature and in the current dialectic, were far enough from being controlled by the presuppositions and conclusions current in our own day. The difference between the schools of theology of the twentieth and the fourth century lies not so much in the facts of the gospel as in the methods and presuppositions with which each age systema- tizes these facts. The church must preach some form of theology, and theology in the final analysis is the result of an attempt of the thinkers of an age to make religion intelligible to their fellows. It is the correlation of the facts of religion with the other things they know. It is easy enough to see, therefore, that the church THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 1 3 is concerned with the results of modem scholarship, for scholarship is really determining the method of thought by which the church must formulate its own convictions. The Christian teacher may disapprove and therefore combat the intellectual environment in which his fellows live; he may approve it and exploit it; but in the very nature of the case he cannot ignore it. Now it is this very simple fact that lies back of a very critical situation. The church of to-day is hving in the midst of the most extraordinary intel- lectual transition that the world has ever seen. Calvin and Athanasius, had they met, could have understood each other's philosophical preconcep- tions and intellectual methods reasonably well; but Calvin would have had no small difficulty in coming to an understanding with Schleiermacher and would have regarded Ritschl as deserving the fate of Servetus. Kant in philosophy and Darwin in science stand for something more than mere phases of in- tellectual life. Since their day we have Uved in a world of thought peopled with new intelltectual citizens. The teacher of religion can stand aloof from the reconstruction which the new science and the new philosophy are determinmg only by stand- ing apart from the world itself. 14 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Even if this intellectual revolution were purely professional, it would be something with which the church is vitally connected. For the great theolo- gies from that of Paul to that of Ritschl have been the product of university men, not of the masses. But the revolution is far enough from being limited to the university. It permeates the entire educa- tional world. Our boys and girls in the high school are not only being taught different facts from those which controlled the men who built up the great theologies of both the Roman Catholic church and the Protestant bodies, but they are being taught to relate these facts in accordance with very different working hypotheses and to interpret them in accord with very different preconceptions. The high school pupil smiles at the scientific conjectures of the school- man and finds the theories of the universe held by Ptolemy unthinkable. And what is true of the high school pupil is rapidly becoming true of that great world of unschooled men and women who pick up crumbs of philosophy and science from the daily newspapers. Scholarship is shaping the thinking of all classes. With a half-dozen exceptions, it is true, the theological seminaries hold aloof; but uni- versities, colleges, high schools, grade schools, kindergartens, are alive with the new enthusiasm. THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 1 5 Over against this tremendous revolution stands traditional dogma with a theory of the universe and a psychology and a philosophy derived from the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Alexan- drians. Many a high school pupil who, in his text- book of geology, is taught that the world is the out- come of processes extending across millions of years, is taught by his Sunday-school teacher, that he must take it on faith that the world was created by the successive acts of God in six days. The biologist who is devoting his days to finding the secret of life is taught by his pastor — if he has a pastor — that a spirit was breathed into a man miraculously made of clay, creating in him an entirely different order of life from that found in the rest of the animal world, and that woman was made miraculously from Adam's rib. The student of comparative religion who has watched the slow accumulation of the sacred litera- tures of the nations is told that the literature of the Hebrews was written under such dictation of the Holy Spirit as to be infallible and permanently authoritative not only in religion but in science, history, and literary criticism. It is little wonder that the world of scholarship, professional or merely amateur, finds itself increasingly out of sympathy with the church as the representative of such teach- l6 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER ' ing. It is not so much that it has any controversy with religious teachers; it simply finds itself in- capable of appreciating their point of view or of respecting their opinions. The situation is not helped very much by the proposal to disregard theological formulations and return to the gospel itself as it is found unsystema- tized in the New Testament. The world of scholar- ship still finds itself in perplexity as it listens to the authoritative word of the church. For in the New Testament there are concepts which the modem world under the domination of science finds it im- possible to understand, much less to believe. The difficulty here does not spring from the details of religious instruction. It inheres in the point of view itself. To Paul and the other writers of the New Testament the earth was flat with a series of heavens above and a great pit for the dead beneath; the relations of man and God were those of the rela- tions of the subject of an oriental monarchy to his king or of the subject of the Roman Empire to the emperor; sin was statutory, punishment was a matter of penalty, and justification was primarily a matter of acquittal at the world judgment. For those who think of men's relations to God in such a way, Paulinism and the theologies which have been THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 1 7 based upon it present no fundamental difficulty. But for men who think of God as dynamically im- manent in an infinite universe, who think of man's relation to him as determined not by statutory but by cosmic law, who regard sin and righteousness ahke as the working out of the fundamental forces of life itself, the conception of God as king and of man as a condemned or acquitted subject, is but a figure of speech expressing an actual fact far more profound than the figure itself. When, therefore, the church insists that in order to become one of its members one must assent to a series of doctrines embodying the cosmology, the psychology, and the philosophy of the New Testament taken literally, it inevitably sets up a test which will compel a man under the influence of to-day's scholarship to abandon not only a life of evil thinking and of evil action, but also the results of his education. The church in standing uncompromisingly by anciently formulated dogma as an expression of the facts of reUgion as known in the life of Jesus and in human experience is also standing for a philosophical world-view, for scientific conceptions, and for a religious philosophy that sprang up in an age that was not only pre- scientific, but was also untouched by the modem ideals of political democracy and social evolution. l8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER II The extent of this breach, between the church and scientific scholarship, will be apparent to any one who looks at the facts. The average church is always something of a spiritual force in a community. Because of its partici- pation in large missionary movements it is also a champion of world-wide sympathies. Any philan- thropic enterprise can count upon receiving assistance and cooperation from its members. Similarly the church is one of the educational forces of the com- munity in that it statedly compels a group of men and women to give at least superficial attention to important subjects which lie outside the realm of their ordinary interests. The man who belittles the significance of the church in society is beUttling his own power of observation. But this is by no means to state the entire situa- tion. Although the rank and file of the church mem- bership come into touch only indirectly with the great currents of thought, their economic and political life is being set by new ideals. With these new ideals they somehow feel that their rehgious think- ing has little or no connection. Because of a great number of reasons their attitude of mind relative THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 1 9 to doctrine is passive rather than active. They test instruction by the standards which they have agreed to accept as true without serious testing. One might almost say that they are theological alge- braists, who once given their x and y are able to work out a conclusion, but who seldom stop to ask what reahty x and y represent. To men and women of this sort the world owes an incalculable debt as the champions of an aggres- sive though generally individualistic morahty and of faith in the eternal worth of the human personality. But it does not owe them any large debt of gratitude for intellectual leadership in religion. The mere fact that such Christian people do not desire too vigorous thinking in the realm of theology, but do enjoy warm-hearted, concrete, uncritical exposition of accepted doctrine, is an evidence that they do not belong to the formative intellectual group. Yet it is imperative that they should be allied with such a group. Otherwise the church would compel its ministry to think in one way in the pulpit and an- other in the study. Just at present, however, the situation is pecuharly difficult because of the attitude of the churches toward the results of our new education. The churches number among their members few of the 20 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER professional, that is to say of the scientifically trained, classes. They are composed very largely of men and women who, whatever may be their culture, are not college bred. It is, of course, to be expected that the great majority of our church members should come from Just such classes because the proportion of college-bred men and women in a community is small. But what becomes of the thousands of young Christians whom our colleges and universities report as making up half of their entire enrolment? A recent census taken of one denomination numbering between twenty and thirty thousand commimicants in Chicago showed that, except in two or three churches, not one in fifty of its membership was a college graduate. Our college men and women, by thousands and tens of thousands, are coming out of our Christian homes, are being educated for the most part in institutions founded originally by Christian men and taught by Christian men. It would therefore naturally be expected that their proportion in church- membership rolls would be constantly increasing. Such an expectation is strengthened by the other fact that in any great city the professional class at large is steadily growing. Yet the facts stand as they are. THE CHUKCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 21 Are we then educating a generation away from the church? If we are, is the trouble with our educational system or with the churches? If we are not, what r61e is the college man to play in our church life ? There are two forces at work in all our institu- tions where anything like serious academic work is being carried on, each disconcerting to the faith with which a large majority of college students come to our colleges and universities. These two forces are the spirit of investigation and the denial of all dogmatic authority in the intellectual realm. At bottom, however, these two are one. For the last twenty years our universities have been opposed to authority, as such, in science. Everything has become an open question. We inves- tigate not only atoms but the origin of morality and the history of the idea of God. Our ethical teachers will not listen to the appeal to statutory enactment as a basis for moral sanctions, and our teachers of natural science either deliberately or unconsciously impress upon their students that that can only safely be called knowledge which can be tested by orderly experiment. Our teachers of history very properly do the best they can to break down the belief that the study of history is a mere matter of memorizing 22 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER an authoritative text-book, and if they do not agree with Napoleon's famous dictum that history is Jhe lies men,, have agreed to believe, show their classes the difficulty which inheres in the valuation of the sources of our knowledge of the past. Our archas- ologists are ranked in hostile camps on almost every known discovery, and our metaphysicians are in- creasingly teaching us that the only things we can be sure of are relationships and our stream of consciousness. A young man comes into this atmosphere. He has been taught by parent and pastor and Sunday-school teacher that the Bible is the inerrant, authorita- tive word of God. He has never seriously questioned the basis for such an affirmation. His entire reli- gious thought has been grounded upon authority. In his Freshman year he hears echoes of discussions in the upper classes concerning matters which he does not understand, but which in a general sort of way he feels are incompatible with Christianity as he has known it. By the time he reaches his Junior year he begins to feel the effect of the general in- vestigative if not the sceptical atmosphere of scholar- ship. Many of his teachers are interested in religious life, but in too many cases the men whose scholar- ship he most respects are either unsympathetic with THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 23 the church or are merely conventionally religious. He is set to reading books in which religion is handled as a matter for investigation or in which the idea of nature and of natural law apparently leaves no room for God and divine love. He him- self begins to grow investigative. His training makes him resolve life into a series of problems each de- manding an answer which shall rest not upon the belief or the opinion of some man or group of men, but upon ponderable evidence. Inevitably his religious faith becomes unsettled. Perhaps he goes in his distress to some member of the faculty or to some more advanced student for help. He is very probably told that there is no necessary contradiction between doubt and faith; that doubt very often is the beginning of faith^ But he is also told that the faith which brings assurance is not to be based upon the authority of any book or church, but upon one's own experience of God. When he asks what this experience of God is, he is told it cannot be described but must be felt. Taught thus to examine his own consciousness he finds that his investigating mood attacks the very citadel which he is told is impregnable. Is it any wonder that if he graduates in this mood of mind, he should enter business life feehng that 24 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER while the church has value as the expression of one of the forces of social control, he himself cannot assent to its doctrines; that he should hold himself aloof from its work and should grow indifferent to those beliefs with which he began his educational career ? Such college men and women as these are not in the churches. Many of their fellows of another type are. Possibly this second group outnumbers the first. But it is far more than a matter of mere proportion: it is one of attitude of mind. There are many men and women who have passed through college without having their religious thinking in the least modified. They have never attempted to correlate what they have learned in the laboratory or the lecture room with the religious teachings to which they have been accustomed and which they continue to hold. In their college days they have seen men and women attempt such correlations, but such persons seem to have "lost their faith." For their own part they prefer neither to think deeply nor to question authority. They thus divorce them- selves and their education from formative influences, and join that majority of the workers in our churches who are primarily immersed in practical affairs, out of sympathy with the readaptation of evangelic truth THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 25 to the intellectual forces of the day, preferring to listen to preachers who have been trained to read Hebrew but who cannot read the signs of the times. Ill But we have by no means faced all the elements of the situation. Despite the fact that the church has been the mother of colleges, its authorities have generally opposed the beginnings of any scientific progress which threatened their own teachings. The modem church has indeed numbered among its members such men as Dana and Gray, but it has fought vigorously and sometimes passionately these men's positions. Particularly has this been true since the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species." All readers of Huxley's correspondence will recall the struggle into which that militant soul threw himself after the attack made upon Mr. Darwin by the ecclesiastical authorities of England. No one would for a moment claim that the temper of those whom Professor Huxley represented was that of meekness, but the struggle on the part of science was one for very existence. And it was to have effects we have not yet out- grown. The chief defenders of a traditional theology in the nineteenth century erected a distinct issue 26 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER between the teaching of the church and the teach- ing of the laboratory and refused to believe that a man could accept the doctrine of evolution and re- main a Christian. The result of this alternative was unfortunate to all concerned. Men took the clergy at their word and left the church. Many of them went much farther than to submit to excommunica- tion literal or figurative, and allowed themselves tc be swept into a general antagonism not only to the church but to Christianity itself. It is true there has arisen a group of Christian evolutionists who endeavor as best they can to bring about a modus vivendi between science and the gospel. Such men constitute, probably, a majority of the most intelligent members of our churches; but they are still the object of suspicion and of attack. Certain religious teachers are devoting themselves to a continuous attack upon evolution as one of the great enemies of Christianity, and as a part of their campaign are spreading broadcast the statement that it has collapsed. The effect of such propaganda is easily imagined. The scientist to whom the general evolutionary hypothesis has be- come all but an axiom, not only laughs at the state- ments of these zealots, but finds himseU perplexed when judging their motives and standards of veracity. THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 27 And his perplexity is increased by the vocabulary of those who in the name of Christianity find it necessary to oppose the findings of physical science. If a man is to be called an infidel because he believes in natural lav7, the outcome of such a classification may easily be forecast. Men under the domination of modem science — and this number includes most professional and university-bred men — will no more join the church than they will become Chris- tian Scientists. It may be the churches do not want them. At any rate, they do not have them. As a consequence there is an alarming danger that the church will have small influence upon lines of thought which are formative in to-day's civihzation. It is in danger of losing its grip on the educated classes. Are they, then, not worth saving ? Fortunately there are many churches whose pastors and whose leading laymen do not share in this revival of emasculated persecution. But if one reads the average denominational paper or listens to the frequent slurs cast upon current science by speakers at religious gatherings, one will be con- vinced that the rank and file of the clergy of the evangelical denominations as well as of Roman Catholicism are opposed to anything like a conces- sion to science. To be known as an evolutionist is 28 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER still to risk condemnation as a heretic. It is not so long ago that the trustees of a certain denomi- national college had difficulty in preventing the en- forced resignation of the ablest man on their faculty because some of the reactionary members of their board, as they frankly said, thought they "saw the traces of a monkey's tail" in his laboratory ! The greatest formative principle in the world of thought to-day is biology. And biology means evolution. Modification of the views of Darwin and of La Place, the works of De Vries and Weiss- mann, have not changed but rather have strengthened the fundamental concept of evolution. The church must either fight this controlling hypothesis of sci- ence or use it completed by the inclusion of Jesus, the first-fruit of them that sleep, as one element of theology and of popular teaching. I do not mean to say that the outcome of a choice which shall exclude men touched by to-day's philoso- phy and science will be the ending of the church. That institution will undoubtedly continue to exist; it may even grow in numbers; it will undoubtedly do good. What I would emphasize with all the strength at my command is that by such a choice the church is cutting itself off from cooperation with the controlling intellectual force of to-day and is THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 29 making it certain that in the future it will embrace only by sufFrance, if at all, the intellectual leaders of society; that it consequently will be composed ex- clusively of those who, however able as business ' men and above reproach as individuals, are not the moulders of public opinion or the makers of the new age. The church will live — but what sort of church ? IV The position of the church relative to the exten- sion of scientific methods in the study of the Bible is similar to that forced upon it in the case of physi- cal science. It stands at the cross-roads. It may fight or use and hallow scholarship. The rise of higher criticism and its adoption by practically every biblical teacher of scholarly sig- nificance in the world is one of the most striking characteristics of to-day's religious life. He would be a rash man who would insist that the current schools of criticism have reached final results, and he would be even rasher who would insist that the philosophy which lies back of much of the literary criticism is in itself a criterion warranted to give final results. But the question is more vital than one of this or that school of criticism. It is rather 30 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER whether there shall be within the church any his- torical study of the Scripture whatsoever. As in the case of the evolutionist, the higher critic is being read out of not a few churches, and in many cases out of his professional position. So-called religious papers have exhausted the vocabulary of invectives and of prejudice in their description of his infidelity. Various organizations are insisting that a denial of a traditional theory of inspiration means the denial of a divine Saviour. Literary critics may not have given proper weight to archaeology; they do not themselves agree. But they do agree as to method. Their very disagree- ment leads to mutual correction and so to large confidence in the wisdom of giving free hand to in- vestigation. The issue is not one of this or that result or opinion; it is one of attitude toward the Bible. It is true the situation is not that of twenty years ago. The number of earnest religious teachers who have accepted the critics' positions is now very numerous, and, despite the assertions to the con- trary, their influence can be shown by statistics to be anything but destructive to the churches. But these very facts seem to result in a more vigorous propaganda against criticism and a more vigorous THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 3 1 appeal to the doctrine of an infallible and inerrant Scripture. Thus there is forced upon the church an issue of profound import. For to exclude the higher critic is practically to exclude biblical schol- arship. Is the church ready to take such a step? Or shall investigation be given a free but reverent hand? This simple alternative has been generally obscured whenever a reasonable freedom of teaching has been denied religious teachers. Men have been removed from their positions in theological seminaries, and in justification of such action it has been said that they were not removed because of their views but because of their insistence upon their views and be- cause of their lack of tact. Such excuses are dan- gerously near hypocrisy. The only justification that persecution can claim is passionate loyalty to truth. Better such intolerant loyalty than euphemistic hypocrisy ! V Herein lies another danger for the church. To divorce itself from sympathy and cooperation with the intellectual forces of the times means schism in our Christian forces. This is bad enough, but for an institution Uke the church there is something 32 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER vastly more serious — the development of a spirit of intolerance. Let the man without sin of this sort cast the first stone ! For the sake of argument let us grant that the group of clergymen and laymen who administer the affairs of a college or seminary have a perfect right to say what shall be taught in every department from mathematics to theology. Let us admit that they even have a right to duplicate the action of the trustees of a certain denominational college and drop a highly effective teacher of science because of his too liberal utterances in his Sunday-school class. But even after we have made this concession of sup- posable rights, there would still remain the danger that a church thus attempting to suppress investiga- tion in the interest of its own dogmas, would grow un-Christlike. But the champion of tolerance may himself grow intolerant of intolerance. Liberalism has its dog- matism as real as that of traditionalism, and often more arrogant. Its weapons are scorn and con- tempt. The sin that so easily besets it is impatience of criticism and opposition. It is hard for any of us to take our place by the side of the publican and not find ourselves edging over toward where TBCE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 33 the Pharisee stands shouting his self-congratulatory prayer. Shall we never learn the catholicity of our Master with his sheep of other folds ? Appeal to prejudice which has been deepened by misinterpretation will never establish the truth of any position, be it conservative or be it liberal. It can do nothing but lose the church the respect of men it should save. Intolerance as truly as in- difference costs human souls. A disregard of the new conditions in which the church finds itself can do nothing else but what in certain religious bodies it has already done — make the church a group of men and women opposed to intellectual progress on the one side and opposed to the extension of economic privileges on the other. But the spirit of academic arrogance will cost it quite as truly the power of love. And this also means decay. Knowledge puffs up. It is love that builds up. It is no time for schism. Why should the divi- sion now threatening be allowed to proceed further ? Why should misunderstanding and misinterpreta- tion be suffered to exist? As the fine old version has it, the servant of Jesus "should not strive." No scholarship or hatred of scholarship should be allowed to redenominationalize a Protestantism that 34 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER has begun to experience the joys and the efiftciency of Christian union. The new evangelicalism is as passionately devoted to saving men and society as is the old; the older evangelicalism is as passionately devoted to Jesus Christ as is the new. Let them cease to combat each other, and like Peter and Paul preach the same eternal gospel to men of different conditions and acquirements, and thus like the apostles leaven a changing order. VI For we are in a fashion repeating the story of the Jewish and the Gentile churches. Men fall into different theological classes as they are under the influence of different intellectual habits and sym- pathies. Each class is worth saving, but to save all, the gospel, as at Pentecost, must be preached to each man in his own tongue. The imperative demand for reconstruction is not the outgrowth of wanton theological agitation, but of the pressure brought upon the church by the world of scholarship itself. Thought like business is a creature of new methods. We have a new psy- chology, a new metaphysics, a new biology, a new sociology. It is inevitable that there should be a call for a new theology. Yet this is not to say that THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 35 there is need of a new gospel. The "modem man" needs the "old gospel" as truly as the man who never heard of Darwin or Wellhausen. New sciences deal with old reaHties, — man, being, life, society. Similarly a new theology must be old in that it deals with data that it inherits from Jesus and the church, but which it interprets to a world that is thinking in its own new fashion. In this process of reinterpreting the gospel in the interest of world-wide, rational evangelism and social service the new scholarship can be of vast assistance to the church. The nearer every science comes to an exposition of its subject, the more rational and attractive does the real gospel appear. For the church to put to service the mass of knowledge and the more precise methods which scholarship is placing at its disposal, is to insure that it shall be ever more socially effective. As the Magi brought gifts to the infant Christ, so scholarship is bearing gifts to the church of Christ. The psychology that insists upon the unity of the self is vastly nearer a gospel that insists upon the body of the resurrection, the fruit of a transformed personality, than were the old trichotomous and faculty psychologies. We understand God better when we recall that there is no separating between 36 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER will and thought and love. Evolution helps to an understanding of the divine purpose of salvation and almost startlingly gives a setting for the study of the significance of Jesus and the atonement. Biology, astronomy, and physics help us to appre- ciate the God of law and the law of God as could no analogy drawn from the world of politics. Philoso- phy helps us to an understanding of personality and the Absolute which excludes deism and places the church in a position to combat as never before a persistent and deadly materialism. History, politics, economics, and sociology show us the ever growing horizon of human solidarity and possibihties and help us to a better understanding of the redemptive work of Jesus. With such allies the church may as confidently expect to influence a changing order to-day as it has influenced it in the past. Without such allies it can only expect a diminution of such control as it now exerts. It is because I honor the church of Christ enough to believe that it can never become an agency of re- action and obscurantism that I dare to state the issue frankly. From the days of the Montanist to the day of the premillenarian there have always been those who have attempted to reproduce in religious THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 37 thought a theology born of an unhistorical, indis- criminating, literaHstic interpretation of the Scripture. But in the same proportion as Hteralism in the use of the Scriptures and subserviency to ecclesiastical dogmas have been dominant in religious thought, has the church grown less influential in the shap- ing of the intellectual ideals which condition true progress. To perpetuate such literalism would mean that the scientific world would be increasingly removed from the inspiration of the ideals of our Christ, and that the Christian world would be de- creasingly influential over those men and women who are shaping the intellectual future. Who dares forecast the outcome? Why should those whom God would put together be kept apart? VII For scholarship is not the highest thing in life. Above it are culture and the eternal hfe of the spirit. And culture and eternal life are not enemies, al- though too often between them, as between scholar- ship and dogma, there blazes forth hostility. On the part of many of the modem Hellenistic disciples of sweetness and light there is conscious contempt for the Hebraism of the masses. To them preach- ing is provincialism, hymn-singing is nasal psalmody, 38 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER and the prayer-meeting is an opportunity for the dis- play of unhealthy introspection. At the same time, earnest teachers of religion, in their emphasis of the divine elements in life, have minimized and an- tagonized the intellectual and aesthetic movements of our time, continually telling us that culture can- not save. This divorce is not inexplicable. On the side of religion there has often been since the days of the Puritans a one-sidedness in religious development, a lingering belief in the moral efhcacy of asceticism, and too often a systematic decrying of an educated ministry. To this must be added the suspicion aroused by the very methods which have given suc- cess in work among the masses, — methods which have been the natural servants of enthusiasm and excitement, and which too often have made religion an affair of the housetops rather than of the bolted closet. On the other hand some of the chief representa- tives of culture have unnecessarily adopted a hostile attitude toward popular religion. Preferring the position of critics to that of co-workers, they have sought to clarify dogmas without according them a sufiiciently gentle treatment. Magnifying the crudi- ties and monstrosities of religious beUefs hallowed THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 39 through generations, they have overlooked, or examined but scantily, the profound moral impulse and magnificent faith that have accompanied un- couth words and acts. Gaining religious emotion through the sphere of the aesthetic, they have wor- shipped God in the cathedral, but have questioned the genuineness of the worship in the chapel. Be- lieving profoundly in a God, they find themselves averse to definition or to the slightest approach to anthropomorphic conceptions. In too many cases, it must be added, has this reverence for infinity given way to an agnosticism which can see in the positive preaching of Christian truth only cant or wilful deception. He who would see the real meaning of human progress can be content with no such superficial views as these. Faith and culture are not exclusive terms. The possibihty of a religious culture and of a cultured religion grows more evident as we probe each to its essential element. Culture at its heart is a form of faith; and the fruit of faith is a form of culture. He who ingenuously seeks culture, attempts to raise the highest instincts and sympathies into dominion over those that are merely commercial or workaday. The poet, not content with the sight of external nature, finds beauty in that which to 40 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the mere farmer is potential milk or butter. The sculptor seeks to catch in stone some unnoticed grace of the human form. The architect expresses with the exactness of mathematics and with the aid of otherwise unshaped masses of material some- thing of the creative idea. The musician, rising above the limitations of all senses but one, appeals to man's deepest sense of harmony and rhythm. In all of these attempts to suggest through one sense the deliverances of others, men are always passing from that which can be weighed and meas- ured to that which must be first ideal. He who would appreciate the work of the artist must himself cultivate that which is the glory of art, — the seeing of the invisible. The uncultured man sees in a Greek urn a mere mass of clay singularly preserved through the centuries, but worthless. The Philistine who trudges through life with the heavy tread of one of his own fat dray horses demands that a thing be useful before he allows it room to Hve. The man of culture, while not disregarding those things that make for common use, yet sees in things of beauty something more than agents of production. The mere acquisition of knowledge is not culture. The professional scholar too often finds in learning nothing but the weapon for his conflict with circum- THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 41 stances. Too often must we admit that losing its higher aim, education itself becomes the servant of mediocrity. Who has not met the loud-talking, ill- dressed man who boasts of his learning while he bolts his food? Education that does not change the fibre of a man's character, that does not awaken some love of that which is truly beautiful, that does not make a man into a gentleman, makes vulgarity doubly vulgar. Nor is culture a mere veneer of absent-minded interest in things we have been told should interest us. To talk readily at a reception about the latest novel ; to parade a smattering of Greek or Latin or politics; to know when to leave one visiting card and when two ; to be able to tell without the aid of a clock when a call has reached its end; to be in- discriminately interested in pictures, gowns, music, University Settlements, and all other good works : this is not culture. But to seek to train the deepest sympathies of one's life; to choose that which is noble and that which is beautiful ; to learn to despise cynicism and to believe that the world is the abode of purity and goodness as well as of evil; to study with such sincerity that smug respectability be felt unworthy a struggle; to feel in life the upspringing of loftier ambitions and sympathies ; to be ready to 42 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER stake one's life that truth is more than victory, be the triumphal procession never so long, in a word, to transmute knowledge into love : this is culture. With such high purposes as these religious faith has much in common. It, too, seeks to apprehend that which eye has not seen, but which yet is real. It, too, endeavors to appropriate the world of beauty and harmony that lies within the nearer and dustier world of everyday life. But it does more. It knows that this world of beauty and goodness exists. It stretches out its hands to that which will not delude. It knows that so long as personality rules in the world we can feel, so long must it rule through- out unending caverns of space. Without stopping to demonstrate the ground of this confidence — for faith that turns upon itself and demands proof is not faith — it has assimilated the eternal verities of an all-embracing personality as instinctively and as confidently as ever musician trusted the harmonies he so imperfectly reproduced, or artist the bright ideal his chisel so often marred. But the faith of religion is nobler than the faith of culture. Its sympathies are more subtle and tender and dynamic. There is more moral impulse in a belief in a God than in a belief in ideal beauty. From the days of beauty-mad Greece, culture has THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 43 proved insufficient to preserve a nation that has lost its faith in God. He who enters the world of ethics through the gateway of mere asstheticism, finds the sharp drawing of moral distinctions replaced by the uncertain coloring of sympathy and has little con- tribution to make to the world's teaching except an optimism as irrational as that of Mrs. Eddy. It is just here where faith is strongest that culture is weakest. It can furnish ideals ; it too often fails to furnish motives. Notwithstanding its noble ideals, a culture not impregnated with a living faith in God tends toward finical criticism, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism. And even if these be not reached, culture is always in danger of pushing its devotees into a dilettante pedantry, or into a worship in which profound trust in a Heavenly Father is replaced by conventional genuflections. Diogenes was no more real than the character in "The Portrait of a Lady" who was a paragon of good manners, of devotion to painted crockery, and of selfishness. And the reason why this tendency toward the trivial so pursues that which plans so nobly, is not far to seek. Culture apart from faith is mutilated — its ideal, be it never so godhke, is but a torso. Man's soul that cries out for God, starves when it is given only a painting or a song. 44 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER It is one of the astonishing things, this indifference of so much education to man's religious nature. It would sometimes appear as if men believed their religious natures were not worth attention. We with our gymnasiums and baths and games and muscular Christianity are never done sneering at the ghostly scholar of the Middle Ages. And an Abelard or a Thomas might turn upon us and ask why our learn- ing is the servant of business, and our scholarship of trade; why theology and metaphysics give way before the bustle of so-called practical study; why we have fewer kings among our clergy; why reverence flees before flippancy; why when men's bodies have been growing sleek, their spirits have been growing lean. There never was greater need than now for the culture of that power which is as truly human as the power to add or subtract — the power of serving God. When culture is seen to be incomplete until it embraces religion, when a man will not be con- sidered educated who has no sympathies with right and God — when this time comes, and not till then, will the genuine aim of culture be realized. When that day shall have come we shall hear no more sneers at vulgar and narrow religion, and no more warnings against the pretensions of an overripe THE CHURCH AND SCHOLARSHIP 45 intellectualism. For they two, faith and culture, shall be one, and every disciple of the beautiful and gentle will grow more evidently into the virile like- ness of the Man Christ Jesus, and more avowedly devoted to the evangelization of a world of sin. But to bring about this union it is not enough that culture alone should realize its deepest mission. Faith must be set forth in its own might and beauty and universality. We know to-day better than we knew twenty-five years ago that religion is something grander than a single cult, and that the faith of the Christian is neither a logical formula nor a spasm of a troubled conscience. The thinking of the world may not confirm every teaching we have in- herited from the past, but it is doing something vastly more important. It is saying to him who seeks the highest possible development: "If you will be perfect, you must be true to all sides of your nature, and above all your rehgious nature. 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.'" To the church is given the opportunity of showing that faith may be intense and philanthropic, and never commonplace; of reinstating religion as a natural part of man's spiritual life ; of educating men in the ways of social righteousness. Not by belittling culture, but by invigorating it 46 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER with the Spirit of Christ; not by forcing cultured men to accept the religious forms and experiences of ignorant men, will this be accomplished; but by holding up the faith of Christ as the indispensable prerequisite of culture; by welcoming every new truth; by emphasizing the social content of the gospel, and by urging the appropriation of every- thing new that is true and noble, until it shall ap- pear that faith in Christ which seizes hold upon eternal life is also but a synonym for all that is beautiful and manly and divine. CHAPTER III THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF THE RISEN CHRIST If there is danger that the church shall become indifferent to scholarly procedure, there is also already discernible a danger that, in the persons of some of its more "modem" representatives, it shall mistake negation for scholarship and dubiety for illumination. Particularly is this true in the region of the strictly evangelical message. Many a pro- gressive teacher or preacher judges that he is in sympathy with his age when he magnifies the un- certainties and doubts which scholarship suggests. Just as we are apt to think a man is scientific if his writings are uninteresting are some of us tempted to think that a man is liberal if he abounds in doubts. Nothing could be more fatal to the progress of the church than to call the attitude of denial, tolerance. Tolerance is not even indifference. Better a per- secutor with conviction than an indifferent agnostic. One needs to believe something to be genuinely tolerant of the beliefs of others. The church needs just now an emphasis upon truth rather than a re- 47 48 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER duction in the quantity of truth. To judge from the past, if it is to fulfil its appointed function, the church must devote itself whole-heartedly to its peculiar mission of socializing the gospel. Therein lies the truth of that exhortation so often misinter- preted, "Preach the old gospel." Philosophy has appealed only to a select few and in their case has not always proved itself possessed of the power of moral control. That which the world needs is not a speculative or even a polemic theism, but the gospel. For the gospel includes all that is philo- sophically and scientifically valuable in theism and in addition adds positive historical elements on which one may base a more lively hope of immortality and a more satisfying faith in the goodness of the Father of the Universe. Yet it is just at this point that religious teachers of more liberal sympathies are exposed to tempta- tions. In their ranks there is a tendency to reduce the gospel to ethics and to take from it that insistence upon immortality which has been one source of its power. If the ultraconservative wing of the church is in danger of neglecting the formative intellectual forces of the time, the liberal wing is quite as much in danger of forgetting that it has a gospel of facts and hope. THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 49 What is the gospel ? It is certainly not a general philosophy of conduct. The moral ideal contained in the New Testament is hardly in itself good news. It involves too many responsibilities. You look to the Sermon on the Mount for ideals, but you do not look to it for power to help realize those ideals. The gospel is not a philosophy of the universe, or even a philosophy of the divine love implied in the progress of the race. I. In its New Testament sense there can be no question that the gospel is the good news concern- ing the kingdom of God. That was the precise definition given it by Jesus when he came into Galilee preaching that the kingdom of God was at hand, and urging people to believe the "good news." To enter this kingdom was to save one's life. In the course of time the word gained a richer content, but its root idea remained steadily the same. It was the good news as to the possibihty of salvation from sin and death, through that regenerating union with God revealed and set forth in the cardinal facts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Let us briefly formulate this original content with 50 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER some precision. The gospel as preached by the apostles involved the following statements of fact : — (a) The "last days" have begun; the kingdom of God is presently to appear. (b) The Christ has already appeared in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was killed at the instiga- tion of the Jews, but who exhibited his Messiahship in his resurrection. (c) The Christ has returned to heaven, whence he will come to establish the great judgment and to introduce his kingdom. (d) To believe in Jesus as this Christ is to insure forgiveness and reconciliation with God, acquittal at the judgment, admission into the kingdom of God, a share in its blessings, and in particular, the redemption of the body, i.e. its resurrection. (e) As the first instalment of this blessed heritage the believer has received the Spirit of God. When these constituent elements of the gospel were brought into connection with the religious philosophy, if one may use the term, of Paul, they helped solve certain of the fundamental questions of religion. In the first place the question, so diflScult for any Jew, as to how a God of law could forgive a man who, wittingly or unwittingly, had broken the law, THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 5 1 was answered by saying that the death of Christ had met the requirements of law and so set God right in the eyes of those who otherwise might cavil at His indifference to sin. In a sense which the apostle never precisely elaborated, Jesus had died for the world. Then, too, the moral problem as to why a man who is freed from punishment should be good, was solved by recognizing the fact that the believer who had the Spirit of God should realize the new life born of this union and mortify the flesh or the lower self. His salvation was therefore not accomplished by " works " but as the outcome of eternal life was to lead to good works. As every student of the New Testament knows, the significance of the gospel was further traced by Paul into practically aU the departments of human life and thought. It is unnecessary, however, to follow him or his fellow-apostles farther, as we are now interested not so much in their application of the gospel or its correlation with their other beliefs and knowledge as with the chief content of the gospel itself. 2. Now a consideration of this summary of the evangelic message will show that, clothed though it was in a Jewish apocalyptic terminology which to a 52 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER scientific age is all but unintelligible, the gospel was regarded as an historical demonstration of the saving love of a law-abiding God ; the exposition of a hope concerning the future of those who really believe in Jesus as God's Christ, guaranteed by the Christ's experience. In brief, it was the message of a mor- ally regenerating communion with God made easier and complete through a knowledge of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So far as the individual believer is concerned, these facts on which the gospel was based are ob- jective. Take away the historical, risen Jesus, and you take away the gospel in its original sense. And you change the definition of Christianity itself. For Christianity as the embodiment of the gospel is a phase of religion determined by historical facts and conditions. It is well to pause a moment over this statement, because men of the less conservative type have an increasing tendency to treat Christianity and religion as synonymous. Such procedure, however, is either to generahze Christianity out of existence or to minimize the r61e of concrete historical facts as aids to giving intellectual content to religion. There is a certain type of mind which cannot conceive of the significance of a concrete fact until it has THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 53 been made over into an abstract proposition or reduced to terms of a theory of knowledge. There are religious teachers who would insist that alleged historical facts derived from ancient records have no direct significance to religious experience, or at least that it is possible so to utilize them as to out- grow them. In the words of Coningsby Dawson they would say : — " If He lived or died, I do not know, For who shall disprove the words of the dead, And who may approve of the wisdom they said, That lips of dust uttered so long ago ? And where He is buried, I may not know. " If He lived or died, I cannot say. But loneliness knows the sound of His name; That men could imagine such love is the same To me as a living of yesterday. And words which God speaks are the prayers men say. " If He lived or died, I may not know, For who shall disprove the words of the dead, Or who may approve of the wisdom they said ? For me He is not of the long ago. But speaks in the mom of my life, I know." Far be it from me to minimize the inestimably valuable evidence of the Christian life. But it is imperative that we recognize the fact that the sec- tion of the church which is really being influenced 54 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER by to-day's philosophical and scientific thought is moving pretty rapidly toward a conception of the gospel different from that which we find in the New Testament. This change is due in no small degree to a suspicion as to the historicity of the cardinal facts of Jesus' Ufe and to an insidious agnosticism regarding such of the New Testament thought as centres about immortality. The representatives of this tendency, like the New Testament writers, would define the gospel as a message of deliverance, but, unlike those writers, would make it a message of deliverance from the anxieties and sins of life. Their kingdom of God is a new social order here upon earth under historical relations. That the gospel implies such a message no one can deny. But the progressive theologian of this class must answer the further question whether or not he, Hke Paul and Jesus, will add to this message of moral deliverance and social evolution the further promise of release from the power of death the penalty of sin; of deliverance from that fearful state which Paul calls the wrath of God; of a deliverance that involves the replacement in death by that body which we have inherited from an animal past by a higher medium of communication between our- selves and the outer world. THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 55 The church is particularly interested in this ques- tion of the real content of the gospel because we are persistently told that religion and science are two exclusive spheres, and that reUgion is not involved in scientific investigation. Religion, says Professor Santayana, "must withdraw its pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact." While no one would deny that there is a great element of truth in this contention, we may as well face the fact that in such an antithesis the character of the gospel is being decidedly modified. Religion as a form of human experience may be independent of specific facts in history, but the gospel as a means of inducing and regulating that experience certainly contains his- torical elements. Paul puts the matter flatly, "If Christ be not raised from the dead, then our preach- ing is vain." He does not mean by such a state- ment to imply that religion might vanish, for he would still believe in the God of Judaism. What he does mean is that in the destruction of the his- toric fact of the resurrection of Jesus as he conceives it, the gospel as a basis for a new type of religion has disappeared and with it the new and particular form of religion as well. But in history as in the body of the resurrection, religion overlaps the field of science. To the his- $6 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER torian and to the common mind alike, the Pauline position seems very much more intelligible than that of those men who insist that one may give up Jesus as an actual revelation of God, may deny his resurrection as a historic fact, may evacuate the doctrines of the atonement and of justification of all the content given them by the apostolic preachers, may reduce the hope of the doctrine of personal immortality to that of an immortality of influence, and still claim to be preaching the gospel. Conceivably such an emptying of Christianity of all historical contents may be in the line of en- throning an empirical religion of superior merit, but that is simply to put the question we are now con- sidering more distinctly: Do the times demand such a dehistoricalized message? This is a supreme question. It is no wonder that men committed to doctrines which rise and fall with the reality of the historical Jesus, resent the propa- ganda which in the name of scientific theology would reduce Jesus to a beautiful ideal, his resurrec- tion to an illusion, and the gospel as anything more than religious experience to the esoteric tenets of hypothetical groups of "Nazarenes" or pre-Christian Syrian Gnostics. Whether or not this resentment is justifiable, must THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 57 be left for discussion a little later. At this point it will be enough to refer to the substitute which is offered in the place of a gospel of historic fact — a religion of experience born of illusions. It was these illusions according to a recent writer that preserved "the invaluable treasure of the Christian teaching and of the figure of the teacher." Without the historical Jesus the gospels would become "more wonderful and more encouraging than before, for the profound wisdom and lofty character found in them would prove to be the expression not of a single and unique religion of Jesus, but of the spiritual ideals of many humble and unknown men." Is this the gospel or the ghost of the gospel ? II But can this gospel of facts be preached effec- tively to our modem world ? I. It is claimed by certain apologists that such a message is no longer possible except to the intel- lectually anachronistic masses; that the Christian church gains decidedly by waiving all questions of historicity. But, granting the difficulties besetting the discovery of historical facts, such a procedure constitutes a very singular apologetic. In order to $8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER occupy impregnable evangelical grounds it abandons much if not all that in the New Testament sense is evangelical. It is as if Russia after having lost her navy had congratulated herself that she was guar- anteed from naval defeat. There was once a man who after a rather stormy financial career found himself insolvent. He took philosophical pleasure in the situation by declaring himself independently poor. The position of the apologist who begins his defence of the gospel by surrendering everything above the generic questions of religion that is really the subject of serious debate, is about the same. Evangelically he is independently poor. Whether or not such a stricture as this upon cur- rent apologetic be justifiable, the church has not yet reached a place where it can reduce fact to illusion in the name of functional psychology. There is a tendency nowadays, particularly on the part of those of a philosophical rather than a scientific trend of mind, to insist that a historical record may be true even though the facts which it claims to describe never existed. According to such a view the resurrection of Jesus may be a truth although it may not be a fact. That is to say, belief in it may have led to the coordination of Christian life and thought and to the inspiration of Christian activity ; THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 59 but such results give no assurance that the resurrec- tion as described by Paul actually occurred. When once such a method is given the sanction of a technical vocabulary, it is likely to have no small influence in religious thinking. Nor can it be denied that in certain regions it is of real help. Truth does find its highest attestation in experience. The goodness of God, for instance, establishes itself by the test of the effect upon human conduct of a belief in His love. It becomes reasonable because it is borne out by the moral development which re- sults from accepting it as a working hypothesis of faith and conduct. Even if there were no historical Jesus, the highest rehgious idealism probably — I say probably advisedly — would demand that the conception of God as Father be held to be a truth. Its worth would be its guarantee. But this conception of the gospel, so far from that set forth in the New Testament and in Christian history, is not likely to be of particular help to any one expect the pragmatic philosopher. Men who hold it persist in asserting that such a view of Jesus as commonly prevails in our churches identifies religion with the acceptance of alleged facts liable to be destroyed by archaeology or criticism. But any reasonable orthodoxy — and there is such — 6o THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER as truly as a liberal historico-biblical evangelicalism will deny that it makes historic facts the basis of religion. It makes the evangelic facts aids to religion. Such a practice may characterize "scientific" theol- ogy as well. For why should a theology be scientific only when it is negative? So to use facts is to do precisely what the anti-historical pragmatist would do with his historical illusions, — employ them for the inspiration, the direction, and the enrichment of faith. But a belief in realities is more effective than a belief in illusions. That is the reason why a genuine evangelicalism, whether it be conservative or liberal, will always have vastly more power than a religious apologetic that tries to convert the world with a minimum of religious certainty. The church should welcome all arguments that prove men may believe in God and have communion with Him and be blessed in living with Him even if criticism should destroy the historical Jesus; but it must also recall that it is the custodian of the gospel — • a record of facts supplementary to this generic religious faith. These facts do indeed open the door to historical criticism. But they are not thereby destroyed. Rather they are being established. And if it comes to a choice between the difficulties of criticism and those of epistemology, for one I will choose the former. THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 6l It is easy enough to forecast the effects of this sort of presentation of an unhistorical gospel. If once the world becomes convinced that Jesus has no more reality than his value as a working h)^othesis of God's character, and that the gospels have only a functional worth, the church as an aggressive spirit- ual force will go out of commission. The very men who champion such a view will find it difficult to do more than reshape the religious fervor and faith which belong to men who once lived assured of the actual historicity of a risen Christ. The world at large has very little use for a myth or a legend or an illusion, no matter how it may assist it to func- tion religiously. We may need sometimes to specu- late as to what would be left the v/orld if evangehcal theology were to go into bankruptcy; but it does not become us to depreciate its assets, much less call for a receiver of a solvent concern. 2. There is little gained by insisting that in the place of the historical Jesus we have the spirit of Jesus. The very phrase is in itself difiicult of under- standing. It is biblical, but with something other than the biblical content. The spirit of Jesus in the New Testament is the Holy Spirit sent by him to his disciples, their final argument to establish that he was the Christ. That is to say, their experience 62 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER of God was conditioned upon their acceptance of the historical Jesus at a certain valuation. The fact that the epistles contain httle information about his life and deeds and words beyond the facts of his suffering and resurrection, is no argument for hold- ing that Paul and his fellow-apostles cared nothing for such matters. On the contrary, their dependence upon the historical Jesus stands out in every page of their epistles. But they did not need to talk about his deeds and words. They could presuppose knowl- edge of them. Otherwise what were Mark and the other ministers of the word doing? It must be admitted that the term "historical Jesus" sometimes has a connotation calculated to justify this insistence upon the superiority of the non-his- torical spiritual Christianity. Unfortunately much of the historical study of Jesus' hfe gives the impres- sion that the most important matters for rehgion are archasology, geography, literary criticism, and the defence of the historicity of every line of the evan- gelic records. If to study the historical Jesus means that it is necessary only and primarily to know just where and why and how he did a certain thing, any sensible man will admit that the "historical Jesus" might be either a source of new legahsm or a creature of the pedants. But such a conception is THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 63 far enough from what properly is meant by the term. Not the complete picture of Jesus with his peculiari- ties of life known to the last detail, but the presenta- tion of a Jesus who actually existed as an historical person, the main events of whose life are really those which to Paul and others of his contemporaries made the content of a completer revelation of God — that is what the preaching of the "historical Jesus" demands. To be convinced of the reality of the main elements of such a life is not to create a new legalism or to make the critic a priest ; it is to have at one's disposal a group of facts which can be brought into relationship with the facts of Christian experi- ence and of science and so be made to form the basis of a noble induction which shall control our religious ideals and kindle our rehgious hopes and deepen our religious faith with the power of reality. Shall the church use these facts of evangelic history, or shall it rely upon dogmatic authority, theories of knowledge, and mysticism ? If facts are to be used, why not discover them methodically and use them frankly as facts without attempting to account for them or to declare that something else is better than they? There is a real danger lest the church in its zeal for things spiritual should forget that the truest spiritual hfe is that which is 64 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER bom from the recognition of realities which ante- date one's own experience and can be substantiated by the processes of historical criticism as well as by one's own growth in grace. 3. It is worth while, however, to consider spe- cifically three objections to preaching this gospel of the practicability of a godlike life extending natu- rally into a blessed future after death, based not upon philosophy, but upon the actual career of Jesus. First, it is alleged that such a gospel has been destroyed by historical criticism. This charge has a measure of justification. If the conclusion of certain radical critics are the legiti- mate and the only results of the critical process, one may very well abandon any attempt at preaching the gospel in the New Testament sense of the word. But these conclusions are not likely to prevail except among those who live in the highest altitude of anti- supematuralism. It is not that the method employed by men like Schmiedel and Van Manen and Schmidt is incorrect. It is the only permissible method. The real difiiculty lies in the fact that such critics use as criteria of their normative processes certain presup- positions and ingenious guesses as to what things are not and cannot be. One may follow their method THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 65 as long as it is genuinely comparative, but when it comes to a choice between on the one hand a risen Jesus possessed, not, it is true, of ordinary flesh and blood, but of genuinely objective reality, and on the other hand a belief on the part of the apostles in a risen Jesus which was merely the product of hyp- notic suggestion, the church must choose the former. Criticism itself suggests the choice. For, except in the case of such of its phases as are controlled by certain phases of philosophy, the tendency of criti- cism is toward a larger recognition of the historical aspects of the New Testament. It is unfair to charge up to it the denials of philosophy and excessive in- genuity. Secondly, it is claimed by some that this gospel of hopes built upon historical facts cannot be preached because it involves the miraculous. Now while he may not admit with Schmiedel that as regards historicity the accounts of the gospel vary from those that are per se incredible to those that are per se credible, even the conservative will admit that i;here are miracles and miracles. No man under the influence of to-day's scientific thought can believe in any anti-legalism in God's relation to his world. It is impossible for him to conceive of an exceptional event as possessing more defensive value for religion 66 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER than is furnished by the intelligible uniformity of nature. He finds God more evident in the rule than in the exception. He knows that many people at the time when the New Testament was written called some things miracles which we have learned to clas- sify under different names. But he will not define "miracle" so cleverly as to evaporate that for which it really stands — an unclassified exhibition of divine power. The issue is obviously something more than one of logomachy. Wholly apart from the explanations given by his contemporaries, does a fair criticism lead us to believe that Jesus actually performed the acts attributed to him in the gospels? If it can do this it makes very little difference whether we de- scribe those acts by one word or another. We may call them supernatural or preternatural or natural. Every theist believes that all force is God's force. The distinction between natural and supernatural is one for a debating society. It should not be al- lowed to cloud the issue as to fact. If something exceptional happened, we may be sure that in bring- ing it to pass God did not throw the universe into anarchy. If Jesus could cure men of deadly dis- eases and show himself, however inexplicably, to his disciples after his death, he was possessed of a THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 67 personality able to accomplish such things. That is the main thing. Jesus is the real miracle. Because we find difficulty in accepting as strictly historical the accounts of the so-called nature miracles, such as walking upon water and turning water into wine, is no argument for an off-hand re- jection of the gospel narrative as a whole, or even a curtailing of its trustworthiness to the limits set by the theologians of the extreme left. Suppose we should find that the accounts of such matters must be rejected for good and sufficient reasons, the church would still value Jesus as the revelation of the ever loving God. It would still have its real gospel. For the church is vitally interested in discover- ing, not whether the water was actually turned into wine, but whether Jesus actually "showed himself alive after his passion." Did he or did he not really communicate with the apostles on the first Easter Day? Once settle that and the problem of nature miracles will take care of itself or can be left for more light. Not that it is necessary to establish the historicity of every detail in the various New Testament accounts of the resurrection any more than on the other hand there is need to rationalize those accounts or to eviscerate them by clever re- 68 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER definition or appeal to functional psychology and pragmatic philosophy. The bald fact of communi- cation between Jesus and his apostle, as declared in I Corinthians, is a minimum as defensible as it is evangelic. There is nothing in the New Testament so thor- oughly substantiated by impartial criticism as the belief of the apostles of the resurrection of Jesus. As yet there has been suggested no way of accounting for that belief so satisfactory as the hypothesis that the apostles actually experienced what they thought they experienced. Paul knew what visions were; one might almost call him a connoisseur in visions. But when he came to discuss the resurrection of the believer he frankly bases his confidence in it not upon visions, but upon the fact of the risen Jesus. The more we know about life the more does it grow possible to show that such an alleged fact is not necessarily contrary to the laws of nature; and as a criticism in the hands of historians replaces the vagaries of a criticism in the hands of philologians, the more does it seem able to meet the difhculties inherent in the story itself. Whether or not the resurrection is called a "miracle" is comparatively of little importance. As a fact substantiable to a high degree of probability by a fair criticism and THE CHURCH AND THK GOSPEL 69 psychology, it is something too precious to be dis- carded or belittled. In the third place it is urged that we should not preach this objective gospel because it involves an eschatological hope too naive for the modern man. But why should eschatology be an objection? It must be admitted that no man whose thought is under the dominance of scientific concepts can approach the eschatology of the New Testament with full assent to its literal interpretation. It is too largely the survival of pharisaic apocalyptic. But it is easy to remove such interpretative elements by the use of a definable method. There are, in fact, few ministers outside of those who are aggres- sive champions of theological literalism who do em- phasize the details of New Testament eschatology. But this is not to deny the reasonableness or the power of that which lies at the heart of the Jewish apocalyp- tic hope when once it is properly interpreted. The kingdom of God never came as the apostles expected it to come ; but God came, and God will continue to come to the man who has living faith in Jesus. It has been its eschatological message which has given the gospel its grip upon human life. For escha- tology is one phase of a developing doctrine of im- mortality. 70 THE CHUECH AND THE CHANGING ORDER III Shall the church preach a gospel that presupposes and emphasizes immortality? Your " modem man " is endeavoring to construct an ethics for men and women who possess no immor- tality. Not that he would frankly deny that there may be life after death, but he will not assert it with any degree of conviction, and judges that it will be on the whole safer if he can persuade men and women to be good regardless of whether death ends all. We ought to be good in any case, he argues ; we may or may not be immortal. If a good man discovers after death that he is still Hving, he wiU be none the worse for having attained virtue without that expec- tation. It will be a sort of gracious surprise. If, on the other hand, after death he finds himself anni- hilated, the world will at least have had the benefit of his virtues, and none of his expectations of the future will have been disappointed. I would not attempt to deny that a virtue can be taught which adopts this caution as to the future. The church, however, in enforcing such an ethics, and in adopting such a non-committal attitude as to im- mortality, and in insisting that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments is to play no r6le in the THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 71 region of motive, is making a fundamental mistake. It is playing into the hands of its enemies and is in a fair way to take all vitality out of morality. It can ofiFer a moral culture for a generation whose moral momentum has been set by an inherited belief in immortality, but it is making it certain that the moral- ity of that generation's grandchildren will be little better than a regard for the conventions. You cannot arouse enthusiasm for righteousness among people 'who you are assuring may be simply a new type of animal. You cannot induce men to be good by insisting that they are under the duty of improving the race. Posterity has little hold upon any one who is convinced that the great argument for morality is to be found in stock farms. If such a person has any atavistic tendency toward that conscience which his grandfathers developed be- cause they believed that death did not end all, he will see to it that so far as he is concerned there is no posterity to live for. Christian men and teachers may as well face the situation. A morality that does not at some point draw its motives from immortality has seldom been very effective and will be less effective in the future. For the Christian church with its risen Founder to abandon its teaching as to immortality is to make a 72 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER bid for spiritual bankruptcy. If the Christian church does not soon come to a realizing sense of its position, it will discover that just as it is allowing socialism to usurp its position as a champion of peace and fraternity and social justice, so it will have allowed science to have usurped its position as a herald of immortality. But why should Christian preachers hesitate to preach a gospel that has at its very centre a trium- phant conviction that man does not die like the beast, but that he may rise into life Hke Jesus the Christ ? Are we afraid to be called immortal? It is not hard to find answers to these questions. The scientific study of religion, just like every other science, is more interested in origins than it is in destiny. We will spend years trying to discover whence we came; what our primitive ancestors did when they first made up their minds to be hu- man rather than simians ; whether morality is in any way related to a circulation of the blood close to the skin ; whether men are more religious after dinner or before dinner. But we can be silent as to the destiny of the individual. We talk with a splendid generosity of generalization about the future of the race. We are sure at least of a reasonable immor- tality of that sort as long as we have immigrants THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 73 with large families. But how often do our modem prophets preach convincing and enthusiastic ser- mons on the outcome of the individual life as set by death ? Possibly at Easter, but even at Easter too many "modem men" prefer to tell how mother na- ture gives birth to beautiful spring, how butterflies come out of cocoons, and how goodness emerges from badness. Then again we hesitate to bring immortality into the region of morals because of rewards and punish- ments. For if there is anything that your ethical teacher nowadays is determined to avoid it is the thought of a reward or a punishment. Any ethics which says that a man should undertake to be good because he would be better off for being good, is to him an abomination that makes desolate. It must be, of course, admitted that the rewards and punishments of immortality too often have been presented crudely. Who of us has not pendulated between horror and amusement as we have looked at the pictures of the churches and art galleries of Europe which portray the joys of the saved and the sufferings of the damned ? But there is at least one thing to be said for the ethics of rewards and punishment. After you have stripped it of its crudity it is adapted to human needs. 74 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Possibly there has been such a thing as art for art's sake, although most of us have discovered that art also exists quite as much for income's sake. But goodness for goodness' sake has about as much grip on the ordinary human as cleanliness for cleanli- ness' sake. It is time the church realized that sin is, as Sir Oliver Lodge says, akin to disease; that it carries with it inevitable suffering of the sinner as vyell as of the person sinned against. Until the Christian teacher really is possessed of a horror of moral degeneration, he is not likely to be very keen to herald a gospel of salvation from suffering as well as from imperfection. Another reason why a belief in immortality has been banished from morality is the fact that our religious teachers are in a sort of philosophical, psychological, anthropological, epistemological panic. Like Childe Roland they see nothing about them but ranks upon ranks of men who have been defeated by the Lord of the Dark Tower. A mili- tant conviction as to immortality has been put to flight by monads, totems, survivals of animism, and problems of knowledge. When once these serried hosts have advanced, too many religious teachers have looked about for a line of dignified retreat. What chance has the foolishness of preaching THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 75 against the combined forces of a new philosophy, a new psychology, a new anthropology, a new epistemology? But while religious teachers have been talking about the beauties of Browning and the duties of school boards, the scientists have turned preachers. Immortality stands to-day on a stronger apologetic basis than ever before, not because of the convic- tion of the preacher of the gospel, but because of men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Frederic W. H. Myers, John Fiske, and Professors Royce and Shaler, and that group of higher critics who, undismayed by the assaults of epistemology, are convinced that the resurrection of Jesus is something more than the child of auto-suggestion and feminine hysteria. I do not need to recount the role which evolution has played in reestablishing confidence in immor- tahty not only of the genus, but of the individual. There are questions here to be given better answers than they have as yet received, but the man who believes in the development of an as yet partially free individuality from the determined life of a lower animalism finds a new article for his creed in Royce 's splendid paraphrase of Paul, "This mortal must put on individuality." He cannot believe that the uni- verse should have groaned and travailed together 76 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER in pain to produce humanity and then treat men as if they were of no more value than mice. But just because immortality seems demanded for carrying one step farther the evolution of a free indi- vidual, does it determine the perspective values in per- sonal goods. A man is as much a possibility as he is a survival. Between those elements which are the results of completed evolution and those other elements which are in the process of development into a completed individuality when death shall once help it get bom, there is constant struggle. Therein is morality. It may be urged that such considerations exist even in case the higher elements of self are not im- mortal; that as Paulsen says, "ethics will not change a single proposition whether there be life after death or not;" or as Robertson says, in the famous pas- sage to which nearly every man sooner or later goes back, even if there were no immortal life it would still be better to be chaste and honest and generally virtuous. Probably this would be the case provided only that we could be sure that those elements which we have been taught to believe get their value because they are elements of the immortal self are really the more valuable when immortality is lost in religious agnosticism. But how is one to THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 77 be sure that a man who, like Jesus, cultivates the spirit of love and sacrifice is not a weakling? We are apt to judge him such in the rush of our com- petitive world. How are we to be sure that seK- restraint is better than self-indulgence unless we are assured that the lower self is not the eternal self? It is no answer to say that love and heroism and truthfulness are better because the world has re- garded them as better and because our souls express themselves in a confidence of their ultimate suprem- acy. There still hangs over us the doubt as to whether such estimates may not be the outcome of a morality which found its first sanctions and in- hibitions in a doctrine of immortality, or whether they may not be merely conventions according to which men have agreed to live. How much more assured become one's convictions as to the ultimate value of love and temperance and self-sacrificing jus- tice when one is convinced that such a life as that of Jesus leads to certain immortality ! It is a stronger objection to urge that such an argument as this for the tendency of evolution can- not be tested by actual experience and so must al- ways lie in the region of a working hypothesis, and that it is unwise and unscientific to incorporate such a hypothesis in anything like scientific ethics. This, 78 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER we suppose, must be granted. It may very likely be that these considerations may fail to meet the re- quirements of scientific ethicists who prefer to find a firm foundation for morality in the habits of primi- tive man who lived before history. But this much is certain: practical morality as expressed in con- duct has been and will be modified by a conviction as to the consummation of the tendencies of person- ality in the immortal life. It may be true that we are no longer afraid of a literal hell with literal flames, and no longer desire a literal heaven with literal streets of gold ; but every reasonable man should stand in awe of a spiritual hell. For him the com- pletion of personality in those terms which a blessed immortality demands is as likely to be effective in regulating conduct as is the desire for a healthy ma- turity in leading to the observance of the laws of health through the period of adolescence. Now it is at this point that the gospel meets us, and bids us surrender ourselves to this impulse and let life as we find it in ourselves express itself in the search for a discovery of the next higher stage, the life of that nobler age which is yet to come. Its position is as tenable for the evolutionist as it is for the creationist; indeed, more so. For eternal life, as Jesus clearly shows, does not imply the injec- THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 79 tion of a new vital quantum into personality, but rather is the emphasis and larger realization of cer- tain elements already in personality. To such a view, our present Life may become the embryo of eternal life. The really practical matter before the church, however, is not so much a philosophy of immortality, however important that may be, as the recalling of the men of a materialistic age to a sense of their spiritual importance. Immortality is not the only basis for morality, but it should be made in some rational way a motive for morality. In a profound sense the gospel must become to-day an eschatologi- cal message. Its central fact is the concrete argu- ment for the immortal worth of a Christlike man seen in the resurrection of Jesus. It is possible and, in the interest of morality, imperative that these elements of the gospel be combined with what we know of life and its tendencies and thus made to serve the interests of an ethical appeal. It is the business of the Christian church to rationalize the appeal of immortal life and to make it something more than a naive exploiting of physical fear and hope ; to extend it to all social relations. He would be untrue to the gospel who would insist that a man ought to be good in order that God may at some 8o THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER future time arbitrarily assign him a share in the bliss of heaven. The Christian can make no appeal to a Mohammedan paradise, however transcendental it may make its feasts and its houris. The appeal which the church must make is rather the appeal of a spiritual physician to men who are diseased. In the interest of their personal welfare it must urge upon them a hygiene of the soul, and in the name of the Master and with the conviction bom of our knowl- edge of his life and resurrection urge them to give freest expression to the eternal life in social love and service rather than to the merely animalistic life in selfish indulgence and strife. Its ethical appeal should be based upon the teleological value of personality. If we do not believe that the self has immortality, our ethical appeal will be little better than poetical exhortation or socialistic utili- tarianism. If like Jesus and the apostles we do possess that conviction, we shall find a new grip in our ethical conceptions, a new enthusiasm for religious uplift, and a new motive to sacrifice in the interest of social fraternity. For the eternal life of which Jesus spoke and which he revealed His more than mere continued existence. It is the present life of God within the human soul — death- less because He is deathless. THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 8l IV How shall we preach this gospel of the risen Christ and of the eternal life? I. Above all else, positively, with a contagious conviction. A man will neither fear nor love a God under investigation. With the passion of moral physicians who know that sin is a deadly curse — not a term of the school- man. And, up to the utmost hmit of our convictions, with an emphasis upon both its experiential and its historical elements. To appreciate the evangelic significance of the life and teachings of Jesus it is necessary to centre one's attention steadily upon his individuality as affected by historical environment, upon his own Messianic self-estimate, and upon the Messianic interpretation given him by his followers. The terminology of these estimates, age-product though it was, helps us appreciate the real personality that compelled the Messianic valuation. Integral in this must be the fact of his resurrection as it is ex- pounded by Paul. According to Paul and the Acts, the resurrection did not make Jesus the Messiah, but it showed that he was the Messiah. He was the 82 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Christ while he was preaching by the side of the lake, but the crowning evidence of the fact did not ap- pear until after Calvary. More distinctly: the life of Jesus is a part of the gospel because it shows the content of the eternal life — that is, it shows how the divine life would appear under certain recog- nizable historical conditions in terms of loving service to the bodies and the souls of men. 2. This insistence upon the historical elements of the gospel carries with it the necessity of distin- guishing sharply between the evangelic facts and the interpretation given them by the people of the first century. It is the first duty of the constructive theologian, and of the preacher as well, to make this distinction. Many of the interpretative concepts by which the gospel was exhibited to men of the first century are outgrown. It is not that they were necessarily false, but that they are interpretations and naturally stand in a different category from the facts with which they deal. There is, for example, the conception of the demons as causing certain forms and in fact nearly all forms of disease. We find it running through the entire ancient world. But the New Testament concept of demoniacal possessions is not a part of the gospel. It is a contribution to historical pathology. Simi- THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 83 larly in the case of the use by the New Testament writers of the idea of a flat earth and superimposed heavens ; of an underworld for the dead ; of angelic powers and principalities; of the heavenly Jerusa- lem and the lake of fire. Such beliefs are not the gospel but ideas that conditioned the first preaching of the gospel. So, too, in the matter of apocalyptic eschatology. The cosmology of those who know that the earth is round is radically different from that of those who described the coming of Christ in terms which imply that the earth is flat. But cosmology, though a necessary part of a man's intellectual equipment, is not a necessary subject of preaching. Like these other matters it lies within the region of the inter- pretative concept and is not one of the elements of the gospel itself. Messianism, finally, is a sur- vival of Judaism, and its influence and implications must be removed before we see the essential ele- ments of the gospel. 3. The facts of the gospel are to be preached, but they are to be preached in such thought forms and in such vocabularies as will make them efficacious with the people whom the church to-day addresses, not with the people who wrote the New Testament. We do not need to be citizens of the Graeco-Roman 84 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER world in order to be Christians. We can and must be citizens of our own new age. Our thought forms must be those of to-day's thinking. For after allowance has been made for these con- cepts of a prescientific age, the facts of the gospel themselves can be reinterpreted. And this inter- pretation will be found in a translated Paulinism. We all have undoubtedly a large amount of sym- pathy with the cry of "Back to Christ," or as some would have it, "Forward to Christ." There are probably few thoughtful Christians who do not feel that vital Christianity has suffered somewhat at the hands of those who have attempted to reduce its truths to great systems. But I cannot share in the more or less general revolt from Paul. I have a feeling that when a man belittles Paul, he shows that he does not understand Paul. True, the apostle in many places thinks in ways it is difficult to follow; but for a man who takes the Pauline point of view, Paulinism is an open book. And I venture to say that any man who seeks to get back to Christ will find, if he looks about him, that at every step he takes toward the Master he will find ahead of him the guiding footsteps of this same Paul. No man ever understood Jesus as did the apostle to the Gen- tiles; no man ever equalled Paul in grasping the THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 85 capacity of the fact of the dead and risen Christ to help one solve the problems of death and sin, of immortahty and righteousness, and above all that deepest of all questions: Is the universe run by heartless law or by love ? It is true we do not think of God in the forensic fashion, but Paul's doctrine of justification by faith, much as it turned about the forensic figure, has in it eternal truth. We may conceive of righteousness to-day more from the point of view of spiritual hygiene than from that of the law court, but any man will take many an unneces- sary step toward evangelical truth who does not first master the Pauline concepts of the atonement and acquittal and then express these great teachings in terms which will do for our day what the forensic conception did for his day. There are two great foci in the evangelic thought of Paul. The one is the fact of the historical, risen Jesus and the other is the experience of God. From these two foci his penetrating intellect swings with magnificent sweep around the entire ellipse of reli- gious thinking. The man who would preach the gospel to-day must bring these two facts to the solu- tion of the precise problems which Paul himself confronted, viz. : the way of approach for an un- clean soul to a forgiving God, that is faith in Jesus 86 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Christ; the possibility and certainty of moral ad- vance toward the ideal set by Jesus, that is sancti- fication through the indwelling spirit; the place of Jesus in the cosmic purpose of God, that is the atone- ment; the physiological-psychological outcome of death in the case of the life in the spirit, that is the body of the resurrection ; the unity of believers, that is the new social order. Within these and the sub- sidiary doctrines which they involve will be found the sphere of the positive and effective preaching of the historical gospel. It is possible that this insistence upon facts and particularly upon the resurrection of Jesus as essen- tial elements in an evangelical message may appear to preclude the preaching of the gospel by those who do not possess a similar confidence in the reliability of our historic records. For there are many who have come to distrust the scientific worth of the apos- tolic testimony to the resurrection and feel that it is impossible at this distance to distinguish between actual occurrences and the faith of the first evan- gelists. Two things may plainly be said to such persons : first, by way of repetition. Any theology that THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 87 is unaffected by a conviction of the reality of the risen Christ is not evangelical in the strictly New Testament sense. Conceivably such a theology may be true ; conceivably as far as other doctrines go it may be in accord with the traditional ortho- doxy. But just because it fails to embody in itself the triumphant note of the resurrection it is some- thing different from the gospel as it is presented in the New Testament. But secondly it should be said that some men reach this conviction as to the risen Christ by the way of Christian experience rather than by the way of historical criticism. To such a person the his- torical argument may bring no assurance of the trustworthiness of the New Testament records, but he believes with all his soul that Jesus' life upon earth was so divine that it was indubitably consum- mated in the glorious life of heaven ; that Jesus to-day lives beyond a shadow of doubt ; that is to say, he believes in a risen Christ without believing in the events of the first Easter Day or in the objective character of the appearances of Jesus to Paul and the other apostles. Is such a man excluded from preaching the gospel of salvation from sin and death? Assuredly not. He, too, can bring and must bring his conviction of 88 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the continued life of Jesus to bear upon men and women. To my mind in refusing to make the testi- mony of Paul and the apostles an aid to religious faith because he believes it cannot be verified, he has lost something exceedingly valuable from his message. But if he actually preaches the gospel of eternal life, his is an evangelic message. For it rises above moral exhortation and sees in the historical Jesus an actual faith-compelling revelation of a God who saves from sin and death those who trust themselves to Him as Jesus trusted himself to Him. Whatever are the means by which a man gains this conviction, whatever may be the means by which he refuses to gain it, the conviction is indubitably his. But to him as to the man who has fuller confidence in the New Testament records such a conviction must be no mere appendix to a theological system. It must permeate and control his thinking. It must make him feel a horror of sin and its conse- quences. It must teach him the hopelessness of a life without God. Above all it must dominate his estimate of the worth of a human soul and of the fatherliness of the God of the universe and inflame his ambition to bring men to God that they may be saved for two worlds. It may also possibly have occurred to my readers THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL 89 that this insistence upon the preaching of the gospel as nearly as possible in its New Testament sense is in many ways more like the evangelistic message preached a generation or so ago than that which has been considered the progressive orthodoxy of the last generation. I am free to admit it. A theology may be liberal and scientific and not be unevangelical. The history of Christian thought cannot be wholly a history of mistakes. The fact that historical criticism and the acceptance of the methods and results of biological science bring one back with new confidence to the heart of an historic faith, though by the road of a somewhat radical methodology, is at once reassuring and eloquent as to the future. There are many points both in conclusions and in method at which there will always be honest difference of opinion, but whatever is a fact will finally be reached by any legitimate investigation. In this loyalty to the gospel lies the hope of the church. Outside of it is suicidal division. I can- not see in ethical teaching, pure and simple, whether it be in ethical culture societies, or in evangelical pulpits, any greater hope than in a hopelessly out- grown literalism and anti-scientific conservatism. But I can see a magnificent future for that preaching go THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER which dares bring the data of the gospel of Jesus, however it may gain them, into fellowship with the facts of natural science ; which interprets them in the terms and concepts of the men of to-day just as Paul and Calvin interpreted them in the terms and concepts of their day; and which makes them the foundation for an estimate of the immortal worth of men and for the consequent gospel of brotherhood. This, and not a metaphysical theology, nescient or omniscient, is the evangelical message for which the church, whether conservative or liberal, friendly to criticism or hostile to critics, can stand and must stand. CHAPTER IV THE CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD The church can prepare men for heaven only by teaching them how to hve upon the earth. The gospel of the risen Christ is also the gospel of re- generate men building the eternal life into a frater- nity that must some day include all social rela- tions. For the heart of eternal life is aggressive, privilege-sacrificing love like that of Jesus himself. To many men the faith in an abiding social peace grows hardly more than a dream and a wish. Prog- ress, so far as social solidarity is concerned, seems leading for the moment to a cul-de-sac walled in by contradictions of its own making. Human Ufe has passed from savagery, where that man was safest who was most alone, to the present chaos of rela- tionships. Never was the division of labor so minute and cooperation so imperative. Never was power more synonymous with dependence. Never was a theoretical democracy more in evidence. And yet from its evolution the social universe has not yet emerged. The division of labor has not grown 91 92 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER cooperative; democracy was never more in need of guidance; social classes were never more sensitive to each other's prerogatives; the interests of the individual are not yet always those of society; education has not yet taught our children the art of living together as men; the church has not yet brought about the kingdom of God. To offset this disintegrating force, to what shall we look? Economic cooperation, ' the brute forces of army or police, foreign war, and socialism have had their champions, and to a greater or less degree each has been tried in actual life. Yet, so far as we can judge, the question still awaits an answer, and it must continue to wait until a basis be found in some fundamental human relationship so indepen- dent of the accidents of life as to be capable of appealing to all men everywhere and inciting them to greater efforts for themselves and a more spon- taneous recognition of the rights of others. It is not at all certain that any single basis of this sort will ever be found. Life is so complicated that perhaps social unity is as visionary as the fountain of life. But one thing stands true : whatever power there may lie in other aspects of human life, even a partial social unity will be but a dream to the man who shuts his eyes to religion and God. Despite CHURCH AND THE GOSPEI, OF BROTHERHOOD 93 one's own doubts and the apathy of organized Chris- tianity in social reform, wherever there is to be a bundle of lives in which the humblest man and woman shall be physically and morally safe, there must also be the all-embracing eternal life of the gospel. And in occidental society, at least, this means that the Christian church has a distinct ofiBce and duty to perform in bringing in unity through fraternity. Will it face this duty? The grounds for asking this sweeping question are two facts : first, religion has to do with powers and instincts that are not acquired, but are ele- mental and common to all men; and, second, Christianity, if true to the gospel of Jesus, makes men incapable of isolated life. I. Religion is the expression of an elemental, common, and therefore unifying factor of human life. To unite men, emphasis must be laid upon inter- ests that are not mere accidents or accomplishments, but common to all. The habits of the man of wealth, his very necessities, are so far removed from the habits, and even the luxuries, of the man of poverty as to constitute a genuine, and almost insuperable, wall 94 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER of separation. To insist that unity can be made possible for a people by teaching them to obey the laws governing the time for dinner and the proper style of clothes and the literature one should read, is ridiculous. No people has ever become perma- nently unified on the basis of customs or civilization. Customs and civilization are the results of a deeper something in life. Nor is social unity to be found even in a devotion to art. Music, painting, sculp- ture, and other forms of an essentially aesthetic life have never succeeded in building up a united so- ciety. Greece with its arts was as divided as Judea with its refusal to make to itseK a graven image. The aesthetic life is a product, not a source, of social conditions. When the Romans first conquered Greece, they thought they should have a knowledge of Greek music; but a Greek orchestra only bored the conquerors, until a centurion divided the musi- cians into two bands and ordered them, as they played, to advance toward each other as if in bat- tle. When once this was done, the Romans broke forth in loud applause. War they knew; music they could appreciate only as it simulated war. Perhaps men have grown less frank in the expres- sion of their opinions, but, inestimably valuable as is art in all its forms, social millennia will never spring CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD 95 from symphony concerts and art exhibitions. Cul- ture is too much a matter of the individual, too much an acquisition. The great elemental things in life are, always have been, and always must be, the basis of united social action. Within the physical sphere, for example, there is the passion for food. A nation rises or dies as one man if starvation be upon it. There is the passion for fighting — inherited from a savage past, it is true, but something which, as almost nothing else, links men together with unbreak- able bonds. A little higher is the elemental desire to acquire property. From the days of Tyre and Sidon this desire has broken across geographical wastes and bound people of different races together. There is hardly a stronger bond of union than that of com- mercial interest, and commerce rises superior even to the brutal elemental passion for war, and demands that there shall be arbitration where formerly men rushed headlong into battle. But hunger and fighting and the desire for prop- erty are not the only elements of human life. Be- sides them and above them there are such things as faith, a trust in some power outside oneself, the instinct to pray, the belief that in some way the world is not the result of a toss-up of chance, and that, once made by a God, it has not been aban- 96 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER doned by its Creator. Religious instincts are as elemental as the lust for blood. They are not something learned, and so added to life. Religion is one way of living. This was one of the messages of Jesus : to be religious is to live with God as well as with men. If one life is natural, so is the other. If religion is one way of living, it can be a bond of lives in so far as it calls into action original and essentially human elements. Ignoring all questions as to the relations of his ancestors with his tribal god, the savage in the Pacific islands to-day kneels at the altar of the God whose first messengers he devoured. The man of culture bows before God, hesitating, perhaps, to assent to any sharply articu- lated theology, yet wishing to let his faith find expres- sion in deeds, if not in words. The philosopher, who more than any other man appreciates the difficulties which lie inherent in theistic belief, still sees in re- ligion a philosophy of the whole of things, and can- not believe in anything less than an absolute unity lying back of all sensible variety. The root of all this belief in each class of men is undoubtedly the same, whatever may be the variety in its expres- sion. Were religion the luxury of the rich or a necessity of the poor, it would be far otherwise, for somewhere the instinct would disappear with the CHXTRCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD 97 death of creed, and awe would vanish before knowl- edge. But as the call to war leads men away from the accidents of life, the differences of business and culture and station, and binds millionnaire and pauper, clubman and cowboy, into a regiment, so Christianity, if only it is true to religion, can call men from busi- ness and daily routine and join them into the indivis- ible kingdom of God. To make men trust God better is to make them more ready to trust men better. To make them resemble God in universality of in- terest is to make them more companionable, more eager to do good, less eager to succeed through oppression, less isolated and self-centred, more intent upon performing duties than upon demand- ing rights. If men are God's sons, then must they be each other's brothers. 2. But such a statement as this leads us directly to the position of Christianity. It is fundamentally a religion, but on its social side gains its great cen- tripetal force by the fraternal instincts which it engenders among its followers. There has probably been in the history of social agitation no more dy- namic thought than the Christian teaching as to the divine paternity and the consequent human brotherhood. Epictetus with other Stoics, it is true, recognized it, but even he could not make it H 98 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER dynamic. Christianity itself for hundreds of years failed equally. But just as the heart of the strict Calvinist rebelled at his logic when it came to the fate of children who died in infancy, so in the same proportion as the interest in Christianity has swimg from metaphysics to its real content has the recog- nition of a common humanity and a universal obli- gation of the more privileged to the less privileged found expression in the thought of humanity's sonship to God. It is true that in support of this doctrine men have often been exegetically at fault. Jesus himself does not seem to use the parental analogy to express the universal relationships of God; but that which we mean by the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man lies in the very heart of his teaching as to eternal life and the kingdom of God, and no man can be said to have found the centre of Christianity who does not find his life regulated and inspired by the thought for which, whether accurately or inaccurately, the words stand to-day. But, further, the individual Christian, if he ap- proach the ideal of Jesus and Paul, is being made into a man who cannot live an isolated life. According to the conception of Jesus, to be religious is not to depend upon external authority, to limit one's think- CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD 99 ing, to perform certain duties, to practise protracted deprivation, and to narrow one's interests and life. On the contrary, in his own words, it is to have life, and have it more abundantly. Whatever help there may be in religious rules and regulations he rec- ognized, but, according to his conception, to hve religiously was to live helpfully with men because one was living trustfully with God. The divine life in man makes altruism instinctive. Eternal life, what- ever it may be in heaven, on earth is a life of spontan- eous service. The Christian dynamic is a faith that finds expression in love. The Christian virtues are not those of the hermit, but of the man who lives among his fellows — love, joy, endurance, meekness, self-control, trust-worthiness. Not one of these is the outgrowth of education or of degradation, of peculiarly good or peculiarly bad environment. All of them alike are the expression of elemental religious impulses shared by all men and obtaining reenforcement and energy from a God who dwells with all men. This is another of the legacies of Jesus: a selfish man cannot be religious. To the Christian religion is the Godward expression of a equality of life that is fraternal in its manward ex- pression. The one is the proof of the other. As John asks, How dare one say he loves God, whom he has lOO THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER not seen, when he fails to love his brother, whom he has seen? He must first violate his Christian nature who seeks his own things rather than the things of others. The real impulse, the greater in- clination of Christian life, is outward. Thus com- munion with God is possible only for the man who is living a life of supreme social service. Divine forgiveness is conditioned, according to Jesus, upon a man's forgiving his enemies. Just as a man can be a son of God only when he is a brother of his fellow-men, so the better Christian a man is, the less aristocratic and the more fraternal he is. And so it is inevitable that as a community is composed of men whose lives are filled with the spirit of Jesus, it will be bound close together. If one may paraphrase the noble saying of the church father, society, like man, is by nature Christian; in so far as it is un-Christian it is unnatural and dangerous. An irreligious aristocracy gave France the miseries of the old regime; an irreligious proletariat gave France the reign of terror; an irreligious middle class gave France the massacre of the communists; an irreligious Republic has given her travesties of justice in the name of honor. But genuine religion in our modem world is not an affair of a community, but of the individuals CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD lOI of a community. And if it be, as one can say with- out cant, that many of society's ills to-day spring from irreligion, to cure them one must work upon the individual life as well as the social environment. Regenerate men are the only material out of which to construct a regenerate society. Panaceas may look more fascinating, are almost sure to be more dramatic, than the unheralded production of Chris- tian character. It is always easy to leave a Christ bound for Calvary for the untested but magnificent promises of a Christ in the wilderness. But there is no surer way toward the New Jerusalem than the road of service to one's fellows made possible and heroic by an overpowering belief, as instinctive as it is magnificent, in the eternal worth of humanity and in a developing providential order in human society. To make men Christians is to make society fraternal. Economic oppression must vanish from a Christian society as slavery and branding van- ished. How can one deliberately "sweat" a soul possessed of immortal destinies? II It is at this point that we hear the call to the Chris- tian church to fulfil its social office as an embodiment of religion in general and of the gospel in particular. 102 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER It must awaken in men instincts which are common to the race, and induce them to grow into the likeness of Jesus. In a word, it must exploit and exhibit the social content of eternal life. If it fulfils this ofHce, it is as essential to social unity as is the school or the legislature. If it fails here, it fails completely. But its method must be its own. Unlike government, it furnishes no external force for social unity. It must stimulate and educate the social instincts in the individual life by appealing to the moral and religious nature. If it neglects this office, it fails of performing its proper functions and will be out- grown — a danger which is not unexpected by some serious thinkers. The nature of its social ofSce determines the ends by which the church must work. It is not to take the place of the school, or of government, or of institutions of popular amusement. Its work, to say the very least, must be coordinate with that of these others, but, if it would be a source of union rather than of disintegration, it must deal with those ele- ments of human nature that find expression in religion. I. It must appeal to and stand for life, not phi- losophy. Christianity has always been marked by the two CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD IO3 tendencies so indispensable for every evolutionary process. On the one hand, it has been a cause of disintegration in that it has stimulated men to originality and, therefore, difference in thought. On the other hand, it has tended toward unity within the region of common religious life. The most casual knowledge of the evolution of the Christian centuries corroborates these statements. On the one hand are the wars of the theologians, and on the other that beautiful unity of Christian spirit which makes it possible for Christians of all shades of belief to use the hymns and litanies of those with whose teachings they differ. Unfortunately, however, the Christian church has sometimes attempted to make the disintegrating tendency bring about unity. It has appealed to authority. Practically the earliest reference to the rise of an autocratic bishop patristic literature has preserved for us is in connection with the preserva- tion of correctness in doctrine. The great Roman church and the New Testament canon are the results of the attempt made by men and women in the early Christian centuries to bring the church to ortho- doxy. Protestantism, although originating in a revolt against coerced uniformity, and often over- emphasizing Christian individualism, has itself. I04 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER within the limits of separate denominations, too often attempted likewise the impossible task of ac- complishing unity by an authoritative orthodoxy. The result of all these efforts to reverse the natural workings of Christian forces has ultimately been failure. No reform can run long against nature. Heresy, like the church, has spnmg from the blood of its martyrs. But coercion is an anachronism. We are getting to understand — though in some quarters very slowly — that a man who differs from us in doctrine is not of necessity a bad and blasphemous man. In proportion as each denomination recognizes that its work is not to force men to pronounce accurately some shibboleth, but to create God-fearing, man- loving, honest lives, does it come to insist upon such teachings as are bom of universal Christian ex- perience rather than of disproportionate emphasis upon various dogmas. By endeavoring to give men more abundant life rather than a more voluminous theology, the church will far more contribute toward denominational unity, and also toward a magnificent Christian unity that will not only embrace theological opponents, but bind together social classes as well. For the church to attempt to save society by a phi- losophy made over into a theology — especially if CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD I05 that philosophy be centuries out of date — is des- perate foolishness. Theology, indispensable as it is, always has been and is always likely to be a disin- tegrating force in Protestantism. To simpHfy the- ology is to help unify society. With all the stem realities of uncoordinated social life pressing in upon Christian people, it is suicidal to waste time dis- cussing the calculus of religion. With the sanctity of the home threatened by reckless divorces and even more reckless marriages, with a generation polluted by a mania for gambling, with saloons and brothels at its door, why should the church pause to manicure its theology? Facing a world in the darkness of heathenism, a submerged tenth rotting in our cities, an industrialism that is more murderous than war, why should the church stop to make a belief in the historicity of the great fish of Jonah a test of fitness for cooperation in aggressive evangelization? If it would make toward fraternity, the appeal of the church must be to life ; and so far as social signifi- cance goes, the church that does not make this appeal is dead while it lives. And what is true of religious philosophy is just as true of other causes of divisions. Church mem- bers may hold different opinions as to socialism, monarchy, trusts, prohibition, evolution, and a Io6 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER thousand other things, but a church as a social institution is concerned with none of them. It must educate its members in the principles governing Christian conduct; it must inspire men to value men as Jesus valued them in the hght of an impending eternity; it must teach them to do right by society at any cost ; it must bring them into vital relationship with God, that their hves may get something of the divine expansion ; and then it must trust them to act freely as their own intelligence and judgment dictate. As matters are to-day, with moral and religious teaching barred from the schools, with the state rightly but unfortunately held to be unconcerned with religion, with colleges and universities increas- ingly emphasizing learning and method rather than moral discipline, this educative, coordinating work of the Christian church is imperative. Its attitude here is critical not alone for itself but for society. It alone can devote itself to that side of the elemental humanity which religion represents. If it fails in its duty here, not only will individual lives grow poorer because imperfectly developed, but the whole structure of society will suffer. The most sceptical and most irreligious of statesmen have recognized the truth of this statement, and, however much they may have judged their own lives superior to the need CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD 107 of the religious motive, they have been anxious to maintain the church as an institution for the masses. But the church is something more than a deus ex machina, and preaching is something more than a terrifying of the masses into social order and decency by an appeal to their fear of hell. Religion, as a constituent element in human life, if developed along the lines indicated by a real gospel, produces men who will constitute the better environment for which all sociologists plead. The eternal life, which is the gift of Jesus, is inherently social. It cannot be egoistic. I do not mean merely that Christians will be active in seeing that reforms come to pass. Many Christian people are thus active, despite the apathy of certain of their number and the laments of certain men whose zeal has made them as unfair as pessimistic. Besides such assistance rendered by Christian people, each individual church has a definite social task to perform. It is an institution of its neighborhood, and as the world with Christ in it is a different thing from the world with Christ out of it, so a community, a ward, a neighborhood possessing a genuine church, is better than it could possibly be without such a church. Social environ- ment and public opinion are only other names for men and women. As men and women grow purer Io8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER and more generous, and their virtues get socialized in some institution, social environment and public opinion must improve. It is here that the local church becomes of social importance. It not only can produce Christian people, but, if it is properly performing its duty, it can coordinate and socialize their influence. But it must work out from life — eternal life. It cannot socialize orthodoxy or heterodoxy. That is an affair of each individual soul. And if the church has to do with life, then it must be ready to coordi- nate all the aspects of life. There is a Christianity outside the church; there are customs and insti- tutions made necessary by the course of social de- velopment; there are other virtues than the eccle- siastical. All these must be preserved, not destroyed. Jesus gave much of his teaching at dinners. Shall the ideal of the church be asceticism, which is but another word for social disintegration? Paul preached as he worked at his trade. Shall the Christian be taught that life can be split into religion and business? Jesus had pity upon the hungry. Shall a church neglect the poor in its region — or in any region ? Jesus gave men that which was better than what he destroyed. Shall church members vote away the saloon and give the poor man nothing CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD 109 better in its place ? This does not make it necessary or desirable for a church to identify itself with any special political reform. That is not the function of a church, but of church members. Let the church cease to be a theological lectureship, and, without puzzling men with strange theologies and stranger class sympathies, train them to express the ideals by the gospel in Christian living, and under the guid- ance of God they will be able as individual citizens to devise wise means by which social institutions and economic conditions and political machinery shall so embody the Christian spirit as shall make a Christian society less a matter of rhetoric, and Chris- tian living easier for all classes. The great dynamic of a society as it advances toward a real, a world- wide fraternity will be a public opinion surcharged with the ideals of the gospel. This is not to say that the unity which thus the church is to assist in producing will be absolute imiformity. Absolute similarity in work and char- acter is impossible so long as society does not return to primitive savagery. Christianity and Christian fellowship are not identical with an immediate aboli- tion of social classes. In the present stage of human development it is a part of human nature for men and women of similar instincts and occupations to seg- no THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER regate. Only the anarchist plans to destroy social organization, and even he expects that after it has been thoroughly disintegrated, its individuals will recombine in other and, as he believes, better groups. An army is a unity, but its very unity is a matter of organization. The spirit of Chris- tianity is not that of individualism gone mad. What it will accomplish will be, not the destruction of social organization, but a social unity in which inevitable economic and even social differentiation will be complemented by oneness in spirit. Economic classes may remain, but social hatreds must dis- appear. Nations may remain, but war must cease. Utopian as this may seem to a society in which competition has not yet succumbed to solidarity of interest and the spirit of Christian fellowship, the time must come when in some way or other, either with or without revolution, wealth and poverty, learning and ignorance, as well as all other accidental differences, will cease to divide men and prevent the growth of human fraternity. What society under such conditions will then resemble, no man can proph- esy. Perhaps these differences themselves may have been largely abolished, although it is not clear that the ideal will be reached by any socialistic pro- CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD III gramme. But, however or whenever attained, Chris- tianity must have a large share in its accomplishment. Social unity is a fellowship in life, not in opinion or vocation, and nowhere can human lives so readily, so finally, enter into fellowship as before the altar of a God who has been revealed as Father by a Son of Man. Will the church consent to rise from the divisive quest for orthodoxy to the unifying message of fra- ternity born of the gospel? To do anything else is to misinterpret that gospel and to be untrue to the Life brought to light by Jesus. 2. And this brings us to the heart of the whole matter, as far as the church is concerned. It must bring society and God together. God is the cor- relative of religion. One cannot develop, or even appeal to, the religious instincts of mankind sanely or healthfully except by showing how they may find satisfaction in his God. To attempt to satisfy a religious longing by a phrase or by a philosophy or by high-class amusements is to give men a stone when they have asked for bread. The church is something more than one among many social institutions. It is society's priest. It mediates God to a race that can, but does not, worship. If religion is to play any part in the accomplishment of social unity, God must be 112 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER treated seriously, and men must be bound together by being bound to him. Religious thought has lately been marked by an insistence upon the immanence of God in nature. Whereas he was once thought of as transcendent, and to be brought over into nature only through some bold anthropomorphism, we are now getting glimpses of a God who is always with us, whose will does not push the planets in their courses, but who is in some true sense force itself. It is hard to believe that such a philosophy any more than any other exhausts reality, and it is not yet demon- strable that God and matter are the same substance. But this new thought of God satisfies the religious wants, and the unimaginable stretch of space seems less fearful as one thinks that God is present wher- ever his will acts. But for the church, men and women are more im- portant than the stars. Dare we think that God is as much in humanity as in heavenly space? If the thunder is still his voice, can that voice also be heard in the succession of empires, the rise of social classes, the whole sweep of social evolution? Or is God only a convenient name for the subliminal self and the social mind, and is the materialism which in physical science is passing from atheism to agnos- CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD I13 ticism to be intrenched in psychology and sociology? All the logic of the schools cannot prevent a theist from believing that if God be in nature, He must also be in humanity ; that whatever He be in one part of His universe, that He must be in another; that He who keeps the universe from tumbling into chaos is also watching over every Zion and keeping every Israel. Nor can such a God care only for politics. Shall he be a God of armies and not a God of labor unions and of corporations? Shall he be a God of battle and not a God of strikes ? And if no such distinction is possible, then the man who prayed for victory in war may pray for fraternity in peace, and the church that insists upon religion as a social bond must also preach a God whose presence gives eflScacy to every effort toward the ennobling of social discontent, who is himself the inspiration of all social as well as of all individual effort. Social reform needs reenforcement at just this point. It is not enough to clean up the slums, to build schoolhouses with playgrounds, to appoint boards of arbitration. All these and countless other reforms, provided only they are not reforms against nature, are necessary and invaluable. But if they ignore God, what promise is there in them of a 114 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER completed social evolution ? In addition to reform, men need to feel that there is something more power- ful making for social peace than even regenerate men in a new environment. That something is a God. Only He must be no fate that sits and grins at human misery, but one who is the guardian of widows and orphans, who knows our human needs, and who can so work upon the hearts of men that they shall turn from injustice to justice, and from selfishness to love. He must be the Father of Jesus. I know the response likely to be made to this. It is a return to the faith of childhood, and that for men is very difficult. It is easy to see God in the calculable, impersonal course of sun and comet, but it is tragically hard to see him in the economic world in which one struggles. One may even be indifferent as to whether God really works in the law of gravitation ; but what if He be said to work in Gresham's law or the iron law of wages? It is easier, then, to fall back on social psychology and leave God to the theologian. But, none the less, there are the facts of social evolution and of Christian history. Despite its own questions, the church must take up its Master's work, and, while it teaches men to be kind and helpful, it must also insist that they can believe in a CHURCH AND THE GOSPEL OF BROTHERHOOD 1 15 God that still loves and reigns ; who in the last anal- ysis is the basis of social law — the One who will give men the kingdom of brotherliness. Times change, but man and God and faith survive. With many a David mad to wrest from some unwill- ing Nabal the wealth he holds to be his by equity, if not by law ; with many a Nabal clinging to privileges he is too blind to see are another's quite as much as his own; out from our storm-and-stress period, we, too, believe that humanity is something more than selfishness and that life is more than meat. But we need to be taught that religion is social as well as individualistic ; that only from the union of lives can there result safety and peace ; and that the bundle into which lives are to be bound must be the life of God. Only the church that sets before itself this social service is working in the spirit of its Master; it alone really appreciates its responsibility in con- verting society into the kingdom of God. It alone is really preaching " the old Gospel." CHAPTER V THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT No matter from what point of view he approaches the subject, any thoughtful man must be appalled at what he must see to be the possible consequences of the growing divorce of the church and the masses. For he must feel that the church cannot long survive its present indifference, or at best its ineffectual anxiety concerning its relations to those great revo- lutionary movements already discernible through- out the world. I I. The most superficial observer knows that there is widespread economic discontent. We are reaping what our fathers sowed. With the beginning of the modern era in the middle of the eighteenth century, capitalism usurped the place of a feudal aristocracy. The movement for political liberty resulted in re- publics, but it could not prevent the segregation of artisans about factories and the rise of a group of conscienceless, short-sighted employers to whom human nature was as nothing and the building up ii6 THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT I17 of fortunes everything. It was inevitable that a reaction should come from such misappropriation of power and disregard of responsibihty. And this reaction became something more than envy and covet- ousness. The poor have always been unreconciled to seeing others rich, but the bitterness of economic contrasts was deepened by the increased helplessness of these factory communities. Theoretically, labor was free to sell itself to the highest bidder. Prac- tically, the laborer was without the means of moving from the place of his employment and always bar- gained at a disadvantage. The labor union was the inevitable outcome of such conditions. It was the child of discontent and in- justice, real or imagined. Throughout its successive transformations it has always insisted that labor is not getting its fair share of that which it produced, and that the machine and its owner, the store and the commission merchant, were getting altogether too large a share of the social product. The rise in wages, which is one of the most re- markable features in to-day's economic life, has in- creased rather than diminished this discontent. It would not do to say that the labor movement is becom- ing a phase of socialism, but it would be even more unsafe to deny that it shares common ground with Il8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the socialist in its demand for a larger share of the products of industrial processes. The wage-earner no more than the speculator finds discontent di- minishing with an increase of income. The more one has, the less content is he with what he gets. And so it has come about that the very prosperity which many of our optimists treat as a synonym of content has increased contagious discontent, until the entire world is vocal with the complaints of those who be- lieve that their prosperity is not proportionate to their share in the creation of the prosperity of others. 2. Such an attitude of mind inevitably extends itself into politics. The rise of socialism as a poUtical force is one of the most striking phenomena of the past decade. Italy, France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Great Britain, and more recently the United States, have well-organized and effective socialistic parties who go about their campaigns with the fervor of propagandists. Economic in- equalities are to be righted by political action. But it would be a mistake to feel that socialism is the only political phase of this discontent. In Great Britain the labor party is already developing unexpected strength in Parliament, and in the United States it is inaugurating one of those great popular movements which might almost be called cyclical. THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT II 9 The greenback movement, populism, the extraor- dinary movement represented and fostered by Mr. Hearst, are all expressions, in the terms of politics, of a discontent which is not concerned with platforms and parties, but with the actual condition of those who first of all believe that they have not had their proper share in the blessings of economic develop- ment. 3. It is hard for most church members to judge of these movements impartially, to say nothing of their almost universal inability to judge them sym- pathetically. But he is an unsafe leader in Christian activity who belittles them or misjudges them. For this discontent includes within itself a distrust of the church. There is an alarming tendency for the church's influence to be limited by the class cleavage of society. Such a cleavage is not apparent in communities where modem industrial forces are as yet inoperative, but it appears the moment that such forces come into being. The grounds for this are not merely that our wage-earners, to a very large extent, are foreigners owing a more or less sincere allegiance to the Roman Catholic church : it is not to be accounted for in any large measure by the fact that so many of the leaders discontent are Jews who in the reaction 120 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER from Talmudism find themselves practically without any religion whatsoever; it is not due to the fact that so many immigrants have developed a genuine hatred of Roman Catholicism and welcome the infidelity of Paine and IngersoU. These facts have their influence, but one must make a wider induction to discover why economic and political discontent have dissociated the masses from Protestant churches. The real ground for the cleavage lies in a class consciousness which is economic. The Protestant ^churches are composed almost exclusively of those who belong to or who are in sympathy with the capi- ' talistic classes : employers, salaried persons, farmers, and those engaged in personal service of such persons, like cooks, housemaids, and coachmen. This fact and the far more discreditable one that church members have been too often notoriously indifferent to the need of applying the principles they profess to believe to industrial matters, have led the wage- earning class as a whole to regard the church as an institution allied with capitalism and the local church as a social club. Any one who is a member of a genuinely Christian church knows how unwarranted such a suspicion is. Most churches would be only too glad to welcome the workingman ; but workingmen as a class do not THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 121 want to go to Protestant churches, because they distrust the ministers and distrust church members. I cannot believe that such a distrust is justifiable, but the church cannot afford to close its eyes to the fact that it exists. The failure to face this fact has led to an increase of the suspicion and to a further extension of discontent. The man who feels that he has been wronged is not likely to assume a judicial attitude or to miss an opportunity to generalize from any fact which seems to justify the hostility he may possess. A few years ago an arbitration committee in Chicago, composed of three clergymen, charged one ; thousand dollars apiece for rendering its decision. ' The fact that this verdict was, on the whole, against the wage-earner, coupled with the exorbitant charge for a few days' work, did more to confirm organized labor in its conviction that the churches were the creatures of capitalists than any number of sermons could remove. The hesitation of many preachers to speak openly upon the morality of economic life has served to confirm the attitude of the masses. The socialist who hates the church as an essentially bourgeois organization has found it easy to fan this discontent and suspicion into downright hostility. Yet, in the meantime, the church seems happy in its 122 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER lot. Here and there, it is true, there is some effort made at conciliation, notably among the Presby- terians ; but in general the church seems ready to rest under the onus of the accusation of being a class organization, and the clergy seem too often indiffer- ent to the fact that they are hardly more than coop- eratively sustained private chaplains of well-to-do chques. And its enemies declare Christianity a lost cause. II I. It would be a great mistake to imagine that this threefold discontent which permeates the masses is pathological. It is farthest possible from being a sign of disease. Social movements, like that we see going on in our day, are the expression not of degeneracy ,but of a new social life bom of new ideals, themselves bom of socialized intelligence. The eighteenth century was another great period of the same sort. It, too, saw tremendous movements in the westem world among those who, having tasted of certain rights, believed that they ought to have still others. But the discontent that gave rise to the era of revolutions and produced a new America and a new Europe was certainly not a creature of • weakness. The eighteenth century was not an age THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 1 23 of saints, but it was something more than an age of destruction. From one point of view, a contented man is the most dangerous member of a community. True, he can be counted upon not to head revolutions or even to bolt his party ticket ; but he is a millstone around the neck of progress. That sort of discontent which sends the boy from the farm to the city to make his fortune is the hope of the industrial supremacy of the nation. That sort of contentment which pre- fers to see things as they always have been, because it is too much trouble to change them, is nothing more nor less than social lethargy. To denounce dis- content because we are prosperous, and therefore everybody else ought to be satisfied, is worse than futile. It not only discloses a hopeless incapacity to face facts, but it also serves to turn existing dis- content into downright class hatred. We cannot comfortably say to ourselves that in the course of time the present situation will pass, leaving all things as they were. Whoever hugs such optimism to his soul is a fool. Discontent has always bred change. Bom of a more or less fermenting idealism, it has changed institutions and laws and re-classed privileges. It always will change them. The discontent of to-day's life is expressing itself in 124 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER huge organizations, in political parties, in literature, and in a class consciousness. It will work changes as certainly as darkness disappears when the sun rises. To question the certainty of such a result is to question natural law. 2. And these changes which are to be wrought will be in accordance with the ideals which have occasioned discontent and toward which the efforts of reconstruction are directed. Just what these ideals are can be learned by any person who will take the trouble to study the two great literatures of popular idealism: socialistic propaganda and the journals of organized labor. There are other publications claiming to represent these ideals, but too often they are less trustworthy exponents of the masses than they are bids for the support of the masses. The demagogue may be in a fashion the mouthpiece of discontent, for he en- deavors to appeal to what he regards the dominant feeling of those whom we would control; but dis- content is no mere creature of the demagogic agitator. There is a passionate sincerity in the literature of both socialists and the labor unions which compels respect. A man does not need to approve of every- thing to be found in this literature, but he must recognize the fact that both the socialist and the THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 125 labor movements are brimful of an idealism which is not to be measured by their economic accomplish- ments. Each alike is a Cause. Each believes itself to be a champion of human betterment. Men will plead and fight for them, and, if need be, die for either cause with the self-sacrifice that led the martyr to the stake. This self-estimate, particularly that of organized labor, is justified in actual accomplishment. The member of that middle class from which church membership is largely drawn finds it difficult to realize the truth of this statement. In a general sort of way, he believes that labor has the right to organ- ize, but on the whole he is inclined to believe that its aims are selfish, irrational, and productive of nothing but a social discontent, boding evil. For a socialist he has less respect and more fear. A man pleading for a candid examination of the motives which rule in these two great popular movements is very apt to become an object of suspicion. But with- out any disrespect for the work of organized Chris- tianity, it must be said that there is many a church which, in point of general altruism and of loyalty to its professions of high purpose, could not endure a comparison with the work of some labor unions. It would be a severe shock to the self-esteem of such 126 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER churches to compare their fellowship funds, which are spent in alleviating the wants of their poor members, with not only the funds but also the prac- tical help of other sorts with which many a labor union surrounds its members. 3. It cannot be too often repeated or too strongly emphasized that if the church is to affect the labor movement and socialism, it must recognize that, while each works within an economic class, neither is exclusively economic in motive. Each emphasizes more than does many a church the specific application of its ideals of fraternity and justice to economic inequality, but such also would insist that good wages and fairer economic conditions are not ends in themselves. At the end of the struggle is to come equality and fraternity. The foreigner working in the stock- yards of Chicago is determined that his children shall be educated, that they shall share in all the good there is in life, as he knows it. Therefore it is that he buys pianos on instalments and hangs pictures on his walls and forces his boys and girls to go to school and, in ever increasing numbers, to college as well. Such discontent will never be quieted by better wages. It rises up against some- thing besides economic poverty. It will not endure poverty in life. THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 12 7 Nor is this estimate of proletarian idealism to be destroyed by a reference to the lawlessness and violence which attend a strike. Such violence is unjustifiable, and is clearly an injury to the better ideals of the labor movement. But, if organized labor has its strikes, has not the church had its holy wars ? And if the labor union has its agitators and its demagogues, has the church not had its murderous persecutors? It is time the idealist in the church sees a brother in the idealist in the man who voices social discontent. Ill I would not be understood by these unpalatable comparisons to argue that all the ideals which lie back of social discontent are as noble as those of the church. Farthest possible would I be from arguing that the labor union any more than a lodge should become a substitute for the church. The splendid altruism of foreign missions has no rival in the mutual benefit funds of the union, and, in general, a genu- inely evangelical church is less self-centred than a labor organization. Theoretically and, even with the necessary allowance for human frailty, practically, the church stands for duties, the labor movement for rights. For these reasons, if for no other, the more equitably one endeavors to value the facts of society, 128 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the more is one convinced that this discontent as it is expressed in the organizations of the non-church- going masses needs the gospel and offers an ex- ceptional opportunity for the influence of a church loyal to the ideas of the gospel. The greatest service which the church can render society just at present would be to contribute the spirit of Jesus to the ideals which are provocative of discontent. The gospel is something more than a creed, and the obligations of organized Christianity are some- thing more than an insistence upon a scholastic or- thodoxy. The past should make this clear. Eras of theological discussion have been eras of moral retrogression. Much of the dynamic power of popu- lar movements is derived from a partial socialization of the ideals for which the church avowedly stands in periods of vital religion. I. But here one faces an as yet insurmountable difficulty. The wage-earning classes, as classes believe, or affect to believe, that the church is untrue to its own ideals, and has allowed itself to become an organ of capitalism and is giving the lie to its own professions of brotherhood. To quote the words of Mr. Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor: — THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT I29 " My associates have come to look upon the church and the ministry as the apologists and defenders of the wrong committed against the interests of the people, simply because the perpetrators are possessors of wealth, . . . whose real god is the almighty dollar, and who contribute a few of their idols to suborn the intellect and eloquence of the divines, aijd make even their otherwise generous hearts callous to the sufferings o.f the poor and struggling workers, so that they may use their exalted positions to discourage and discountenance all practi- cal efforts of the toilers to lift themselves out of the slough of despondency and despair.'' I do not believe the charge is wholly true, but neither is it wholly without foundation. At all events it represents an actual element in the social mind. The church cannot avoid trial at the bar of those who, like the labor leaders and the socialists with all their mistakes and distorted partisanship, have appro- priated even in part its ideals. However zealous a church member may be in his professions of loyalty to the teachings of the New Testament, or however effective he may be as a champion of an individual- istic salvation, he cannot escape condemnation by those outside of his own economic class who repudiate those commercial presuppositions which he and the other members of his class carry into their church life. The church must make its central teachings central. 130 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER The attitude of many professing Christians toward industrial life is far from being an asset in the effort of the church to bring its idealism more effectively into the industrial world. Speaking in a broad way, many of those conditions which give rise to social discontent have been set and are being maintained by men who are members of the church of Christ. The fact that a man is a professing Christian has not always prevented his paying low wages, or leaving dangerous machinery exposed, or employing children, or maintaining "pluck me" stores. One may well believe there are many exceptions to the charges made by the representatives of the wage-earner that the Christian employer is no better than the im- Christian ; but it is not to make a very strong defence to reply that the Christian employer is, after all, the creature of the world of business to which, by the very necessity of the case, he is obliged to conform. This, unfortunately, is close to the truth, but it simply gives point to the discontent with the church. For why should the Christian employer with his protes- tations of loyalty to the gospel of the eternal life be subservient to Mammon ? Why should he not at- tempt more vigorously to rectify the conditions which the world of labor and of capital alike believe to be so unjust ? Above all, why should he not obey re- THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 131 forming legislation and exert all his influence to create a better and more human spirit in the world of industry ? No one, least of all the genuinely Christian em- ployer, would claim that the industrial world is as full of fraternity as it ought to be. But this conces- sion, on his part, does not serve to allay discontent on the part of those who suffer rather than gain from this lack. There is needed further a distinct evi- dence of some effort on the part of the Christian capitalist to bring matters more thoroughly into line with his ovioi ideals. The history of the tre- mendous development of industrialism during the past generation abounds in examples of Christian employers who have genuinely attempted to benefit their employees. But the last few years have also been marked with a tendency on the part of Christian capitalists to escape moral obhgations by a retreat behind corporate interests. These facts make a rapprochement on the part of the church and the masses exceedingly difficult. If there were no moral question involved, it would be far easier. But morality is involved, and that, too, of the church member. After all allowance has been made for the recent advance of social standards toward elemental justice, to say nothing of fraternity, 132 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER it is a fair question whether such advance has not been due more to the efforts of the masses to obtain rights than to the voluntary sharing of privilege by church members. Is it any wonder that the masses distrust fine phrases? The very insistence on the part of the church that it is to be judged by its ideals, and as an organ of moral and religious inspiration, has tended to alienate rather than to win the masses; for this insistence itself has given those who are keenly alive to what they believe to be economic injustice grounds for their charge that the church allows class interests to pervert or to nullify its own ideals. 2. Similarly, in regard to political discontent. The point of contact between the church and the masses is again in the region of morals ; but here again Christian men have failed to make a regenerating connection between the gospel which they profess and the actual conditions of society in which they live. Church members have insisted that the work of the ministry is to preach "the old gospel." Noth- ing could be truer as a proposition, but nothing could be more deadening to the social conscience than the interpretation which the average church member places upon such a formula. It is commonly held to mean that the minister, the moral teacher of the community, is to leave politics as well as THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 1 33 economics severely alone. As things are, such a course is undoubtedly wise policy, for political ser- mons would likely be partisan sermons, and in a democracy we expect to suffer from the other man's partisanship. But what will be the outcome if the spirit of Jesus be permanently excluded from the field of politics ? The existing political discontent is something more than a discontent with certain parties. It concerns the great moral issues which are involved in govern- ment. And here the church has a mission which no other social institution can fulfil. It must make moral issues and ideals regulative and controlling in the world of politics. Yet the indifference of Christians to their political obligations is notorious. It is not merely that they have allowed themselves to follow unquestioningly their party leaders; for that is probably the inevitable accompaniment of popular government. The great reason why the church has had so little effect upon politics has been that the Christian voter has never sufficiently realized that politics is in the field of morals. Matters are already righting themselves, but somehow. Chris- tian men still vote for notoriously corrupt men, and themselves benefit by political corruption. Politics, as it now exists is not concerned largely with matters 134 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER which we ordinarily think of as political. As the exanaination of the records of any legislature will show, the chief occupation of the modem legislator is the passage of private bills which concern business enterprises. And Christian men have not hesitated to manipulate legislation by unworthy means in order to accomplish unworthy ends. They have furnished money to assist in the election of men they knew to be, or might easily have discovered to be, dishonest. They have maintained lobbies trained in illegitimate methods. In the same proportion as they have had control of wealth, too many of them have not hesi- tated to regard politics as a department of their business. This is not to say such men are wholly to blame. Legislative bodies, from city councils to the national Congress, have always included men who have been ready to use their position as a means by which to blackmail business interests. But to state such facts as these is to call attention to some of the reasons why the church finds it difficult to deal with that rising discontent among the masses bom of the belief that government as it exists, whether in a monarchy like Germany or in a republic like the United States, is a creature of the capitalistic class, and that the church is an institution of that class. THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT I35 In politics, as in economics, the vital questions are not whether this bill or that bill, this particu- lar policy or that particular policy, should prevail. Attention should not be diverted from the far deeper issues of fundamental right and wrong. After all has been said in favor of political utilitarianism, there yet remains this primary fact, that beneath all political issues lies morality. It is at this point that the church ought to be a leader and must be a leader if it is to remain anything more than an organiza- tion for semi-aesthetic religious culture. Social dis- content can never be impregnated with principles of Christianity by a body of men who persist in main- taining that the morality which the church is to in- culcate must not concern itself with the questions of the large social life. The church must, indeed, insist that the groceryman sell sixteen ounces to the pound, and that men and women observe the seventh com- mandment; but it will be a decreasingly influential factor in society if it does not also train the conscience to such a point that under its remorseless spur the influence of Christian men shall be powerful enough to remove those suspicions of the honesty of the gov- ernment which are just now the largest stock in trade of the political agitator, whether demagogue or sincere. 3. Further, the church has a serious task when 136 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER it undertakes to deal with the discontent of the masses as regards religion itself. Far more than most of us are wont to suspect, the masses are controlled by those conceptions of nature and of humanity which are the outcome of scientific materialism. It is, of course, impossible to maintain that the masses have read very widely in materialistic litera- ture, but there is no question that such literature has a percolating influence through its wide circulation among the socialists. Indeed, it constitutes a part of the pjopaganda of socialism, whether it be of the more philosophical or the more revolutionary type. To a very considerable extent the revolt against conventional authority is also a revolt against a beUef in God, or at least against the God of Christianity. There are hundreds of societies among certain na- tionalities of immigrants whose avowed purpose is to ridicule and destroy religion. The masses are threat- ened with atheism. The Roman church, indeed, exercises a considerable influence over the masses, particularly over the women and children, and it also has set itself vigorously for an attack upon socialism. But, however healthy its influence may be, there can be little question that the drift among those struggling for economic betterment is steadily toward materialism. Particularly among the leaders THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 13 7 is there a distrust, not only of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, but of religion itself. This discontent with religion is perhaps the most aggravated of the dangers into which the church at present is involved, for it concerns something more than an organization and cuts the ground out from under religious work of any sort. But this is only to find our diagnosis again carrying us below the superficial expression of discontent into its central motives. As in the economic and political spheres, rehgious discontent springs from a region of. human interest which is particularly that of the church. If it were simply a question of organization, or of more money, or of a political party, the church would be profoundly interested in the progress of discontent : but because such discontent is the outgrowth of a devotion to certain ideals which are more than good wages and new parties, and involve moral and re- ligious judgments, and because it is to such a con- siderable extent controlled by such ideals, the church must transform it or be weakened by it, IV How then shall the church meet an attitude of mind that, unless changed, threatens the further extension of at least Protestant Christianity? 138 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER I. This vital question is not easily answered. There are those who hold that if we can only pro- duce honest, chaste, and God-fearing individuals, we shall overcome all social troubles. Such men and women are indeed necessary, but it will be a serious mistake to think that the present crisis will be settled by an unmodified individualism. At- titudes of the social mind must be treated from their own point of view. This discontent within the worlds of wealth and of politics and of religion may affect men who feel no unrest whatsoever in their individual relations. The problem before the church is complicated, and elusive. Human nature cannot be satisfactorily transformed by preparing people to live in heaven in supreme disregard of the social conditions in which they and their children must live on earth. Social evils must be remedied socially. The difficulty involved in the fact that discontent is an attitude of the social mind is increased by the further fact that it is compUcated with other ques- tions of race, language, and religion. This is true of all countries where discontent is now threatening to ingulf the wage-earning class, but it is particularly true in America. A comparison of social conditions here with those in Germany, France, and Great THE CHXTRCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 1 39 Britain is likely to bring depression to the American. The laboring classes of America are not homo- geneous. In large proportion, they are not even American bom. They are composed largely of foreigners who bring with them their own language and ideals. The very fact that they have emigrated from their native country argues special predilection to discontent. They come with their religious affiliations fully determined with some national church or with the church of Rome. The relations which exist between them and their churches may be purely formal, but they are so marked by preju- dice as to make it all but impossible for the Protestant churches, which, far more than any other, represent the spirit of American democracy, to influence them. It is to be borne in mind that, outside of the Bo- hemians, this discontent, so far as it concerns reh- gion, is concentrated pretty largely upon Protestant churches. And yet, in the very nature of the case, these churches have great difficulty in coming into contact with their critics. It is as hard for them to convert a Pole or a Finn as it is a Chinaman. This fact must, to some extent, account for the small num- ber of wage-earners in such democratic churches as those of the Baptist, the Congregationalist, the Disciples, and the Methodist denominations. In I40 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER small cities it is possible for churches to come closer to the people and to the labor movement than in a great city; but the reason for this is not simply that the city churches are less eager to come into contact with the masses, but that the masses in great centres are, to a large extent, foreigners already nominally associated with non-Protestant and national churches. 2. None the less, desperate as the situation must appear to any man who looks at it in the large, it is not without hope. In the long run, public opinion can be affected by modifying the sympathy and idealism of individuals. And it is the almost uni- form testimony of clergymen, that while labor imion- ism and socialism as movements are opposed to the Christian church and increasingly to religion itself, the average wage-earner as an individual has not as yet taken a pronouncedly hostile attitude toward the moral or religious principles for which the church — • Roman, Greek, and Protestant — stands. If he is not too thoroughly committed to the national church of his fathers, or has not committed himself to an atheistic propaganda, he sends his children to a Protestant Sunday-school ; and once he is convinced that a clergyman has no unworthy motive, he is ready to meet him as man with man. The con- THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 141 sensus of opinion of nearly forty clergymen in Chicago, of whom inquiry was made, is to the effect that the attitude of the workingman to the church, notwithstanding his economic discontent, is really one of indifference. It is this fact that makes the moment so critical in the history of aggressive and vital Christianity. This attitude of indifference cannot continue. The masses are coming increasingly under the control of men in avowed revolt from existing conditions. If in some way their influence is not counteracted, this indifference on the part of the individual will be transferred into effective hostility. In fact, as has already been said, the tendency in that direction is already apparent. The church must immediately come into contact with the masses, if this tendency is to be met. It cannot, in any large way, probably affect the labor movement as such. The men whom the preacher would meet at the session of a union or at a meeting of socialists are possessed of the spirit of the debater or the propagandist. But the church can come into contact with the individual workingman on the very ground which lies below his political and economical unrest. It can bring religion home to the individual, and through its Sunday-school can train up a generation of those 142 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER who are to be leaders in social life to a larger sense of their social obligations. 3. The pressing duty, therefore, of the church is to moralize social influences through the slow pro- cess of the development of new moral and religious ideals in the two classes which just now stand in unfortunate antagonism. In other words, it is to attempt the regeneration of class consciousness by the elevation and energizing of moral ideals of the representatives of both capital and labor. It is not the business of the church, as an institution, to go into the field of economics or politics. The church is not a sociological lectureship. Its function is spiritual in the largest sense of the word. One of the chief reasons why the social influence of the pulpit is not greater among the masses is undoubtedly the fact, that in its zeal to get in touch with the masses it has undertaken to do too many things. Preachers have been nagged into undertaking every sort of reform. But in the same proportion as the church has been diverted from its peculiar field, in the division of labor or society, has it lost not only its religious but its general social influence. But any institutional church — and a church that is not institutional is missing its greatest opportunity to reach the masses — any institutional church that THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 143 is doing its duty, and is actually touching the life of its constituency, is doing something more than keeping its members out of mischief or amusing them. It is also developing their moral s)mipathies. A mere churchman is as much the creature of the imagination as the economic man. Church members are also wealth-producers and citizens. The church as a social organization is expected to develop a quality of life on the part of its members which shall express itself in their economic and political activity in accordance with the principles of Christianity. This, of course, is simply to reiterate that upon which the church itself has again and again in- sisted; but the reiteration is more than ever de- manded just now when the church faces one of its supreme crises and is bewildered as to the best course of procedure. Christianity is undergoing the temptation of Christ to prostitute its supreme purpose to some inferior good. It is so much easier to assail economic and political wrongs than to train up a generation of men who shall be morally and religiously sensitive, and who shall go out into the world to do actual reconstruction in accordance with their own regenerate lives. The pulpit should attack abuses, but its chief function is not that of denunciation, but that of the development of a 144 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER moral sensitiveness on the part of its followers. It must dignify discontent by ennobling the ideals of discontented men. It may be said that this is precisely what the church has been doing, and that the present con- dition is in part the outcome of this effort. The objection has a certain plausibility, but little else than plausibility. One must recognize that the church has always commendably stood for the things of the spirit, but one must insist also that to-day as never before the church must look upon morality from a more social and less individualistic point of view. It has trained its followers in the precepts of a morality that conceives of its relations as exhausted in the relation of distinct individuals. The church must now train its members to con- ceive of morality in terms of the relation of an individual to society itself. Under the individualistic concept of morals and religion a man might be a good church member and be honestly desirous of the salvation of other men's souls, and yet see in business and politics fields of activity which he out- side of the truth and ideals which he professed in his church relation. Such men were not and are not necessarily hypocrites. They simply may not have been trained in the real content of the truth they THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT 1 45 prpfess to hold and the regeneration they profess to have experienced. But it is the fault of the church, if from this time on they do not either become con- scious of this hypocrisy or repent. The church, if it would stand for fraternity, must insist upon the socialization of privilege. Until it faces this duty, it is idle for it to expect to be treated seriously by those who do not share in privileges. 4. Speaking generally, the privileges of to-day's social life are very largely in the hands of church members. So, to inspire these privileged Christians with ideals of love and sacrifice as to lead them to extend these privileges would be one of the most effective ways of allaying discontent and forestalling radicalism. Will the church dare undertake such preaching of self-sacrifice on the part of the winners in life? The answer to this question will not come from the pulpit as much as from the pews. For it is a question whether the men who employ the minister will permit him the free- dom of the true prophet of God. If they do not, the church will increasingly cease to be of significance to an age of transition. You cannot treat a prophet like a hired man and expect him to prophesy. And the church has in the Sunday-school an even 146 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER more important agency than the pulpit for modify- ing the attitude of discontent. A man interested in the welfare of society is apt to lose patience with the work done in the average Sunday-school. It seems to him perfunctory and formal, with lamentably few results of importance. Unfair as such criticism is very apt to be, it cannot be denied that the church is missing an opportunity in its failure to undertake to train up a generation under the control of social ideals which are more in accord with the spirit of Jesus than are those which now obtain in the economic and political world. In the Sunday-school the church comes into touch with the leaders of the next generation of economic and political life just at the time when they are most susceptible to moral and religious in- fluence. After a man is thirty-five, it is practically hopeless to attempt to transform him. The Sunday- school, however, handles the same man when his character is in the making. Why should it not inculcate conceptions of social morahty as well as individual morality? Suppose that for a series of years it were possible to utilize the great machinery of the Sunday-school to give the rising generation broader conceptions of social obligations, to teach them the rudiments of a THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT I47 social morality which recognizes the fact that the individual is practically powerless to undertake reform, except as that reform is buttressed and guaranteed by a new social consciousness. Such a training would not minimize the teaching of the Bible. It would rather emphasize the fact that a man cannot be a Christian in the truest sense of the word, except as he is interested in bringing in a social life in which honesty and kindliness shall not be a hindrance to any legitimate success in business and in politics. The young men and women under such instruction would go out into the economic and political and religious worlds under the influence of conceptions which would lead them to a larger social cooperation. Sanitation, honest legislation, non-materiahstic standards of success, would be something more than mere words to them. And as they contributed their efforts and ambitions to the social life, it would be not in the interest of merely individualistic morality, but in the true spirit of the kingdom of God, in which the idea of brotherhood is quite as prominent as the desire to save one's soul in heaven. They would not be the less eager to achieve their soul's salvation, but they would see that no man can be saved alone; that because he has the spirit of Christ within him he must be ready 148 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER to sacrifice privilege where such sacrifice is for the social weal. They would see immortal souls in men their fathers could estimate only as human machines. 5. The church can produce such an attitude of mind, if it will once go about it. It can be an actual factor not so much in allaying a social discontent, which, in the interest of the future, it is to be hoped will not be allayed, as in giving to that discontent a larger outlook and more Christ-like ambitions. But one thing stands out with startling clearness. With such idealism the church should never insist that the masses must be content with mere submission to existing conditions. It should recognize their right to demand a larger share in the goods which civihzation has produced. We want no sermons on the divine right of capital any more than we want compromise with that propaganda of atheistic materialism which would seek to exploit the dis- content of the masses in the interest of class hatred. It would be worse than foolishness to preach sub- mission to any alleged divinely established social order to men and women whose souls are on fire with the sense of the injustice of that same social order. The welfare of society will never be furthered by making religion an anaesthetic for social unrest. It rather demands that the church, as the represen- THE CHURCH AND SOCIAL DISCONTENT I49 tative of Jesus Christ and of the brotherhood of the kingdom, shall inculcate self-sacrifice as the duty of those of its members who belong to the privileged classes, and that it shall also stimulate a discontent with merely materialistic ideals on the part of those among whom discontent is as yet almost the only evidence of an awakened idealism. In brief the church, by all its agencies and such better agencies as it may adopt, must endeavor, on the one hand, to educate its members to the point where they will surrender voluntarily those privileges which are stumbling-blocks of justice; and, on the other, it must seek to Christianize discontent by making genuine Christians of the members of the discontented classes. The gospel of brotherhood and the gospel of the risen Christ cannot be dis- sociated in any evangelism that would do more than save individuals from a world abandoned to greed and strife and godless materialism. Is not such an evangelization of the individual and of society a responsibility large enough for the best endeavors of a imited church ? Does it not rebuke that mutual criticism which keeps so many of us apart? CHAPTER VI THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT Discontent is the dynamic of the social move- ment. It expresses itself in that uprising against social miseries that already amounts to a new crusade, and which, from every point of view, is critical for both the church and society. What is the social movement? Without defining all its various phases, it may be said to be an attempt now being made throughout Europe and America to bring greater happiness and possibility to the life of the so-called masses. It is discontent at work in the changing order. In its most energetic form it appears as labor agitation, labor organization, philanthropic institutions like social settlements, reforms of various kinds, and, as much as in any- thing, in socialism. In such a ubiquitous and varied movement there are many things to condemn, many persons insincere. Social settlements and "slum- ming" too often supplant Browning societies as mere diversions of the hour ; bescriptured philosophy and crude generalization about the social organism very ISO THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 151 often masquerade as sociology ; but back of all such conscious or unconscious shams there is a deter- mination to obtain social betterment that is not superficial, but sincere, and even passionate. It is idealism working out in life. It would seem as if there would be cooperation between such a movement and the church as a representative of the social teaching of Jesus, but the alarming fact obtrudes itself that the relation of the two is one of mutual ignorance and distrust. On the part of the churches there is too Kttle effort to understand and to sympathize with the movement among the masses. Here and there, it is true, men with the spirit of Maurice and Kingsley have en- deavored to capture socialism bodily for the church. But such efforts have met with only partial success — the difficulty lying quite as much with the clergy as with the labor leaders. And so it has come to pass that the two great altruistic movements of the century have refused cooperation, mistrusting each other to-day almost as much as in the past; and, in consequence, each has lost the other's aid. Earnest and noble as is the movement among the masses, it is suspicious, if not the enemy, of the 152 THE CHXTRCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER churches. It is, in part, the frank expression of this fact that has caused so much ecclesiastical hostiUty to social leaders, the churches being convinced that no good could come from men it has judged violent and blasphemous. Yet a closer knowledge of the actual attitude of the masses and their leaders might have led, and yet must lead, to a better understanding. The essentials of one age are often the bric-k-brac of its successor. The spinning-wheels and swords which were to our ancestors the symbols of toil and adventure, and even life itself, fill museums and adorn the walls of reception-rooms. Their mission is past, and an age which they created, but by which they have been outgrown, regards them with curios- ity rather than reverence. Similarly, to many men working at the cost of infinite sacrifice for their less fortunate fellows, the churches are pieces of bric-k- brac. Useful in the life of the past, doubtless of the utmost value as agents in the production of the life of to-day, they are now judged no longer needed. The age is believed to have outgrown them, except as reminders of a less perfect civilization. But here one meets a phenomenon hard for the man reared in the atmosphere of traditional evangeli- calism to credit. Anti-ecclesiastical and even unreligious as the THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 153 movement among the masses may be, its Messianic hope in the future is the creature of Christianity. Discontent, be it remembered, is the child of ideaHsm. The demand for human betterment springs from a behef in the worth of the individual that is the gift, not of the primitive German, but of the Christian. Has not organized Christianity, through all its devious and too often unholy ways, held up the ideal of brotherhood? What period in which aristocracy has lifted its head without or within the church but has had also its St. Francis ready to cast away home and parents and very garments in devotion of Christian fraternity? In this light, the hostility of the social movement to the church is an Indian mutiny, in which men trained by imperial masters, in the name of love and justice, are turn- ing their newly, acquired discipline against their teachers. But for this reason, if for no other, the church of to-day must do something more than complacently praise its past and optimistically dream of its future, if it would not see too late that its influence and power have passed into other hands, less intelligent, perhaps, but quicker to come to the aid of a discontented race. This is no rhetorical crisis, painted black that presently the certain victory of the church may be 154 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the more brilliantly set forth. There are, happily, many churches and clergymen excepted from such distrust, but even with this allowance, one cannot say that the situation has been overdrawn. One cannot overlook the disposition among social writers to regard rehgion itself as a merely temporary basis of ethics ; the constant tendency of our churches to follow the line of social cleavage; the decay of country churches; the growth of Ethical Culture Societies. Such facts do not portend the end of Christian morality. The ethical teachings of Jesus must stand and be operative as long as goodness is better than badness, and love more advantageous than hate. Nor is there any likelihood that churches as institutions will disappear. The danger is lest the churches as religious organizations thall cease to be of any social service or significance. And this brings us to the heart of the matter. Without attempting to justify this criticism or to eulogize or blame the discontent from which it springs, let us put the matter frankly and distinctly : Is such distrust legitimate ? Is the Christian church as a social institution to have any significance for a movement which is preeminently ambitious to elevate the masses that as yet have had comparatively Uttle share in a Christian civilization ? THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 155 II The conditions of the problem themselves indicate the responsibiUties of the church. It must recognize that its fundamental mission is dynamic, and not regulative. "Sometimes," says Mr. Bryce in his " American Commonwealth," "standing in the midst of a great American city . . . one is startled by the thought of what might befall this huge, yet delicate, fabric of laws and commerce and social institutions were the foundation it has rested on to crumble away. Suppose that all these men ceased to believe there was any power above them, any future before them, anything in heaven or earth but what their senses told them of; ... . Would men say, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ' ? Or would custom, and sympathy, and a perception of the advantages which stable government offers to the citizens, as a whole, and which orderly self-restraint offers to each one, replace supernatural sanctions and hold in check the violence of masses and the self-indulgent impulses of the individual? History, if she cannot give a complete answer to this ques- tion, tells us that hitherto civilized society has rested on religion, and that free government has prospered best among religious peoples." 156 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER The truth in this generalization is obvious, but it is only partial. The significance of the church to society is something more than that of a check upon crime and materialism. Its mission is not that of a policeman. Even the authority of tradition, for which the church has been commonly held to stand, is but regulative and conservative, too often quick to hold by the form while despising the spirit. Precedent is the stumbling-block as well as the foundation of progress. However much one may appreciate the service which the Roman church rendered civiliza- tion in furnishing the immutable centre about which for centuries the elements of a new Europe might gather ; however much one may honor that devotion to the persistent elements of religious hfe that finds its expression in the Anglican's devotion to his prayer-book and bishop; however much one may honor the steady independence and passive resist- ance of Nonconformists, one must at the same time say that, in the same proportion as he has pre- ferred to check rather than create Christian impulses. Catholic, Anglican, and Nonconformist, has been un- true to the highest conception of the duty owed by the church to the society in which he Uved. If religious tradition be aU for which the church can THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 57 stand in society, it will be hard, indeed, to prophesy its perpetuity. To plead its power to conserve states is possible only after one has established other and stronger presumptions in its favor. It cannot be content to make good citizens. It must make good men. That which is the salt of the earth is like- wise to be its leaven. I In the division of labor that characterizes society to-day, the school, the state, the bank, has its special duties. In the same way the church, as the plain purport of the words of Paul implies, has but one supreme mission, and that is the religious. How- ever much a church may employ charitable organi- zations, amusements, employment bureaus, a con- sciousness of this spiritual mission must be its coordinating and unifying force. It is to the honor of most "institutional churches," so needed in every city and country town, that, even more clearly than many of the older sort, they make religion supreme. But to make a church a religionless mixture of civil- service reform, debating societies, gymnasiums, suppers, concerts, stereopticon lectures, good advice, refined negro minstrel shows, and dramatic enter- tainments, is to bring it into competition with the variety theatre. And when the masses have to choose between that sort of church and its rival, if 158 THE CHTTRCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER they have any sense left within their perplexed heads, they will choose the variety theatre. That, at least, is performing its proper social function. Ill The church should not cheapen or underrate its social significance. As a religious organization it is especially fitted to educate and direct the social im- pulses, both within itself and within society at large. And in two ways : by enforcing regard for law, and by guaranteeing sanity in reform. I. It can keep social impulses law-abiding. Periods of transition, we are repeatedly told, may easily become revolutionary; but quite as danger- ous, in some ways more dangerous, to a society than open revolution is the spirit of contempt for law. Our day is marked by a decrease in actual armed revolts, but, none the less, law is still held in too httle regard. As it is made with astonishing ease and volume, so is it as easily and universally despised. A governor of Illinois once declared that he proposed to prevent by force a mining company's importa- tion of negro workmen into Virden, IlUnois, on the ground that it is sometimes necessary for an execu- tive of a state to enforce law in advance of its legisla- tive enactment, while the labor officers maintained THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 59 that they might resort to bloodshed because the company had no right to import bad negroes as substitutes for strikers. Company, men, negroes, governor, so far as newspaper accounts can be trusted, carried on their struggle as if laws might be enforced or forgotten to suit one's need. In our cities, municipal statutes are ignored and broken by those who have "pulls," while many a law-abiding citizen has been, wittingly or unwittingly, an acces- sory to forgery in the use of railroad tickets bought of "scalpers." This superiority to the will of society which justifies disobedience, whenever disobedience ap- pears desirable, is especially characteristic of those persons who are the avowed champions of society. Sometimes, indeed, the individuahstic spirit is un- disguised, and we have anarchists pure and simple. But men who are not anarchists do not hesitate to hold the will of the individual superior to the will of a community. To such a spirit the church as a social institution has something better to impart than ethical plati- tudes. It, too, has suffered from unrighteous laws; it, too, has felt the pressure of its own ideals pushing it toward a disregard of law. Sometimes, per- haps, it has too much yielded to the power of prece- ( ( l6o THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER dent and to God-ordained powers. But its slowness in rising against injustice has been the deliberation of preparation. Not by violence or contempt of law has it been resultful, but by a patience that has linked submission with such transforming power that unjust laws have been repealed or have fallen into desuetude, to be replaced by others breathing mercy and justice. Perishing by the sword, its chief victories have been won by peace and love. The blood of its martyrs has been the seed of new legislation and new government. Nor could it be otherwise. That recognition of the whole of things which is the metaphysical formula for religion does not permit the man who has come within the influence of the church to arrogate to himself discretionary power as to what laws should be obeyed and what may be disobeyed. Authority always is an element in religion. In part, it is be- cause of the deep reverence felt by the church for law as the earthly analogue of the will of God that radicals oppose it, slandering it as committed to reaction, because it refuses to join in an orgy of iconoclasm. ii d> (i ^ But who dares say that in its reverence for law, the church is wrong? Better a law-abiding spirit and bad laws than anarchy, however disguised or THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT l6l procrastinating. If there is one lesson above all others that social enthusiasts need to leam, it is that bom of the church's experience : a regard for law, even though it be unjust law, is the first guarantee of progress, of legal reform, and of the permanence of the good law that must inevitably replace the bad. Besides the church, so far as I can see, there is no institution, state or school, court or prison, capable by history, nature, ideals, and martyrs, of enforcing this unpalatable but indispensable truth. The church must do something, if possible, even more difficult than stir the individual conscience. It must champion obedience to existing law. Theo- retically, of course, this is easy. Practically, it is one of the most perplexing problems which morality faces. It is easy for men not readily responsive to moral ideals in themselves to evade the law. It is not so long that America, at least, has taken legislation very seriously. It has always been possible, and to a certain extent held to be justifiable, for large interests to manipulate law-making and to evade law when once made. A virile church must set its face in- flexibly against such an attitude of mind. Not that it should justify all legislation, or that it should attempt to sit as a court of appeals in the conflict of legal interests. Its office is rather that of develop- 1 62 THE CHURCH AND TECE CHANGING ORDER ing a social conscience that shall, on the one side, protect men and corporations from the sandbagging legislator and "organizations" so frequent in our legislatures; and, on the other, of insisting that Christian men, whether they be rich or poor, shall not be practical anarchists. A transitional period that belittles or is contemptuous of law cannot expect its successor to be law-abiding. But will the church stand for such regard for law ? Is not religion itself losing that fear of the Lord that used to be regarded as the beginning of wisdom ? Democracy is stretching over into religion. In olden days God elected men; now men elect Him. Fatherhood to the ancient world meant authority as truly as love. Nowadays men are tempted to treat God as a fellow-democrat. This matter means as much to the social move- ment as to theology. The idea of authority must be refurnished religion. Only it cannot be the authority of the king ; it must be that of universal Will. Herein lies one call for the church to cooperate with Science. The leaders of the social movement have little patience with a sovereign God, but they know the meaning of Natural Law. The God of the church must be the God of the universe — of the entire universe. He must be too great for a rising democ- THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 63 racy to dethrone. Once let the church stand posi- tively for such a God who is both Law and Love, and it will have something to contribute to the present social movement in fact as truly as in theory. A mediaeval church preaching a mediaeval theology will be the laughing-stock of social leaders who are dominated by modern scientific concepts of law. Yet the indifference shown by men who would not think of breaking laws intended to regulate individual relations to laws affecting a community or corporation is one of the astounding anomalies of the religious life. Sometimes this lawlessness is the expression of downright hypocrisy; more often, however, I am inclined to think, it is the outcome of a perverted notion of the relations of the citizens to the state. We have not yet outgrown that carica- ture of democracy which springs from the logical fallacy that because the people are sovereign, every man is a sovereign. Our religious teachers them- selves are so possessed of individualistic concepts of morality as to be abundantly able to see motes and beams in men's eyes, and, at the same time, be unable to discover that an entire people, including themselves, are as yet partially blind to social morality. I have in mind a certain pastor who counts smoking a sin, and the Sunday newspaper an unspeakable 164 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER iniquity, but who so trims his message that a man who grew rich by going into bankruptcy after putting his property into his wife's hands feels no twinges of conscience in Hstening to a discussion of what he misnames "the old gospel." I heard once of an evangelist who was a converted thief. By some means he was able to recover from another thief stolen property for which the police of a cer- tain city had searched in vain. In gratitude for his assistance the chief of police of that city told him that, although it was contrary to law to have preach- ing on the street, he might use the best comer in the city and be free from police interference. The gentleman who told me this story declared that the evangelist preached for weeks at this comer in con- travention of municipal law. The fact that, thanks to police protection, his relation to the law was precisely that of a dive-keeper who also, though from quite other reasons, was given poHce protec- tion, was beyond the perception of either my in- formant or the evangelist. If the entire church were thus to couple law- breaking with soul saving, what hope of social leadership would there lie within it? The social movement needs no spur to contempt for laws capitalism itself makes or disregards. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 165 2. The church, better than any other popular in- stitution, is calculated to guarantee sanity in reform. One real danger that threatens to-day's life is un- employed reformers. From all sides they come. Young women on fire to prevent the abuse of chil- dren by cruel and tyrannical parents; college men and women who long to win the submerged tenth to sweetness and Ught and the appreciation of art by residence in a university settlement during three weeks in the winter; men with all sorts of social panaceas, from a new method of reading music at sight to tin dinner pails ; temperance reformers who tremble for the nation if a war vessel is christened with champagne; diet, drink, clothes, house, school, church, Bible, street-cleaning reformers — all promis- ing millennia, and all taking themselves seriously. Far be it from any one to disparage the motives of such enthusiasts, but, with the remembrance of the similar altruistic hysteria that preceded the French Revolution of 1789, one cannot help seeing the danger that lies in imregulated and visionary amateur philanthropy. Far more worthy of serious study is the danger attending the fanaticism of professional reformers. Millennial programmes are easy to print, but as difficult as the genius of the "Arabian Nights" to control — if, indeed, they ones miss the broad way 1 66 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER leading to the limbo of impracticability. The con- servative is not mistaken when he sees in their champions not merely earnest men and women striving for the good of mankind, but possible social firebrands. Agitators are indispensable, but an agitator mad with altruism is as dangerous as any other madman. Perhaps an acquaintance with such facts should have made surprise impossible, but none the less it is surprising that leaders in the social movement should not have seen how extravagance injures their cause. An admirable evidence of this fact, as well as of the efficiency of sane efforts at reform, is to be seen in the history of woman's suffrage. Perhaps a better illustration is to be seen in the history of socialism in Russia. But the socialist himself can learn lessons in the methodology of social reform from the church. With all its demands, socialism to-day proposes nothing like the radical change in society accomplished by Jesus when he swept away Mosaism ; nor does any declaration of the rights of man contain more than a shadow of the equality that bursts out in the words of the apostolic radical of the first century who confronted an age steeped in slavery and inequality with the Magna Charta of a new age : in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 167 male nor female, bond nor free. Yet in Jesus and in Paul, radicalism in teaching was tempered by sanity in method. Jesus dared to lay down his life and — ■ what must have been harder — the life of his followers, while preventing a revolutionary and unintelligent effort to realize his new social order. Paul sent the converted slave Onesimus back to his Christian master, and counselled women not to let their equality deprive them of veils. The spirit of the early church was equally sane, and its sanity, quite as much as its love, carried its regenerating influence from the upper room in Jerusalem to every comer of the Roman Empire. As a social institution, while as earnest as any group of men in the world, the church still can show men that, if individualism is not anarchy, reform is not that virtue of madmen, iconoclasm. From the days when Paul counselled his Corinthian brethren not to turn their prayer-meetings into bedlams, down through the days of Ambrose agitating and yet restraining the masses of Milan; the medieval church tempering universal feud by the truce of God; St. Bernard directing the military spirit of empires; Thomas k Becket defying the passions of a hot-headed Englishman; Luther denouncing the extravagances of a Peasants' Revolt ; Wesley utiliz- l68 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER ing the enthusiasms of Methodism; and Moody bridling the impetuosity of college students, the church has said, by word and example : Let reforms come; make reforms come; but let everything be done decently and in order. Until there can be shown some other social institution or movement which can boast an equal record of permanent social reforms, — of slavery ended, of life protected, of woman ennobled, of children educated, of homes sanctified, of schools, and missions, and charities, and martyrs, — your social reformer had best give himself a course in church history. There he will learn something of the effectiveness that comes to a reform through the sanity bred within the Christian church he affects to regard as outgrown. Contempt is here the sign manual of ignorance and conceit. But here again we must challenge the church of to-day to be worthy the church of the past. Not that there is any danger that it shall be overzealous for reform, but that it may mistake indifference and the spirit of laissez-faire for sanity. If it is to bring sanity into the social movement, it must get into touch with that movement. Preaching by itself will accomplish little. The church must put the spirit of brotherhood and sacrifice into every one of its members, and particularly into those who are in THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 169 touch with the unprivileged masses. A Christian employer or a Christian member of a labor union is a point of contact between the church with the changing order. Christian ideals must be incarnate in Christian men before social forces will be Chris- tianized. Sobriety in reform is a possible gift of the church only when the church can sober reformers. IV The church must aid the social movement by emphasizing its own method of social regeneration. Within the region of philosophy there are few questions more delicate or elusive than those which concern the relations of the individual to society. Indeed, one might almost say that the terms them- selves are still in search of definition. None the less, two things are increasingly evident; the individual is of worth, and the individual is complete, only as his hfe is joined with the lives of others. These two considerations are at present claimed as among the chief foundations of the multicolored social philoso- phy and social propaganda which go under the name of socialism, and it is the earnestness of the socialist's efforts, on the one hand to convince society at large that the proletariat has souls, and on the other to raise society as a unit into a good-natured lyo THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER deity, that gives them much of their efi&ciency. Now, with economic programmes of all sorts, a church as an organization, if it be wise, will have nothing to do; but with socialism's demand for economic justice, and its unquenchable determination to secure for all, however humble, the rights and enjoyments of common humanity; with its insistence upon fra- ternity, — a church is profoundly concerned. For — it may well be repeated — the spirit that lies back of this better ambition of socialism is the child of the Christian church — a prodigal, perhaps, strayed far from home and into strange companionship, but none the less a child. But the Christian church has a doctrine of the individual that no hard and fast system of socialism, however noble and ethical, can duplicate, if, indeed, as a matter of self-preservation, accept. The final test of a system's worth lies not so much in what it proposes as in what it presupposes. Socialism and Christianity are alike in that they are both laboring for a new and higher social order, in which all — men, women, and children — shall live better and happier lives; but they are unlike in the position each takes as to the relation of these individuals to [Society. Although there is untruth in any antith- /esis, the difference can be roughly stated as this: THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 71 socialism expects society to make good individuals; Jesus expects good individuals to make a good society. The untruth in such an antithesis lies in its disregard of the fact that socialism does not ignore the need of an ethical basis of social life, and of the other fact that Christianity is oblivious neither of the influence of environment nor of the need of law. But after this common element has been eliminated, the differences in the presuppositions may still be stated in terms of the individual : social- ism assumes that the individual must be raised through his connection with a better social order; Christianity assumes that it is impossible to have a good social order composed of bad men. Thus the point of attack, so to speak, is, in the case of socialism, environment, and in the case of Chris- tianity, the individual. Now, at this point one is likely to be prejudiced, if, like the writer, he is not a socialist. There are, of course, Christians who are socialists, and — what is quite another matter — socialists who are Chris- tians. Indeed, it is not imcommon to hear men identify socialism and Christianity. But after guard- ing, as best I can, against prejudice, and judging the two from their most significant elements, if words mean anything and there be any distinction between 172 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER the two, Christianity seems more capable of pro- ducing permanent social betterment than does socialism. The church has chosen the slower and more difficult method; for it is always easier to attempt reform by legislation than by the education and conversion of individual lives. It would, in- deed, be untrue to facts to say that much good can- not be accomphshed by legislation that expresses the sentiments of an intelligent and righteous minority, but a study of such reformatory and pro- hibitive legislation will convince any man that it succeeds in something like the proportion as the in- fluential men of a community are in sympathy with its objects. There is here not merely a question of a regard for law sufficient to lead to its conventional enforcement, but also the question as to whether a good law enforced by a part of a community is ideally so desirable as such an elevation in the per- sonal character of each citizen as makes such a law unnecessary. If it be replied that the social will must always be in advance of a considerable number of individuals, the original question is again pre- sented: granted such must be the case, which is likely to be of more permanent social service, a belief that the chief effort should be made to make the individual good through social environment, or THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 73 to produce such men and women as will themselves constitute a proper society ? It is easy to reply that both are needed, but such an answer leaves the point at issue undecided, and if the alternative be frankly met as it actually exists, the answer seems to favor the philosophy of the church. Its method has one great advantage. Utopias presuppose Uto- pians, and the church undertakes the production of Utopians. And in another particular the social doctrine of the church is superior in its practical bearings upon the individual to that of socialism. I know that the socialist will strenuously deny the statement, but, do the best it can to avoid the criticism, socialism is essentially an economic system and approaches the individual life with much the same presupposition as did the older political economy it assails. And that presupposition is the existence of an "economic man." In a word, socialism says this: Make the economic man prosperous, and the moral, the altruistic, the intellectual, the aesthetic, and (as a concession) the religious, man will inevitably be pros- perous. Here again indiscriminate criticism is un- wise. No one can deny the influence of economic conditions upon the character of men, and the Chris- tian who follows the better impulses of his nature 174 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER will make common cause with any rational effort at producing greater economic equality. Indeed, if once socialism as a merely economic programme according to which some or all industries were to become socialized, were seen to be just and best, there is no reason why Christians should not accept it. But as homeopathy as practised to-day is one thing, and homeopathy as Hahnemann worked it out is another, so socialism as a form of economic life and socialism as an all-embracing philosophy of social reform are not to be confounded. Good economic surroundings, so far as ordinary observa- tion shows, are in no way the guarantee of good or even contented men, and, as a working theory of life the position of Jesus is not only more philosophical, but more practicable: "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and food, clothes, and creature comforts will follow." It may very well be that a thoroughly Christian civiUzation will be — at least partially — ^socialistic. It is not so clear that a socialistic state would be Christian. At the same time it must be granted that, as both are to-day, the church has much to learn from sociaUsm. It is hard to say it, but the church has hardly yet the clear vision which enables socialism to see the moral aspects of to-day's economic life. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 75 But to say this is not to give up the church, or to despair of the salvabihty or the fundamental justice of a regulated competition. It is simply to say that justice and goodness are superior to business success. It is high time that the historic church already crowned with centuries of beneficence ; which, how- ever slowly, has for centuries been moulding economic life to the pattern of its Master ; which has produced the only stable material out of which socialism can hope to build a new society, — should challenge social- ism to say why it arrogates to itself a monopoly of love for the masses, and challenge it again to say whether, instead of the Christian nation of kings and priests, its social regeneration through economic comfort will produce anything better than smug, selfish respectability, a comfortable but heroless mediocrity. V The church can aid all efforts at social betterment by producing religiously regenerate lives. A church does not, it is true, regenerate a man ; but, however more exactly it might be expressed, the duty of the church remains. Its office is not that of a school, but of a home into which new sons and daughters are continually being bom. It, and it alone, of all social institutions is capable of furnishing the 176 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER individuals out of which a good society can be built. The Christian ideal of the regenerated individual is social. A man cannot conform to the example of Jesus unless his life be joined consciously to others. The spontaneity with which Christians have always crystallized into the social groups of school and state and church, as well as the social reforms that have always accompanied its religious revivals, abun- dantly evidence this fact. But the church, except as its zeal for others has too often committed it to a pauperizing charity, has never flattered men into believing that their miseries were simply the result of environment. It has dared to cut deep into the heart of that lie, and to teach that sin is at the bottom of misery. But it does something more — it defines sin as the voluntary withdrawal of a man from his filial life with God and his fraternal life with men. Irreligion, it holds, lies behind social iniquities. Then, having clearly in mind the disease, it undertakes the remedy. By the interpretation of God through human love, it shows men the way to that reHgious environment that is the source of righteousness. By the story of its Christ it inspires men to sacrifice in social service. As sin is selfishness, so righteousness is fraternity. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 77 The great ecclesiastical doctrine of regeneration has, therefore, a social application, not by accommoda- tion, but by necessity. Regeneration, if it is any- thing, is the change of a man's life from insulation to social union. He is a son of God, and therefore a brother of men. In the Christian sense, therefore, to produce regenerate individuals is inevitably to produce a regenerate society. Goodness, in the Christian sense, is social, not monastic. Yet to determine the forms in which this social goodness shall express itself does not fall within the power of the church as an institu- tion. Reforms are for church members, not for churches. Any economic or political expedient that will best and most effectively express Christian fraternity will be supported by Christian church members if only their heads are as clear as their hearts are warm. And it is precisely here that evangelical religion is resultful as a social force. We may weU thank Unitarianism and ethical societies for their insist- ence upon morality and rational faith. But with all possible respect for their profound theological influence, with notable exceptions, they cannot be said to have exercised wide influence over the masses. The age to-day, as never before, knows the right. 178 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER but needs the power to do the right. The so-called liberal movement, while justly criticising evangeli- calism in the old, crude, popular sense, has too often confused religion with ethical culture, and, with all its undeniable services as a corrective of a too often irrational orthodoxy, lives institutionally to- day largely by the adoption of dissatisfied products of evangelicalism. Morality has little power of inspiration in comparison with religion. The gos- pel of the eternal life is more dynamic than abstract truth, and it is in the rehgious procreativeness of evangelical churches that the Christianization of formative social influences will largely rest. What new sort of humanity the future may have in store, one cannot, of course, foresee, but, with all respect for a current belief to the contrary, so long as men continue to resemble the men of the past, it is certain that a churchless society and a religion- less morality mean social and moral degeneration. If the social movement has any respect for the results of experience, it will count upon religious men and women as the central force of any reform. And it will not read immortahty out of court in order to prove that a man's soul does not consist in the things that he possesses. THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT 1 79 VI And thus we arrive at a conclusion which is neither novel nor sensational : the church need not be out- grown, if it furnishes its age regenerating social influences in the shape of men and women whose hearts are fraternal because they are Christian — the inevitable fruit of its gospel of the more abundant life. But it can do more. These men and women, who serve their fellows because they love and fear their God, should not be sent forth altruistic dilet- tantes and untrained enthusiasts. The church is a social institution — or better, each church is a little social group, a microcosm of society itself. To belong to a church that is worthy of the name should be to be trained in the art of social, not in- dividualistic, living. A genuinely Christian church member always is material ready at hand for any rational social movement ; and if a census were made of those who are effectively connected with social, municipal, and national reforms, it is no very rash statement that the large majority of such persons would be found to have come, either personally or through family example, under the influence of some church. It should never be otherwise. While men dream and agitate, the church should be creat- l8o THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER ing and organizing altruistic and religious impulses, training men to live together in mutual recognition of each other's rights, and compelling them to recog- nize social as well as individual units. In a w^ord, as exemphfied in the Christian church, religion can be made to breed and discipline corporate enthusi- asms. Can the social movement afford to despise it? And the present duty of the church ? If it would be as significant as its past and its Fovinder make possible, it can no longer preach merely an individu- alistic salvation. It must educate the social sym- pathies of its children; it must teach that the ques- tion of right and wrong must have its answer from the counting-room as well as from the pulpit; it must train its members to trust their Christian im- pulse to side with whatever cause is true and beau- tiful and sane; it must teach that, if there can be no regenerate society without regenerate men, neither can there be regenerate men without a re- generate society. And therefore, for the sake of all, it must fulfil its central duty of throwing into an irreligious but generous age a host of sons and daughters filled with the fraternal enthusiasm of its Founder. This is the evangelicalism that our age needs: the gospel of a man's saving his Life, THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT l8l and the gospel of the kingdom of God. Let men be reborn, not that they may by and by get selfishly rejoicing into heaven, nor yet as a matter of duty or penance perform good deeds on earth ; but rather let men be reborn that, just because of their new and divinely immortal natures which draw love from God himself, they may, while awaiting heaven, constitute a better social environment and a better humanity here on earth. By becoming sons, let Christians remember that they have become brothers. CHAPTER VII THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM "Not that thou should take them from the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil." So prayed Jesus in his last hours for his disciples. It is a prayer which has needed answer in every age, but particularly in our own day when it is so hard to draw the line of demarcation between the church and a civilization already partially respon- sive to Christian ideals. The evil from which the church needs to be protected is something far more insidious than the persecuting Jew or the idolatrous Roman; it is the materialistic habit of thought which not only in its more aggressive form openly attacks Christianity as a representative of spiritual interests, but in a far more deadly way poisons the atmosphere in which the church must live. The materialism that fights in the open is the monism of men like Haeckel with its two cosmic laws of the constancy of matter and the constancy 182 THE CHURCH AND MATEMALISM 1 83 of force. It would deny the existence of those ele- ments of human nature and of the universe which make religion possible. Such a philosophy is liable to result from the view of the world which science gives. It is something more than a distinct philoso- phy. It is a fixed idea which determines the entire scope and process of a man's thinking. Who can hold to a belief in the existence of a human soul, if it be possible to reduce consciousness to the reactions of the nervous organism? Who can think of a God in the universe, if thought be a function of the brain? Morality itseK, assailed thus at its very centre, slips away into a regard for conventions or becomes a form of social utilitarianism. It is true that within the past half-generation the materialist, pure and simple, has found himself somewhat discredited both on the side of philoso- phy and on the side of science. Our investigations of matter have reached such attenuated units as to make it difficult to distinguish what we com- monly know as substance from what we would call force. This difficulty has played into the hands of the idealist until, from the point of view of meta- physics, at least, there are more problems connected with the reality of what we call matter than there are with the reahty of what we call experience. 184 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER But this after all has not removed the danger to which the church as the representative of religion is exposed. The ordinary man finds it rather difficult to get much satisfaction from idealism. However often the materiahst may be answered, the influence of such books as the "Riddle of the Uni- verse" is difiicult to counteract. It has been read by hundreds of thousands of persons who are not capable of sustained philosophical thought, but who are captivated by the assurance with which Haeckel sets forth his conception of materiahstic monism. And an attitude of mind once fixed is hard to correct. If the outcome of the influence of such materialism were confined to the realms of speculation regard- ing ultimate realities, the church would even then be vitally interested in producing rebutting evidence ; but there are far more important matters at stake than metaphysics. When once the average man gets possessed of the beUef that the entire universe is soulless, composed of one substance which, what- ever force it may possess, permits no radical difference between physics and psychology, he finds himself adrift in his thinking and opposed to everything that the church really stands for. God and immortaUty are to him the survivals of primitive superstition and fear. Convinced that he and the beast, while differ- THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 1 85 ing at some points, are alike in that neither is in the image of God; convinced further that there is no love or purpose in the universe, but only a series of changes which lead nowhere, — he is inevitably led to cheapen himself and virtue and reHgion. Such a man, under the inertia of an inherited altruism or under the inspiration of men moved by other conceptions of mankind and the universe, may live a helpful and even beautiful life ; or, if such inertia be lacking as it is among thousands of immigrants, he may become frankly sensual. But in any case, in the same proportion as his doubts move over into a positively negative conviction, will he become an enemy of the church and that gospel which the church must preach. One has only to observe the second generation of Jews and Bohemians to realize what this means in the case of the masses. Yet, although philosophical materialism is alarm- ingly prevalent, the church seems to have overlooked its importance. There are hundreds of societies carrying on a vigorous campaign of atheism, societies with their catechisms and their Sunday-schools. But the great publication houses of the various de- nominations are publishing little or nothing to coun- teract their influence. The "Age of Reason," "The Mistakes of Moses," and the "Riddle of the 1 86 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Universe" cannot be counteracted by eight-page tracts about pious soldiers or the danger of using tobacco. One of the greatest services such societies could render the community would be the publica- tion of very cheap editions of really masterly books capable of counteracting this materiaUstic drift and propaganda among the masses. It is pathetic to see good men regarding such books as those of Henry Drummond as injurious to Christian faith. There are, of course, many earnest Christians who never heard of Haeckel or of materialistic monism. To them the entire matter is a bogejTnan raised by scholars. But even they feel the influence of the at- mosphere which materialism is creating, just as a crowd that knows nothing of carbon dioxide be- comes sleepy in an ill-ventilated room. Good sense would argue that the [church should undertake to protect its members from an xmappreciated danger. 11 For materialism is something more than a view of the world. Closely allied to this deadly philosophi- cal movement is that materialism which accompanies the pursuit of wealth. Commercialism is something more than the matter THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 1 87 of the counting-house or the stock exchange. It, too, is an attitude of mind which controls us in far other activities than those of business. We may admit that some of the criticisms of the commercial spirit are extreme. Economic life is as legitimate as spiritual life. More than that, down in the heart of commercialism there is a strain of idealism which makes the great merchant or finan- cier akin with creative spirits of other spheres of life. Ages of great commercial activity have always been themselves or have prepared the way for eras of the highest culture. Poor nations have produced little art and less philosophy. The wealth of Athens made possible the glories of the Acropolis, just as the wealth of Florence and papal Rome and Venice made possible the art of Michael Angelo and Ra- phael and Titian. But when all this and much more is said by way of forestalling an exaggerated denunciation of com- merciahsm, we must still confess that Jesus never said a truer thing than, "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." In a competitive system a business man, by the very force of circumstances, is a warrior. He may be an industrial Bayard without fear and without re- proach, but he is none the less a warrior, and war 1 88 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER in the very nature of the case is an enemy of love and a thoroughly Christian society. There is, moreover, constant danger that the heroism of war may be lost in the unscrupulousness of business. A competitive world with all its faults certainly tends to produce strong characters, but it also lamentably succeeds in developing men whose ambitions do not rise above the standards of mere wealth. Commercial success carries with it too often an arrogance and an animalism of which our daily papers are only too well informed. But the animalism of the idle rich is far less dangerous to the community than the breakdown in moral stand- ards which too often accompanies and causes com- mercial success. We have only too often seen how different is the code of morals which a man pre- scribes for himself as an individual and for himself as a director of a corporation. Individually, he may be a delightful companion, a generous citizen, a good father, and a self-sacrificing neighbor, inter- ested in religion and in culture. As a member of a corporation, he may be guilty of bribing legislators, of diverting fimds to illegal uses, of manipulating accounts, and of heartless methods in the achieve- ment of his ends. He would be a most unfair critic, however, who THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 1 89 would see in these men sinners above all other men who dwell in our modern Jerusalem. As Jesus said so long ago, except we all repent we shall all like- wise perish. For they have been the victims quite as much as the creators of false standards of mo- rality. "A man cannot serve two masters," said Jesus, and the saying is as true in the twentieth century as it was in the first. But the deteriora- tion of a human soul is too subtle a process for the soul itseK to appreciate. Few men would deliber- ately say that wealth was a supreme good. They would say they seek the power, the enjoyments, that wealth makes possible. And yet the entire world is in danger of yielding to a despair as to the finality of spiritual standards. Public opinion has become surcharged with the behef that success is in itself an answer to all criticisms as to the methods by which it has been attained. The dangers which assail the church in such an attitude of mind are too obvious to demand detailed description. There are, however, two which are par- ticularly fatal to the spiritual purposes of the gospel. The first danger is that the preacher shall be con- trolled by men whose ideals are materiahzed by the standards of an unethical commercialism, and who would lose money by a genuine Christianization of 190 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING OILDER law. This control is sometimes explicit, and the preacher is bidden to keep silence on the larger questions of business morality and to confine himself to the sort of sins of which church attendants are seldom guilty. There is, for example, little opposi- tion to the pastors denouncing saloons or red light districts except in those rare instances in which the property devoted to immoral uses is in the possession of a member of his congregation. There is, how- ever, frequent objection to outspoken frankness concerning the rights of laboring men and of those who are being crushed in the war of competition. Such opposition does not always result in the forced resignation of a preacher or a teacher, but even such instances of the silencing of a social message are not unknown. It is not so many years ago when, if report is to be believed, one of the most prominent New Testament scholars of the day was forced out from his position in a theological seminary in the East because of his criticism of the methods adopted by a corporation represented by a man who was ready to make a large gift to the institution, provided the professor no longer taught within it. And there has been more than one pastor who has aroused such opposition on the part of certain members of his parish as to compel his resignation or his silence. THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM I9I A more subtle and widespread danger than this, however, is the time-serving spirit which creeps in upon the church because of its relation with men of wealth. In too many cases a church will have among its attendants men whose business ethics are notoriously bad. The minister who preaches to a congregation thus leavened with corruption does not need to be a conscious sycophant or time server to find himself, both in the interests of his church and of himself, avoiding topics which would tend to alienate such persons. For the minister in such a position, we can have only the deepest pity. It is easy to say that he should speak out bravely, not regarding the face of man. But a study of most situations of the sort will show that for him so to speak out would mean not only the end of his use- fulness, but also a crippling of the power of his church. It is little wonder that in such a condition he attempts to quiet his own conscience by a deter- mination to accomplish his ends by indirect methods. But the world will not be saved by tact. The rank and file of ministers are in sympathy with a nobler social ethics and with every good cause. It would be slander to believe otherwise. Show them what to do in a moral crisis, and they will try to do it. But too much is expected of their unaided 192 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER efforts. Church members must come to their sup- port. The minister can accomplish httle, except as his teaching is reenforced and disseminated by the lives of his laymen. There must be heroism in the pew as well as in the pulpit. The church that stands in terror of wealth will not be loyal to its God. It must often choose between God and large contributions. Until its membership is ready to say that, in case the faithful preaching of the gospel of brotherhood results in the alienation of large con- tributors, it will practise self-sacrifice to make up a resulting deficit, a church cannot expect large spiritual influence. It has refused to take up its cross and to follow its Christ to Calvary. It is, of course, easy here to exaggerate. A rather wide knowledge of the situation in churches leads me to the conviction that the type of business man who is really influential in the affairs of the church is much more ready to hear a rational presentation of the social significance of the gospel than the enemies of the church charge. "Bourgeois" he may be, but he is not an ecclesiastical tyrant. It is true, he does not want his minister to give him advice as to the management of his business. He looks to his pastor not for counsel on strikes and credits, prices and combinations, but for moral inspiration, THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 1 93 help in the maintenance of his own spiritual life, and great truths that shall direct his conscience. And a minister of ordinary common sense can be of profound assistance to the world of business precisely at this point. He should remember that his position is not that of the actor who would win applause, but that of the physician who would cure souls. He is not a social reformer with programmes. He deals with materiahsm, not business. And if in himself there is the flame of spirituality, he will be able to see and combat the materiahsm of wealth in its very citadel — the soul of the man of business. Yet it is at this point that the second and more insidious effect of materialism is liable to appear. A materialistic commercialism affects many a man whose real interests are in the realm of the spirit. The scientist grows commercial when, instead of setting his heart upon new discoveries, he makes the results of his investigations the means of accumu- lating wealth. At the door of every laboratory is the promoter with the promise of fortunes for the man who can wed science to industry. At the door of the study of every author is the publisher with his promise of royalties. Few of us, laymen or ministers, can withstand the temptation to leave the service of the gospel for the service of tables. 194 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER I am not referring now to the grotesque temp- tation set before ministers to act as agents for mining companies, rubber companies, and all sorts of ques- tionable business enterprises. The temptation is much more subtle than that. It is rather to bring material tests into the realm of spiritual activities; to worship statistics rather than spiritual influence; to judge a church successful when it can point to large congregations and large additions to its roll of members. Far be it from me to minimize the importance of such results. But still farther be it from any one to judge that the work of the church is completed if this be all it can show. Fanaticism can point to its hordes of converts. Crowds are no proof of a prophetic message. The gospel must point not only to numbers but to new souls and to a new social mind and conscience. It would very possibly be the best thing that could happen to some churches if their enormous roll of membership could be so thoroughly sifted that there would be left only those men and women who can be counted upon for service and for the support of the real mission of the church. A church is something more than a body of per- sons gathered together to sustain cooperatively a private chaplain. Such a church would make THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 1 95 religion one of the luxuries which wealth can afford, and make the materialism of creature comfort appear as an angel of hght. That church alone is fulfilling its real function which flees every tempta- tion to judge its efficiency by any material standard ; which gives its pastor freedom to preach a prophetic message ; which will itself seek not only to increase its membership roll, but will also stand self-sacri- ficingly for those principles which led Jesus him- self to Calvary. There have been more churches ruined by being "run on business principles" than by excessive spiritual zeal. Over against this temptation to yield to material- istic standards, the church must emphasize its mis- sion as the one institution that insists that material goods shall be used for spiritual ends. By this I do not mean that the church should follow the example of earher centuries and insist that the chief good to which wealth can be placed is the endowment of rehgious establishments. Some such establishments are demanded, but, as many a region of Europe can testify, such a method of devoting wealth to spiritual ends, if too exclusive, becomes a social in- jury. To devote wealth to spiritual ends means something vastly more difficult and more needed. It means that, to use Jesus' own words, we are to 196 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER "make friends through the Mammon of unright- eousness." In other words, the church must teach the world that weahh is a servant and not a master; that it is not an end in itself but a means to the de- velopment of brotherliness. I am aware that such a statement sounds hopelessly general and trite; but it is none the less a funda- mental truth. And, paradoxical as it sounds, the most powerful message is that of truism. Revo- lutions, themselves, are the children of socialized generalities. The man who believes with all his soul that the life is more than the body, and that a man is something more than an economic agent, who believes in the dominance of the spiritual rather than the material, will be the man most ready to apply the spirit of brotherliness to his economic life. To be religious in the Christian sense is some- thing more than to assent to theological definitions. It is an imperial trust in God's love and an impelling conviction of the eternal worth of man. And just because a man is thus at one with Jesus in spiritual idealism will he be also one with Jesus in caring for humanity's other needs. He will see that the sick are healed, that the poor are evangelized, that the hungry are fed ; and, as Jesus could not, he will also see that society itself comes under the control THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 197 of spiritual idealism. He will vehemently oppose all that hideous materialism that makes life cheaper than dividends ; that fails to protect workmen from deadly machinery; that wrings the life out of little children in huge factories ; that ruthlessly turns the ambition of competitors into despair; that builds up business success at the expense of justice and of love. To bring spiritual idealism into the production of wealth is just as imperative as to bring it into the distribution of wealth. In a far different sense from that which the apostle said, charity does cover a multitude of sins. The devotion of ill-gotten wealth to spiritual ends is undoubtedly a just social restitu- tion, but, so far as the man himself is concerned, it is the rankest hypocrisy if it be not accompanied by an abandonment of illegitimate methods of pro- ducing wealth. It is one thing for a repentant thief to contribute his plunder to human well-being, and it is quite another thing for a thief to steal in order that he may be charitable. I know only too well the reply which will be made to these statements — that the individual is powerless to further the spiritual ends in an environment that is tyrannically materialistic. But it is precisely to such men that the call of Jesus must be brought iqS the church and the changing order by the church. Calvary may mean to them the bankruptcy court. The cross may mean to them penury and the contempt of former business asso- ciates; the call of the church to spiritual life may mean the championship of unpopular legislative reform and the following of profit-reducing ideals of business ethics. It may mean cooperation with the certainty of financial loss in the government's in- vestigation of business abuses. It will certainly mean the adoption of conscientious methods in competition and a loathing of bribe-giving, whether it be open or disguised as advertising or retaining fees. Nor is this call of the church to the rich alone. Materialism is not to be guaged by income. It contaminates the wage-earner as truly as it contami- nates the millionnaire. For the labor movement and socialism are unavoidably compelled to bring to the front the question of wages and to emphasize the struggle for the material goods of hfe. As we have elsewhere insisted, they have other ideals, but the point of their attack must always be material. It is a misfortune that this is the case, but it is one forced upon labor by its situation. The wealthy class is ready to assist the poor collectively with libra- ries, university settlements, schools, and occasionally THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 1 99 churches. All these benefactions, however, are made without in the least affecting the existing economic struggle. They may even give bitterness to it. The church should assist within all legitimate limits labor's struggle for the good things of life, but it should reenforce the better type of labor leaders in combating that tendency to gross living and sor- did estimates of life which so threaten the masses. If it does nothing else, it should help the poor man to see that in his envy of another man's wealth and in his own struggle to keep body and soul together, he is threatened with the same dangers that he sees in a larger scale in the lives of the men whom he as- sails. It is a difficult, one is tempted to say at times, an impossible task. And, indeed, it will be impos- sible for a church that, at the moment in which it brings the gospel of the worth of man to the laboring class, does not also bring the same gospel with its im- perative call for justice to the capitaUst. The one class, as the other it must teach that a man's hfe does not consist in the abundance of things he possesses, but it must also teach the rich that the gospel of brotherhood means sacrifice rather than selfish content. That is the message of the Cross to the lords of a commercial age. 200 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER III The desire for a personal income is even more potent in materializing the present social transition than the desire to make one's fortune. For the ris- ing standard of living which incites the search for increased income on the part of a family group is reacting upon the family. It is hardly necessary to call attention to the sig- nificance of this income problem upon marriage and the birth rate, although the matter is of impor- tance in the realms of morals as truly as in the realm of politics. Parenthood is a moral responsibihty that increases in proportion as one judges a human soul to be as valuable as the gospel of the risen Christ would argue. A man may well stop to consider his financial ability to maintain wife and children before establishing a home, but it is just as essential that he should stop to consider whether he is capable of maintaining such a home as shall guar- antee the proper training for those immortal souls it will call into individual existence. Apart from this much debated subject, however, the church cannot ignore the industrialization and the new economic independence of women. Back of this process which has become so pronounced in THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 20I the present generation there lies this matter of in- come earning. The thousands and hundreds of thousands of women who are now competing with men in practically every branch of our economic life are not seekiag to grow rich ; many of them are not seeking even the means of bare support. A large proportion of them are supplementing the income of the head of the family or are seeking an indepen- dence not otherwise possible for them. This breaking down of the industrial difference between the sexes brings a distinctly new duty upon the church. It is another evidence of the truth which cannot be too often repeated to the effect that the church must deal with men and women as it finds them in a given period, rather than as its inherited theologies and philosophies found them. Compare the state of society in. which Paul could bid a wife as the weaker vessel be subject to her husband, and in which he insisted that women should wear veils and keep silent in religious meetings, with that of to-day with its rapid approach to indus- trial, social, and political equality of the sexes, with its armies of women working side by side with the armies of men, and with the prominence of women in church and reform movements ! But just because economic life is growing sexless 202 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER and the husband no longer has an ownership right in his wife, must the church insist upon an ideahsm which would prevent this aspect of industriahsm lowering all the relations of life. One of the very real dangers which arise from this aspect of the new order is that industrial comradeship between men and women shall tend more to the lowering of women than to the elevation of men. The church does not seek to reinstate the Greeco-Roman conception of the family ; on the contrary, it knows that in Christ there is an equality that knows no male and female. But it does need to insist upon the Christian concep- tion of the sanctity of the home and upon that health- ily romantic idealism which makes marriage some- thing more than a business partnership, and woman something else than plaything or industrial rival. Literature, unfortunately, is here an ally of in- dustrialism. Your modern noveUst knows too much about physiology and primitive man and the equality of the sexes to be romantic. To him, — or quite as truly to her, — the devotion of the knight to his lady is as unintelligible as the laws of heraldry. In too much of our modem hterature men and women no longer fall in love with each other. They mate. For such literature the home in the Christian sense is only an incidental matter. THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 203 Here is a new responsibility for the church if it would Christianize the formative forces of the changing order. This increasingly industrial con- ception of woman bodes evil to society. And it i; this that the church even more than the woman's club must seek to offset. The membership of our churches is preponderatingly feminine. This con- dition is Kkely to continue because of a great variety of reasons, chief among which is the universal fact that women are more susceptible to idealistic ap- peal than men. For this reason, if for no other, the church must be in a position to inspire women to work for women. It cannot say that women shall abandon the economic world; it must see to it that they do not abandon idealism. The business woman is in danger of losing her sense of spiritual values as truly as is the business man ; possibly even more so, for she is in danger of losing her very womanli- ness. The church must cease preaching to an in- dustrial world as if it were composed exclusively of men. The new industrial democracy which is in the making even more than we now appreciate, will be a democracy of the sexes. But the church cannot be content with the economic equality prom- ised woman by socialism. To meet the Christian ideal, women who are income-earners must be saved 204 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER from the materialism of commercialism that they may continue to leaven a commercial age with non-eco- nomic interests ; that homes may be established that may become permanent centres of idealistic and re- ligious influence ; that sex may not be cheapened, and that society may not be hopelessly devoted to wealth. What sort of society would that be with childless homes and business-centred male and fe- male bachelors at the top, and prolific immigrants at the bottom ? Is the home like the ministry to be judged unneeded in supposedly advanced social order? Another result of the influence of this general materialistic trend upon the family is to be seen in the increase in divorce. But it would be bad diag- nosis not to see that this evil is but a symptom of the weakening of the Christian conception of the family and the rise of the conception of woman as an independent uicome-eamer. Legislation to regu- late divorce is, of course, very desirable, but reform must go deeper than law can sound. It must reach the consciences and reasons of the individual man and woman. It must forestall the dissolution of marriage ties by insisting upon the sanctity of be- trothal as well as of marriage. Married life in too many cases is entered as thoughtlessly and for about THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 205 the same reasons as one would attend a picnic. The constant spectacle of divorces belittles marriage and cheapens love. For such a state of affairs there is no fixed remedy but a rehabilitation of Christian social idealism. Least of all is there a call for that most naive of remedies — a trial marriage. It is a fair question whether the church should usurp legislative functions in the matter of legal separation, but there can be no doubt that it should refuse its sanction to the remarriage of divorced people. It ought not to lend the sanctity of Jesus to a marriage which he declares to be adulterous. If divorced persons wish to remarry, let them go to the representative of that law that broke an alliance which the church had declared should be holy. To say the least, such a course has the merit of consist- ency. But the church can take this position of self- respect and of loyalty to the teaching of Jesus; it can thus attempt to dignify the home and ennoble the position of woman, without committing itself to the hard and fast rule that there should never be a divorce. That is a matter of the Christianized good sense of the community. The church is not concerned with legislation. It should not urge any position which, in our social life as it is now organ- 206 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER ized, will cause unnecessary suffering. The Chris- tian ideal of the impossibility of divorce presupposes really Christian people who can live together, for- giving one another's wrong-doings, and extenuat- ing one another's faults. If men and women were jthoroughly Christian in the sense that they were em- ibodying principles of the gospel, divorces would be rare indeed. But society is not Christian in this real sense. The church must devote itself to this extension of Christian ideals of the family among very ordinary men and women. At present, it very hkely must content itself with aiming to produce motives which will themselves realize the ideal of Jesus. Without insisting upon fantastic romanticism in the relation of the sexes, it should inculcate a spirit of genuine love within the family; and in loyalty to those women who helped support its founder, who were the last at the cross and the first at the tomb, it must devote its creative idealism to the maintenance and elevation of that chivalry toward women which has been one of the fairest products of its honoring of Mary. Society under the grip of materialistic concepts of the home and of woman, be it never so full of industrial comradeship between the sexes, will be a sorry representative of that king- THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 207 dom of God to which the church looks forward. An industrial order in which the mother would normally become an income-maker would be even worse than that in which she must become such through misfortune. Despite the zeal of women noveUsts and sociologists to uncover and annul the mystery of sex, the highest estimation in which women will ever be held will be that which the church in loyalty to Jesus must champion. Industrialism can bring women equality with men only in those relations in which men are most tempted to be least Christian. Whatever women themselves may think, the most of us men do not want women made our equals. We would rather try to be theirs. IV A man who has been travelling all day in an alkali desert finds water almost incapable of satisfying his thirst. He wants something to "cut the alkah," and so turns to whiskey. In something the same way, the world that is in breathless pursuit of wealth finds it hard to get entertainment from anything that appeals strongly to the higher nature. The materiahsm to which our industrial life inevitably exposes men finds another expression in the demand for amusements that are themselves materialistic. 2o8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER This demand may be in part wholesome. So, at least, must we regard the growing interest in physical sports. The business man finds healthful enjoyment in goLf, the factory worker in his game of ball on the vacant lot. But in sport, as in so many other things, the champion of things spiritual can see only too plainly the operation of forces which tend to destroy health, both of body and mind. The curse of professionalism is not that men are paid for playing, but that it engenders in an entire com- munity an interest in unsound standards for recrea- tion. Sports which in themselves are thoroughly honorable and enjoyable have become the agents of gamblers. An entire public is interested in foot- ball or baseball not because it understands the game, but because it wants to see the championship won. Colleges and universities by surreptitiously offering them assistance while technically leaving them amateurs, corrupt the morals of young men and teach them how to join the army of respectable lawbreakers. All this may seem a far cry from the sphere of the church. In its details it undoubtedly is. But the church must combat with all its vigor the spirit which expresses itself in this practice. It is the lawlessness of commercialism. If university faculties THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 209 and alumni were possessed of the fine spirit of comity and honor for which gentlemen ought to stand, we should hear less of the unseemly wrangles of athletic boards over the amateur status of opposing teams. If the ideals of the supremacy of the spir- itual were everywhere operative, we should have no fewer games, but we should not see athletics prosti- tuted to unworthy ends. The Christian man, if he sees fit, can carry his Christianity into his sports as truly as into the prayer-meeting. But athletics, after all, though possibly the most virile, is only one of a great number of means by which the strenuous life of to-day seeks relaxation. There is, above all else, the stimulation of animal- ism in the theatre. Unless a man be ultra-puritanical, he recognizes the value of the theatre, if properly maintained, as a source of legitimate entertainment. There are few men among the clergy who would approve of the action of the ministers of a Southern city in declar- ing that plays like "Romeo and Juhet" are immoral; but any one in the least acquainted with things theatrical knows that the playhouse too often pan- ders to sensuality. We are under the ministration of a commercialized stage ; we are becoming callous to sights and words which would have shocked our 2IO THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER fathers. The materialism of the theatre does, in- deed, attempt to cloak itself behind fine phrases, and to justify itself by appeals to noble plays and noble lives which are more numerous to-day than ever on the stage. But it is sheer hypocrisy to justify a tawdry musical comedy with its vulgar exhibition of dancing and immodest dressing by an appeal to the real possibilities of the stage. Theatres grow sensual because overworked or overfed men and women like to be sensualized. Indiscriminate denunciation of the theatre is unwise. But indiscriminate approval of aU plays because of the noble ideals of some plays is just as foolish. The church, as the representative of the spiritual ideals, has no war with any amusements which are healthful and uninjurious to its own ideals. Religion, we now see clearly, is not ascetic. Whatever may be claimed for the theatre as a teacher, people go to it not to be taught, but to be amused. A public opinion and a public taste really inspired by the social ideals of the gospel would not permit the legitimate fimction of the theatre to be prostituted to the office of debauching moral ideals, either by treating them with contempt or by too frankly suggestive discussions of matters which, in the very nature of the case, cannot be discussed with- THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 211 out bringing moral debility. There is no sophism so sophistic as that which would say that every- thing in life is fit material for art. The position of the church and particularly of religious teachers at this point is difficult and critical. Theoretically, many churches stand committed to a complete opposition to popular and even conven- tionalized forms of amusements. Practically, church members, with the exception of those who live in small towns and the country, do not hesitate to go to the theatre, play cards, and dance. If this state- ment is too sweeping as a description of the situation at present, it is undoubtedly a description of the situation that will be tolerably universal in the course of a few years. It is, of course, easy for religious teachers to condemn such a tendency when the con- gregation to which they speak are not parties to it, just as it is easy for the preacher to thunder against the sins of the rich when preaching to a congrega- tion of the poor. But the problem is too vital to be left to such ex parte treatment. The church must learn to distinguish between real and fiat sins. It must teach temperance in amusement rather than the sinfulness of being amused. Without insisting that all the spheres of human interest should be identified, it should with all its strength endeavor 212 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER to make every such sphere instinct with at least moral neutrality. If a man does not go to a base- ball match, or to a social function, or to a healthy play to have his religious life deepened, it ought at least to be possible for him to attend such places without his capacity for religious life being lessened. And what is even more evident, it ought to be pos- sible for him to escape the theatre's constant attack upon that reserve concerning the relations of the sexes which is one of the truest safeguards of the home from sensuality and divorce. V At the risk of appearing pessimistic, I must notice one other alarming tendency toward materiahsm. Gambling has become a disease threatening the in- tegrity of our entire social life. College students bet on their football team, clerks play the races, business men of aU classes buy stocks on the margin, husbands play poker, and wives play bridge. We must leave it to casuists and sociologists to decide just how far the universal attraction of games of chance is legiti- mate. Some legitimacy must be admitted. The danger does not lie at this point, but in the passion for gaming which looks not to the game, but to the gain. Materialism of this sort carries with it material- THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 21 3 ism of almost every sort. The nerve-racking anxiety makes the entire moral self degenerate. It is the uni- versal testimony that the gambling habit is the most difficult to eradicate. It saps the very foundations of morality and perverts the energies of the entire person. There is no pastor but knows the delicacy of attacking card-playing from the pulpit. Perhaps more than any subject of preaching, it arouses the bitterest hostility. But it is not necessary for the wise religious teacher to involve himself in just this form of discussion. He will find the moral sense of the community supporting him in every temperate discussion of the various forms of gambling. More than that, he will find most hearty support from the most influential members of his church when he endeavors to warn the young from this insidious and debilitating vice. The issue is something much bigger and more fundamental than whether or not a man should play cards rather than checkers. It is not a question of amusement; it is a question whether the church will sit quietly by and watch the growth of a generation of economic perverts. The struggle between the gospel and the gambling habit is one of life and death. It is idle to preach the gospel of brotherhood to a generation of gamblers, male or female. It is futile to attempt to urge the 214 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER claims of noble living among persons who are being driven into moral insanity by a devotion to any sort of chance. Just as it is not pnidishness to insist that our places of public amusement should not overstimulate the sexual impulse, it is not hyperpuritanism to plead with a community to turn from the madness of the bucket-shop and the bridge- table. The church, as the representative of ele- mental morality, of faith in something other than chance in the universe, of trust in the supremacy of love, must take up a crusade not against this or that particular game, or this or that particular busi- ness, but against the whole accursed attitude of mind that is incomparably more dangerous than that which Paul confronted in the Corinthians, or Jesus confronted in the publicans. It must fight sin — concrete, insidious, sensual, attractive sin. Until the membership of the church is ready to practise self-mastery at this point, it will inevitably find its efficiency curtailed and its evangelistic message transformed either into meaningless appeal or aesthetic luxury. VI Yet, even in materialistic passions, we must recog- nize an evil that is a prostituted good. A spreading materialism should teach the church that men THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 21 5 want something more than abstract virtue or trans- cendental ethics. It is a perverted form of the de- mand for reality. Strange as it may seem, in its very devotion to truth the church may alienate the average man and woman. It is unfortunate that we have so few descriptions of the religious experiences of average people. We have a vast and helpful religious literature recounting the experiences and aspirations of men of peculiarly religious temperament; but the average person is not an Augustine or a Thomas a Kempis or even a Frances Havergal. It is only natural, therefore, that there should have grown up the impression that a peculiar temperament is needed for the religious life. Most of us believe only a poet or a theologian can think of God and beauty and righteousness. Sometimes, indeed, it almost seems as if the church demanded that the man who wishes to be religious should be so constituted as to believe easily what others say is true and to hold such beliefs unaffected by his other convictions. But the average man is in business. His life has no time for poetry or philosophy, and his attitude toward what people tell him is one of caution. He must not believe too readily. That peculiar tem- perament which seems to make faith easy and reli- 2l6 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER gious contemplation a joy is foreign to him. He deals with things, not with aspirations. He does not dare trust his impulse. He trains himself to be non- committal to fine sentiments. Above all, he hates professions of superiority and he dislikes to talk about ideals. He even suspects those men of his own class who occupy prominent positions in re- ligious organizations. Suspects them, not, it is true, with any good ground, nor for any distinct reason, but simply because it does not seem natural for the average man, as he knows himself to be, to experience what he hears them describe. Duty he can understand; a mystical union with God or Christ seems very hard to realize. At any rate, he knows little about it. Yet it would be a great mistake to think that such a man disbelieves in Christianity. He honors Jesus, and he admits that a man's life ought to be Christlike. His belief in the Master, however, has few of those elements he is told should characterize religious ex- perience. His feeling toward Jesus is much Hke his feeling toward his political candidate; he admires him; he will vote for him; but he never expects to be acquainted with him. He is rather surprised and a little self-conscious if his minister calls upon him at his place of business, and he has an indistinct THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 21 7 idea that probably Jesus in some particulars is a good deal like his minister. Has religion any message for such a man with his habit of concrete thought, with his developed power of concrete judgment, and his undeveloped power of spiritual sympathy ? Or must he be told to stand apart and wait for that experience which grows the more improbable the older he grows and the more closely he identifies faith with the power of estimating business credits? The average man should be helped to see that there is reality in the sort of religion he can live. Indeed, he should learn that there are as many forms of Christian experience as there are men; that the vast majority of people have no such religious experi- ences as they wish to have. He should be told that very few people, except those gifted with a capacity for such experiences, spend much time in religious contemplation, and that the language of noble books has grown into a conventional vocabulary that ex- presses aspiration quite as much as accomplishment. He should realize that true religious experience is simple, and, like the water of different springs, takes its character from the soil through which it comes to the surface. This elemental something in religion is not poetic sentiment or even a constant conscious- 2l8 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER ness of union with God ; it is life in accordance with the will of God. To live thus, a man does not need to be a philosopher or a poet or a theologian. He needs simply to be persuaded that down at the bottom nf things there are reason and love ; and that it is best to live as though such love and reason were real — actually real. He ought to be assured that if a man cannot distinguish sharply between reUgion and morality, it is probably because he has come to see that there can be no religion without honesty, and no downright goodness without a recognition of God. In a word, the average man needs in some way to be assured of the reality of that for which the church stands. Assailed as he is by the attractive material- ism of business and pleasure, he needs to catch the power of the prophet and of the apostle and of Jesus of seeing things that are invisible. He needs to share in the contagious conviction that the things which are not seen are eternal. Argument will not do this as readily as that concrete evidence which comes from life. Probably the rank and file of people will never come to see just why a man should accept some of the beliefs that the religious leader so confidently holds; but whether or not the philosophic reasons for faith are ever clear to him, any man can ap- preciate the power of a creed wrought out by hands THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 219 and feet. The church must meet the appeal of materialism by its own appeal of concrete, regenerate living, by good deeds, the sacrifice of monopolized privilege, the practical recognition of the calls of economic and social justice, the service of the poor, and the institutionahzing of the Christian impulse to love. It must herald reality, not merely truth. It must meet the honest doubt as to the reality of the Father by publishing the historic reality of the Son. It must incarnate the truth of the gospel of Jesus in the well-knit body of the Christian society, of which he is the Head. It must spur society to demonstrate the rationality of love by inculcating social service and sacrifice, as fundamental laws of our economic life. In industry as in religion, "love builds up." If the church thus deals with reahties rather than with speculation ; if it expresses the social meaning of those great doctrines for which it stands, — it will lelp men to recognize the wickedness of some of those influences about which they find themselves per- plexed. We could all be more honest if we wanted to. The religion which will be thus engendered in the rank and file of men and women by the modern prophet, whether he be lay or clerical, will be some- thing more than a formal repetition of a creed or a 220 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER devotion to that which is felt to be impalpable utter worldliness. It may not be a poet's experience, or a philosopher's experience, that the church will thus breed in the great world of affairs, but it will be an experience that will come inevitably to the average man who, without peculiar religious endowments, is convinced of the great realities which poets sing and apostles herald, and who has been trying to live in accordance with the will of a very real God and in the light of a very real gospel. And it will express itseK in very real service. VII Will the church inspire its members with this passion for spiritual realities ? Will it train up men and women who will place wealth and physical pleasures in the true perspective of the good things of life? Or will it choose silence or academic generalities or indiscriminate denunciation as the easier alternative? Will professedly Christian men and women praise the martyrs of the sword and of the fagot and forget that the gospel calls for witness- ing against the idolatry of creature comforts and the allurements of animalism, as truly to-day as in the days of Domitian and Decius ? Is it too much to hope that the disciples of the Prince of Peace shall THE CHURCH AND MATERIALISM 221 show as much loyalty to his Cause as the unhappy Russian revolutionist devotes to- his? Will the church grow tolerant enough to insure a united front against its real foes — materialism, sensuality, greed, class hatred, merciless struggle for wealth ? What shall be the fate of the church that does not inspire and purify a materialistic age? The fate of salt that has lost its savor. CHAPTER VIII THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST " I CAME not to send peace, but a sword," said Jesus. We do not ordinarily think of the sword as a type of the gospel. The church has preferred the cross. Yet the two symbols supplement each other. The Christian life is, indeed, one of submission to God's will, but it is also one of conflict and heroic leader- ship. The gospel is a message of love, but it is also the occasion of hatred. In an evil world peace is possible only on terms of a good man's surrender to the evil. Christ preferred the struggle and the consequent suffering. I The church has at least one message to the world that the world does not want to hear. It is the mes- sage of sin. To the church as to the ancient prophet there comes the divine call to assume the responsi- bility of a watchman set to warn against danger. The reason that the great gospel of immortality and brotherly love is not more acceptable to men and THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 223 women is not primarily that it is unintelligible; it is rather because they have no sense of a moral need to which such a gospel comes as a message of peace. Calloused consciences are only further deadened by talks about the divine fatherhood and the salva- tion brought by Christ Jesus. The age is suffering from moral self-complacency. It is the business of the church at all costs to startle it into self-exami- nation and repentance. The changing order must be given a conscience To some extent this is being accomplished. In the United States, at least, during the past two years we have seen the public conscience awakened as it has not been awakened for two generations. Confused with class hatred, as is this moral renaissance, it is none the less a thing for which to be thankful. The nation is in some way aroused from the lethargy bom of com- mercial materialism and is demanding that commer- cialism itself shall at least respect the rules of the game. How far the church has been the source of this new public conscience, it would be hard to state. Its influence, however great, has not been as great as the influence of Christian idealism which has spread out from the church but to a considerable extent regards itseK as fatherless and motherless as 224 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Melchizedek. But this is no cause for discourage- ment on the part of the church ; it is rather a call to more vigorous endeavor. A careful observer of current events must see that in the reforming zeal of men and women between thirty and fifty years of age who are the real leaders of these movements, we are reaping some of the indirect results of the Sunday-school and particularly of the young people's movements. But the singular thing is that the church is failing to exploit the new moral situation. Its conception of its mission is still controlled by a too individual- istic view of man. It prays for revivals, but wants revivals of its own choosing. Just as the primitive church, because its programme for the coming of Christ involved cataclysms and miracles, failed to see a real coming of Christ in the development of a new social conscience among its members, has the modem church failed to see that the revival for which it prayed is here. True, it is a different revival from those under Finney and Moody, although it would be a mistake to think that the methods of those men are altogether outgrown; but the chiurch is none the less living in the midst of a revival with which it ought to cooperate and which it ought to utilize for its own development. For that revival, THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 225 incipient though it may be, is a part of the changing order. Essential Christianity is conquering the consciences of men, but unless the church fulfils its mission as an awakener of still deeper moral discontent, of a more intense hatred of hypocrisy and selfishness and greed, of a new horror of the social aspects of sin, it will become a mere survival in the social organism. The church must do something more than de- nounce sin; it must educate society to loathe sins, and seek righteousness. It must still further study the moral motives of men already aroused in order to insure that we do not presently suffer one of those depressing reactions to which American people are so subject. The church must educate men to withstand moral fatigue. It must so organize and direct the awakened conscience that it shall not suffer the otherwise inevitable penalties of overstrain. Such a call as this is something more than one to hold delightful religious services. What sort of con- ception of its social significance and of social ser- vice and of moral appeal has a church that spends thousands for a quartette of singers and all but nothing for missions ? Such a church is little bet- ter than a high class culture club — a purveyor of aesthetic soporific to moral unrest. To well-to-do, Q 226 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER comfortably housed, intelligent middle class people, it can preach release from struggle, repose in God, deliverance from anxiety, emancipation from the storms of passion, but is this its only mission? May not this be the tithing of mint and anise and cummin and the forgetting of the weightier matters of justice, mercy, and faith ? The peace of which Jesus spoke is the peace which comes to a soul that has been morally disturbed; the peace that goes with the yoke of service. It is the peace which comes alone to the man who, struggling after God and battling against evil in himself and in society, trusts a God of love who is also a God of law. Such peace is neither the child nor the father of inaction. Re- ligious indifference is no more the rest of faith than chronic meddlesomeness is conscience. The Greek honored courage no more truly than did Jesus. He saw the kingdom of God being stormed by strong men. He foretold that friend would rise against friend; that a man's foes were those of his own household ; and he promised deliverance only to those who were strong enough to endure. The Christian life is to be something more than one of patient submission to moral evil. Such aid as the church renders those who have fallen in the struggle of life : its hospitals, its homes for the poor THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 227 and aged, its ministrations to the children of the slums, its rescuing of the fallen ; — all this is noble and only too sadly needed. But the church must stand for justice as well as for charity. For charity is as truly a tribute to the failure as to the success of the gospel. A triumphant church will be something more than the Red Cross Society of social evolu- tion. It is as much the business of the Christian to maintain an efficient police force as it is to main- tain an effective ambulance corps. The church must do something more than to bind up the wounds of an abused humanity. Good Samaritans presuppose robbers. The church must train people to see to it that the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is safe for travellers. II Such an heroic programme summons the church to undertake an heroic social leadership. Leadership means leaders. In religion as in every- thing else, what is everybody's business is nobody's business. Just at present the church seems in danger of growing incapable of producing leaders. There is nothing more threatening to the growth of evangelical Christianity than the failure of men to go into the ministry. We may philosophically say that there 228 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER are curves which rise and fall in successive genera- tions; we may be filled with a sane optimism bom of a faith in the divine order of things which will lead us to believe that as far as an effective ministry is concerned, the falling curve will rise again; but just at present a rightfully ambitious Christianity faces alarming conditions. Notwithstanding the growth of the church, notwithstanding the large growth of the community, there are no more men in our theological seminaries to-day than there were seventeen years ago; in some denominations and in nearly every country in the world there are barely half as many as there were ten years ago. And these denominations and these countries or sections of country in which this decrease of trained religious leaders is found are those which have shared most generously in the prosperity of a commercial age, have partaken most completely of the fruits of ah intellectual revival, and have most completely come under the influence of the forces that are making To-morrow. The changing order is growing ministerially sterile. We long since learned that the city church is too much a parasite upon country churches both for its leading members and for its pastors. It is the small church and the small town and the "im- THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 229 modern" community that have always supplied the ministry. And in proportion as these smaller churches, towns, and communities share in the economic and intellectual life of the cities is this supply being cut off. The little springs that fed the rivers are drying up. In place of leaders, too often appear untrained or but poorly trained cham- pions of the past. In some denominations like the Baptist and the Congregationalist, the entire annual output of the denominational colleges north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi would barely make a respectable entering class in a single theological school of each denomination. In the South and in the Southwest the situation is not yet so serious, but as industrialism and the new education spread over these sections the same antiforces will be operative — are indeed in some sections already operative. Who is agitating the question of ministerial supply? Not pastors, but professors in colleges and theological seminaries and secretaries of Young Men's Christian Associations. Ministers are silent, because they do not want their sons to go into the miaistry. At a recent great convention of theologi- cal students, only a fraction of nearly five hundred delegates came from ministers' families. Fathers 230 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER and mothers do not want their sons to be ministers. Individual churches are indifferent. Those with a young man among their membership who is studying for the ministry are the exceptions. Chris- tians of maturity in America, Scotland, England, and Germany do not want to be ministers. They do not see just what the function of the ministry is. In the vast majority of cases, the decision to go into the ministry is made by boys in academies and even before they enter the secondary schools. As a result, one of the largest problems that beset Christian education is how to prevent young fel- lows from losing their early ambitions during the col- lege or university course. And many such college students are more eager to be married than to be trained for real leadership as ministers ! Ill Too many theological seminaries are failing to send out trained leaders of the church. In the first place, as a class, they are committed to a commerciaUzed method of offering their students financial aid. How much respect can a strong young man have for the ministry when he sees men no poorer and with no poorer prospects than himself offered free tuition and free room rent and an out- THE SWORD OF TBffi CHRIST 23I right gift of two or three hundred dollars a year in cash, if only they will enter some theological seminary ? There are sacrifices, indeed, in the ministry, but prophets should not be hired to go to school. Some of our theological seminaries and our educational societies are teaching the ministers of the future the dangerous lesson of ministerial discounts and other forms of sanctified graft. Some, it is to be hoped many, men will rise above such influences, but what sort of social leadership or what call to virile sacrifice can this subsidizing of ministerial students beget? If seminaries have fimds for student aid, why should they not use these funds to pay students for reas- onable but actual service to weak churches? If such an arrangement made their students poorer in pocket, it would, nevertheless, leave them richer in self-respect. In the second place, too many theological semina- ries fail properly to educate men for leadership in a transitional age. There are notable exceptions here, but the curriculum of most theological seminaries was practically determined two hundred years ago. The thoughtful student coming to them fresh from the last year or two of his undergraduate work in college is apt to be nonplussed at finding himself forced to devote himself to matters remote from life. 232 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Instead of dealing with the vital matters involved in philosophy, sociology, poHtical economy, and literature, he finds himself forced to a wearisome study of languages and a memorizing of theological text-books. Hour after hour he struggles with the details of grammar as if the salvation of society hung from an iota subscript. Occasionally, it is true, he meets a professor for the discussion of some large theme in Christian world or thought, but throughout the first and second years of the ordinary seminary course, his efforts are mainly restricted to an attempt to master material which he knows and everybody else knows will be all but useless for him when he enters a pastorate. "The first thing I did after leaving the seminary," I once heard A. J. Gordon say, "was to try to forget what I had been taught in the seminary." Why this attempt to force theological students to devote to unusable studies time which might be given to the study of Christian truth or to actual conditions of the human beings among whom they must work ? Why should a theological student be forced into scholastic moulds, while the medical student is work- ing in the clinic ? The reply given by the seminaries who persist in this sin against the changing order amounts to nothing more nor less than that it has THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 233 always been customary to train theological students in this way ! Fortunately, however, within the last decade, there have developed some radically different ideas as to how a minister should be prepared for his work, and it is already possible to speak of two conceptions as dominating theological teaching, using that term in its widest sense. On the one side, there is the scholastic conception to which allusion has been made, which yet obtains in the larger number of theological schools. The course is almost entirely prescribed, and the student is seldom free to choose subjects to his own liking. The attitude of mind cultivated is not one of investi- gation, but rather that of receptivity and submission to authority. The church to which the student belongs is assumed to possess the truth, and all that is required of him is to remember it and defend it. Of that actual social life into which he is to be plunged, he is taught no more than if he were to work on Mars. Over against this conception, there is rapidly growing up that of the seminary of the more pro- gressive type. The attitude which such a modem school attempts to develop in its classrooms is not that of the mere reception, but rather of the recog- 234 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER nition of truth. It belittles neither the gospel mes- sage nor the age. It seeks to prepare its student for his supreme duty of bringing the gospel to his own age through his own personaUty. The new type of theological seminary is no less scholarly than its predecessor, but it refuses to sanction scholasticism. It knows, for example, the value of Hebrew and cognate languages and provides most elaborate opportunities for those who may really be benefited by studying them. But it knows, also, that it is perverse pedagogy to compel every student, regardless of his linguistic gifts, to study them as mere languages. If they are to be studied, it is only as preliminary to other courses in history and biblical theology. It would interest the men it is training for social leadership in the content rather in the language of the Bible. It is characteristic, also, of the new movement in theological education that its spirit is increasingly scientific. Its students are no longer obliged to abandon their habits of thought when they enter a classroom. With possibly one exception, there is no prominent theological school to my knowledge in which biblical instruction is not given with more or less pronounced opposition to the methods of older biblical teachers. The critical method has THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 235 triumphed, even when its results are rejected. The- ology, as taught in these progressive seminaries, is no longer a mere aggregation of proof texts or a be- scriptured philosophy. It is rather a painstaking induction from facts furnished ahke by the Bible, sociology, history, psychology, and epistemology. The man trained in a theological school of the modern type fears no fact or any search for facts. He has his convictions, but he believes omniscience to be a prerogative of the Deity and not of himself or of his teachers. And what is of far larger significance, he does not have to look in a treatise of theology to find out what he believes. The older scholastic training for the ministry is thus being replaced by a training that seeks to fit men not only to recognize evangelic truth, but also to use it in real life. It is a grievous shame that the minister should be left to work out such problems as he must confront, without some sort of training which shall prepare him to solve them. Here, also, our theological seminaries are seriously at fault. It is true some of them have occasional lectures upon Christian sociology, and there are a few schools where students are given a genuine opportunity for training in work among the masses of a city. But this should be true of all 236 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER seminaries. Such work as that done at the Chicago Commons, and other social settlements, as well as clinical practice as evangehsts, Sunday-school workers, and pastors of small coxmtry churches should be a part of the curriculum of every theological school. To train men how to act in the pulpit, how to conduct prayer-meetings, how to make pastoral calls, how to write sermons, and how to deliver them — all this is indispensable, but no more in- dispensable than to train them in sociology and political economy and pedagogy, until they know what not to tamper with, and to see clearly at what point they will find the least resistance to the moral and reUgious message it is their business to socialize. It is a mistake to think that theological training, such as this, makes a man less sure of his mission as a representative of Jesus Christ, or less effective in ministering to the spiritual needs of his commimity. I have, for instance, before m^e statistics showing that conversions in a dozen churches served by men so trained are twice as numerous as in churches of similar strength in the same state served by men of the older type. The fact is, the newer theological training makes men profoundly religious and capable of real leadership. Through it. Christian truth becomes something more than a "system." It is something THE SWOED OF THE CHRIST 237 to be experienced, not merely logically proved. Subtle questions of metaphysical theology are dis- cussed, and, if possible, answered, but they are not made the substance of the minister's message. That must be intelligible, vital, dynamic. Individuals must be taught truth that can be put into life as well as into books. Ministerial efficiency thus becomes, on the one hand, a matter of a minister's spiritual life through faith, and, on the other hand, a matter of teaching, service, and organization bom of such spiritual life. But at this point the church faces another vital decision: Will it permit men thus trained to enter pastorates ? No man to-day enters the ministry without passing some sort of examination by representatives of the denomination to which he belongs. In many cases this examination is conducted impartially and with full sense of the difficulties with which young men are beset in the eaily years of thought. In other cases it is hardly more than an attempt to show the heretical teaching of the theological school from which the yoimg man comes, or a heartless cross- examination in quest'ons of scholastic theology. No man who knows anything about young men will deny that dread of these examinations and that which 238 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER they represent, works against their entering the min- istry. It is not so much that the student is con- scious of holding views that are unorthodox; it is rather that he suspects that in some way his freedom of thought will be limited if he becomes a minister. The justice of this suspicion no minister would be ready to admit as a universal condition, but at the same time it is only too true that there are self- appointed heresy hunters in every denomination, who not only oppose the views with which they differ, but who make it a part of their life-work to "mark" a man who is too liberal for them ; men who create suspicion of those they distrust by letters written to pulpit committees of various churches; men who do not hesitate to bring such pressure to bear within ecclesiastical circles as will sooner or later force their victim from their vicinity, if not from their denomi- nation. In part, of course, such an attitude of mind, and such habits of petty persecution, are matters of tem- perament and lack of a genuine Christian spirit, but in a large measure they depend upon a conception of the functions of the ministry that results from the training given men in their schools. Instead of considering himself as essentially one who deals with life and facts, the theological student in the past THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 239 found himself constantly confronted with the im- portance of conformity. It is naturally difficult for men thus trained to realize that there are others who, thanks to their education, as well as to the pre- vailing spirit of the age, find themselves at their graduation from college intellectually uncertain on many points about which their fathers had no question. As has already been said, the inevitable, therefore, has happened. An increasing number of Christian young men prefer teaching to preaching. As teachers of non-theological studies, they hope to exercise religious influence without credal tests. Others enter the new social welfare work which is destined to be one of the most important influences in the renovation of modem society. Such men can be trained for practical efiiciency as helpers of their fellow-men, and as representatives of a Christian- ity of deeds rather than of beliefs. Too few of our theological seminaries are undertaking to train them. But it will be a great loss to the ministry if they are not numbered within its ranks. Otherwise they will rapidly form a class of social leaders distinct from, if, indeed, not out of sympathy with, the churches. It is to be hoped that the future will open some way by which these men can be saved to the 240 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER churches rather than forced to work outside of the churches. The church must once more offer ambitious yoimg men a career; not only a career that offers prefer- ment in office, but, above all else, one that a man bom to be a leader can see is full of opportunities to do something more than make social calls and utter beautiful thoughts. At the best, the life of a sincere minister of the gospel is full of loneliness of soul, of overtaxed sympathies, of self-searching, and of spiritual con- flict. He is a priest between man and God, between society and the kingdom of heaven. He cannot be manufactured, but he can be trained. But to fit him for this sacred office is a larger question than one of courses and hours of recitation. If it is foolish pedagogy to think that students must be compelled to take certain courses in order that a professor or a department may have employment, it is fatal pedagogy to hold that the aim of a theo- logical education is the production of lecturers on religious and moral topics. Ministers are, in the best sense of the word, men of affairs, promoters. They should be trained to bring things to pass, not merely to "edify" saints and threaten or comfort sinners. To arouse the religious life, to make it THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 24I intelligent and moral, to organize or to assist in or- ganizing it into social groups of all sorts — that is the real function of the minister. He has his message, he has his church, he has his world. Let him be trained to bring things to pass, and once trained, let him be given a real opportunity to bring things to pass. IV But social leadership of the church involves some- thing more, even, than the production and the proper training of ministers. It cannot be too often reit- erated that the church members themselves should be moral leaders in their respective fields. It is, of course, impossible to suppose that every professed Christian will be a man or woman of importance. Church membership is no guarantee of large in- fluence, but the churches include many, and ought to include more, men and women who represent the actual formative forces of society. If the minister cannot inspire them, let them inspire the minister. The merchant, quite as much as the scholar, paved the way for reformation in modern Europe, and the teacher and the lawyer and the doctor ought to cooperate with every sanely progressive impulse that the pastor may exhibit or can be induced to exhibit. 242 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER It has been charged that church members have, in the past, opposed social reform. Garrison and the aboHtionists failed to find the support they Jemanded from many of the churches of their time, even in NewEngland. The Earl of Shaftesbury could say that he had received little or no assistance from the clergy. But, in a large degree, the new social consciousness has changed this attitude, and, as has already been emphasized, professedly Christian men and women are now among the most ardent sup- porters of every good cause. But the rank and file of the church must also lead in moral matters. Although as an organization the church is not to have a programme, its members ought to be trained to moral efficiency, and particularly to a speedy support and leadership of every good cause looking toward the amelioration and the transformation of social con- ditions. It should require no argument to prove to a church member that there is need of some radical legislation to rid old age of its terrors. There may be some question as to the details of estabhshing industrial insurance, the regulation of the liquor traffic, the prevention of child labor, and the safe- guarding of the home from the miseries of drink and divorce, but no condemnation will be strong enough for organized Christianity if the present generation THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 243 is not trained in church services and Sunday-schools to champion such causes. A man does not need to be a specialist in sociology to vote for honest men at the polls or for honest candidates at the primaries. A man does not need to be a philosopher to realize that it is better to follow a Christian impulse than it is to refuse to support movements that attempt to correct evils that are sapping the strength of an entire nation. Socialistic and premillinarian pessimism, it is true, would prevent ameliorative efforts; but the common sense of a community, if once it is touched by the human sympathy born of the gospel, can always be trusted to follow reasonable religious leaders. Unless the church really takes itseK seriously in these matters, we shall see an increased tendency for social workers to leave its ranks. Suspicion of the church as a bourgeois group standing for the privi- leges of the well-to-do can be overcome only by the manly enthusiasm of self-sacrifice and brotherhood. The Christian man, particularly the leader in the work of the church, should not be deterred from emphasizing such fundamental verities because they are called "generalities." The world will not be saved by novelties or fads. Real leadership will consist in making the fimdamental truths of the gospel, be 244 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER they never so familiar, the warp and woof of social change. Indeed, one of the greatest needs of the day is a revival of the vivid preachiag of doctrinal commonplaces. Our pulpits presuppose altogether too much knowledge of Christian truth in the part of the pews. A generation trained in such "gen- eralities" as God, sin, immortality, and duty will not be likely to grow morally or evangelically nerveless. It is a tribute to the fact that the church is really beginning to undertake something of this fimda- mental preaching and this social leadership, that so many men decline to enter it. There have been epochs when a man could be at the same time a rascal and a good churchman; but there never wiU be a time when a man can be a rascal and a Christian. The world is getting to appreciate this fact. The refusal on the part of men who have grown morally callous to enter the church is an unexpected testimony to an ineradicable honesty in humanity. A man might be ready to profess allegiance to a set of doctrines, even while conscious of his own moral delinquencies, but he is slow to take a public stand as a representative of a system whose standard is declared to be the Sermon on the Mount and whose watchword is the Golden Rule. Unwilling to be THE SWORD OF THE CHEIST 245 religious hypocrites, such men undertake to belittle the church. Their hostility is but new testimony that the sword of the Christ has not grown dull. V Social leadership of the church must be exercised by men whose faces are set to the future. The church must follow modem men; modem, that is, in the really noble sense of that word, not in the sense of those who claim the title because they find their faith in the historic gospel growing weaker and who are, therefore, growing increasingly out of sympathy with earnest reUgious effort. The really modem Christian is not a doctrinaire recluse, but a man who believes in socializing a positive, evangelic message in terms of to-day's creative thinking and among men who are actually transforming the world. Such men form the vicarious tenth of society; the frac- tion of a community that carries its burdens. There are thousands of men and women who are incapable of leading and who want to be led. There are thousands of other men and women who are anachronisms pure and simple. They do not know that the modem world has begun, or if they believe it, cannot see any difference between the great con- structive forces of to-day and those which have been 246 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER at work in the past. It is no accident that the Eng- lish historian who, in 1863, published a "History of Federal Government from the Achaean League to the Disruption of the United States," also declared that modern history began with the departure of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans. To such a mind, Abraham was more intelligible than Abraham Lincoln. Human anachronisms must be saved, but they cannot be the saviours of society. Such ofi&ce awaits only those who, with the enthusiasm of Mes- sianic hope, are ready to follow Jesus out from some comfortable Galilee to an Easter Day of inteUigent faith along a road that runs through some Geth- semane of doubt and over some Calvary of vicarious service. There will be no salvation for the changing order at the hands of theological demagogues who can raise a storm of applause by an appeal to the past or to the prejudices of men trained to think in ways long since abandoned by men who really think. Theological "safety" never begat a real leader. And, although a theological radical is at best hardly more constructive than any other irritant, the genuine modem man does not stand for rehgious partisanship or iconoclasm, but for that spiritual impulse which is bom of a new sense of ethical values and of an over- THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 247 mastering confidence in the sanity and the inevitable- ness of righteousness. He knows the sanctity of facts as well as the dynamics of new ideals. The older he grows, the surer he is that while some things are passing away, there are verities that remain. That infectious devotion to reality which the scien- tific attitude of mind involves and which the newer type of thought in the church is emphasizing, has only to be given free scope to change an age of rehgious indifference into an age of rehgious en- thusiasm. That change is even now in progress. Whether or not there shall arise a new age of ec- clesiastical enthusiasm will depend upon the men now in control of ecclesiastical institutions. Religion, in a broad and truly evangelic sense, must certaialy grow more powerful. Whether or not the church as an institution will share in such growth will be determined by the attitude which the church takes toward men who might become, and ought to become, its real leaders. Nor is this aspect of the present crisis merely local. The task that must be taken up by the church, if it is to be a genuine leader in the changing order, is world-wide. A missionary church is the only con- ceivable effective church. And a missionary church must face the future. With nations being bom anew 248 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER through the influence of a new age, the church must do something more than exhort the heathen to accept a sixteenth- century theology. Foreign mis- sions, as a part of the sociaHzation of the gospel, must partake of the ideals of social as well as of individual regeneration. Since the time of the early apostles, there never has been an opportunity like to-day's for real statesmanship in missionary undertakings. Fortunately, our missionary leaders are seeing this. They are founding schools as well as chapels ; they are sending doctors as well as Bible women to the millions of China and India. Foreign missions as well as the church at home must be led by men of to-day rather than of the past. We should not send theological radicals to China and Japan ; but until these nations evolve as they surely must evolve, their own type of Christianity, we must send them men who will not be content to preach a mechanical theology or a mechanical theory of inspiration or a distrust of our new intellectual and social forces. These forces are operating in the Far East as truly as in America. The surest way for missions to commit slow suicide is for missionary boards to reject thoroughly trained men to whom the Lord has given a vision of a New Earth, but who are unable to meet technical theological tests upon which the THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 249 representatives of the older order of things insist. The nations of the earth need, not an officialized orthodoxy, but well grounded, intelligently directed, constructive enthusiasm for the gospel of the risen Christ and human brotherhood. VI There is nothing more difficult to transfer to the region of practice than this insistence upon expansive and enlightened Christian love. Almost incompre- hensibly, the higher one's ideals, the more difficult does a genuine fraternity become. The man of vision sees with ever increasing ease the frailties and follies and sins of people. But if the church is to produce social leaders, it must offset this incipient cynicism by training its leaders to take each other at their highest, rather than at their lowest, values. The conscientious man must do something more than criticise his neighbor. Religious leaders need something even more positive than tolerance. They must choose to be martyrs rather than persecutors. They must fight sin — not each other. They must be ready to stake their lives on the faith that they are nearer God's character when they suffer, rather than when they cause evil. If anything were needed to prove that our age 2 so THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER is morally out of joint, it is the fact that kindness so often reacts injuriously upon its author. A selfish age can endure its critics more complacently than its benefactors. We appoint investigating committees for our heroes and relegate philanthropists to the comic papers. We too often fear to profess moral earnestness lest our neighbors shall consider us charlatans or poseurs. The penalty of generosity is publicity and of pubhcity abuse. The reward of love is often distrust and hate. It was something of this that Jesus had particu- larly in mind when He spoke about sending a sword into the world. His words are a call to heroism. He meant to say that a man who would live a life of love and of social service and a devotion to the ideals which He was teaching would find bad men hating Him. He meant to say that the most mad- dening thing for privileged, selfish men is not the aristocratic virtue of the ecclesiastic, but the demo- cratic altruism of the Christ. But He would also say that the future lies with the opposed and even op- pressed champion of fraternity. He himself was to triumph by being defeated. He was to save His life by losing it. And disciples are not above their lord. How largely the modem attitude of mind that THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 251 honors both the law of the statute book and the law of the laboratory is vitahzing religious teaching, is apparent to any man who is more than a partisan. But there is still opportunity for the prophet who dares face the pit and exile. The moral renaissance to which reference has already been made, calls especially to men who combine large vision with evangelic impulse. It is not so much here a question of a liberal or a reactionary theology as it is of genuine discipleship of the kingdom. Upon whom should the sense of responsibility for evangelizing the changing order rest more heavily than upon men and women who have acquired some sense of moral proportion; to whom life is something more than an aggregation of equally important duties? There never was a time when breadth of view could be so readily transformed into genuine moral and religious fervor as to-day, among men and women through whose pulses beats the new hfe of To-morrow. And such men and women will not only wash the outside of the cup; they will cleanse the inside as well. The man who can refuse to be swept into a cru- sade against conventions because he would devote his strength to vital issues ; who will refuse to be drawn into controversy over metaphysical theology because 252 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER he knows that true evangelism is a matter of life rather than of theories of life; who finds in the entire universe no mechanical dualism, but rather one supreme Father who would have His creatures sons and brothers — such a man can furnish the perspective for religious work that will banish in- difference and bring moral and spiritual enthusiasm to minds confused with the doubts that spring from our ever growing sense of the ignorance of knowl- edge. To whom shall we look for members of that vi- carious tenth of society, who, by bearing other people's burdens, will make a new age fuU of more serious faith in God and of more hearty self-sacrifice for others ? To the ignorant man who, however well intentioned, must always be Umited by his narrow environment ? To the man of cynical culture to whom moral distinctions are of small importance, and whose emotions are less stirred by the spectacle of a moral revolution than by the faded colors of an old master? To the absorbed student who, oblivious to the ocean of life about him, sees only the drop he would patiently investigate? To the stem eccle- siastic who would break an opponent's usefulness because of his refusal to assent to an admittedly unthinkable proposition ? THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 253 Rather shall we not turn to those men of generous culture who, seeing but not exaggerating, the diffi- culties of many traditional affirmations, see also an eternal God present in the universe, beheve in the reality of a risen Christ, and are ready to consecrate their Uves to preventing the changing order from resulting in an age where social and economic con- ditions shall be determined only by the terms which the victors may grant the vanquished ? To-day, as never before, there is a call for heroes in full sympathy with the scholarship and the discontent and the hopes that possess the new age, yet filled with faith in a God of justice and love. As one hears that call, how petty and unworthy seem the differences men of evangelic fervor have allowed to breed schism. The sword of Jesus is, indeed, in the world — but not to set evangeUsts against teachers, or pastors against theologians. He who has his own trained personality as his one great asset cannot invest it better than in a superbly cooperative effort to direct a transitional era toward a more dynamic faith in Jesus and a deeper brotherliness among men. The call which Jesus would make to men and women of large vision in such an age is not to enjoy their liberties, but to serve their fellows. 254 THE CHURCH AND THE CHANGING ORDER Above all, does this call come to his church. There too, in a far larger sense than even yet is realized, must there be fraternity in a co-working of the members which will make the Body the true servant of the Head. VII Our eyes at times may be slow to see the way as clearly as we should like to see it; our judgments may sometimes be mistaken. An honest conscience and even an ambition to be brotherly cannot always guarantee us from mistakes. But one thing is cer- tain ; despite his mistakes, a man who devotes his life to the cause of the gospel of Jesus Christ will not be laboring in vain. With such a Master it is better to use the one talent even at the risk of losing it than to bury and so save it. It is better to be morally earnest and make mistakes than to be mor- ally indifferent and avoid them. It is better to suffer with the Prophet of Nazareth than to triumph with Annas, Caiphas, and Pilate. It is better to fight against the indifference of culture and the materi- alism of a commercial age at the risk of wiiming a reputation for quixotic enthusiasm and commercial obtuseness than to permit the evangelic light that is within us to become darkness. Those of us who make this choice which Jesus THE SWORD OF THE CHRIST 255 made and left as one of His last commands to His jhurch, may not live to see our ambitions for a new social order fulfilled or some milleimium dawn, but we shall at least have sold our lives dearly in fighting for the cause that, as surely as there is a God in heaven, must ultimately win. For we shall have done our part to make the gospel of Jesus and the Spirit, of immortality and brotherhood, a power of God unto salvation, not only to individual men and women, but to the changing order. " Charge again then, and be dumb 1 Let the victors when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall 1 " T HE following pages are advertisements of other volumes in this Series, and The Macmillan Standard Library. The Modern Fiction Library A new and important series of some of the best popular novels which have been published in recent years. These successful books are now made available at a popular price in response to the insistent demand for cheaper editions. The authors include such well-known names as : JACK LONDON JAMES LANE ALLEN ROBERT HERRICE WILLIAM STEARNS DAVIS H. G. WELLS E. V. LUCAS RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS ELIZABETH ROBINS Mrs. ROGER A. PRYOR B^ch volume. Cloth, 12mo, SO cents net; postage, 10 cents extra Burning Daylight By JACK LONDON " Burning Daylight " is just the kind of a story that Jack Lon- don loves to write — the story of the struggles of a strong man in a world of strong men. Moreover, it is a story which he has written purely for the story's sake — he does not preach any- thing in it. This fact will make it appeal to those who dislike to have their socialism, or whatever it may be, mixed up with their fiction. "Jack London," The Springfield Union writes, " has outdone himself in ' Burning Daylight.' " The book gets its title from the hero who is nicknamed " Burning Daylight " because it was his custom at the first intimation of daylight to rout out his companions for the day's work, so there would be no waste of the daylight hours, or in other words, no burning of daylight. The Reign of Law A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields By JAMES LANE ALLEN " Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly fin- ished as Hawthorne's, and he has also Hawthorne's fondness for spiritual suggestions that make all his stories rich in the quali- ties that are lacking in so many novels of the period." — San Francisco Chronicle. 3 THE MODERN FICTION LIBRARY ~ Continued Kings in Exile By CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS " ' Kings in Exile,' a book of animal stories by Charles G. D. Roberts, is a series of unusually fascinating tales of the sea and woods. 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PRYOR In this novel, Mrs. Pryor, well known and loved for her charm- ing reminiscences and books about the old South, has pictured life in Virginia sixty or seventy years ago. The story she has told is one in which the spirit of the times figures largely ; ad- venture and romance have their play and carry the plot to a satisfying end. It would be difficult, indeed, if not impossible, to find a fitter pen to portray the various features of Virginia life and culture than Mrs. Pryor, who is "to the manor born," and was raised amid the memories of a past where, until the war for Southern independence, families retained their social standing and customs from generation to generation. 4 THE MODERN FICTION LIBRARY — Con