iti,i.m,',i,i,i,i.iij:i.i,i.m.i.i.i.i.i.i.i.i.li.i.i.i.i.i.i.i.t^tt YALE UNIVERSITY Xibrarg ofthe ©toinitg School GIFT OF Douglas qigde JWarintosh DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 1916-1942 '¦''"'"¦""'"""""¦'""""¦ ' "¦'¦ """¦¦¦ "I'l'l'IWl ft |.W|..,|bJ BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS BEING ADDRESSES DELIVERED AT THE PRE-CONVENTION CONFERENCE AT BUFFALO June 21 and 22, 1920 PHILADELPHIA THE JUDSON PRESS BOSTON LOS ANGELES CHICAGO KANSAS CITY ST. LOUIS SEATTLE NEW YORK TORONTO KX3 Copyright, 1920, by GILBERT N, BRINK, Secretary Published September, 1920 INTRODUCTION The Baptists of the United States should thank God and take courage. God has greatly blessed, and pros pered us. In 1794, there was one Baptist to every ninety-four of our population; in 1840, one to every thirty; in 1900, one to every nineteen. Today we have in our church-membership one-fifteenth of the population of the United States, and certainly one-fifth of the people of the Nation are Baptists in sentiment and sympathy. But our distinctive principles have grown in popularity more rapidly than our churches have grown in member ship. Indeed, many of the principles for which our Baptist fathers did battle royal, have now become the cherished heritage of the whole Christian church. The prosperity with which God has blessed us opens to us many doors of opportunity and places upon us a great burden of responsibility. Thanking God for the past, let us face the future with new courage. We must still safeguard the truths for the advocacy of which our fathers here in free America were cruelly flogged and imprisoned. Soul-liberty and separation of Church and State still need champions. Baptists still need to pro claim the spirituality of the ordinances and to make unceasing warfare on sacramentarianism and ecclesiasti- cism. Our fathers held to our distinctive principles with tenacity and proclaimed them with enthusiasm. In every controversy their appeal was to the Bible. The scholar ship of the world agrees that the unmistakable teaching of God's Word is embodied in our fundamental Baptist principles. Through three centuries our fathers fought INTRODUCTION for the principles which they held dear, and now victory has come. But in the very day of our victory we are in danger of losing the fruits of the victory. The chil dren of those with whom our fathers contended are now meeting us with a bland smile and an outstretched hand, saying : " We are willing to grant your contention, but after all ought we not to minimize our differences and get together for the great forward work of the kingdom? Ought forms and ordinances and polity to keep us apart when we need to present to the world a solid front?" Having fought valiantly for the truth through the cen turies, are we now to compromise with error in the name of tolerance, fraternity, and Christian charity? The Baptist fathers conquered error on the fields of battle. Are their sons to compromise with error at drawing- room conferences? Not only we are in danger of compromising our dis tinctive Baptist principles, we are also in danger of com promising our more fundamental Christian principles. The recent Interchurch World Movement emasculated Christianity by eliminating all doctrinal emphasis from its pronouncements and appeals. It had no doctrinal basis, and yet it sought to explain to the world the mean ing of Christianity. Because it represented everybody, it was under obligations to offend nobody. The move ment represented the compromising spirit of the age, and yet Northern Baptists were foremost among its pro moters! Within our own fold we hail as leaders men who deny the miraculous birth of Christ, the vicarious death of Christ, the triumphant resurrection of Christ, and the promised second coming of Christ. If one dares to raise his voice in protest, some one immediately hauls up the banner of Christian charity and seeks to cover with its folds the teaching that denies our Lord, mean while saying : " Yes, we have radical differences among us, but surely the Baptist denomination is big enough, INTRODUCTION generous enough, charitable enough to include men of all shades of opinion. Let us soft-pedal doctrinal differ ences and> get together by working together." This subtle appeal put forth in the name of tolerance and charity is utterly at variance with Paul's admonition that we " contend earnestly for the faith." A month before the assembling of the Northern Bap tist Convention in Buffalo, a call for a Pre-Convention Conference on Fundamentals of Our Baptist Faith was sent out by one hundred and fifty ministers and laymen. The call said: We believe that there rests upon us as Baptists an immediate and urgent duty to restate, reaffirm, and reemphasize the funda mentals of our New Testament faith. Beyond all doubt the vast majority of our Baptist people are as loyal as were our fathers to our Baptist principles and our Baptist policy, but this loyalty will not long continue unless something is done to stay the rising tide of liberalism and rationalism and to preserve our principles in their simplicity and purity. A program was arranged by the group of men who were primarily responsible for the conference. The speakers were given the utmost liberty, because it was understood that each speaker would speak for himself alone. The addresses were received with much favor by the great host that the conference brought together. The demand for the publication of these addresses was gen eral, and in response to that demand this volume is being sent forth. That it will have a wide reading and produce a profound impression goes without saying. The Buffalo conference was more than a passing inci dent in our denominational life. It was a demonstration of the fact that our people " view with increasing alarm the havoc which rationalism is working in our churches as evidenced by the drift upon the part of many of our ministers from the fundamentals of our holy faith." The conference was thoroughly representative of the INTRODUCTION rank and file of our denomination, and this fact is signifi cant and prophetic. • It means that throughout our de nomination, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, our people are determined to do their utmost " to stay the rising tide of liberalism and rationalism and to preserve our principles in their simplicity and purity." This book will cheer the heart and strengthen the hands of those who will devote themselves to this holy task. Curtis Lee Laws. Office of " The Watchman-Examiner," NevO York City. GENERAL CONFERENCE ON FUNDAMENTALS To All Baptists within the Bounds of the Northern Con vention. Greeting : We view with increasing alarm the havoc which ration alism is working in our churches as evidenced by the drift upon the part of many of our ministers from the fundamentals of our holy faith. The -teaching in many of our educational institutions is proving disastrous to the faith of the young men and women who are to be the leaders of the future. A wide-spread and growing world- liness has crept into the churches, a worldliness which has robbed us of power and brought upon us open shame. We believe that there rests upon us as Baptists an im mediate and urgent duty to restate, reaffirm, and re- emphasize the fundamentals of our New Testament faith. Beyond all doubt the vast majority of our Baptist people are as loyal as were our fathers to our Baptist principles and our Baptist policy, but this loyalty will not long con tinue unless something is done to stay the rising tide of liberalism and rationalism and to preserve our principles in their simplicity and purity. Therefore, acting upon our own initiative as your brethren, we issue this call for a conference on " The Fundamentals of Our Baptist Faith," to be held in the Delaware Avenue Church, Buffalo, from 7 p. m., Monday, June 21, to 9.30 p. m., Tuesday, June 22. These dates immediately precede the meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention. CALL TO THE BUFFALO CONFERENCE All Baptists within the bounds of the Northern Con vention are invited to attend this conference. Let in creasing prayer be made for the guidance and favor of God. Adopted April 21, 1920. Your brethren in Christ, J. C. Massee Curtis Lee Laws Joel B. Slocum Tillman B. Johnson John Roach Straton John Donaldson Warren Steeves A. C. Archibald J. D. Adams Floyd H. Adams George D. Adams J. Whitcomb B rougher Christopher Burnett F. O. Belden Charles R. Brock Guy L. Brown Thomas Bolger W. S. Bradshaw John Compton Ball Daniel Bryant W. W. Bustard E. H. Bancroft M. P. Boynton John E. Briggs Edward Babcock R. B. Benjamin A. W. Bourne J. Francis Behrens Harry Watson Barras T. H. Binford John H. Byrne John B. Champion S. W. Cummings J. A. Campbell Charles A. Cook John H. Chapman Russell H. Conwell J. E. Conant I. W. Carpenter Amos F. Chase C. A. Chader W. Dallas Cope Eric Carlson F. E. Dark George Douglas John M. Dean A. C. Dixon A. A. De Larme W. F. Dissette John A. Davis J. H. Davis Groves W. Drew I. N. Du Puy M. G. Dickinson E. H. Emett W. T. Elmore O. P. Eaches F W. Farr CALL TO THE BUFFALO CONFERENCE B. F. Fellman H. H. Gill Frank M. Goodchild Joshua Gravett John R. Gunn William L. Haines M. E. Hare Charles H. S. Hicks John A. Hainer J. Heinrichs J. Q. A. Henry John C. Haswell j. W. Hoyt C. H. Heaton V. E. Hedberg C. T. Harper E. A. Harrar W. B. Hinson Albert Johnson F. W. Johnson T. C. Johnson David Lee Jamison Gove G. Johnson C. S. Kerfoot Volney P. Kinne George M. Knights W. B. Kelley Charles M. Kessler Luther Keller Clarence Larkin G. A. Lawson H. C. Leach W. J. Lockhart Charles F. McKoy H. O. Meyer J. A. Maxwell A. Z. Myers Lawrence A. Meade W. C. Myers George McNeely Cortland Myers J. J. Muir R. B. McDanel John Muntz David Miller W. E. Needham Swaney Nelson F. W. O'Brien A. H. O'Brien A. E. Plue William L. Pettingill Arnold V. Pent Joseph B. Rogers W. H. Rogers J. F. Rake F. W. Randall John B. Remmey L. E. Reed A. J. Rowland W. B. Riley D. F. Rittenhouse Samuel Russell J. J. Ross H. F. Remington John A. Swanson Granville H. Sheip Alfred Schmitthenner John Snape S. H. Snashall M. T. Shelford William T. Sheppard J. B. Smith CALL TO THE BUFFALO CONFERENCE George W. Taft B. C. Taylor Cary S. Thomas H. Stewart Tillis . M. C. Treat W. Leon Tucker. Alex. Thomson Albert L. Townsend J. M. Tyson J. Francis Vought George M. Vercoe Frederick R. Vine Nathan E. Wood M. L. Wood T. J. Whitaker O. Lee Warren C. H. Woolston J. F. Watson Joshua E. Wills A. F. Williamson W. Ward Willis Walter Whitley J. W/Weddell A. C. Warner W. W. Weeks G. W. McPherson CONTENTS Chaftir Pag» Introduction v By Curtis Lee Laws, D. D., Editor of The Watchman-Examiner. Call to the Buffalo Conference ix I. Opening Address *. 1 By J. C. Massee, D. D., President of the Buf falo Conference. II. Historic Baptist Principles 13 By Frederick L. Anderson, Professor in New ton Theological Institution. III. Fidelity to Our Baptist Heritage 27 By Rev. Thomas Jefferson Vill-ers, D. D., Pastor, First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich. IV. The Divine Unity of Holy Scripture. ... 53 By Rev. Frank M. GooDCHltD, D. D., Pastor, Central Baptist Church, New York City. V The Significance of the Ordinances. ... 73 By Emory W. Hunt, D. D., LL. D., President, Bucknell University. VI. Northern Baptists and the Deity of Christ 81 By John Marvin Dean," D. D., Director of the Dean Campaigns of Evangelism and Bible Study. VII. Historic Baptist Emphasis on Prayer... 95 By Seldon W. Cummings, D. D., Pastor, First Baptist Church, Pasadena, Calif. CONTENTS Chapter Page VIII. An Unexpected Message 107 By Rev. J. W. Porter, D. D., Editor, The Western Recorder. IX. The Bible at the Center of the Modern University 117 By A. C. Dixon, D. D., Professor, The Bible Institute, Los Angeles, Calif. X. The Baptist Program of Evangelism 141 By W. W. Bustard, D. D, Pastor, Euclid Ave nue Baptist Church, Cleveland, Ohio. XI. Things Not Shaken 149 By Cortland Myers, D. D., Pastor, Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass. XII. Modernism in Baptist Schools 165 By W. B. Riley, D. D., Pastor, First Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minn. XIII. Baptists and World-wide Missions 189 By J. Whitcomb Brougher, D. D., Pastor, Temple Baptist Church, Los Angeles, Calif. OPENING ADDRESS J. C. MASSEE, D. D. President al the Pre-Conrention Conference Buffalo, New York. June 21. 1920 OPENING ADDRESS Brethren, this is the Call which is responsible for this Conference : To all Baptists within the Bounds of the Northern Convention: Greeting: We view with increasing alarm the havoc which rationalism is working in our churches as evidenced by the drift upon the part of many of our ministers from the fundamentals of our holy faith. The teaching in many of our educational in stitutions is proving disastrous to the faith of the young men and women who are to be the leaders of the future. A wide spread and growing worldliness has crept into the churches, a worldliness which has robbed us of power and brought upon us open shame. We believe that there rests upon us as Baptists an immedi ate and urgent duty to restate, reaffirm, and reemphasize the fundamentals of our New Testament faith. Beyond all doubt the vast majority of our Baptist people are as loyal as were our fathers to our Baptist principles and our Baptist policy, but this loyalty will not long continue, unless something is done to stay the rising tide of liberalism and rationalism and to preserve our principles in their simplicity and purity. Therefore, acting upon our own initiative as your brethren, we issue this call for a conference on " The Fundamentals of Our Baptist Faith," to be held in the Delaware Avenue Bap tist Church of Buffalo, from 7 p. m., Monday, June 21, to 9.30 p. m., Tuesday, June 22. These dates immediately pre cede the meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention. All Baptists within the bounds of the Northern Convention are invited to attend this Conference. Let increasing prayer be made for the guidance and favor of God. The Committee issuing this Call is a self-appointed Committee. We acted entirely upon our own initia- [3] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS tive. In the minds of the members of the Committee responsible for the program of this Conference its pur pose is purely that of conference- It is not legislative. We trust that your courtesy and forbearance will per mit the Conference to proceed along the lines for which it was called. . The constituency of this Conference is purely a vol untary one. It is not a delegated assembly. It is not responsible to any one. We are here because we have chosen to come. Our deliberations and conclusions will be those we voluntarily reach. The design of the Conference is to furnish a forum open to all Baptists in the interests of the time-honored, historic funda mentals of our Baptist and New Testament faith. In other years, in connection with the meetings of the Northern Baptist Convention, certain small groups have constituted themselves steering committees of the Convention and have assumed for themselves re sponsibilities to determine in secret conference courses of action for the whole body. We propose that this Conference shall differ radically both from that con ception and from those efforts. If influences are be gotten here which shall be carried into the Convention, if conclusions are reached here which would seek to in fluence action in the Convention, then all Baptists in the bounds of the Northern Baptist Convention, having open access to the Conference, may have privilege of participation in its counsels and thus in determining its influence upon the Convention. For that reason our call was directed and addressed to " all Baptists in the Northern Baptist Convention." Regarding the reason for and timeliness of this call to conference, we who issued it are assured that some of our treasured historic fundamentals of the faith are in jeopardy. The situation in our schools and semi naries is critical. The faculty of a school or seminary [4] OPENING ADDRESS may be nine-tenths sound, sensible, and spiritual, but if such school permits the presence and the unrestricted teachings of even one or two men in the faculty who undermine the faith, upset the convictions, and alienate the hearts of the students, that institution becomes and remains unsafe until it has purged itself of that source of pernicious percolating poison. We do not acknowl edge the necessity of furnishing specific cases wherein this situation obtains, though we are quite able to do that. Everybody knows of the present drift away from the ancient landmarks, of the present tendency toward modernism in theology and rationalism in philosophy, as well as the wide-spread materialism in life which has long since passed the point where it is simply disturb ing, and has reached a condition which can only be described as destructive. We are, we believe, justly concerned at the presence in our schools of the radical, scientific attitude of mind toward the Bible, of the materialistic evolutionary theory of life and the extreme propaganda in behalf pf the gospel of social betterment in substitution for the gospel of individual regeneration. We are equally distressed, and justly so, at the grow ing tendency on the part of some ministers and laymen to advocate openly the practical abandonment of the historic ordinances of the church and the creation of an open church-membership. This advocacy appears in many modifications of opinion, from those who advo cate a simple liberal construction of Baptist policy and practice to those who would make the church of Christ equally the home of all men who have a semblance of reverence for God without further distinction of creed or further demand upon life, and apart from any vital faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have been uneasy in the presence of these demands of liberalism as an indi cation that some among us would join those from: with- fS] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS out our Baptist circles, who insistently pursue the vain purpose to promote organic church union throughout Christendom, beginning with Protestantism, and the discarding of all distinctive principles, practices, and preachings. To some of us at least, there is serious menace in the fact that practically all our schools seeking support from the churches represented by the Northern Baptist Convention, are beyond even the indirect control of those churches through the Convention. Self-perpetu ating boards of trustees easily entrench men in posi tions of responsibility as teachers, who maintain their positions on the ground of pleasing personality, per sonal friendships, or even family ties, or in the interest of New Theology and the modernistic view of our Christian faith and the Christian church. We covet the frank discussion of this situation. A recent edi torial in The Baptist indicates that not only the pro moters of this conference, but the leaders of the de nomination at large recognize the necessity for im mediate and serious attention to the situation in our schools. For the schools are the fountains from which all our youth must slake their thirst for knowledge and receive the life refreshings of their intellectual and moral faculties. To change the figure, our schools are the hotbeds from which we must in future years continue to transplant the individual slips that in the field of bur activities will grow into the leaders of our denominational life. What should be done in this situation? What can we do? Let us take counsel together. Responsibility for the language of the Call as printed is in the Brooklyn Committee. Responsibility for the Conference belongs to them and to those who signed the Call, the consent of every signer having been obtained before his signature was affixed. [6] . OPENING ADDRESS Responsibility for the program itself belongs to the Brooklyn Committee. What shall be said by the individual speakers on the program is to be determined by those speakers alone, and responsibility for their utterances will be theirs as the responsibility for all utterances from the floor of this Conference will belong to those who make utterance. In that connection, it is perhaps wise to say now that the chairman of this committee, having been asked by the committee to preside during the sessions of this Confer ence, will tolerate no interruptions of speakers. Since ample opportunities of open forum for discussion have been provided, criticisms, questions, and other tempta tions to interruption must be held in abeyance until the hour of the open forum. The Brooklyn Committee has earnestly desired that the Conference should adhere to the purpose expressed in the Call, to restate, reaffirm, and reemphasize the fundamentals of our New Testament faith. The Con ference is called frankly and openly in the interest of the conservative interpretation of our historic position and principles. While we would earnestly say, " Cursed be he that removeth the ancient landmarks," yet we would not write nor consent to the writing of a formal creed. Orthodoxy, like the virtue of a woman, need not be, indeed cannot be, defined, but when once lost leaves an ineradicable taint upon those who have departed therefrom. Therefore we would seek to save our Baptist family from the disastrous results of a departure from the faith once for all de livered to the saints, and we would save them before they are lost. We believe in the essential loyalty of the great mass of Baptists to the New Testament. We are willing to trust the body of believers in our Baptist brotherhood. We are not seriously concerned for them except that [7] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS they shall be supplied with and assured of the proper leadership ; " Like priest, like people." - The multitude can be led astray by false teachers who are willing still to maintain the terminology of orthodoxy while in jecting into it a new content which, when finally understood by those who have given their confidence to leaders employing it, will have subverted the faith of the people and will have instituted a final apostasy disastrous at once to the church and to the world. If we would save them, we must cease now to let Philistine teachers plow with our educational heifer, lest our denominational Samson, stripped of the goodly gar ments of his faith and virtue, fall under the witchery of a scholastic Delilah, and be permanently shorn of his strength, blinded as to his spiritual eyes, and bound to the unspeakable service of godless and mock ing masters. Some years ago I stood in the tropical gardens sur rounding Tampa Bay Hotel in the city of Tampa, Florida. Among other things of special interest, apart from the varied flora of the garden, was a cage filled with chattering, laughing, prank-playing mon keys. Some practical joker had thrust into this very large cage one big, sadly distressed cat. The poor cat was very anxious to leave the cage. There were friends on the outside quite willing to aid his escape. Again and again the door of the cage was opened, and the cat invited to come forth. He made many at tempts to do so. But every time, just as he reached the point from which he could escape, a watchful monkey, supported by his own caudal appendage from the transverse bar above the cage door, reached down and, catching the cat by the tail, ignominiously flung him back across the cage. I was never more amused, hardly ever more filled with sympathy at the situation of a helpless victim than at the situation of that cat. [8] OPENING ADDRESS The incident has many times been reproduced in my mind. Even now it provides a rather adequate illus tration of the situation in which we find ourselves. Our educational cages contain many scholastic monkeys, who with Darwinian complacency confess their parentage. A student in such an institution is like the cat in the Tampa Bay cage, with the ridiculous hand of some evolutionist upon the tail of his religious beliefs. It seems to me high time for us to take the hands of our theological, philosophic, and scientific monkeys off the tail of our denominational convic tions. We are often asked why we should concern our selves with what others teach. We are told that the truth will take care of itself. That is just a new specious phase of the appeal for personal liberty made by all destroyers of the rights and securities of others. It belongs at once to the Model Liquor License League and the liberal modernist in school and church. Even if we were willing to let them alone, they will not let us alone ! Like all German philosophy, theirs is at once a philosophy of materialism and of conquest. I am reminded of an incident which aptly illustrates what I wish to say. Our street-cars in New York are often crowded to the point of practical suffocation. We are so crowded together that we can neither move nor see in any direction save at those angles from which with immovable bodies we are able to turn our heads. In that situation some time ago, a woman sought to find the pocket of her dress in which she had buttoned her purse. Her first effort failed. The gen tleman sitting at her right, against whom she was hopelessly wedged, since he could not rise, courteously offered to assist her. She courteously refused his as sistance. A second time she tried, and a second time he proffered his help. Again she declined. When he [9] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS offered the third time to help her in her unavailing search, she became indignant. He apologized for his repeated offers, saying, " Madam, I would not annoy you, nor persist in my efforts to help you find your pocket, but you have already three times unbuttoned my suspenders." Now the trouble with the men who endanger our denominational integrity is that in their vain search for their own pockets of privilege, they are unbuttoning the suspenders of our security. When we are told that it is idle to protest, we have this to say, " We shall see whether it be vain or not." When we are advised that a protest now is inoppor tune, we ask, When shall we call attention to the situ ation and make a stand against it? When all our schools have been captured by liberalism? When our denominational machinery is Under the control of the modernists, and when our people generally have been delivered to the teachings of the radical theologians in their pulpits'? In making such a protest and inviting such a confer ence as this, are we enemies of our organized work? We do not fear a comparison of our activities as ex pressed in our churches with any others. We invite attention to any utterance of ours expressing disloyalty to our denomination or to our Convention. If we at any time have seemed to be out of sympathy with any effort of the denomination, that sympathy has been withdrawn not from the denomination nor from the Convention, but from individual leaders who have un dertaken to exercise lordship in a situation which de manded more wisdom and more courtesy than they were able to find for it. What is to be the effect of this Conference on the Convention? That is altogether problematical; that is beyond our computation or our control. We cannot escape carrying into the Convention the impressions [10] OPENING ADDRESS and conclusions which this Conference may beget. Of this be assured, we will not carry into the Convention because of this Conference, any less loyalty, affection, and fraternity, but more of all these than ever before. We will not go with swords sharpened to conflict, but with spirits prayerfully called to unity on the basis of our historic evangelical Baptist faith. Therefore, in formally opening this Conference, I voice the earnest prayer and constant desire of the men who have called it and of the Brooklyn Com mittee who have arranged for it, that we may here abide in the bonds of unity in Christ our Lord, and that the results of our Conference may be to his glory, the furtherance of his gospel in the earth, and the further establishment of those great truths, dear to our fathers, and to us as dear as life itself. [H II HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES FREDERICK L. ANDERSON, D. D. Professor in Newton Theological Institution HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES The Baptists are no modern sect, but were among the original Protestants of the sixteenth century. They be long historically to that primary group, which contains the Lutherans, the Reformed, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians. Their greatest leader was Balthasar Hiibmaier, rector of the University of Ingolstadt, preacher at the imperial cathedral at Ratisbon, ranked in the Roman Catholic Index with Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin as one of " the ( four) heads and leaders of the Protestant heretics." He alone among these Reformers died a martyr to his faith, being burned at the stake in Vienna in the forty-eighth year of his age, and his wife, an even more determined Baptist, being drowned in the Danube three days later, the first leading Baptist woman. Our spiritual ancestors were known as Anabaptists or Rebaptizers in Germany, Switzerland, and Holland. It is the best opinion that they came through Holland to England in the seventeenth century. The Protestant Reformation had many sides — eco nomic, political, social, cultural — but • whatever else it may have been, it was fundamentally a great revival of real religion, of an experience of immediate or direct communion with God through Christ. So great was the power of God in it that it became nothing less than a spiritual revolution, and its external results, which were immediately apparent, have changed the face of civili zation. This mighty experience of God, being immediate, could not only dispense with priests, sacraments, con fession, liturgies, and all formalisms, but felt them to be [15] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS alien to itself. Since it was an experience of full and free forgiveness and reconciliation, it rejected penance, absolution, indulgences, and purgatory. Since it felt in itself a new heaven-born freedom, it had no further use for popes, bishops, creeds, or external authority. The Baptists went the whole length in these lines. Their Protestantism has always been radical and self-consis tent. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Archbishop Hughes of New York in his catechism, published in the fifties, called them " the only consistent Protestants." They have tried to carry Protestant principles through to their legitimate conclusions. They are Protestants of Protes tants — furthest from Rome except Quakers, Unitarians, and a few such small bodies. A learned Congregational leader, speaking at Newton a few years since, said, " There is only one denomination which has had a more glorious career than my own, and that is the Baptist denomination." We have had four hundred years of noble history. The past at least is secure. The fundamental principle of the Baptists, in common with many other evangelicals, has always been the gospel, which is the essence of all Scripture. They have through their whole history been out-and-out evangelicals. With them the gospel is the determining factor not only in the theory of the church, but also in its actual external organization and polity. Among Baptists, the gospel creates the atmosphere, sets the ideals, molds the thought and feeling, shapes methods and machinery. Legiti mately, the gospel should dictate even such externals as our choice of music and singers, our form of public- worship, the shape of our church building, and certainly the symbolism of our ordinances. But some one asks most fittingly, What is the gospel? The answer, which Baptists have ahvays drawn from the New Testament, is perfectly plain. The gospel is the good news of the free forgiveness of sin and eternal life [16] HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES (beginning now and going on forever) through a vital union with the crucified and risen Christ, which brings men into union and communion with God. This salva tion is graciously offered on the sole conditions of re pentance and faith in Christ. It is a God-given salva tion, all of grace, having in it the divine power of regeneration and sanctification. It is not self-earned or self-won, though it depends on the whole-hearted" self- surrender of the sinner to Jesus Christ — to believe in him, to love him, and to do his will, to serve men as he served them. It is God's unspeakable gift. It also contains a message of hope for the world, the promise of a new earth in which God's will shall be done as unanimously, gladly, and intelligently as it is done in heaven. Whether this shall be ushered in by Christ, working in and through his people, or by his sudden ap pearing in glory, is a question which I have not now the time or the disposition to discuss. There have always been two opinions among Baptists with regard to that subject. It is very difficult to find one phrase to express the fundamental principle of the Baptists, standing on this gospel platform. Possibly the best is the sentence dropped from the lips of that dear old saint of God, Doctor Gubelmann : " The fundamental contention of the Baptists is the spirituality of Christianity." Now let us enumerate some of the inferences which Baptists have deduced from these basic statements, and which, we are glad to say, have now wbn their way wholly or in part into the mind and heart of our Protes tant world. 1. The Immediacy of the Communion of the Soul with God This principle demands that no priest, organized church ritual, sacraments, ordinances, creeds, or anything else [17] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS can stand between the soul and God: There is a secret place of the Most High where the Father speaks to His child and the child speaks to his Father, and this is the very seat and center of religion. Nothing extraneous can intrude here. The Baptists are therefore radically opposed to priests, sacraments, and all formalisms, are anti-sacerdotalists and anti-sacramentarians of the deep est dye, and are the natural enemies of ecclesiasticism or churchianity. 2. The Voluntariness of Religion All true religion is at its root purely personal, the free response of the free spirit to the gracious spirit of God. Forced religion is no religion at all. Its very life is its willing devotion. Consequently no one — parent, pastor, Church, or State — has a right to compel any act in the sphere of religion. Even the desire to compel a religious act shows a fundamental ignorance of the very nature of religion itself. This principle clearly prohibits the forced baptism of infants. The infant has rights, even against his parents, as the laws of every state declare, and one of them is the right to self-determination in matters of religion. An other corollary of this Baptist principle is the doctrine of the separation of the Church and State. The State cannot rule the Church, prescribe its beliefs, or force contributions from any citizen in the shape of taxes for the support of religious opinions in which he does not believe. It must grant, not reKgious toleration, but com plete religious liberty to all. Nor, on the other hand, should the Church, as such, strive to rule the State or seek its aid. Christians, in their capacity of citizens, should be active in all that concerns the common good and should make their voices heard and their influences felt, but the Church, as such, should remain separate from the State. They are not mutually hostile — indeed, [18] HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES they should be fnutually friendly ; but they should recog nize the fact that they function in different though closely related spheres. 3. The Equality and Liberty of Believers If communion with God is immediate, and every be liever has an equal right to the fulness of the blessing in Christ on purely spiritual terms, all Christians are on an equality in their relations to God. In this sphere there is and can be no special privilege. The Duke of Wellington knelt in St. Paul's beside a laborer, who, recognizing him, started to rise. " Stay, man," said the duke, " we are all on a level here." From this principle spring our doctrines of the de mocracy of the local church, of the invalidity of the dis tinction between clergy and laity which is foreign and repugnant to the inner spirit of our religion, and of the independency of the local church. This independency is a necessary corollary of democracy and indispensable to its preservation, as is clearly set forth in the noble dec laration prefixed to the by-laws of the Northern Baptist Convention. The Convention is thereby constituted not a legislative, but a purely advisory body, having no authority save that moral authority which comes from its faith, wisdom, and character, and the molding of its decisions by the Holy Spirit. But immediate communion with God guarantees not only the equality, but also the liberty of all believers. In the end every Christian is responsible to God, and to God alone. What he hears in the secret place, he must tell, and he has not only the duty but the right to tell it, and must be granted freely large liberty in thus reporting his experiences of the grace of God. There is only one limitation here, and that is that within the organized church of Jesus, founded as it is on the gospel, opposi tion to the fundamental principles of the gospel cannot [19] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS be permitted. Otherwise evangelical Christianity com mits suicide. Still even here there should be moderation and dis crimination. We should distinguish between prejudices and realities, between particular statements and the truth stated, between our definition and the thing defined, be tween form and substance. We should not only allow, but indeed cherish, divergencies and varieties within the evangelical type. Only thus can our denomination be enriched, broadened, and kept fresh and vigorous. No three Christians could have been much more different than Peter, John, and Paul, and yet they could give each other the right hand of fellowship. Inclusion within the limits of the gospel and not exclusion must be our ideal. It is a fact that all other denominations from Roman Catholics down to Quakers retain men of very different views in their fellowship. Why should not we do the same? No two Christians are alike, no two have the same experience, no two see alike the many-sided Christ in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. None of us have yet attained to a full under standing of the Son of God and the unsearchable riches of his salvation. There is always a possibility that some one else may have penetrated farther into the secret of godliness than we have, and may have attained a larger or profounder view of God than we. So while on the one hand we must guard with jealous care the heavenly treasure of the gospel against all who would dissipate or rationalize it away, must fight for it, and die for it, if need be, on the other hand we must be equally vigilant against spiritual pride, hereditary prejudice, narrow dog matism, a desire to force our views on others equally spiritual and equally Christian, and an unwillingness to count others, who also commune with our Christ, better than ourselves. (Phil. 2:3.) [20] HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES And here comes in the question of the imposition of a creed. Now I am in favor of creeds. I like the man who believes something and believes it with all his heart, can tell what it is, and proclaims it from the housetops. Only the great believers have ever influenced men largely and beneficially. I have made it a practice every five or ten years to write my own creed for my own satisfac tion, and some of these creeds have been published. I see no objection and indeed much good in a group of agreeing brethren formulating their creed and publishing it, if they wish. But in view of the equality and liberty of believers, no man has a right to try to impose his creed on others. He has the right to hold the creed, to proclaim it, to seek to win others to it, but he has no right to demand that others shall sign or favor it, if it contravenes their experiences in the secret place or their Christian judgment. Nor has he any right to cast them out of his love and fellowship so long as they hold the gospel fast. Consequently I oppose any creedal statement whatever in the Northern Baptist Convention, or any other formal gathering, because it would be sure to be regarded as an attempt to impose that creed on all Baptists contrary to their liberty in the gospel to differ from us, and, as we could not all agree, it would surely be divisive and exclusive in its tendencies. This is just the opposite of seeking to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace. 4. The Spirituality of the Church -Those who have surrendered themselves to Christ, immediately find themselves in union with those who have like precious faith and like communion with God. They are brethren and recognize each other as such, and they inevitably iind each other locally and unite in a local loving society of those who call Jesus Lord in [21] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS spirit. On this fact of the spiritual life is founded the Baptist theory of the true church. The phrase comes from the Roman Catholics. They define the true church as that Christian body outside of which there is no salva tion, and declare that true church is the Roman Catholic Church, that external visible fellowship which has the pope at its head and which is governed by its bishops throughout the world. They firmly hold that outside of this true church there is no salvation. Baptists have never called themselves the true church, in the Catholic sense. Of course, they claim that their churches are rightly organized, and if it can be pointed out that in any respect they are wrongly organized, they stand ready to organize them right. But we have never for a moment even thought, much less said, that outside our body there is no salvation. In fact, the Baptist theory of the true church is the broadest and most catho lic in existence. I quote with hearty approval the noble declaration of the Texas Baptists on this subject, a declaration which I read to my seniors every year : We hold the immemorial position of Baptists that all true believers in Christ are saved, having been born again, and this without the intervention of preacher, priest, ordinance, sacra ment, or church. Therefore we profoundly rejoice in our spiritual union with all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sin cerity and truth. We hold them as brothers in the saving grace of Christ and heirs with us of life and immortality. We love their fellowship and maintain that the spiritual union of, all believers is now and ever will be a blessed reality. [This is the true exegesis of the phrase, " That they all may be one "— Christ's always answered, not his still unanswered, prayer.] This "spiritual union does not depend on organizations, or f brms, or rituals. It is deeper, higher, broader, and more stable than any or all organizations. We hold that all people who (truly) believe in Christ as their personal Saviour are our brothers in the common salvation, whether they be in the Catholic com munion, or in a Protestant communion, or in any other com munion, or in no communion. [22] HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES How lofty and free are these words, to which all Bap tists say a hearty " Amen ! " How they refute the com mon slander that Baptists hold that no one is saved unless he is immersed! Yet that is believed by three pedobaptists out of four and is the greatest obstacle to Baptist progress as such. One of our pressing duties is to nail that slander on all possible occasions. Its increase is due to our shameful cowardice in proclaiming our principles during the last twenty-five years. Instead of being the narrowest of Christian bodies, we are in our principles the broadest and most liberal, and my blood boils when I hear outsiders and, indeed, some intelligent Baptists, maintaining the opposite. So, then, on the basis of the gospel, our fundamental principle, we maintain that the true church, outside of which there is no salvation, is the company of all those in heaven and on earth who are ruled by the spirit of Christ. It follows that the local church must be in like manner a spiritual body, created, filled, nourished and guided by the Spirit ; that it can have as members only believers, no infants or unconverted persons — a regenerate church- membership ; that it must be democratic and independent save as ruled by the spirit of Christ; that its leaders, teachers, and officers should be those whom the church recognizes as especially fitted, called, and filled by the Spirit. All its external forms and activities must express its fundamentally spiritual character. 5. Yet We Are not Impracticable and Fanatical Votaries of the Inner Life While we have and always hope to have our hearts in the heavens, we keep, and always intend to keep, our feet on the earth. In other words, we believe that our spiritual religion will have some very concrete and prac tical external manifestations. [23] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS We have always believed that there should be a local organized church, independent in its government, indeed, but united by Christian love and the desire to propagate the gospel with all other sister churches in voluntary missionary organizations. We have always believed in the Word. This spiritual religion of ours is not unintelligent. It does not propa gate itself by magic or mere enthusiasm. It depends on the truth. Its method is preaching — the appeal of the reasonable spirit of God through human lips to the rea sonable spirit of man. The gospel, which is the very essence of the Holy Bible, is fundamental, and the great principles of Scripture the authoritative court of appeal, which will save the church from vagaries and fanaticism. We have always believed in the ministry, though not in the deep-set distinction between the clergy and laity. That is to say, we believe that some of the brethren, con vinced that they have been called of God to this service and so recognized by others, must be set apart to give their whole time to preaching the gospel and carrying on the work of Christian love. They have no special grace, nor any special privilege of approach to God, nor any spiritual authority except that which comes from Chris tian character and experience. All Christians have not only the right, but the duty to preach and render loving service in the name of Christ. Every Christian a mis sionary in his own sphere and place is the method of Jesus, the slogan of the coming century. The only dif ference is that one set of Christians are recognized as called and freed from life's labors to give their whole time to Christian service, and the other set are called to do their Christian service in, through, and amid the tasks of the workaday world. Both are equally called and ordained of God. They have the same essential duties and privileges. They are equally under obligation to maintain the highest moral and spiritual standards. [24] HISTORIC BAPTIST PRINCIPLES They must in all their several spheres be men of prayer and men of God. The one natural and practicable thing to do is to find in the class who give their whole time to Christian service, the teachers and leaders of the churches, and to give them, as pastors and teachers, the honor and respect which is due to their task and their devotion to it. We still believe in the ordinances. The Friends (Quakers) and we are closely allied, but they have gone one step farther than we have felt that we could go. Of all Christians, except the Friends and Unitarians, we put the least stress on the ordinances. As the Texas Bap tists so nobly say, men may be saved without ordinances. There is no redeeming grace in the ordinances, or peculiar grace of any kind, which cannot be equally found in prayer and Christian service and which is not common to every act of obedience and true worship. But while, as evangelicals, we reject as alien to our faith all mere rites, sacraments, and ceremonies, especially if they pretend to give some peculiar grace which cannot be gained from immediate communion with God in prayer and in the Word or in loving service in the name of Christ, we do find two ordinances, baptism and the Lord's Supper, which originated in the primitive spiritual age of the church and had the sanction of the Lord Jesus and the early church behind them. These we accept, not as sacraments, rites, or ceremonies, but as fitting and useful symbols of spiritual religion, emblematic Gospels, visible words, acted parables, moving pictures of Chris tian history and Christian experience, preachers of the profoundest Christian truths. They beautifully express the experience of the inner life. If the symbolism of these ordinances is their one claim to perpetuation, baptism should be preserved in its purity as immersion, which alone rightly and fully expresses the evangelical truth of the believer's death to sin and [25] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS resurrection to new life in Christ ; and baptism, adminis tered only once as the symbol of the new birth, should precede the Lord's Supper. The serious distinctively Baptist problem is how to re tain the New Testament symbol of immersion and still keep it in its proper place of logical subordination, thus avoiding a reputation for ritualism and externalism which is repugnant to our whole history and every fiber of our being. And, now, what shall we say in conclusion? Simply this : These principles of ours have stood the test of time; they are essential to the progress of our religion; they come from the very core of the gospel; they are already largely victorious; they are bound to win, for they are, we believe, the truth. They are therefore sure to be enshrined in the Christian church of the New Age through our agency or that of others. Let us proclaim them, then, modestly and kindly in deed, realizing that many others hold them in part, but also with fervent conviction. Let Baptists lift up their heads, and lift up their voices too. Let them tell every body that while they believe in immersion and intend to retain it, immersion is only an insignificant part of the wide reach of glorious truth for which they stand. Let them dissipate the deadly mist of ignorant popular mis apprehension and prejudice which surrounds their name. Let them sound out the gospel in all its fulness and im plication fearlessly, constantly, and with the faith that overcomes the world. And let them in private conduct, in the local church, and in the great assembly live and thus commend the truth they preach. [26] Ill FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE THOMAS JEFFERSON VILLERS, D. D., LL. D. Pastor First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich. FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE Artemus Ward used to talk about the time when the Mayflowers came over in the Pilgrim and brought Ply mouth Rock with 'em. When that frail craft dropped anchor off New England, she carried a cargo more en during than stone and more precious than gold. "She was freighted with principles, convictions, institutions, and laws." Her passengers were few ; but they were tall men, sun-crowned. In all that constitutes true soul-greatness, despite their poverty of purse, they matched our high mountains and broad plains. They were men with empires in their bosoms and new eras in their brains. As the Mayflower was laden with merchandise richer than her British owners ever dreamed, so are we the heirs of other and better things than acres or dollars. Our fathers bequeathed to us a heritage of principles, convictions, institutions, and laws ; a heritage which we cherish because its price was their blood ; the heritage of soul-liberty, the new world's distinct and priceless contribution to political science and the church universal ; the heritage of a regenerate church- membership, a notion scouted for centuries, but now so commonly held that few know it to have been a con viction onte peculiar to us ; the heritage of culture, mind according well with soul, the sacrifices of primitive years being supplemented by ever-increasing benefac tions till now our educational plant has leaped beyond the eighty million dollar mark; the heritage too, of world evangelism, for to us belongs the inextinguisha ble glory of Carey, the fjather of modern missions, and [29] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS of Judson, the first missionary in these latter days to set foot on an unmixed heathen soil. Let me rehearse these facts a little more in detail. ¦; Tlie wprds of Bancroft are -familiar to us all j " Free dom of conscience, unlimited freedom of mind, was from the first the trophy of the Baptists." In this he agrees with Skeats, the English historian, who declares that " It is the singular and distinguished honor of the Baptists to have repudiated from their earliest his tory all coercive power over the consciences and actions of men with reference to religion. They were the protoevangelists of the voluntary principle." For the first three hundred years, Christianity was a forbidden religion. Imperial power sought to suppress it as a depraved and immoderate superstition. Chris tians endured a great fight of afflictions from Jew and Gentile alike. They were publicly whipped. They were dragged by the heels through the streets. Their limbs were disjointed. Their noses and ears were cut off. Their eyes were dug out. Sharp knives were run under their nails. Melted lead was poured over their bodies. They were drowned, beheaded, crucified. They were ground between stones, thrown from high buildings, torn by beasts, smothered in lime-kilns, broiled on gridirons, scraped to death with sharp shells. These horrors culminated in the dawn of the fourth century, when Diocletian issued three edicts in swift succession, commanding that all churches be de stroyed, all Bibles burned, all Christians deprived of public office and civil rights. For eight years fire and sword, rack and cross, wild beasts and beastly men did their deadly work. Christ's people were killed all the day long. In one month 17,000 suffered death ; 144,000 were martyred in Egypt alone ; while of those con demned to banishment and slavery 700,000 died. In the year 312 Constantine conquered Rome, and put on [30] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE the crown of the Western Empire. Eleven years later, by defeating Licinius at Chalcedon, he became sole master of the Roman world. He saw in Christianity a unifying force which he could turn to his own advan tage. He favored Christians; restored their confis cated property ; rebuilt their places of worship ; became a nominal Christian himself ; felt that the suppression of heresy was a political necessity ; turned persecutor ; leveled pagan temples throughout his dominions ; con demned to the flames any Jew who threw a stone at a Christian convert; made it a penal offense for a Christian to embrace the Jewish faith ; forbade the as sembling of Arians and Donatists for worship; de molished their churches, and banished their bishops. Then in 324, by making Christianity the religion of the State, he administered a blow from which the Church has not yet fully recovered. For in that unholy alli ance of Church and State lay the germs of the papacy, with its fiendish Inquisition, an engine of oppression which surpassed all human and inhuman devices for confiscating men's property, torturing men's bodies, and coercing men's consciences. From the fourth century, the time of Constantine, to the sixteenth century, the time of Luther, civil rulers, allied with ecclesiastical officials, claimed the right to dictatecreeds and compel assent thereto. From popes and councils Luther and Zwingli and Calvin appealed to Scripture as the final and supreme authority in mat ters of religion. But not one of these Reformers advo cated the freedom of the church from secular control. Not one of them consistently recognized the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual conscience. In Switzerland the exponent of soul-liberty was not Zwingli at Zurich. His statue there rightly represents him with a Bible in his right hand and a sword in his left. Not Calvin at Geneva, who openly advocated [31] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS compulsory worship, and whose good name is badly scorched by the burning of Servetus. Not these, but Baptists like Sattler, who, before his tongue was torn out and his body burned, penned at Schleitheim in 1527 the first Confession of Faith, in which men claimed for themselves and demanded for others the boon of a free conscience; and Mantz, the noted Hebrew scholar, who for the crime of rebaptizing adults was thrust into prison, loaded with chains, and then sentenced to be drowned. Led through the fish- market and shambles, he preached to Zurich's people as he went ; his old mother walking by his side, brush ing away her tears, and exhorting him to suffer bravely for Jesus' sake. He was put into a boat, his hands were tied together and looped over his knees; a stick was stuck between his arms and his legs; the black cap was drawn over his head ; then, while uttering the prayer, " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," he was thrown overboard into the lake. In Germany, Luther was so far from espousing the cause of soul-liberty that he said of the Anabaptists, " Let the sword exercise its rights over them." Even the irenic Melancthon denounced our forefathers as " a diabolical sect, not to be tolerated," and advocated the sword as the most effective argument against their views. The German apostles of freedom were not Lutherans, but Baptists like Hiibmaier, who, despite his. learning, eloquence, and acknowledged . piety, was hounded from city to city, until seized by order of the emperor and imprisoned. at. Vienna. Refusing to stul tify, his conscience and renounce his faith, he was tor tured with red-hot pincers on his way to the head man's block,, where the murderous ax fell flashing down, and his headless body was burned. Three days later,: his faithful wife, with a stone tied. to her neck, was flung from a bridge into the Danube. [32] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE The Netherlands tell a similar story. They be longed to the domain of Charles V; who claimed the right to regulate their religion. In 1535 he issued an edict, commanding that all rebaptizers be put to death by fire. If a man repented of his new faith, he was so far forgiven as to be beheaded. If a penitent woman confessed her " error," she was tenderly spared the flames, and was buried alive. By 1546 the number of these Baptist martyrs had reached the awful total of 30,000. Philip II continued his father's butchery. Duke Alva, the new king's chief adviser, urged that these Dutch " men of butter " could be ruled only by the sword. Give him an army, and he would pour into the royal coffers a stream of treasure a yard deep. Within three months after reaching the Netherlands, he had taken eighteen hundred lives. Then growing weary of such insignificant work as sentencing indi viduals, his Council of Blood with one fell swoop (Feb ruary 16, 1568) sentenced to death the entire popula tion — three millions of people! Trees and scaffolds by the roadsides were everywhere hung with the dead. Alva boasted that in addition to those whose deaths he had caused in battle, siege, and massacres, he had executed eighteen thousand six hundred heretics. Philip, however, pronounced Holland " the country nearest to hell." No wonder he thought the climate there rather warm ; for in his vain attempt to crush the civil and religious liberty of the people, not only did he drain his treasury, but he buried around the walls of the Netherland cities three hundred thousand of his soldiers. Of all the religious parties in this struggle, the Baptists alone had clearly grasped the New Testa ment principle of the soul's competency in religion; and it was they, as Douglas Campbell rightly affirms, who exerted "the greatest influence on the indepen dent sects of England and America." [33] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS The first man on British soil to plead for complete religious liberty was Hendrik Terwoort, who, being persecuted for his Baptist views in Flanders, fled for protection to Elizabeth, head of the English Church, ahd for his misplaced confidence was roasted alive at Smithfield, dying, as Bishop Fuller tells us, " in great horror, with crying and roaring " ; then this Protestant queen ordered all Baptists out of her realm on pain of imprisonment and confiscation of property. Bishop Spencer boasted that he would drive every Lollard from his diocese, .or make them hop headless, or fry at the stake. Nor were English Presbyterians more toler ant. " New presbyter was but old priest writ large." As an illustration of the Presbyterian idea, take this instance. A Catholic, named Morgan, unable to obtain priest's orders in England, went to Rome for them, and on his return was hanged. Knox expressed the opin ion that persons guilty of popish practices should be killed as idolaters. By an act of the Scottish Parlia ment in 1560, all who attended mass were condemned to banishment or death. The Edinburgh Convention, which framed the articles of Church Polity, proclaimed that the observance of days like Christmas and Epiph any ought not to escape the punishment of the civil magistrate. In 1644 Featley, a Presbyterian contro versialist, entreated the most noble lords that Milton might be cut off as " a pestilent Anabaptist." Even Baxter declared, " I hate unlimited liberty and tolera tion of all, and think myself easily able to prove the wickedness of it." Declaiming against baptism, he averred that " apo plexies, palsies, debility of the stomach, fevers, colics, and spasms " would be produced by it. Then having detailed that grim catalogue of Baptist woes, Baxter, author of " The Saint's Everlasting Rest," continued in this restful language : " All hepatic, splenetic, and pul- [34] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE monic persons, and hypochondriacs will soon get enough of immersion. It is good for nothing but to dispatch out of the world men that are burdensome, and to ranken churchyards. If murder be a sin, then dipping over head in England is a sin; and if those who would make it men's religion to murder them selves are not to be suffered in a commonwealth any more than highway murderers, then judge how these Anabaptists, that teach the necessity of such dipping, are to be suffered." Soul-liberty in England did not originate with Epis copalians or Presbyterians, but with our Baptist fore fathers. They, as John Locke declared, when Lord Chancellor King sought to crown him as the author of this blessing, were the first and only propounders of absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and im partial liberty. It was from a little dingy Baptist meeting-house in London, where Thomas Helwys and his congregation worshiped (1611), that there flashed out first in England this sublime principle. The first official document published by a body of associated churches, advocating an untrammeled conscience, was the confession of Faith issued by seven English Bap tist churches in 1644. Article 48 of that Confession was then deemed revolutionary and dangerous. It is now, as Professor Vedder tells us, a shining landmark, not only of Baptist history, but of the progress of en lightened Christianity. It recognized king and Par liament as supreme in all civil affairs, but affirmed that in matters of worship there is only one law-giver. even Christ. It was in America, however, that this Baptist doc trine was destined to achieve its greatest glory. When the Puritans settled Massachusetts in 1628, they were determined to worship God according to their own conscience, and to prevent everybody else from wor- [35] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS shiping him according to theirs. They organized themselves into Congregational churches, established those churches by law, limited political sviffrage to membership in those churches, forbade all dissenting churches, and enforced these requirements and pro hibitions by penalties of disfranchisement, fine, im prisonment, scourging, and banishment. Roger Wil liams was denounced as a man with a windmill in his head, a disturber of the peace, a disseminator of pesti lential opinions, because he dared to teach that the civil magistrate's power extended only to the bodies and goods of men. For this teaching he was banished from the colony, though John Cotton heartlessly re marked that it was not banishment but only enlarge ment. For fourteen wintry weeks, without bread and without bed, Williams wandered through trackless forests, till he alighted upon a place called Providence, and there built " a shelter to persons distressed for conscience." He founded a State without a king, and organized a Church without a bishop; the corner-stone of the new community being " the principle of absolute religious liberty combined with perfect civil democ racy." The charter provided that no person within the colony should at any time be molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any difference of opinion in religious matters. And there for the first time since Christianity ascended the throne of the Caesars, we read in a code of laws, as Judge Story said, the declaration that conscience should be free, and that men should not be punished for worshiping God in the way they believe he requires. The story of William Witter, the old blind man, is well known. He lived at Lynn, but was a member of the Newport Church. In July, 1651, he was visited by his pastor, John Clarke, and two other Newport breth ren, Obadiah Holmes and John Crandall. They [36] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE reached the old man's home on Saturday evening. Next morning the visitors were holding a religious service with Witter's family and four or five others who had come in unexpectedly. As Clarke was open ing to them the Scriptures, two constables entered with a warrant for their arrest. Clarke, with his com panions, was imprisoned in " the ale-house " ; then taken to Boston and brought before Governor Endi- cott for trial. Without accuser, witness, jury, law of God or man, they were condemned. The governor charged them with denying infant baptism, declared that they were worthy of death, and that he would have no such trash within his jurisdiction. He sen tenced Crandall to pay a fine of five pounds, or be well whipped ; Clarke to pay a fine of twenty pounds, or be well whipped ; Holmes to pay a fine of thirty pounds, or be well whipped. Tender-hearted friends satisfied the claims of Crandall and Clarke, but Holmes felt that he " durst not accept such deliverance." He lan guished in prison till September ; then for the atrocious crime of preaching the gospel and denying infant bap tism, he was taken into one of Boston's public streets, stripped of his clothes, and handed over to the execu tioner, who was told to " do his office." Thirty strokes with a three-corded whip were laid upon his bared and bleeding body, the man striking with all his strength — " yea," said Holmes, " spitting on his hands three times." So gashed and torn was his flesh that for many days he could take no rest save upon his knees and elbows, being unable to suffer any part of his body to touch the bed. And yet while being un mercifully whipped, like Jesus on the cross and Stephen under the death-bearing stones, he prayed for his tormentors ; and when the last lash had fallen, he cheerfully said to them, " You have struck me with roses " ! That is the kind of stuff out of which our [37] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS forefathers were made. We need a little more of the heroic in our present-day religion. A halo of glory will forever wreathe the name of Virginia Baptists; for they protested and petitioned, they struggled and suffered, till the principle of soul- liberty was grafted into our national constitution. Virginia was settled by Cavaliers, whose charter of 1606 made the Episcopal faith the religion of the colony. Withdrawal from the Episcopal Church was accounted a crime equal to revolt against the govern ment. The charter provided that non-conformists should be arrested and imprisoned till fully and thor oughly reformed. The clergyman's salary was fixed at sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. It was levied on the parish, and collected like other taxes. Absence one Sunday from an Episcopal service was punished with a fine of fifty pounds of tobacco; absence for a month, four thousand pounds ; refusal to have one's baby sprinkled, two thousand pounds. So that the support of Episcopacy in Virginia, as Doctor Carroll remarks, made " awful inroads on Baptist tobacco." Baptist ministers were fined, beaten, imprisoned, poisoned. Sometimes a snake or a hornet's nest was thrown into their meeting. Not infrequently the ordi nance of baptism was rudely interrupted, the adminis trator and the candidate being held beneath the water till nearly drowned. No wonder that Madison called such outrages " that diabolical and hell-conceived principle of persecution." No wonder that Patrick Henry rode horseback fifty miles to a crowded court room, where he appeared unsolicited as the attorney for three Baptist preachers. He took from the prose cutor the indictment, and reading that the prisoners were charged with no other crime than that of preaeh- ing, he waved the indictment three times roundels head, exclaiming each time, " Great God! Great Q&d\ [38] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE Great God ! " and thus shamed the prosecution out of court. But our sufferings were not fruitless. By the time of the Revolution, Baptists in Virginia were wielding a mighty influence. They were patriotic to the core; but as the war-cloud darkened, they agreed to promote the common cause on condition that they be allowed to worship God in their own way, without interrup tion; that they be permitted to maintain their own ministers and no others; that they be married or buried without paying the clergy of other denomina tions. The first great triumph was scored when other than Episcopal clergymen were admitted to the army as chaplains. Then in May, 1776, the Bill of Rights was passed, declaring that all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion. In October of the same year the state salaries of the Episcopal clergy were suspended. In 1785 Jefferson's " Act to Estab lish Religious Freedom " became the fundamental law of Virginia. And in 1802 the last step was taken in the sale of the clerical lands, it being held that they had been purchased by a public tax and so belonged to the state. With the sale of these glebes, Bishop Meade says, " the warfare begun by the Baptists seven and twenty years before was now finished." In 1772 a general committee of Baptists was ap pointed to secure for all the colonies what was being so nobly won in Virginia. When the first Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia in 1774, this com mittee with Isaac Backus as leader presented a me morial, pleading for "the inalienable rights of con science to all." They were told by John Adams that so far as Massachusetts was concerned they might as well expect the planets to turn from their annual and diurnal course, as to expect the Bay Colony to change its ecclesiastical establishment. But that Baptist [39] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Committee believed in the perseverance of the saints. They persisted. They collected facts; they circulated petitions ; they memorialized Colonial Assemblies ; un til the national Constitution was adopted in 1787. Article Six provided that no religious test should ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. But this did not satisfy these Baptists. They saw that it would not prevent the government from erecting a State Church. They consulted with Madison as to the wisest course of action ; and on his advice they wrote directly to Presi dent Washington. In his reply he praised the Bap tists as " the persevering promoters of our glorious revolution," and pledged himself to use all his influ ence in establishing effectual barriers against the hor rors of spiritual tyranny and every species of religious persecution. One month after this correspondence, Madison, with the approval of Washington and in the language proposed by a committee of Virginia Bap tists, introduced in the House of Representatives the First Amendment : " Congress shall make no law re specting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof " ; the most important writing since the canon of Scripture was closed and sealed with the stamp of Deity. On September 23, 1789, Con gress adopted the amendment; and by December 15, 1791, it had been ratified by all of the States, except Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Georgia. And so at last, after generations of suffering, the Baptist idea had become the American idea. At last, after cen turies of bloodshed, the despised old Baptist doctrine of soul-liberty had become a part of our national law ; and America in the widest sense was the land of the free as well as the home of the brave. Such is our glorious heritage of soul-liberty, a heritage which we are bound to defend, and extend and bequeath. [40] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE With our heritage of soul-liberty has come that of a spiritual church. Our fathers bequeathed to us the conviction that the church is a body of believers called out from the world, that the membership is a regener ate membership, consisting of such only as have been renewed by God's Spirit and are by faith vitally joined to Christ. They could not, therefore, accept the West minster Confession, which affirms that the church in cludes all those throughout the world who profess the true religion, together with their children. Nor could they assent to the Book of Common Prayer, from which the minister, at the christening of an uncon scious babe, reads, saying, " This child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's church." Our fathers held that the reason for our denominational ex istence is not baptism as a mode, but the church as a spiritual organism. They practised immersion not simply because Christ was buried beneath the yielding wave, but because immersion is " our Lord's appointed sign of his death and resurrection, and of the believer's entrance into communion therewith." They rejected infant baptism not simply because it has no scriptural warrant, but because it admits to the church such as do not know and cannot know aught of the new birth. They opposed sprinkling or pouring in the case of adults not simply because no such method was known in apostolic days, but because the ordinance when thus administered does not symbolize that dying and rising with Christ which is essential to admission into a New Testament church. A glance at history reveals the fact that when formalism was substituted for spirituality, and devo tion to externals supplanted personal faith, the regen erate church became a degenerate church, gross dark ness covered the people, and the martyr-fires were kindled. The church in the world and the world in [41] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS the church are two very different things. So long as the church was a separated church, it gave proof of its divine origin and supernatural power. But when the world was taken into the church's bosom, the church was not only shorn of strength but became a public scandal. Take an illustration from Virginia. Preachers there, we are told, wore black coats, babbled in the pulpits, roared in the taverns, and by their exac tions and dissoluteness destroyed rather than fed the people. The clergy, Bishop Meade informs us, were ^sometimes a gambling, swearing, horse-racing, cock- fighting, and drunken set. One of them, a noted pugi list, getting into trouble with his vestrymen, knocked them down severally, then dragged them out more or less collectively, and the next Sunday celebrated his victory by preaching from the words of Nehemiah, " I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote cer tain of them, and plucked off their hair." In Massachusetts, where citizenship and church- membership were nearly identical terms, a number of ministers, with a view to extending the franchise, met at Boston in 1657 and adopted what is known as the Half-way Covenant. This covenant provided that all persons of sober life and correct sentiments might be come members of the church without being examined as to a change of heart. Persons baptized in infancy were to be regarded as belonging to the church of their parents. Such persons, in turn, if not guilty of heresy or scandalous conduct, could have their children bap tized. Thus the unregenerate were granted baptism, but were as yet denied communion. It was not long, however, before the bread and wine were declared to carry converting grace, and then all were admitted to the Lord's Supper. And so the sluice-gates were flung open, and worldliness, with its consequent dearth and deadness, poured in. Against this inrushing flood [42] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE Baptists stood almost alone, with here and there a mighty helper like Jonathan Edwards, who for his in sistence on a spiritual church was driven from his pas torate at Northampton. History calls loudly to us to be true to the Baptist idea — true to it, not simply be cause it is an inherited idea, but because it is the New Testament idea; true to it because God has honored and blessed us in proportion as we have cherished and practised it; true to it because while other churches advocating a mixed membership have become de cadent, our growth has furnished conspicuous evidence of divine approval. The Advance, of Chicago, commenting on the decline of Congregational churches in some of the western States, several years ago said : It is significant that this has occurred at a time when it is easier than ever before to get into a Congregational church, excepting the period of the Half-way Covenant. In many of the churches the doors are as wide open as hinges and posts will admit. A Chicago gentleman of liberal proclivities was constrained to protest that his church could not go any fur ther without removing the whole front end of the building. No teaching in the New Testament [the Advance declared] is clearer than this, that for spiritual work and spiritual re sults there must be spiritual power. The churches, however, are more or less under the influence of an opposite kind of teaching. We have imbibed just enough of the evolution theory to turn our heads from the upward look of the apostles to the downward look of the naturalist. We do not openly admit it, except in radical cases, but unconsciously we act out the theory that the forces of religion are all in man. With this conviction comes indifference to prayer, and a feeling unfavorable to revivals. What the churches need is a return to the upward look. It is this upward look that has made the Baptist church so potent, and the Baptist heritage so precious. What memories throng us as we mention the church of our fathers? We think of Pentecost, the birthday [43] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS of the church ; the army of martyrs who stand by the throrte and gaze into the face that made glorious their own. We think of the romance and heroism of mod ern missions; of childhood days and the Sabbath chime of bells, when we joined the well-appareled crowd that went together to the house of God, where the gray saint just on the edge of heaven and the little child just taught to close the lash of its blue eye the while in prayer — knelt in attitude of worship ; then the hymn sincere in its old-fashioned melody, and then the tremulous accents of the preacher who lent Isaiah's fire to the truth of revelation. We think of father and mother and many loved ones. Part have crossed the flood, and part are crossing now. We loved them, and they taught us to love God. We followed them, and they taught us to follow Christ. We think of the barrenness and joylessness and hopelessness which might have been our curse had we not known the church. We think of the inspiration which the church has breathed into us, of the safeguards which the church has thrown round us, of the hope with which the church has anchored us to things within the veil. The church has been to us a Bethel, where in our stony griefs we have seen the angel-crowded ladder; a Peniel, where through the long watches of the night God has wrestled with us, withered the sinew that re sisted him, and then, as we hung on him pleadingly, showed us his face. The church has been to us a Patmos, where being in the Spirit we have looked right, through heaven's gorgeous roof, and have caught visions of the land that is fairer than day. So we sing: I love thy church, O God, Her walls before thee stand, Dear as the apple of thine eye, ,,, ,; And graven on thy hand. [44] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE For her my tears shall fall, Fpr her my prayers ascend; To her my cares and toils be given, Till toils and cares shall end. We may also be justly proud of our educational in heritance — a goodly heritage of culture. Many im agine that our forebears, like the conies, were a feeble folk, whose feebleness was equaled only by their igno rance. But a study of beginnings and developments furnishes quite a different story. Among the earliest friends and promoters of the free public schools in America was a Baptist, Dr. John Clarke, of Rhode Island. It was a Baptist, Henry Dunster, who served as first president of Harvard, the oldest American col lege. That he might put the struggling institution on a solid financial basis, he obtained large gifts of money and gave one hundred acres of land himself. With masterful hand he shaped Harvard's early life, till after fourteen years of remarkable service he was in dicted by the grand jury for disturbing the ordinance of infant baptism, and was compelled to resign. It was a Baptist University, begun as " a seminary of polite literature," which under Francis Wayland em phasized scientific training and early introduced the elective system, thereby helping to blaze the way which other colleges now almost universally follow. It was Matthew Vassar, a Baptist, who founded here the first distinctively woman's college, " thoroughly Christian, frankly feminine." It is the Baptists of this country whose sixty-eight educational plants have reached the enormous money total of $80,000,000. To this total we are now planning to add $28,000,000 more ; but we are not willing that a penny of it shall go to any institution that would pluck the crown of Deity from the brow of Jesus. At the great world-courts, it has long been held that [,45] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS education must be coextensive with sovereignty. Here, therefore, where all are sovereigns, education ought to be coextensive with the people — especially with Baptist people, since our principles encourage the freest investigation, and our mission demands the best equipment. The intellectual graces which adorned our fathers and mothers are urgent calls to further cul ture in us — a practical culture, like that of Martin Brewer Anderson, who as an educator had a passion for practicalness; whose education did not make him an impractical dreamer; who was preeminently a man of affairs; who knew as much about poultry as about poetry; who was as familiar with calluses on men's hands as with calluses on men's brains; whose advice was eagerly sought in matters ranging from the petti est details of commonplace lives to the most compli cated questions of public policy ; who studied history and science and theology that he might be the better able to help his fellow men ; who appealed to scholars to bring themselves into contact with humanity at the point of need; who criticized unsparingly literary re cluses, that peep out from their loopholes of retreat, finding the pleasure of their life and the end of their being in the accumulation of mental wealth, which they never make available for any good purpose be yond their own enjoyment. In his " Fragments of Science," Tyndall speaks of certain crystals in the mineral world, certain forms of fluor-spar, which have lain darkly in the earth for ages, but which nevertheless have a potency of light locked up within them. In their case the potential has never become actual, the light being held back by a molecular detent. When these crystals are warmed, the detent is lifted, and an outflow of light immedi ately begins. This is the work of Baptist parents and teachers and preachers — to warm the living crystals in our [46] FIDELITY TO QUR BAPTIST HERITAGE homes and schools and churches ; to convert the potential into the actual; to lift the detent from the minds of our children and young people; to cause these future workers and leaders to become conscious of light within themselves, and sources of light to others; to teach them that our heads ought to be as full of light as our hearts are of devout heat ; that there need be no antagonism between a luminous intellect and a devo tional spirit ; that knowledge ought to Grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster. As a final bequest, may I briefly mention our heri tage of evangelism. One Sunday afternoon, in a little churchyard of Kettering, England, I stood with bowed head at the grave of Andrew Fuller, the man who held the ropes while Carey descended into the mines of India. A few minutes later I was standing at the old home of Mrs. Beeby Wallis, then occupied by Mr. Stockburn, president of the city magistrates. I knocked with the old-fashioned knocker, and was ad mitted. Mrs. Stockburn, an aged lady, graciously ushered me into the famous back parlor, where I found not twelve men planning missions, but two young couples busily courting. As my funds were running low after a long trip to the Orient, I was strongly in clined to suggest that if as a minister I could be of any service, I should be glad to render such service at half price. But other and more serious thoughts pos sessed me. It was in that room that a few humble Baptists organized a movement which is now girdling the whole earth. I thought of October 2, 1792— the birthday of the modern foreign missionary enterprise ; and of the world-issues that were wrapped up in that [47] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS little meeting. I thought of Carey, ridiculed as a tinker and tub-preacher; denounced as a fool and -mad man ; ahd yet hei: it was who revolutionized" the agri cultural, social/and religious condition of a vast em pire; who put out the heathen fires that burned widows alive ; who started the first Sunday school in India, and the first school for native children in Hindustan ; who translated the New Testament into Bengali, the first version of modern times in any heathen tongue; who by making and helping to make twenty-eight such versions, put the sacred Scriptures within reach of one-third of the human race ; who saw twenty-six gos pel churches planted among the heathen; and who, aided by Marshman and Ward, gave to missions out of his own earnings nearly half a million dollars, and dying poor said, " I might have had large possessions, but I have given my all." Time would fail me to tell of Judson, the firstmod- ern herald to an absolutely heathen nation. When he set foot in Burma, there was not even the semblance of a civilized government, and he' found that the tender mercies of the king were cruel. We have punctuated with tears the pages of his life, as we have read of his awftrl- sufferings while Undergoing the -remnant of Christ's "woe. Seventeen months he -was in chains '. To his dying day he bore in his body the branding1 marks lof ' Jesus. When seized and hurried off to prison, his precious manuscript, which he had hidden in an old pillow, was thrown away-as-a worthless -piece of cotton. - But God preserved- the pillow-, and- that manuscript now forms part ofthe first Burmese Bible. It was' a Baptist, Joshua Marshman, who first trans lated "the Bible into the Chinese language. It was a Baptist, Francis Mason, who gave the Karens their first Version. It was a Baptist, Nathan Brown* to whom Assam and Japan are alike indebted for their [48 J FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE complete translation. It was a Baptist, Lyman Jewett, who rendered a similar service to the Telugus. It was a Baptist, William Care)-, who at Serampore, with a view to printing the New Testament in seven of the Indian languages, organized the first Bible society, anticipating by a few months the British and Foreign Bible Society, which itself was originated by a Baptist minister, Joseph Hughes. In the missionary conquest of America also, our forefathers were among the pioneers. Take a single instance. Napoleon, while attending the Easter ser vice at the Notre Dame Cathedral, suddenly deter mined to sell our government the heart of the Ameri can continent. Such an opportunity had never oc curred to Jefferson. He was trying merely to secure at New Orleans such rights as would permit our free navigation of the Mississippi. Seeking a humble foot hold in a city, he was surprised to find an empire for sale. The purchase was bitterly opposed by such men as Fisher Ames, who declared that by adding an un- measurable world, we should rush like a comet into infinite space. In our wild career, even if we did not jostle some other world out of its orbit, he was of the opinion that we should in any event quench the light of our own. Jefferson admitted that he stretched his presidential power till it cracked; but he persisted, and closed one of the biggest real estate deals on record. In all that vast territory, larger by fifty-five thousand square miles than the original thirteen States, there was not a single Protestant church. The first mission ary to enter the Louisiana Purchase was John Clark, a Baptist, who four years before the date of purchase paddled down the Mississippi in a little canoe and settled in St. Louis County; and it was a Baptist, Thomas Musick, who organized the first church within the limits of that purchased empire, that old. Baptist [49] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS church being now the mother of forty thousand Protestant churches between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Possessed of such an inheritance, bequeathed to us by men and women now among the saints in light; commissioned by the Son of God, whose pierced hand is pointing us to every nation ; impelled by the world's need, two-thirds of the human race, after nineteen centuries, still unevangelized ; inspired by the example 'of Carey, whose blood-earnestness aroused a slumber ing church^and made him obedient to our Lord's last "and unrepealed command ; mellowed by the sufferings of Judson, who, conducting an embassy in chains, was reduced to beggary ; emboldened by the prayers of Jewett and Murdock and Barbour and Gordon, who " prayed mission stations into being and missionaries into faith, prayed open the hearts of the rich and gold from the most distant lands " ; quickened by the zeal of Peck and Going and Bolles and Morgan, by the sacrifice of Chivers and the statesmanship of More house, who, seeing the destitution of the home field, resolved to lend efficient aid with promptitude; in creased in goods and amply able to plant and equip and maintain new stations and schools and churches; encouraged by our gospel triumphs in such fields as Porto Rico, where Delfino Muler, once a policeman, now an evangelist, testifies to the people, " You all know me, you know what I was ; you see what Christ has done for me " ; and in the Philippines, where Si Loy, our first Baptist deacon, mobbed and beaten, cries, " I can't strike back, for there is a great love in my heart"; and in Africa, where Lutate, surnamed Barnabas, son of consolation, with shining face and melodious heart, tells Richards, "I do believe Jesus has taken away my sins; I do feel that he has saved me, and I do feel so happy " ; and in Siam, where Thang [50] FIDELITY TO OUR BAPTIST HERITAGE Kan, the Garo, declines a lucrative government posi tion, saying, " The official might bid me go north when the Lord Jesus was bidding me go south " ; and in Burma, where Henry Parke Cochrane tells us old U Po Hline, returning from a mission into the hill- country, sank with exhaustion again and again, yet each time he fell in the hot road, putting his hands together and praying, " Lord Jesus, I have been away doing thy work; I have tried to be faithful; give me strength to get home " ; and in India, where Krishnu Pal, black-skinned, white-souled, sings, O thou my soul, forget no more The Friend who all thy sorrows bore; while Keshub Chunder Sen exclaims, " None but Jesus, none but Jesus, none but Jesus is worthy to wear the diadem of India, and he shall have it " — pos sessed of such an inheritance and encouraged by such conquests, Is this the time, O Baptist hosts, to sound Retreat? To arm with weapons cheap and blunt The men and women who have borne the brunt Of truth's fierce strife, and nobly hold their ground? Is this the time to halt, when all around Horizons lift, new destinies confront, Stern duties wait our people, never wont To play the laggard, when God's will was found ? No, rather strengthen stakes, and lengthen cords. Enlarge your plans and gifts, O ye elect, And to the kingdom come for such a time. The earth with all its fulness is the Lord's. Great things attempt for him, great things expect, Whose love imperial is, whose power sublime. [51] IV THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE FRANK M. GOODCHILD, D. D. Pastor, Ceatnl Baptint Church, New Yark City THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE " I accept the Bible unmutilated." That was part of the statement I made thirty-two years ago to the council that examined me for ordination. Some who were present that afternoon did not like the statement. I am not sure that they would like it any better to night. And yet I did not then, and I do not now, mean to make any insinuating suggestion. I simply meant to declare my absolute confidence in the one ness of the Holy Scriptures, and to intimate that any subtraction from them would be a mutilation of them'. It was not an ill-considered statement when I made it at first, though I was then but a youth, fresh from college ahd theological seminary. And I make it again tonight after many years have furnished me ample opportunities for careful and profound consideration — opportunities that have not passed unused. I am free to confess that during all these years I have felt no fear about the Book. I have enjoyed an unshakable conviction that it is God's Book; that he is able to take care of it ; and that he will take care of it. The people who have sat under my ministry know that I am not afraid of criticism of the Bible as such. The spirit of some critics, however, I have unsparingly condemned, and their dicta I have unhesitatingly re pudiated. But criticism, so far as it means a careful, intelligent, honest, and scholarly study of the Scrip tures, I have always welcomed. The Bible itself in vites and common-sense approves it. The higher the claims a book makes for itself, and the more positive [55] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS its demands for our obedience, the more searching our scrutiny of it should be. I have no use for a super stitious credulity that is determined to believe the Book, no matter what its contents., And I have no use, on the other hand, for the critic, who is determined not to believe the Book, no matter what its contents. The blind believer and the blind disbeliever are equally fools — both of them having cast reason to the winds. And I do not know but the man who professes to be lieve in the Bible, but denounces those who undertake to examine its contents and manifests fear for the results of an examination, does the Bible more harm than the worst critic of the Word can do. It is another case of our needing to have the Lord take care of our friends, while we ourselves are quite able to take care of our enemies. He does not believe in the Bible who hugs it to his bosom and runs off with it into the darkness of superstition and traditionalism, fearing to bring it to the light, lest its statements be disproved. But he believes in the Bible who confidently seeks to have all light possible shed upon it ; who says, " The more light, the better," and who feels that the more we study the Bible, the more we shall see what an in finite treasure we have in this Book of God. Now, while I have not shut my ears against any thing that scholarship has had to say about the Bible, and while I have done all that a busy pastor could do to keep up with the work of Biblical students at home and abroad, yet I am obliged to say, and I say it with out any sense of shame whatever, that I have today pretty much the same Bible that my godly father gave me so many years ago. There are just as many books in my Bible as there were in his. The parables are all there; the miracles are unshattered; the history re mains trustworthy ; the requirements are just as high ; the assurances are just as comforting; the promises [56] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE are just as reliable. I find myself preaching from the Book pretty much as he did. And I make the bold claim today, that, in spite of the supposedly superior light of the present, he was as expert a student of the Word as are we. Not with grammar and lexicon. He did not know much about variant readings, or inter polations, or clay tablets, or the results of excavation. But he knew GOD as the men who walk the halls of Scripture knew him, and he knew how to make others acquainted with God. It was the boast of Tertullian, the author of that fine saying, " The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," that every mechanic among the Christians of his day knew God, and could make him known to others, and it delighted Tertullian to set that fact in contrast with the ignorance about God of Thales, the Greek philosopher, just as Tertullian's Master once said, " I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes\" Well, like those Christians of old, my father knew God and he believed his word implicitly. He did not know anything about the " Joseph-traditions " that modern scholars have guessed about, and when he told me the story of Joseph as I stood by his armchair one Sunday afternoon, he spoke as though it was all true. He did not know that Abraham was simply " a typical ex ample of unworldly goodness elaborated by several schools of writers," as Cheyne says. He thought Abraham was a real man, faithful enough to be called " the Iriend of God," and when he told me the story of Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice, I could fairly see the angel swoop down and arrest the uplifted hand. Of course he did not know anything about the story of the deluge being a myth which the Hebrews had borrowed from the Babylonians, and that it is [57] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS " fundamentally a myth of Winter and the Sun-god." He thought it was a true record of God's wrath against a world that had given itself up to sin. And so one Sunday afternoon after a shower, when we took a walk together, he told me that there was once a terrific and prolonged downpour of rain, and that the waters pre vailed over the earth and God's enemies were de stroyed, and only through the handful of people that were saved in an ark did humanity have another chance. And I remember walking by his side that afternoon, full of awe, as one who had seen the judg ments of the Lord. And when every day that dear father of mine used to read from that Book and then fall on his knees and talk with God, every one of his children felt that God was a reality and that he was in that room with us. You will understand then, breth ren, that having spent my childhood under the tuition of a man who knew God face to face, I feel much more obligation to him for showing me the Bible as a living book than to these scholars who, taking what Astruc called his " Conjectures," have extended them and have acted as though they were certainties, and have merely shown how skilfully the wonderful Book can be dissected. There is another way of knowing the Bible than by a critical study of the text or a scrutiny of its origins, and that is by the illumination of the Spirit. The Bible knows how to bear witness to itself. The divine qualities of the Book are intrinsic and self-authenti cated, arid are not dependent on anybody or anything outside for certification. We do not believe the Bible because of anybody's attestation of it, but because of what it is in itself. It is not necessary for us to have the countersignature of Tubingen or Leipsic or Berlin or Oxford before we read the Divine Word. The Psalmist prayed, " Open THOU mine eyes, and I shall 58] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE behold wondrous things out of thy law," and to all appearances he did not pray in vain. The discouraged apostles after the great tragedy found in HIM who was dead but was now alive forevermore, the teacher they needed, and it is written, " Then opened HE their understandings that they might understand the Scrip tures." Grammar and lexicon and historical acumen are no doubt valuable in their, places, but men may know the Bible well without them. And, on the other hand, men may feel that they know the source of every paragraph in the Book, and the historical setting of every incident recorded in it, and the biography of every word that is used, and yet altogether miss the inner meaning of the Book. It is as true today as ever it was, that some things are "revealed to us through the Spirit." And I cannot escape the conviction that we get more from the Book if we approach it in sym pathy and gratitude, than if we come with challenge and criticism. Scholars who are disposed to sneer at the average man's attitude toward the Bible, should remember that it was to very plain men that Jesus Christ said, " To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to them it is not given." Let me speak of the oneness of the Bible in its effects, its structure, and the personality it presents. A man who had never seen a Copy of the Bible, who should pick it up and look into it, would perceive at once that it is not like other books. It deals with won derful things ; it speaks in a wonderful way ; there is a majesty in the words that makes them different from men's words. There is an insight into our nature that makes us tremble, a perception of our needs that fills us with hope, a power to satisfy those needs that goes beyond our hopes. And these qualities so pervade this Book that there are many people who declare that they can open the Book at random and read, and they r 59 1 BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS find the inspiration and comfort and counsel they need. And it is an undeniable fact that every part of the Bible has been instrumental in awakening men to a sense of their need, in relieving their consciences of the burden of guilt, in enlightening their minds as to what they ought to do, and in making their lives beautiful with goodness. Archbishop Leighton has told us of a man who entered a church in Glasgow in his day, and heard the fifth chapter of Genesis read. You know that chapter is nothing but a list of the patriarchs, from Adam to Noah, and the number of years they lived. Did I say nothing but a list of names? No, for in that chapter we have the most marvelous biography of a good man ever written : " Enoch walked with God ; and he was not; for God took him." But it was not that verse that impressed the listener that day. Archbishop Leighton tells us that the man left the church that day a converted man, and that the thing that converted him was the constant repetition of that phrase, " And he died." And Dr. Robert F. Horton, in alluding to this incident, says, " I believe you can show concern ing every book, beginning at Genesis and going on to the very end, that each page has its trophies." And then he tells of a French skeptic who was converted by studying for philological purposes that same fifth chapter of Genesis. No one has a better chance to learn how the Book finds men out than the missionaries. And what testi mony do the missionaries give us? Listen. Robert McAll says that one evening after giving an exposi tion of Scripture in the city of Lyons, a man came to him with tears running down his cheeks, and said: " Never have I heard the truth*,so proclaimed. My conscience answers to it." That is the part that de serves special notice. " My conscience answers to it." [60] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE Once, when Dr. John Chamberlain had read to the natives of an East Indian city the first chapter of the epistle to the Romans, an intelligent Brahmin said to him : " Sir, that chapter was written by one of you missionaries about us Hindus; it describes us so ex actly." But nobody disputes that that chapter was written by the apostle Paul eighteen hundred years before our missionaries went to India. At another time a learned Chinese man was em ployed by some missionaries to translate the New Testament into Chinese. At first the work of trans lating had no apparent effect upon the scholarly Chinese man. But, after some time he became quite agitated and said, " What a wonderful book this is." " Why so," said the missionary. " Because," said the Chinese man, " it tells me so exactly about myself. It knows all that is in me. The one who made this Book must be the one who made me." Dr. Robert F. Horton, from whom I have already quoted, seems to have made a specialty of preaching about the Bible, and he has made the startling declara tion that, if any man will with unprejudiced mind read the Bible, it will surely bring him to God. He men tions the Moslems. They are particularly hard to move from their religious faith. But he says the only way a Moslem is ever brought to the faith of Christ is when he is induced to read the Bible. If you can once get a Mohammedan to read the Bible, his conversion is certain. He can resist preaching. Of course he can resist denunciation. All of us can do that. But he cannot resist the Bible. Doctor Horton gives an incident of an English officer in Kashmir who was a devout Christian man. He was shooting in the moun tains of Kashmir, acoompanied by his native servant, who was a Mohammedan. This Englishman was no more ashamed to be seen praying than was his Mo- [61] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS hammedan servant. Every day he read his Bible and prayed in his tent. The servant observed it. He was not surprised at the praying, but was curious about the reading. He asked his master what he was reading. His master explained to him that it was the New , Testament, and then he said, " If you would read it, I will get you a copy, but you must promise to read it." The Mohammedan said he would. The English officer procured him a New Testament in his own language. The native read it, and before long came, asking to be baptized, and he became himself a herald of the Cross, and no longer a follower of the Crescent. Then Doctor Horton said : " This book left to itself, without note or comment, without explanation or criticism, left in the hands of any reader who is not hardened or prejudiced and determined to resist it, brings a man to God. You want no better proof of what a book is than that." Doctor Dale, of Birmingham, has told us in one of his books of a conversation he had with a Japanese gentleman of high intelligence and culture, who had accepted Christianity. The good doctor asked him by what arguments he had been convinced that Chris tianity was the true religion. He did not get the answer he expected. The thoughtful and learned man said that he had read no books of evidence, but he told how, in his heathen days, he had been a seeker after truth, and as he studied the cold system of Confucian ism, he longed for the revelation of a personal God. At length, a New Testament came into his hands, and as he read it he seemed to be finding at every step just what he had been seeking. When he came to the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, he was fairly dazzled with the glory and truth, and felt that it must be divine. And when he read the Gospel of John, he became sure that Jesus was the Son of God. This seems always to be the result of an unprejudiced. [62] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE open-minded reading of the Bible. It carries convic tion to all who so read it that it comes from God, just as we know the light about us comes to us from the sun. Now, when we find this Book so exactly adapted to all races of mankind — to the passionate Arabian, the sluggish Greenlander, the philosophic Greek, the low born Hottentot and the high-bred Chinese, the studi ous German and the polite Frenchman, the thoughtful Englishman, the enterprising American and the quick witted Japanese — when we find it so well meeting the needs of all sorts and conditions of men, we must agree with the learned Chinese man that only the Creator of man could be the Creator of the Book. It is the one Book that appeals to all ages alike ; it is the one Book that appeals to all classes alike. Old and young, wise and simple, learned and ignorant, all delight in it. A Canadian preacher has told us that he went into his own home one day and his little daughter cried out: "Oh, papa, nurse has been reading me such a beautiful story. Don't stop us, please." He found that the nurse had been reading the story of Joseph from the Bible. Soon after he went over to the home of Sir William Dawson, geologist and naturalist, and he found him poring with equal interest over the same story. The same Book for young and old, the rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the sorrowing and the rejoicing. This is no merely human book. It brings tears to eyes that have been pitiless, and wipes away tears from eyes that are overflowing. It arouses the careless, and it speaks peace to the penitent. There is no Experience into which the human soul can come for which this Book has not an appropriate message. SurCly we are right when we say that only He who knows man altogether could have made a Book that so exactly helps every man. if 63;] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS From the singularly uniform results that come from reading the pages of this Book we can easily infer that in all its parts it must have a singularly uniform char acter. And it has. It is a book marked by great di versity, to be sure. If some one who has never seen it before should pick it up and examine it, he would find that it is not a single book, but a whole library. Here are sixty-six books bound together. Some of them cover only a page or two, and you could read them through in a few minutes. Others are fair-sized books, and would take you many hours to read aright. These books were written by as many as forty differ ent authors. These authors lived in different lands. They wrote in several different languages. They rep resent every social condition; they were kings, courtiers, shepherds, farmers, fishermen, a physician, and a publican ; men of every degree of culture. Each author was evidently conscious of being free in the work he did : he developed his own theme, and used his own peculiar style of expression. These men wrote, some of them, as much as fifteen hundred years apart. There was no possibility of collusion. Indeed, they did not know that what they wrote was to be a part of a book, so thoroughly independent were they in their writing. And yet the result of their writings is not many books, but ONE Book — a Book so intensely one that we bind all its parts together and, following the example of John Chrysostom, we call it " The Book," the Bible. And really that is one of the most mar velous things in the world. It is scarcely possible for any two men to report alike about anything they observe. It is as impossible to get men to think alike as it was for Charles the Fifth to get two clocks to tick alike in the famous experiment he made. Men differ about the simplest and most commonplace things. And yet we are confronted with this remarkable har- 64] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE mony of the Bible. Its authors, as we have seen, were men of the most diverse type. The literary forms in which they expressed themselves were very different — poetry and prose ; the poetry, lyric and dramatic ; the prose, history, philosophy, and prophecy. And the subjects on whieh they wrote were also those on which nature and their own thinking would give them the least light. And yet, in the whole fifteen hundred years of its composition, the aim of the Book was one, its principles were unchanged, its view of God and man remained the same, and all over the world, among the most varied peoples, the effect of reading any part of the Bible is always the same. There is nothing in the least like such unity anywhere else. It is unnatural. Men could not produce such unity if they set out to do it. They could only approach it. It is a unity so profound that it demands some explanation. What explanation shall we give? An illustration will set it forth. You go some evening to a musicale. A symphony orchestra is before you. There are forty players, let us say. They are a varied lot of men ; of very diverse temperaments; they come from very different homes, and they approach their work in very different moods. The instruments they play are very different: some are of strings, some are reed instruments made of wood, some are of brass, some are of skins stretched tight. Each man has his own strain to play, and these strains sound very different when heard separately. But when played together, the harmony is ravishing. Now, how do you account for the unity of effect? You are in no dilemma about that. You say one mind governs them all. One man wrote the symphony, and each of the players gets his directions from the one composer. We cannot think of such unity in result, such harmonious volume of sound, without thinking of one master mind as its cause. [65] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS My church built a new house of worship not long since. I often went to look at the men in their work of building. There was a small army of them. They were working on every part of the structure. They were very different men. The materials they worked with were very different. There was steel from Penn sylvania: There was limestone from Indiana. There was other stone from quarries. at Germantown. There was wood from the forests of the Northwest. There was such a diversity of materials as forbids mention of the kinds. Each man went about his work without paying much heed to most of the other men. And yet out of all that confusion of movement, the structure daily grew into finer perfection of beauty and useful ness. And if, as I stood there, you had asked me for an explanation of such harmony of result, I should have pointed you to a man who now and then moved about among the workmen, stopping here and there to look, and then calling the attention of some of the men to a sheet that he had in his hands. That man was the superintending architect, and the sheet to which he referred was the detailed plan of the building, and that plan was the work of the one master mind that con trolled everybody who did a stroke of work on that building. So, of the marvelous harmony of the Bible. There is no reasonable explanation of the impressively har monious work done by these forty or more men, unless we accept the statement that many of them made plainly and repeatedly, that they were inspired and controlled by one master mind, the mind of God him self. That is a sensible and a satisfactory explanation. And the unity of the Bible is all the more remark able when you remember that its teachings were often at variance with the notions that prevailed among the people with whom some of the authors lived. Men [66] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE are usually profoundly affected by the ideas of their time. Environment is counted mightier than heredity today. Tennyson said, " I am a part of all I have met." Ordinarily that is true of men. At the recent commencement of Crozer Seminary, Prof. B. C. Tay lor, in retiring from the place as a teacher, which he has so honorably filled for more than forty years, said that he wished he could analyze himself and see just where each part of him came from. Often we can do something of that sort. We say of one trait, " That came from my grandfather." Of another trait we say, " My father is responsible for that." And we explain another by saying, " I had a friend, and I learned that of him." And no doubt the Biblical writers betrayed many of their life relations by the ideas they express and the way they express them. Yet in the great thing for which God was using them, to reveal to men his own character ; his abhorrence of sin ; his grief over their fall, and the method by which they must be re deemed — in that one great thing the Bible writers are held absolutely true, and they always found them selves in instant revolt against the things that would in any way corrupt their thought. Some have impressed it upon us that Moses learned much from the Egyptians, and that what the Jews have given us, they got from Babylonia, and Egypt, and Assyria. Stephen does indeed tell us that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. But one of the main things Moses learned from the Egyp tians was not to do as they did. No doubt in Egypt he was in the midst of the greatest civilization of his time, yet through what God had taught him, he found himself in revolt against it. Turn to the book of Genesis that carries the story of the race back to its beginning, and you will find there a view of things that is a flat contradiction of the notions that prevailed [67] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS among the Egyptians and among the other nations that were neighbors to the Jews. Moses shows God creating the sun and moon and stars. Now you know that the sun and moon and stars were the gods of the nations round about the Jews. But, in Moses' view, they were simply the creatures of God's hand. The more you read that story and reflect upon it, the more marvelous it will seem to you. All through, that first chapter of Genesis, Moses is demolishing the gods of the heathen. With almost every stroke of his pen a god goes. And, if you are familiar with the isms of to day, and the prevailing false philosophies, you will find that that chapter demolishes them with equal effec tiveness. And by the time any reader gets to the end of that chapter, instead of worshiping any creature, he finds himself bowing before the Creator of heaven and earth and all that in them is. Turn to Leviticus. Many do not like the atmos phere of the book. It is: full of blood. There are several good reasons for that, which it would be aside from my purpose tonight even to allude to. The book is so distasteful to some men who have no insight that they have called the priest of God in it a butcher, and the Lord's altars have been sneered at as shambles. But think of what Moses is doing in that book. When he got his unorganized mass of people out into the wilderness, he had to teach them. How should he do it ? Remember that they had come from a land where the bull was a god. The Egyptians worshiped cattle. The one time when the Israelites broke away from Moses they set up a calf as their god, showing that they had been profoundly influenced by their Egyptian life. But when Moses, the servant of the Lord, ar ranged his sacrifices, in what did those sacrifices, con sist? They were cattle— the gods of paganism. Every morning and evening in the worship of Jehovah the [68] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE blood of an Egyptian god was poured out, and the flesh of an Egyptian god burned upon the altar. You see the point of it, surely, All the gods of the heathen are offered in sacrifice to Him who alone is God. And so in books that men have spoken slightingly of we find exalted testimony borne to the same great truths that are set forth in the other books of the Bible. And what I want to know is, where Moses got those ideas that are so different from the prevailing notions of his day and so in harmony with those of the other writers of the sacred Book. And we have testimony from the Lord Jesus himself as to the unity of the Book. He says that the books are one in pointing to him. One great personality dominates the Bible. Does it sound a bit old-fashioned to say that each book of the Old Testament has Christ as its object and center? And yet our Lord himself says that. I know that there are many who do not believe it — and they are men who think they under stand the Scriptures, too. But do not be troubled. They are no new species. In the Saviour's own time there were two men who thought they knew the Scrip tures, but they could not see Christ in them. And the Lord rebuked them for their blindness, and said, " O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken." " And beginning at Moses and all the prophets he expounded unto them the things concern ing himself." They had a Bible reading, conducted by the. Lord himself, and his subject was " Christ in the Old Testament," I should like to have been with them then. On another occasion he said of the Scrip tures, " They are they which testify of me." And on another occasion still he said, " All things must be ful filled which are written in the law, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms concerning me." That covers all the divisions of the Old Book. It is a unit in its mes- [69] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS sage concerning Christ. We can hear his lips saying, " In the volume of the Book it is written of me." It is. He himself hath said it. If we are not able to see it, we should mourn over our blindness, and ask him to open our understanding. And he will do that. And our hearts will burn within us while he talks with us by the way, and opens unto us the Scriptures. That the purpose of the New Testament is to pre sent Christ to us, we do not need to have demonstrated to us. The purpose of the whole book John gives to us as he concludes his Gospel : " These things are writ ten, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing, ye might have life through his name." I have but begun to speak. There are scores of signs of the Book's mysterious unity to which I may not even allude. No matter how these books came to gether, they are one book. Whatever the principle of selection was, the result is such a volume that you cannot add to it profitably, and you cannot subtract from it without hurt. Men have tried to cast out cer tain books. But these books are there yet in the Book. Sit down and read them, and you will find they deserve to be there. To take them away would be like sever ing a limb from the body, or putting out an eye. It is a marvelous Book — one in its purpose, one in its struc ture, one in its saving effect on those who read it. Back of its historians, back of its prophets, back of its poets, back of its apostles, back of its seers who gave us their uplifting apocalyptic visions, there is one speaker, and that is the living God. The authors of the Book claimed to be the mouthpieces of the Almighty. Their work has proved itself to be God's Word. Even the Lord Jesus places himself alongside the prophets who spoke before him, and the apostles who spoke after him. He says — you remember — " The [70] THE DIVINE UNITY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself, but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." And again in his high-priestly prayer, he says : " I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them." He never discriminated between the words he spoke and the words of the writers of these books. It is a wonderful book ! There is no other like it. Men have studied it microscopically. They have pulled it to pieces. They have tried to destroy it. But it has gone on ministering to the spiritual life of the cen turies. It has shown a power to comfort and console, to strengthen and inspire men, to redeem men from sin, and to develop in them Christlike qualities, that sets it quite apart from the books that men have writ ten. Wonderful Book! Its author is God, its subject is Christ, its object is the salvation of men, its end is eternity, its name is the Bible. Wonderful Book! Do you read it ? Will you read it henceforth as never be fore? It will make you wise above your fellow men, wise unto salvation. Wonderful Book! No wonder men cling to it as worth more than life itself. Let all the plans that men devise Assault that book with treacherous art; I'll call them vanity and lies, And bind that Bible to my heart. [71 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORDINANCES By EMORY W. HUNT, D. D., LL. D. President of Bucknell University THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORDINANCES I need not enumerate them. In this company I need spend no time on the reasons why we do not include among the ordinances ordination, marriage, feet-wash ing, and the laying-on of hands. It is perfectly clear that from the earliest days the entrance upon the Christian life was marked by the ordinance of baptism. From the very first days also the meeting together of Christians was marked by a simple memorial meal taken in a solemn hush which vividly recalled the evening of the Last Supper. Of course these acts were intended to be significant, and of course their sig nificance is the important thing about them. A word is not merely letters and syllables. It is content and meaning. The important question about it is not its spelling, but What does it say? It was expected that when the families of Israel were gathered together in the land of promise to observe the Passover for an " ordinance to thee and thy sons forever," the children would say, " What mean ye by this service ? " and it is recorded that it should be regarded as quite as impor tant to explain its meaning as to continue the obser vance. When, with reference to baptism and the Lord's Supper, we ask, " What mean ye by this service ? " we are fortunately not left to speculation. We ought not to be surprised to find that the most vital things of the Christian message are enshrined in these forms. There is very little theory which is directly expressed by them, but very much of fact. In Romans 6 Paul writes as if the significance of baptism had so often been explained that his readers [75] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS might be expected to understand it and to draw the obvious conclusions. Puncturing the Antinomian ar guments by which apparently some of them had hoped to save their favorite sins, he says : " How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein? Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." Jesus Christ was dead and buried, and rose again, and in this significant ordinance of burial and resurrection I declare that I deserved to die, that he died for me, that I accept his death for me and declare it my own.. Whoever takes the death and the new life out of the Christian experience robs it of its unique value. Whoever interprets this as involving merely a. theory and not requiring a life of positive holiness and actual service, is sadly degrading it. Paul pleads that we make good on the proposition and show that we are free from the dominance of sin by the exhibition of a new life. What baptism says is more important than how it says it. Here indeed is the chief mischief of sprinkling and any. of the substitutes for baptism. Those who urge a more convenient baptism plead that " any application of water signifies cleansing." That might do for the Jewish ablution. Perhaps it is conceivable that that might have served for John's baptism and the inter pretation of the message to repent. It might easily serve to indicate a purpose to reform, to change the outward manner of life. But herein consists the unique addition which Jesus made to the Old Testament. His purpose was not the polishing up of the old life, but giving a new one. The keyword of the Old Testament is righteousness, [76 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORDINANCES purity. The key-word of the New Testament is life; " I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly." And as in all nature, that life springs out of death. Christ died for me. Perhaps there is a time when our tongues, schooled in the prosaic habit of the West, striving to conform to the standard of an earthly tribunal of justice, may have stammered at the word vicarious. These last fearful years have served to accustom our thought to it. So much of life is shown to be vicarious that we have learned it is the regular order. With even less hesitation than in other days, without shame, because of the necessities of my case, I say, " Christ died for me." My baptism says, " I died, and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." Far more than ritual is the significance of the death with Christ and the reality of the life in him. No sub stitute for Christian baptism declares these basic facts. The serious objection to any substitute is that it obscures them. We need the emphasis of this truth with every new Christian life. The words in which the Last Supper was explained place solemn emphasis on the same fact : " This is my body, given for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for many, for the remission of sins. This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remem brance of me ; for as oft as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death, till he come." We are assured that the purpose of this ordinance is defeated when it is partaken of, not by one lacking some outward condition of eligibility, but by one with out the inner discernment which enables him to per ceive the Lord's body. No formal participation in either ordinance is of value if it does not tell the truth about our personal relation to him. No acceptance of [77] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS any doctrinal statement about him can take the place of a personal experience of him. We are always brought back to him. " Christ is all." " Christ liveth in me." " Christ in you, the hope of glory." No theories about him, right or wrong, determine our standing in him. We should do our poor best to have them right, but blessed be his Name, my imperfect thinking does not wholly exclude him. And indeed, we have known some who had great confidence that their ideas were correct, who made gruesome repre sentations of his spirit. We cannot too often be brought back into his personal presence and face to face with him. From henceforth let there be but one only Baptist fundamental. Let all inferences from it take their second place. " Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." I am proud to claim fellowship with any man who is on that foundation, even though "his mind does not go along with mine " all the way. I am sorry when any brother draws away from me merely because I do not draw all of his inferences from that foundation. But I- can only " remember Jesus Christ " and try to follow him as he went about doing good to the sick and sorrowing, the hungry and discouraged. I have a deep conviction that the Bible is inspired, but that conviction does not include the inspiration of its inter preters, not even in the twentieth century. I cannot give my assent to the modern version of the parable of the Good Samaritan, which would suggest that, if we are on our way down to Jericho, and see beside the road a suffering pilgrim who has fallen into misfortune by the way, the proper and orthodox procedure for us is neither to pass by on the other side nor to administer oil and wine, but to take our seat on the curbstone across the street and figure out a time-table of the [78] THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORDINANCES coming of the Lord. The next step is to conclude that our time-table is inspired, and finally to require that all the brotherhood accept it on pain of demotion. Can we not carry in our minds two simultaneous ideas: first, the salvation by grace of the individual soul ; then, the New Testament teaching as to how the saved disciple is to operate, on the Jericho road and on the journey of life? It is not a superfluous or less spiritual work to give due interpretation and emphasis to the duties and obligations of the new life. We cannot afford to forget that He who came to save the souls of men left us one only outward and visible test by which our attitude toward him is finally to be judged, namely, this, our interest in the hungry and thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. I cannot preach Christ and ignore in my program the work which he was accustomed to do. I cannot discern his body, and neglect the work his body did. He was apparently less concerned about what we call him than about what we do with his orders. Let no other thought, however true, usurp the place of primacy which belongs to him alone. Baptists do not place too much emphasis upon the ordinances, but when that emphasis is only on their form, obscuring their significance, it is sadly mis placed. [79] VI NORTHERN BAPTISTS AND THE DEITY OF CHRIST JOHN MARVIN DEAN, D. D. Director ofthe Dean Campaigns of Evangelism and Bible Study NORTHERN BAPTISTS AND THE DEITY OF CHRIST Northern Baptists are Trinitarians. They worship Jesus Christ. He is their sovereign God. " The Word was God." They do not believe merely in the Lordship of Christ, but with Thomas they cry, " My Lord and my God ! " They do not have mental reservations concern ing Christ's deity. They would be false to the best that their minds and hearts teach them, false to the Sacred Scriptures, false to the testimony of the centuries, and false to human experience in the spiritual laboratory of prayer if they did not worship the Lord Jesus Christ. To the Jew Christ may be an impostor; to the Unitarian he may be a moral example; to the Catholic he may be a remote God, to be approached only through the mediation of Mary and the saints; but to the Baptist he is the Creator-Redeemer, to whom the soul of man moves inevitably and directly, and before whom it rightly bows in humble adoration and solemn worship. Baptists give a glad assent to the words of Lyman Abbott when he cries, " I have no thought of God that goes beyond Jesus of Naz areth." Baptists claim that no sin compares with the rejection of Christ as God and Saviour. The Baptist's message to the world is, " Turn from sin and self-suf ficiency and fall at the Sovereign Saviour's feet." The Baptists feel that he is blind indeed who has not seen the glory of Christ's deity. Baptists do not deify Christ, for one cannot " godify " God. They only, with very great reverence and godly fear and with un utterable tenderness, recognize and acclaim the eternal fact of the Triune God, and call upon rebellious men to [83] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS join with angels and with saints and with the in numerable witnesses of the vast creation in unitedly adoring the Christ of God. If the Baptist Jay mn-book were reduced to a single selection that selection would be: All hail the power of Jesus' name! Let angels prostrate fall; Bring forth the royal diadem, And crown him Lord of all. Let every kindred, every tribe, On this terrestrial ball, To him all majesty ascribe, And crown him Lord of all. Northern Baptists believe that the twelve apostles were the first Baptists. In substance and essence their teaching is our teaching. We stand willing to correct our doctrines and amend our conduct by their stand ards. If they were living on the earth today we would hasten to join ourselves to them in fellowship and co operation. They taught unequivocally the deity of Christ. In particular they taught his preexistence. His life, they declared, did not begin at Bethlehem: the Son of Mary was also the Eternal Son of the Father. Language was exhausted to describe his prerogatives. He was " before times eternal." He was " in the form of God, yet considered not his being on an equality with God a thing to be retained," but for our sakes descended to the Cross. "In the beginning was the Word." " The Word was God." " The Word be came flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father." " That which was from the beginning our hands handled, and we declare unto you." " Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth." " A Lamb slain before the foundation of the world." " Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, yea, and forever! " The significance of [84] THE DEITY OF CHRIST these statements is far greater than we are apt to think. We have been Trinitarians so long that we forget these utterances fell from the lips of men who had been the most intense of Unitarians. When pious Israelites, born and matured in the most radical of monotheistic schools, teach the preexistence and eternal nature of an earthly human associate, their words should not only have the value of gold but the weight of gold. Why did the apostles teach the preexistence of Christ? The facts compelled them to. There was the fragrance of another world about Jesus Christ. They lived with him for three years, and they rightly concluded that such living and thinking evidently had their source in another world, differently conditioned and conducted from this world, a realm where values and standards were wholly unlike their own. He impressed them equally as a Brother and as a Foreigner. His whole life persisted in running counter to the grain of the world to which they were accustomed. His deeds had the motives of heaven : his speech had the accent of heaven : his philosophy as sumed the authority of heaven. He utterly refused to accept the stamp of the commercial, social, ecclesiastical, or scholastic world of the time. He manifestly brought with him his credentials from a ranking, heavenly juris diction. The profound allusions of the Son of God deeply im pressed them. Sometimes casually, sometimes with sol emn emphasis, he dropped sentences that amazed and staggered them : " I came from the Father; I go to the Father." " The glory I had with the Father before the world was." " In heaven they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God." " I am the bread that cometh down from heaven." " Before Abraham was, / am." These and numerous other utter ances spoken with the vast miracle of his life to enforce them, broke down their preconceived ideas of him, [85] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS pushed out the partitions of their minds, and led them on to final convictions. They discovered that he who lived as though under the rules of heaven and not of earth, could speak intimately of that condition and realm from whence he came. The apostles did not fail, either, to note with more than fascinated interest the recognition accorded him by angels and evil spirits. In these they believed. But they were not prepared to see them so subservient to Christ. As the followers of the Nazarene went on from experience to experience, the angelic evidence accumulated. There were angels to herald him. At his cradle the sky glowed with them. At his temptation they ministered unto him. They attended him as the birds of the field were wont to flutter about the head of the holy Saint Francis. They were at his tomb and at his ascension. Twelve legions of them stood, full-panoplied and ready, in the shadows of the Garden of Gethsemane. And there was not only the bright testimony of the angels; there was the dark en dorsement of frightened evil spirits. These knew him. There was recognition. They had seen him before Mary saw her Babe at Bethlehem. " What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the Most High God? We know thee, who thou art, thou Holy One. Hast thou come to torment us before the time?" Thus beings bright and fair and spirits dark and sinister alike acknowledged their Master in realms other than human and earthly, and the amazed disciples took notes, pondered, and went steadily on toward the ultimate truth of his person. But more weighty than these considerations in the minds of the apostles was the fact of his deathlessness. To their astonishment he did not die. His body died, but he survived it and revived it, transformed it and appeared in it openly and repeatedly for forty days before finally leaving his Church in the Ascension. It was easy to dis cover the preexistence of Christ by the illumination of [86] THE DEITY OF CHRIST his post-ascension life. Standing in the glow of the resurrection, they saw with startling clearness the eternal nature of their Master. Long prior to the resurrection they had accumulated part of the materials from which the Christian doctrine of the Deity of Christ was to be erected. It was material largely having to do with the astounding moral miracle of his sinlessness, as well as with the considerations already advanced as operative in their minds. As we, even in our day, read such an interpretation of the person of the Nazarene as Bushnell gives in his " Character of Jesus," or such an argument from the human Nazarene to the Divine Logos as Carnegie Simpson follows in " The Fact of Christ," or the conscientious analysis of the qualities of the Son of Man that Speer attempts in " The Man Christ Jesus," we find ourselves partially able to get the effect that the Life of Lives thus had upon the apostolic mind. But the apostolic mind owed no slight accelera tion to the frequent glimpses that, even before Pentecost, his followers had obtained of his omniscience, his om nipotence, and omnipresence. The resurrection and the early days of the apostolic history completed the evi dence and thus gave final form to their definition of Christ. They found him possessed of more than human wis dom. Not alone the high and unique order of wisdom exemplified in the Sermon on the Mount, but the dramatic foretelling of events as, for instance, his own violent death, its manner, his resurrection, the destruction of Jerusalem and the victory of his Word. The full evi dence of the omniscience of Christ could not be known to them nor even the full value of the evidence they themselves presented. It has, for instance, taken long centuries to appreciate the true altitude of the Sermon on the Mount. As we travel away from it in time, it rises higher and increasingly dominates the moral and intel- [87] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS lectual landscape. The apostles were hidden in the foot hills of this mighty peak, too near perhaps to realize the intellectual grandeur of his utterances- or to appreciate the vast perspectives of his far-seeing mind. They were perfect reporters. But it has taken the ages to adequately interpret and assay his wisdom, and that work is not yet fittingly accomplished. But they found him unhesitat ingly to be All-wise. He was to them omniscient. Of all men then living on the earth they had perhaps the greatest depth of soul. Under the shadow of the Cross they tested him with their yearning, eager questions, and even when the shadows were darkest, and the light of the resurrection had not been vouchsafed to them, they clustered about him in the upper room and passionately declared : " Now know we that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou, earnest forth from God." There was no need of asking him more soul-questions. He had answered them all. They had found their point of rest in the wisdom of Christ. He was found also to be omnipotent. It was their high privilege to turn page after page in the book of his strength. They assisted him at his clinics where he re versed the processes of disintegration and decay and shortened the long, patient healing processes of nature into the flash of a single second. He drove before him the fevers, cancers, and leprosies of men. He called men back from the portals of Hades. He reached the long arm of his healing across the nineteen miles of space from Cana to Capernaum. He suspended the law of gravitation and made the unstable waters his sufficient pavement. He breathed upon " a great storm " and smoothed it into "a great calm." He who had not a place to lay his head accepted the obligation of five thou sand guests in a desert place and sent them away well satisfied. He transmitted his healing powers to others. [88 THE DEITY OF CHRIST He made health contagious. Nature was made for him and made way before him. The very universe seemed to salute him. Death threw its shadow over him and paid the penalty of its affront by losing forever, from that time forth, its power to throw a shadow into any soul that trusted in him. They also discovered him to be omnipresent. This must have been to them a supreme discovery. It is true that he had said, " Lo, I am with you alway." It is also true that he had said, " Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst." But they may have taken these words figuratively. They were soon, however, to experience their blessedly literal fulfil ment. Hardly had the Church begun its work, than the good news began to come in that Christ was everywhere! The apostles and disciples compared notes. On the very day that Christ showed himself near Damascus to Paul, it was found that he could show himself to the Twelve in Jerusalem and to Philip in Samaria. It is difficult for us to imagine the splendor of that great revelation — the tri umphant truth that the Risen Christ was with every one of his disciples everywhere they might go in his name- When this was realized the Church became irresistible. It is true that imprisonment and death threatened them in every- place, but Christ also waited to welcome them in every city and town. No committee met without him, no church worshiped without his presence, no apostle wended his way through a desert place unaccompanied by his Lord, and no lone martyr endured the final bite of the Empire's jealous hate without the mysterious recom pense of a Saviour's dying grace. His multiplied leader ship was in the very air. Lo.. on the darkness brake a wandering ray — A vision flashed along the Appian Way, Divinely in the pagan night it shone, A mournful Face, a Figure hurrying on. [89 BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS "Lord, whither farest?" Peter wondering cried; " To Rome," said Christ, " to be recrucified." Into the night the vision ebbed like breath, And Peter turned, and rushed on Rome and death ! He was in Jerusalem, but also in Antioch; he was in Ephesus, but also in Rome; he was in Alexandria, but also in Illyria. Jesus Christ was discovered to be omni present. It was, then, experiences such as these that gave to the world its first Baptists, men committed profoundly to the only possible interpretation of his being ; namely, that he was the incarnate God himself. In the cathedral at Copenhagen stands the benignant figure of Thorwaldsen's Christ. It has become a Mecca for the lovers of beauty and for the devout in heart. A traveler came from afar to see the famed production. He looked long and critically, standing first near and then back, then to the right and again to the left. He finally turned away disappointed. But a little child standing beside him and eagerly watching his face said : " Oh, sir, you cannot see Him that way. You must get very close, and fall on your knees and look up!" It was this that the manifest Deity of Christ had led the apostles to do, and in the doing of it that Deity was still further unveiled and unfolded to their ardent gaze. Their loyalty to his teaching followed as a matter of course. They would have permitted themselves to be torn limb from limb rather than change his orders or his ordinances. Their vivid conviction as to his Deity photo graphed like a flash of lightning upon their sensitized hearts an indescribably strong devotion to his person. Who would have dared suggest to them the whittling and belittling conceptions of Christ contained in modern liber alism? They cut their way sharply through the false re ligions and confusing philosophies and corrupt culture of their day. No system, however pretentious or subtle [90] THE DEITY OF CHRIST or insinuating, could daunt or defeat or swerve these first Baptists, for they had stood on the holy mount with Christ. He alone could save. He alone could organize his Church. He alone would be permitted to present to it its doctrines. And he alone would be recognized in the executing or the changing of its ordinances. They wor shiped him. And their spiritual children still worship him! The millions of modern Baptists, marvelously blest of God despite all their unworthiness, still proclaim the Triune God, still press his claims upon the souls of men, still declare the infinite compassion of his redemp tion through sacrificial blood, and still baptize those who in penitence turn to a living, reigning Christ, into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Yet the modern Baptist does not believe in the Deity of Christ alone because Paul and John did so. Christ is re vealing himself directly to his modern disciples. We cry with the delighted Samaritans : " Now we believe, not because of thy speaking : for we have heard for ourselves^ and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world." Men are constantly meeting the Divine Christ. Slow-witted Moody met him, and became a field-marshal of the kingdom of God. Desperate John Woolley met him, and turned from thoughts of suicide to a noble achievement in service to humanity. Gordon, of Boston, met him in the quiet of his library, and the Clarendon Street Church became famous the world around. And what shall we say of Florence Nightingale and Thomas Chalmers, and William Booth, and Hudson Taylor, and Charles Spurgeon, and John G. Paton, and George Muller, and Andrew Murray? Yes, Baptists of America! what shall we say of Henry Morehouse, and John A. Broadus, and P. S. Henson, and William Cleaver Wilkinson, and Henry Weston, and George C. Lorimer, of Mabie and Chivers, of Haskell and Armitage, of Sey- [91] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS mour and Carroll, of Boardman and Hoyt, of Conant and Wooddy, of Hovey and Wayland, of Bickel and Clough ? Did they not know the Divine Christ? Did they not march under Immanuel's banner? Did they not gladly bow the knee to the Supernal Son of God ? Did they not know him in whom they had believed? Were they the sons of doubt or the sons of faith? Shall we substitute for their kind of leadership the endless interrogations of the German universities? Shall we shrink our thoughts of the Christ to fit the latitudinarianism of the hour? Or shall we expand them in a worthy attempt to make room within our minds and hearts for the transcendent facts that have to do with a proper faith in God the Son of God? These are not the days to believe less. Time does not dilute, it enriches the stalwart creed of the Baptists. " The Bible has passed through the furnace of persecu tions, literary critcisms, philosophic doubt, and scientific discovery, and has lost nothing but those human interpre tations which cling to it like alloy to precious metal." The centuries have a like witness to the Deity of Christ. Time but clears the mists from the towering fact of the redemptive manifestation of God in Christ Jesus. Yes, the Eternal Christ is with us. He is ours to wor ship and to serve. His bugles are pealing throughout the Church Militant. A great hour is upon us. Vast vic tories are within our grasp. Northern Baptists! let us repudiate apostasy. Let us demand a leadership in our denomination that is above suspicion. Let us inaugurate, by a holy loyalty to Christ our God, the noblest era of evangelism, missions, justice, and righteousness in all re corded time since Calvary became a fact of history. Let us whole-heartedly return to our first love. Let us exalt the Name and splendor and preeminence of our majestic Redeemer. Then we cannot fail of a stupendous triumph in the hearts of men. [92] THE DEITY OF CHRIST Lead on, O King Eternal; The day of march has come; Henceforth in fields of conquest Thy tents shall be our home: Through days of preparation Thy grace hath made us strong, And now, O King Eternal, We lift our battle-song. Lead on, O King Eternal: We follow, not with fears: For gladness breaks like morning Where'er Thy face appears: Thy Cross is lifted o'er us: We journey in its light; The crown awaits the conquest: Lead on, O God of Might. 03 | VII HISTORIC BAPTIST EMPHASIS ON PRAYER S. W. CUMMINGS, D. D. Pastor, Firtt Baptist Church. Pasadena. Calif. HISTORIC BAPTIST EMPHASIS ON PRAYER Historically Baptists have thrown themselves upon God. They have recognized no intermediary save Jesus himself. Taking the Bible as their creed and the Holy Spirit as their guide, they have found access to the Father through Christ alone. They have made it their first concern to be in harmony with God's re vealed word and God's manifest program. Strength of numbers, efficiency of organization, perfection of machinery, important in their proper relation, were made to take secondary place. Prayer to them has been not the attempt to enlist God's approval upon a man-made program, but it has been the means of en listing themselves upon the side of God's proposed program. E. M. Bounds, in opening his book " Power through Prayer," says: We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel. This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man, or sink the man in the plan or organization. God's plan is to make much of the man, far more of him than of anything else. Men are God's method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. We are frequently asking what is the distinguishing Baptist principle? Doctor Mullins states in his " Axioms of Religion " that the historical significance of the Baptists is " The competency of the soul in re ligion — a competency under God, not a competency in the sense of human self-sufficiency." My old teacher, [97] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Dr. Henry G. Weston, used to announce the Baptist position to be " the personal relation of the personal sinner to a personal Christ." Baptists have, and still must therefore, put great emphasis upon prayer, as it is one of the main links which makes this personal rela tionship possible. It has been this personal reliance upon God that has enabled us to grow from a small and despised sect to a denomination of leading power in this country and in the world. We must not allow any force of circum stances in these present days to turn us aside from that high and true position so strongly taken in earlier times. Our new movement in missionary outlook and enter prise was born in prayer. In the small group of lay men that met in Cleveland, and later in the Committee of One Hundred, prayer had first place. The Lay men's Campaign for $1,000,000 and the Victory Cam paign for $6,000,000 grew out of these counsels per meated by prayer. The present status of The New World Movement must be kept within the compass of prayer or we will find ourselves adrift and helpless. Some affirm that the relation of our New World Move ment to The Interchurch Movement has been a source of weakness rather than of strength ; that, ac cording to their belief, the policy and appeal of the Interchurch has been too much that of man-made devices rather than that of absolute confidence and dependence upon God's direction and power that Bap tists have ever emphasized. The emphasis we put upon prayer reveals itself not so much in the time we put upon prayer, or in the phraseology in which we shape our prayers, as it is revealed in the attitude of our whole life to God and our cooperative program with him in Christian service. The very conditions superimposed by the World [98] HISTORIC BAPTIST EMPHASIS ON PRAYER War and the aftermath of the war have necessarily given strong place to the humanitarian call of the world. Most of our young people throughout the land are touched by this call and desire to make their lives tell in some worthy way for the good of others. But after all, is not the great need of the world today to be brought to a state of mind and heart that recognizes not simply a sympathetic Jesus touched by the world's pain, but also a holy and judging Christ; where shall be raised aloft an authority not ecclesiastical, but spiritual and Christian, that shall bring to a self-con fident and self-satisfied humanity, whether organized as nations, or unions, or corporations, a note of divine judgment in human affairs — a God not of our own making, but a God who has made us ? This means not how we can call in God as an aid or ally to attain the plan we have in mind, however worthy, but how we can give God the glory and obedience he merits and demands. As Doctor Jowett says : " We do not pray to ingratiate God's good-will, but to open our souls in hospitality. We do not pray in order to create a friendly air, but to let it in ; not to propitiate God, but to appropriate him." Doctor Fosdick says : In the churches, service is the popular note, and the favorite hymns are " The Son of God Goes Forth to War," " Soldiers of Christ Arise," and their kind. Our failure in prayer is partly due to the prevailing temper of our generation, which in its splendid enthusiasm for work has neglected that culture of prayer, on which in the end the finest quality of spirit and the deepest resources of power must depend. Is not this one reason why keen observers note that our generation is marked by practical efficiency and spiritual shallowness? May we not hope to keep in ourselves the best gains of this efficient age and at the same time recover the "practice of the presence of Christ." Prayer is above all else communion with God. The [99] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS soul needs and wants God. An instinct of his being leads man to Him; out of the hunger of his heart he cries to God, and God answers. In reply to the dis ciples' request, Jesus said, "When ye pray, say, ' Our Father.' " He further encouraged them with the thought that if earthly parents give good gifts unto their children, how much more the Heavenly Father. The filial spirit marks the real approach to God. All true prayer is founded on the spirit of our Lord's words, " Not my will, but thine be done." The pur pose of prayer should not be to pull God down into our ways and to induce him to carry through our plans, but to bring us into harmony with his all-wise pur pose, and to discover his will that we may obey it. The Christian's cry will be, " Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." In a recent religious periodical the writer of an article entitled " The Benedictine Life " says : Prayer, like every other kind of effort, has its end; but, un like any other kind of effort, its end is unique — it is the union of the soul with God. Prayer is a graduated thing of differ ent degrees and stages, but in each of these the soul becomes more and more as God wishes it to be; it gives and loses and gets and gives itself again; it gives itself to God, it loses its own selfishness, it receives of God's goodness in return, and again gives this to others without any spiritual loss. And so, quietly, surely, and persistently, now in one way and now in another, in darkness, in grayness, or in light, in yearning or in hardship, in refreshment or in ease, the soul goes on to God, until God, who is ever becoming more attractive to it, becomes in the end, the one and only object of its life. Prayer should come before planning. Too often we form our plan, work out our program, and then ask God to help us put the plan or program through. Prayer is not " a sort of magic by means of which we can induce God against his natural inclination to show us a favor." Is it to be wondered at that so many [100] HISTORIC BAPTIST EMPHASIS ON PRAYER prayers get nowhere and accomplish nothing? " You ask and receive not, because you ask amiss." Few will doubt the subjective effects of prayer. But must we stop there? Does prayer accomplish any thing apart from the reflex influence upon the sup pliant? Can it change conditions? Cure illness? Avert danger? Bring blessings? Are there objective effects through prayer as well as subjective? Baptists of the past evidently believed so. They took the Bible seriously and believed what it said. They proved its teaching true by experience. James says : " Elijah was a man subject to like pas sions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain ; and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heavens gave rain." And again the same writer says : " The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up " ; and " The effectual fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth much." Jesus prayed for Simon Peter and for others. He taught us in the model prayer he left us to pray each day for our daily bread. He said, after casting out the evil spirit of the boy at the foot of the Mount of Trans figuration, " This kind goeth not out but by prayer " ; and to his disciples he said, " Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest." To the one who holds that the effect of prayer is simply subjective, that it is nothing more than a reflex influence, it may be answered in the first place that there are few men and women of real religious experi ence who have not tested and proved to their complete satisfaction the Bible assurances as represented in the references given above. Grenfell, on the ice-floes, prays and deliverance comes ; the mother at home prays* and the boy at col- [101] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS lege is deterred from the evil step whilst on the very threshold ; the boy in the trenches, with sinking heart and quaking limbs, waiting for the order to go " over the top " which must come in a few minutes, prays for courage, and finds what he asks for through the com ing of the sergeant, with a friendly word of cheer and a clasp of the hand. The page of missionary history is full of amazing and miraculous answers to prayer. Joseph Clark on the Congo prays as the boat filled with cannibals approaches, and a wind rises that blows them off. Spurgeon and the wife join in prayer for her sinful husband, and the woman goes home to find the man on his knees crying for pardon and finding it. Gordon prays for the healing of the stricken man, and he recovers. George Mueller for years provides food and clothes for hundreds of orphan boys by asking help from no one save God. A few years ago I was a trustee of a home for needy boys and girls in Lowell, Mass. . I filled the office with others simply as a formality, in order to conform with the laws of the state. The woman in charge had taken over the home some time before. The buildings were then in bad repair, and a heavy mortgage stood against the property. She never made any appeal to the com munity. The whole upkeep and expense was met by donations received unsolicited. I was present at a meet ing when the accounts showed the mortgage paid off, the buildings in good repair, with the expense of pro viding for a large number of needy boys and girls in the home all met. Day by day this God-fearing and children-. loving woman made known her wants to her Father* in heaven, and he never failed through human agents to supply the need. , : • •= *. In the next place, if it be objected that prayer -hasv.no > power to change or offset conditions outside the praying mind, because to do so would override the fixed laws of [102] HISTORIC BAPTIST EMPHASIS ON PRAYER nature that God has established, it may be answered that God is not a slave to his own laws. The laws he has made are his servant, not his master. Moreover prayer is a force, and must take its place with all other created forces. God is not a God of disorder, but of order, and somewhere in his plan the prayer force co operates with other forces to secure the results desired. Some one has said: Man does not change God's mind when he harnesses elec tricity and makes it do work that otherwise it would not do. On the contrary, he fulfils God's will, for God has made man a coworker with himself. Likewise prayer does not change God's mind. It is man's part in cooperating with God. It does in us and gets done through us, what else would be impossible. And Dr. Augustus H. Strong puts it thus : The plans of God will never be executed unless we pray. But the plan of God includes our prayer. God decrees, but we must decree also. God has decreed to save the world, but he will not save it without us. We have our part to play in his plan, and his salvation comes about through the agency of his church, his ministry, and his followers everywhere. The statements of Jesus are clear and unmistakable. " If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." " Whatso ever ye shall ask the Father in my name, ye shall re ceive." " Ask, and it shall be given you." If this means anything, then it means everything. This leads us to say that while prayer is communion, it is also cooperation. It is the bringing of our will into union and cooperation with God's will. It will be of no avail to petition God to do something we can do for our selves. We have no right to call upon God to take our place, so we shall not be compelled to put forth the per sonal effort and sacrifice necessary to attain the desired end. God never does for man what man can do for him self. But when man finds himself at the end of his [103] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS rope, where his power is exhausted and only God can meet the emergency, it is then that God makes man's ex tremity his opportunity and does for man what he can not do for himself. It is well stated that " Work with out prayer is presumption, and prayer without work is sacrilege," or, by a boy, in these words, " Prayer is promising God I will do my best, and trusting him to do what I can't." Men can do nothing so efficient as to pray. It is the greatest privilege of the Christian church. Through prayer man obtains audience with the ruler of the universe. Through prayer the power of omnipo tence is at the disposal of the weakest saint. In the dawn of this new day which gains its incentive from Calvary's Cross and now rises over the charred battle-fields of Europe to prove that those who fell for righteousness have not died in vain, are we fit for our task if we let the insidious working of the Evil One manifest itself in the undermining of faith and the sub stitution of material for spiritual advancement ? Has not the time come when we must put greater emphasis upon prayer? We are unequal to the world's call unless we throw ourselves in complete dependence on him, and let his sufficiency overcome our insufficiency, his strength making us strong indeed through the power gained in the communion and cooperation made possible by prayer. At one time I was pastor of a church in a thriving manufacturing town in Nova Scotia. At the mouth of a coal-mine several miles from the town had been erected a large electrical power-plant. Over wires the power was carried to a central distributing-point and thence to every factory in the town. From a room in each fac tory the power could be turned on to drive each indi vidual machine. A child could turn on the switch that allowed power to operate through each machine and pro duce the result desired. God is operating a great power house. Over invisible wires this power can be com- [104] HISTORIC BAPTIST EMPHASIS ON PRAYER municated to each church and individual member throughout the world. Prayer is the switch that opens the channel of communication whereby God's power be comes effective. Wherefore, " Men ought always to pray, and not to faint." [105] VIII AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE J. W. PORTER, D. D. Editor. •* The 'Western Recorder ' AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE Mr. President and Brethren, with all my heart I wish to thank you for your cordial invitation to address this distinguished body of Baptists. In my judgment, there is nothing better than Baptists, but more Baptists and better Baptists. I desire also to assure you, that I never have, and never expect to feel more " at home," no, not even when I go home to heaven, than among you, who are contending for the like precious faith. I shall choose, as a basis for my remarks, the words that have made The Western Recorder perhaps the most loved and hated religious paper in all the world. Yet its shame is its glory, and its glory is to put to flight the enemies of the once delivered faith. It tries to thank God for its friends and its foes, and has the reputation of usually meeting the expectations of both. Let me, then, for a few minutes, exhort you to " earnestly con tend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints." Contention is the law of life, from the cradle to the grave. Apparently, God has not always permitted the survival of the fittest, but in all ages and with all people, he has decreed the struggle for existence. Life begins with a gasp, and goes out with a groan, and ceaseless contention marks each step of the way. Only in the re ligious realm do men deny the necessity for constant contention. Alas, we have fallen upon times, when many seem to believe that one faith is as good as another, and that no faith is good enough to contend for. The man who believes one doctrine is as good as another, is doc- trinally good for nothing. Practically the entire civil ized world has been contending on the bloody battle-field. [109] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Millions have, not counted their lives dear, that victory might come in the battle for universal freedom. Oh, that something of this same earnestness and deathless determination might characterize the soldiers of the Cross ! Sure I must fight, if I would reign; Increase my courage, Lord; I'll bear the toil, endure the pain, Supported by thy word. Conviction and contention have the same relation as cause and effect. One will contend for that which he believes in and loves. A man must, and will, contend for his honor and for the sanctity of his home. Yea, he will lay down his life for his loved ones. Should occasion demand, I trust I too should have the loyalty to lay down my life for those I hold dearer than life; yet should God require me to choose between my family and my faith, I should unhesitatingly choose the faith once for all delivered to the saints. With a heart bursting with a boundless love, I would turn from them, sus tained by the everlasting consolation that he who would not forsake father and mother, and houses and lands for " My sake," is unworthy of the Cross and the Crown. I am not unmindful, that owing to my contention, I am frequently referred to as " a Baptist and a half." Surely my unconscious friends do me too much honor, though I rejoice, and will rejoice in their words of splendid praise. The man who buys bank-stock at one hundred cents on the dollar, and it becomes worth one hundred and fifty cents, surely has cause for congratulation. Among our many acquaintances we cannot now recall one, who would prefer his bank-stock being fifty per cent, below par, rather than fifty per cent, above. There may be such, but we have not met them. We should bear in mind that contending for the faith is not a matter of choice, but of positive command. It is [110] AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE impossible to obey Christ and please God without con tending for the faith. The man who will not contend for the faith is not apt to contend for the Christ. Surely we can afford to contend for him who contended with death and hell for us. Mark you, we are not commanded to contend for faith, or a faith, but " the " faith. Saving faith is a subjective proposition ; but the faith is objective. It is a correlated system of New Testament doctrines, that is subject to neither addition, nor subtraction. Many have faith in Christ, and are therefore saved, and yet do not hold, or contend for the once delivered faith. It will not suffice to say, " My faith is all right, though there is a little error in it." With equal propriety, we might say of a glass of water, that " It is good drinking- water, though it has a little poison in it." A pie is not acceptable to the average man, or woman, though it con tain only one fly. One fly is quite enough to make saint, or sinner, say " good-bye " to an otherwise excellent pie. The churches are on the Mountain of Temptation. Only recently they have been offered the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them, if they would substi tute social service for a blood-bought redemption. If they would only open their doors to the unregenerate and the unbaptized, they were promised untold wealth, and suitable salaries for preachers. With all the earnestness of our soul we believe the success of the Interchurch Movement would mean the recrucifixion of Christ, and that too, at the hands of his professed friends. Millions of noble men and women followed in its train, and yet its attack was more deadly than any ever launched by its enemies. The rattlesnake before he strikes, gives his deadly rattle ; the viper, before he vomits his venom in the veins of his victim, gives his hiss; the tiger, before he rends his prey, gives his growl; and the wild eagle; before he seizes his victim, gives his scream of warnings [HI] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS but this ecclesiastical Goliath, in the guise of a friend, without warning, sought the destruction of doctrines and denominations. Should it succeed, we will virtually have two popes — one on the Tiber, the other on the Hudson. The fact that this faith was delivered to us, is quite sufficient to cause us to contend for it. We are trustees for the truth, and well may we sing " A charge to keep I have." We are stewards not only of dollars, but also of doc trines. Sound dollars without sound doctrines are as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. It would prove a good investment, for time and eternity, if some of our churches would exchange all that they have for a New Testament faith. When some of our brethren become as liberal with their dollars as they are with the doctrines committed to their keeping, they will have as much, or more money, than the Interchurch Movement promised them. Personally, I would rather misappropriate en trusted funds, than the entrusted faith. As a denomi nation, we dare not become defaulters ; we must, and by the grace of God, will not violate a sacred obligation. Just here I am reminded that, even concerning saving faith, Baptists have all the best of it. For example, if, as some insist, we are saved by works, certainly Baptists have their share. If we are saved by baptism, Baptists have the only one that is universally esteemed scriptural; Should it finally appear to us all, as it now does to not a few, that salvation is by grace, Baptists will be more than conquerors ; but what about others ? My friends, the enemy will not permit me to forget, that to those who earnestly contend for the faith, there will be applied some more or less endearing epithets. For instance, some of my somnambulistic friends occa sionally refer to me as " hidebound." Wise or other wise, the charge is literally and figuratively true. My [112] AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE hide is bound to my body, and will be, I trust, till the " skin-worms " begin their task. If a " skinning " is needed, I prefer to be the skinner, rather than the " skunt." Of course, if one's hide was not bound to the body, he might exchange it with the same facility that characterizes the exchange of ecclesiastical cuticle by some. Should a number of our friends, who are not " hidebound," lay off their hides, for a season, we would suggest a thorough tanning before they are returned to cover their tenements of clay, or sand, as the case may be. Those who are set for the defense of the gospel are quite commonly termed " narrow." For all such I must plead " guilty " to the impeachment. Truth is, and ever more must be, narrow. You may relate an incident in a thousand different ways, but it happened in only one way. We may tell many falsehoods concerning a mat ter, but the truth in only one way. The truth is narrow, and marked by metes and bounds. To broaden the bounds of truth is to enter the domain of falsehood. It is impossible to broaden a body of water without reduc ing the depth. Intellectual shallowness usually comes with spiritual broadness. We have yet to hear of a husband who compliments his wife upon her broad ideas of virtue. Social broadness concerns itself with affini ties ahd frequently terminates in the divorce court. Political broadness often ends in the Federal peniten tiary; while spiritual broadness quite frequently contents itself with " thirty pieces of silver," without the sequel of the potter's field. At all events, the New Testament gives us some specific information concerning two well- known ways : " Enter ye in at the strait gate : for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruc tion, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." [113] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS So we see that we have a " broad " way for broad people, and a " narrow " way for narrow people. One is broad and beautiful, but its terminal conditions are not all that could be desired. This faith is a finality, since it " was once for all " delivered to the saints. It is just as complete as is the atonement. It cannot in the very nature of the case be "progressive," but is a fixed and unchanging quantity. The fact of the late war did not, and could not, in any way change one jot or tittle of this faith. " Time writes no wrinkles on its brow," and it is immutable amid countless mutations. It is as divinely adapted to the needs of the twentieth century as to the first, in which it was given. There is no such thing as a new truth in theology, if that theology is built upon the New Testa ment. Some years ago an editor of The Recorder of fered one hundred dollars for a new truth. The reward is still unclaimed. The destructive critic, or any other agency of Satan, cannot change this faith. Hear the words of the Lord: " If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." Let us beware, lest we bring this consuming curse upon us. Let us, then, brethren, in spite of the " perilous times " in which we live, continue to contend earnestly for the faith, until He comes and consummates our contention in millennial glory. May the God of all grace hasten the coming of the day, when obedience to the one Lord, one faith, and one baptism shaU cover the world as the waters cover the sea; for then, and not till then, can Baptists cease their Christ-commanded contention for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. [114] AN UNEXPECTED MESSAGE Note: Doctor Porter is editor of The Western Recorder, Louisville, Ky. He was reporting the Conference for his paper. He was called for by the Conference in response to his most generous offer to finance and publish in book form the Confer ence addresses. This offer was gratefully acknowledged by the Committee, but declined, as the chairman said, because Doctor Porter hailed from the land where they still believe that " only hot biscuit are fit food for Christians." Doctor Porter is also pastor of the First Baptist Church at Lexington, Ky., and made many friends by this visit to our Convention. 115| IX THE BIBLE AT THE CENTER OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY A. C. DDXON, D. D. Professor, The Bible Institute, Loi Angeles, Calif, THE BIBLE AT THE CENTER OF THE MODERN UNIVERSITY The first verse of Genesis, " In the beginning God cre ated the heaven and the earth," reads like a perfect crea tion. There is no hint of fiery nebulosity. " The heaven " and " the earth " have clearly defined meanings in the Pentateuch. The inspired comment upon it in Isaiah 45 : 18 in forms us that God " formed the earth and made it : he established it: he created it NOT WASTE; he formed it to be inhabited." " The heaven " remained perfect, but " the earth," by some power not revealed, was wrecked. Mr. Anstey, author of " The Romance of Chronology," insists that the Hebrew word rendered " was " in the Authorized Ver sion must be translated became. " The earth BECAME without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Other authorities admit that it may be thus translated. The first three verses give us an epitome of the whole Bible : 1. Construction: God's perfect creations. , 2. Destruction: The wreck of God's perfect creations. 3. Reconstruction : Restoration of order out of chaos. Redemption is reconstruction, restoring man to the perfect character in the image of God which sin has wrecked. And the means used in reconstruction, ma terial and spiritual, is God's Word : " God said " ; " God said." And whatever God said was done. God's will expressed in words worked the wonders of creation and restoration. " God said, Let there be light " ; and when ever God speaks, the"re is light. " God divided the light [119] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS from the darkness " ; and this dividing of light from darkness will continue until at last there will be only two worlds, one of light and the other of darkness. •' God called the light day, and the darkness he .called night." '* And God .called, the firmament heaven." The Bible is God's dictionary of definitions, and its authority is the highest. When God defines sin, salvation, heaven, bell, or any other subject, it is wise to accept his defini tion as final. He knows. Mature Product First " God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind." It is plain that the mature product comes first. The herb yields the seed; not the seed the herb. The tree yields the fruit; not the fruit the tree. " And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and let the fowl fly above the earth." As in the vegetable, so in the animal kingdom, the mature product comes first, not the life germ producing the living creature, but the living crea ture that has the life germ. Not the egg that produces the fowl, but the fowl that produces the egg. This is economy of miracle. If the germ of animal or egg of fowl comes first, then there must be a series of many miracles to produce the mature product without the fos tering care of motherhood. But if the mature product comes first, reproduction takes place by natural law. No further miracle is needed. We will not pause to view this in relation to present-day science. Of that later. What appears now is that the Genesis record places the mature product first, whatever its relation to modern " science." A Perfect Civilization It is also evident that in the moral and social world the perfect comes first. In the second chapter of Genesis [120] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY is the highest type of civilization this world has ever seen. There is a perfect man and a perfect woman. And there can be no perfect society unless there be perfect indi viduals. There is for this perfect man and perfect woman per fect environment. " God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed." They are in the midst of fertility, beauty, and plenty. There is perfect employment. " The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden, to dress it and to keep it." Here is industry exerting itself in the cultiva tion of the beautiful and the useful, an ideal condition. There is perfect rest. " God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it." One day's rest in seven is the need of man's body and mind. The fifth day and the tenth have been tried, but they do not meet man's physical and moral need. He is built for one day's rest in seven. There is perfect law, for God himself is the law-giver. " The Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat : but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it." This invests him with the dignity of moral responsibility. There is perfect love in the marriage of one man and one woman. "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." It is not said that the woman shall leave all and cleave to her husband. It is taken for granted that she will do that. But the hus band leaves all for her. She has preeminence in the realm of love, and even a suffragette ought to be satisfied with that. Has any civilization on earth given woman a higher position than that? Verily not. There is perfect life. In the material, mental, moral, and spiritual realm all things are good. Th^re is no disease or death. Perfect life of body and soul prevails. r 121 1 'BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS A civilization of perfect character, perfect environ ment, perfect employment, perfect rest, perfect law, per fect love, and perfect life has never been surpassed in the history of the world. The Wreck of God's Perfect Order But there comes a change. A powerful personality, who may have had something to do with wrecking the perfect earth at first, comes on the scene. Speaking to those who had been listening to God's Word, he first calls in question the fact of revelation. " Yea, hath God said ? " " Are you sure that God has spoken at all ? Does God speak directly to his creatures? Is there such a thing as a revelation from God ? " Satan puts an inter rogation-point after the fact of revelation; and the fact that he continues to do so is clear proof that the person ality who operated in Eden is at work in the world to day. And when the reply is given, " God hath said," he calls in question the truth of revelation. " Thou shalt not surely die." " Such a revelation is too severe. It savors of cruelty. A God of love could not have said it ; or if he did, we have a right to reject it. It violates our inner consciousness." Another proof that the person ality in Eden is active in the world today. Then he goes a step farther and offers knowledge as a substitute for revelation. " God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be open, and ye shall be as gods, KNOWING." " Reject God's revela tion, or act independently of it, and your sphere of knowledge will be enlarged. Now you know only good ; then you shall know good and evil." This enlargement of knowledge marks the difference between heaven and earth, if not between heaven and hell. In heaven they know only the good ; in hell only the evil ; on earth good and evil.^ A desire to know the evil as well as the good has wrecked the character of many a young man in a few. [122] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY weeks after he has come from the pure atmosphere of a Christian home in the country to the great city with its monstrous mixture of good and evil. Some of our educational institutions do not hesitate to offer to students in lecture and text-book the evil as well as the good. At the commencement of a theological seminary, I heard the baccalaureate speaker say that seminaries ought to keep on their faculties at least one heretical professor, so that the students may learn the other side. That is, one professor at least should be per mitted to play the part of Satan by calling in question or denying the revelation from God, so that the students may know the evil as well as the good. Another proof that the personality in Eden still lives, and has to do with the preparation of baccalaureate ^addresses. By questioning the fact of revelation and then denying the truth of revelation with an offer of knowledge as a substitute for obedience and a further appeal to the physical nature, a " tree good for food," to the esthetic nature, " pleasant to the eyes," and to the intellectual nature, " to make one wise," Satan succeeds in wrecking God's perfect civilization. Sin enters " with all its woe." Man is brought down to Satan's level. " Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." And if Satan can induce us to call in question the fact of revelation, deny the truth of revela tion, and accept knowledge as a substitute for revelation through our physical, esthetic, or intellectual natures, he will bring us down to the dirt level with himself, and give us a diet of dust earthiness instead of the manna which comes down from heaven. He would thus make us crawl with him in the dust of low desire rather than look up and wait upon the Lord, that we may " mount up with wings as eagles, run, and not be weary, walk, and not faint." [123] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS The Conflict of the Ages As I stood on a hilltop near Geneva, Switzerland, and looked down upon the confluence of the Rhone and the Arve, I could but think of these chapters of Genesis. The Rhone flows out of Lake Geneva as pure as crystal, while the Arve comes tumbling down from the Alps tur bid with the many impurities it has gathered. As soon as the two rivers meet, there begins a conflict between mud and crystal; and after a few miles, the muddy Arve has gained the victory; the whole river is turbid. The first two chapters of Genesis are like the Rhone, clear as crystal, flowing from the great lake of God's power, wisdom, and love. There is no trace of sin. But the third chapter is like the muddy Arve flowing into this crystal river. There begins at once the conflict be tween mud and crystal till the mud of sin, through Satan's subtle temptations, gains the victory, and the whole river has been muddy ever since. The river is very muddy when Cain murders his brother in a religious quarrel (no falling upward here), and goes out from the presence of God ever afterward to ignore him and to found a civilization without God or altar. He builds a city, and it may have been magnifi cent in its architecture. But God has no place in it. There is education bordering on a university curriculum, but God is also excluded from that. Professor Jabal teaches agriculture and sends out many cattlemen who live in the fields with their herds. It was a civilization like that which still exists in portions of Western America, far removed from barbarism. Professor Jubal gave himself to music, and from him went out a great musical family skilled in handling harp and organ. Pro fessor Tubal-Cain was a great metallurgist, " an in structor of every artificer in brass and iron." It is an age of agriculture, music, and metal, but of moral de- [124] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY generacy. Polygamy begins. " Latnech took unto him self two wives " and murdered two men on account of them. He is the first polygamist, and the second re corded murderer. But the crystal water is still in conflict with the mud. Along the line of Seth, whom Eve recognized as spiritual successor to Abel, there continued a civilization which recognized God and called upon his name. The altar occupies a prominent place. We have in Genesis five the genealogy of these worshipers from Seth to Noah, in which is another Enoch, who did something better than give a name to a city. He walked with God. Noah also reached the same eminence. But the Arve of the godless civilization of Cain soon flows into the Rhone of the civilization of Seth, and again pollutes its waters. " The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose." The result was a race of giants, " mighty men," " men of renown," who filled the earth with wickedness, so degenerate that God was compelled to clear the earth of them, that he might start again a pure civilization with the altar and the family at its center. The student of history is startled by the fact that the vitiation of the true by the false results in strength with violence. Con- stantine by uniting the Christian Church with the Pagan State filled the world with a violence which drenched the centuries with the blood of martyrs. It made the Spanish Inquisition and many a kindred cabal of perse cution. Two Civilizations In 1620 there landed on Plymouth Rock a little com pany of men and women who were chased from their homes in England by the violent spirit of this unholy alliance. In the hold of the " Mayflower " they wrote a compact which had in it two phrases, " for the common r 125 1 BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS good," and " just and equal laws," which have been mighty factors in fostering the spirit of democracy and the love of justice among the American people. When I was in Old Boston, England, I went to the Guild Hall where are the prison cells in which John Bradford, William Brewster, and others were incarcer ated. I requested the janitor to shut me in one of the cells, that I might sit in the dark on the hard stone seat and meditate upon the " Mayflower " and what the little vessel with its Puritan passengers meant to the world. My mind flew across the Atlantic to the museum at Ply mouth in which are John Alden's well-worn Bible and the cradle in which little Peregrine White, the baby born on the " Mayflower," was rocked. Near by is the pot in which the pilgrims cooked their common dinners, and beside it, the long flint-lock gun of Miles Standish, the only soldier in the company. Here are the four pillars of the American commonwealth, the Bible, the home, the pot, and the gun. As I sat in the narrow cell, I saw the " Mayflower " still sailing across the ocean of time with all the nations on earth trying to get on board. And then I saw her multiplied a hundredfold crossing the Atlantic with three hundred thousand soldiers every month, still carrying the open Bible, the Christian home, the pot, and the gun, that all the nations of the earth may now enjoy the liberty which the Pilgrim Fathers braved the perils of the ocean to secure. Then I saw another ship landing at Jamestown, Va., with a civilization on board which approved of human slavery without thought of " just and equal laws " or " the common good." The " Plymouth Rock " and " Jamestown " civilizations were again like the conflu ence of the Rhone and the Arve, mud and crystal in con flict; and the mud at length prevailed. The spirit of slavery mastered New England. In the Old South Church, Boston, is still preserved the gallery under the [126] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY belfry in which the slaves sat during the Sunday ser vices. But finally the Plymouth Rock civilization was victorious, and since 1865 there have been no slaves under the American flag. Today " Old Glory " has the new glory of having delivered little Cuba from her strong oppressor and of having joined with Great Britain and her allies in defending the weak against the aggression of the strong. The same spirit has led to the victory of prohibition over the oppressive powers of the drink traffic in America, and now seeks to drive this enslaver of man from the face of the earth. Genesis of " Evolution " Let us trace this modern conflict between the weak and their oppressors back to its source. The Greek philosophers, between 700 and 300 B. C, were, with one exception, evolutionists. Thales, of Miletus, taught that water was the primordial germ. Heraclitus believed that fire originated all things, and Pythagoras, the mathe matician, was confident that number somehow brought life and form into existence. Plato, the greatest of all Greek philosophers, did not agree with his compeers. He believed that man began equal with the gods, and that beasts were degenerated men, contending that the monkey came down from man and not man up from the monkey. And Plato had the weight of evidence on his side even without a revelation, for any one with eyes in his: head can see that- there is more tendency in men to become, monkeys than in monkeys to become men. Darwin and Malthus ;. Charles Darwin, in his university course, caught the vision; of. the Greek philosophers and, rejecting the theory of Plato, became an ardent advocate of the hypothesis that everything was evolved from beneath ; that life originated with germinal, embryonic beginnings ; [127] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS that in nature there is perpetual war, which was called " the struggle for existence," the strong and fit destroy ing the weak and unfit, and thus causing everything to move upward. Darwin did not get his idea of perpetual warfare in nature from the Greek philosophers, who were more benevolent in their thinking. They believed that all life and form were evolved from beneath by quiet forces ; but they did not give the strong the scien tific right to destroy the weak. Darwin confesses in his autobiography that he received this suggestion from Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus, an Anglican clergyman, who died in 1834, when Darwin was twenty-five years old. I do not know that Darwin ever met Malthus, but he was a careful reader of his books, and in his auto biography admits that he was indebted to Malthus for the suggestion. Malthus taught that man increases with geometrical ratio, while food supply increases with only arithmetical ratio. Therefore wars and pestilences are necessary, that the surplus population may be killed off, in order that the remainder may survive. A little clear thinking makes it clear that Malthus was wrong. Man does not increase with geometrical ratio, while food does increase " some thirty, some sixty, and some an hundredfold." But Darwin was deceived by the plausible reasoning of Malthus, and made this mis take one of the foundation-stones of his scientific sys tem. It is a libel upon a benevolent God, who has provided enough for man and beast without demanding that the strong shall kill the weak. The fact that dolphins chase flying-fish for food, and that some ani mals are intended for the food of others does not prove that in nature there is perpetual warfare, but rather the contrary. It is a benevolent provision that some animals should be intended as food for others, so that the strong may subsist without a struggle with their equals for existence. Read George Paulin's books, "No Struggle [128] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY for Existence," " No Natural Selection." and you will see proof enough that there is no struggle for existence even among carnivorous animals, a benevolent God hav ing provided a kinder method of preventing their dan gerous increase. Of course, we are all evolutionists in the sense of Mark 4 : 28, " First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." Everybody knows that the embryo or germ in plant and animal develops by growth into the mature product. But evolutionary processes have no history. The growth of embryo or germ into mature product, as we see it, simply suggests to the imagination a similar process which, it is claimed by evolutionists, took place in the abysmal past. No one has ever observed it and its history, therefore, cannot be written. If, however, life began on earth with immature embryonic beginnings and evolved through countless ages into the mature product, it must have done so in obedience to the same laws which govern the development of the immature embryo as we see it develop today, and must be subject to the same limitations. Bear this in mind, for it is a fact of great importance. Now, though I confess a repugnance to the idea that an ape or an orang-outang was my ancestor, I have been willing to accept the humiliating fact, if proved ; but the more I have investigated, the more thoroughly I have been convinced that, if I am to be an evolutionist and thus keep up with the modern academic drift, I must refuse to let the gray matter of my brain work, while I permit others to do my thinking for me and accept their authority, not because of the reasons they give for their theory, but solely because of their eminence in the literary and educational world. But there are insur mountable difficulties in the way of my permitting emi nence to decide this matter for me. [129] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Facts Against Evolution 1. Immature, embryonic life is never reproductive. An embryo never multiplies into an embryo. Eggs do not hatch eggs. Wheat does not reproduce itself into wheat. Babies do not bear babies. Apples do not mul tiply into apples. Only the. mature product can produce an embryo or germ. This is true even in the lowest stratum of life. The cell becomes mature before it articulates another cell. Indeed, an embryo does not produce the mature prod uct, though it develops into it. The mature product is simply a full-grown embryo. The microscope reveals a symmetrical oak in the acorn. But the mature product may bring into being what did not exist before as a liv ing organism. It is not a question as to which came first, the embryo or the mature product, the egg or the eagle. If the egg was created first, with the possibilities, under certain conditions, of hatching into an eagle in a few days, that is not evolution; that is direct creation. Evolution de mands that the egg shall come into existence and through millions of years evolve into an eagle. If now, I am to be an evolutionist, I must believe that immature embryonic life came into existence millions of years ago, and continued to exist through the countless ages required for its development without the power of reproduction. An absurdity, which calls for great scien tific credulity. 2. Immature, embryonic life is unimprovable. The evolutionary theory demands that things shall move up ward. There must be improvement. But immature embryonic life can be improved only by improving the mature product. If you would secure better eggs, you must make better hens. " To touch protoplasmic life is to destroy it" Seek to improve the quality of an egg [130] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY by working directly upon it, and see the result ! Darwin experimented with pigeons ; but if he experimented with pigeons' eggs in any decided manner, he doubtless had on his hands a basket of rotten eggs. "A good tree bringeth forth good fruit," and the only way to get good fruit is to make the tree good. It is a universal fact that the only way to improve the quality of embryo or germ is to improve the mature product that yields it. If, therefore, I am to be an evolutionist, I must believe that immature embryonic life came into existence millions of years ago and continued to exist through successive ages without the power of reproduction and continued to im prove without the power of improvement. A twofold absurdity, which amounts to an impossibility in a healthy mind. 3. Immature, embryonic life is unpreservable. Em bryos and germs are easily destroyed. To exist at all, they must be carefully guarded, and nature makes pro vision for this. But no such provision has been or can be made for the preservation of embryos or germs through thousands of years. I thought there was one exception in the grains of wheat found with the mum mies of Egypt, which, after four thousand years, ger minated and produced wheat, though four thousand years is but the tick of a clock in the chronology of evolution, but Doctor Kyle, the distinguished archeolo- gist, tells me that there is no exception, for it has been proved that the wheat found with Egyptian mummies was in the straw which the workman used in packing them for shipment. A member of the British Associa tion recently said that, if embryonic life had been intro duced into the chaos of this earth, as it is said to have been introduced, it could not have survived. The evolu tionary hypothesis demands that embryonic life was in troduced in the midst of chaotic conditions and was preserved through succeeding ages. My difficulties in- [131] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS crease, for if I am to be an evolutionist, I must believe that immature embryonic life came into existence mil lions of years ago, and continued to exist through suc cessive ages without the power of reproduction, con tinued to improve without the power of improvement, arid continued to be preserved without the power of preservation. A threefold absurdity, which no healthy mind can admit. 4. There are two things lacking which are essential to the evolutionary theory: SPONTANEOUS GENERA TION AND TRANSMUTATION OF SPECIES. Professor Tyndall said that he could see " the promise and potency of life in matter." But he saw no such thing. As he looked at matter, he really saw the promise and potency of death. There is no promise and potency of life in a corpse, but there is a promise and potency of putrefaction. In wood or stone there is no promise and potency of life, but of disintegration into rottenness and dust. No scientist of any repute claims that life has really originated from lifeless matter. Naturalistic evolution which ignores God has no explanation of the origin of life. And theistic evolution which admits that God must have created matter and introduced life can give no good reason why a God who introduces one kind of life into suitable environment, should not introduce another kind of life under similar fitting conditions. The claim that one species of living things in plants or animals develops into another species has no facts in nature to support it. "After its kind," as in the first chapter of Genesis, is universal law. When one species unites with another, the result is a hybrid which is sterile, so' that the stubborn mule stands in the path of the evolu tionist and will not let him pass on his way of error. 5. Evolution, whether naturalistic, theistic, atheistic, or Christian, is pagan in origin and spirit. The Bible, which is the text-book of Christianity, teaches that God [132] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY created the mature product first and left this mature product to reproduce itself by natural law. As we have seen, this is economy of miracle, while the beginning of all life in immature embryonic form is forbidden by the scientific fact that embryonic life is never reproduc tive, it is unimprovable and unpreservable. One of the most pathetic bits of biography in exis tence is the effect of this pagan teaching and the atmos phere it produced in Darwin himself. In early life Darwin was a believer in the Bible as the word of God, and he believed that God answered prayer. In his later life he confesses with regret that he had lost all taste for poetry, music, painting, and religion. But to the last he was fond of the habits of worms. He wrote the best book on worms ever penned. He glorifies the little creatures as benefactors of mankind none too much. It is all true. But what I insist upon is that any theory or atmosphere which effaces all taste for music, poetry, painting, and religion, while it makes one revel in study ing the habits of worms, has something the matter with it ; and, when we observe that the effect of the theory in others is to drag them down from the spiritual to the natural, from the realm of music, poetry, painting, and religion to the realm of the worm as it works in the dirt and dark, we are driven to the conclusion that there is something in this pagan theory which drags us down into the mud, and robs us of the clearer vision and purer atmosphere of the higher spiritual realms. 6. Evolution with its " struggle for existence " and "survival of the fittest," which gives the strong and fit the scientific right to destroy the weak and unfit, is re sponsible for the oppression and destruction of the weak and unfit by the strong and fit. It has fostered auto cratic class distinctions and is no friend to the democracy which stands for the protection of the weak against the oppression of the strong. The greatest war in history, [133] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS which has drenched the world with blood and covered it with human bones, can be traced to this source. If the strong and fit have the scientific right to destroy the weak and unfit, that human progress may be promoted, then might is right, and Germany should not be criticized for acting upon this principle. The "Superman" Nietzsche, the neurotic German philosopher, hypno tized the German mind with his pagan brute philosophy. " The weak and the botched," said he, " shall perish ; first principle of humanity. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice ? Prac tical sympathy with the botched and weak — Christianity." " If what I publish be true," he wrote to an invalid woman, " a feeble woman like you would have no right to exist." " Christianity," he said again, " is the greatest of all conceivable corruptions, the one immortal blemish of mankind." And he hated it because of its sympathy with the weak and botched. He glorified his ideal Ger man " blond beast " and gave to the world a " super man," one-third brute, one-third devil, and one-third philosopher. Under the spell of his daring brutality, Germany adopted the motto, " Corsica has conquered Galilee." Nietzsche's philosophy of beastliness has its roots in the evolutionary assumption that the strong and fit, in the struggle for existence, have the scientific right to destroy the weak and unfit. Under the spell of Nietzsche's " superman " there came into the brain of the Kaiser the vision of a supernation, a national brute, devil and philosopher, with the scientific right to destroy all weaker nations and erect his throne upon their ruins. One Sunday morning, four months after the war began, I spoke something like this from the Metropolitan Taber nacle pulpit, in London; and, after the service a gentle- [134] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY man with military bearing appeared in the vestry and said : "I am a German, brought into London on a cap tured ship; and why I have not been interned I do not know; but I have an intimation that I shall be interned next week, and before I go I would like to give you a piece of my mind. You have said that this terrible war was due to Darwinian evolution, and I believe it. I hope I am a Christian. I love Jesus Christ and believe the Bible, but my wife and daughter have had their faith wrecked by Nietzsche and his pagan gang. But what I want to say to you is that we Germans got Darwinism from England. We took it from you and worked it out to its legitimate consequences. So, when you mention it again, speak softly, for you are really getting back what you sent." I could not deny it. Back of this war and responsibility for it is Darwin's pagan teaching that the strong and fit have the scientific right to destroy the weak and unfit. England and France This suggests the fact that France gave to Germany her first lessons in the destructive higher criticism of the Bible. It was Jean Astruc, a learned, dissolute French physician, of Marseilles, who first suggested that. Genesis had two authors. Doctor Eichhorn, of Germany, took Astruc's suggestion as a clue and announced that he had discovered many authors. Thus began a movement which has done more to discredit the Bible than any other movement of modern times. The scientists of Germany took Darwinism from England with its struggle for exis tence, giving the strong and fit the scientific right to destroy the weak and unfit, and gave to the politicians the infernal dictum that might is right, while the German theologians took from Jean Astruc his composite-author- ship-of-Genesis theory and worked it out to the dis crediting of the Bible as a revelation from God. Thus [135] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS England and France sent to Germany the forces which gave her a " kultur " that robbed her of her Christian faith and plunged her into the bottomless pit of national degradation. Through Darwin and Astruc England and France let loose a flock of scientific and theological vul tures which put their talons into the vitals of academic thinking and ethics in Germany, destroying faith in the Bible, and vitiating the spiritual life of the people. Strengthened by their feasts upon Germany's vitals, these ferocious birds returned to England to wreck the Christianity founded upon the Bible, which has been the glory of English history and which broke the fetters of papal superstition that for centuries retarded the progress of France. It was hoped that this world war, with its unutterable horrors, would open the eyes of the educators of En gland and France to the wreck of faith and character which their scientific and theological dreamers had wrought; but, instead of that, the religious, liberal lead ers of England and France, realizing that their rational istic theories and their books based upon them are in danger, are reasserting with nervous haste their destruc tive teachings. While victory on the side of liberty and humanity has checked, if not destroyed, German militar ism, it remains for those who believe and love the Bible to mobilize and fight the battle for the truth which has given to the world its passion for liberty and humanity. Darwin and Lincoln It is an interesting fact that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day, February 12, 1809, and in the lives of these two men continue the battle between mud and crystal. Darwin, born into an environment of wealth, through the teachings of Greek philosophers and of Malthus became the champion of the strong and fit against the weak and unfit. Abraham [136] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY Lincoln, born into an environment of poverty and strug gle, became the champion of the weak against the strong. He believed that the weakest and worst have the right of existence with fair treatment, and that the strong and fit, instead of destroying and weak and unfit, should be their protectors and benefactors. When he saw a negro woman in a New Orleans slave-market auctioned off to a rich slave-owner, he said, " If I ever get a chance to strike that thing, I will hit it hard." And he did hit it hard, when he led the movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery under the American flag. Let us turn again to Genesis and trace the crystal river of faith in the coming Messiah in conflict with the- mud of unbelief. In the curse- upon the serpent there is a promise that the seed of the woman (not man) shall bruise his head. Of course, we know who the serpent is : " that old serpent, which is the devil and Satan " (Rev. 20: 2). But do not think of Satan as Dore painted him, with horns, hoofs, bats' wings, and forked tail. Such a monster could tempt no one, except to run and get out of his way. Paul declares that Satan in this age is transformed as a messenger of light. His mission is to give light, historic light, scientific light, all kinds of light, if by any means he may satisfy the world with light without Him who is the light of the world. Satan would have our colleges, universities, seminaries, and churches blazing centers of light without the Light, Christ Jesus, as atoning Saviour. And Satan wishes his ministers to be ministers of righteousness. His favorite is the ethical minister who preaches a high standard of morality and humanity, urging people to be good and to do good with out salvation through the atoning blood of Christ. One of the great needs of the Christian Church today is a university with the Bible at its center as the standard of all truth, religious, moral, historic, and scientific, and the Lord Jesus Christ preeminent in the realm of knowl- [137] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS edge as in all other realms. The Bible, " the Impreg nable Rock of Scripture," as Gladstone called it, is the only book in which its religion, ethics, history, and science, are always and everywhere up to date. You have doubtless heard of the " scientific morgue " in Paris, a rather gruesome place, where dead scientific theories are laid out for inspection. Most of them died under twenty-five years of age. Almost every theory I studied in college is in the scientific morgue. But the Bible is not there and never will be. Its statements have fre quently been denied by high authorities, but time has always proved that the Bible is right. The Bible mentions Sargon, king of Assyria; but the historians, in the absence of all mention of Sargon in secular history, refused to accept its testimony, until the pick and shovel unearthed not only the date and deeds of Sargon's reign, but the ruins of his palace. So you see the Bible was twenty-five hundred years ahead of the historians. Wellhausen said that the five kings in Genesis four teen were fictitious characters born in the writer's im agination, but now through the ministry of the pick and shovel again it has been discovered that the date of Arioch's reign is " the one certain starting-point of ancient history." The Bible is again more than four thousand years ahead of the historian. When Job wrote, " He stretcheth out the north over empty space, and hangeth the earth upon nothing," he was three thousand years ahead of the astronomers. And when Job wrote again, " God understandeth the way thereof, to make a weight for the winds," he was thousands of years ahead of the scientists who, until comparatively recent times, taught that air was without weight, not suspecting that it pressed more than fourteen pounds upon every square inch. And now the facts of science against the fancies of all [138] THE BIBLE IN THE UNIVERSITY scientific romancers, ancient and modern, are confirming the teachings of Moses and the dim vision of Plato that man began perfect and was wrecked by sin. In some universities the theological schools are clus tered about the halls of history, philosophy, and science. It is time that the order should be reversed. Let the Bible school with teachers who believe in the infallible Book and give Christ preeminence in all realms, be at the center with the halls of history, philosophy, and science clustered about it. Let the Sun, and not the earth, be the center of God's solar system of truth. Paradise Restored In Genesis 6 : 14 we are told that God commanded Noah to make an ark, and " pitch it within and without with pitch." And the Hebrew scholar is almost startled to find, as he reads Leviticus, that the Hebrew word translated "pitch" in this verse is rendered "atone ment" all through Leviticus. It was the pitch which made the ark seaworthy, keeping out the waters of judg ment and keeping in Noah and his family. So the aton ing blood of Christ it is, which keeps out the waters of judgment and keeps in the subjects of grace. And all through the Bible we can trace the Messianic idea which grows fuller and fuller until it finds complete fulfilment in the " Lamb as it had been slain standing in the midst of the throne." "The Lamb as it had been slain " standing suggests life from the dead, and stand ing in the midst of the throne suggests royalty. It is the risen, living Christ with the marks of the cross upon him who gives us paradise restored. The perfect civili zation in Eden with its perfect environment, perfect em ployment, perfect rest, perfect law, perfect love, and perfect life, has been restored. To all who have accepted the crucified and risen Christ the muddy river has been clarified. God has recon- [139] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS structed their wrecked world through the death and resurrection of Christ. And we need not wait until the millennium for this experience in our own souls. If we will enthrone the risen Christ with the marks of the cross upon him in our hearts and lives, Paradise has been restored within us, the reign of Christ in us has begun. All hail the power of Jesus' name; Let angels prostrate fall; Bring forth the royal diadem (Ye men of the schools, colleges, and seminaries, and universi ties) AND CROWN HIM LORD OF ALL! 140 X THE BAPTIST PROGRAM OF EVANGELISM W. W. BUSTARD, D. D. Pastor, Euclid Avenue Baptiat Church, Cleveland, Ohio THE BAPTIST PROGRAM OF EVANGELISM A thing is a success when it does well that for which it was intended. This is a practical principle which we ought to apply to the work of the church today, as we ask ourselves the questions : " Why a Church ? " " What Is Its Mission? " " For What Purpose Did Christ Leave It in This World?" There are those who tell us the church is here to teach the truth, but we know that this is not the whole answer to the question nor the whole duty of the church. It is not even the primary function of the body of Christ. To start with, the church is not so much educational as it is regenerational. Or, to state the whole truth, the church is primarily regenerational and then educational. There are those who tell us that the church is here to help solve the social problems of the day and render social service to the community. Once again we have but a partial answer, for we know that evangelism is the program of the church, while social service is the by-product of this program. While it is good to clean up a community, it is better to clean up the people who live in the community, for the reformation of society is made possible only through the regeneration of human nature. There are those also who tell us that the church is here to preach the gospel. Of course the church should preach the gospel, but preaching the gospel is not an end in itself, neither does it end in itself. It is the divine means to a great end, which is the salvation of all those who believe in it. To answer our own question fully then, we would say, that the great mission of the church [143] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS is to win men and women into Christian discipleship and through them establish the kingdom of God upon earth. If the Baptist denomination is to adopt this as its program, there are three things we ought to believe, three things we ought to realize, and three things we ought to do. The first thing we ought to believe is in the authority of the Scriptures and inspiration of the word. The Bible is not only the god of books, but it is also the book of God. It is the word of God because it reveals the will of God. Regardless of the fact that everything has been done through centuries to destroy it by enemy, agnostic, and higher critic, every book in the Bible says to its critic what Paul said to the jailer, " Do thyself no harm, we are all here." It is a fact which is beyond contradic tion that the men and the churches, in our denomination, who are doing the greatest soul-saving work, are those who believe in the authority of the Scriptures and the inspiration of the Bible. The second thing we ought to believe is in the divinity of Christ, and, by this I do not mean that he is divine as the rest of us, but he is " God of very God," " God mani fested in the flesh," " God doing his work through his own Son for the redemption of the race." What others say about Christ ought to make very little difference to us, but what Christ says about himself ought to decide the matter of his deity beyond all controversy. Jesus said, " I am not of this world." He said, " I am the light of the world," " I am the way, the truth, and the life." " Before Abraham was, I am." When Thomas said, " My Lord and my God," Jesus did not rebuke the disciple nor refute the statement. Christianity is the only religion which has a divine Saviour in it. Buddha was a teacher, Mohammed a prophet, and Confucius a philosopher, but Jesus is the world's only Redeemer. [144 THE BAPTIST PROGRAM OF EVANGELISM The third thing which we ought to believe is the effi cacy of the atonement on the Cross. The Bible reveals but one plan of salvation, and that is redemption through faith in Christ's atoning blood. There is character by salvation, but there is no salvation by character. The Cross is the pivot around which the progress of the world moves and upon which the hopes of humanity depend. In connection with the evangelistic program of our de nomination, there are three things which we must realize : 1. There is something from which men must be saved, and that is sin. Jesus never denied the reality of sin. He dealt with it as something which actually existed in the hearts of men and the world around him. He spent part of his time in forgiving sinners, but never spent any of his time trying to reason sin out of existence. The trouble with sin is not that it is unreal, but that it is alto gether too real. Today the church must face sin as the chief thing which keeps men from God— something which makes possible all the unhappiness that is in the world, which fills even the nations of the earth with a selfish ambition, and which may at any time turn the earth into a human slaughter-house again. 2. There is something with which man can be saved, and that is the power of God. This is the one thing which is even greater than the power of sin. Marvelous as is the power of God as we see it in the creation of the world, it is even greater as we behold it in the redemp tion of man. In this great work of salvation, the church does not have to depend so much on its own human strength as on God's divine power. In the work of man's salvation, God is seen at his best. No one is be yond the reach of his redeeming grace. 3. There is something to which men should be saved, and that is service. God's best gift to men is man, and God has seen fit to employ the redeemed in this great [145] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS work of world redemption. Angels might well envy us the honor of helping others to Christ. The church's greatest privilege is to evangelize a lost world. There is no other way of saving the world except as man shall cooperate with God, and there is no work greater for the church to do than this work of winning a world lost in sin. There are also three things which we must do. These three things are found in that one great sentence, which fell from the lips of Christ when he said, " Seek first the kingdom of God." Here Jesus is establishing the law of precedence — teaching us that there are some things which because of their importance should precede others, and one thing which should always be first. I take it that here Jesus is teaching that the interests of God's business should precede the interests of our own business. We are not to seek first that which per tains to our own worldly advancement but that which pertains to the upbuilding of God's kingdom in the world and the transaction of God's business on the earth. As ambitious as we may be to make a success of our work, we should be even more ambitious to make a success of God's work. This may look like a hard rule and un doubtedly it has never yet been adopted by Christian people, and yet we firmly believe that this is one of the things Jesus meant when he established this law of pre cedence. Again, Christ also intended that we should put the in terest of God's kingdom ahead of the interest of our family affairs. Of course we realize here that we are entering into a sacred realm and invading that thing which is so . near to all men and women, namely, the family circle. In our law of precedence undoubtedly our family life comes first with its interests and its hap piness, but in Christ's law of precedence the interests of God's kingdom are put first, with the intention in the [146] THE BAPTIST PROGRAM OF EVANGELISM Master's mind that they are to be kept first, and so our sense of divine values is to be established by seeking first the interests of the heavenly kingdom. In enunciating this principle of precedence, Jesus is also trying to establish the fact that the interests of the kingdom of God should precede the interest of life itself. In a sense there is nothing more sacred than life, and yet to live only for the selfish interests of our own lives would mean to violate the law of Christ, refuse to follow the Master's example, and relegate to the rear the sub lime interests of God's kingdom. Time and again mis sionaries, converted native Christians, and martyrs have listened to the voice of the Master, followed the heroic example of Christ and laid down their lives in order to establish first the kingdom of God in the hearts of men. 147] XI THINGS NOT SHAKEN CORTLAND MYERS, D. D. Pastor, Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass. THINGS NOT SHAKEN That those things which cannot be shaken may remain. — Hebrews 12 : 27. I question whether there is any word in our vocabu lary that would express quite as fully and emphatically the world's present condition as the word used in this Scripture reference, that verb which is freighted with such deep meaning — " shaken." There has never been a period in human history in which there has been con densed so much of dynamic element to shake this world as in this recent half of a decade. The guns on the battle-field and on the sea shook it and made it unsteady in its pathway. They shook cathedrals from their foun dation. They shook factories into ruins. They shook cities into ashes. They shook fields and forests and orchards into wreckage and ruin. They shook the very rivers until they ran over their boundary-lines and then colored them with crimson. They sent millions of our fellow men into early graves. They shook your world into pestilence and famine and disease, starvation and death. We never dreamed of passing through such a period of shaking as these recent years. When this process was over and we thought it was all over and peace had at last dawned for humanity and a permanent peace according to promise and according to dream and the only just answer to the tidal wave of sacrifice, after we had given our billions of money and our millions of young manhood, had given without limit, sacrificed in every direction, then the peace prom ise and the quiet of our world was left in the hands of politicians, and greedy eyes searched all over the map of [151] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS the world, and then feet of animals instead of man climbed over into the trough and a sordid, selfish transaction was immediately on, and the old game was being played, and the whole program was toward one end — the next elec tion. England had it first, and Lloyd George had to be Prime Minister again, and he went over all his land making all kinds of promises, and he was elected. Then France immediately had her game, and Clemenceau had to be defeated, and another politician had to come in, and things had to be changed, and all kinds of promises were made by the politician. Then they threw the treaty over here to America, and the American Congress used it like a football and tried to get into a good game and a good play and reach the goal. They said, " We will get a touch-down in the next election." The greatest opportunity this world ever saw to make peace for humanity and no more war and bloodshed has been lost, basely lost, politically lost, worse than lost, and the political machinery is making the earth now shake from center to circumference, and wise men are won dering whether the old planet will be able to stay in its orbit any longer. Everything has been shaken. Alas, some men's faith has also been shaken. But I am rejoicing that in the midst of these world conditions and with no good out look for the future, there are some things that cannot be shaken, and I am going to mention only those which are fortified and made absolutely secure by revelation. First of all, the throne of God cannot be shaken. No matter what may take place in the world materially, no matter what may take place in its ultimate destination, no matter what may take place in any of the starry worlds, they may all disappear from their setting for ever, and yet the throne of God at the center of this universe cannot be shaken. We have seen other thrones topple, tremble, tumble, and fall. We have seen the [152] THINGS NOT SHAKEN crowns kicked around the earth and thrown into the rubbish-heap. We have seen the scepters used by the anarchist used as a walking-stick. We have seen throne after throne fall in the shaking process of these years, and some of them were considered the strongest and most durable thrones in the world. But they are gone in the period of a few days. One, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty, all gone. Shaken from their foundation. The thrones of the earth are apparently insecure, seem ingly on the increase of insecurity. No matter what you may name them. You may call them democratic if you please, and yet you mark them with instability and insecurity the moment you put them on top of the planet. It is all shaken, but when the thrones of the earth totter and tumble, the throne of God endureth forever. That is what the Scripture says. We have been so sadly disappointed over the apparent failure as a result of this great world war and this up heaval. The earth was struck with a tidal-wave and a volcano and an earthquake all at once. We supposed some beneficial result was to accrue and the program was to be carried to a finish, and we have been tremen dously disappointed. No worse failure was ever put on the table than the Treaty at Versailles. It has crumbled all to pieces today. Before it was signed it was going to pieces. It was a farce from beginning to end. With all my desire for a world peace, I could never have uttered another word to substantiate my fellow men's faith in God if that peace treaty had not gone to smash. Why? Because the God at the center of the universe, whose throne is immovable, was absolutely ignored. His name was not mentioned, his blessing not asked. Infidelity wrote that document, and then we expect the good God to see it through. You will have to change every page of human history, if God did not pass judgment on such a bit of infamy as that. Heathen men would not per- 153 BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS mit it. One of the Big Three was an atheist, and he would not permit it. The others were not men enough to stand up for it. No breath of prayer was offered for it, and God was ignored. Now we are on the edge of an abyss. Do not imagine this is the result of shallow thinking or of insanity either, because it is universally agreed upon by thinking men. We are on the edge of an abyss just now. I have given you fundamentally the reason for it. This great war broke on the earth because nations forgot God. Ger many first of all, and the rest of them following in the trail. Now we are on the edge of an abyss because the recognition is not made that the great defect is the failure to recognize God and the great need of this human family is the spiritual need. It is not in any economical program ; it is not in any material progress \ it is not in new inventions. God knows if you make them it will make the next war infinitely worse than this last one, and I read this last week of the men, and Clemenceau and Lloyd George were in the list, who said that we were getting ready for another war. It was in evitable. They are building bigger navies and creating bigger armies, making new inventions, and God pity the old world and its inhabitants with all their progress in inventive genius if you forget that the only salvation for this human race is to satisfy the spiritual need and the souls of men. You know that Marx, who is the author of all this modern socialism, said there were four things to be gotten rid of before there could be any progress in the human family. First of all, you had to get rid of your abominable idea of a God; you had to get rid of the superstition of religion ; you had to get rid of conscience, and you had to get rid of the insanity of immortality. Now you have it. That is the fountain-head of all the streams of all socialism that have been flowing through [154] THINGS NOT SHAKEN Russia. It is to get rid of God, get rid of the church and religion, get rid of conscience, and get rid of immor tality. That is the ashes and the quicksand upon which the Bolsheviki and all the rest are trying to build the structure which they call the social organization and new government and progress of the world. Nine-tenths of the people who are striking in America and those who are keeping the railroads from running and other con ditions in peril, are in exactly that class. Whether they say it or not, they are there. It is their conviction to get rid of God, get rid of religion, get rid of conscience, and get rid of immortality. A Russian leader wrote a letter the other day and says this : " When I kill a hen or kill a rat no one says any thing. Why do you say anything when I kill a man, for he is only an animal with a little higher reasoning ?" There is something in that to think about. That is no light remark. That is not something to turn away from. Think it through. Why is he not right? If what he believes of man is true, then I say his logic is perfectly right, and it is not for us to cry out at the killing of a man. If a man has no conscience and no immortal soul and he is only an animal, kill him. You kill a hen that you may feed on it. Kill a man that you may feed on him. Why not? The throne of God still stands at the center of this universe unquestioned in spite of the cry of the Bol sheviki and his kind today throughout the world. The throne of God still stands, and we must reckon with it if we have any hope for our future. The changes may come, and they are constantly coming, but God still lives, and he still swings the scepter. If you do not believe that, all you need to do is to read the history of the Jews. When they went away and went into idolatry and fell down before heathen gods, they went into exile. That is the reason the Jews are where they are today. They [155] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS have left God out. What is the matter with Germany? She had culture and education and music and art. She led the world. We went there for almost everything. Alas, we made the mistake, we went there for our re ligion. We forgot God. Germany left God out of the account and then came to ruin. Do not mistake it. The world has no border-line on it. It is all one. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever; and these United States are not separated from the consequences of the Jews and the Germans, from Ephesus and Karnak and Thebes, for your world is simply covered with the ashes of destroyed cities and governments, and all for the same reason. With all these changes of thrones go ing down and governments being destroyed, there is one thing that remains. The throne of God still stands, and I have that as my great hope and encouragement and comfort. There is another thing that remains in the midst of the shaking process. That is just as evident and has no interrogation-mark after it. The word of the Lord en- dureth forever. All other things may go. All other books may go. All other literature disappear. All his tory even be forgotten, but the word of God remains. In my brief experience we have had a period of atheism led on by that mocker and blasphemer of America and some other secondary followers here and some across the water, who gathered in his fortune from the pockets of his fellow men and women from whom he stole all their faith and the real riches of their life, and they were fools enough to pay him. His name is almost forgotten. We have no follower of his whatever in this country or the world. He is gone. The young people of this age have never heard his name. I passed through that period when this Book was torn apparently into shreds. He took it in front of his audience and tore page after page out of it, and even the covers he threw [156] THINGS NOT SHAKEN into the fire. He has gone into oblivion and is forgotten, but the Book still stands. I passed through a period of criticism when inside of the church, the nominal church (and the greatest ene mies are always inside the walls, never on the outside), when strong men, noble men in my presence, men who have been presidents of theological seminaries, said : " The old Book is gone. They have to cut it to pieces." Schools have taken up what we call higher criticism and destroyed our Bible. We do not hear very much about higher criticism now. That is all past and gone. Their books are all thrown in the fire and on the rubbish-heap, and no one would pay a penny for them today. The Bible still stands. I passed through a period of what they called rational ism and that turned itself over finally into what we have named all over the world New Theology; then men lost their authority and depended on their own experi ence and other things, and this Book was gone. Ger many led the way and spread it over the earth. The Bible was gone. Rationalism was the false god that scholars and other people worshiped. I passed through that period; but rationalism is dying or dead, and this Book still lives. The word of the Lord endureth for ever. There grew out of this all kinds of " isms " until we are living in a day men call materialism. We are living in a day of spiritualism. We are living in a day of Christian Science, and living in a day of Russellism and all manner of devilisms. We are in the delta of the great Mississippi. We have passed thirty years of criti cism from those who have tried to destroy this Book. Now we are in the delta, and all these things are destined to be lost in the great ocean of God's everlasting truth. I have seen the Ganges River run eighty miles out into the ocean and retain its yellow, muddy stream for eighty miles as it made its way through the ocean; but I have [157] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS seen that eighty miles disappear and every last drop of water that came down the old Ganges lost in the heart of the great ocean. I have seen all these streams come down through these years, and, thank God, their muddi- ness is being lost in the great ocean of God's truth. The word of the Lord endureth forever. That is what we need. That is what the ministers need. We have almost lost our authority ; and when we have lost that, we have lost everything. We have lost the supernatural ; and when we have lost that, we have lost everything. What the ministers of God need today is to understand that this thing is not, can not, will not be shaken. This is the authority and the only authority. It is not any pope, it is not in any rationalistic idea. It is not in any man-made authority. This Book comes from God and is the divine authority and his revelation to men, and I hold it as mine. No great piece of oratory ever came from any other fountain-head. Patrick Henry at Virginia had it. Abraham Lincoln on the battle-field of Gettysburg had it. Wendell Phillips had it. Daniel Webster had it. Oh, would to God that Daniel Webster could walk down the halls of legislation today ! We would hear some thing if he could appear there or his ghost show up some day. In all the period of this war, in these crisis hours in human history, there has not been a single speech made, not an address made, not a book written that will live tomorrow. Not one that will stand print or a schoolboy ever will read. We have had speeches down in Washington four hours and a half long but a mockery for humankind. If Daniel Webster with his soul con viction of God on the throne of this universe and right eousness to reign in the earth and a conscience back of it, could speak, something would be heard. We have not had anything like it. Absolutely nothing. The sad dest commentary I know on this day and on the political [158 THINGS NOT SHAKEN world is that not a line or word will live for the school boy of the future. Nothing but politics. , Our ministers have been drinking at the same foun tain. They have lost their authority, their soul convic tion. I read only yesterday of a minister who preached on " Why Does a Dog Pant ? " He had no gospel, no message, no Bible. Another minister preached on " Who Took the Ham out of Abraham? " All kinds of topics of that kind instead of the great truth out of God's Book, burning with a holy passion and ready to sweat blood, backed up by the message of divine au thority — the Book of God, the truth from cover to cover. Not that the word of God is in it, but it is the word of God. That always accomplishes its purpose. I have up in my office a huge knife-blade which came from the jungles of Africa, made by one of the canni bals. That blade was given me by our Doctor Ostrom, who brought it from the Congo region. It was pre sented to him by the chief of the cannibal tribe, and that blade is all covered with human blood now. That old chief had cut off many human heads with that knife. What has happened? He was a savage, the chief of his tribe, with a knife that could chop off a human head as easily as a chicken's head. Where is he today? What is he doing now ? I have his knife, and he has my Bible. He is preaching the gospel of the Son of God to the can nibals in the jungles of Africa. That is what this old book can do. Nothing else in this world works miracles like that. The word of the Lord endureth forever. Something else remains. The throne of God, the Book of God, the Church of God. I have my authority for it too. It came from the lips of the Son of God, and he ought to know. I do not, but he does. He said, " The gates of hell shall not prevail against it." What ever he may have meant by that expression, he meant undoubtedly the extreme of all language to express the [159] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS fact that there was nothing on earth or in hell that could ever shake the foundations of his church. That is a great comfort, is it not? He built his church according to his own statement on the heart of his gospel, that the great central fact of Christianity is in his deity. He said that was the foundation-stone on which his church should be built. Peter made the statement and Christ said, " That is where my church stands." Not as an example ; not as a teacher, good as he was. He walked through this world as no other man walked, but not that. He built his church not on any philosophy. He built it on no books, for he never wrote one. He built his church on the fact that God in the person of Christ came into this world and died on Calvary to save men. That is the foundation, and he said that church will never be budged or moved a hair's breadth from that foundation. That makes this true that there is no church in this world that does not rest on that foundation. Christian Science is not a church. It is a farce. It is a fake to call it a church. It is an organization. It is like other organizations, like world organizations, but the Church of Jesus Christ is founded on the deity of Jesus Christ, so Christian Science is no church. The Unitarians are no church. They are a club, because the church is built on the foundation-stone of the deity of Christ. The real church of Christ — I do not mean only the material structure of wood and stone, I mean the real spiritual church, the body of Christ, the men and women who be long to him everywhere in this world, that great or ganization known to God and cared for by God and waiting for Christ's coming — that is the church which stands forever, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. This is the day of big things. We are accustomed to big things. We jump right into big things. We counted money by the billions. We kept on doing that until we [160] THINGS NOT SHAKEN raised unbelievable sums of money for the Y. M. C. A. and for the Red Cross, and just as soon as we got through with one drive we had another. We had the big things so much in our mind that we had to keep on, so we had a big drive for the church. Men said, " If we are going to save the church of Christ, we will save it by having these big things and having big organizations and big money and big machinery." Men have said to me within a few days, " This is the age of big things, and it will stir men and women to do big things and give money." I do not think so. They have swept the country with speakers and organizations, and this is what they say, that they are going to tell the preachers " how to put it over." Men who never knew such a thing as the Holy Ghost are coming to tell the preachers " how to put it over." The fact in the case is that nine-tenths of these men are ecclesiastical parasites, they are theological pig mies, they are ministerial traitors, and they are trying to tell us, by a big piece of machinery, how to put it over. Not a word about humiliation ; not a word about re pentance; not a word about the Holy Ghost, or looking to God, but " how to put it over." The Israelites thought they knew how to put it over, so they got the ark back in the camp. They never turned toward God at all. They never thought of repentance or humiliation or sorrow or tears. They said, " We will smash the Philistines." And the Philistines themselves were scared, and they said, " Now let us come together as we are and be neighbors." But what happened? They went right into battle, plunged right into it because they had the ark. They had the machine there and thought they were safe; but thirty thousand of them were wiped off the earth. Then Samuel said: "We have made an awful blunder. Let us get to Mizpeh quick, and get down before God and be humiliated and pray." And on his knees the great man of God fell, and [161] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS tears of penitence rolled down his face. God was recog nized, and the battle was won. You put the machinery in the camp, but you cannot take God with it. You think the thing is done and we will put it over, but the Philistines will defeat you day after tomorrow. What the church of God needs is the Holy Ghost, needs the gospel of the Son of God, needs repentance and humilia tion, needs to come back. These may be dark days, and they are, but we have seen others in history. The word of the Lord endureth forever. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and still lives. The throne of God still stands. The gates of hell shall not prevail against his church. In the darkest hour of human history, according to this, Book, he is com ing back again. He may come today, but when he comes the world will have a king that is above every other king and who swings the scepter of peace and rules the nations of the earth ; the King of kings and Lord of lords. He is coming back. He is not going to fail. I have been always interested in M'Cheyne, and I read a bit of his biography the other day. He died at twenty- nine years of age. Wherever his feet stepped Scotland shook. Whenever he opened his mouth there was an electric force that swept in every direction. Whenever he entered there was a magnetic personality that drew everybody toward him. He lived a wonderful life, and hundreds and thousands of people followed him into the kingdom of God. This incident about him fell into my hands this last week. A traveler anxious to see where M'Cheyne had preached and worked, went to the Scotch city and found the church. He told the old sexton he had come a long ways and wanted to see where M'Cheyne had preached. The sexton said, " Come on," and that old gray-haired Scotchman led the way into M'Cheyne's study. He said, " Sit down in that chair." The traveler hesitated [162] THINGS NOT SHAKEN a moment and then sat down. On the table in front of him was an open Bible. He said : " Drop your head in the Bible and cry like a child. That is the way our min ister got ready to preach." He said, " Come on with me." He took him up into the Scotch pulpit before the open Bible. " Now," he said, " stand there and drop your head in your hands over the Bible and begin to weep." He said, "That is the way our minister preached." With a deathless conviction that breaks up the foun tains of the deep and wets my face with tears, I shall continue to remember the throne of God and stand in the shadow of the cross and hold the Book to my heart and preach the glorious gospel of the Son of God, and believe in its everlasting triumph. [163] XII MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS V. B. RILEY, D. D. Faatar, First Baptist Ckarck, Minneapolis, Minn. MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS I am to speak on a theme, not a text ; I am to deliver an address, not a sermon, and my theme is " The Menace of Modernism in Baptist Schools." Shortly after the appearance in " The Watchman-Examiner " of a " Call " for this Conference, there came to my desk a letter written by Dr. Frederick B. Greul, saying: Your name, affixed to this call, implies that you claim that many of our Baptists ministers are drifting from the faith held dear by Baptists; and that many of our educational institutions are breaking down, or undermining the faith of the students therein. Your affixed signature indicates this to the denomina tion as the reason why you joined in the call for the conference alluded to. If such is your belief, your right to do this is in no way questioned. As one of the interested multitude, addressed by this call, I desire to ask a reply to the following questions : 1. Are you prepared to make personally the charges to which you subscribe? 2. Are you able and willing to specify the schools alluded to, and state, to proper parties, in what particu lar they are using a disastrous influence on their students? 3. Have you definite knowledge of the ministers alluded to in the call, and are you willing to designate them? On June the fourth I sent to Doctor Greul the follow ing reply: "Your letter has just reached me. In answer to all three of your questions, one word — YES. I hope to have in print by the time of the Convention abundant proof of all of these points." My theme relates itself particularly to the second of these questions, although it is impossible to treat it with out answering all three of them. A father in Israel, 'a great and wise friend, once said [167] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS to me. " In discussing, insist upon definitions !" So I propose definition for the first step, discussion for the second, and in conclusion, some words of warning. It could hardly be necessary for me, in the very outset of this address, to disclaim all disposition to offensive personalities. Some of the schools to which I refer, I have never seen; the most of the men whose names I shall call and from whose lips and pens I shall quote, are delightful, cultured gentlemen; to know them inti mately is to be enamored of them. I love them! This discussion has to do wholly with opinions, not with personalities, and I propose to relate it to three themes: The Baptist Faith Defined, The Baptist Faith Denied, and The Baptist Denomination Endangered. The Baptist Faith Defined There has been a report, spread throughout the length and breadth of the land, to the effect that the conveners of this Conference were interested in but a single phase of truth — eschatology; and were determined to compel the denomination to consent to their peculiar views of " the Second Coming," as the great, if not solitary fundamental of Baptist faith. The falsity of this report is abundantly proved by the very language of our pro gram, its personnel, and the content of our plea. The explanation of the motive of this report we leave to the people who have so industriously made it. It would be easy to show that " That Blessed Hope " has played a conspicuous part in Baptist history, and was as certainly the faith of our forefathers as it is conceded to have been the faith pf prophet, apostle, and Lord. But the discrediting of that fundamental is not the disturbing factor in Baptist theological thinking. The Pythian priestess, in the Delphic cave, is reputed to have sat upon a bronze altar while she delivered her oracles, and that altar was supported by three legs, and [168] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS took the name of tripod. Every Baptist who retains aught of fellowship with his forefathers, accepts three pillars for his support. Baptists believe the Bible to be an inspired, and conse quently an inerrant book; Baptists believe Christ to be the very God, and hence infallible; Baptists believe Christianity begins with a new birth, known as regenera tion ! It may not be an easy matter to define "A Baptist," and we consent without controversy, that some Baptists are incapable of definition ; but it still remains a con ceded fact that " go where you will among those that wear the name, and you will find them holding a certain set of beliefs concerning God and Christ, the Scripture and the ordinances." If, therefore, one were thinking of uniting with them, it would be natural for him to ask what those beliefs are, unless he belonged to the unthink ing crowd who seek human fellowship for its own sake, and care nothing at all for '* metes and bounds " in brotherhood. 'The attempt to substitute for Baptist foundations " the Baptist flavor " is, to say the least, a nebulous endeavor. People who think of uniting with us will continue to ask " the particular points of doctrine from which we look out upon life and religion." They need not ask in vain. Not to multiply these points indefinitely, nor to make mention of any of lesser moment, we turn again to our tripod. Baptists believe the Bible to be an inspired Book, and hence inerrant! The editor may tell us that " from the beginning Baptists have boasted that they have no creed," but in the next sentence he will be compelled to concede the first article of our faith, namely, that " The Bible is the only rule of faith and practice "; and, if, instead of a mere reference to that article, he rehearsed it in full, it would read after this manner: [ 169 ] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth with out any mixture of error, for its matter ; that it reveals the prin ciples by which God will judge us; and therefore is, arid shall remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions should be tried. And if he consulted the proof-texts printed after this article he would immediately discover that there is no difference between the Baptist creed and the Bible ; that the first is the succinct statement of the elaborate teach ings of the second; and that instead of men entering this denomination having to make a choice between a human statement and Divine Scripture, the second is absolutely included in the first and demanded by it! If Baptists have never had any Confession of Faith, what does Thomas Armitage mean when he says of the Swiss people, " It was customary for the ancient Baptists to use private declarations of their principles, drawn up by some member of their communion " ? Why did they take such pains " to conceal these Confessions " lest the State lay hands upon them and charge them with treason against the State religion? If they never had any " Confession of Faith," what was the significance of "the seven articles " drawn in the year 1527? And did Zwingli lie when he declared that he had " two copies " of that Confession in his pocket ; and charged every Bap tist with having a concealed copy somewhere about his person ? If Baptists have never had any " Confession of Faith " what was that instrument drawn up by John Bunyan, and forty elders, deacons, and' brethren, and approved by more than twenty thousand Baptists, ahd presented to King Charles II in London in 1660; and concerning which they declared, " We are not only re solved to suffer persecution to the loss of our goods, but also life itself, rather than decline from the same." If [170] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS Baptists have never had a " Confession of Faith," what was the origin of the phrases, " The New Hampshire Confession" and "The Philadelphia Confession"? We would not at all be willing to have Baptist churches replace the Bible with a creed, but we did suppose when we united with this denomination (and we imagine that other people proposing to unite with . it, still suppose) that " there is a certain set of beliefs concerning God, Christ," the Scripture, and the Ordinances, etc., to which Baptists universally subscribe. Our problem is not, as stated by the editor, " Where shall we find our infallible interpreters of this inspired volume? " The question is an altogether different one — have we an inspired and an infallible volume to inter pret ? If not, the first leg is gone from beneath the Baptist base; and the denomination that was steady on its tripod will be found tottering on two remaining legs. The attitude, therefore, of professors, schools, and preachers toward the first fundamental of our holy faith will determine the whole question as to whether the de nomination is being menaced by Modernism. But, with equal emphasis, Baptists believe Jesus Christ to be very God, and consequently infallible. Their com mon " Declaration of Faith " is in the following unmis takable speech : We believe that there is one, and only one, living and true God, an infinite, intelligent Spirit, whose name is Jehovah, the Maker and Supreme Ruler of heaven and earth; inexpressibly glorious in holiness, and worthy of all possible honor, confi dence, and love ; that in the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ;. equal in every divine perfection, and executing distinct but harmonious offices in the great work of redemption. From the days of the apostles until the beginning of the twentieth century, scarce a single man denied the deity of Christ and dreamed of retaining fellowship in the [171] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Baptist denomination; and in that same time, not a one attempted the camouflage of so defining Christ as to make him a mere mortal, son of Joseph vs. the Holy Ghost, and yet continue to talk of him as " divine." That is the new method; that is the increasingly common method. I beg pardon; for the moment I forgot my Scripture ! So far away as Peter's time he said, " But there were false teachers also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even 'denying the Lord that bought them " (2 Peter 2:1). If Christ is not divine, very God of very God, the in fallible, inerrant One, then the faith of all our fathers was falsely fixed, the chief foundation-stone upon which our denomination has always rested, is once and forever removed; every Baptist contention has been without oc casion ; and Christianity itself is in collapse. Henry Van Dyke, to whom believers are indebted for many admir able statements of truth, never expressed a more funda mental one than when he declared : " The unveiling of the Father in Christ was, and continued to be, and still is, the palladium of Christianity. All who have surrendered it, for whatever reason, are dispersed and scattered; all who defend it, in whatever method, have been held fast in the unity of the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God." In the language of John Watson, " The life-blood of Christianity is Christ." It is not in Jesus of Nazareth, a mere man, it is in Christ! " Other foun dation can no man lay " (for a true church) " than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Mark you, not Jesus the man, but " Jesus Christ ! " Mark you, not Christ the son of Joseph, but Christ the Lord! Mark you, not " the earthly Christ " in " cohtradistinction to the heavenly," but Jesus the Christ! Before I have finished this address I will be found addressing some of my brother ministers in the pathetic [172 MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS complaint of the woman in the Garden, "They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him." Take him away, and the denomination totters on a single leg ; and the time of its fall is not far ! But while that remaining leg, contrary to the conten tion of some Modernists, is altogether insufficient, if it stand alone, it is alsp too important to be passed without presentation. Baptists belicz'e Christianity begins with the new birth, namely, regeneration. " That the salvation of sinners is wholly of grace; through the mediatorial offices of the Son of God." In this they are not setting up a creed against the Bible, but they are calling attention to the proper emphasizing of the contention of Christ, " Ye must be born again." " Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." Only a few years since, a liberal theologian, occupying a most prominent pulpit, said of regeneration, " I never experienced any such thing and neither has any member of my family." And then he strangely concludes. " Such an experience is not essential to a place in the Christian church," as if the failure of one man to understand the divine demand, abolishes the demand itself ! Prof. Gerald Birney Smith, a member of the faculty of the Divinity School of the Chicago University, asks the question, " Who is a Christian? " and answers it, " A Christian is one who shares the life and manifests the spirit of Jesus Christ." By this text, therefore, the Roman Catholic who wrote. " There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea." was a Chris tian. So was Whittier, the liberal Quaker poet, who wrote, " We only know we cannot drift beyond his love and care." " To be a Christian means to trust the living God and Father of Jesus Christ." That would almost pass for orthodoxy ; but when the Modernist talks of the living God as " the Father of Jesus Christ " it is well to [173] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS- ask what he means, and if you learn he holds God is the father oT all men, the former sentence loses its signifi-, cance,. and when he defines Christ as a product of evolu- , tion, whose Messiahship, essential deity, was a posthu mous propaganda, then nothing is left. Not only the liberal, Whittier, but also the Jew and the Unitarian trust that same God, and may with equal occasion be called " Christian." In fact, no less an authority than a former and most excellent President of this Convention, Mr. Coleman, has given to the world his convictions of church-membership after this manner : My ideal church would be so big and broad, so true and tolerant, so virile and varied, so strong and secure in the hearts of the people, that no one would think of having more than one such institution to serve any given community or neighborhood, even though such district might embrace five or ten thousand souls. Of course it would be a Christian church. But it would be unlike any sectarian church you ever heard of. You would find within its fellowship Jew and - Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, Trinitarian and Unitarian, ritualist and evangelist. Even the reverent agnostic would not be barred out of such a church if I were its doorkeeper, and I have seen some so-called atheists who wouldn't hurt such a spiritual fellowship. This would bring about a conservation of our spiritual forces which are now so widely scattered and so fearfully wasted. That President was a member of a Baptist church when he made that declaration. That it was distinctly in line with Modernism no man will dispute; but, up to the present, even Modernists have not set up the contention that this would be A BAPTIST CHURCH, or that its organic constitution would entitle it to fellowship in a Baptist Association and in the Northern Baptist Con vention. The Baptist Faith Denied We come, then, to the crux of Doctor Greul's ques tion. Are there Baptist theological seminaries and Baptist ministers who are repudiating the great doc- [174] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS trihes and principles for which the Baptist denomina tion has stood? If one were compelled to believe all that is found in official editorials, he would conclude that the only " fundamental principle in Baptist belief is the right of- private judgment," and that it matters little where that private judgment leads — the fact that one entertains it leaves him fundamentally a Baptist ! Our fathers did not think so; nor do their true sons and natural suc cessors ! The only occasion for a Baptist school is the conserva tion of Baptist precepts and principles. To be sure, that is not its entire function. It must provide a liberal edu cation in arts, sciences, languages, and cognate subjects; but unless it stand for distinctive Christian and Baptist principles and precepts, the former functions are mean ingless. The state can render them as well or better than the sectarian schools, and there is no need for our double taxation if it result not in the defense and propa gation of the divine truth. We have investigated the text-books and teachings of several Baptist colleges, and find that in matters of Christian faith they are not fundamentally different from the text-books and teachers employed in State universi ties. Here is the rehearsal of a college-town pastor, concerning the text-books in one Baptist College: "I found Lyman Abbott's ' Evolution of Christianity ' was required to be read by students in this school, notes , taken, and examinations followed." Think of the fol lowing extract from this book: "An infallible book is an impossible conception, and today no one really believes that our Bible is such a book." " As a collection of litera ture, the Bible is unquestionably the result of evolution." W. F. Bade's book, " The Old Testament in the Light of Today," had to be read by the same students, notes taken and submitted to the teachers. Its position oh the matter of inspiration is this : [175] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Needless to say, the conception of revelation that underlies this study, regards it as an illumination from within, not as a communication from without; as an educative, not as an in structional process. . . . For the harm lies not in dealing with the imperfect moral standards (of the Bible) but in failure to recognize them as imperfect. ... It was a compiler who identi fied the Noah of the flood with the Noah of viticulture. . In the original traditions they were undoubtedly two persons. . . . The story of Cain and Abel is only a torso. . . As an additional instance might be mentioned two legends, in one of which Jah veh wrestles with Jacob at the ford of the Jabbok, and in the other, attempts to slay Moses at his lodging-place in Egypt. In both stories, Jahveh has undoubtedly taken the place of local night-demons. But still further, and quite interesting from the scientific standpoint, is this statement, " In order to find a mate for Adam, He (God) first engaged in a futile experi ment with animals ! " Without putting in too much time on a single institu tion, it suffices to say that the text-book on ethics was Durant Drake's " Problems of Conduct." When one has made that remark, and reminded his auditors that it was a Baptist school, it is enough said! Its definition of morality makes it " a redirection of impulse " appearing in animal life first and later in man as he *' emerges from his apelike ancestry." In Mr. Drake's judgment, mor ality is not the result of religion, but came even " without the concept of God," and in itself accounts for religion. Out Bible is only one of a number of holy books. The- only way to get a satisfactory ethical code from it is by a process of " judicious selection and ingenious infer ences." " Its recorded teachings of Christ are fragmen tary and touch only a few fundamental matters." The same authority was selected in the same institu tion on the " Problems of Religion," a book that con tends " the early Jews were as polytheistic as their neigh bors " ; that " Jahveh was originally a ' storm-god ' of Mt. Sinai " : that " outside of a few illiterate fishermen [176] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS and peasant folk, Christ made no impression on his time." " His public career lasted not over a year and a half, and was spent, except for the last few days or weeks, io the out-of-the-way province of Galilee " ; that " Judas grew skeptical at his pretensions, angry at his presumption, and betrayed his secret claim to Messiah- ship." " Paul had no knowledge of an empty tomb " : Jesus " never prophesied emergence from the grave." " The concept of Christendom that it is the only true faith, we have now come to see. was a presumptuous and narrow conceit." If this school stood alone among Baptists, in the use of such text-books, if this school stood alone among Bap tists in bringing its students to such convictions, our problem would be easy. The local pastor, who called attention to it, might find on his hands a fight with col lege authorities, and be compelled to seek a new field, but the denomination would readily rise and read the college out of its calendar. The simple truth is that the majority of our Baptist colleges in the North are em ploying text- and reference-books little or no better, and more than one student has reached conclusions similar to this sample, an actual excerpt from an approved stu dent thesis, " It comes as a shock to the faith of many Christians when they are compelled to face the fact that the Bible is not inerrant." " Daniel and Jonah are proba bly sacred novels or romances, intended to serve re ligious purposes and to teach religious truth." " Genesis tells us that God created the earth in six days and six nights. That is poor science." It would not be a sur prise to leam that that young man is now in the Baptist ministry, and since he entertains the " Baptist spirit and practises "the privilege of every man to interpret the Bible for himself," he would be in perfectly good standing ! If the name of this college is desired, the speaker [177] BAPTIST; FUNDAMENTALS stands ready to provide it, but he believes it would be an injustice to the college named, since he knows it is not a sinner .above several of its sister Baptist institutions. .1 have personally talked and corresponded with students from four other Baptist schools who have confessed to kindred skepticism in teaching. In -fact, if there is- a single Baptist college in the North, every one of whose professors now holds to the three great fundamentals aforenamed — namely, the Bible, the inspired and iner rant Word of God ; Christ, the eternal, infallible Son of God; regeneration essential to the Christian life — that school can forge to instant popularity and take a place of unwonted power, by providing to the denomination indisputable proofs of its loyalty. We call for the evi dences! I believe I can speak for this Conference; we stand ready to a man to back any such Baptist school ; to call upon our churches to contribute to its mainte nance, upon our parents to educate their children within its walls, upon our mission boards to accept, for home and foreign fields, its graduates; and we are ready to recommend to pulpits that need their services, all such students as come from that college carrying kindred con victions ! But I am supposed to speak specifically of the theo logical seminaries. Unfortunately for the Baptist de nomination, the theological condition here is not better, but worse! Many of the Baptist theological seminaries of the North are hot-beds of skepticism. This remark is not born of hearsay, but based upon the literary output of these institutions. Take the Divinity School of the Uni versity of Chicago. If there is one article of the Baptist Confession of Faith that is not opposed and practically destroyed by the volume, "A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion," then the speaker is incapable of un derstanding the English language ! And yet , in that [178] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS volume, the following prominent Baptist preachers and professors unite : President Faunce, of Brown University ; Doctor Mathews, of the University pf Chicago Divinity School; Dr. Powis Smith, Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature; Prof. E. D. Burton, head of the Department of New Testament Literature and In terpretation; Dr. Shirley Jackson Case, of New Testa ment Interpretation; Dr. George Cross, Systematic The ology, of Rochester; Dr. Gerald Birney Smith, Professor of Christian Theology; Prof. Theodore G. Soares, of Homiletics and Religious Education; the late Professors Charles Henderson and George Burman Foster. But an assertion is not sufficient: I must quote from the pages themselves to prove my indictment. Accord ing to that volume, Jehovah, the God of the Old Testa ment, is an evolution of Hebrew thought — a tribal god, who through conquest by the tribe itself, became a national god (p. 42, 43). Hebraism, by a peculiarly con structive principle, was monotheistic, freer from my thology than most polytheistic religions, and so universal ized the conceptions of monarchy, bringing " Yahweh " into governing relations with his subjects; so that their god idea was organized about an essentially political experience (p. 48). According to this book, man is not the direct creation of God in any Garden of Eden, but an evolution from animal life and has been dwelling upon the face of the earth for hundreds of thousands of years (p. 27). Christ's Messiahship is traced to mytho logical roots (p. 55). Religion is not a revelation, but an evolution, and we have no more knowledge as to how it came into being than we have as to how man ,came to his present form (p. 33, 34). A gradual evolution, not a direct inspiration, was, the explanation of the Bible. The Hebrew faith is a de velopment " from a primitive type of thought and con duct into a relatively advanced and lofty type " (p. 136). [179] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS The difference in the: origin of the Bible and that" of any other.' literature;- fs-eaifed- ihtd-'questioii -(-'p; -553), -whife the -claims; .of : infallibility for-' it are -utterly-repudiated. On- this fast point, the language is ' "There is- no-appeal except that of 'orthodoxy itself to the authority ;of either councils, the .pope, or an a priori belief in an infallible Scripture. It goes, without saying that such an appeal will completely break with our modern world ""{p. 76). The* Old Testament books were declared to be not by the authors whose names they bear,rbut most of them of composite origin (p. 110). Concerning portions of the Old Testament, they are declared unprofitable. -The language is, " There are whole pages of the Old Testa ment that can, in and of' themselves, by no legitimate methods be made to minister- to the soul's welfare, and evidently were not written for that purpose"- (p. 105). Even the trustworthiness of these Old Testament books, in ''Spite of multiplied evidence from archeological sources, is still disputed (p. 130-134). -The New Testament fares no better at the hands of these men. Its. literature came into existence haphazard. Ouf present text1 was really an accidental collection (p. 180). Mark made an effort ^to preserve, for the Roman church and other churches, Peter's recollection - of the words' and ministry !of- Jesus, he having played the part Of- ¦ interpreter to Peter in-Peter's -latter, days (p. 190). Matthew and Luke -got their information from Mark's Gospel (p. 191). Of the author of the ¦- Gospel-' of Matthew, "nothing is definitely ' known (p. 192). The writer, whoever he- was, -was simply anxious- to explain to his Christian brethren the continuity of the Christian movement with Judaism (p: 193). "The Gospel of John was originally anonymous. A later epilogue claimed the apostle1 as its voucher." Notwithstanding the fact that' in the Synoptic- Gospels, Jesus is reticent about himself and his office; in John's Gospel he becomes [180] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS promptly a divine Christ and boldly, asserts his preexis tence and Messiahship. It is conceded that if John, was a personal. follower of Jesus, his Gospel has substantial claims to be regarded as the authoritative formulation of Jesus' thought and teaching, but the author immedi ately hastens to remind us that " apostolic authorship is not the most vital point." The question is whether it contains a true picture of Jesus and his teachings (p. 196, 197). We ought to be grateful perhaps that all of these Bap tist men have not gone the length of Drake, a consulting author in some of our Baptist schools, who says of John's Gospel, " But it is of little value in helping us to get an idea of the real Jesus as he lived and taught on the earth." If there were time, we could take the great doctrines in turn, beginning with an Infallible Book, and conclud ing with Final Judgments and Futurities, and show that not one single article in the accepted Baptist Confessions of Faith finds a full reception with this volume. But all of this only serves to illustrate the. principle recently officially announced, that " nothing is more fundamental in Baptist belief than the right of private judgment." Infidelity concerning inspiration never reached its climax, until Prof. Shirley Case wrote his book, entitled " The Revelation of John." But we must remind our auditors that Chicago Divinity School does not stand alone, nor indeed are the authors of these volumes even lonesome in the theological semi nary realm. They are speaking the new Baptist semi nary shibboleth. Rochester retains ,a somewhat effective plea for Baptist patronage in the. face of an orthodox presidency. It cannot be forgotten that Doctor Cross' article on " The attitude of the modern scientist toward Jesus " provided an exact occasion of Ex-president Strong's remark, "Ask him if he believes in the pre- , [ 181 ] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS existence, deity, virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, physical resurrection, omnipresence, and omnipotence of Christ, and lie denies your right to require pf him any statement of his own belief." That this, for some years, has been a sort of Rochester City atmosphere is proved by the circumstance that L. E. Finney some time ago received from his old friend and former college chum, Dr. J. E. Woodland, Baptist professor in the University of Rochester, a letter , in which he said: As for the church, I believe it is dying at the top and will have to sprout anew on sounder foundation. The day of Cal- vinistic ideas, to which so many preachers seem to hold, whether they admit it or not, has long since gone by; and as these beliefs were laid aside, so I think the myths and fables of the Bible will be laid aside and the new church be founded on truth. But not to abide too long in one place, let us shift to Crozer Theological Seminary and begin with President Evans. I quote from the Crozer Theological Seminary Bulletin of April, 1919 : It is too late in history for any Protestant denomination in 1919 to formulate a creed concerning the infallibility of Scrip ture in order to safeguard other inherited beliefs (p. 72). Our Baptist opportunity rests upon the fact that the idea of the infallibility of the sacred Scriptures is not a distinctive Christian doctrine. Some years ago Doctor Evans prepared a paper on " The Deification of Jesus — A Test of Character," and read the same before the Presbyterian ministers of Phil adelphia. I tried to get a copy of this address, having heard much of the same, but Doctor Evans' answer to a friend who wrote him regarding it, was, " It is in manu script form only, and it is not for publication or distribu tion." Of that paper "The Presbyterian" of Philadel phia, said : " A man may take his choice between the dreamings of Doctor Evans and the plain teachings of [182] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS Christ ; but he cannot accept both ; there is no fellowship between them." Professor Meeser, of the same school, writing in Crozer Bulletin, October, 1917, said of the Scriptures, "Authority is scarcely the term to describe this value." Again,. " Authority, as an external, is an unwarranted intrusion." Again, " Man is true to the end of his being only in rational self-guidance." Three weeks ago we did think that ONE doctrine remained to the Baptist denomination. We had a right so to conceive. It was authoritatively declared, for The Baptist now speaks for the denomination, and in the leading editorial we were told that " Baptists are at one in holding to salvation by grace " ; but, alas for the Bap tist principle, " the right of private judgment " ! A week later there came into my hands a volume from the pen of Prof. A. S. Hobart of Crozer, entitled " Transplanted Truths from Romans" (p. 29). I read it, and when I came upon this statement, I cannot see anything understandable or acceptable in the theory that my guilt and my penalty were placed upon Christ, or that Christ's holiness is imputed to me in any way that in volves a substitution of his holiness for mine, or of his suffer ing for what was due to me. That view of the theory of the atonement finds no foothold in my consciousness or my reason, and as I further perused the same volume, I concluded that these were truths bereft of roots and stripped of branches in the transplanting process. That all of Crozer needs a denominational disinfecting, became fhe more evident when, a lew days later, I received through the mails a series of " Little Sermons Out of Church " from fhe pen of Prof. H. C. Vedder, in which I found the following exhibit of Baptist independence : There is one crowning absurdity of theology that even human law never suggested, namely, that the penalty of an evil deed can be vicariously borne by another, while he goes scot free. The idea is a violation of the universal instincts of justice— [183] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS and that in the face of the plain teaching of the Bible, " for He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him" (2 Cor. 5 : 21); "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree that we, being dead to sin, should live unto righteousness; by whose stripes we are healed " (1 Peter 2 : 24) ; while Paul to the Romans writes, " For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous" (Rom. 5 : 19). Doctor Vedder,' in Chester Times of April 10, said : The same difficulty attends any theory of the atonement that supposes Christ to have borne our sins and died in our stead. . . The fault of all such theories of the atonement is that they are pitched in too low ethical key. . . Especially repugnant, to our best ethics, is the idea of sacrificial expiation made by the inno cent for the guilty. . . The moment we make an effort of im agination to realize what it means, our gorge rises. Reader, did you ever visit a slaughter-house? Have you ever smelted burning meat? What is your candid opinion of a Being in the heavens whose eyes would be pleased with such sickening sights, or who found in that horrid, nauseating stench a "sweet savor ? " The whole thing is too revolting, too stupidly absurd, to be worthy of serious refutation. No God whom we could possibly love and worship ever devised such a method of ap proach to him and of winning his good graces. Of all the slan ders men have perpetrated against the Most High, this is posi tively the grossest, the most impudent, the most insulting. But follow these gentlemen in their attempts to explain away plain Scripture and introduce a novel • and far more .intelligent operation, and you have a perfect -illusr-. tration of what Doctor King of Oberlin, ; himself an expert in the business, has said : -. . One'' of the greatest dangers o'f the educated man is ' to ¦ be found in his ability to defend more br less successfully-ahy posi tion. He finds it easy, therefore, as Fichfe puts it, to go on subtilizing, until he loses all power of recognizing truth, and [184] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS readily persuades; himself either; that what he- wants- is: true ' or that .aH .convictions are, about equally .justified. ¦¦ ;v ',-..- »,.-' .There is much more, from this, Crozer source'that one might quote. To. the theological . seminaries of the North unmen- tioned, aside, from the .Northern Baptist Seminary of Chicago,. I present my .apologies ! I pass you over not frpm lack. of. interest. If there were time, I should like to bring to you a letter from a late student. of Berkeley to show that.the Pacific Coast is not. one inch behind the Atlantic, in its adoption of a most, dangerous modernism, but I must conclude, with a declaration. The Denomination Is. Endangered I think you "will consent that that is a mild putting of our peril. Our distinctive doctrines are being denied; our distinctive mission is being disparaged; our distinc tive influence is being destroyed. I;~ But in order to make the fundamental appeal the final one, -let me state these facts in another order. Our distinctive mission is being disparaged. The very same men who, in Baptist meetings, , talk most >about "the distinctive' mission of -Baptists;" head-movements that look- to the- final and .effective1 effacement'' of- that mission. -The men with whom they affiliate have -ex pressed themselves as hoping to produce a .new type of; Christian churches, in which "every denominational body would recognize the ministry, ^ordinances; and discipline of "'the -diners." The time was^w-hen'we supposed we had a '-special mission; 'namely, -to emphasize the 'divoaxemertt, of Church and State; the new birthessential- to Christian experience, the proper interpretation Of New .Testament ordinances, the priesthood of the mdivMual-be;Hever;'Jetc.s;', but now we draw lines, not in teaching ' at all, but'. "art territory, and divide from any people -thast care to'Mssume [ 185 j BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS the name of Christ, not on basis of doctrine, but to share the sphere of " social service," calling it " the kingdom,'" forgetting more and more that such federations put the soft pedal upon the great principles that have made our people a power. This necessarily destroys our distinctive influence. Alarmed lest we should be' called exclusive or bigoted, we have more and more consented to the Ingersollian philosophy : " You have your opinion ; I have mine. Let it rest at that, and let us increase our good fellowship by uniting our forces toward desirable objects." Such a philosophy ignores the fact that people without pro found convictions have never exercised saving influences, and that so-called Christian organizations, created by such, have coihmonly been as incompetent as creedless. All of which refers to our original declaration, the greatest danger to oUr denominational life conceivable is the common denial of our distinctive doctrines. In a coal-mine near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., one morning in early September, some years since, the watchman gave an excited alarm : " The roof is working ! Men ! Out .without delay ! " An awful scramble resulted. But a few minutes had passed when the great ceiling fell, with a terrific crash. The air was expelled with such violence that timbers and ventilating-doors were shivered into kindling; loaded cars were blown from the track like autumn leaves; one hundred acres of solid earth, had- sunken; a long strip- of- a half mile had gone down from three to five feet-, seaming itself as it went widi great fissures, and men who were slow in movement, and every poor beast employed in the deeps, met an awful fate. The fall came in consequence of removing the -coal pillar* that had supported the rooL Men, in their greed, had flecked, aw&y at them, taking piece after piece, and when remonstrated with, would answer: " Oh, that earth is too solid ; it will never cave in ! " And finallv when [ 186 ] MODERNISM IN BAPTIST SCHOOLS some of the supports were wholly removed, and others were sadly weakened, the crash came. It is a parable ! " When the foundations are removed, what shall the righteous do ? " It is no longer an in stance of God's giant, groping in darkness for the pillars of a heathen temple, that he may hurl them to the ground and conquer against his adversaries. The whole figure has shifted. The Samson of Modernism, blinded by theological fumes from Germany, feels for the pillars of the Christian temple and would fain tear the last one away and leave Christianity itself in utter collapse. If in any measure that ever be accomplished, let it not be said to the shame of Baptists that they were engaged as " pipers of peace " at the very time when their denomi nation perished! [187 XIII BAPTISTS AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS J. WHITCOMB BROUGHER, D. D. Pastor, Temple Baptist Church, Los Angeles, Calif. BAPTISTS AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS The mission of the Baptists is defined by Scripture. I wish to base what I have to say on two texts: Phil. 1 : 21, " For to me to live is Christ," and Acts 16 : 9, 10, " A vision appeared to Paul in the night : There was a man of Macedonia standing, beseeching him, and saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help us. And when he had seen the vision, straightway we sought to go forth into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel unto them." The motto of Paul's life was enunciated in the words to the Philippians, " For to me to live is Christ." It was around this principle that every thought, word, and action in the apostle's life revolved. Wherever he was, he was living the Christ life. This motto should be the center of every Chris tian's life. It should be the principle around which the life of the denomination revolves. It is Paul's definition of life. Some people have said, "Join me and money, and that will be life." Others have said, " Join me and pleasure, and that will be life." Still others have said, "Join me and fame, and that will be life." But Paul defines life as that mysterious union between the believer and Christ himself. Being united with Christ wherever he went, whether to Jerusalem, Macedonia, or Rome, he testified by word of mouth and manner of life for Jesus Christ. The world-wide mission of Baptists is for the members to live Christ and preach Christ to every crea ture in the whole world. In our Baptist churches there are enough members, if consecrated to the service, to evangelize the world in a few years. There is money enough in our membership, if it were dedicated to the [191] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS service of Christ, to finance this world program. There is divine power enough promised through Christ to en able us to perform this great task. Jesus said: "All authority, -(which "implies power)- is*'.giyen. • -nnttr^i^ in heaven and on earth. Go, make disciples of the nations ; and lo, I am with you always, even unto the consumma tion- of the age. -J Equipped, thus, fwith members; money, and power,- the church of Christ cannot be. true to her Lord and undertake anything less than the evangelization of the whole world. The door is open for the progress of the gospel in every land in the world. The simple question is, How are we going to gear up the spiritual forces of our denomination to the great task of preach ing Christ to the World ? '¦'..- At the present time; our denomination is bearing wit ness along four great lines : Our missionaries are preach ing Christ; they are conducting educational work with, a view to building Christ character; they have their minis try of healing that they may introduce Christ to' the sick and distressed ; they have their ¦ industrial work through which they are seeking to establish- the principles. : of Jesus Christ in the industrial life of the people of all nations. Out of . all these combined efforts>. the one great objective of evangelizing the world and ' hastening the doming of the kingdom of God is to be found. In order that we may inspire our people to an enthusiastic under taking of our great mission, I wish to suggest three V's : The Vision ; The Voice ; The Volition. I. The Vision 1. The Vision of Christ. . Paul says (2 Cor. 3 : 18), "We all with unveiled face, beholding as- hi a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same, image from .glory tri glory, even as from the Lord the- Spirit." We do not have the privilege of beholding the Lord with our physical eyes. We may get a fresh revelation of [192] BAPTISTS' AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS him, however, through the medium of the New.: Testa ment record. of his words and actual achievements- of his lif e.and; the consummate beauty Of -his-- character. '• These ate the mirrors- in which we, may behold' our- Lord. Jesus said, " Ye search the Scriptures because ye think that in them ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me." Words are a reflection of a man's character. I meet a stranger; we speak to each other; the special accent of his voice and the words he uses tell me that he: is an Englishman. I meet another, and his language reveals that he is a Scotchman. I meet another ; the in tonation; the: special mellow accent of his voice tell me that he is from the South. Words reflect a man's life. They reveal his education, or lack of it. They reveal his purposes and his Ideals. No man can read the New Testament and meditate upon the words Of him who spake as never man spake, and not feel the transforming power of those words and get a new vision of Christ's purposes for a lost world. I received a letter the other day from my wife. Two of my children were graduat ing, a daughter from college and a son from high school. Another son is preaching the gospel of. Christ as ayoung theological student. Still another daughter is honorably married and living in a happy home. The words of that letter were expressions of gratitude and love. My wife was thanking God for the four children that were mak ing their parents' lives so happy by their love for their parents and obedience to their will. That letter was. a revelation of that mother's heart. Read the New Testa- mentthfough the eyes of love, and there will be revealed to you the vision of Christ's heart and his purpose to redeem a sin-cursed world. ¦"•¦••' ¦We get a still further revelation of his wonderful pur pose for humanity through the actual deeds he per formed. Go- with him to the wedding, learn there his thoughtful consideration for the housewife in an embar- [193] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS rassing circumstance. Follow him to the side of the sick, and see his compassion as he heals them. Kneel with him as he washes the disciples' feet, and behold his wonderful forgiveness. Most of us would be willing to wash our enemies' feet if we could use boiling water. Stand beside the cross and see him die, and as he is dying hear him say : " Father, forgive them ; they know not what they do." When we behold the marvelous char acter of Jesus Christ revealed in his words and his acts, when we meditate upon the spirit animating his life and prompting his words and deeds, our hearts burn within us, we are inspired with a new determination to do his will and to carry out the mission he has given to us. The contemplation of Jesus Christ transforms our own character and gives unto us the power of revealing him through our words and actions to men and women who have rebelled against God and rejected his love. A boy of eighteen, an only son, ran away from home. He left a message for his father and mother in which he told them that he had gone to make his own way in the world. He declined to accept their help any more and refused to go to college. A few days after he had gone, the father called me up on the phone and asked me to help him find the boy. He thought he might be in my Sunday^night congregation. I announced on Sunday night that I would be glad to see the young man who had left home that week to give him a message from his- parents. No response came, but a few days later I had a letter from him in San Francisco. He asked me to cheer up his father and mother, tell them that he was all right, but that he was not coming home. I told the parents, and they asked me to go to San Francisco and have a talk with him. After a few days, I made arrange ments to go. Before I went, thougli, I looked into tlie face of my own son just eighteen and graduating from high school. I wanted to put myself in that father's 194] BAPTISTS AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS place. 1 thought on the feelings I would have if my son had run away. I took the train at night and reached San Francisco the next morning. By noon I had gotten in touch with the young man I was seeking. I prayed earnestly that I might reveal to that boy by word and act the love of his own mother and father. After an hotir's earnest conversation I asked him to kneel and let us pray together, and we did. In the middle of the prayer he began to sob, and when we stood to our feet, he put out his hand and grasped mine and said, " I will go home." I wired the father and mother to meet us the next morning at the station. When the train rolled in I saw this son fall into the arms of his mother and be wel comed home by his parents. He was fully forgiven, and went to college, and is today living an upright, honorable, successful, happy life. When Christians become so thor oughly imbued with the Spirit of Jesus Christ that their conduct reveals his love and forgiveness, we shall have power to win a runaway world back to Jesus Christ. 2. In the second place, we need a vision of the world. We need to get a conception of the world such as Christ had. Our task is a world-wide one, starting at Jeru salem, to Judea and Samaria, to the uttermost parts of the world. Not merely my home, my church, my city, my State, or my country, but the whole world. I must be as interested in the boy and girl, the man and the woman of China, Japan, India, Africa, and the Islands of the Sea as I am in the boy or man in my own city. Yes, I must be as interested in the boys and girls, men and women of all the world as I am in the boy or the girl of my own home. I have in connection with my church a Newsboys' Club. Once in a while those boys get into trouble. Six of them were arrested recently for manipulating a slot-machine and running the gum all out. In response to the call for help, I went to the police station and conferred with them and their parents. [195] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS As those little fellows gathered around me and looked into my face, I felt the same love for them that I would have felt for my own boys. In response to my kind and earnest solicitation, those little fellows promised never to steal again. What I would do for my Own boy, I must be willing to do for the other man's bby. What I would do for my own daughter, I must be willing to do for the other man's daughter. Hardly a week goes by that I am not in jail — for the sake of somebody's boy and somebody's girl. I have visited many of the wonder spots of the world. I have seen the great gorge of the Grand Canyon, the wonderful mountains of the Pacific Coast, including Alaska. I have traveled through Yellowstone Park, God's wonderland of the world. I have been to Yosem- ite Valley and seen its great cliffs. I have visited the great trees in the Mariposa forests; but, my friends, I have never seen anything that can interest me for one moment as can a boy or a girl/a man or a woman. No doubt Jesus Christ loved the beauties of nature, but be yond all other love, beyond all other interest, beyond all other consideration, he was concerned about the welfare of humanity. I want to see mankind through the eyes of Jesus Christ. I want to love them with the same love that he had; I want to have the same interest in my fellow man that he had; I want to touch humanity in every part of the world with the same sympathy and lov ing service that he gave to the world. It is only as the church of Christ gets the same vision of the world that Jesus had that it will perform the same mission that Christ had to the world. II. The Voice There are two voices to which I wish to call special attention : 1. The voice of humanity's need. Some one has said [196] BAPTISTS AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS that all babies cry in the same language ; it does not make any difference whether it is a Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or an American baby, they all have the same cry. There is likewise a universal cry of humanity. The world longs for forgiveness from sin. The world longs for perfection. It longs for the power to master temptation. There has never been given to humanity the power to redeem itself nor to live a perfect life. The only name under heaven given among men whereby men may be saved is the name of Jesus Christ. God through Christ does forgive sin ; if he did not, there would be no deliver ance from it. No man can live a perfect life ; if he could begin now to live a perfect life, he could not live more than a perfect life and thereby make amends for past sins. The only possible way whereby the past can be satisfied is through the forgiveness of God. Jesus Christ met the demands of the law and died on Calvary that God might be just and still forgive men. But the world needs more than forgiveness, it needs regeneration. To be forgiven, and then have no power to conquer the sin that has once mastered you would be useless. But Jesus Christ enters the heart of the be liever and by his Spirit gives to him a new nature. The believer becomes a partaker of the divine nature. This regeneration is not effected by reform or education. A little tow-headed boy had his head shaved. When he came home, his old baldheaded grandfather said, "Charlie, you are as baldheaded as I am." The little fellow looked up at his grandfather and said, " Yes, but I have got the roots left." Reform is cutting off evil habits on the outside, but the roots are left. Regenera tion is rooting up the sin. Regeneration is radical. It drives out selfishness with unselfishness. It implants the Christ spirit and makes possible the development of a Christ man. Education is not the fundamental need of the world. [197] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS Regeneration is fundamental. The owner of a wild animal circus told me his experience with a trained panther. The young lady had trained the panther from the time it was a little kitten. She led it around on the street at the end of a chain. She was warned not to do it. She declared that the young panther had been so trained from the time it was a little kitten and had been educated in domestic lines, that it had lost its brutish nature and could be trusted. One day coming down the sawdust trail in the circus, a big ostrich put its head out through the railing of its pen to look at the panther ; quick as a flash, the panther grabbed it and bit off the head of the ostrich. The young lady knew then that her panther was not a kitten. The brute nature in man is not to be changed by education. Jesus knew that the fundamental need of human nature is regeneration. He said to Nicodemus, a man of high moral character and thorough education, " Ye must be born again." Bap tists believe in a regenerated church-membership. We believe that the world's greatest need is a regenerated spirit. The cry of humanity for forgiveness and re generation must be answered with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The world's discord and confusion will never be allayed until Jesus Christ calms the souls of men as he calmed the Sea of Galilee. Henry Watterson, the great Southern editor, has declared that the world has only one hope, and that is Jesus Christ and him crucified. The soUls of men will never be satisfied outside of Christ. Jesus Christ, and he alone, is the solution of every problem known to human experience. An old German in Portland, Oregon, in the financial panic of 1903 went to the bank to get his money. He was handed a clearing-house certificate. He refused to take that — he wanted real money. The president of the bank explained to him the process by which clearing-house certificates took the place of gold or silver and could be [198] BAPTISTS AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS used for the same purpose. The banker asked him if he did not understand. The old German replied : " I think I understand, but it don't give me much satisfaction. It seems to me it is this way : You and your wife put the baby to bed, and in the middle of the night it wake up and cry for milk; you get up and give it a milk-ticket." The world today is crying for the sincere milk of the world. Some of our higher critics are giving it a milk- ticket. Nothing can take the place of Jesus Christ and his gospel in meeting the fundamental needs of humanity. 2. In the second place, we may hear the voice of Christ saying, " Go, and make disciples of all the nations." Back of all voices, truer than all other voices, expressing absolute authority is the voice of Jesus Christ. Jesus declared that he was the good Shepherd and that his sheep recognized his voice. To me there is no other supreme authority. There ought to be no higher au thority for any Christian than the word of Jesus Christ. When he speaks, his word should be final. It makes very little difference what any preacher or theological professor, or any other man or woman may say or think, but it makes a vast difference to the Christian what Jesus Christ says. My son was greatly disturbed by one of his theological professors. When he wrote to me about the matter, I told him to listen respectfully to anything his professors had to say, but if their word was in direct conflict with the teachings of Jesus Christ, for him to take Christ in preference to the professors. During the war when I was in Europe, I asked for the privilege of going from Coblenz to Paris by way of Cologne and Brussels. The Y. M. C. A. authorities could not give me that privilege. I went to General Liggett, whom I knew, and through his kindness and the courtesy of Colonel Nutt of the Railroad Transportation Department, I was given passes to go by that route. When I started on my trip, I was [199] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS stopped at various times by army officers. Under ordi nary circumstances they would have had the authority to direct my coming and going, but with the passes in my pocket, signed by both Colonel Nutt and General Liggett, I walked past all other officers and recognized no other authority except that of the commanding officer in chief of the army. Joseph Smith, with his Mormon Bible, Mohammed with the Koran, Mrs. Eddy with her so-called Science and Health, philosophers, scientists, and higher critics receive no attention from me if their utterances are in conflict with the simple, plain teaching of Jesus Christ. Baptists have always stood on the fundamental fact that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church and his word and his authority supreme au thority. No Baptist can be loyal to Jesus Christ and not respond to his command to preach the gospel to every creature in all the world. III. The Volition In answer to the vision and the voice, Paul responded immediately with his life. He dedicated all his talents and his powers to performing the mission that God gave him. There is nothing else for the Christian to do if he is a Christian. God blessed Abraham that he should be a blessing. God has never bestowed a blessing upon any individual without expecting that that individual would pass the blessing on. We have been given the gospel and enjoy today the blessings of living in a land of light and liberty and gospel truth. If we perform our sacred duty, we will pass those blessings on to those who have them not. When I went to Europe a friend gave me five hundred dollars just to use in helping the soldiers. If I had spent that money on myself, I should have been recreant to my trust and should have been unfaithful to my benefactor. The greatest joy of my work overseas was the pleasure I had in usin^ that money to minister [200 I BAPTISTS AND WORLD-WIDE MISSIONS individually to American soldiers who needed something of cheer to comfort and help them. And God has given to us the unspeakable gift of his Son. He has revealed to us the good news of salvation. How can we be faith ful to our trust, how can we enjoy even our Christianity, if we fail to use the blessings God has given us for the distinct purpose of redeeming a lost world? I knew a preacher twenty-five years ago who received money from the president of his seminary in order to complete his education. After his graduation, he located at a good church. He never made any effort to pay the money back. A&er a couple of years, the president of the institution wrote him about the matter. The preacher did not answer the letter. The president wrote him again, but no reply. Finally, I received a letter ask ing me to interview the man and see why he ignored the matter entirely. I discovered that he thought the de nomination owed him an education and felt under no obligation even to respond in the case. He was a con temptible ingrate. We all agree that his attitude was unpardonable. Yet I know of thousands of Baptists who have received all the blessings of God's grace, and to his request that we carry the message of salvation to our fellow men everywhere they make absolutely no response. Paul responded and responded immediately. We read that " straightway " he went. He did not hesi tate. A colored porter was once asked if the train stopped at a certain station. He replied, " No, sir, she don't even hesitate." In answer to the voice of the world's need and the supreme voice of Jesus Christ, his people should not even hesitate in carrying out the Great Com mission. When Dewey at the opening of the Spanish- American War received from President McKinley a message which read, " Capture or destroy the Spanish fleet," he did not hesitate a moment. With the vessels under his com- [201] BAPTIST FUNDAMENTALS mand, he sailed, away to Manila. He arrived early in the morning of May 1. Before breakfast he had per formed his duty and sent back the thrilling word, " I have performed my duty and destroyed the Spanish fleet." In this hour of the world's greatest need, in this time when humanity is seeking for some solution of the great problems in every sphere of life, the church of Christ should answer that need by preaching Christ everywhere. In answer to the command of Jesus there ought to come an immediate response : " We have obeyed our orders and have taken Christ to all the world." [202]