¦ML,KUBBH

It' II 1C*I

•

mm::yr^':R

¦¦;'¦,

-sm^::: '

ij,'.l,',l,!,l,',l,',l.!.l,!.t,!,l,',l,',l,!,l,!il.',l,!,l.!,l,M,M.M.M.M.'.l,l.l.'.l.'.l.'.l.',l.',l.'.l,',UJ3

Library of rhe
IPale Srtvtnitg Scbool

The Books of
jfranft Cbamberlatn porter
Winkley Professor of
Biblical Theology

.Ctrirnwnvivrrivv/i'i'mvrrivivriTnvivivmviwnTi'rvi'ivi'i'rra

THE PLACE OF JESUS
IN THE
LIFE OF TODAY
A Series of Unconventional Talks on
Some Present Day Realities
of the Christian Religion

By HENRY KINGMAN
Author of "Building on Rock," "Way of Honor," and
"The Faith of a Middle-Aged Man"

ASSOCIATION PRESS
New York: 347 Madison Avenue
1922

Copyright, 1922t by
The International Committee of
Young Men's Christian Associations
Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface  -v
Henry Kingman, A Biographical Sketch . . vii
A Gospel for Today  i
The Bringer of Love  8
The Leader of Righteousness  34
As Arbiter of Debated Things  51
The Bringer of the Kingdom  67
Jesus as an Outstretched Hand  84

PREFACE
Old religions, stranded here and there among the obliv
ious years, are a common sight. Names of divinities
that once shook the world have now to be looked up in
books of reference. Clever writers tell us that the reli
gion of Jesus is already laboring among the shallows, and
will soon be hard aground, never again to move under its
own power.
We believe, on the contrary, that the Christian faith
pulsates with the power and wonder and beauty of the
God of Life, and that the personality of Jesus is — to
human experience — the living center of its glory. All
that is sweetest and best in human life still finds its source
in Him.
These papers are written to give expression to this con
viction, that is as sunshine to the soul. They are not so
much an argument as a testimony. Obviously they are
not for the scholars or theologians, but for the ordinary
people who have to live and suffer without much comfort
of philosophy or mystical experience. They are the wit
ness of one who — though plagued with doubt and some
what beaten on by disappointment — has yet found life
more and more taking on the cast of gratitude to Jesus
Christ for the difference He has made.

HENRY KINGMAN
a biographical sketch
By George Irving
While Henry Kingman does not need any written
memorial a full life of him should be prepared. All too
few records are made of lives whose talents and oppor
tunities, while above the average, are yet not so far in
advance of the rank and file of us as to discourage any
possibilities of emulation.
There is at least one other good reason why such a
life should be written which will appear more fully
I hope as this sketch proceeds. Henry Kingman was a
hero. He was victorious in one of the very fiercest fights
ever waged by a mortal.
Henry Kingman was born in Boston, in 1863. He
died in Claremont, Cal., April 15, 1921. He was born
into a home of substantial comfort and thorough culture
¦ — facts which left their mark on all his days, for Henry
Kingman is more frequently described by those who knew
him best as "God's Gentleman" than by any other term.
In 1880 he entered Colby College, Maine, which he
chose because of his father's friendship for the president,
Dr. Henry B. Robins. Dean Shailer Mathews, a class
mate of Kingman's in Colby and a warm personal friend
to the end of his life, says of his college days : "Henry
Kingman came from a family with traditions. His grand
father was Dr. Rufus Anderson, for many years Secre
tary of the American Board, and his father was a mer-
vii

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
chant of standing in Boston. He brought to the college
a natural sense of superiority — a quality justified by his
natural abilities as well as social standing. He never
went into athletics in any prominent way, but was among
the first to organize tennis, then a new game and quite
unknown in our little college town. But he was a
prodigious walker and would tire the best of us.
"His vitality was exuberant. I do not remember ever
knowing a young man who seemed so radiant with health
and animal spirits. I recall that once he persuaded some
of the little group to which we both belonged to sleep
out one rainy night. I was too cautious to follow his
lead, but the campus for days abounded in stories of
how the irrepressible youth slept in a tree after having
failed to find protection in a camp on a rainy night."
This reference to his exuberant vitality makes illumin
ating reading for the friends of the last twenty years of
Henry Kingman's life, when he carried with him a body
beset by what to many another good man would have
been overpowering weakness. How Uttle the college
students whom he delighted to watch in their games and
contests realized that, even though now in critical health,
he was a few short years before the equal of anv of
them in the oft-quoted "pep" to which they gave such a
high regard. Often have I seen a quizzical smile pass
over the face of "the Bishop," as several of his inti
mates affectionately called him, when some boisterous
young physical Samson would dilate on the absolute
necessity of perfect health as a basis of any sort of suc
cess in life.
His college course during which he was, in the opinion
of a well known classmate, "on the whole the most po
tent influence for good in the college," was followed by

HENRY KINGMAN
three years of study in Hartford Theological Seminary.
Here his exuberant spirit continued. A college mate says
he was at the bottom of most of the pranks at the Semin
ary. During his college course he spent one summer
vacation as a home missionary in Michigan among the
copper mines. "His letters," writes a friend of those
and later days, "were a characteristic exposition of both
sides of his nature. He was ready to work with the
spirit of a martyr but he missed the joyous life he lived
when among people of culture and wealth."
In 1886 he went to North China as a missionary of the
American Board. His decision to become a foreign mis
sionary was made, I believe, because it was for him "the
way of honor." No man could have possessed and en
joyed more the rich associations and unmistakable oppor
tunities that were his among his own people. He elected
to go to China because he saw there a difficult field that
unmistakably called for workers. For ten years he threw
himself into that service. One who was in a position to
observe his work says that "he soon came to the front
as one of the most trusted and influential workers."
Early in his Chinese career he married Miss Annie Lees,
daughter of a distinguished missionary of the London
Mission Society and the union was a perfect one in
every respect. Of the three children from this mar
riage who grew to maturity, two are today missionaries
in China. Could any commentary on the life of parents
be stronger than this living witness to their unselfish de
votion to the cause of their Lord?
On being invalided home from China, Kingman spent
some time in Southern California, and while still a very
sick man, was called to the pastorate of the Congrega
tional Church in Claremont, California. This church,
which is the only one of any character in the home of

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Pomona College, is unique in many respects. Usually
over a score of different denominations are represented
in its active membership. As a rule there have been
during the last fifteen years over twenty-five retired
clergymen and furloughed missionaries in the congrega
tion. In addition the faculty of Pomona College, with
hundreds of its students, regularly worshipped in this
church. This was an audienee to draw the very best
out of any man. To Henry Kingman with a mind tem
pered and sharpened like a Damascus blade it came as a
ringing challenge. One who was an officer of the church
during many years of Dr. Kingman's pastorate makes
this true characterization of his preaching : "To the viril
ity of his thought, the logic of which was inescapable,
were added charm and brilliance of diction of unfailing
attractiveness. Apart from their moral and spiritual
appeal, his sermons were models of English — not the
studied productions of a mere master of rhetoric, but
the natural outgoings of a mind of rare genius."
He had himself passed through periods when his faith
was tested as by fire. He was so made that he must ever
seek the fullest light possible on any subject under con
sideration. His brilliant, well-trained mind delighted in
his stimulating audience. Occasionally it would seem
as though he had himself gone so far beyond the experi
ence of most of his hearers that they could not fully fol
low him, but his perfect diction, his capacity to express
his ideas with a clarity and a nicety which was the de
spair of fellow preachers, his unfailing good taste in apt
quotation and illustration, carried the interest of his
hearers on the rare occasions when they could not keep
abreast of him in his spiritual journey. Almost always
he read his sermons, but so splendidly did he master the

HENRY KINGMAN
art of pulpit reading it never hampered his freest de
livery. While Henry Kingman scorned "to play safe" in theol
ogy or in anything else, he was alike impatient of those
on the one hand who think they have achieved a static
faith and on the other those who are ever "proving all
things" and never holding fast to that which is good. He
was profoundly indignant with any one who would lead
young people into academic bogs and towards intellectual
will-o'-the-wisps. The life of a small college town while abnormal is
vividly interesting. In matters of religion it is much like
living in the measles ward of a contagious hospital. Al
ways the students are the same age and perennially are
they breaking out with first one mental disturbance and
another. To many, naturally and properly, continuous
questions come concerning their religious faith. Others
have heard that "College men and women are haunted
by doubts" and forthwith proceed to be so "haunted."
With each group this Christian scholar was sympathetic,
patient, and eager to be helpful.
One who had close intellectual and spiritual fellow
ship with him writes discriminately : "To his fingertips,
Dr. Kingman was a modern in his thinking. He kept
abreast of the world's best literature; and was a keen
observer of the great world movements. His judgment-
values of men, of books and things were greatly prized
by his friends. In his theology he was a progressive;
but he was too wise and careful a thinker to discard the
garnered treasures of the past. While an evangelical
in spirit he was often sorely baffled concerning the com
monly accepted formulas of the evangelical faith; and
clung to the Cross while perplexed regarding some of its
xi

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
orthodox interpretations. His faith was implicit rather
than explicit. His charming little book, 'Building on
Rock,' is an epitome of his religion. Its very title sug
gests that there were certain things of which he felt sure;
and in which he found a final resting place for the soul."
More than any but a few of those whom I have ever
met, Henry Kingman delighted in the refinements of life.
He was one of the fortunate ones who could maintain a
proper balance in his appreciation of the material and
spiritual gifts. A classmate has pointed out that in col
lege he was known, especially at first, as aloof. That
quality followed him to the end of life. This was in
tensified by his physical limitations. Longing for com
radeship and friendly relationship he was never able to
be hail fellow. Those who were so fortunate as to get be
hind his involuntarily raised barrier of shy reserve found
a large, rich, full comradeship that is rarely if ever
equalled and never surpassed in human friendship. In
spite of and sometimes because of this reserve, hundreds
of students, now scattered to the ends of the earth, came
into helpful relation to this great heart in a frail body.
President Blaisdell of Pomona College, of which our
friend was a trustee and unfailing supporter, has writ
ten: "I have never known a man whose mere presence,
shut into a sick room, dominated a community as did the
spirit of Henry Kingman."
With this demand for sincerity, there was coupled
an almost terrifying power of sarcasm. Sad indeed was
the plight of the luckless one against whom it was di
rected. His satire never burned without a good reason
and then rarely. As one of his warmest friends, Rev.
James M. Campbell, has written, "His power of sarcasm
and invective was something 'uncanny,' but with the pass-
xii

HENRY KINGMAN
ing years his spirit grew sweeter and mellower, and he had
but little use for these dangerous weapons. His eyes
could flash with fire, but the prevailing expression was
that of gentleness and tenderness. His smile was a
caress. He was just the kind of man to whom one can
instinctively turn for sympathy when in trouble and for
advice when in perplexity." Never have I known any
man who was more consistently impatient of all that
bordered on sham and humbug.
In 1908 the church, having grown greatly in size and
demands on the pastor, decided to call an assistant. By
an interesting series of Providences I was led to that
post in November of that year. In all the range of reli
gious work it is doubtful if any other relationship gives
such an opportunity to test the real quality of men. For
almost five years we worked together with perfect sym
pathy and growing understanding. In this relationship
how often did I see demonstrated Kingman's fine concep
tion of honor and steel-true loyalty to a friend and col
league. With his own meager strength constantly drain
ing away he might have been excused if at times he be
came impatient of those whose physical vigor was con
stantly increasing. But no such feeling ever existed. He
was ever the soul of generosity. Probably there is no way
in which a true man can be detected more quickly than
by his relation to those associated with him in junior po
sitions. A truly big man is ever eager to see that those
about him receive more than their own share of the
credit for anything that is done. By this standard Henry
Kingman's life was absolutely faultless. He was, in the
phrase which was often on his lips, "a true Christian
knight." Harry Emerson Fosdick, who visited the college after
illness had nearly finished its work with the body of our
xiii

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
friend, has this to say about him : "Dr. Kingman was one
of the most gracious, Christian gentlemen whom I have
ever met, combining delicacy with power, spiritual in
sight with moral courage in an unusual way. George
Eliot says somewhere that some people are like a quota
tion from the Bible in the midst of a newspaper para
graph. I think of Dr. Kingman as deserving to have this
said about him. Delightfully human and simple in his
friendliness, there always was a height about his spirit
and a purity about his insights that made one feel that
he must be living signally close to the Eternal Spirit."
The Reverend James M. Campbell, whom I have al
ready quoted, writes further with restraint and insight
about some of the qualities of his friend:
"Perhaps the most outstanding quality in his character
was his indomitable courage. A braver soul I never
knew. He was a true knight-errant of the Cross. Of a
certain Greek poet it was said that he wrote of the sub
lime and was himself the sublime of which he wrote.
Our friend wrote of the heroic and was himself the
heroic of which he wrote. His sermons were autobi
ographical. They rang with the note of victory. He
himself lived on the victorious side of life, triumphing
over bodily weakness and pain, concealing his own suf
fering, and entering into sympathy with the troubles
and sufferings of others, as if he had none of his own."
Nothing could more completely reveal the true life of
this radiant, heroic, chivalric spirit than the following
comments on and notations from his letters and diary
furnished by his son, Harry L. Kingman, now a mission
ary in China, who as a college undergraduate won his
letter in every field of athletics and became nationally
known as a base-ball player.

HENRY KINGMAN
"He kept up his courage and happiness and love in
spite of great bodily weakness. His diary shows that he
sometimes suffered great secret depression because of his
ever-increasing asthma but he concealed it. In March
1920 he wrote in the diary which he kept for over thirty
years : 'Dreadful month of asthma. Cannot see way out.'
Dec. 3 — 'Very great shrinking from being sick again.'
Dec. 10 — 'Unprecedented night of sweet sleep.' A week
before he died, his sister-in-law said to him, 'Henry, I
suppose you will just go on playing the game and putting
up a brave fight.' 'What else is there to do?' he said
with his sweet, wistful smile. He often visited sick peo
ple when very miserable himself. April 28, 1920, he
wrote in his diary — Wish I could do something of use.'
Two days before death he wrote in scarcely legible hand,
'In shadow of death from 1 a. m. Doctor thought I
could not rally.' It seemed as though he was chuckling
in his weakness at again having slipped out of death's
fingers as he had done so many times before. He was
always joking whimsically about his weakness. A year
ago he took charge of the church for a few weeks in the
summer. He wrote me, 'And now I am in charge for a
few weeks and am putting up a bluff at being a live wire.
Mother and I are calling on new families and I am adver
tised to preach five times in the next four weeks. It will
be a great joy if only my strength is equal to it. It hasn't
been for six weeks past, but the fine weather ought to
make a difference. The trouble is almost more with the
thinking than the actual preaching, as on so many days I
am like a mud-turtle for lack of quiet sleep, and it is
hard to read a thoughtful book. Mending stockings has
been nearer my size intellectually. I am polishing up the
auto, one morsel at a time — an eye today, an ear tomor-
xv

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
row, the back of the neck or a hand the day after, and so
on until by the eye of faith I can see a clean car in the
near future.'
"He was a good sport and understood us in a way that
helped greatly. He wrote me recently 'It is fine that you
can keep up your athletic practice. It is a splendid cor
rective for too much introspection, and should give you
the fresh personal contacts that are so necessary to keep
a man wholesome and natural. One simply can't get too
much sunshine in his spirit, so long as it doesn't bleach
out his stern, strenuous obedience to the call of duty;
and I hope you'll never have less enjoyment of the good
things of life than you have today.'
"Many entries in his diary show his worldwide sympa
thy. He suffered when there was famine in China or
plague in India. He was almost too sympathetic and
patient in the weaknesses and shortcomings of his chil
dren for their own good.
"He was the soul of honor. Whether it had to do
with large sums of money or only the question of using
some one else's commutation ticket there was no wavering
or hesitating as to which way he should go. The Way
of Honor was* the only way that he knew. Of speaking
in public he wrote me 'One must be above all else honest
and sincere. Don't let enthusiasm or zeal lead you to
exaggerate or over-color. Prune your best passages se
verely, so that men won't feel you are putting it on thick,
but that you have reserves of truth behind.'
"In China he translated in two years a much needed
'Harmony of the Gospels,' but it was destroyed in the
Boxer uprising before anyone had seen it. He never
bewailed the loss. I hadn't even heard of it until recently.
Mother told me last week that as a young man he was a

HENRY KINGMAN
fine swimmer. He must have known that it would have
impressed me greatly had he told me, as I aways rever
enced any sort of physical prowess, but never did he
mention it. He was so widely read that at home he
might well have spoken autocratically, and have imposed
his beliefs and ideas on his children, but he did not do
so. Just after his book 'Building on Rock' was published
he wrote me, 'It was a real comfort to read your words of
appreciation of the little book, because I was not sure
whether the work was worth the doing. Over and over
again I was inclined to give it up because it seemed so
dull and commonplace — and yours was the first judgment
about it that has reached me. So I thanked God and
took courage. It is not easy to satisfy myself now, and
whatever I do is done at the expense of an inordinate
amount of labor. Fortunately that doesn't matter much,
because I have time enough and more.'
"He had unlimited faith in God and also in man.
Dr. Stoughton, who attended him in his last illness, said
father's deathbed was unique in his experience, in its joy
and faith and hope. Of his last summer's sermons he
wrote : 'I am afraid that I never get out of the rut of a
single topic in these days, and that all my talks are merely
variations upon one theme. But people never seem to get
tired of listening, and it occupies my thought so largely to
the exclusion of other things that I make no effort at
originality. The miracle of God's love in our poor fail
ing lives is a wonder of which people never tire of hear
ing.' In another letter he wrote me, 'There is not the
slightest question in my mind that- — however one may ac
count for it — the greatest joy and the greatest efficiency in
life are found in a close alliance with Jesus Christ All
sorts of things puzzle me and perhaps grow nebulous

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
with years, but of this central fact of experience I have
no doubt — the mercy of God comes to one through faith
in Jesus and in His message. And don't be at all con
cerned at the inevitable fluctuations in your own respon
siveness to this truth — its reality and fruitfulness are
happily independent of our changing physical conditions.'
"A short time ago he wrote me, ' You ask how I would
express my theory of Father and Son. I would never
try. Any time this last twenty years I should have been
so sensible of being quite beyond my depth, that I should
avoid discussing the question if possible. When one asks
if Jesus was of the same eternal substance as the Father
¦ — if he was God in that sense — I realize that I don't know
what I am talking about. I can only affirm that Jesus
and His friends all agreed in affirming about Him — that
He was the God-man — that "God was in Him, reconciling
the world to Himself" — that He and the Father were one
— that He was the perfect expression and revelation of
God— that when we find Him we find God — that He has
the "value of God" for us. But not one nor all of these
affirmations seems to me to declare or explain His met
aphysical relation with God. I shrink from calling Him
"God" even as He never called Himself by that name;
Master and Lord seem to satisfy me; the other term I
reserve for clearness sake, for the Eternal and Almighty.
But, there as soon as I begin discussing it I fall into
difficulties. I rest in the fact that I find God in Him and
through Him, and that He came to bring men to God.
I feel sure that any doctrine that men have fought over
so fiercely for centuries, never able to understand it or
explain themselves to others of differing views, and one
where even the necessary terminology of discussion re
quires a keen and highly trained mind to grasp the thought,

HENRY KINGMAN
can never be of the essentials of faith and religion. A
little child can smile back at Jesus, with an eternal sub
mission of His will to the God who expresses Himself in
Him. But the Trinity! I merely lose myself helplessly
and painfully in the effort to grasp its content.' "
In spite of increasing physical weakness Henry King
man lived vividly and gladly to the very end. On the
morning he died, just before the end came, he returned
to consciousness to find Mrs. Kingman weeping by his
bedside. On asking her why she was weeping she re
plied that she could not let him go. "Is that what it is ?"
he asked. In reply to the unarticulated affirmative,
with the smile that was so characteristic of his whole life,
he replied, "Then it is inexpressibly beautiful." With
these brave words, so characteristic of him, upon his lips
this triumphant warrior of the Lord Jesus Christ laid
down his sword at his Master's feet. Like that other
radiant spirit who had much the same physical burden to
carry he could have said, "Gladly I have lived and gladly
I'll die, and I lay me down with a will." In one of his
last published sermons, delivered only a few months be
fore his death, in speaking on the text "One thing I do,
I press forward," he quotes a couplet which is truly auto
biographic :
"The handles of my plow are wet
The shares with rust are spoiled
And yet, and yet my God, my God
Keep me from turning back."
God answered his prayer. xix

Chapter I
A GOSPEL FOR TODAY
A thoughtful man today — whether in Wall Street or on
the Arabian desert — cannot long be forgetful of the prob
lems of God and life. Interest in them are a part of his
manhood. And if he is honest as well as thoughtful, he
does not want to get away from them, because his highest
welfare seems somehow to be bound up with their solu
tion. From time to time, in moments of unwonted spir
itual attention and discernment, the consciousness of God
wells up in him as from some unplumbed depth of real
ity in his own being, and troubles him with questions he
cannot answer. What does it all mean? What is the
relation of this tantalizing, incomplete human life to the
illimitable life of God? How near can He come to us
across the unbridged unseen? Can our weakness draw
in any way upon His strength, or our troubles find com
fort in His help ?
Questions such as these, that may have been curiously
indifferent to us once, press in upon us with hungry in
sistence as years go by and we are made to feel how
slight our hold upon earth's sunshine is. And never does
such a question thrust itself on our attention but we are
brought, whether we will or no, face to face with the per
sonality of Jesus Christ. What He once said and did
and was has taken such hold on the thought and con
science of mankind, that we cannot think of God, or of

2 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
the way in which His life may touch our lives, without
thinking in terms of Jesus' experience and teaching. The
clarity of His insight in these matters so far outruns any
thing else of which we have any knowledge in the world
of religious literature, that it cannot honestly be ignored,
if we are to think of them at all.
And so it happens that the association of Jesus with
the life of today is as inevitable as the human hunger for
some knowledge of the unfathomable abysses of life and
death that hem us in. Sooner or later, out of our depth
or need, we cry out for light, for understanding — and
there stands this Jesus, of ancient Nazareth, professing
to offer just the knowledge that we want. What are we
to make of Him ? What are we, who are caught so help
lessly in the intellectual currents of the twentieth century,
to do with this Teacher of the first century in Asia?
Half of our present-day literature, we may say, seems to
ignore Him as constituting any factor in the thinking of
our time. And yet He makes profound appeal to all in
us that is most divine. What place has He among the
forces that are actually moulding society today?
It is easy to give to questions' such as these conventional
answers out of the past, such as once seemed to settle
the matter with authority and to silence discussion.
But in point of fact the familiar answer of authority
simply does not engage the interest of the young people
of this generation. It does not meet them intellectually
where they are — it fails of their respect as well as of their
sympathy, as though it were an evasion of honest inquiry.
This is true whether we think of the young men and
women in our colleges, or of such a vast and representa
tive gathering of the average men of today as was assem-

A GOSPEL FOR TODAY 3
bled in camps and trenches during the war. No official
pronouncement out of the distant past, whether from an
infallible church or an infallible book, can any longer be
relied upon to make friendly connection with the modern
point of view, or satisfy the critical search for truth that
has become the intellectual habit of our generation, and
that — critical and unsparing though it be — is nowhere
more fittingly employed than in seeking for the greatest
truth of all.
When we set ourselves to think who Jesus was, and
what He is to the present-day society, we may — because
of early training and unshakable convictions — be quite
content with an interpretation of His person and message,
couched in forms and habits of thought belonging to an
age so remote and unfamiliar as to have passed altogether
out of the understanding of the common people of our
Western world. To us it may be all living and significant,
inexpressibly dear and sacred, also, through its associa
tions. But the fact that some of us have been trained
from childhood to understand and appreciate this He
brew imagery should not make us forgetful of the needs
of the ordinary man of today who has had no such train
ing — one of the eighty per cent of the men of Great Brit
ain not in touch with the church — and who is often ir
ritated by his utter inability to relate church teachings to
the matter-of-fact world of reality in which he lives.
As Canon Barnett, apostle to the East End, said to his
Anglican friends, out of his deep sympathy for the poor
of Whitechapel, "We who feel the charm of the old
words and phrases need to compel ourselves to remember
that this feeling is not shared by the majority." He urged
on his associates the need of simple intelligible expression

4 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
of the great truths, because even the best of men in our
day are for the most part "too hurried to look for a mean
ing which is not on the surface."
Jesus spoke His undying message in terms so simple
and universal in their interest as to appeal equally to the
untaught Syrian peasant of the old world, and to the
university student of our day. The stories of the prod
igal son, the lost sheep, the lilies, and the sparrows, the
man with the talent in a napkin — the pictures of pride
and humility and service also — are as vivid and eloquent
now as when He uttered them. They deal with prim
itive and elemental phases of human experience, in its
many-sided relation with the will of God. The great
thing He tried to accomplish with men astray from God
was so pathetically simple as compared with the demands
of the Thirty-nine Articles, or the Nicene Creed, that
even the social derelicts of His day could grasp His
intent and fulfil it. And the great vital realities that
the man in the street today needs to know and feel, are so
unembarrassed and unconfused with metaphysical prob
lems or theological subtleties, that they must admit of
very plain and unconventional statements, suited for prac
tical and busy men. As one of the leading philosophers of
today has said, "Subtle religion is false religion." The
truth about religion cannot be in itself obscure or intri
cate — it corresponds too closely with our most elemental
instincts for its expression to be limited to a single type
of traditional presentation, however sacred.
And so it must be possible, if we choose, to discuss
the whole question of the teaching of Jesus and His
place in modern thought and life with a range and free
dom quite unembarrassed by traditional limitations. It
is by no means necessary to confine ourselves to an in-

A GOSPEL FOR TODAY 5
terpretation of the viewr-point of the first generation
of Christian disciples, as in a study of the New Testa
ment. Such an interpretation is o*f course indispensable.
But the field of experience has enormously widened since
that day. Unhesitating acceptance of Jesus' leader
ship was a pure experiment then — it needed a bold and
trustful heart indeed to step out on that untried way.
The mental reaction upon it of men like Peter and John
and Paul was that of men facing a problem bewilderingly
new and strange. Since their day, however, it has been
tested and tried and weighed and examined in the labora
tory of life in every conceivable way. Millions of earnest
men and women have lent the undivided energy of their
souls to its understanding. In every imaginable mortal
stress, men have trusted the so-called gospel of Jesus, and
we have the age-long record of their venture of faith.
Surely a humble, thoughtful man in this twentieth cen
tury must have before him a range of facts in illumination
of the mission of Jesus that Paul never knew, together
with whole worlds of spiritual experience that lay below
any horizon he could see, beyond the horizon of his age.
Of course it is worse than futile — it is disastrous — to
try to meet the need of our own day for a gospel that
meets men where they are, that appeals to them so as to
compel attention, by dropping out of sight the eternal
realities of redeeming love and forgiving compassion, and
preaching instead, not the Jewish law, but a new and better
law suited for the twentieth century — a law of service.
Of course it is intelligible and interesting — it is divine and
•beautiful and most truly Christian, and the conscience
yields assent. But it no more meets men's immemorial
hunger for God and for the daily refreshment of His
undimmed love and mercy, than the call to pay our

6 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
debts assures us of a comfortable income. Men are as
ready as they ever were to listen intently to the realities
of the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ. But
the truth today best wins a hearing if it is in a form
easy to be grasped — if it seems to be -a part of the every
day world in which we live, and not of a religious shad
ow-land of venerable antiquity.
The following studies are a fragmentary contribu
tion to the effort at the re-appraisal of Jesus with which
the men and women of our generation are engaged. They
are an interpretation of human experience — a discussion
of the significance of Jesus for our world — not from the
standpoint of the Church or even of the New Testament,
but of an ordinary man of today, reacting on all that
life has to offer towards a conclusion, from the open-air
talks of Jesus in the calm of Galilee to the deadly struggle
of the World War in Europe. It is, to be sure, absurdly
fragmentary and inadequate as an interpretation, in view
of the infinite wonder and mystery of the subject. But
so far as it goes, it deals with realities that the human
heart thrills to believe and of which it is a joy to speak
with confidence.
Note. — There are two assumptions that underlie the whole of
the following discussions: (i) That we have today in the
New Testament an indisputable record of the great outlines
of the life and teaching of Jesus. After all allowance has
been made for sane sceptical criticism, the picture that remains
is unchanged in its essential features of incomparable and com
pelling power. Neither peasant nor pedant of his day had the
religious genius to alter substantially the outlines of that supreme
personality. There are disputable points, of course, where sure
conclusions may not be within our reach. But in the fields we
are about to traverse, we walk with a sure step, without apology
or hesitation. (2) That the only contact of Jesus with our time
is by way of men's faith in Him. His influence is manifestly
a spiritual influence, and the only way it can possibly be brought

A GOSPEL FOR TODAY j
to bear is through the lives of those who are willing to receive
it. His place in any society, as in any individual life, is sharply
limited by the response accorded Him — whether of sympathy
or indifference or critical doubt. It would seem to go without
saying that His power over anyone for good must be propor
tioned to one's confidence in Him, not to the correctness of
one's theological beliefs, but to the genuineness of his faith in
Jesus as a revealer of God. Only as men or nations believe in
Him, does he bring to them the benefits of which we speak.

Chapter II
THE BRINGER OF LOVE
Let us go straight to the heart of our subject at the
beginning, and speak of Jesus as the great bringer of love
into the life of today. We cannot get closer to the real
ity of life, to the actual operative forces of the universe
we know, than when we come to the power of love.
There are all sorts of natural forces about us by means
of which we can work wonders for human comfort, and
we are apt to be a bit overawed by the overwhelming
evidences of their value and power in the development of
modern civilization. But not one nor all of them together
can preserve the civilization whose material welfare they
have built up, or keep it from falling back into moral
chaos. They have rtot the sublime energy in highest
spheres of development to enable them to deal with human
hearts, as electricity, e. g., deals with so many refractory
materials. Half the homes in Europe are bitter with
misery or want today, or bitterer still with hatred and
fear and spiritual bankruptcy; and all the resources of
science are unequal to bringing them back to brother
hood and joy.
But love can do it. Wherever you see a trace of it in
action in the desolated area, you see a ray of hope break
ing through the pall of misery. But it is the only
natural power of such divine efficiency with human souls
8

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 9
as to give any promise in face of so bewildering a
task. When we talk about love, then, we are not dealing with
mere pious emotion or airy sentiment, but with a reality
as irresistible in its power as the half-invisible flame of
the oxy-acetylene torch — only in immeasurably wider
and more delicate relations. If the place of Jesus in the
life of today is inseparably associated with a productive
energy like this, then it is a place of power indeed. And
as a matter of fact and commonest observation it is so as
sociated, as cause with effect — where the influence of Jesus
comes, there love springs up. Many common folk, per
plexed with various doubts, rest on that unshakable fact
with great comfort of spirit.
There is no sort of doubt as to what Jesus did for
the people of his own brief time — He brought love home
to their lives. The most notable thing He did for them
was not primarily to bring them comforting words about
divine benevolence, or new ideas as to the need of love
in social relations, but the very substance of love itself.
This was an altogether astonishing thing for a great
sage or rabbi to do. It was too homely and human to be
profound, or startling, or original, as the founder of a
religion is supposed to be. Anyone, not a genius, can
be kind and compassionate. And yet the chief distinc
tion of Jesus was that He warmed with love hearts that
were dead and cold as burned-out cinders, and brought
them back to life and God. Many of the hated profiteers
and plunderers of His day, both men and women, were
curiously affected by this divine friendliness that could
not be hidden nor mistaken. It was almost ridiculous
that they should be attracted to a perfectly unselfish man,
a preacher of righteousness. It was an utterly incon-

io PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
gruous association. But they were attracted to Jesus be
cause they saw He loved them, and yet was good. The
scribes and Pharisees went up and down the streets, fairly
exhaling the odor of sanctity: but just in proportion to
their righteousness they were cold as ice to the sinners of
the town. Love and religion made queer company to
their thinking. But Jesus brought a new thing to the
light of day — a kind of religion that actually expressed
itself in sympathy with objectionable people. He broke
down their defences against goodness before they knew
where they were : and He carried this so far that He be
came known as the friend of undesirable citizens.
In one way it is easy to understand. It was simply that
He was so human — not like the religious leaders of his
day and most days. He understood people better than
they understood themselves. And seeing how much of
the divine was in them, marking them out as God's, He
linked Himself to it as with hooks of steel and tried to
draw them back to their Father.. It was a strange fas
cinating phenomenon in the religious world, to which men
gave different explanations.
Jesus Himself gave it an explanation. And here the
inexhaustible mystery and wonder that have always clung
about His person assert themselves at once. He claimed
that He brought love into life for the astounding rea
son that He came from the Almighty God. He set the
door of heaven ajar, and the light that came through was
that of fervent compassion for human sorrow.
The religious leaders of His day protested fiercely, as at
blasphemy against the national Jehovah. The holier men
were, the wider of necessity was the gulf between them
and the rabble of the unlearned and unclean : and as for
the ignorant worshippers of idols, they were fitting fuel

THE BRINGER OF LOVE n
for God's wrath. But the face of Jesus was as wistfully
kind to the unclean as to the clean, and to the ignorant as
to the learned. Whatever else was perplexing about
His mission, this at least was clear, that He turned the
light of God on the drab life of the common people, and
lo and behold! it was a light tremulous with the deep
colors of pity and love and sacrifice.
We talk of it with glib familiarity, as though the West
ern world had always believed it. Yet when, in rare
moments of spiritual illumination, we catch a fleeting
glimpse of its reality, that He who is behind all things
regards us as Jesus regarded those poor straying men and
women in His day, what glory and wonder our human life
takes on! One would hardly be afraid of life or death
if Jesus were right.
It was a most winsome propaganda while it lasted —
strangely merciful and unworldly to venture out into
open competition with the cold wisdom of this world.
But it lasted — as one might say — only through one long
summer day, and then night overtook the loving face
and the friendly voice, and they disappeared forever from
among men. So far as men could see, only the memory
of that face and voice remained, in the minds of a few
peasant friends — no book, no school, no written word,
only the memory of a divine love searching out human
need, transitory as a wind in the forest that rustles the
leaves and then is forgotten. Whatever power of self-
propagation that love might have, it was left to a few
loyal hearts in the midst of the sinister selfishness of
their age. One would have thought it would run out
quickly — say in three generations at the most: like a
mountain stream lost in desert sands. A faith, a con
viction, a life, so largely interwoven with emotion, would

12 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
quickly run into strange forms and pass on into other
manifestations, and so be superseded. Even if left to
itself, it might be trusted soon to disappear, just because
of its delicacy and unworldly beauty in an impossible set
ting — like a rare exotic, doomed to degenerate among
common weeds.
But the little circle of friends of the friendly man was
not even left to itself. As it grew, it ran into perils in
credible, unimaginable — unending in number and variety.
It lived amid hostile forces, like a lamb in a forest haunted
by a wolf -pack. The blood-rusted ungulce themselves —
sharp claws of iron, used by the Roman magistrates to
tear the flesh of accused Christians — were not so cruel
as the dangers that sprung up from among themselves.
The lingering influence of Jesus was not only smothered
in blood, it was crushed with bigotry, it was volatilized
in argument.
And yet, as so shrewd a publicist and man of the world
as the genial Col. Watterson of Kentucky said only the
other day, "The teaching and example of the Prince
of Peace have been engulfed beneath oceans of ignorance
and superstition through two thousand years of embittered
controversy" ; but "never in the history of the world was
Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant" as
now. In spite of all our pessimisms this fact is clear as the
sun. Jesus means more to the men of today than He
ever did to the men of Judea. Bitter as the bigotry and
strife have been, all the more starvingly eager is the
wistful hungriness of men for what He still brings to life.
His own inner circle of friends was bigoted and quarrel
some, even when He was with them; and again and
again He had to call them back to humble, unselfish

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 13
brotherliness. And today His call is just as thrillingly
clear and inevitable that any who follow Him should be
"tenderhearted, humble-minded, forgiving one another."
The incomparably urgent need of society today is for
just what Jesus brings — self-mastery for the ends of love.
The nations of the twentieth century need for their de
velopment food and clothing and labor, and the raw mate
rials of coal and iron and oil and cotton: but they may
have all these in abundance and yet stagger backward till
civilization is drowned in night. But the spirit of Jesus,
love and good-will and self-restraint, will carry on the
human race to ever higher stages of development. The
process of development in creation may be hindered and
brought to a stand in our own century by the self-asser
tion of human instincts that ally us with the animals :
but in Jesus we find the very force needed to carry on
creation to its consummation.
One stands in amazement before this fact. We have
become so used to hear Jesus spoken of in terms of patron
age or indifference or unbelief, that we need to shake
ourselves free of popular affectations to realize that He
actually supplies to society just the constructive force
that humanity needs for life and growth. The future of
humanity is not with the last clever novelist who con
descends to the Master. The key to advancement is with
Jesus. Because moral power radiates from Him. He
is the living center of operative love. That is not pious
exaggeration, but prosaic fact legibly written in un
counted lives. The reality of power is here. For the
purposes of unselfish service, Jesus is to men of today what
the sun is to the plant world. Where He is, life is.
The thrill of His example spreads far beyond the circle
of those who name His name — even to Buddhists and

14 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
agnostics. And as men's hearts turn to Him in honest
devotion, fresh energies are being released every day
for social redemption. It is every whit as true for fisher
men on the Labrador coast as it once was for fishermen
under the hot skies of Galilee — the fellowship of Jesus
lifts them up into touch with God and His Fatherly ways.
He lets the light of heaven shine on their understanding,
and straightway they see new visions and think unac
customed thoughts of gentleness and friendliness with
men. We look to see how this result of power is actually
achieved in men's lives today through the medium of
Jesus' personality. Roughly speaking there are two sets
of conditions that spoil and cripple life and render it ig
noble and ineffective. Both of them fight against love —
they inhibit its operation, and benumb and paralyze the
more generous impulses of our nature. The old Baby
lonians had to fight with them just as do our neighbors
in the next street, and no conceivable future developments
of society can alter very much their hostile influence.
It is the glory of Jesus that He brings in love in spite
of them— even by means of them.
First of all is the eternal enemy of love in every form —
sin. One shrinks from using a word so inextricably
bound up with ages of odious controversies, and one so
thoroughly out of taste today. But what other term
describes the element we all admit in human nature that
is like the moth and rust of the soul, ever at work to
destroy our spiritual possessions? The common, deadly
selfishness that drinks up love ?
Our thinking ought to be clearer on this matter than
it was ten years ago. We have had a riot of sin for
years — not of the polite artistically draped indulgences

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 15
that modern society permits itself, but of the raw pas
sions of the brute, scientifically edged and sharpened for
destruction. We have drunk to the loathsome dregs the
cup of that will-to-power that unblushingly disassociates
itself from love and all its works. And tens of millions
of innocent women and children are still suffering, day
and night, because the dregs of the cup are so dreadful
in their poison of death. Men have thrown away love
with both hands, in utter abandonment, and they have been
reaping the destruction that Jesus used to speak about
in words as awful as the condition of those uncounted
homes of sorrow. Here is stark reality — such as chills
the blood to look at near at hand — the reality of sin.
And Jesus opposes to it the other reality, equally sure
but infinitely wider in its scope and reach, the love of His
Father. Here also was a cup for men to drink, He
said, with no dregs of death or any disappointment what
soever, but a cup of joy — an elixir of life. Not in any
high-flown, mystical way, for emotional ecstatic natures,
but in a perfectly obvious way of daily, homely operation
in the common life of common people. Their Father
loved them, forgave them, received them back to friendly,
intimate association, so as to undercut the root of their
distrust of him, and bring the evil flower of their ill-will
to the ground, a wilted plant, unable to flourish in the
wholesome sunlight of His goodness.
It is impossible for any one to believe heartily in Jesus
without finding himself being led out into this open sun
shine of God's love, as a very first step under the in
fluence of the new Leader. We may have been a tor
ment to ourselves and to others, because of our wrong
thinking and wrong doing. An uneasy conscience is a
ceaseless irritation, making a man "gey ill to live with."

16 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
But an uneasy conscience cannot live in one who trusts
himself to the truth of Jesus' teaching. The poor beg
gared spendthrift who crept back to his father's house —
in Jesus' story— was miserable enough with cankering
remorse and uncertainty and shame : but all these feelings
suddenly fell away into speechless gratitude, when he felt
his father's arms about his neck and knew that his father
loved him still. A touch of nature makes the whole
world kin, and in this respect the South Sea savage re
acts just as the educated Chinese scholar — Jesus actually
brings them into touch with the Almighty Father of their
spirits, and at this touch of sympathy the whole world
alters. Forgiveness and the forsaking of what displeases
Him mean, suddenly, the dawn of a new heaven and a new
earth. We see the all but incredible wonder of it in the lives
of those who have forgotten what love is, who are yet
brought by a miracle of kindness within the range of
Jesus' influence. Years ago a young Scotchman and his
wife were set ashore on the beach of the island of Tanna,
in the New Hebrides, in the hope that they might be
able to bring the gospel of Jesus to the natives. They
were not able. The islanders were blood-thirsty savages,
filthy, brutal, dangerous, and delighting in cruelty of
every kind. Times past remembering they plotted mur
der against the man who tried to love them into a true
manhood. For months he lived in the very shadow of
death, familiar daily with threat of club and killing
stone, musket, and spear, in the hands of furious enemies.
Within four years they drove him out empty handed,
leaving even his wife and little child buried there by the
beach, waiting like hostages for his return.
More than thirty years later, his son, Frank Paton,

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 17
landed again on the shore of Tanna. The same crowd
of naked, painted savages, with spears and guns, pressed
dawn to meet him. Yet now he had certain aids in his
work among them, and very early the work began to show
results. The very chief who had once led a war party
to murder his father was among the first converts. An
other and another followed. Schools were begun and
presently a church was formed. And when, at the end
of only five years, Mr. Paton, broken in health, was forced
to leave, under what conditions do you suppose he parted
from them, who had been so lately — both outwardly and
inwardly — like very children of the devil? "The hardest
thing to bear," he says, "was the sorrow of the people."
On the day just before his departure the church was
crowded in the early morning with hundreds of those
who had come to a farewell service. One stalwart man,
who had become himself a teacher, spoke on the words,
"Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows."
With tears rolling down his face, he told them how
true these words were of their own pastor, who had suf
fered with them and for them, and now was going away
in sickness. Then the war chief, Iavis, rose, and after
speaking on the verse, "What shall it profit a man if he
gain the whole world and lose his own soul," begged the
people to show their love for their missionary by being
better Christians. Then with prayer and singing the
meeting concluded.
In the moving words of Mr. Paton, "It was a dreadful
parting from our people. Death would have been easier
than that terrible wrench. As the steamer moved out,
we watched the light in our home till it faded into the
darkness, and then we went below to battle through the
sorest night in all our life. We may travel far afield,

18 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
. . . but we shall never meet with nobler or more Christ
like men than Lomai and his brave fellow-teachers.
They are heroes, every one of them, God's Heroes."
A great power house at Niagara is a wonderful sight,
but is there anywhere a whirring dynamo whose energy
is in any way comparable with the power behind those
words, "Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our
sorrows"? The reality of love, and especially of love
that suffers in silence, plays upon the hearts of men of
all tribes and peoples, as the high current plays upon the
lighting system of a great city. And it is undeniably
in Jesus that we find the undying center of those high
currents of spiritual power that lift men out of degrada
tion and make them heroes who had been vicious cowards.
Hardly less impressive is the experience of one at the
opposite end of the scale from those imbruted cannibals,
one whose whole life was a seeking after God, yet barren
and forlorn for lack of love to feed upon. The story
of the well-known Chundra Lela, of India, throws a
clear ray of light on the singular power of Jesus' influence
to make love triumph over the restlessness of an uneasy
conscience. Born in India, far up among the mountains
of Nepal, of a priestly Brahman family, she was left
a child-widow at the age of nine. Nevertheless her
father gave her a careful education, and took her with him
when she was but twelve years old, on her first pilgrimage
to Juggernath, where he died of cholera. More and more
eagerly she studied the sacred books of the Hindus,
until she decided that a vision of God and forgiveness of
sins would be worth more to her than anything else in
the world. With this one end in view she left home with
two other widows of like mind, on a long series of pil
grimages to the sacred places of India, seeking some

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 19
evidence that the Supreme Being was pleased with her
worship. Thousands of miles they travelled on foot,
through perils innumerable, of robbers and wild beasts
and pestilence and famine, taking seven years to com
plete the circuit of the holy places. But no comfort
came to her, nor any rest of soul, though she was now
a devotee and holy woman, reverenced by all for her piety.
Again she set out upon her fruitless quest, hungry of
soul for what no temple or priest could give. This time
she went far up into Assam, and there on the Brahma
putra River, surrounded on three sides by hills and
forests, she lived alone for eight years, far from any
human habitation, striving to gain by austerities and
self-torture the approval of 'God she craved. Only twice
in these years did she see the face of a human being, and
the story of the self-inflicted torments she underwent is
all but incredible to a Western mind.
The forests, like the temples, brought her no rest. She
returned to India, and there for the first time learned of
the Christian Bible. She secured a copy and for months
studied it together with the Hindu Shasters. The story
of Jesus filled her with inexpressible hope and longing,
and in the end her prayers were answered and her heart
overflowed with joy as she put her trust in him. She
was a Christian! From that time, for more than thirty
years, until her body was feeble and her hair white with
age, she went up and down through northern India,
known everywhere as a "holy woman," telling of the love
of God that had come to her through Jesus Christ. She
had found that which made her forlorn life blossom like
the rose, and she gave that late blooming life utterly to
Him who had brought deliverance.
The finest flower of our own type of intellectual develop-

20 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
ment is not too proud to make the same confession of
loyalty to Him who has made love triumph in their lives,
in spite of their own fears and failures. Witness that
last word of Charles Cuthbert Hall, in which he left di
rections for his funeral service :
"I have indicated what shall be said and sung today
because my one great longing is for the joy of wit
nessing in death, as I have tried to witness in life,
to my adoration and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ,
my Lord and my God in whom I rest securely for
salvation, pardon, and peace. I lie among my
friends. They love me. I love them."
We read behind those simple lines the moving story
of a glowing life-purpose, incandescent with the trans
mitted energy of love. And it is the same story that
underlies that last "author's prayer" of Professor Raus-
chenbusch, "Pardon the fraility of thy servant, and look
upon him only as he sinks his life in Jesus, his Master
and Saviour."
Both of these men were intensely modern; they were
alive in every fibre with social sympathies. But they
bore glad witness that this love was the overflow of a
life made possible only by what Jesus Christ had brought
them. Their very memory is like sunshine: is there
any doubt from whence that sunshine came?
Professor Rauschenbusch would have believed in Jesus
in a far different way from that poor transfigured cannibal
of the New Hebrides, just as Dr. Martineau and Mr.
Moody and Col. Roosevelt would each have had a
sharply differing view-point for regarding Him. Yet
all would have agreed that Jesus made life rich and
beautiful, because He set the way to God wide open in
spite of sin. Jonathan Edwards made the average worldly

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 21
man feel that God was the awful Sovereign and Judge,
whose wrath was the very element in which he lived.
Jesus made the careless men and women of His time to
feel that God — in every way — was better to them than
the fathers whom they knew. If fathers were tender and
forgiving toward their often wilful children, "how much
more" did their Father in heaven long for their good,
and welcome their stumbling efforts to return to Him.
And Jesus has this place in the life of today, that, where-
ever men believe in His word, He makes them know that
between them and God there may be a flawless sympathy.
Not a half-suspicious, half-grudging toleration on His
part, secured on the credit of another; but limpid natural
affection, as between father and son. And every atom of
its strength and purpose leads men, as they perceive it, to
forsake and hate the sin that as a matter of experience
shuts them out from Him. So love takes possession
of them.
Even 'with the clear assurance of Jesus' word, many of
the best men and women of our day never come to trust
God's love as they would trust their own father's. For
them, God is not as human as Jesus, not as good as
the parents of their childhood home. The old terror
of the Oriental monarch still clings about Him. There
is a story of a little girl who was learning to write.
With laborious effort she had prepared a whole sheet of
her handwriting, to show her father as a surprise. One
night when he came home, his little daughter brought
him her masterpiece, and with pride and joy submitted
it for his approval. Several small blots were on the
page, which were — even in her eyes — a disagreeable in
trusion. But over these she laid her hand, saying, "Don't
see the blots, father!" What father would be deaf to

22 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
such an appeal? The spirit and purpose of her loving
effort were what counted, and not the staring imperfec
tions of her pathetic attempt to please him.
But, as many of us well know, we do not give God
credit for being as good as that. We do not believe in
Jesus' teaching at this point. What is called the "New
England conscience" is a sorry reflection upon God's
patience and sympathy with His children. If we come
to God at night with the story of the day, often it is only
of the blots we are thinking, and only the blots that we
suppose will attract His attention. And the result is
to keep always a cloud between ourselves and God, to
keep us always uncertain and uneasy as to His favor, and
so to rob life of the free gladness of His love. To be
lieve in Jesus is to have a better wisdom than this, for
still He assures men that all we know of human love and
forbearance is but a poor reflection of what is in our
Father's heart.
It is not wholly amiss to recall the street-boy's defini
tion of a friend, as "a feller who knows all about yer, but
likes yer just the same." Some of us haven't even the
homely good sense to trust that God comes up to the
level of a friend ! We are still partly under the influence
of ancestors who thought they pleased God by living in
an atmosphere of sorrowful self-reproach and extrava
gant self-depreciation. As Jonathan Edwards said in his
diary, among many similar expressions, "When I look
into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it
looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell." What
sort of family life would be possible where the children
so abased themselves in perpetual remorse for their
shortcomings, they seem never to have considered. In
any case, Jesus brings to men of this as of every day the

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 23
natural, wholesome life of love, in spite of sin and blunder
ing and failure. It is only the plainest outcome of ex
perience to affirm that there is no other name under
heaven given among men that can give such assurance of
eternal goodness, reaching out of the infinite unseen, to
assist and beautify our familiar daily plodding through
these earthly years.
But there is something gravely wrong with life besides
the wrongness of men's hearts — something bewilderingly
wrong and hostile. The terms of this earthly struggle for
existence are not what one would expect in God's world
¦ — they are too harsh! Huxley and Spencer were after
all hardly more drastic in their summing up of the merci-
lessness of Nature than was Paul, when he said "the
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together
until now." Life is kind to a chosen few: but on many
sensitive hearts its forces beat like flails, bruising and be
numbing with sheer pain: not kindly pain, directed
to helpful uses, but senseless, useless suffering, em
bittering the spirit like punishment undeserved. Men
strike out against it blindly, and because they see no one
else to blame, they blame God. Love dies at the root,
and faith with it: and God's face is hidden from them.
One remembers what Mrs. Annie Besant said to
Moncure Conway, as they came out of the court-room
where the judge had just taken from her the care of her
little daughter — "It is a pity there isn't a God : it would
do one so much good to hate him." During these last
few years we have heard from bewildered hearts, tor
tured by the spectacle of suffering, many such utterances
as this, voicing the bitterness of their distress of doubt.
Dr. Fort Newton, of the City Temple in London, quotes
a letter he received from one of the boys of the church

24 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
in the trenches, dated "Somewhere in Hell." One of the
sentences ran as follows : "Dear Preacher, forgive me
writing so. I know you will forgive, but who will forgive
God? Not I — not I. This war makes one hate God.
. . . He let it happen. Omnipotent ! and — He let it hap
pen. Omniscient ! He knew it in advance — and he's let
it happen. I hate Him. . . . You have been kinder to
me than God has been."
God knows, men and women who speak like this are
distraught with pain. But there are many of them thus
distraught, and life for them is a feverish rebellion against
things as they are. The comfort of a reassuring love
passes them by, leaving them defiant and hard and often
dangerous to society.
There are many more who never reach defiance, whose
spirits are yet broken by misfortune. The pleasant
light of life dies out and leaves them in the shadow.
They are defeated by life's hardness and carry their bur
den heavily through dragging years, making the world
a sadder place for others, because of their self-pity and
discouragement. It may be sickness, or failure, or lone
liness, or fear : but whatever it is — and no one can deny
the strain and sorrow of it — it robs them of life's joy
and shuts them out from the comfort of their Father's
presence. It is wholly pitiful to think of the number of
those who, for one reason or another, lead dispirited,
drooping lives, without the resilience and buoyancy of
love triumphant over all.
The place of Jesus is of one who brings back victory
of the spirit to those who, but for Him, had been sullen
and defeated or perhaps only heart-broken. It is not
so easy to say just how He does it, but that He does it' —
for those who believe in Him — we have the grateful wit-

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 25
ness of men and women past numbering, in every walk
of life and in every generation. He floods one's con
sciousness with the assurance on which He Himself
rested in the dark, that a Father's ten'derness is behind
and above all distress, and that He will not let his child-
dren slip from His remembrance and good care.
They suffer — yes. Nothing interferes to save! But
the suffering is not the last word. The last word is
victory and joy and love triumphant. That is the con
fidence which Jesus had in His own heart when He was de
spised and forsaken of men, and He somehow puts it,
indestructible, in the hearts of those who trust in Him.
"When I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto
me." He does not do it by argument, or by reiterated prom
ises. In His daily meeting with anxious men and women
He must have said numberless reassuring things, sooth
ing the sting of their sorrow and reviving their courage.
But hardly a trace of them has been preserved. It is
nothing less than astonishing that the three first gospels
have so few utterances explaining life's hardness and
affirming the compassion of God. Jesus does not even
once use the word "love" of His Father, as does the Old
Testament so often with deep feeling — so completely do
the simple records shun any tendency to sentiment or
emotion. But every day of His life unfolded the divine
compassion in ways that the world will not forget, and
every fresh glimpse of His calm self-possession reveals
His confidence that love and not evil will win the day.
This is what makes men today stand courageously firm
in circumstances where their hearts ache with trouble
they can neither explain nor relieve. They might crum
ple up under it morally, losing faith in God and courage

26 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
for life and the spiritual victory that makes one great.
It is easy to show yellow: — to give up, or break down, or
turn bitter. But when one sees Jesus standing over
against him — like one stricken, smitten of God, and af
flicted — yet undefeated, unafraid, majestic in His trusting
obedience to His Father's will, then one needs no argu
ment. This is not a "rotten world," this same world in
which Jesus once went quietly to His death, triumphing
by faith and love. If He rested on His Father's goodness,
in spite of pain and shame surging over Him in the dark,
then who are we to lose heart and faith when the hard
days come and heavy clouds lie like lead upon our
spirits ! If He could rest on God's love to the very end,
then we who believe in Him can do nothing else in our
sharp trials. In any case, explain it as you will, the
spirit of Jesus in human hearts today makes men look
up in love and hope where, but for Him, their eyes would
be bent miserably upon the ground.
Life all about us is full of instances of this reality.
The heroic triumphs of spirit, maintained by love that
cannot understand yet stakes all on Jesus' word, are all
around us, in humble lives of which the wise world never
hears. Years ago the writer well knew a young mother,
glorified by pride and joy in a little daughter, her baby.
Suddenly it was stricken down by infantile paralysis,
and the mother, who longed to shield it from every
breath of pain, had to look on, day after day and week
after week, while the smiling face grew drawn and hag
gard with suffering. Even for friends who came in for
an hour, it was a sight too sad to see. But for her, the
mother, whose arms could no longer rest the little griev
ing daughter, it was such a way of sorrow as often
makes of life a hopeless enigma of blinding disappoint-

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 27
ment. But hecause her spirit rested on the assurance of
Jesus, when the end came she wrote her pastor : —
"We look to you to voice our gratitude for so much
of beauty and 'delight and sweetness, which has been and
still is ours. We both feel very strongly that we cannot
thank the dear Father enough. . . . We know that some
day the revelation will be given of what these suffering
months have wrought for her. How good He has been
to keep our faith through the time of mystery and dark
ness ! In all the trial there has not been a drop of bitter
ness." If He can make love so triumphant, without strain, even
in life's darkest hours, then there is a great place for
Him today in the lives of men and women — perhaps even
in our own.
Take from India another instance, of the place of
Jesus in life's dark realities. There was a bright, happy
young girl of seventeen in an Indian orphanage — popular
with all, engaged to be married, delighting in a glad
world. Without warning, there broke out sores upon
her hands that shut her up to a living death as a leper.
She was admitted to the Leper Asylum opened by that
well-known friend of the forlorn, Sam Higginbottom of
Allahabad. He tells of her arrival there.
"Arrived at the asylum, we all went in. It was not into
the beautiful quarters we have now, but into a miserable,
tumble-down collection of dilapidated mud huts, not
fit for the habitation of any living thing. This fair young
girl, dressed in her white clothes, looked round this
fearful place,, and caught sight of a group of creatures
crouched under the trees. She took one look and then
threw her head on her brother's shoulder and sobbed as
though her heart would break. She asked : 'Is that what

28 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
I am coming to? Am I going to be as one of those?' "
A few days later, trying to comfort her, he reminded
her of how much had come into her life from others
to make it richer and fuller and better, and urged her
to have a school for those forlorn women, and to teach
them some of the hymns she knew. She agreed to try.
Months afterwards she opened her heart to one of the
missionary doctors :
"She said when she first went into the Leper Asylum
she did not believe there was any God ; or, if there were a
God, He could not be a God of love and afflict any human
being as He had afflicted her. 'But now,' she continued,
'every day I live I thank God he made me a leper, be
cause as a leper He has given me a work to do for Him
that otherwise I would have known nothing about.'
"As one went through the women's quarters and saw
the women, clean and neat and tidy, with hope in their
faces and songs in their hearts, nearly every one of them
having learned to know Jesus and having confessed Him,
it was evident that the consecrated life of this Indian leper
girl had borne abundant fruit for the glory of God and
the help of His afflicted children.
"Today, eleven years after she first entered the asylum,
she is the same sweet Christian. She shows traces of the
awful suffering caused by the disease, but behind the
furrows of pain one sees the radiant calm of one who has
found Jesus able to save."
Amid a thousand perplexities, we are sure that there is
no nobler capacity in life than this, to be able to wring
victory out of defeat, and to make love blossom out of
conditions that breed bitterness and rebellious protest.
And we find this capacity in lives all about us, rooted in a
faith in Jesus. His conviction as to the divine love behind

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 29
the menacing evil, becomes their conviction. Arthur
Lyttleton, British Secretary of State for the Colonies a few
years since, had certain severe trials, ending with death
of his little boy. But out of it all, and in spite of its bruis
ing impact on his soul, he drew the "unalterable conviction
that there is strength and beauty and glory to be won
from these awful events." Our world desperately needs
the forces of such an unconquerable faith in love beyond
all, and we find them in fact inseparably associated with
the influence of Jesus.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that His touch
on the life of today is felt only as men are directly con
scious of His personal agency, or as the love that re
fines their lives reaches them through the channel of
ecstatic or mystical feeling. It would no doubt be a won
derful and convincing experience to have a new world
dawn on one as it did on Paul, or Chundra Lela, or thou
sands of other twice-born souls, as through the direct,
personal agency of the great Revealer. Many people still
would like to think that all divine agencies must be super
natural agencies, working by means that are miraculous
or at least marvellous. But as we now well understand,
God's divinest ways with men are often very homely and
familiar ways, so natural and unobtrusive as scarcely to
excite remark. And as a matter of fact, Jesus is a
bringer of heavenly love into the lives of this generation
by means so simply natural, that thousands of our young
people, inexpressibly indebted to Him, are hardly con
scious of any debt at all. The incalculable value of His
contribution to their lives escapes their notice, because they
fail to notice how far their moral heritage is of His
creating. The love of God may seem to us to be at best some-

30 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
thing very unsubstantial and far away — and so indeed it
is, if it is to dawn on us only through visions or spiritual
transports. But suppose it looked out on us first through
our own mother's eyes, bending over us in infancy, and
that we saw it in our father's face long before we knew
how that tender and gracious affection was a reflection of
the true glory of Jesus Christ, whose spirit lived in them
triumphantly and made our father and mother what they
were. Then followed a host of influences in our lives,
all radiating from that same divine center of unselfish
love — brothers and sisters, teachers, friends, associates,
Christian leaders and pastors, great loving minds of the
past also, that spoke to us through books — a thousand
subtle and interweaving appeals to what is noblest in us,
all springing from that living center of goodness, and all
revealing our Father in heaven. The lines fall to us
in pleasant places, we have a goodly heritage! Why?
Surely not because we are so superlatively deserving,
but because this Jesus so immediately and powerfully
lived in our ancestors and still lives in the lives of His
disciples all about us. Stupid we are, and blind and deaf,
not to feel the incalculable riches of the love that has
always been at work upon us — the imperishable energy of
Jesus, mediated to us through the agency of those who
live by Him.
A few days ago a wretched negro murderer was hur
ried away to the gallows. He was not fit to live, and he
knew it. But he said in explanation, and said truly, that
he had never had a chance. Kicked into the world and
forsaken by cruel parents, kicked and beaten and abused
through all his childhood, growing up among drunken
criminals in ignorance of any better thing, despised and
feared by society, his hand was against every man, and he

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 31
died as he had lived, undesired and unloved. Against that
lurid background we can measure something of our in
debtedness to Him who has caused our life to be actually
rooted and grounded in Christian love — in the pervasive
reality of a divinely helpful sympathy, reflected on us
from infancy, from a hundred angles, because Jesus still
reproduces His gentleness in the hearts of men. That is
the way God most evidently makes Himself known to our
generation, through the lives of men and women brought
into spiritual contact with Him by the agency of an Elder
Brother, the great friend of men. It is a great League
of Love and Light, with our God at its head. And as a
matter of fact and history and experience, men discover
it and come into it under the leadership of this man of
Nazareth, whose fervent friendship made him a Man of
Sorrows. That is why he still has the name that is above
every name, because he leads through love to life.
"Through love to light! O, wonderful the way
That leads from darkness to the perfect day !
From darkness and from sorrow of the night
To morning that comes singing o'er the sea."
Let us not leave this phase of our subject without re
membering once more how exquisite and supreme a ser
vice Jesus renders to human life when He attunes it to
love as its major key. No conceivable degree of good
fortune in material things is quite equal in value or perma
nence to this blessing. More and more as life goes on,
one may apply to love the acid test and prove its unap
proachable primacy among all human possessions.
Nothing makes this more clear than the clairvoyant re
appraisal of life's values that comes with severe illness.
After certain days or weeks of invading pain and weak-

32 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
ness, one reaches — perhaps with a half-conscious sense of
relief — a day when one no longer thinks of this world as
his own. Its pursuits have slipped away from him,
perhaps forever. Its boisterous appeals to his life-long
interest, in business or politics or literature or reform,
quite fail to reach his spirit in the strange border-land
of detachment where he now lives, with only the nurse
and the doctor and the weary struggle for rest as his
chief concerns. But when he has come into these deep
waters, where he finds no standing-ground at all, and
where all his possessions have suddenly lost value and
faded out into vague unreality, when he gropes con
fusedly for some reality on which his mind may rest with
comfort, then love remains supreme, alone. Nothing can
rob him of its power. His work may be finished, but
by God's mercy he can still love — the noblest part of him
still lives, faintly felt but invincible. His wife, his chil
dren, his friends, the neighbors who daily send in re
membrances of their loving sympathy, and those, too, who
have long since passed into that other world now so near
— yes, and his Father in heaven also, who has loaded
life with benefits — he is conscious that they love him and
he loves them all, and that even the waters of death can
not drown that undying part of himself. And with
even greater restfulness he knows that, as never before,
their love now encompasses him: it watches by his bed
side, it suffers with his suffering; his Father is with him
in the dark and pain, and nothing can spoil that assurance,
or quite loosen its hold upon him. He cannot think of the
great doctrines, his spirit may be too dulled for prayer
¦ — but believing in Jesus he knows that love is there with
him, that it will not leave him as the world slips away,
and that it will even be waiting for him when he ventures

THE BRINGER OF LOVE 33
out solitary into the infinite unknown. The whole wide
universe has nothing else that reaches or relieves him in
his extremity — but underneath are the everlasting arms
of love.
Is that not a rare imperishable essence that Jesus in
fuses into life? And would any man in his senses speak
slightingly or patronizingly of Him who enriches life's
relationships with this enduring fragrance? Yet if hu
man consciousness bears unhesitating witness to any ex
perience in life it is to this, that we love because He first
loved us. He also that abideth in love abideth in God.
This is the faith that Jesus brings to men and women of
today.

Chapter III
THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS
In that imperishable classic of the soul, the Shepherd
Psalm, one of the great affirmations runs, "He leadeth
me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake."
Imagination tends rather to catch on the opening sentences
— on the idyllic pictures of the green pastures and the
still waters, and even on the valley of the dark shadow,
with the shepherd safely leading. But after all, we know
that the very heart of the poem is in this central emphasis
on the paths of righteousness. Here is the deep reason
able foundation that underlies the truth of all this high
imagining. It is because God leads forever in ways of
righteousness, that His children may sing confidently of
pastures green and living waters. Other paths there
are that lead into the desert and to death. But it is not our
Father who leads His children there. His righteousness
is like the great mountains. Justice and judgment are
the habitation of His throne.
And so most naturally, when Jesus was seeking to make
men understand what God was like, He filled this ancient
psalm full of new meaning and reality. He gave it
substance. He brought it within men's understanding,
and gave it a deathless hold on their loyalty and affection.
For when it spoke by faith alone of Jehovah as the
Shepherd of His people, was not Jesus in visible reality
the Good Shepherd? Did He not, before men's eyes,
34

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 35
Himself walk through the valley of the shadow, and there,
seeing the wolf coming, give His life for the sheep ? He
made the colors of that old picture glow with the splendor
of the tenderness of God. And most of all did He give
color and reality to this central affirmation, He leadeth
us in the paths of righteousness. He could do no less
if God indeed were to shine through Him on the ignorance
and unbelief of men.
To be sure, the world was deadly sick of righteousness
in a way, and Jesus had need to present it in some new
color, if he were to make men really hunger for it. The
scribes and Pharisees were always before them, as the
unco guid were always before the eyes of Robert Burns
— and little help either of them brought to the poor
wastrels of their time. But it -makes one thank God
and take courage that Jesus was so divine as to put God
in a new light, so that very weak and shifty people came
naturally to a steadfast purpose to do His will — actually
grew into righteous people — because the whole outlook
of their life was changed. No doubt it was love changed
it, but it put iron into their character, who had been like
reeds shaken by the wind. Jesus led them to God, and
this was the inevitable result, that they began at once to
grow like Him. They could not really live in touch with
their Father and not think His thoughts and try to follow
His ways. This is what Jesus did, and infallibly does,
before our eyes today, for those who trust His leadership.
He commits them to a life of righteousness.
It is something as normal and natural as any other
process of life. We need to be clear on this point, for
there have been centuries of almost impenetrable mystery
and unreality surrounding it. The words and example
of Jesus Himself leave us in no doubt of the central fact,

36 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
so simple and yet infinite in scope. He came to put men
right with God, in the only possible way, by leading them
to choose to do His will. When a woman out of the
crowd called out in her enthusiasm, "Happy is the mother
who bore you," with its suggestion of an inner circle of
God's favored, Jesus answered, "Yea rather, blessed are
they that hear the word of God and keep it." Again he
said, "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the
will of my Father which is in heaven." Nothing was
greater or wiser or better than just to do right in God's
sight. And when someone told Him in the house, "Thy
mother and thy brethren stand without desiring to speak
with thee"; He answered, "Whosoever shall do the will
of God, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother."
This is what Jesus was trying to bring about in the
people whom He met from day to day — something very
plain and simple, but very real and searching. They were
to choose God's will just as children are loyally obedient
to their father. A little girl in His audience could under
stand that, or a peasant, or household drudge. But for
many centuries the Church has wrapped this central pur
pose of Jesus round with mystery and puzzling difficulty,
so that its appealing simplicity has been much obscured.
How many of us can sympathize keenly with Harriet
Beecher Stowe, when she was a little girl in the parsonage
at Litchfield. With all her heart she longed to be right
with God and to do His will as one of His children: but
how she was to cross the line from being a child of wrath
to being a daughter of the household, she could not see.
Her father's doctrinal sermons were no more intelligible
to her "than if they had been in Choctaw," and from

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 37
month to month she was held, miserable and afraid, out
side the threshold, longing to enter in.
And then one day her father preached a communion
sermon, without notes, straight from his true, warm heart,
on Jesus as a friend offered to every human being. "For
getting all his hair-splitting distinctions and dialectic sub
tleties, he spoke in direct, simple, and tender language of
the great love of Christ." Harriet, then fourteen years
old, listened with growing wonder and delight, her "whole
soul illumined with joy." She chose to follow Jesus'
call as naturally and eagerly as a sheep might follow its
shepherd, and she went home that day in a new world of
gladness and peace, to tell her father she had become a
Christian. She had run in under his guard, so to speak,
and was safe. And he, like a good father, was too wise
to turn her back into the wilderness, though she had
come into the fold in a strange way and with dangerous
ease. But when next year she went to Hartford, and made
application to be received into the church there, the pastor
— trusted friend of Dr. Beecher's — turned to the timid
little girl, after her simple confession of faith and love,
and said, "Harriet, do you feel that if the universe should
be destroyed, you could be happy with God alone ?" The
awful picture was hardly to be realized on the instant, but
she faltered, "Yes." The doctor continued, "You real
ize, I trust, in some measure at least, the deceitfulness
of your heart, and that in punishment for your sins God
might justly leave you to make yourself as miserable as
you have made yourself sinful?" Again she whispered,
"Yes," but the old torturing fears and perplexities had
returned upon her; the path, then, could not be so simple

38 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
as it seemed : and it was years before she again fought her
way through the wilderness into the pleasant light of
the simple invitation of Jesus.
If we of today have swung over to the opposite extreme,
it is most natural and wholesome and inevitable, after the
doctrinal refinements of many centuries have so often
obscured the primary intent of Jesus' message to man
kind. He was trying to turn the hearts of the children to
the Father, that they might do His will — there in Galilee
— as it is done in heaven. And still this is the place He
holds among men — with no lesser or more puzzling aim
than this, that they should walk as forgiven children
the ways of God. He confronts all men, everywhere,
with this primary demand for righteous living, and He
leads the way, so that they may be able to follow. The
mystery of infinite love encircles it all around, -but the
human duty and privilege are in homely terms that all
fathers and sons, all mothers and daughters, can under
stand. Never was the world less able to dispense with such
leadership as this. It needs to hear, clear as a trumpet
call, the divine authoritative demand for righteousness.
It is the supreme need of the hour, even though society
has fallen out of humor with it, and prefers the witty,
mocking voices of its own prophets. No one questions
that the people of the nations are sick with longing for
quietness, and peace, and far-stretching sunny vistas of
security and good-will. Everywhere, beneath gaiety and
misery alike, is a fierce unrest and discontent with the
present order. Men seek for some new lubricant for
the wheels of civilization. A League of Nations might
answer, or a Peace Court at the Hague, or a non-competi
tive industrial system, or some Sweeping social readjust-

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 39
ment. Something new must be found to check the dis
integrating forces visibly at work on every side.
Yet what is needed is nothing new. It is something
so prosaic, old-fashioned, and sternly uninviting as right
eousness — so commonplace, so Puritanic, so Philistine in
its uncouth associations ! Can any reasonable man sug
gest an alternative? If he could, if some very clever per
son could find a better way, then Christainity would col
lapse speedily, as so many have been expecting it to do,
for a thousand years and more. But until that new
prophet has appeared, to introduce a social force more
constructive than Jesus offers, we of this day must be
lieve in Jesus just because He holds men so firmly and un
compromisingly to God's order — the order of His Father's
kingdom. He summons men individually to yield their
lives to God's direction. There is something splendid,
something majestic, about the life He calls them to — a
life rooted in the Eternal Goodness. But that is just the
place that Jesus fills in the world of today, the place of
one who undoubtedly does lead men to this high fellow
ship with the Unseen — a fellowship in righteousness.
What is the infallible note of an honest association
with Jesus, such as might warrant one in being called
Christian? An acute student of the races of the Near
East has recently said that "in the Levant the typical
Christian is an accomplished liar, and abject coward, and
a noxious parasite, pimp, and pander." Even if we dis
count this fifty per cent, for possible prejudice or exag
geration, the statement still concurs with history's esti
mate of Byzantine Christianity for a millennium.
That is the type of Christianity that "failed to prevent"
the late war. A "Christian Europe," on such formal and
quite illusory lines as these, is the one that threatens in a

40 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
few years to take up war again, for frankly selfish pur
poses. Whatever "Christian" may mean in such connec
tions as this, it evidently does not mean the actual religion
of Jesus, or anything resembling it.
What is it that the spirit of Jesus still demands of
men today, and what does He make of men and women
who actually follow Him?
There is no doubt that the average man's idea of religion
that makes one acceptable to God is a strange, impossible
compound. It has to do with baptism, and the Church,
and believing many things one does not understand, with
setting up to be more pious than other men, with Bible
reading and saying prayers and attending meetings. On
the other hand, Donald Hankey has left us an unforget-
able picture of the average man's religion or ideal, as it
came to the front in the field life of the British army.
We cannot do better than study it a moment, familiar as
it is, to see how it compares, not with conventional church
religion but with what Jesus demands and measurably
secures from those who follow Him.
The average man — so Hankey says — may be immoral
or irreligious, but there are certain moral qualities he
admires and others that he despises. He admires courage,
generosity, practical kindness, honesty, persistence in try
ing to do the right thing. He despises meanness, physical
fear, moral cowardice, instability, equivocation, narrow-
mindedness, subservience to rank or power or wealth.
He hates "swank," cant, cruelty. Singularly enough, as
Hankey reminds us, this picture so far as it goes is like
the ideal of the gospel — it fits in with what Jesus taught.
It would be easy to point out, item by item, how Jesus
nobly presented the very qualities the enlisted man
admires, how He fought with the things despised, and how

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 41
completely He loathed the cruel pride and insincerity that
honest men detest.
And yet the average man scarcely associates this moral
ideal of his — this working religion — either with Jesus or
with his Church. It shows how dreadfully out of joint
present religious conditions are, that the very type of char
acter Jesus came to bring should not even be associated
with him in the popular mind, but that, instead, the mes
sage of Jesus should be identified with a puzzling mass of
ecclesiastical teachings that the average man turns away
from as impossible or unreal.
This is certainly not altogether the fault of the Church.
It has struggled with its task heroically, but it has been
clogged by a heavy burden of tradition relentlessly im
posed upon it for centuries, and it has often failed to put
first things first. Many of the unrealities the average man
objects to become as real and natural as living itself,
when one has made the acquaintance with Jesus and has
come humbly back to God. Moreover, the ordinary man
in the street has an insincerity and a cant of his own,
when he talks about the kind of religion that appeals to
him. As Hankey points out, he is often abominably
selfish in his pleasures, and his actual living is stained with
the moral cowardice he affects to despise. There is a
good deal of camouflage about his profession of ideals.
But with Jesus there is no cant or camouflage what
ever. He stands for the average man's ideal of righteous
ness, quite without reservation. Not as something to be
put on as a garment, but as the natural living out of an
inward spirit — the doing right because one is right. And
He asks a good deal more than does the ordinary man— as
we should expect. Even we feel that we need a more
exacting guide and leader in matters of righteousness than

42 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
the man from the trenches. The voice of the people, as a
matter of history, is not apt to be quite like the voice of
God, nor are the thoughts of the crowd like God's
thoughts in the concerns of the soul. And Jesus leaves
the crowd utterly behind in the requirements he lays on
men — he outruns all our feeble ideas of unselfish helpful
ness. He teaches that a man should not try to crowd to
the front of the procession. "If any man would be first,"
He said, "he shall be last of all and minister of all." He
took on Himself the servile office of washing their feet,
saying, "If I, then, the Lord and the Master, have washed
your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet." He
firmly demanded self-mastery for the purpose of love,
purity in deed and thought, and faithfulness in duty —
where popular thought only hesitatingly follows Him.
And before and above all He sets His two great command
ments, that we should love God with all our heart, and our
neighbor as we love ourselves. We have to admit that
this is not average religion anywhere, and that society
must always stand in need of a strong Leader and Helper
if it is to come to righteousness such as this.
We have to admit regretfully, also, that the Church has
not always kept this phase of Jesus' teaching to the fore.
Jesus Himself unquestionably placed it in the very fore
front, as primary and indispensable for all who would
follow Him. But the early Church had its attention
quickly diverted from what Jesus said, to what the Church
authorities demanded. It is a genuine comfort to remem
ber this, for only so is it possible to understand or explain
why the living gospel of God so sorrowfully languished
for centuries in the great needy world. For a thousand
years the common people did not have in their hands the
gospel records with Jesus' words placing the doing of

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 43
God's will above all else, but they did have ever in their
ears, emphasized by the relentless determination of the
Church to crush all dissent, this paralyzing summons, still
repeated in the ears of millions : —
"Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary
that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except
everyone do keep whole and undefined, without doubt he
shall perish everlastingly." Does this even faintly
remind us of the message and spirit of Jesus? Can we
imagine Him adding, after a bewildering series of meta
physical subtleties regarding three "uncreated and incom
prehensible" Persons in the Godhead, "He therefore that
will be saved must thus think of the Trinity" ? Nor can
we conceive of Him who was the Friend of Sinners going
on to say to His diciples, "It is necessary to everlasting
salvation that you also believe rightly in the Incarnation."
He did ask without ceasing, as John so often reminds us,
that men should believe that God had sent Him, so that
they should receive His message as truth and recognize
His mission as divine. But He asked men to think not
on the mystery of His eternal relation to the Godhead, but
on their own relation to their brother — whether he had
aught against them — and to their Father in Heaven,
whether they were doing His will in love.
Who can measure the loss and pity of it, that half of
intellectual Europe thinks of the place of Jesus in the life
of today as they think of His Church — despotic, auto
cratic, suffocating thought, forbidding inquiry, insistent
above all on submissive conformity to the inherited dogmas
of the Great Councils of antiquity? Or that the world
of labor should think of Jesus' influence as the "chloro
forming agency" of the bourgeoisie? Is it strange that
the thinking world has so swung away from Him who

44 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
came to lead men home to God, when His demands have
been so piteously misrepresented to them for fifteen hun
dred years ? The wonder of wonders is that through all
these centuries the true Church of those who simply heard
His words and did them has kept on its way unbroken,
believing in Him with joy and thankfulness, and follow
ing after Him till death. And today, in the face of all
retrogression and apparent decadence of faith, there is
such an open and waiting field for the preaching of the
real Jesus, the Saviour of men, as there has never been
before since the Near East first listened to the message.
The Jesus of today, like the Jesus of Galilee, is a
leader in righteousness rather than a leader in correct
opinions: and just in proportion as men give attention
to Him, and trust that He was sent of God, and so yield
themselves to His Mastership, will they find themselves
walking in paths both of truth and goodness, such as lead
men by green pastures and still waters.
But quite apart from inherited beliefs and enthusiasms,
is it a fact that Jesus really does lead men in these difficult
ways of righteousness today? Anyone can see the grave
relaxation of moral restraint in our generation — 'the
impatience of control, the feverish demand for amusement
and ever more amusement, the all-prevading appeal to sex,
and the steady degeneration of the dance and the movies
and popular literature in obvious response to this appeal.
The tide of relaxation and self-indulgence runs danger
ously swift for the young men and women who have to
build their house of life in these days disordered by the
world-wide passions unleashed by war. Is Jesus actually
more than a fading name, a hollowed memory from which
the virtue has gone out? Now that there is so much
selfishness and uncertainty and doubt abroad, does He

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 45
still bind men's hearts in steadfast allegiance to truth and
purity and love — in leal loyalty to God. And if He does
it, how does He do it ? Assuredly one has need to reflect
deeply before he essays to answer such an appeal with
confidence. And yet, when all has been said about the
sinister forces of the world today, the experience of life
takes clear form and gives decisive answer in some such
wise as follows.
In the distributing station of a great power plant there
is no visible sign or assurance of the presence of tremen
dous forces. An ignorant man might refuse to believe
that any great powers were gathered there for service.
And yet -behind each silent shining lever lie forces as swift
and powerful as lightning, ready to leap out in action
serving the necessities of millions. And here also, in spite
of its lowly origin, is this divine immeasurable energy.
flowing from Jesus Christ through society today in streams
of power, building up men in righteousness — individual,
social, civic, international — limitless in power as they be
lieve in Him, bringing moral leadership to humanity in
ways as diverse as the infinite variety of human need.
It springs first and most obviously from His character
¦ — His life — His example. We have in the New Testa
ment the brief, artless story of His life. Any man of note
in our day would have a fuller biography than this. And
yet as we read it attentively we feel its extraordinary
quality. All idea of its being an invention, like the
biography of a character in fiction, drops away from us at
once and of necessity. By every instinct of the soul we
recognize it, with whatever reservation we may make as to
details we do not understand, as the true story of a true
man. If there is such a thing in human life as beauty, or
dignity, or majesty, we find it here. It lays hold on the

46 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
very springs of our being, probing our inmost thoughts,
charming us, inspiring, inviting, filling us with strange
desires, breeding hunger for better things. All that is
noble and aspiring in us revives under its strange incite
ment and rouses itself to make response.
Sometimes we may wonder, doubtfully, whether we
really do make such response, or whether our apparent
feeling is only in mechanical conformity to the conventions
of training and tradition. Thank God, we need not
suspect the genuineness of our spiritual reactions to such
a story. It draws us irresistibly, because in us is some
thing — much baffled and crowded down — that recognizes
in Him our true estate, the very type of man that we
would be. If He were here now, being such as He was,
He would draw us infallibly, as has no man we have ever
met, in admiration and friendship and imitation. All of
us have known men whom we have made our heroes, so
noble they seemed to us, so great in helpfulness, so win
some and enviable in character. And here is one whose
goodness might fairly bring us to our knees in reverence
• — a man so strong, so fearless, so gentle; so clean and
true and honorable in the midst of all life's shuffling and
deceit; so full of sympathy and help for people whom
others push aside or tread upon ; so radiating trust in God,
and hope unquenchable. If we had the faintest chance
to get near such a man in the society of today we would
seek his company and commit ourselves and our ambitions
to his influence with eager gladness. A little of his
friendship and personal attachment would make this often
sordid world a different place to us. His very aware
ness of God in the midst of this blind ruck of things
would of itself alone draw us to him with all our hearts,

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 47
in a hope of like victory over the down-drag of material
circumstances. Just to see him, as a beloved physician,
bending over the sick in body and bruised in heart,
making rest and ease and hope bloom again in faces worn
with pain, would pull mightily at our hearts ; and to know
that he was able, too, to bring peace of soul to the vicious
and despairing — would we not follow after such a man
today, if good fortune made it possible for us to be at his
side! And one thing more ! We do not judge of the wonder
of Jesus' life, as His first friends did, only by what they
saw in Him. We have seen His character reproduced in
other lives swayed by His spirit, so that we can judge how
His temper works out under innumerable diverse con
ditions, often unfavorable — and especially in this wise,
modern world that we call our own. There is nb doubt
that such lives vehemently attract us. We may feel
regrettable limitations in some of them from their train
ing or mental environment, but so far as they have lived
and served in the faith and friendship of Jesus, they have
had a truly heavenly beauty, and they stir our souls with
longing, like rare music or a memorable sunset.
One can see this principle working every day in non-
Christian lands, where the example of Jesus — however
imperfectly reproduced- — is thrown up against a back
ground of national religions that lack redeeming power.
Men who love their country see hope for her in this moral
power that springs from Him. Mr. Wen Shih Ken, re
cent Secretary of State for Chekiang Provinces, gives
typical expression to this experience. Mr. Wen was re
ceived not long ago into the Presbyterian Church, a-nd
gave this brief statement of the explanation of his action.

48 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
"My first impulse towards Christianity was re
ceived when I was a student in Tientsin. The stu
dents of the Medical College of the city were no
torious for their immorality. Every effort was
made to bring about their reform but without success.
Finally President Liu of the Medical College induced
some of the students to join a Bible class in the Tient
sin Union Church. At first there was no perceptible
change, but presently surprising results came out.
Most of the men in the class were baptised. They
became diligent in study, patient in healing, and en
ergetic in preaching the gospel in other schools. The
evidence furnished in the lives of these students con
vinced me that God had real power to make young
men repent and to purify their hearts. . . .
"I have decided to become a Christian because I'
wish to be like Christian men whom I have observed
— a man with a pure, strong heart, strong blood,
true patriotism, and perfect zeal. I believe that
Christianity is able to save China. I believe the
Bible is the weapon with which she can work out
her salvation and face the civilized world."
No doubt power flows from the life and example of
Jesus — undying power so long as men are men ; even from
that brief sketch preserved in the gospels, with the
appended two thousand years of living commentary and
illustration. The same creative energy for righteousness flows from
His teaching — increasingly, as the disappointing centuries
emphasize its unapproached supremacy. All the steadily
mounting knowledge and wisdom since His time have not
brought us more vital, searching words of social and
spiritual guidance than He once spoke to an out-of-door
crowd of peasants on a hill-side in Galilee. We have to
stop and think — and think hard — to realize how fruitful
His teaching as to human relations has become in this last

THE LEADER IN RIGHTEOUSNESS 49
century, when men have begun to look intently at His
words rather than at the authorized theological system of
the Church. Most men today are ashamed not to seem at
least familiar with His idea that honor and greatness lie
rather in serving than in being served- — although even so
late as in the eighteenth century we find His Church look
ing for the most part in another direction. His repeated
calls to brotherliness, and mercy, and forgiveness, because
of our common kinship with God as our Father, echo in
the ears of all humanity today, as though they belonged to
all branches of the human family by right of birth: and
yet their growing power, already immeasurable, flows
straight from Him who talked of these strange obligations,
even to narrow fanatic Jews, who were notable haters
even in that harsh Roman world.
We remember, too, the calm assurance with which He
spoke of all that realm of reality beyond what our
physical senses grasp — of the over-shadowing presence of
God, of His goodness, and His fatherly care in the midst
of a world of cruel forces and yet more cruel men. What
astounding revelation He brought, also, of the possibility
of moral recovery and restoration for those broken by
spiritual failure and defeat. Men never guessed that the
way back to God could lie so broad and open, so invit
ing with the promise of joy again, and even love, for
such as had abused love and poisoned the springs of joy.
And always He spoke as one who belonged to two worlds
— to this one, to which he was subject by ties of flesh
and blood, as are we all: but also to the world of the
eternal life, already begun here amid earthly days and
nights, but reaching on timelessly to horizons only known
to God.
There is no other teaching like it in all the world — no

50 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
other influence like its influence. How can it be that He
retains this primacy in leadership, when our generation,
standing as it were upon the shoulders of all that have
gone before, should be able to produce seers and prophets
such as the weary rank and file of humanity have never
known before? All sorts of cults and theosophies claim
our attention, and some of them have much of truth and
inspiration. Yet when we come to view them closely
they are at best but reminders, in some respect, of Him
who spake as never man spake. The world simply does
not take them seriously when they claim primary authority.
But the sayings of Jesus radiate the unique majesty of
authority that belongs only to revelation — not to cleverness
like George Bernard Shaw's, nor to the crude dogmas of
Mrs. Eddy, nor the transcendental musings of a philoso
pher like Emerson, but to him who alone could say with
out bathos, "I am the truth." When he says, e. g., to the
nations of today, "Be ye therefore merciful as your Father
is merciful," He speaks with profoundity, and authority
as well, that leave men silent, as if listening to the voice
of God.
And so, amid the endless uncertainties through which
we have to guide our way, we count this as certainty, that
Jesus and righteousness are inseparably linked. His
place in modern life is such that He and social righteous
ness are simply not to be considered apart. If we are
thoughtful men we cannot ignore Karl Marx. How much
less can we ignore — as some affect to do — Him whose life
and teaching are like a living flame in their power to re
buke evil and refine the good. Whether in the solemn
loneliness of the individual spirit, or the complicated re
lationships of classes and nations, He is a leader in
righteousness — in all the paths that lead through human
weakness to the will of God.

Chapter IV
AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS
There are certain matters of grave import, that men
endlessly debate. Not such perennial themes as the high
cost of living or the way of a man with a maid, that one
may discuss in sheer vacuity of mind. But certain high
matters of universal and perpetual concern, to which the
human spirit turns in moments of clearest vision and
deepest self-consciousness. The American Indians used
to debate these problems around their camp-fires in
northern forests, just as men do today in discussion groups
in the universities or under desert stars in Africa.
They are matters not simply of speculative interest- —
though men have always loved to speculate about them.
They are intensely practical — at least as much so as any
other phase of the stormy struggle for existence.
Whether my life tends up or down, whether it runs into
success or failure, depends largely on the answer that I
find for them. One man loses heart and commits suicide,
another becomes as the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land for thousands, according to his conclusions on these
themes. We may be quite unconcerned about them for
years — and then suddenly, at a turn in the road, we are
met with an insatiable hunger of the soul for light and
understanding. We may think ourselves quite superior
to what we consider an old-fashioned concern over theolog
ical questions, but we do not really know what is in our
SI

52 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
hearts until they are shaken by trouble as leaves are
shaken by the wind. Then we discover new longings and
new needs. A house built on the sands stands up as
squarely in fair or foggy weather, and makes as brave a
show to the world, as one built on rock : but when the clean
hurricane sweeps in from the ocean, and the milk-white
waves break through and flood the land, then is the testing
time when one thinks about foundations. And it is these
foundation realities of human life that men endlessly
debate, and to which no thoughtful man long holds him
self superior.
Jesus frankly stated that He came to throw light on
these problems, whose beginning and end reach into the
unseen. He said, "I am come a light into the world."
He said again, with the tense earnestness of one standing
on the very edge of death, "To this end have I been born,
and to this end am I come into the world, that I should
bear witness unto the truth." Probably He is the only
man who ever ventured to say, "I know whence I came and
whither I go." So great a sage as Confucius deliberately
refused even to speak on these questions. He would not
pretend to give assurance where he felt he did not know.
"Not knowing life," he said, "how can we know death ?"
He told men not to seek to inquire whether there were
gods or spirits. Jesus said, "Ye have not known God,
but I know Him." He made vast pretensions as to His
wisdom in the fundamental concerns of the soul. The
philosophers and theologians of His time he called "blind
leaders of the blind," but of Himself He said, that the
man who trusted His word and acted on it built his life
on rock. These are staggering assumptions for a man
who never had as much school education as we who read
this book. What are we to make of them? As practical,

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 53
open-minded men of the twentieth century, what place
are we to give to Jesus as an authority in these problems
as apprehended in the present day?
Of course there are various attitudes that may be taken
regarding Him. His first friends, who had known Him
longest, said that He was crazy. This is what His own
family thought, so bewildered were they by His assump
tion of authority. His neighbors, who had seen Him com
ing and going on the streets for years, said, "He is merely
one of us villagers, what is the use of paying Him any
attention? He is only a carpenter. We all know His
sisters here in town, and as for James and Joseph and
Simon and Judas, His brothers, they are no better than
we. Whence hath He this wisdom ?" They were clearly
jealous of Him and His popularity. Others, among
whom were the leading citizens and the Church leaders,
who should have known, said, "The devil is in Him."
As for the public opinion of today, the only uttterly
foolish and indefensible attitude is to ignore Him, as
so many do, as though His teachings were negligible for
men so modern as ourselves. He is disregarded by many
as completely as though He taught that the earth is flat.
Some typical writers discuss these topics, which He lived
and died to make luminous to men, as if Jesus had never
lived on earth or spoken unforgettable words of wisdom.
Some of our popular novelists make great show of an
alyzing human life in its realistic completeness, trailing
hero or heroine through a labyrinth of moral and spirit
ual perplexities, and yet apparently never having heard
of that master of men whom none can wholly forget and
whose words still fall on life like sunlight on a wintry day.
And other writers and teachers come to conclusions dia
metrically opposed to those of Jesus, without a trace of

54 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
hesitation or misgiving, as though His teachings were like
a text-book out of date, worthless save as a curiosity.
If Jesus had taken a doctor's degree at Jena, if He
had studied at the Sorbonne, and if He had the cordial
commendation of the psychologists and philosophers of
our leading American universities, we should be compelled
to listen to what He has to say. But as it is, we are
forced to recognize not only that He lived in times pre-
medieval, but that he was not even one of the intelli
gentsia of His day — just a workingman in a country vil
lage. What place has He as arbiter among learned men
in this scientific age ? n
He has the place of an unapproached specialist in the
things of the spirit. Even though He were despised
and forsaken of all men, we could not attentively face
Him without perceiving the Master. We can discuss
Him glibly enough when He is out of sight, but when
we thoughtfully consider Him as He is presented in the
gospels, letting mind and heart weigh well His words and
deeds, we feel — as such a critic as Pierre Loti said —
that He is "inexplicable and unique." There is no man
like Him in spiritual quality. Even the callous police-
runners of His day sensed the fact that never man
spoke as He did; but it was because never man saw
the divine realities of human life as He saw them. He
looked into the face of God as an eagle gazes on the
sun. The eye of His soul was undulled with sin —
stainless He was, where to be stained is to be troubled
in vision, as we are troubled. You and I could never
read both human heart and divine thought so unerringly

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 55
as to say to an outcast with confident authority, Thy
sins be forgiven thee. But it excites no wonder to
see Jesus assuming as a matter of course this pre
rogative of a flawless spiritual insight and author
ity. He did not hesitate to claim for Himself the place of
a specialist, such as no university of today could secure
for its department of ethics even had it the wealth of
Rockefeller. We can hardly exaggerate the amazing
quality of His pretensions as a moral teacher, or the
angry disgust they created in His time, so extravagant
and ridiculous did they appear. If an untaught young
man from Oklahoma were to come East today, announc
ing that the men in our leading schools and pulpits were
blind leaders of the blind, and that the truth as to the
religious duties of mankind was with him, we should
hardly do him the honor of being indignant. We should
pass him by as a brash young man. But Jesus set Him
self unhesitatingly above the most venerated authorities
both of the past and of His own time. "Ye have heard
that it hath been said . . . but I say unto you . . ." —
the audacity of those familiar words is the sublime au
dacity of one conscious of being the supreme specialist
in concerns of the soul. "One greater than Solomon
is here," He told them — one even "greater than the
temple," if Jews could conceive of such a thing. "Many
prophets and kings have desired to hear the things that
ye hear, and have not heard them" — so He said once to
His disciples.
There is nothing ridiculous to us in these assumptions
— nothing subtly humorous, when seen from our modern
scientific angle. Abraham Lincoln, in the severest stress
to which a human spirit groping for wisdom could be
put, found them superlatively reasonable. We approve

56 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
them. They are justified by the moral power and glory
of the speaker. Nothing less could make them other than
grotesquely impertinent. He Himself based them on the
fact that He spoke for God. He did not refer His
hearers to books or other authorities for His statements.
He said, "As the Father taught me, I speak these things,"
Either that is bosh, or else it is of awesome and mo
mentous consequence. And not only did He claim the
authority of the specialist. He spoke with a strange
clairvoyant insight into the realities of the spirit, its
fundamental needs and capacities, that silences our
shallower contentions. It imperiously demands assent.
And something in us answers, and approves. We may
feel unable or unwilling to obey, but we reverently recog
nize a higher wisdom than our own. We may even be
in a critical and argumentative mood; yet when Jesus
says, "This is my commandment that ye love one another,
as I have loved you," we have little disposition to argue.
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do
ye even so to them." "He that humbleth himself shall
be exalted." "Blessed are the pure in heart for they
shall see God." "God is not the God of the dead but
of the living." Words like these leave us in no mood
for measuring ourselves with Him. Something in us
surges up in approval, as though our spirits were made
to respond to truths like these — truths more searching
and imperious than those to which we are accustomed in
books. From all over the world today, from soldiers, and
statesmen, and leaders in finance and industry, one could
gather fervent approval of the teachings of Jesus, as fur
nishing the key to progress in this new century. As in

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 57
that recent "last word to the people of Great Britain"
from Earl Grey: —
"It's Christ's way. Mazzini saw it. We've got
to give up quarrelling. We've got to come together.
We've got to realize that we are all members of the
same family. There's nothing that can help human
ity, I'm perfectly sure there isn't — perfectly sure—
except love. Love is the way out, and the way up.
That's my farewell to the world."
It is a striking fact that the modern statesmen of the
English-speaking world, the men of affairs who are
actually carrying the world burdens as freely chosen
representatives of the people, fall back upon the author
ity of Jesus as the supreme arbiter and guide for our
troubled civilization. Witness that recent appeal to the
"Citizens of the British Empire," issued by the premiers
of the British Commonwealth of Nations, in which they
say: — "The spirit of good-will among men rests on spirit
ual forces : the hope of a 'brotherhood of humanity'
reposes on the deeper spiritual fact of the 'Father
hood of God.' In the recognition of the fact of that
Fatherhood and of the divine purpose for the world,
which are central to the message of Christianity, we
shall discover the ultimate foundation for the re
construction of an ordered and harmonious life for
men. . . . The eternal validity and truth of these
spiritual forces are in fact the one hope for a per
manent foundation for world peace." (Signed by
Lloyd George, Louis Botha, and the premiers of the
other leading colonies.)
Our own leading statesmen for fifty years past would
say the same.
We need not then apologize for giving to Jesus of

58 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
Nazareth as attentive a hearing as to the latest magazine
writer of our day. If any portion of current literature
makes us feel that He has quite dropped out of consid
eration among practical men of this century, so much
the worse for current literature. So great a specialist
was He in the things of God that His appeal to men is
universal and timeless. Soviet Russia may utterly
repudiate Him, but Soviet Russia is to Jesus Christ as a
single crashing breaker on the shore is to the vast silent
tidal wave swinging endlessly across the oceans.
in
What is it we most need to know, that we may live
our life today and tomorrow ardently, faithfully, undis-
couraged by rebuffs and failures? What but the truth
about God and his relation to us ! If that should link
up our brief career with His glory, making each unful
filled capacity and hunger a prophecy of what shall be
when His plan for our lives is complete, then even earthly
life means God and we together, working to an end He
knows and desires. Such truth would make life great
indeed. All social efficiency lies behind it. But who
can assure us of such truth? Not the reviewers, or
essayists, or even the novelists of today ! Jesus alone
says He can. He said of God, "I know him"- — said
that His knowledge was direct, personal, unparalleled
on earth. "No one knoweth the Father save the Son."
"The world knew thee not, but I knew thee." In this
magnificent confidence He won for Himself, first of all,
the greatest moral victory over life that the history of
our race has known. It made Him socially efficient — a
physician, a minister, a saviour, without a parallel. This

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 59
huge assertion of His self-consciousness did not wreck
Him — as it should have done if it were false — it made
Him the man of all men; it gave Him the name that is
above every name. It accredits Him to each succeeding
age as the supreme teacher about God in humanity. So
we listen with moral intentness to what Jesus has to
say. None other can do for us what He can do, by
bringing Father and child together here and now. He
knew how. He knows how. If we would but attend
to him, and believe in Him !
Again, our world needs inexpressibly to know what
this God of Jesus thinks of us. Is it likely that He
who made the universe thinks of us at all? If so, what
does He think of us, in the few poor years we have be
fore we drop out of sight as a leaf drops in the forest?
Is it possible He cares for our infinitesimal concerns?
Jesus, so to speak, staked His life on the fact that He
cares. When we read an essay by the genial John Bur
roughs, asserting that God does not care, and that in
any case we know nothing of Him, then whose authority
shall we accept, that of John Burroughs or of Jesus?
Which is the greater specialist in spiritual things? The
one who belongs to our time, or He who belongs to all
times? The world will soon forget the denials of the
naturalist, but when do you suppose men in trouble will
forget the assurance, "Not a sparrow falleth to the
ground without your Father. Be of good cheer, ye are
of more value than many sparrows." Humanity prefers
the convictions of Jesus to the doubts of the sceptic, not
because Jesus' teaching is the more comfortable, but be
cause in the long run the doubts make for the destruction
of society, as in Bolshevism, while the faith of Jesus
makes for the uninterrupted integration of society along

60 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
the path of maximum development. Just to be assured
— as Jesus assures us — that the very first demand God
makes on men is for their intelligent love, is to be lifted
up into a new world of hopes and possibilities and obliga
tions. Again, our age longs to know whether God hears us
— can we speak with Him? In the still loneliness of the
night may one take counsel with a better Friend than
any we know on earth? Is it possible that here among
the seductions of earth we may actually have this bracing
fellowship with One infinitely better than ourselves.
Prominent scholars today may tell us No. The question
is at best much debated. But Jesus says to the man or
woman of today, "Ask and ye shall receive." "Pray to
thy Father, and thy Father who seeth in secret shall
recompense thee." Suppose He had said, as some say
today, "Ask not in prayer, as the heathen do: for your
Father knoweth what ye have need of before ye ask
Him." Instead, He vindicated God's right to be as freely
kind as the average man, by saying, "If ye then, being
evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children.
how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give
good things to them that ask Him?" What a world
this would be if men trusted the judgment of Jesus at
this point! If they accepted fearlessly and loyally His
confidence that God is as helpful as a human father —
and far more so.
Jesus does not hesitate to assume the reality of God's
duties to men. A leading preacher, who belongs in
thought to an earlier generation, advertised himself the
other day as preaching on the blasphemy of just this
assertion. Yet how could Jesus set forth God as
Father, and leave Him without duties to His sons and

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 61
daughters except by special covenant? There is hardly
a more beautiful and touching sight in our world, than
that of a mother holding her baby in her arms. The
little face, still smooth in serene unconsciousness of care,
gazes up into its mother's face with unwinking stare,
perfectly safe, perfectly content, knowing nothing of the
thousand dangers that would beset it were those arms
to fail, only trusting that the face on which his eyes are
fixed is his own happy universe of security and promise.
In all our world there is no other trust so perfect or so
common. Jesus shared it when He lay on His own
mother's breast. And wholly knowing this sacrament
of parental love, He used it to make luminous His gos
pel. He called on men everywhere so to think of God,
and so to treat Him every day, as the One who had made
them for Himself. Evidently, if one believes in Jesus,
the sky never can be altogether gray, life never utterly
forlorn — although here, as everywhere, it is the great
faith that reaps the great reward.
It is of the future that men debate most eagerly, as
to what lies behind death's inexorable curtain. Does it
hide blank nothing, or a new self-realization pulsing with
life and promise? At times it has been the mode to dis
miss the question with a blase indifferentism, as if man
kind had grown superior to hopes bound up with its
intellectual childhood, and were ashamed to confess to so
primitive an emotion. We have passed through such
a time within the memory of us all. But whatever the
psychologists and essayists have been saying in their
class-rooms and reviews, the common folk in life's
trenches, the wives and husbands and fathers and moth
ers, the old and lonely and sick and disappointed, the
unnoticed millions of those who carry on grimly in

62 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
silence, still share the unquenchable life hunger — still
cling to the vanished love of those who seem to have
left them forever. Should any doubt it, let him enter
a leading bookstore and see the tables loaded with "psy
chic" literature bringing a babel of messages from that
unknown beyond — by ouija board, by automatic writ
ing, by mediums and spirits of every description, telling
in detail of conditions in the life to come.
Here again we have to stop resolutely and ask our
selves what place is to be reserved for Jesus, as an au
thority amid this jostling throng of clairvoyant seers?
He is manifestly out of vogue, and quite left behind
by the eager crowd who find Him without pungency or
flavor in comparison with disembodied spirits who will
discourse every evening, if duly persuaded, on the most
minute details of existence on the spiritual plane. But
when the fad has burnt out, and the crowd has passed on
to something else, what then will Jesus have to say to
us and our children ?
He will still bring the unhesitating assurance of eternal
life. His argument for it is not in any logical demon
stration, but simply in His own self-consciousness and
His calm insight into the realities of the spirit. He im
parts to men His own convictions, by sheer force of
His own personality. We come into His company and
under His influence, -and presently find ourselves sharing
His faith and assured of a life indestructible by death. If
we come under the influence of certain men of our time
- — Theodore Dreiser, say, and his school of fierce con
tenders for an art that knows neither morality nor re
straint — faith in a continuing fellowship with God be
comes almost instantly not incredible only, but puerile
and ridiculous. In the same way, moral and intellectual

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 63
sympathy with Jesus speedily opens our eyes to some
thing of what was so real to Him. And with that insight
we are content : we do not even feel the need of argument ;
we are satisfied, as with knowledge at first hand.
What Jesus did for men in His day who knew Him
was to show how unthinkable was fellowship with God in
terms of this life only. It was a fellowship of love,
which reached out every day into the eternal. He said
to those first enthusiastic friends in Galilee, who were
jeered at and maltreated for His sake, "Happy are you,
for great is your reward in heaven." They were to
look up and on. When He had been preaching to the
poor and healing the sick through a hot summer day in
the villages, He slipped out in the cool of the night to
talk with God, thus holding fast to His brethren and to
His Heavenly Father, as with either hand. When His
eyes were just closing to the last dread sights of Calvary
He said, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit."
All along the way, from the first days to the last, He
lived and spoke as one related to two worlds. He was
bound up in the same bundle of life as the eternal God.
And any man who closely attends to Jesus Christ today,
inevitably comes to share this consciousness and convic
tion. We find in Him a supreme authority as to the
mysterious hinterland of earthly life. We rest in His
assurance that there is a home of the soul with wider
and more glorious horizons than these hills and prairies
and oceans that shut us in. Love is stronger than death
and God's love does not exhaust itself upon us here.
But if we pay first heed to the voluble spirits, whom
Sir Conan Doyle so vehemently commends to our
attention, the whole scene changes. The majesty of the
glory of God— that filled the anticipation of Jesus-^

64 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
fades out miserably into an existence wholly bounded by
human imagination. No longer does the ineffable wonder
of God's love and righteousness fill the hearts of the
children who have found their Father's 'house. No
longer is the clear vision of Jesus Christ the joy of men
and women He has redeemed. All expectation of being
like Him, when we see Him as He is, drops unhonored
out of sight. The central fact of that existence is no
longer a divine enlargement that "hath not entered into the
heart of man to conceive."
Instead we have an ever-changing composite of the
views, often most attractive and uplifting, of men and
women like ourselves — Unitarians, Christian Scientists,
exponents of New Thought, spiritualists, conventionally
orthodox, of every shade of religious training and in
sight. It is a bewildering labyrinth of conflicting coun
sels, always haunted by the admitted presence of "lewd
spirits of the baser sort," seeking to break in by unworthy
channels and confuse the truth. If once we part com
pany with the serene confidence of the Great Master, and
refuse to rest in his calm anticipation of God's love for
ourselves and those we love, then suddenly we fare forth
into a region of mocking plausibilities, where faith at any
moment may break down and leave us in a twilight bleak
and chill.
Here we recognize the fitness of Jesus as a leader for
today. He made no effort to describe what transcends
our limited human understanding. A business man has
no language in which to make his little boy of three under
stand the complexities of financial credit and exchange.
The little lad is in his father's world and has the same
brain and potential mental capacity. And yet just for lack
of a few years of development he cannot faintly compre-

AS ARBITER OF DEBATED THINGS 65
hend his father's world. There is no language in which it
may be made plain to him. How infinitely wider is the
chasm between our physical conditions here on earth and
the realm of spirit that transcends all earthly experience
and imagination! Jesus said in simple words that His
followers should enter into the joy of their Lord; that
they should be with Him and behold His glory. He
said also that they should still carry weighty responsi
bilities in the service of His Kingdom.
And so we may be content for those we love who "have
the misfortune to die." They are in the hands of a
tenderer care than ours, and there we may leave them,
without nagging pursuit or cross-examination by mediums
or ouija-boards, in the strange peace of God. Jesus
steadies men today by a transcendent hope, built up on
love, instead of leaving them to "a puzzled fumbling with
distracting mysteries."
"People don't believe that way now" — so we are told
confidently in answer to any argument like the above.
"Jesus is impossible as arbiter in these matters because
He is quite out of touch with the trend of modern
thought." There is much truth in this last contention.
He is out of touch with current thinking. But so He was
long ago. So He has always been. The explanation of
it lies all too plainly on the surface. As He said to Peter
when Peter differed sharply with Him, "You mind not
the things of God but the things of men." The crushing
humiliation of his Master by evil men was unthinkable
to Jesus' friends. It was not unthinkable to redeeming
love, nor to those in sympathy with God, but self-
interest and worldly wisdom could make nothing of it.
And here is the infinite worth of Jesus to society in our
time. He does not represent "current thought." With

66 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
an insight divinely clear He "minds the things of God."
The stream of eager, excited talk flows on — he stands
unmoved as the revealer of our Father's will, holy and
right and good. So we lean on Him as arbiter. We
take refuge in His insight, fearing our own self-will and
ignorance. Jesus then has this place in the life of today, as of a
light shining in a dark place. We may talk as much as
we please about the "decadence of the church" and the
"new orthodoxy," but it is truer today than ever it was
that millions would die for Him, intelligently and with
out hesitation, through sheer devotion. Whether among
the Brahmans of New England, or in the African Congo,
in dazed, unshepherded Russia, or in China or Armenia
where we have watched so many noble spirits die, among
all classes and cultures, Roman and Greek and Protestant,
men and women are at the core of their hearts loyal to
this Jesus who opens to them a way to God. They rest
upon His revelation of the Father — they trust His insight
into eternal truth — they believe in Him.
Dr. J. H. Hutton of Glasgow has given in one of
his essays a most arresting definition of what it is to be a
Christian. "A Christian," he says, "is one who pro
poses, God helping him, to go on to embody in his entire
system of life the insight into things which Jesus Him
self lived by." That is what it means to believe in Him.
To take Him as arbiter! To live by His insight. To
come gradually, as His friend said, to "have the mind of
Christ" in all problems personal and social.

Chapter V
THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM
We have spoken of Jesus as the bringer of love into the
social life of today. Imagine infinite love brought into
close contact with the cold selfishness of such a world
as ours ! This much is certain, it would be found strug
gling mightily with hostile forces. It would find itself
confronted with a staggering task, as wide as the world.
We cannot conceive it as quiescent in the face of horrid
wrong and cruelty. It could not be simply for the com
fort and uplift of the few fortunate souls who might
be willing to receive it. Divine love, suddenly made
operative in Armenia, would be as stern as death, and
tender as a mother. Wherever in our world it might pre
sent itself, it would be challenged to mortal combat:
always it would face the need of heroic self-assertion and
intense activity.
A life like that of Jesus in the midst of humanity like
ours must always mark the center of a world conflict. It
stirs up trouble. He came to bring not peace but a sword.
Love as a sentiment may be placidly airy and unsub
stantial, and Christian people may talk much about it
on their personal way to heaven. But the true love of
God on earth, honest and open-eyed, is an aggressive
energy, always involved of necessity in the greatest of
all good fights — the fight for the Kingdom of God.
And that is the place of Jesus in the life of today —
67

68 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
He is the heart and soul of the cooperative struggle to
make God's love rule on earth. The reign of His
Father's good will in the lives of men He called the
Kingdom of Heaven. He thought of it as realized here
on earth, and equally as reaching on into the world to
come. And that men might have it as a master ambition
in the very forefront of their living and thinking, He
left them this prayer for a constant spur and reminder:
"Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Manifestly it is a fighting prayer, for all true hearts
and gallant souls who, even at the cost of ease, would
fain leave the world a better place than they found it.
And the power and the glory of it as a prayer are in the
fact that it links up our fitful impulses of benevolence
with the steadfast love of God, triumphing and undis
mayed. The odds are too great for us, the ills of society
are too deeply lodged, if we are to rely only on our
own resources and our sharply limited sympathy and
wisdom. But the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! and
if Jesus binds up human endeavors with His plans of love,
even common folk can play an honorable part with
courage. Andrew Carnegie was a genuine lover of his fellow-
men. He knew the seamy side of life and the hardships
of the poor, and especially he hated war and all its
grinding oppression, and its after-brood of miseries and
hatred. He gave himself and his millions whole-heart
edly to the cause of peace and human betterment. Early
in life he gave complete allegiance to the first extravagant
claims of Darwinism and the agnostic philosophy of
Herbert Spencer. He seems thereafter to have shunned

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 69
all thought and speech of Jesus, as of one found some
how at the center of a web of imposture. He was
satisfied that the human race was steadily developing, and
that only knowledge was necessary to bring it forward
to happiness and social stability. He sowed libraries all
up and down the nation, confident of a harvest of human
welfare and self-mastery for the common good. Then
came the appalling out-break of the Great War ! and — as
his wife says in her pathetic preface to his life story
¦ — from then on his heart was broken. He never rallied
from the shock. Till then he had kept the spirit and
even the habits of a young man, in hearty enjoyment of
all good sport. But his life-long hopes lay in ruins,
his confident optimism was shattered beyond recovery,
and he had no inner citadel of refuge.
Jesus builds men's social hopes and sympathies into the
Eternal Love and Righteousness, as a lighthouse is dove
tailed into the living rock. One may ridicule the pre
sumption of such a confidence, but it was the warp and
woof of the most fruitful life ever lived on earth. Year
in and year out, Jesus gave Himself to the Kingdom of
His Father, here on earth among men — undiscouraged by
crushing odds, undismayed by death. And those few
years of unquenchable faith have wrought more good for
humanity than all the wise and prudent programs of cau
tious doubters through the centuries. Sanity is said
to consist in the right interpretation of one's environ
ment. Jesus counted His environment to be that of a
great campaign of endeavor to bring to pass His Father's
will in human life. He commends that interpretation to
men of today. He calls all who believe in Him to a great
constructive programme of love, ignoring the selfish inter
ests of race or class. He cheers them with the convic-

70 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
tion that their Leader is God, that His kingdom is an
everlasting kingdom, and His dominion endureth through
out all generations. We shall not lose our labor if we
work with Him — we cannot come to old age and the end
of our campaign of altruism with a broken heart.
n
Let us look more closely at Jesus' conception of a
Kingdom of God among men, which He still puts in the
mind and heart of those who believe in Him. When He
first emerged from the long loneliness of the carpenter's
shop at Nazareth, with the fresh enthusiasm of a young
man eager to help His people, it is evident that He was a
man with a message that burned like fire in His bones.
He was not acting the part of the Messiah, or setting
an example as the world's perfect man, or founding a new
religion or a Church, but bringing to the people a mes
sage of glad tidings. He came with good news. We
are left in no doubt as to what form it took. It was
not the substitutionary atonement, or the doctrine of
His own majesty as Son of God. It was the "gospel
of the kingdom."
Plainly it was of tremendous concern to Him. For
years He had been brooding over it in silence while He
went about His work. His heart burned with pity as He
saw the wretchedness of His people. He saw the dull
misery of human life on God's good earth. And he
felt that it was for him — "the carpenter's son"- — to bring
in a new day, to herald a new social order. He called
it the Kingdom of God, or Kingdom of Heaven. Every
countryman of His was thinking about it, as surely as an
Irishman today is thinking about Home Rule. The na-

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 71
tional literature of His time, the so-called apocalyptic
literature of the few generations before His day, centered
about this national hope. The brief record of the synop
tic gospel uses the expression over eighty times. Yet it
quickly dropped out of sight. We do not find it in the
writings of Paul or John. It belongs to Jesus Himself.
But evidently to Him, in those early days in Galilee, it
was at the very heart of His thought and teaching.
Probably the most difficult problem of New Testament
study today is the problem as to just what Jesus meant by
this message of the Kingdom close at hand. Did He
mean what all His countrymen meant — the great catas
trophe of the end of the age, to bring to a close the long
drama of human sin and suffering by means of the last
judgment and the destruction of the wicked, with all the
dramatic setting of the coming in the clouds and the in
gathering of the nations by the angels? Did He believe
that His own generation was to see the great final deliver
ance, wrought by the wrath and power of the Almighty?
Or was He thinking of a triumph of spiritual forces, creat
ing a new order by bringing men into a new relation with
God and their fellow-men ? Was He looking for a long-
suffering service of love to win men's hearts, or for a
sudden victory by the slaughter of all unbelievers until
— as the Revelation pictures it — blood flowed as deep as
the horses' bridles? Even till today many good people
are explicitly hoping for the latter, and sing joyfully
of the day when He shall come "the lawless to destroy,"
and so crush all opposition and bring our difficult labors
to an end.
We are confused by the fact that His own disciples,
who recorded His words, obviously misunderstood His
program for the future. It required the keen, far-reach-

72 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
ing insight of such a leader as Paul to make plain — even
to so sympathetic a follower as Peter — the scope and
meaning of Jesus' plan for the world. They expected
Him to preach a patriotic and nationalistic gospel- — in
the language of today, ioo per cent Judaism, Palestine for
the Jews, "pure Judaism." They did not understand that
He came to give new meaning to the old submerged
prophecy, "through thee shall all the peoples of the
world be blessed"; not by a great catastrophic day of
revenge and punishment, but by the triumphant working
out of a spirit like His own, the spirit of "the suffering
servant," in a patient ministry of love. That method can
achieve nothing save with time, slowly and at the cost of
endless patience and hope and forbearance — "first the
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear."
Yet it is beyond dispute that the thought and life of
Jesus were keyed to such a program of divine sympathy
as this, built up about the compassion of a Father, and
not the insulted majesty of an Oriental sovereign. His
nearest friends — like so many of His friends since then
— would have hastened the day of better things by calling
down fire from heaven on unbelievers. Jesus simply
said, "Ye know not what spirit ye are of." He was
working by different methods, so indirect and slow, as
compared with the swift violence of cleansing fires, that
they seemed forlornly ineffective.
This is not the place to discuss further this latest prob
lem of New Testament interpretation. It is only possible
to sum up the conclusion in which scholarly Christian
thought is likely to rest, viz., that Jesus' central and per
vading message of good tidings had to do with a new
spiritual life. His fellow countrymen only too soon found
out that it was not nationalistic or local or even patriotic.

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 73
It was not 100 per cent Judaism. It did not satisfy any
of their fierce longings for the vindication of the law and
the overthrow of its enemies. It was not orthodox, not
Jewish at all — not even intelligible to a good Jew. It
did not even throw on Jehovah the responsibility for vin
dicating by one almighty avenging judgment His out
raged holiness, but seemed to leave to a pitiable company
of feeble men and women the silly undertaking of win
ning a hateful heathen world through a gospel of love
and divine forgiveness.
This seems to be the only conclusion in harmony with
the broad certainties as to Jesus' life and teaching, that
stand out unescapable, unmistakable, above all perplexing
details. Not only the fact that he laid clear stress on the
spiritual character of the kingdom as one already in the
midst of them, subject also to the slow development of
natural growth, working in ways of love and leading to
moral ends — but above all the fact of his own conscious
ness as the Son of God sent to bring back the children
to the Father. The consciousness of such a mission, so
wonderful, so divinely tender, infinitely transcending all
considerations of time or place or nation, dealing with the
great underlying realities of human need and divine re
sponse, leave us no room for any other conclusion that
does not land us in hopeless confusion.
in
What then was this vision of hope that drove Jesus
hither and yon unrestingly among the villages of Galilee,
preaching a new gospel to the poor? It was the vision
of a new relation between God and men, that should trans
figure life. The very best His people as a whole had

74 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
dreamed of up till then, was the hope of winning God's
favor by fearing Him and keeping His law. It made
them anxious and scrupulous, but it also made them
proud, self-righteous, and intolerant. Always they had
before them the kindling thought that they — one small
Semitic tribe — were the people of privilege, the sons of
the covenant. There was a contract between them and
God. They had the sublime inheritance of the law,
and as they kept the law so would God be good to them
and confound their enemies. And so their very privilege
made them selfish, arrogant, useless. All sorts and con
ditions of men hated them for their spiritual conceit and
bigotry. And Jesus was one of them — a Jew !
Yet what He saw by faith was this ! A new covenant
between God and men! Not like the old, that was so
human and even-handed and that we can understand so
well — they to keep the law and He to reward them with
blessing. That had worked out in the sight of all the
world as a moral failure — it bred pride and legalism,
while at the same time it was a weary yoke to wear, and
after all failed of the purpose it had in view. Jesus
told of a new relation between God and men, divinely
one-sided and infinitely, overwhelmingly rich in mercy and
power — yet thrillingly real and true. God was to go the
whole way in meeting them in their shamed reluctance
and perplexity. There was no more pretence of an
evenly balanced exchange of virtue on their part and
favor on His, than there was when the father ran to
meet that disreputable hobo figure of his broken-spirited
son, and put his arms openly around him and kissed him.
It was a new proposal, not at all like any contract among
men, but God-like in the glorious abandonment of its
unpurchased love. Jesus preached good news of a king-

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 75
dom of love, whose King admitted Himself — nay, de
clared Himself — the Father of these common men and
women of the country villages and city streets. And
if any one pointed to the stain of sin on them, and the
vice and avarice wrought into their lives, He only asked
them to take His forgiveness and cleansing to the full
limit of their need, and trust and love Him for his over
flowing goodness.
It was a new message indeed ! No wonder men could
not understand it very well or believe it when they under
stood it. And so, in order to make it plain, Jesus lived
among men to illustrate His Father's purpose, and died
among men, by the side of the open road, to confirm and
seal His message. And men have been thinking over it
ever since, to try to understand it better, and to see
what manner of kingdom this may be that is altogether
built on the holy love of a Father for His children,
and what sort of a social order it involves for hu
manity. Think what it means to our generation, struggling des
perately in the world-wide net-work of selfish interests,
to catch the vision of this reality. To have the living
spirit of Jesus wakening in the spirits of men and women
everywhere faith in such a kingdom on earth. And not
only faith in it, but passionate devotion to it, like Jesus'
own. It goes without saying that everyone who believes
in Jesus, really believes in this kingdom of heaven, here
and now among men — the real presence of God; the
operative power of his forgiving, redeeming love as Father
of his wandering children; and behind all, the almighty
purpose that His good-will shall triumph in the end,
both in our individual lives and in the corporate life of
men.

76 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY

TV
A vision of love like this, wide as the world and passing
no one by, is, of course, a social hope. It cannot be
concerned only with the saving of individual lives. It
sweeps away at once the old order of things amid which
Jesus Himself grew up. Never again could there be
the old proud aristocracy of godliness. The men to
whom every one looked up in Jesus' town, the men of
standing in the church, were men who despised the rabble
as unclean, hated the Samaritan, and would not so much
as eat with a Greek or a Roman — their piety was meas
ured by their exclusiveness. They were proud of their
prejudices, and of the gulf that separated them from the
common world.
Jesus' new gospel shattered forever all idea of vested
interests in religion, and left behind in ruin the old
world of prejudice and caste and ill-will. While He
lived He was the friend and elder brother of every man
and woman in need, Jew, Roman, or Samaritan, clean or
unclean. He said that God was like that, and that in
His new kingdom every son of man — white or yellow or
black— was on the same footing of dignity and privilege
as God's child. The only possible social order, if this
were true, is one of brotherhood; not only as between
races, but between the mutually suspicious and hostile
classes in our industrial society. The only possible basis
is one of genuine mutual service.
The visible church has often treated this ideal as if it
were pure moonshine. But Jesus gave His life for it,
and wherever His spirit penetrates today, men begin to
catch a glimpse of this plain, honest fellowship of

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 77
brotherly men. In the broad warm sunshine of our
Father's love, the old, bleak selfishness of a society with
out God simply cannot exist. Where the gospel of the
kingdom really penetrates, there begins to be a profound
intellectual ferment, as men rouse themselves to inquire
what it means to be their brother's keeper under actually
prevailing conditions.
The place of Jesus in the life of today, then, is not
at all that of a social reformer of the first century, the
leader of a tiny, communistic group in old Jerusalem.
As we apprehend Him, He is the spirit of eternal love
applied to present-day conditions, and working through
every channel of twentieth-century efficiency. Applied
love might once have been content with the comfortable
patronage of distributing coal and blankets to the poor.
But today, how can an honest man fail to see that the
principle of Christian brotherhood goes far, far back
of superficial charities, back as far as the roots of justice
and sympathy and intelligent comprehension of the other
man's needs and wants, seeking patiently, by endless study
and experiment, for the way of redress and economic
equity in our complicated world? "The kingdom" means
the love of God applied to the social world — the fact of a
divinely created brotherhood recognized in face of a pre
vailing order of caste and hereditary privilege. To be
sure, such leadership actually operating in society today
means difference of opinion, and sharp antagonism, and
the everlasting turmoil that attends on divine love in
human society, like molten iron plunged in cold water.
But how is an honest man to escape it if he believes in
Jesus ?
It is a matter of wonder and humiliation that the so-
called church of Christ, for long periods of its history,

78 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
should have been untrue to the spirit of its Master so
far as to bring measureless hurt to the very name of
Christian. For example, the churches of the eighteenth
century in England, both free and established, lived in
the midst of the most shocking wrongs and abuses, with
out lifting voice or hand — as a rule — against the existing
order. Creeds they had in abundance concerning the
person and work of Jesus, but when John Wesley and his
associates came in the spirit of Jesus to preach the simple
gospel of the kingdom to their poor, some even among
the clergy "sought to put him to death," as men before had
put to death his Leader. The doctrine of love honestly
applied to human need filled them with fear and anger, so
cruelly did it expose their hollow, selfish formalism. But
Wesley and his followers, seeing a work to do, "flung
themselves upon the task of saving England." And pres
ently, under the influence of Jesus, the great organizations
of sympathetic love for the neglected began to spring
up everywhere, like violets after a rain.
One simply cannot come in touch with the spirit of
Jesus without hearing His call to this brotherly solicitude
for all men. One may join the church, or become a very
"prince of the church," and yet live in selfish preoccupa
tion. But to believe in Him — just in proportion to one's
loyalty — is to be rooted and grounded in love. As one of
the earliest friends of Jesus said, "We love, because He
first loved us." Every day, as one reads the newspapers,
he sees — without noticing them — fresh illustrations of
this principle. It works out the same whether in New
England or in lands just being reached by the teachings of
Jesus. For example, here is Mr. Shinjiro Omoto of Matsu-
yama, a Japanese prodigal son. As a young man he was

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 79
banished from home for his drunkenness and immorality.
In an attempt to break up some special services that
Christian missionaries were holding in a theatre, he was
himself attracted by the message of Jesus, and after
sundry trying experiences became a Christian. He took
work in a cotton-spinning factory, in order to earn a
living, and advanced rapidly to an important position.
But his heart ached for the thousands of young girls em
ployed in factory life and compelled to live under dis
astrous conditions morally. It was not his business to
interfere in the matter, but like his Master, he saw these
friendless waifs distressed and scattered like lost sheep.
He started what he called a "Sympathy Society," a sort
of night-school, where the girls could have wholesome
recreation, and add some common studies to their play.
This was soon over-crowded. Mr. Omoto saw that
little could be accomplished so long as the girls were com
pelled to herd together in the common lodging houses.
Some sort of a Christian home was needed: and this he
started, in a humble way, by the aid of American mission
aries. Five hundred girls enjoyed the shelter of this
home in its first five years, and so successful and appealing
was this humble experiment that it attracted wide atten
tion and has borne fruit in various ways in other factory
centers. Mr. Ishii's noble orphanage at Okayama grew
from a similar seed of Christian sympathy.
Such illustrations of course could be multiplied without
end : and while the tale was being told, new activities of
living helpfulness would spring up over night, as freshly
awakened souls took up their birthright as sons and
daughters of God, obedient to the leadership of Jesus
Christ. But the point to be noted is, that for this living
fountain of social renewal our generation is directly in-

80 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
debted to the gospel of the Kingdom held up by Jesus
Christ. It is, one might almost say, far more a gospel
for the twentieth century than for the first, because better
understood, more widely proclaimed, and more efficiently
applied. It has the advantage of a thousand years of ex
perimentation. It works divinely well. Is there anything
else in the whole tormented field of the war more reassur
ing, more shiningly victorious over human weakness, than
the Quaker ministry to the hungry children of Germany ?
Unadvertised, silently and all but secretly, they have been
feeding 700,000 children daily, in as many as 5,000
feeding centers. And the deed, so in keeping with their
history, has sprung directly from their vital contact with
Him who said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of
these least, ye have done it unto me.'"
This is the fact to be noted, that the place of Jesus
in the life of today is one of tremendous and immeasur
able consequence for good-will among men, and for ap
plied sympathy in forms as various as human needs.
Our world is seething with intellectual activities, and eco
nomic and social theorists and reformers fill our ears with
their ever-new proposals and appeals. Many of us are too
timid to mention the name of Jesus in such scholarly
company, lest we be smiled at as antiquated or conven
tional. And yet it is the spirit of Jesus that is actually in
corporating millions of men and women in a kingdom of
world-wide fellowship of love and service that has its
assurance of permanence and success in the almighty
will of God. Their unquenchable activity is the witness
to the continuing kingdom of God on earth. Full in the
face of human distrust and bitterness and opposition is
this holy, loving, redeeming will at work to bring about a
brotherhood of men rooted in the supreme wonder of the

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 81
Fatherhood of God. As Benjamin Kidd has recently said,
"Jesus is the center of the greatest power system which
has arisen in history." Even in university circles one
does not need to patronize Him, or mention His name with
apology. One might as well apologize for any other mys
terious primal force, like that of atomic energy.
Thousands of happy people were leaving last week for
over-seas. But among the crowd on the dock at San
Francisco was a little group of six young people on a
peculiar errand. They were ordinary Salvation Army
soldiers, leaving home for a term of seven years' service
in leper settlements in the Far East. Perhaps they would
return, perhaps not: but it was a cheery, hopeful party.
Possibly money could have bought so lonely and repul
sive a service, possibly not. But it was not money they
were thinking of. It was the love of Christ that warmed
their hearts with pity for outcast, suffering brothers and
sisters across the sea. Class-room and arm-chair re
formers of society are easy to find. But those who ac
tually go down into the pit for a lifetime, as did Gen.
and Mrs. Booth with the children of despair and misery,
are, so to speak, purchased with life-blood.
And here is this peculiar yet inseparable quality about
the spirit of Jesus, that underlies the whole structure
of His kingdom today. The "friendly community" of
well-disposed and mutually helpful people is not the whole
story. Good-nature and generous sympathy and tolerance
are not the only forces that are demanded. Very much
of our thinking and writing about the pleasant theme of
the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, the
leadership of Jesus and the universal duty of social ser
vice, leaves out of sight one necessary element that Jesus
never lost from sight. One word is missing — the unwel-

82 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
come word "cost." Every day of Jesus' life was saturated
with the thought of God, and of His fatherly love, so
willing to sacrifice to prevail over human sin. Here
is where the urgency and the solemnity, the mystery and
the power, of the teaching of Jesus about the longed-for
Kingdom of God, find their explanation. He knew what
the Fatherhood of God costs — what the Brotherhood of
Man costs — what the actual saving of a lost man or
woman costs. His effort to realize it in His own ministry
made Him, for all His attractive quality, a man de
spised and forsaken, acquainted well with grief.
In the race for comfort and wealth and ease today,
what is it worth to have a Leader like this, just next us
in spiritual contact, to hold us true to such a kingdom?
To link us up with the purposes of God, while we must
yet live shoulder to shoulder with avarice and all selfish
lusts? That is the place Jesus fills in this year of the
twentieth century — of one who does in fact make men
and women a part of the army of love, of the working
Kingdom of God. He cuts a man clean away from dis
loyalty and indecision, as with a sharp sword. His call
leaves no room for any lingering insubordination at any
point — as by tolerating secretly the indecency and dis
honor of popular up-to-date novels and plays and social
standards. Not because those who believe in Him set up
to be better than their neighbors, but because they know
themselves to be the children of a holy God. One purer
than their mothers, truer than their fathers, the very
heart and source of worth and goodness, They are to be
unhesitant as Cromwell's Ironsides, as soldiers of a great
purpose — a purpose oft assailed, perhaps often shaken,
but never to be laid down till dishonor is to be preferred
to death.

THE BRINGER OF THE KINGDOM 83
So, even though Jesus is still despised and rejected of
men, we seek Him out today, only fearing lest any cool
altruistic purpose should come between Him and our
heart's devotion.

Chapter VI
JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND
There is one reason above others why our modern
world will not let Jesus go : because in Him men actually
find an outstretched hand of help. They may not be
able to argue very well about the psychology of religion,
but they will cling to the hand that raised them up out of
the shame and darkness of moral defeat. A group of
men sitting pleasantly about the table over the coffee and
cigars will discuss the problem of racial prejudice with
cool, academic reserve. But if one of them were lying
on a heap of stones by the roadside, beaten up by thugs
and thrown out of a car to die, and a friendly Chinaman
were to raise him up, and bring, him bewildered back to
consciousness, and bind up his wounds and carry him to a
place of safety and rest and nursing — all at the risk of
his life there in the lonely night — he will have had at
least one experience of social solidarity, of which he will
never be able to speak without deep feeling. And there
are millions of common people who feel just in this
intense, unreasoning way about the spiritual leader who
is still despised and rejected of men. As Pascal says,
"the heart has its reasons of which the world knows
nothing." They cannot discuss critical questions about
documents, but they have felt the healing touch of divine
pity and out of weakness have been made strong. What
they feel to be God's help has reached them in an emer-
84

JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 85
gency through their faith in Jesus ; and always afterwards
in life they feel toward Jesus as one must feel toward a
friend who has show him unforgetable kindness. There
are all sorts of kindnesses, but this is of supreme excel
lence in that it lifts one up toward God. For sensitive
souls there is the thrill of love in it, as well as power, and
it binds their spirits in loyalty to him ever after, so long
as they have any being. Learned men may discuss in the
religious press whether or not the church is losing its
hold on modern society: and often the reason is obvious
enough when it is losing hold. But does any one sup
pose that common folk throughout the world are going to
let go of Jesus if he actually brings them to see and
share God's life, in spite of their sin?
Browning, in his "Epitaph of One of Nero's Slaves,"
puts in his mouth the familiar words :
"I was some time in being burned :
But at the close a hand came through
The fire above my head, and drew
My soul to Christ, whom now I see."
"A hand came through." So Jesus dawns even on the
sophisticated life of our day. When the eternal mystery
breaks through from God to human eyes, it is as a hand
stretched out to help. When the ultimate, unknown
power beyond the universe would make Himself better
known to men, it is in this winsome form of one who
came to do what a mighty friend might do for human
life. Not at all as once in the long past when "out of the
fire and blackness and tempest came the voice of words,
which they that heard entreated that no word should be
spoken to them" — when even Moses "did exceedingly fear
and quake."

86 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
Thank God! those days of dull understanding have
passed away. For long ages men in every land had
"stretched lame hands of faith, and groped, and gathered
dust and chaff." But when the glory of God dawned
like the morning star on human life, men saw it in the
face of one meek and lowly in heart, a man himself made
perfect by suffering, that he might be the Good Physician
for all time, a man who called himself the Good Shepherd
of the straying sheep, and who went deep into the wilder
ness and the mountains to find and bring home such as
had lost their way.
"And none of the ransomed ever knew,
How deep were the waters crossed,
Nor how dark was the night our Lord went through,
Ere he found the sheep that was lost."
The simple words touch the profoundest depths of human
consciousness. Men interpret God through that undaunted
Shepherd, and know that He is very good.
We shall best understand what place remains for Jesus
in the life of today as the revealed sympathy of God, if
we look inquiringly at His behavior when He lived for
a little while in the sight of men. To be sure, we are
familiar with it all, but one never refuses another look at
a beautiful painting, to say nothing of a beautiful life.
And almost at once, in the first chapter of the story, we see
Him in His most characteristic gesture and action. A
loathsome and disgusting figure thrust itself upon His
notice — a leper banished from the common haunts of men.
He did not ask for money, but for what no money could
buy — a clean body, at rest from pain. What did Jesus
do? He did not do what you or I would have done, or
what any other man of His race would have down to

JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 87
this lonely wretch, unclean and dangerous. By Jewish
law and custom the leper was cut off from common life,
and from any close approach to his fellows. Cursing
and cruelty were his life-long portion. But Jesus
stretched out His hand and touched him — as a brother
might — as God might — lingeringly and lovingly, unafraid,
as one sent to meet him there and draw him out of hell.
Surely, the leper saw God looking out through Jesus'
face! Would that we might have seen and read what was in
Jesus' eyes, and understood, so that life-long thereafter we
might rest on such a God as that, loving Him heart and
soul and mind and strength for His sympathy and under
standing and compassion! But if we choose, we can
meet men by the score today, commonplace figures on the
street, who will say that Jesus has drawn them out of a
worse hell than leprosy, and that they have seen and felt
the pity and power of God through Him.- The same hand
has lifted them up. We need to remember this when
men tell us that our generation has outgrown the need
of Jesus.
Then, later on, we have the picture of Jesus saving a
drowning man. His friend Peter, having leaped over
board from the shelter of the boat, and feeling for the
first time the full force of the wind and the driven spray
like hail, was just sinking below the frothing waves.
Jesus caught him in a grip made vise-like by years of
work with plane and saw, and drew him back to life.
Peter's faith failed him just at the crisis, as it did at a
deadlier crisis, later on. He miscalculated his courage,
and was going under. And just at the moment of terror
— terror of death or worse — a great pitying love reached
out to him by a man's hand and saved him. The hand

88 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
was that of Jesus— but the understanding sympathy,
quick to help, was that of the Father of our spirits, in
whom, unseen, we live and move and have our being.
If such a hand could reach to a tempted young fellow in
our city streets today, there would be a place in the
twentieth century for Jesus still, -would there not !
And then again we have the scene where Jesus stood
looking down at the bed where lay the little daughter of
the home, dead. Father and mother stood behind Him,
awed and silent, and His three friends helpless to aid of
comfort. But He in whom the power of God was,
reached down and took her hand in His, calling her, and
watched the tide of life flow back, and when her hand was
warm again, He lifted her up, and left her to her parents.
It must have been an inexpressible joy to him to do
this thing, because it summed up visibly the very spirit
of His mission. When God reaches through to touch
men with fatherly sympathy, it is that they may have
life and have it abundantly. So Jesus Himself said. A
few years more or less under the sun is nothing by com
parison, and yet it is a stunning marvel to see the body's
lease of life lengthened out unexpectedly even by a hand's
breadth. But just as the soul is greater than the body, so
it is a greater thing by far to put within the soul the
conscious power of an endless life, or to cleanse and
vivify and widen its capacities here on earth. And this
is what Jesus obviously was doing for His friends and
acquaintances when He was with them. He stretched
out a hand of beckoning invitation to a couple of local
fishermen whom he knew — James and John — and led them
on and up until, instead of being village fish-pedlars,
they became "friends of all the world," lifting men up
toward God. He saw that fearsome madman among the

JESUS AS AN OUTSTRETCHED HAND 89
tombs, and scattered his dreadful night, and sent him
home in joy to tell what Jesus had done for him. He
gathered little children in His arms to bless them, and
when He died "with out-stretched arms in mortal woe,"
they were flung out in sheer love as if to embrace the
world. You could scarcely find an artist in our generation who
would depict Jesus as a philosopher, with hands muffled
in His robe. We reverence Socrates in such an attitude,
but it would be curiously impossible and incongruous for
Jesus. His hands are free and busy with service. Simply
because He was not a philosopher but a Saviour, and the
most untutored mind recognizes Him as such. He spoke
the universal language of help and love, and its power
and attraction are timeless. The Russian Soviets could
no more cast Him out of men's hearts than they could
forbid men the sunlight. It warms and cheers. So does
the glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus. His
voice may be drowned out for a little while, but presently
it will be heard again, like the silenced chimes in Belgium,
rippling now with joy. 11
But has Jesus lived on into our twentieth century, and
is He as truly as ever He was an outstretched hand of
heavenly love for needy men ? Let any one answer, any
where under heaven, from Oxford to Peking, who has
sincerely turned to Him in faith that He would redeem,
even from life's dregs. It is not fair to ask those who
hold the coolly critical attitude of unbelief, because in the
nature of the case the spiritual influence of Jesus can
ionly be imparted by that contact of spirit which faith

90 PLACE OF JESUS IN THE LIFE OF TODAY
affords. No more today than once in His own home
town can He do any mighty works for those whose minds
are closed against Him. But where men reach out to
Him in the audacity of need, that hand responds. This
is not the assertion of the church, it is the witness of
human experience the world over.
This is what Francis Thompson, the poet, meant when
he spoke of Christ walking not now on Galilee but on the
River Thames. Thompson was one who knew by ex
perience. He had almost gone under : he had drunk to the
dregs the cup of sin and poverty and loneliness in London.
To use his own words :
"In the rash lustihood of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me : grimed with smears
I stand amid the dust of mounded years —
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke."
Yet it was he who wrote later :
"Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter
Cry ! clinging heaven by the hems.
And lo ! Christ, walking on the water,
Not of Gennesareth but Thames !"

the end

.,.,,„•'/