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Presented by the Author

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

BOOKS BY
PROF. WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN
Published by Chables Scbibheb'b Sons

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IS CHRISTIANITY
PRACTICABLE ?

LECTURES DELIVERED IN JAPAN
BT
WLLLIAM ADAMS BROWN, Ph.D., D.D.
UNION SEMINABY LECTURER ON CHRISTIANITY
IN THE FAB EAST

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1916

Copyright, 1916, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published November, 1916
'382.

TO THE MEMORY
or
GEORGE WILLIAM KNOX
MT COLLEAGUE TOR MANT TEARS
MT PREDECESSOR IN THIS LECTURESHIP
MT TRUSTED AND DEAR FRIEND

PREFACE
On the 25th of April, 1912, there died
in the Severance Hospital at Seoul a
man who was bound to Japan by many
ties. For fourteen years a missionary in
Tokyo, George William Knox continued
after his return to the United States to
take a lively interest in things Japanese.
Through his books and articles he inter
preted the spirit of the Japanese people
to his fellow countrymen in America, and
during the Russo-Japanese War he was
one of the most effective advocates of
the Japanese cause. It was always his
hope to revisit the country where his
young manhood had been spent, and to
share with his friends there, young and
old, the insights of his maturer years.
This opportunity came to him in 1910,
through his appointment as Union Semi-
[vii]

PREFACE
nary lecturer on Christianity in the Far
East, but his hope was not destined to
be realized. An attack of pneumonia,
contracted while he was in China, pros
trated him just as he was on the point
of leaving Korea for Japan. From this
illness he never recovered, and the lec
tures which all who knew his fitness to
deal with questions of comparative reli
gion had so eagerly anticipated were
never delivered.
Twice before in the person of its be
loved president, Dr. Charles Cuthbert
Hall, Union Seminary had sent one of
its faculty to the Far East to witness to
its faith in the supreme importance of
the cause of Christian missions. Dr.
Knox hoped that the custom might be
come an established one. He repeatedly
expressed the wish that others of his
colleagues might follow the precedent
set by Dr. Hall and himself. My own
appointment as lecturer on Christianity
[viii]

PREFACE
was the result of this suggestion. It
seems appropriate, therefore, that this
httle book, which owes its inspiration
to Dr. Knox's example, should be in
scribed to his memory.
The substance of the chapters that
follow was delivered in the form of lec
tures in Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo,
in response to an invitation from the
Federation of the Japanese Churches,
and from the Continuation Committee
of Japan, a rbody representing all the
organized Christian agencies in that coun
try. At Kyoto the lectures were given
under the auspices of the Doshisha; at
Kobe, of the Kwansei Gakuin; at Tokyo,
in the Ginza Church, under the auspices
of a committee representing the different
theological schools of that city. Two
of the lectures were repeated at Osaka
before an audience which included rep
resentatives both of the missionary body
and of the native church. [ix]

PREFACE
The subject chosen needs no justifica
tion. In this time of world crisis when
existing customs are everywhere being
challenged, and the very existence of
civilized society seems threatened by the
world war, it is essential that we who are
Christians should raise anew the ques
tion as to the nature and grounds of
our faith, and should ask ourselves
whether the enterprise in which we are
engaged is a practicable one, worthy of
the allegiance of sensible men. Espe
cially is this inquiry appropriate in such
a country as Japan, where Christianity is
a missionary religion, facing older faiths
which also claim universality. Here the
grounds on which Christians base their
belief in the validity of their own re
ligion have peculiar interest, not only to
the Christian, but to the non-Christian.
In considering these grounds, therefore,
in the wider connection in which the
war has placed them, we are making a
[*]

PREFACE
direct contribution to the cause of mis
sionary apologetic.
But in truth the issue here raised
transcends all local or national limita
tions. The question whether Christi
anity is a practicable religion is not
simply a missionary question; it is a
human question. Indeed we may say
without exaggeration that it is the human
question, the question upon our answer
to which our hope for the future of man
kind depends. Is force to be the ulti
mate word in human affairs, or is there
something higher and more compelling —
the love which bears and believes all
things and which, if our Christian faith
be justified, shall never fail? If these
pages can do anything to strengthen this
faith where it has been weakened, or re
vive it where it has died, they will have
justified their purpose.
A part of the matter incorporated in
the present volume has already appeared
[xi]

PREFACE
in print. Since the war broke out I
have had opportunity repeatedly to dis
cuss the moral issues which it has raised
in lectures, addresses, and articles. So
far as this material was available for my
present purpose I have not hesitated to
make use of it. A part of the first chap
ter appeared in the Hibbert Journal for
January, 1916, under the title, "Is Chris
tianity Practicable?" The substance of
the second was delivered as the Drew
Lecture at Hackney College, in London,
in October, 1914.1 A part of the third
appeared in Present Day Papers.2 A few
paragraphs have also been used from a
sermon on "The Allies of Faith,"3 and
an address on "Worldwide Peace."4 I
1 Published in the Christian World Pulpit for October
28, 1914, and the Methodist Quarterly for January,
1915. 2 "Christianity on Trial," September, 1915; also
published as a tract by the Church Peace Union.
8 Oxford, 1914.
4 " Worldwide Peace; What It Is, Why We Want It,
and What We Can Do to Bring It About," published
in the Christian Work, April, 17, 24, 1915.
[xii]

PREFACE
wish here to express my indebtedness to
the journals in which these extracts first
appeared for permission to reprint them
here. It remains to acknowledge my indebt
edness to the friends who have helped
me in the preparation of these lectures.
First of all to the Board of Directors of
the Union Theological Seminary, to whose
action I owe my appointment as Union
Seminary lecturer; secondly, to the
Federation of Churches and the Con
tinuation Committee, whose invitation
encouraged me to accept the appoint
ment, and especially to President Ibuka,
of Tokyo, and Dr. Dearing of Yoko
hama, who arranged my programme in
Japan, and the latter of whom read the
lectures in manuscript; most of all to
the many friends in Japan, both among
the missionaries and the native Chris
tians, whose sympathetic interest in the
lectures during their delivery, and whose
[xiii]

PREFACE
request for their preservation in more
permanent form have encouraged me to
give them to the public. To Professor
Kashiwai, my interpreter in Tokyo, and
a former student in the Union Theologi
cal Seminary, I owe a special debt of
gratitude for his accurate and pains
taking translation of the lectures into
Japanese; and to Dr. Wainwright of the
Christian Literature Society, which has
undertaken the publication of the lec
tures in Japan, my thanks are due for
seeing the manuscript through the press.

[xiv J

CONTENTS paoi
I. The Woeld Cbisis as Challenge and
as Oppoetunitt  1
The Challenge of the War to Christian Faith
— The Issue Defined. Is Christianity So
cially Practicable ? — Attempts to Evade the
Issue — The Principles by Which It Is to
Be Met.
H. The Cheistian Inteepeetation op His
toey  48
The World Crisis in the Light of the Christian
Philosophy of History — History as God's
Training-School of Character — History as
God's Education for Brotherhood — History
as the Meeting-Place of God and Man.
HI. The Cheistian Peogeamme foe Human
ity  97
The Christian Ideal for Society — The Alterna
tives to Christianity — The Practicability of
the Christian Programme — The Resources
Available for the Christian Cause.
IV. The Duty fob To-Moebow .... 141
Where to Begin — The Christian's Duty to His
Neighborhood — The Christian's Duty to
His Country — The Christian's Attitude
Toward War. [xv]

CONTENTS
PAGE
V. What the Chubch Can Do .... 191
The Opportunity of the Church — The Witness
of the Church to Human Brotherhood —
Missions as an Invitation to Spiritual Ad
venture — The Living God as the Guarantee
of Final Success.
Index  239

txvi]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?

CHAPTER I
THE WORLD CRISIS AS CHALLENGE
AND AS OPPORTUNITY
Two friends were recently conversing
about the war. "I do not see how I
can go on living," said one. "It seems
as if I had lost God out of my world."
"Strange," answered the other, "it
seems to me as if I had just found Him."
The conversation is typical. Amid
all the questions which the war has
brought to the surface — questions eco
nomic, political, racial — the moral ques
tion has claimed the centre of attention.
Appalling as has been the loss of human
lives, colossal as has been the destruc
tion of capital, men have been conscious
of a danger even greater for the life of
[1]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the spirit. What will the war mean for
the higher life of man? Are we on the
eve of a permanent relapse into bar
barism, or are we witnessing the birth
throes of a new and higher social order?
To every thoughtful man this ques
tion is of interest, but to the Christian
it comes home with peculiar closeness.
For Christianity in all its forms believes
in a moral government of God in which
all nations and races are included, and
judges all experience, social and indi
vidual alike, in its bearing upon this
supreme issue. It is not strange then
that in every country of Christendom,
those which are at war and those which
are participants only by their sympathy,
men are asking themselves what bearing
the events we are witnessing will have
upon the religion to which they own
allegiance. How far has the Christian
claim been confirmed, how far disproved,
by the war? Of the two judgments
[2]

THE WORLD CRISIS
quoted at the beginning of this chapter,
tested by the Christian standard, which
has most evidence on its side?
In the pages that follow I propose to
raise, and so far as I can, to answer this
question. I wish to ask what lessons
we may learn from the present crisis as
to the nature and validity of Christian
faith, and what contribution Christians
can make to the tasks of spiritual re
construction which must be undertaken
after the war is over?
One of the most striking features of
the last two years has been their revela
tion of the failure of the churches to ex
ercise any controlling influence upon the
national policy of the so-called Christian
nations. In an age when unity was the
dominant note of Christian preaching;
when the barriers that divided the de
nominations, in sympathy if not in ac
tion, were everywhere being overpassed;
when the Christian consciousness of
[3]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
world responsibility and world oppor
tunity had voiced itself in such gather
ings as the Edinburgh Conference, and
such calls as that of the Conference on
Faith and Order; when in every coun
try of Christendom the older individu
alistic conception of Christianity was
giving place to one more conscious of
its social responsibility, and more sen
sitive to the appeals of universal need,
we might have expected that when the
issue of war or peace had to be faced,
the Christian conscience would have
been alert enough, and the protests of
the churches sufficiently powerful and
effective to have called a halt in time.
Whatever may have been true of other
ages and of men of other faiths, in this
age at least, and among nations calling
themselves Christian, war on such a
scale should have been impossible.
But as a matter of fact this expectation
has been disappointed. Not only were
[4]

THE WORLD CRISIS
the churches powerless to prevent the
war, but they made no serious attempt
to do so. And now that the war has
come, and the nations on either side are
committed to the contest, the Chris
tians within each are found heart and
soul in support of their respective govern
ments, not only in the physical struggle
in which they are engaged, but what is
more significant, in their interpretation
of the moral issues at stake. With all
recognition of the unselfishness of pur
pose that has animated Christians as
individuals, it must yet be confessed
that with reference to international re
lations the Christian sentiment of the
world has failed to make itself felt
in this supreme crisis in any unified
and effective way. Individual Christians
have said and done many noble and un
selfish things. The church as a whole
has shown no consciousness of indepen
dent responsibility. It has committed
[51

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
itself to no definite constructive pro
gramme. In this, to be sure, Christians do not
stand alone. What is true of the church
is true of every one of the idealistic
agencies in whose activity we were wont
to take pride. When put to the su
preme test, science and art, literature
and law have proved as impotent as re
ligion. The Palace of The Hague is de
serted. Where two years ago we found
business men investing their capital with
equal impartiality in Russia and Austria,
Germany and England, to-day we see
the nations organizing their economic
resources on lines determined by the
present conflict, and what is more men
acing, promising themselves the perpetu
ation of this divisive policy after the
war is over. Socialism, the one political
creed already definitely committed to an
international programme, has seen its
organization disrupted by the strain of
[6]

THE WORLD CRISIS
opposing patriotisms, and its members,
with a heavy heart, abandoning their
dream of the world war against capital
istic oppression for the more pressing, if
repugnant, task of killing their brother
Socialists who, like themselves but in
opposing ranks, have obeyed their coun
try's summons to arm in her defense.
Even science, the most objective and un-
impassioned of all human interests, has
caught the prevailing contagion, and,
abandoning all pretense of impartiality,
committed itself in the persons of its
most distinguished representatives to a
propaganda of partisanship.
What we seem to see therefore is the
bankruptcy of internationalism in all its
forms. But of all these failures, signal
and discouraging as they are, none is
more surprising, and none more dis
heartening, than that of the Christian
church. For no other organization rep
resents in a more unqualified way the
[7]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
higher interests of mankind, and none is
more definitely committed to the ideal of
brotherhood, of which war is the ex
plicit denial. It becomes incumbent,
therefore, upon us who call ourselves
Christians, to inquire into the reason
for this failure; to discover whether it
is irremediable, and if not to learn what
we can do to make its recurrence in the
future impossible.
The question thus raised is not an
academic one. It is not one which has
to do simply with our private satisfac
tion and reassurance in faith, important
as these may be. It is forced upon us
by the social situation. For we are not
simply thinkers, but actors. When peace
comes, whether it be sooner or later, and
the work of reconstruction has to be
faced, we shall have to do our part in
determining the policies to be adopted,
and the methods to be followed in realiz
ing them. And what we do will be de-
[8]

THE WORLD CRISIS
termined by what we believe. Shall we
yield to the prevailing scepticism, and
abandon our hope of the realization of the
Christian ideal of brotherhood on earth ?
Shall we seek compensation for Chris
tianity's failure here in the millenarian's
dream of a triumph of righteousness in
some other world than ours, or in the
mystic peace which follows the abandon
ment of all earthly ideals for the higher
bliss of communion with the ineffable
God? Or, is the fault not in our ideal,
but in ourselves, a fault which may be
remedied if we do our part, and which
in fact it is our most pressing duty, as
it is our supreme privilege, to remedy?
It is difficult to exaggerate the im
portance of this question. When the
initial shock of the war was over and
men awoke from the numbness of their
first surprise to face the problem of ad
justment to the new and strange world
in which they found themselves, the
[9]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
first effect was a certain exhilaration of
spirit. The very magnitude of the crisis
had in it something inspiring, almost en
nobling. Small concerns were forgotten,
petty interests no longer attracted. Men
were solemnized, uplifted, carried out of
themselves by the enthusiasm of a great
loyalty. Religious men especially were
quick to respond to the ideal elements in
the situation. In their country's appeal
to sacrifice and devotion Christians found
a natural outlet for the instinct of con
secration which had been bred in them
by their religion. They did not doubt
that in serving the nation's cause they
were at the same time promoting God's
kingdom on the earth.
But as time went on this early enthu
siasm gave place to a different mood.
As the magnitude of the struggle has
become more apparent, and its cost not
only in human life but in faith and
hope and love, it has become less easy
[10]

THE WORLD CRISIS
to maintain the optimism which char
acterized the early days of the war.
Face to face with the grim reality of
modern warfare, with its ruthless bru
tality and shameless cynicism, the ideals
of peace which we associate with Chris
tianity seem unreal and remote. What
had at first been regarded as unthinka
ble has come to be taken as a matter of
course; and even those Christians who
still cherish the ideal of world brother
hood and peace despair of finding any
sphere in which it can be made prac
tically operative for generations to come.
Such a situation is full of danger, for a
faith which cannot find appropriate ex
pression in action is held by a precarious
tenure. From every point of view, there
fore, the inquiry which is here proposed
becomes of commanding importance.
What then is the issue which the war
has raised for Christian faith? It is in
[ill

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
briefest statement whether Christianity is
a practicable religion for society as well
as for the individuals who compose it?
There are two different angles from
which the question as to the practica
bility of the Christian religion may be
approached. It may be approached from
the point of view of the individual, or it
may be approached from the point of
view of man's social relations. We may
ask how far Christianity is a practicable
religion for the individual man and
woman; whether it offers a reasonable
creed, a satisfying object of worship, a
worthy ideal of conduct, and motives
adequate to insure its realization; or
we may ask whether Christianity is so
cially practicable, a religion which in
such a world as this, with its complex
relationships, economic, social, and po
litical, we may reasonably expect to
become the accepted standard for the
common faith and life of man.
[12]

THE WORLD CRISIS
It makes a great difference in which
of these two senses we understand our
question. From the point of view of the
individual, few would be found to deny
the practicability of Christianity, for the
evidence to the contrary is accessible
on every hand. There are men and
women all the world over who believe
in the Christian God, accept the Chris
tian standard, and realize that standard
in their own personal conduct to a re
markable degree. They are unselfish,
trustful, brotherly, forgiving, hopeful,
pure. They face calamity with courage,
sin with repentance, opportunity with
consecration, and persecution with self-
control. They may be mistaken in their
belief, and their hope may be destined
to disappointment, but no one can deny
that, so far as their personal experience
is concerned, Christianity has proved and
is still proving itself not only a practica
ble, but a satisfying and ennobling religion.
[13]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
For men of this type the war has in
troduced no essentially new element into
their religious experience. It has im
mensely deepened and intensified it. It
has provided a new challenge for faith, a
new opportunity for service, but it has
not made it appreciably harder to be
lieve in God. Indeed, for many it has
become far easier, for the very shattering
of earthly ideals and the new revelation
of the transitoriness of material posses
sions has served to set in clearer per
spective the unseen reality, and removed,
as it were, a veil which seemed to hang
between them and God. For many it
has meant a readjustment of standards
and a reinforcement of the tendency
present in every religion which, like
Christianity, makes much of personality,
to postpone the consummation from this
life to another. Where so many of the
young and the strong have been cut off
in the flower of their youth, it cannot but
[14]

THE WORLD CRISIS
be that thought should turn to the life
after death for the solution of the prob
lems that baffle us here. But this, too,
is not a new faith, only the re-emphasis
in a new setting of what has been pres
ent in Christianity from the first.
But with the other phase of the ques
tion it is different. When we ask whether
Christianity is socially practicable, we
ask whether the standards which have
been accepted and in a measure realized
by selected individuals here and there,
are valid for the race as a whole;
whether nations and the rival classes
within each nation, whose dealings one
with another are now conducted on purely
selfish principles, may be expected to
abandon their present rivalry in favor of
the more generous and inclusive meth
ods advocated by Christ.
For such a question the war is of mo
mentous significance. For war in the
boldness of its affirmation of the su-
[15]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
premacy of self-interest as between so
cial groups is, in its essence, the denial
of Christianity. If war, and what war
means, is a permanent social necessity,
then Christianity in the sense in which
we are interested in it here is socially
impracticable, and our question must be
answered in the negative.
There are many thoughtful people who
believe that this is the case. Regretfully
but none the less explicitly, and with full
consciousness of the significance of their
action, they have abandoned any hope
that the principles and ideals which in
spire the life of the best Christians can
ever be made dominant in the life of
society as a whole. They look upon the
interpretation of Christianity which has
been so much in evidence in the last gen
eration as a spirit of brotherhood and
tolerance which was gradually to leaven
society as a whole — which, indeed, was
actually leavening it so rapidly and so
[16]

THE WORLD CRISIS
successfully as to make war in any such
sense, and on any such scale as it had
been known in the past, morally impos
sible — they look, I repeat, upon such a
conception as this, a conception made
familiar to us by the theology of the
last thirty years, as a delusion, beau
tiful, if you will, as any dream of an
ideal social state is beautiful, but wholly
unrelated to the matter-of-fact world in
which we live, and full of danger, as all
unreality is dangerous which blinds men's
eyes to the perils of the existing situation,
and leaves them unprepared to meet it.
And it cannot be denied that there is
much to be said in support of this view.
Tested by each one of its cardinal prin
ciples, Christianity seems hopelessly to
have broken down. Whatever else one
may or may not include in Christianity,
this at least it has meant to those who
have accepted it in the past; the father
hood of God, the brotherhood of man,
[17]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
redemption through Christ, the leader
ship of the church. And yet how un
real and far away seems each of these
when measured by the grim realities of
the present ! How can one speak of the
fatherhood of God in any universal and
all-embracing sense in the light of the
terrible calamities which have fallen upon
so many innocent sufferers all over the
round world! How can one beheve in
the goodness of God when one contem
plates this unexampled harvest of agony,
of bitterness, and of death? How the
whole dilemma that in every age has
haunted the imagination of man, the di
lemma: either God would not, and then
He is not good, or He could not, and
then He is not in control — how this
dilemma has been intensified until it
seems as if it could not be evaded. For
the individual here and there, the man
of strong faith and heroic courage, it
may be possible now as in the past to
[18]

THE WORLD CRISIS
fight one's way through the storms of
doubt up into the clear skies of faith,
but for the world at large, surely if what
we see is to be the measure of the future,
it is vain to talk of the fatherhood of
God with any expectation of being be
lieved. The case is still more disheartening
when we pass to the second great article
of the Christian faith, the brotherhood
of man. For what we seem to see to-day
is a colossal denial on the part of that
portion of the human race which has been
longest under the influence of Christ,
and which alone definitely calls itself
Christian, of this central and cardinal
conviction. Whatever else Christianity
may or may not be, it is an international
rehgion. It began as a protest against
the doctrine which identified the King
dom of God with any single nation. It
broke the barrier between Greek and
Jew, and proclaimed the coming of a
[19]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
new social order which should include
both. But now we see the revival in
the most brutal form of the very barriers
which it was the mission of Christ to
break down. The outstanding factor in
the situation is the factor of race; the
final unit, it is declared over and over
again, must be the nation. The Chris
tian claim to reach beyond the individual
life and prescribe laws for the state is
explicitly repudiated, not simply by poli
ticians and by statesmen, but by Chris
tian theologians who tell us that Chris
tianity has to do purely with the life of
the individual, that the unselfishness
which it prescribes and the sacrifices
which it inculcates are valid only for
private persons within the limits of the
present life. As for the state itself, that,
we are told, is the ultimate unit, know
ing no law but that of its own existence,
and recognizing no authority, human or
divine, which has the right to ask of it
[20]

THE WORLD CRISIS
the self-abnegation which is the supreme
law of the individual Christian.
Nor is it otherwise with the third
great Christian tenet, that of redemp
tion through Christ. Characteristic of
Christianity as an individual experience
is the consciousness of the forgiveness
of sins, humility in the presence of the
holy God, penitence because of the mem
ory of past wrong-doing, sympathy with
others who are involved in the same
legacy of sin and are heirs to the same
blessing of redemption. The willingness
to forgive as one has been forgiven, to
bear and to forbear, to think no evil,
to trust where one cannot see — all these
quahties so characteristic of the finest
Christian experience — where shall we look
for them to-day in this world of sus
picion, enmity, and hate? How can we
believe in the social practicability of
the Christian religion when we find each
of the warring nations repudiating all
[21]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
blame from itself and attributing all re
sponsibility for this world tragedy to its
opponents? What concord is there be
tween the spirit of Christ and the pride
and self-satisfaction that are the domi
nant notes of the age in which we live ?
And if it be said that these are but
local and transitory symptoms, the evi
dence of a world-spirit which for the
moment has slipped its leash and run
wild without control; that within or
ganized Christianity at least we may
count on a protest against these unchris
tian tendencies and the reaffirmation in
the face of a challenging world of the
great ideals and principles of which we
have been speaking — we face this further
and most discouraging fact of the all
but complete abnegation of leadership
on the part of the Christian church. In
every country that is now at war we find
the forces of organized religion mobil
ized with army and navy in defense of
[ 22 ]

THE WORLD CRISIS
the particular contention of the state
in question. The consciousness of world
citizenship so characteristic of the
church of Christ in its great days is for
the moment eclipsed, and one wonders
whether it will ever be possible to revive
it. It may be said — it will no doubt be
said — that in principle there is nothing
new in what we see. In one form or
another the problem of evil has always
been with us. But there is something in
the size of the present crisis that stag
gers the imagination, something which
forces home the issue even upon those
comfortable and sheltered lives which
have hitherto managed to elude it; while
for those who are already hostile to Chris
tianity it seems as if here at last a weapon
had been thrust into their hands to drive
home their case with a logic which could
not be resisted. [ 23 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
There are some Christians indeed who
try to evade the difficulty by denying
the relevancy of Christianity to the pres
ent life, or at least to those phases of
human life which concern the relations
of men in society. According to their
view Christianity is purely a religion of
individual salvation. It is concerned
with the soul of man, not with his body,
and with this life simply as a preparation
for that which is to come. To those
who hold such a view there is nothing
surprising in the present situation. It
involves no failure of Christianity, for
the simple reason that Christianity has
never proposed to be a religion for this
world. Not transformation, they insist,
but escape, is the Christian message;
not leadership but protest the true func
tion of the church.
There are two forms which this other
worldly Christianity may take. One is
premiUenarianism. This abandons the
[ 24 ]

THE WORLD CRISIS
present world to the power of evil. It
expects no improvement in society until
the great cataclysm at the end of the
age when Christ is to return in person
to establish his kingdom. In the mean
time it confines the duty of the church
to preaching repentance to individuals,
and warning them to be ready to wel
come their Lord when he comes.
It is easy to understand how this
view arose. During the first decades
of Christianity no one anticipated the
long duration of human history. The
disciples beheved that Christ would come
again within the Hfetime of men then
living in order to establish his kingdom
upon earth and to realize the social
ideals of justice, brotherhood, and love.
And when this expectation was disap
pointed and men faced the prospect of
a period of waiting indefinitely long,
the old habits of thought still persisted
and the social consummation unattain-
[25]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
able, or at least unrealized here, was
awaited in the undiscovered country
that lay beyond death. In the mean
time the energies of Christians found
sufficient outlet in the preparation of the
individual for the life after death, and
the winning of new candidates for the
citizenship of the future kingdom.
So there grew up a conception of Chris
tianity which, while it still cherished the
social ideal, and phrased its faith in
terms of social fellowship, was yet in
principle largely self-centred and indi
vidualistic. I would speak with the greatest re
spect of those who hold the premillena-
rian view. In an age which is tempted to
compromise for the sake of immediate
success they have held aloft the ideal of
personal purity and of unswerving loyalty.
To the sorrowful spirit they have offered
comfort; to the sinful, hope, and to
those who despair of any outcome of
[26]

THE WORLD CRISIS
life here adequate to the demand of the
Christian ideal, they promise in another
world a new sphere of activity, and a
better guarantee of success.
But for many Christians, and these
not the least sincere, such a restriction
of the sphere of Christianity presents
difficulties. They believe with all their
might in the gospel of individual salva
tion, but they believe, too, that Christ
has a message for society as well which
cannot be neglected with impunity.
They remember how much of the Bible
is concerned with questions of social
righteousness, and feel that such a situa
tion as faces us in Europe to-day would,
if accepted as permanent and normal,
be in effect a denial of the gospel. To
hold fast the Christian ideal for society,
while at the same time denying that it
is capable of realization in the present
world seems to involve one in a funda
mental contradiction which, if clearly
[27]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
perceived, must paralyze the will. It
gives us an ideal which we can do noth
ing to realize, and in the midst of events
which are shaking the world to its foun
dations, assigns us the position of irre
sponsible spectators.
The other form of other-worldly Chris
tianity is mysticism. This is even more
radically antisocial.1 It regards our re
lation to our fellow men in any possible
world as of only temporary and transi
tory significance. To the mystic God is
the only true reality, and God can brook
no rival in the allegiance of the soul.
From the vain quest of social betterment
with its divided allegiance, from the false
1 It is hardly necessary to say that I use mysticism
in this connection in a technical sense to denote a
type of religion which concentrates attention upon the
relation between the individual soul and God, and re
gards all other factors as irrelevant if not positively
disturbing. The term is often used in a wider sense,
as a synonym of vital as distinct from traditional re
ligion, and those are called mystics who unite with
ethical devotion to their fellow men a vivid sense of the
presence and fellowship of God. It is with mysticism
in the former sense only that we are concerned here.
[28]

THE WORLD CRISIS
hope of human progress with its inevita
ble disappointment, he would recall us
to the inner world where alone God is
to be found.
When I was in England during the
early months of the war I remember
hearing a distinguished writer, herself a
mystic, give a lecture on mysticism and
the war. She denied that there was any
thing in the present situation which
could disturb the calm of the mystic's
life with God, for the simple reason that
this life was lived on a level where all
such questions as were involved in the
present struggle in Europe were irrel
evant. All the passion and agony, the
struggle and rivalry which fill the days
and nights of the contestants at the
front belong to the region of mundane
interest, from which it is the function
of religion to free the soul. In the un
troubled peace which God gives to his
saints they have no place.
[ 29 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
It is not my purpose here to consider
the relation of mysticism to Christianity
or to debate the question how far the
Christian religion may rightly be called
mystical. It will be sufficient to say
that, to the extent to which the mystic's
definition of Christianity is accepted as
correct, it loses the marks which dis
tinguish it from the contemplative re
ligions of the East, and the teaching
of Jesus is emptied of its natural and
hitherto all but universally accepted
meaning. When Jesus spoke of God as
a Father, he used words borrowed from
the most familiar of social relationships,
and committed his disciples to an ideal
incapable of description in terms of
purely individualistic and self-centred
religion. There are two reasons why it is difficult
to be satisfied either with the premille-
narian or the mystic creed. The first is
psychological, growing out of the per-
[30]

THE WORLD CRISIS
sonal rehgious experience; the second,
historical, based upon observation of the
experience of others.
The first reason why we find it hard
to be satisfied with a purely individual
istic religion is that we know that we
ourselves are more than individuals. The
more we try to be our own best selves,
the more earnest we make with the Chris
tian ideal of personal consecration and
self-sacrifice, the more, in short, we try
to do the things that individualistic
Christianity requires of us, the more in
evitably we find ourselves led beyond
the sphere of individual interest to the
common aspirations, ideals, and endeav
ors which make up the life of men in
society. The second reason is historical. As
we retrace the story of mankind in the
past and ask ourselves who are the
heroes whom we most admire, and the
benefactors in whose achievements we
[31]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
take the most pride, we find they are
those who have given themselves with
the most complete devotion to the ser
vice of their fellows, and to whose sacri
fices, however fruitless at the time they
may have seemed, we can trace some for
ward step in the upward march of hu
manity. Unless we are to renounce all
hope of human progress and, like the
Eastern sage of whom Kipling writes in
"Kim," reduce history to a series of
cycles in which generation after genera
tion retraces with unseeing eye the path
way already traversed by its predeces
sors, we must believe that God has some
purpose in the movements of nations as
well as of individuals, some satisfying
goal to which, by however arduous and
painful a path, he is leading the peoples.
Such, at least, is the conviction which
has inspired the present inquiry. I am
writing for those who, with me, believe
that Christianity has a social message,
[32 ]

THE WORLD CRISIS
and that Christians have a responsibility
to their neighborhood, and to the state,
as well as to their own souls before God.
To all who hold this faith the war is at
once a challenge and an opportunity:
a challenge to justify their faith against
attack, an opportunity to learn lessons
which may prevent similar failures in the
future. It is so in every great crisis. It is at
once test and teacher. We learn by
what we experience, and no contact
with opposing forces, whether in the
world of thought or of action, leaves us
just where we were before. The his
tory of the Christian religion is not sim
ply the story of the reaffirmation from
age to age of a changeless deposit of
faith; it is the record of a growing in
sight into the significance of principles
whose full meaning can be only gradu
ally apprehended in the light of advanc
ing experience. [33 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
So it must be in the present crisis. It
will not be enough for us to maintain our
faith undaunted. We must grasp it more
firmly and understand its consequences
more completely than we did before.
In the chapters that follow I propose
to take up both aspects of this inquiry.
We shall consider, in the first place, how
we are to meet the challenge of the war,
and what answer our faith can give to
the reasons which are urged against it.
In the second place, we shall ask our
selves what we can learn from the ex
perience through which we are passing,
as to our duty for the future.
But before we take up this more de
tailed study there are certain prelim
inary questions which must detain us
for a moment. These have to do with
the principles by which the practica
bility of any ideal must be judged.
What then are the principles by which
[34]

THE WORLD CRISIS
we must test the claim of any social
philosophy to offer us a practicable mode
of life? I will mention four: (1) In
estimating its success or failure it must
be judged by its own claim, and not by
some standard imported from without.
(2) Where it is a question of a process
we must take account of the entire
period of the development and not merely
of a cross-section artificially selected.
(3) In the case of a far-reaching social
phenomenon hke Christianity, which
touches life on all sides and is in process
of constant reaction with its environ
ment, we must not identify the religion
whose practicability is in question with
the ecclesiastical organization which at
best imperfectly expresses it. (4) Fi
nally, in disproving any conclusion it is
not enough to point out its difficulties.
We must face the alternatives, and show
that they involve no difficulty as great
or even greater. [35]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
When we apply these principles to our
estimate of the present situation we shall
be led to temper the severity of our judg
ment. Christianity, whether as a pro
gramme for the individual or for society,
has never promised itself an easy vic
tory. It has been a militant religion,
recognizing evil as a present fact of far-
reaching ramifications and insidious
power. The ideal which it holds forth
is not of a gradual unfolding, taking place
automatically and inevitably as the
flower swells and ripens under the sun,
but a conquest over enemies who need
to be subdued by an effort of the will,
and whose resistance, even when suc
cessfully overcome, will leave its scars
behind. As pictured in the New Testa
ment, Christianity is a religion of tri
umph indeed, but a triumph of those
who have come through great tribulation,
martyrs and heroes as well as saints.
This is so even in the life of the in-
[36]

THE WORLD CRISIS
dividual. The great characters which
Christianity has formed have been formed
through struggle, and there have been
times in the life of each when they were
tempted to despair of success. What
should we have said of Augustine if his
"Confessions" had ended before his con
version, or of Luther before the great
experience which revolutionized his life ?
When we say that Christianity is a prac
ticable rehgion for the individual we
mean that, in spite of personal failure
and sin, the motives which Christianity
commands and the inspiration which it
supplies have proved sufficient in the
case of a multitude of men and women
to overcome the opposing forces of pride,
self-will, and envy, and to produce char
acters rounded, harmonious, and com
plete. How much more necessary is it to
avoid hasty judgments when we con
sider the social practicability of the
[37]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
Christian religion! For here we have
to do with a process which instead of
being complete in a few score years is
to be measured by millenniums. To
say that Christianity is socially prac
ticable is not to say that it is possible
to-day or to-morrow, or even in the next
generation to realize the Christian ideal
in society — but that the realization of
this ideal ought to be the aim toward
which social effort should be directed,
and by the success or failure of which
social progress should be measured. No
doubt a long process of education will
be necessary. No doubt while the edu
cation is incomplete and men who have
accepted the Christian standard face
those who either know it not, or who as
yet reject it, compromises will be inevi
table as they are inevitable to-day in
the life of the individual who as yet im
perfectly apprehends or at least imper
fectly realizes the Christian ideal. But
[38]

THE WORLD CRISIS
just as little as the fact of such com
promises makes us despair of the prac
ticability of Christianity for the indi
vidual or leads us to abandon the Chris
tian test of character in favor of one less
rigorous and exacting, ought the pres
ence of these social compromises and
failures to lead us to abandon our faith
in the social practicability of Christian
ity, provided only we can be assured that
the direction of social progress is toward
rather than away from the Christian
ideal. It is not the fact that we have
hitherto failed to realize the Christian
social ideal that should discourage us,
but the abandonment of the attempt,
and still more the theoretical justifica
tion of this abandonment on the part of
those who in their private life still call
themselves Christians.
Once more, no attempt to measure the
resources at the command of Christian
ity in its world campaign can be ade-
[39]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
quate which ignores the Christianity out
side the organized church. As little as
the spirit of any people can be measured
by the state of its contemporary institu
tions, as little as the moral resources of
a city or a state can be estimated by the
utterances of the politicians who at the
moment may be in control of the offices,
can the spirit of Christianity find ade
quate expression in the deliverances of
its official leaders, or its aspirations be
limited to the programme which at the
moment may command the assent of
ecclesiastical authority. Organizations
are proverbially conservative. They are
the precipitate of the moral victories of
the past. Permanence is their ideal
rather than progress — the thing that has
been rather than the thing that is to
be. It is not, therefore, by the official
utterances of a religion, valuable and
precious as these may be in their conser
vation of the spiritual inheritance of the
[40 ]

THE WORLD CRISIS
past, that we are to estimate the lines
of its future development. Rather must
we gain our clew to this in the strivings
and hopes of the forward-looking, whether
within the organization or without — the
men and women who feel within them
the spirit of the new age and voice the
ideals which will find expression in the
institutions of the future. The signifi
cant thing for the estimate of present-
day Christianity is not the fact that the
official leadership of the church has for
the moment broken down; that in each
of the warring nations the ecclesiastical
authorities have taken their cue from
the utterances of their respective gov
ernments, and with little or no criticism
accepted the official point of view as
their own — but that in every nation
earnest spirits have found this attitude
spiritually unsatisfying, and are trying
in their own way to express a more cath
olic and comprehensive ideal.
[« ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
Once more, it is not enough to reject
any conclusion on account of its difficul
ties. We must consider the alternative.
There are difficulties no doubt in assum
ing the social practicability of the Chris
tian religion, but are there no difficulties
in assuming the contrary? What those
difficulties may be has been brought
home to the consciousness of mankind
with a vividness unexampled in history
by the events of the past two years.
This war with all its horrors is the direct
result of the fact that the men in con
trol of the policy of the leading Eu
ropean nations, whatever their personal
attitude toward Christianity as a private
faith may have been, have deliberately
accepted the thesis of its social imprac
ticability and have been sustained in this
attitude by the pubhc sentiment of their
respective countries. When the war is
over and the questions of reconstruction
are to be faced, this question will have to
[42]

THE WORLD CRISIS
be answered by those responsible for the
terms of peace; whether the philosophy
which underlies the diplomacy of the past
two generations is still to control, or
whether from the mere point of view of
human prudence and reason, if from no
higher ground, it may not prove wise to
try a different method? If the former
alternative shall prevail, we know what to
expect. After a breathing space, longer
or shorter, there will be a renewal of what
we have been experiencing in Europe on
a scale as much more portentous and ter
rible than what we now see, as the forces
which in the meantime modern science
shall have evoked will be vaster and more
appalling. Nor is this all. With the rapid
education of the great peoples of the
remoter East, it is already certain that
in a time longer or shorter, but distinctly
measurable, these unnumbered millions
of men, hitherto largely aloof or qui
escent so far as the Western world is
[43]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
concerned, will be drawn into the vor
tex, and increase by their new reserves
of power the terror of the impending
cataclysm. As the world grows smaller
and the distant draws near, the refuges
which in the past have sheltered neutral
and peace-loving nations from the storms
of war will grow fewer and at last dis
appear altogether, and the extent and
duration of the contests that will suc
ceed one another from generation to
generation in dreadful and monotonous
succession be measured only by the re
sources of humanity as a whole.
Such then is the alternative which we
face. if Christianity be not socially prac
ticable. And the question fairly arises
whether it is not as reasonable to sup
pose that the influences which within
individual communities and states have
gradually substituted the methods of
co-operation and of law for those of
armed force, may not find advocates
[ 44 ]

THE WORLD CRISIS
ingenious enough to apply them to the
new situation when once the magni
tude of its issues has been faced.
More is at stake than appears on the
surface. It is one thing to postpone
the coming of the Kingdom of God, to
realize that in a process so complex and
many-sided, involving so many differ
ent generations and races, requiring for
its completion an education so pains
taking and long-continued, generations
and ages may have to pass before the
consummation which is desired is
reached; it is one thing — while the
process is incomplete — to regard each
struggle for a better social order, each
new experience of tragedy following the
failure of the old as one more step in
the forward march, one more object-
lesson in God's great training-school of
brotherhood — and quite another to see
in the entire attempt to realize the ideal
of brotherhood among men a gigantic
[45 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
self-delusion destined from the start to
inevitable failure, and to be content for
oneself with a purely individualistic and
self-centred faith.
I do not say that life will not be pos
sible with such an outlook. I do not say
that religion in some form will not sur
vive. We know that religion has an in
exhaustible vitality, and manifests itself
in the most forbidding environment and
the most unexpected forms, but I do say
that for the thoughtful man more will be
involved in such an issue than the fail
ure of Christianity as a social scheme.
Even for the individual it is hard to see
how Christianity can any longer appear
a practicable religion if by Christianity
we mean the religion which accepts the
principles of Jesus as its standard of
faith and life. The man who believes
in the fatherhood of God and the brother
hood of man may indeed postpone the
coming of the social consummation. He
[46 ]

THE WORLD CRISIS
may push it into a remote future or shift
it to another world. But there is one
thing which he cannot do without the
surrender of his most vital faith, and that
is, abandon it altogether. Deceive our
selves as we may, try to hide it from
ourselves as we will, the individual and
the social gospel belong together, and
one cannot permanently survive the ship
wreck of the other.
It is in the light of such considera
tions that we have to approach our
problem and measure the arguments
which make for or against the social
practicability of the Christian religion.

[47]

CHAPTER II
THE CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION
OF HISTORY
In the last chapter we considered the
issue which the war has raised for Chris
tian faith. It is, in a word, that of the
social practicability of the Christian re
ligion. Is the religion that we profess
valid for nations as well as for individ
uals — a religion which we can teach in
our schools, practise in our business, and
apply in all the complex relations of our
national and international life ? We con
sidered the attempts which have been
made to evade the issue by those whose
conception of Christianity is purely
individualistic and other-worldly, and
found them unconvincing. Finally, we
laid down certain general principles by
[48]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
which the practicability of any mode of
life must be tested. We have now to
consider more in detail the consequences
which follow from these principles for
the subject of our present inquiry.
There are three different tests which
we may apply to the claim of Chris
tianity to offer a practicable social pro
gramme. We may test it first by its
diagnosis of the existing situation;
secondly, by the remedy it offers, and
thirdly, by the resources at its com
mand. And first of the diagnosis. If the
Christian claim be justified, how shall
we account for the present situation?
The Christian answer is entirely simple
and definite. It is because as a matter
of fact the principles of Christianity
have never been applied.
I do not mean this simply in the sense
in which it is true of our individual fail
ures that our accomplishment falls be-
[49]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
low our endeavors. I mean that in in
ternational affairs no serious attempt has
been made to apply Christian principles
at all. Even in countries which call
themselves Christian the energies of
Christians have, as a rule, been confined
to dealing with individual lives, and the
larger problems which concern nations
and states have, with few rare exceptions,
been dealt with either on principles of
temporary expediency or of deliberate
selfishness. In saying this we are saying only what
is generally admitted. Whatever may
have been their private faith as individ
uals, the statesmen who are responsible
for the diplomacy of the various Euro
pean countries have taken it for granted
that self-interest must be the supreme
law of nations. They have made it their
primary aim to secure advantage for their
own people at the expense of their rivals,
and it was the clash which inevitably
[50]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
resulted from this policy of organized
national selfishness which precipitated
the war.
This does not mean that there has
been no difference in the standards of
the different European countries; that
idealistic motives have had no part to
play in determining national policy, or
in dictating the limits beyond which a
particular state was unwilling to go; but
it does mean that when we take the his
tory of Europe in the large, and trace
the events of the last two years to their
remoter causes, we are led to a concep
tion of the relation of states radically
inconsistent with the Christian ideal.
When in times of peace nations treat
neighboring nations as enemies in dis
guise, and organize their resources, dip
lomatic, economic, and military, with a
view to possible conflict, it takes little
intelligence to predict the results. And
this, without a single exception, has been
[51]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the state of the leading European nations
for a generation at least.
I know no more pathetic utterance in
all recent history than that sentence of
Sir Edward Grey in the English White
Book, in which, pleading against hope
for one more day's delay before the issue
is joined, he promises, if the hoped-for
respite is secured, to do his best to trans
form the system of rival alliances which
had brought the world to the verge of
war, into a real concert of Europe.1 It
is as if he had said: "In the past we
have tried to preserve the world's peace
by the appeal to fear; but now that it
has become clear that this method has
failed, has not the time come for a dif
ferent experiment? Since international
1 "And I will say this: If the peace of Europe can
be preserved and the present crisis safely passed, my
own endeavor will be to promote some arrangement
to which Germany could be a party, by which she could
be assured that no aggressive or hostile policy would
be pursued against her or her allies, by France, Russia,
and ourselves jointly or separately." (British White
Paper, No. 101.)
[52]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
rivalry has brought us to the brink of the
precipice, why not try international co
operation? I for one am ready for it
and pledge myself, if the rest of you will
join me, to do what I can to make it a

success."

Alas, it was too late. You cannot
turn back the wheels of history as you
can the hands of a clock. And all the
efforts of the diplomats who in the fate
ful ten days that preceded the outbreak
of war worked with a good faith that
there is no reason to question, to stay
the impending catastrophe, were neu
tralized by forces to the strengthening
of which they themselves and the peo
ples they represented had for years,
sometimes consciously, more often un
consciously, been contributing.
It is with these underlying causes that
Christianity is primarily concerned — the
rivalries, the suspicions, the fear, the
greed, the pride, of which wars are made.
[53]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
Unlike much contemporary pacifism
which attacks war directly as the evil of
evils, Christianity sees in it a symptom
of something deeper and more evil still,
namely, the radical selfishness of the
human heart. War is not an indepen
dent fact which can be isolated from its
antecedents. It is a part of the process
of discipline through which by ways
painful, but none the less salutary, God
is teaching the nations their essential
unity, and training them for higher
things. Two elements then enter into the
Christian interpretation of war: first, the
sin which has caused it; secondly, the
divine purpose which is being fulfilled
through it. It is only as we put the
present crisis in this larger context that
we reach what is distinctive in the Chris
tian view.
It was the prophets of Israel who first
clearly perceived this connection. From
[54 ]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the first the religion of the Hebrews had
been a social religion, in the sense that
the unit with which it dealt was the
nation, rather than the individuals who
composed it; but it had been a local
religion. Its vision was bounded by
Canaan, and the great world that lay
beyond was all but unknown. The
prophets commanded a broader horizon.
They first measured the extent and the
completeness of Jehovah's control. Not
Israel only was subject to his will, but
the great world-powers — Egypt, Assyria,
Persia, with whose fortune that of Israel
was inextricably involved. All the move
ments of contemporary history — the
march of contending armies, the rise of
dynasties and the fall of cities — took
place by His decree and for the execu
tion of His purpose. The Assyrian was
the rod of His anger,1 the razor with
which He was to shave head and beard.2
1 Isaiah 10 : 5. 2 Isaiah 7 : 20.
[55]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
Egypt was His servant.1 Philistia and
Syria executors of His will.2 Far from
the misfortunes of Israel proving that
God had abandoned them, they were
rather warnings which He had sent them
for their good, stages which they must
pass on their journey to salvation. The
great thing was to understand their
meaning, and to learn the lessons which
they were designed to teach.
Christianity inherited Israel's faith in
an all-encompassing Providence. It gave
this faith new significance through its
new revelation of God's character and
of his redemptive purpose made known
through Jesus Christ. It shifted the
emphasis from the outward drama of the
army and the camp to the inward struggle
of the soul. It spiritualized and univer
salized the social ideal; and through the
resurrection faith opened vistas of com
fort and hope beyond the grave, denied
1 Isaiah 19 : 19-25. 2 Isaiah 9 : 11, 12.
[56]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the earlier stages of Israel's history. But
it never wavered in its faith in God as
Lord of all; of this life as well as of the
hfe to come; of evil as well as of good;
of nations as well as of the individuals
who compose them.
This confidence was the result of
no shaUow optimism. When all goes
smoothly it is easy to speak and to
think comfortably. Some of us have
learned this to our cost. We had under
estimated the forces which resist prog
ress. We had supposed that the great
prize for which we had been contending
was to be quickly won; that war on a
great scale belonged to the past, and
that our more enlightened age, in spite
of its underlying selfishness and cruelty,
could somehow slip easily into the King
dom of God. We have had a rude
awakening, and we are tempted to go
to the opposite extreme and to wonder
whether, after all, Bernhardi and the
[57]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
prophets of force are not right, and our
ideal of a social order at once just and
free is not an idle dream.
Our predecessors in the faith were
under no such illusion. If they believed
in peace it was not because they were un
acquainted with war. There is no fact
which confronts us to-day, however ap
palling and terrible, which they had not
looked in the face. If they believed in
God's control of history, it was not be
cause they underestimated the forces of
evil, but because they had confidence
that God was able to overrule evil for
good. How the Old Testament lives again
in the light of contemporary events !
What a grim commentary upon Isaiah
and Jeremiah are the events which are
even now transpiring in Poland and
France. The "country desolate," the
"cities burned with fire," the land de
voured by strangers, "the daughter of
[58]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Zion left as a booth in a vineyard, as a
lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a
besieged city."1 Then, as now, "the
hills did tremble, and their carcasses
were as refuse in the midst of the
streets."2 Then, as now, could be heard
"the uproar of many peoples that roar
like the roaring of the seas; and the
rushing of nations, that rush like the
rushing of mighty waters." 3 Then, as
now, the swift advance, spreading ter
ror with its impression of resistless
power. These are but examples taken at ran
dom. How many times they could be
multiplied if we were to follow human
history through all the tragedy of its
checkered fortunes, and recall again the
sights and scenes which have been wit
nessed by Christian men who have yet
kept a firm faith in the loving Father
1 Isaiah 1 : 7, 8. s Isaiah 5 : 25.
3 Isaiah 17 : 12.
[59]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
who holds all in the hollow of His hand,
and without whose will not even a spar
row falleth.
It is worth while to recall these famil
iar facts, because they will help us to
keep our sense of balance and propor
tion. We speak of our experience as un
paralleled in human history, and there
is a sense in which this is true. But the
statement needs qualification. The pres
ent crisis is unparalleled in magnitude,
but not in quality. Hunger is hunger,
and pain pain, and death death the
world over; in Palestine as in Belgium,
in Rome as in Austria and France.
And the anguish of hope deferred, the
shattering of ideals, the bitterness of
the "I would, but ye would not," were
as poignant to the patriarchs and saints
of the first Christian century as they
can be to us to-day. There is nothing,
I repeat, that any man or woman or
child is experiencing to-day which has
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
not been experienced by others over and
over and over again. There is no chal
lenge to faith in what we see which has
not been met by faith in the past and
vanquished. What, then, is this faith that rises
triumphant over every obstacle? What
does the Christian see as he contem
plates the mysteries of God's providence
in history? He sees three things. In
the first place he sees God at work for a
moral purpose. In the second place he
sees God at work for a social purpose.
In the third place he sees God at work
for a rehgious purpose. Let us try,
taking the Bible as our guide, to under
stand what this triple vision means for
our faith.
When we say that God is in history
for a moral purpose, we mean that His
chief concern is the making and training
of character. Not happiness, but dis-
[61]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
cipline is His primary interest, and hap
piness, when it comes, is only the seal
that the discipline is complete.
This does not mean, of course, that
Christianity is an ascetic religion; that
it has no place and no regard for the
simpler pleasures and interests of com
mon life. The reverse is true. The fig
ures which Jesus uses to describe His
kingdom are the familiar figures of the
peasant life on the soil — the fisherman
with his nets, the sower with his seed, the
father with his children, the friend with
his friend, the host with his guests.
The ideal state, when it comes, will be
one of prosperity and peace. The lan
guage of the prophets about the holy
city surrounded by fertile fields and in
habited by prosperous and contented
people recurs in the Christian's descrip
tion of the new Jerusalem. But these
things are incidental to the main pur
pose, which is the establishment of jus-
[62]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
tice and brotherhood among men. When
Messiah comes it will be to judge the
world with righteousness and vindicate
the moral government of God.
This explains the Christian's attitude
toward suffering. It is God's means of
training character. Far from its being
a sign of His forgetfulness, the proof of
His weakness or of His indifference, it is
through suffering that God teaches His
most important lessons and opens the
way for the impartation of His choicest
blessings. Here, too, the work of the prophets
was epoch-making. In a world full of
anguish and strife, to a people tempted
to believe that God had utterly forsaken
them, they bring their assurance of a
loving purpose, using evil as an instru
ment of good. "You only have I known
of all the families of the earth," is Jeho
vah's message to Israel through Amos,
"therefore I will visit upon you all your
[63 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
iniquities."1 Love is not afraid to in
flict suffering, when the loved one is in
mortal danger. Where there is sloth
and self-indulgence and unbrotherliness,
there must be suffering if there is to be
salvation. This does not mean that all suffering
is due to sin. We shall see presently
that much suffering has a very different
explanation. But it means that while
sin continues, suffering must continue;
and that where we find evidence on a
national scale, and over long periods of
time of social misery and social degra
dation, we may be sure that there is at
root a moral cause.
The first lesson, then, that comes to
us as Christians, as we contemplate the
sufferings of the present, is that of the
need of self-examination and penitence.
These great evils have not come upon
mankind without a cause, and it is our
1 Amos 3 : 2.
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
duty, so far as we can, to understand
this cause, that we may do our part to
remove it.
One of the encouraging features of
the present situation is that it has put
the moral issue again in the centre of
attention. We had been told that man
kind had outgrown the sense of sin, but
to-day we see it revived in the most un
expected quarters. It is the subject of
the diplomatic correspondence. It gives
its tragic interest to the official papers,
white, yellow, and gray. The theme of
them all is moral responsibility. What
is the contention of each of the parties
in this gigantic controversy if not that
they are fighting to uphold the elemental
principles of justice and morality against
men who have banded themselves to
gether for purposes of selfishness and
greed? It is not we who are guilty, so
runs the official apologetic of all the na
tions. But that there has been guilt
[65]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
on a scale the most colossal in history all
are agreed. What is this but a confes
sion that the sense of sin is still alive in
men, and that the old questions of guilt
and punishment are still living questions.
But the Bible not only points out to
us the inevitable connection between sin
and suffering, it shows us also what is
the root of all our misery. This sin is
unbrotherliness. It is the self-centred
life, regarding only its own interests and
indifferent to the needs and sufferings of
others, which in every age has been the
spring of social jealousy and social un
rest. What the Assyrians planned to
do to Israel as a whole, individual Israel
ites, relying on their superior advantages
of birth, or place, or wealth, had done
in effect to their less fortunate fellow
countrymen. They had treated them
as the raw material of their own pleasure
and gain. They had ignored their rights
as human beings — common children of
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
a common father — to a life that was full
and free. The national misery which
involved their own fortunes with those
whom they had despised and oppressed
was the natural and inevitable conse
quence of the national sin.
We stand too near the great crisis of
our time to attempt any judicial appor
tionment of guilt or blame. That will
be undertaken in due course, and before
the bar of history each will be obliged
to answer for the things done and left
undone. But back of the question of
immediate responsibility — the question
of who touched the spark which caused
the great explosion — there is the deeper
question of the underlying conditions
which made the explosion inevitable
when the spark was applied. Here there
can be no easy shifting of responsibility.
Each of us has his share to bear in the
common burden of sin. Whatever dur
ing all the years that have gone has sown
[67]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
envy and distrust between individuals
and nations; wherever the weak have
been oppressed and the longing for free
dom has been stifled; wherever men have
thought basely of their fellows, attribut
ing to them conduct and desires which
they would despise in themselves; wher
ever brute force has been magnified
as the supreme reality, and the power
of love has been belittled or denied;
wherever, in short, individuals and na
tions calling themselves Christian have
denied by their conduct the religion
they profess, there they have been lay
ing the train which was some day des
tined to explode in bitterness and hate.
As certainly as day follows night, so cer
tainly suffering follows sin. It is futile
to cry, Peace, Peace, when there is no
peace. It is idle to expect peace where
the causes which produce war remain
unremoved. There is nothing, therefore, in what
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
we see to dismay or to discourage us;
nothing that we could not have pre
dicted if we had read our Bibles aright.
What we see, so far from being a dis
proof of God's moral government of
men, is the most august demonstration
the world has yet seen of the inexorable-
ness of the moral law and the inevitable-
ness of the penalties which follow its
violation. Once again God is teaching
us by the most terrible of all examples
that the one sure guarantee of peace is
justice between nations and brotherhood
among men.
And this brings us to the second article
in the Christian philosophy of history —
that God's purpose in history is a social
purpose. It is not simply the training
of the individual as an individual, but
the establishment of the Kingdom which
is his supreme concern, and this intro
duces complications into the situation.
[69]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
It explains the strange phenomenon, so
baffling to faith, of the suffering of the
innocent with the guilty.
From the beginning this has been the
crux of the problem of suffering. It was
not hard to understand suffering where
there was sin. The mystery was rather
on the other side, that so often the wicked
seemed to escape their just punishment.
But that the righteous should suffer
while the wicked went scot-free, this
seemed a challenge of God's moral gov
ernment so staggering that for long — ¦
even in the face of the most convincing
evidence — men refused to believe in the
fact. We see this in the attitude of
Job's friends — when they insist, in spite
of Job's denial, that where there is so
much suffering there must have been
corresponding sin. We see it in the
protest of Jeremiah and Ezekiel when
they repudiate the old proverb: "The
fathers have eaten sour grapes and the
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
children's teeth are set on edge." * And
yet it remains true that the innocent do
suffer with, and for, the guilty, and that
the iniquities of the fathers are visited
upon the children unto the third and
fourth generation. What does it mean?
There are two things which it might
mean. One is that the ultimate reality
is force, and that the Christian faith in
the loving Father, who cares for each one
of His human children, is without foun
dation in fact. The other is that the
individual is not the final unit; that be
cause God's plan is social, a family, and
not simply a collection of unrelated sons
and daughters, His method of training
must be more complex than would be
the case if He were dealing with isolated
individuals. It is the latter which is
the Christian view. God's method is a
method of redemptive love, and redemp
tive love saves by vicarious suffering.
1 Jer. 31 : 29, 30; Ezek. 18 : 2, 3.
[711

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
Of all the revolutions in human valua
tion I know of none more revolutionary
than this. It is the supreme example
of Nietzsche's Umwerthung aller Werthe.
We glean some estimate of it in the awed
surprise with which the great prophet
of the Exile records the story of his own
discovery as he foUows the experience
of the suffering servant. "He was de
spised and rejected of men, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief; and
as One from whom men hide their face
He was despised, and we esteemed Him
not. Surely He hath borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows; yet we did
esteem Him stricken, smitten of God and
afflicted. But He was wounded for our
transgressions, He was bruised for our
iniquities. The chastisement of our
peace was upon Him, and with His
stripes we are healed." 1 The righteous
suffer for the wicked that the wicked
1 Isaiah 53 : 3-5.
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
may be saved. This is the Christian
solution of the problem of problems, the
suffering of the innocent with, and for,
the guilty. It is God's method of re
demption, the method of vicarious suffer
ing, the method which finds its supreme
example and seal in the cross that was
set up on Calvary.
It is not easy to exaggerate the im
portance of the cross for Christianity.
It dominates our theology. It sets the
tone of our religious feeling. It gives
the key to our theodicy. Where other
rehgions have shrunk from pain as the
supreme evil, or turned aside from it as
the supreme mystery, Christianity looks
it full in the face and finds in it the price
of salvation. "Him who knew no sin,
God made to be sin on our behalf that
we might become the righteousness of
God in Him."1
But it is a question whether even yet
JH Cor. 5 : 21.
[73 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
we have learned the full meaning of the
cross. Its very wonder has shrouded it
in an artificial mystery. It has been
isolated from all other human experi
ences as an event wholly sui generis. It
has been explained as God's method of
dealing with the sin of the individual —
your sin and mine — the way in which the
burden of the guilty soul has been shifted
to the shoulders of the guiltless Christ.
But the cross has another and an even
deeper meaning — a meaning not individ
ual merely, but social. It is the supreme
revelation of a law that is valid every
where and always, the law of the soli
darity of all mankind in the moral life.
It is not simply that Christ was willing
to suffer for my sin. It is that, being
what He was, He could not but suffer for
it. When He became man it was not
merely as an isolated individual, but as
a member of the human family. He
became involved in all the fortunes of
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
the race, subject to that mysterious law
of which we have spoken, that binds us
all up together in one common bundle of
life, so that not one of us can live for
himself alone, but each is involved, for
good or for evil, in the fortunes of all
the rest.
How much this consciousness of hu
man solidarity has been reinforced by the
events of the past two years! We are
learning in a terrible text-book the truth
of the old words that God has "made
of one every nation of men." We have
seen the war reaching beyond the nations
immediately engaged, and laying its ruth
less and destroying hands upon peace-
loving and inoffensive people. There is
not an island so remote but feels the
electric shock. There is not a man or
woman so humble but on their shoulders
some new burden will be laid as a direct
result of this war. The time has gone
by when any nation can say to other
[75]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
nations: " It is no concern of yours what
I do to my neighbor." For good or for
evil (for evil certainly if not for good)
we are members one of another. We
have been told it before, we know it
now. But there is another side to this mat
ter of human solidarity which it is just
as important for us to understand, and
that is its function as an agent of salva
tion. We have learned that there is a
divine law which involves us all alike
in the consequences of past sin. We
have yet to learn that the same law may
be made equally effective in the trans
mission of good.
And yet this, too, is the lesson of the
cross. There is a contagion of good as
well as of evil. As the sin of mankind
brought suffering to the innocent Christ,
necessarily, and as part of God's law, so
the courageous acceptance of that suffer
ing by Christ brought salvation to sin-
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
ful mankind, with an equal necessity,
and as part of a law equally divine. In
redemption, as in suffering, Christ is the
type of humanity at its best. What was
true of Him on the supreme scale, and
in exceptional degree, may be true on a
lesser scale, but no less truly in the case
of every man or woman who follows Him
in His path of loving sacrifice, and has
learned from the heart to pray His prayer
after Him, "Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do." Paul
filling up on his part "that which is lack
ing of the afflictions of Christ . . . for
His body's sake, which is the Church," J
Latimer bidding the faltering Ridley
"Be of good comfort, and play the man,"
since "we shall light such a candle by
God's grace in England as, I trust, shall
never be put out," are but the most con
spicuous examples of the great company
of every name and age who, having fol-
1 Col. 1 : 24.
[77]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
lowed Christ in His sufferings, have
shared with Him also the triumph of
sacrificial love.
It is in this spirit that the Christian
must contemplate the terrible events
through which we are passing. As they
are the supreme proof of the solidarity
of mankind in suffering, so they offer
the supreme promise of the solidarity
of mankind in salvation. If the suffer
ings which this great war lays upon the
innocent breed only feelings of bitterness
and hatred; if they are met with the
resolve to return the same in kind with
interest to the oppressor when the bal
ance of power inclines to the other side;
if the answer (the final answer, I mean)
to a desolated France be a ravaged Ger
many, then this war will prove but one
more chapter — the most terrible to date
— in the long story of bitterness and
hatred of which history is full. But if
the sufferers can learn from Christ His
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
lesson of forgiveness; if they can see
in their experience, as He saw in His,
the price of salvation not for themselves
only, but for those who have done them
wrong; if their experience of the evils
of war make them but the more resolute
and the more courageous in their pur
suit of a just and lasting peace, then the
outcome of the great struggle may be a
new era of mutual understanding, and
the blood of the martyrs prove once
again the seed of a new and a better
Church. Much has been said of the compen
sation which is to be given to Belgium
when the war is over. What compensa
tion can be given to a country which has
suffered what she has suffered and is
suffering? Will you give her money?
Will money bind up her broken hearts,
turn gray hairs brown, and recall her
sons and daughters from the grave?
Will you renew the guarantee of her in-
[79]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
dependence ? What treaty that the hand
of man can write can rid her of the
haunting sense of insecurity which is the
legacy of human faithlessness where faith
was due ? There is one gift which could
be given, and one only, which would de
serve the name of compensation, and
that is the knowledge that through her
suffering, appealing to mankind as no
national suffering has done since the days
when Israel's tragedy lent the Prophet
his figure of the Christ to come, there
had been born in every country in Chris
tendom such a sense of the futility and
wickedness of war, such shame at the
profanation of the Christian name by
deeds essentially anti-Christian, such a
searching of heart as to the causes of
this pitiable relapse to barbarism and
penitence for whatever in the life of each
had made it possible; above all, such
determination that such a tragedy should
never happen again, as should mark the
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
end of this whole dark chapter of human
history and usher in a new era of con
fidence, brotherhood, and peace.
Is it to be so? That depends upon
the power which is really strongest
in history, whether the God in whom
we believe — the God of righteousness
and wisdom and love — is really in con
trol. And this brings us to the third article
in the Christian philosophy of history,
the most significant and momentous of
all, and that is that God is in history for
a religious purpose, a purpose, that is
to say, which involves the training of
man for fellowship with God, and man's
consciousness of God's solidarity with
him in all his experiences.
Here, too, we have to do with an in
sight slowly won, and often inadequately
grasped. At first men thought of God
as outside of the drama of history — the
[81]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
spectator, the playwright; if acting at
all, only occasionally, at set times and
for specific purposes, but not himself in
volved in His inner life in the fortunes
of the human actors He set in motion.
This was, on the whole, the dominant
Greek conception, and it recurs again
and again in Christian history. God is
the onlooker, sympathetic indeed, and
well disposed, whose great calm we may
hope to share in the good time coming
when this life is over, and the other which
lies beyond has begun.
But the prevailing Christian concep
tion is very different. It is not merely,
as we have seen, that God is in history,
immanent as well as transcendent, actor
as well as spectator; but that He is in
volved in His inmost life in the fortunes
of the human participants. He not only
acts, He cares. When Israel sins, the
burden falls not on man only, but on
God. He is like the husband whose wife
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has committed adultery; x the father
whose children have rebelled against
him.2 If he punishes, it is not because
he is indifferent or angry, but because
he earnestly desires their moral good.
There is no suffering of theirs in which
he does not share. "In all their afflic
tion He was afflicted; ... in His love
and in His pity He redeemed them;
and He bare them and carried them all
the days of old." 3
It is only in the light of this truth
that we grasp *the full meaning of the
cross. I have spoken of it in its human
significance as a revelation of the law of
vicarious sacrifice which is valid for man
as well as God. But this is only one
side, and not the deepest, of its mean
ing. It is the revelation of the heart of
God. It shows God involved with us,
in our deepest tragedy, fellow sympa-
1 Hosea 1, 2. 2 Deut. 32 : 6, 20.
3 Isaiah 63 ; 9.
[83]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
thizer with us in our sorrow, fellow
sufferer with us in our sin. It is the
assurance that the pain which we suffer
is not wantonly sent. It is the supreme
pledge that the ultimate outcome will
be good.
Here, and here alone, do we find the
complete Christian theodicy, our ground
for faith in the essential goodness of the
world. We win this faith, not by ignor
ing evil, or by belittling it, but by trans
figuring it with the glory of the Divine
sympathy and the serenity of the Divine
purpose. It is a great thing to feel that
our suffering may have a part to play in
promoting human progress; it is an even
greater to reahze that through it we may
gain an insight into the heart of God.
Here, too, with much that is baffling
and discouraging, the war has brought
us unexpected reinforcement of faith.
Where the mind sees only difficulty, the
heart has its own logic, and in the pres-
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INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
ence of a need too great for human help,
God finds his opportunity of self-revela
tion. Illustrations of this fact have been
coming to us from every army in the
field. Wherever we turn we hear of the
spirit of prayer in the trenches. The
Russians kneel before their priests to re
ceive their blessing before they advance
to battle. The French priests are on
the firing-line, ready at any moment to
celebrate a mass or to read a prayer for
the dying. From the English lines come
stories of rehgious revival. From Ger
many we hear of filled churches, and of
the revival of the spirit of prayer. Let
ters from the front breathe an unwonted
seriousness. To many a man who sel
dom named the name of Christ, he has
become a familiar friend.
"Involuntarily," writes a Berlin
teacher serving in the trenches in Poland,
"thoughts turn from this world to the
[85]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
regions beyond. Spontaneously one feels
one's way back to God, and reahzes the
great blessing of the church. Sometimes
when we were compelled to he Still on the
firing-line under a most intense shower of
bullets many hands were folded and many
lips moved in silent prayer, while others
told their rosaries. Afterward one can
see the expression of joyful peace on all
faces." The same experience is put more
naively by an Enghsh Tommy in the lines
entitled, "Christ in Flanders."
"We had forgotten you, or very nearly.
You did not seem to touch us very nearly.
Of course we thought about you now and
then,
Especially in any time of trouble.
We knew that you were good in time of
trouble,
But we are very ordinary men.
"And there were always other things to
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There's lots of things a man has got to
think of;
His work, his home, his pleasure, and his
wife;
And so we only thought of you on Sunday,
Sometimes perhaps not even on a Sunday,
Because there's always lots to fill one's life.
"Now we remember, over here in Flanders.
It isn't strange to think of you in Flanders.
This hideous warfare seems to make things
clear.
We never thought about you much in Eng
land.
But now that we are far away from Eng
land,
We have no doubts; we know that you are
here."
No doubt there is another side to the
picture. To many the war has been
only benumbing and brutalizing, accen
tuating tendencies to evil already pres
ent, but till now held in check. But for
the more thoughtful and earnest it has
acted as a call to religion, reviving the
consciousness of the God in whom till
[87]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
then they had scarcely realized they be
lieved. There is a truth here of which we need
to be constantly reminded. In times of
prosperity, when life is easy, and plea
sure the chief preoccupation, it is easy
to forget God. The factors in our en
vironment which we can see and handle
and measure seem entirely adequate to
account for the results we experience,
and the arguments of the sceptic who
finds God a needless hypothesis win a
ready assent. But when trouble comes
and the familiar props fail us, we find
to our surprise that there is something
in us of which we had not taken account.
The conclusions to which our logic seemed
forcing us become suddenly intolerable.
We awake to the consciousness of the
Great Companion, and we look up and
take courage.
We who are religious teachers have
been slow to learn this lesson. We have
[88]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
thought that we could prove God by
reason to men who had not yet discov
ered His presence in experience. We
have constructed syllogisms and balanced
probabilities, and met the arguments of
our opponents with counter-arguments,
and we have been surprised that the con
viction which we hoped to produce did
not follow.
But this is because we have been pro
ceeding in the wrong way. We have
argued where we should have assumed.
It is not our place to prove to men
without God that God exists, but to
point out to men already in contact with
God through nature, through history,
through their own personal life, the mean
ing of their experience.
This does not mean that reason can
do nothing to help faith, but only that
it must be used in the right way. The
true function of a religious philosophy is
not proof but interpretation. It is its
[89]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
task to point out the experiences of the
soul, out of which, as a matter of fact
and not of theory, faith in God grows,
and the needs of the heart to which faith
in Christ answers.
How many they are! There is the
need of guidance as we face the mystery
of life and realize how many questions
there are which we cannot answer. There
is the need of comfort as we meet life's
disappointments and failures. There is
the need of forgiveness as we realize
with shame our own personal shortcom
ings and sins. There is the need of in
spiration as the monotony of life's rou
tine dulls our sensibility and renders us
unresponsive to new appeals for service
and for heroism. There is the need of
companionship as one by one the old
friends drop away and there are no new
ones to fill the accustomed places. Above
all, there is the need of hope as we face
such an impasse as seems to confront the
[90]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
world to-day, and we are tempted to
despair of any guidance wise enough to
find a way out.
These elemental needs and experiences
of the soul are the real ground of our
faith in God. It is our privilege to in
terpret their significance to those who
have not yet discovered it, and so to di
rect the latent energies of the soul into
their appropriate channel.
This was Jesus' way. He did not try
to prove to men that God existed. He
took that for granted. But He talked
to them about their Father, His care of
them, His plans for them, their duty to
Him, and He urged them to put His
teaching to the proof, and to see if it
did not come true.
This too was Paul's method. He never
talked to men as if they were without
experience of God. He came to them
as bringing a fuller message about the
God they knew already in part, and wor-
[91]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
shipped imperfectly. He spoke out of
experience to experience, and his appeal
was always to a more perfect experience.
This has been the method of the great
evangelists of every age. They have
preached, God as the most real and the
most familiar of facts, and trusted the
conscience of their hearers to answer
with an Amen. And now the war has
come to prove that they were right —
that in the very quarters where God
seemed most forgotten, His Spirit has
been at work all the time, and it needed
only the occasion to reveal His presence.
It is this discovery of God's present
companionship in trial and danger, which
is our deepest ground for faith in immor
tality. Immortality, as the Christian
conceives it, is more than a substitute
for joys denied here, a compensation for
suffering and limitations otherwise insup
portable. It is the completion of a fel
lowship begun here; the consummation
[92]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
in all its richness and fullness, of a Di
vine companionship which has already
made life supremely satisfying. It is
not because life means little to us that
we desire to live by and by, but because
Christ has filled life so full of undreamed
of possibilities; has made personality so
much bigger and better a thing than we
had dared to hope it could be.
Nowhere is this consciousness of life's
inherent value more vivid than in the
case of the young. When one reads the
casualty lists that are published week by
week, "and realizes how many of those
who have fallen are only boys at the very
threshold of their lives; when one sees
the portraits of the bright young faces
which fill page after page of the illus
trated papers, so full of hope and en
thusiasm and the joy of life, one feels
that if there be any reason in the world,
there must somewhere be a place where
these unused powers shall find employ-
[93]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
ment, and these unsatisfied desires satis
faction. And it is not simply the number of
these young lives that forces upon us
the question of another life. It is their
quality. It is the new revelation which
this war has brought of the inherent
dignity of human nature, of man's ca
pacity for courage and sacrifice and loy
alty. Surely a being as great as man is
showing himself to be is made for some
end that endures beyond the span of this
life. Surely the God who has fashioned
such finely tempered instruments will
not suffer them to rust unused.
It is in this faith, and with this in
sight that we must face the crisis which
has come upon us. There are many
pressing duties which the hour has
brought, duties of action, duties of de
cision, duties of endurance. But, press
ing and important as these duties may
be, there is a duty still more pressing
[94 ]

INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
and still more important; and that is
to bear our part in the inner contest
which is to decide whether the ultimate
outcome of all our struggle shall be a
victory for faith or for unbelief. Is
force to be supreme in the world, or is
there something stronger still — the love
that bears and forbears, that "suffereth
long and is kind," that "taketh not
account of evil," that "rejoiceth not in
unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the
truth"?1 Is Christ to be the ultimate
conqueror or the Superman of Nietzsche ?
This is the question of questions, and the
scene of its ultimate decision is the heart
of man.
This, then, is the call that comes to
us who call ourselves Christians, in this
hour that tests men's souls. It is a call
to inner clarity and freedom that, as
we study the working of God's provi
dence in history, we may do so by the
1 1 Cor. 13 : 4, 5, 9.
[95]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
light that shines from His Divine Spirit
in our own hearts. It is a call to con
fidence and courage, that through our
experience of God's present working in
the soul of man we may win assurance
of that larger life to which He is leading
us in the better country that is still be
yond our sight. Above all, it is a call
to fellowship in service that, as men of
faith and brotherly love, enlisted under
Christ for the struggle against the inner
passions that are more deadly than any
outward foe, we may make our contribu
tion to the history that is to be.

[96]

CHAPTER III
THE CHRISTIAN PROGRAMME FOR
HUMANITY
From diagnosis we turn to remedy;
from the explanation of the causes of
the war to the method by which it is
proposed to neutralize them. Here too
the Christian proposal is entirely simple
and definite. It is a change of spirit.
Suppose peace were to be declared to
morrow. What good would it do if there
were no change in the attitude of the
nations which are fighting? If the fear
and suspicion and mistrust and hatred
that are so much in evidence to-day were
still to persist; if the mad race of arma
ments by land and by sea were to go
on unchecked; if each man and woman
[97]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
and child in each of the countries osten
sibly at peace knew that the respite from
slaughter, whether longer or shorter, was
to be used by each in devising means
for being deadlier and more dangerous
still when the breathing space should be
over and the battle be on again — would
such peace as this be worth while ? Could
we in good conscience pray for it ?
Ah, no, it is something different that
we have in mind. We want a peace that
will be lasting and permanent because it
springs from confidence and good-will.
Such a peace as exists between the differ
ent States of this country, once rivals in
arms; between the provinces of Ger
many, once independent and hostile
states; between Canada and the United
States, where for a hundred years along
a frontier three thousand miles long no
rifle has been discharged, and the foot
step of no watching patrol resounds.
We want a peace that frees men not
[98]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
simply from the experience but from the
nightmare fear of war, which releases
energies that would otherwise be diverted
to preparation against the inevitable
catastrophe and turns them to the pur
suit of righteousness and the realizing
of spiritual ideals.
For this more is necessary than the
cessation of fighting. There must be a
change in the spirit of the fighters. An
armistice is not peace, whether it last
for a week or for a generation. We want
more than the silencing of cannon and
the disbanding of armies. We want a
change of mental attitude toward this
whole matter of peace and war so funda
mental and revolutionary as to require
a complete reconstruction of the prin
ciples upon which the relations between
nations have hitherto rested. War, as
we have seen, is, after all, only a symp
tom, and no remedy which deals with
symptoms alone can effect a complete
[99]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
cure. War is the result of a mental atti
tude of suspicion, rivalry, and distrust
which has in turn been engendered by
centuries of social wrong. A peace that
involved the continuance of these senti
ments and the perpetuation of these
wrongs would be as unstable as it would
be unsatisfying. The true remedy lies
deeper in the removal of the causes of
enmity, and this is possible only through
the practice in national and international
as well as in individual relations of the
Christian principles of co-operation, sym
pathy, and service.
Jesus had a name for the society which
is characterized by this spirit. He called
it the Kingdom of God. By the King
dom of God we mean the new social order
in which the principles of Christ shall
dominate all the relations of life; a so
ciety in which trust shall replace fear,
love take the place of strife, co-operation
of selfish competition; in which helpful-
[100]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
ness shall be the test of greatness, and
the supreme reward, the consciousness of
having deserved well of one's kind.
Three points need emphasis in con
nection with this definition of the King
dom. In the first place, its extent; in
the second place, its nature; in the third
place, the means of its realization.
In the first place, its extent. It is a
universal kingdom, taking in all races
and all ages, including the living and
the dead. In contrast to all tribal and
national religions, Christianity is inter
national. Its unit is humanity; its stand
ard for nations as well as for individ
uals the family; its sanction the loving
will of the Father-God. War is the ne
gation of all these. Its ideal is that of
the conqueror, its unit the nation armed;
its standard enlightened self-interest; its
sanction force. War, therefore, not sim
ply in its consequences but in its ideals,
is the uncompromising foe of all in which
[101]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
as Christians we believe and for which
we ought to strive.
This does not mean that Christianity
ignores national distinctions any more
than that it ignores individual distinc
tions of capacity and of function. On
the contrary, as we shall see presently,
it gives them new dignity and impor
tance. But it is true that it refuses to
regard them as ultimate. They exist
not for their own sake, but as part of a
larger unity to which they contribute
each their quota, as the individuals who
compose them add each his part to the
fulness of the national life.
In the prophecy of Isaiah there is a
famous passage1 which pictures the future
of the nations in the form of an interna
tional brotherhood. It looks forward to
the time when Egypt and Assyria, the
former oppressors of Israel, shall be con
verted to the true religion and worship
1 Isaiah 19, 16-25.
[ 102 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
the true God. Led by their own par
ticular paths of discipline and of failure,
chastened by suffering, redeemed from
sin, they, like Israel, shall enter upon a
new era of national prosperity and right
eousness. The old enmities will be for
gotten, the old hatreds outgrown. For
rivalry will be substituted sympathy,
and for warfare co-operation. "In that
day shall there be a highway out of
Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall
come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into
Assyria; and the Egyptians shall wor
ship with the Assyrians. In that day
shall Israel be the third with Egypt and
with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of
the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts has
blessed them, saying: Blessed be Egypt
my people, and Assyria the work of mine
hands, and Israel mine inheritance."
To understand the significance of this
prophecy we must translate it into mod
ern phrase. For Israel read Belgium;
[ 103]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
for Egypt, Germany; for Assyria, Eng
land, and we shall be better able to ap
preciate the prophet's meaning. Let us
suppose that Belgium had suffered at
the hands of England also what she has
suffered at the hands of Germany; and
the prophet, himself a Belgian, survey
ing the misery of his country, for so
many generations the battleground of
contending armies, asks himself what is
to be the outcome of this national tragedy,
and finds his answer in a new and bet
ter future for which it is a preparation.
"In that day there shall be a highway
out of Germany into England, and the
English shall come to Germany, and the
Germans to England, and the Germans
shall worship with the English. In that
day Belgium shall be the third with Ger
many and England, a blessing in the
midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of
hosts has blessed them saying: Blessed
be Germany, my people, and England
[ 104 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
the work of mine hands, and Belgium
mine inheritance."
It is the Christian picture of the ideal
society, a society in which brotherhood
shall be as real between nations as it is
to-day between the best individuals.
This suggests a second characteristic
of the Christian society. It is a spiritual
society. That is to say, a society in
which the ties between its members are
personal and moral, love rather than
law, loyalty rather than compulsion, the
free assent of all to a common ideal rather
than any external device to secure uni
formity, whether of action or belief. It
is a society of brothers freely working to
gether for common ends.
This does not mean that Christianity
is indifferent to the accepted forms of
social organization, but only that it re
gards these as means rather than as ends.
Like the nation it has its institutions,
and has embodied its beliefs in creeds,
[ 105 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
and its worship in sacrament and ritual.
But these exhaust its life as httle as the
life of the nation is exhausted by its con
stitution and laws. Behind the church
that we see, with its organization and
ritual, there is a greater and a more
majestic structure — the society of re
deemed personalities who own allegiance
to Jesus Christ, and live for the ends
which he approves.
We have been slow to recognize this
fact. In religion as on all sides of our
life, that which is visible and tangible
tends to crowd out the unseen and the
spiritual. The forms that were devised
as aids to faith become our masters.
The institution usurps the place of the
men and women whose life it was de
signed to nourish, and ecclesiastical con
formity is made the test of spiritual life.
Only in times of crisis, like the present,
when the real issues at stake stand out
in all their clarity above the mists of the
[106]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
conventional and the customary, do we
realize the true significance of the Chris
tian ideal as a society of persons freely
co-operating for a common end.
And this leads us to consider in the
third place the means by which the ends
of the Kingdom are secured. They cor
respond to its nature as a spiritual so
ciety, realizing its life through the inter
play of personalities. Between persons,
external constraint can effect nothing de
cisive. The only effective way to in
fluence a spiritual being is through his
ideals. This does not mean, of course, that
external means have no place in the
Christian scheme of things. Like all
other human beings, the Christian is
housed in the body and must face the
physical and economic problems which
life in the body brings with it. Like
them he must use science, physical, edu
cational, social, to subdue the forces
[107]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
which oppose him and harness nature to
his tasks. Like them he may be obliged
at times to use force to resist force, and
gain security for the peaceful develop
ment he requires. But this thing is cer
tain, that force as such can never of it
self secure the ends he seeks. It can at
most remove obstacles. It cannot build
the Kingdom of God. For this there is
but one way open to Christians, the
trust and love that beget answering
trust and love in others.
Like all our greater problems, then,
this of Christianizing society proves to
be psychological. It is a question of
controlling the motives which determine
the will. Selfishness must be replaced
by sympathy, suspicion by confidence,
the rivalry of class or race by the con
sciousness of kind. Only when this has
been done; only as men come to feel
their kinship with one another, and re
solve to live together as kindred should,
[108]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
can we hope to deal successfully with
those other problems, economic, indus
trial, political, upon the solution of which
the possibility of an efficient and health
ful social life depends.
Such then is the Christian programme,
universal in scope, spiritual in nature, a
society of brothers bound to one another
by common ideals, common aspirations,
and common experience. Is it possible
to realize such a society in fact ?
There are two quarters in which the
Christian solution of the social problem
is challenged. It is challenged by ma
terialism, and it is challenged by nation
alism. The first questions the means
which it proposes to employ to secure
its end; the second rejects the end.
The quarrel of materialism with Chris
tianity has to do with its reliance on
spiritual forces. For faith it would sub
stitute science, for the spirit of brother-
[ 109]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
hood improved economic conditions. Let
us better man's material welfare, it tells
us, and his moral status will take care
of itself.
In the past Christian theologians have
dealt with materialism chiefly as a phil
osophical theory. They have met its
arguments with their counter-arguments,
and in ways made familiar by the theistic
text-books have tried to establish the
reasonableness of the religious interpre
tation of the world.
I do not propose here to retraverse
this familiar ground, but there is another
and a more convincing method by which
we may test the claim of materialism to
give us a satisfying philosophy of life,
and that is by its fruits. For the last
two generations the apostles of material
civilization have had things all their own
way. They have commanded the ser
vices of the ablest men of their day.
They have gained the mastery of re-
[110]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
sources undreamed of by their ancestors.
They have heaped up wealth on a scale
that to the men of even a hundred years
ago would have surpassed the wildest
dreams of avarice; with the result that
to-day we see all Europe banded together
to destroy the very wealth which it has
been laboring so long to produce.
There is nothing in this at which to
be surprised. It is only what we might
have expected beforehand, had we been
wise enough to learn the lessons of our
own past. Power alone can give us no
guarantee of social betterment, and sci
ence is power pure and simple, as potent
for evil as for good. Give power to a
good man and he will use it beneficently.
Give it to a selfish man and it will en
large his ability to enslave his fellow men.
Science untamed by love has proved it
self the great destroyer, blotting out in a
single day what it has cost the labor of
a generation to produce. It is not sci-
[in ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
ence that must save men, but faith,
faith in some beneficent purpose run
ning through life, in some wise and lov
ing Power on whom we all depend.
For we cannot escape faith if we
would. The choice is not between sci
ence and faith, but between two rival
faiths, each using science for its own
purpose. Of course we need science to
help us in our constructive work. Of
course it is our duty to conserve our
material resources and better our eco
nomic condition. But the point is that
we have power enough now and knowl
edge enough to make the world over, if
only our ideals were right and our mo
tives pure. It is our ideals that must be
changed. If we are to effect any per
manent improvement, it is here that we
must begin.
So stated, the Christian plan seems
not so unreasonable after all. For faith
in self, or class, or race, or nation, it
[112]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
offers faith in Christ as the inclusive
figure in whom each alike finds its true
place and rightful consummation. It
would dehver us from a narrow allegiance
to one that is world-wide, and for a
method that knows no final arbitrament
but the sword, would substitute the
divine method of forgiveness, of trust,
and of service.
Nationalism goes still further in its
denial. Where materialism questions the
means, it rejects the end. For humanity
it would substitute the nation as the
final goal of effort. Peaceably it may be,
but if not, by war it proposes to advance
the national interest and safeguard the
national welfare.
You will notice that I have spoken of
nationalism and not of patriotism. Na
tionalism is exclusive in its spirit, exalt
ing the nation at the expense of its rivals
and indifferent to their rights and wel
fare. Patriotism is love of one's coun-
[ H3]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
try for its higher spiritual aspects, and
is consistent with cosmopolitanism, in the
largest sense. Nationalism says, "My
country right or wrong," and stops there.
Patriotism adds, "Right that she may be
kept right, wrong that she may be made
right." To the nationalist, the nation is
ultimate; to the patriot, she is the dear
est member of the family of nations.
Nationalism in this narrow sense is
essentially antichristian. It seeks na
tional aggrandizement, or at least, na
tional advantage in complete indifference
to the welfare and the rights of others.
It has no comprehensive world policy.
It sees nothing ahead but the continuance
of the present condition of organized
savagery we call militarism. Its high
est hope is that its own nation may by
some supreme effort prove itself master
at last of all its rivals. For this it is
willing to sacrifice everything, even if
need be, Christianity itself.
[114]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
In times of peace those who hold this
brutal philosophy hesitate to show them
selves in their true colors, but when war
comes they throw off the mask. War
gives the advocates of national selfish
ness their chance. The altruistic influ
ences against which they have to con
tend under normal conditions are for
the moment removed, and they are free
to organize the nation's life after their
own ideals. Let them but keep control
long enough and they will do irreparable
damage. In spite of all that we may
say or do, they and not the idealists who
are dying by thousands at their bidding,
will organize the new world which is even
now in the making.
For the dangerous thing about nation
alism, and the point at which its unchris
tian character most clearly appears, is
not the fact that it insists that a nation
must be ready to defend itself if it should
be attacked, but that it makes the possi-
[115]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
bility of war the controlling factor in
the determination of national policy in
time of peace.
I was reading recently an article by
Mr. Jane, a distinguished English naval
expert, on the naval policy of the United
States. In this article he expressed his
belief that the plans now under con
sideration by the American Government
would prove inadequate, and that it
would become necessary very largely to
increase the number of our ships and men.
His reason for the opinion was that
while the plans now proposed were ade
quate to repel an attack upon a single
ocean, they were not sufficient to meet
a simultaneous attack on two. Suppose
Germany and Japan should unite to at
tack the United States, what then ? " We
can, if we like, consider such a future
alliance as quite improbable. But navies
are not built to face probabilities, but
possibilities."1
1 Boston Evening Transcript, July 8, 1916.
[116]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
Could there be a clearer reductio ad
absurdum of militarism ? Where in every
other sphere of life we are expected to
make probability the guide of action,
here and here alone we are to be gov
erned by possibilities. If the Christian
programme be impracticable what shall
we say of the alternative which these
practical men offer us? It is the per
petuation to the end of time of the law
of the jungle, a ceaseless struggle for
existence in which the weaker go to the
wall, in which might makes right, in
which necessity knows no law. Surely
a philosophy which offers us no outlook
more attractive than this cannot hope
permanently to satisfy the human heart.
And as a matter of fact it does not
satisfy it. It does not satisfy even the
men who profess to hold it. When face
to face with the issue, the most uncom
promising imperialist shrinks from the
consequences of his own logic. He does
not accept the jungle as his picture of
[117]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the ideal state. He believes, at least he
tells us that he believes, in culture, in
civilization, in humanity, in the world
state, and all the other beautiful ideals
of the spirit. He, too, wishes to organize
the world for ideal ends, only he does
not think it practicable to do it in the
Christian way.
One of the most remarkable of all the
features of the present war is that it is
being fought by men who profess to be
fighting because of their love of peace.
These are not mercenaries who are fight
ing, soldiers by profession, who follow
arms because they love war, but civilians
— lawyers and merchants, farmers and
professors and clerks — men who have
left home and family at the call of duty,
as they believe, in order to preserve the
institutions of civilized society which
alone make life worth living.
The spirit of the soldiers is reflected
in the language of the governments.
[118]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
As we have already seen, no one of
them is willing to take the responsibility
of having begun the war. Each declares
that it is its opponent who must bear the
blame for this crime against humanity.
Each insists that it is fighting a defensive
war, and that its sole object is a just and
lasting peace.
On April 5, 1916, the German Chan
cellor delivered a speech in the Reichstag,
in which he outlmed Germany's plans
for the future. Speaking of the condi
tions to be faced after the war, he used
these words: "The Europe which will
arise from this crisis, which is the most
severe in the history of all time, will be
a new Europe in many respects. The
blood which has been shed will never be
repaid, and the wealth which has been
destroyed can be replaced but slowly.
Europe must be for all nations that in
habit it a continent of peaceful labor.
The peace which ends this war must be
[119]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
a lasting peace, and must not bear the
germ of new wars, but that of a peaceful
arrangement of all European questions."1
Similar sentiments have been expressed
by all the governments at war. I was
in England during the days that imme
diately preceded the declaration of war,
and I can testify out of my own experi
ence to the strength and extent of the
desire for peace, and to the shrinking on
all sides from the thought of a European
war. There was a sense of horror in the
prospect as of men conscious, like the
heroes of the old Greek tragedies, that
they were being driven against their will
into committing some appalling crime.
What an unconscious testimony we
have here to the extent of Christ's in
fluence! So far as ideals at least are
concerned the enhghtened pubhc opinion
of mankind has been converted already.
1 London Times, weekly edition, April 14, 1916, p.
271. [ 120 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
Imagine Julius Caesar apologizing for go
ing to war, and justifying the conquests
of the Roman legions on the ground of
their benefit to the conquered. Imagine
Napoleon doing so. So much at least
Christ has accomplished as to make the
conscience of civilization uneasy at the
thought of war, and to make universal
brotherhood seem desirable, if it could be
attained. This conclusion then follows with an
irresistible logic: Either the time will
come when the nations will realize the
folly of the present system of interna
tional anarchy, and seriously attempt
to apply Christian principles to interna
tional affairs, or we must resign our
selves to a future of anarchy from which
the stoutest imagination may well shrink
back appalled. The appeal to self-in
terest has been tried and failed; the ap
peal to fear has been tried and failed.
[121 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
One method only remains to be tried,
the method of co-operation, of trust, of
service. But is the Christian method practica
ble ? Is the issue a living issue ? Must
we not confess — shrink from it as we
will — that there is no alternative open,
things being as they are, and man being
what he is, but an endless succession of
struggle and failure and hate, such as
has filled the history of mankind in the
past ?
Certainly, if the present be the measure
of the future, there is no alternative.
If there be no springs of power in hu
man nature as yet untapped; if there
be no reserves of divine reinforcement
on which we have not yet drawn, then
indeed we must confess that the case is
hopeless. But that is not the way we act in other
realms of human experience. The one
distinguishing and original thing about
[ 122 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
man is the fact that he has never been
willing to make the past his measure of
the future. In man alone among the
living creatures that populate the globe
we find the creative and prophetic in
stinct. Man lives by faith and grasps
the thing that is to be while yet it seems
impossible. All that we hold most pre
cious in human life, in science, in art, in
the state, we owe to this indomitable
hopefulness. There was a time when
every man's hand was against his neigh
bor, and in all the ranges of forest and
plain that were open to human habita
tion there was no oasis where a man
could take refuge and feel sure that he was
safe. But we have created states and na
tions, and within these at least have sub
stituted law for the sword, and confidence
for suspicion. There was a time when
the seas were barriers that separated
men of one land from another by an im
passable gulf. There was a time when
[ 123 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
it seemed as impossible that a man should
raise himself above the earth into the
air as that he should pull down a moun
tain by his own unaided strength. But
now the seas have become highways for
commerce which bind all the world into
one, and we fly above the mountains
with a swiftness and security that grow
more astonishing with every passing day.
The impossible of yesterday has become
the possible of to-day. And all because
men have refused to accept this funda
mental heresy of unbelief, that because
we have failed in the past we must still
fail in the future.
So it is in this matter of our Christian
faith. If the ideal which we hold is
really a desirable ideal, and if the only
obstacle in the way of its realization is
in the human spirit, then we must set
about changing that spirit and we must
believe that it can be done.
Are we told that it is impossible? It
[ 124 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
is being done before our eyes. It is
being done in the interests of the very
policy which is proposed as a rival to
Christianity. Men are systematically
training their fellow men to regard the
citizens of other nations with suspicion
and distrust, and they are succeeding in
their attempt. Do not let us deceive
ourselves into believing that the spirit
that now reigns over so wide a part of
the human race is normal or natural to
man. It is itseK the result of a process
of education, in part deliberate, in part
unconscious, through which men have
been taught to associate all good with
their own country and to look upon the
countries to which at the time they hap
pen to be opposed in policy, as danger
ous and unprincipled rivals whom it is
the highest duty of the patriot to oppose
and if need be to crush.
Most ominous of all the revelations
which the war has brought has been its
[125]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
disclosure of the extent to which the
organs of public opinion have been used
to influence national sentiment against
peace and for war. Partly this has been
done through the press, partly through
the schools. University professors have
lent themselves to the propaganda, pub
licists have preached the gospel of na
tional aggrandizement and national glory.
Children have been taught from infancy
to look upon the citizens of other coun
tries as possible enemies, and upon mili
tary service as the highest form of pa
triotism. In part no doubt those who
have taken the lead in this movement
have been animated by motives with
which we must sympathize. It is one of
the tragic by-products of militarism that
it creates the dangers against which it
warns. When all Europe is an armed
camp, it were folly for the patriot to be
blind to the dangers to his own country.
One can only honor a soldier like the
[ 126 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
late Lord Roberts, who — in face of the
danger which he regarded as imminent —
consecrated his last years to a campaign
in favor of universal military service for
England. But behind such sincere and
unselfish characters, advocates of pre
paredness in the interest of peace, as
chivalrous to their opponents as they
are loyal to their own, we discern other
and more dangerous figures, philosophers
like Treitschke and Cramb, who cele
brate war for the moral discipline it
brings, and others even more sinister,
to whom war or at least the fear of war
means personal profit and enhanced pres
tige; manufacturers to whom it brings
increased dividends, capitalists to whom
it opens new markets, journalists who
see in it the material of a new sensation.
It is these men and the influences which
they set in motion which constitute the
real danger agamst which we need to
be on our guard, the most formidable
[ 127 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
obstacle to the creation of that saner
public sentiment without which perma
nent peace is impossible.
What is true of Europe is no less true
of the United States and of Japan. The
most serious danger to the future good
relations between the two countries is
not any real incompatibility of inter
ests, but the jingo spirit. There are men
to-day on both sides of the Pacific who
for reasons in part sincere, in part selfish,
are systematically working to stir up ill
feeling and suspicion between two neigh
bors who for every reason of history,
of sentiment, and of interest ought to be
friends. They attribute to each designs
against the welfare and prosperity of
the other. They repeat in exaggerated
form every utterance on either side of
the ocean which is calculated to wound
sensibility and inflame passion. They
speak of war between the two countries
as not only possible but likely, and urge
[ 128 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
each to arm to be ready for the impend
ing conflict. So through the very reit
eration of possibilities which as yet have
no existence beyond their own brain,
they do their best to make them actual.
It is such a spirit as this, a spirit of
suspicion and distrust, systematically cul
tivated through a long period of time
which is responsible for the present war,
as it has been responsible for most of the
wars of the past. It is this which has
changed the war from a war of govern
ments into one of peoples, and made it
the tragic and heart-breaking thing it is.
It is this spirit which we must somehow
exorcise if we are to secure the perma
nent peace for which we long.
In England there are factories where
crippled soldiers are put to work to make
ammunition to supply the armies in the
field. In one of these factories a re
porter recently found two men, one with
a deformed limb, the other who had lost
[ 129 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
an eye. They fell into conversation.
"It seems a shame to make things as
makes cripples," said the former sorrow
fully. "Sometimes when I think that
one of my shells might twist a German's
leg off same's mine, I feel a bit sorry.
When that happens, I 'ave to 'ave a
read at a newspaper about poisoned
gases." "I don't mind admitting," said the
one with the sightless eye, "that I pray
occasionally that none of my shells will
ever blow a German's eye out. Under
stand I'm no less a Britisher, only human.
I know what it is to lose an eye, and I
can imagine what it would be to lose
two." That is how the normal civilized man
thinks and feels before his mind has
been inflamed by suspicion and hate.
Now, what has been done in the name
of national rivalry and ambition can be
done, and must be done, in the interest
[ 130]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
of international brotherhood and peace.
We must educate men for humanity. It
may take time. It may take patience.
We may not live to see it. Our children
may not live to see it. But in the end it
will be done.
What then are the resources at our
command in this campaign of educa
tion? That is our final question. Do
not let us underestimate them because
they are thus far disorganized and un-
vocal. All over the world there are men
and women in increasing numbers who
have seen the vision that we have seen,
of a world which is really Christian, a
world in which love shall be the law of
life, confidence the inspiration of prog
ress, and forgiveness based upon the con
sciousness of common failure open the
door from the dead past to a new and
more splendid future. They are found in
the trenches and in the hospitals, among
[131]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the men who have seen with their own
eyes the hatefulness of war and learned,
as they could have learned at no less
a cost, how rare and blessed a thing is
peace. They are found in a million
homes among those women who are
waking to a new consciousness not only
of the social privileges but also of the
social responsibilities of motherhood;
women like those whose indomitable
optimism makes itself heard across the
trenches in such utterances as the Christ
mas letter of the English women to the
women of Germany and Austria, and
the answer that came back from them.1
They are found in the ranks of labor
among men like those German Socialists
of Munich who in the early months of
the war drew up a peace programme so
fair to their opponents that their fellow
'These letters, with others of similar import, have
been reprinted by the Woman's Peace Party, in a tract
entitled "A Group of Letters from Women of the
Warring Nations." Chicago. [ 132 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
Socialists in England could accept it as
it stood as their own.1 Above all, they
are found among those Christians of ev
ery name and of every land who have
grown ashamed of a religion that shelters
itself under the great name of Christ and
is content to accept his promise of indi
vidual salvation while it turns a deaf
ear to his call to go out into all the
world and preach his gospel, not only to
every creature but in every relationship
of life.
But we have other allies still, allies
of which as yet we have taken too little
account because they belong in part to
that unseen world that is still waiting
to be born. There is that better man
in men who sleeps in every human breast,
waiting for the voice that can arouse
1 For the full text of these proposals cf. the Labour
Leader for February 4, 1915. They are grouped un
der three headings, as follows: 1. Peace on terms that
will heal fresh wounds. 2. Peace on terms that will heal
old wounds. 3. Peace on terms that will give lasting
security. [ 133 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
him from his slumbers and summon him
to that real world for which he was made,
and in which alone he is at home, the
man who is lover reverent of women,
father tender of children, friend respon
sive to sympathy, patriot loyal to coun
try, worshipper destined for God. This
undiscovered man, citizen of Christ's
Kingdom that is to be, is waiting to be
found and roused and organized for the
greatest of all enterprises and the most
splendid of all campaigns.
He is waiting to be found, did I say?
Nay, he is here already. Of all the mar
vels of this marvellous time none has
been more wonderful than its revelation
of the unsuspected moral reserves of
humanity. The virtues that we had
thought the prerogative of the few, cour
age, consecration, self-sacrifice, faith, are
found to be the common heritage. We
had heard that the days of heroism had
passed forever, that men were engrossed
[ 134 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
in money-getting and money-spending,
blind to spiritual reality and deaf to the
appeal of the ideal, and we have wit
nessed a rebirth of idealism on a scale
more stupendous than any that history
records. We have seen the nations give
of their best and dearest without a mur
mur — mothers their sons, wives their
husbands, young men their lives, parents
their homes. We have seen an entire
people offer its country on the altar of
freedom, and with the sight there has
come to us a new realization of the moral
greatness of humanity, and a new reali
zation of its immortal destiny. We know
now what we had often been told but
had scarcely dared to believe, that of all
the powers that inspire action and com
mand human loyalty there is none com
parable in the range of its influence to
an ideal.
And if it be said that this is just the
tragedy and despair of the situation,
[ 135 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
that idealism has proved so lamentably
false a guide, that the causes that have
called forth loyalty and evoked sacrifice
have been narrow and selfish causes,
the ideals of nationalism and of mili
tarism, the answer is that this is true
only in appearance. It is because these
causes have stolen the garments of Chris
tianity and masquerade as the servants
of world-wide brotherhood and peace
that they have gained the whole-hearted
allegiance of the peoples. Nothing is
more striking in the whole situation,
nothing more full of hope for the future,
than the fact that the old glorification
of war for war's sake has been so largely
discredited. Each nation, as we have
seen, claims to be fighting in self-defense;
each nation declares itself to be the ser
vant of international brotherhood and
peace, not simply to justify its claim
against its opponents, but because on no
other ground could it retain the alle-
[ 136 ]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
giance of its own citizens. The Christian
virus has penetrated too far; the Chris
tian ideal has struck its roots too deep
to make the ethics of war permanently
satisfying to any modern people.
This then is the great gift which the
war has brought us: this new revelation
of the unsuspected moral reserves of hu
manity. Once more we have been re
minded of that oldest of the truths of
religion that man is not simply flesh and
blood, but spirit. When we appeal to
the ideal in him we are dealing with
something that is really there; a force
more potent for good or evil than the
electricity that lights our streets and
draws our engines, or the dynamite by
which we blast our way through the solid
rock. It is in the light of such facts as these
that we must approach our great task
of educating men for humanity. When
we contrast what we are saying and do-
[ 137 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
ing as we go about our quiet tasks of
peace, with what our brothers are doing
and bearing at the front, how little and
futile it often seems. Do not let us be
deceived. It is with the moulders of
ideals that the fate of the future rests.
When as parents, through the familiar
discipline of the home, we train our chil
dren in common action for an end be
yond self; when as teachers, we enlarge
the range of our pupils' vision, and ac
quaint them with the good in other ages
and in other races than their own; above
all, when as Christians we unite with our
fellow Christians of every land in wor
ship of the God of all the earth and con
secrate our lives to the tasks of his King
dom, we are doing the most important
and the most practical thing in the
world: we are generating the forces that
will inspire the armies of the future.
Among the French soldiers at the front
there are some poor fellows who have no
[ 138]

PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
friends or relations to write to them.
To these a distinguished Frenchman has
addressed a letter which has been pub
lished in the daily press. "What are
you fighting for?" he asks, "you who
have neither wife nor child nor home to
defend; for whom no mother prays and
no father waits? I will tell you. You
are fighting for the future. The others
are fighting for the past and for the
present. You are fighting for the French
children who are just born, for those who
will be born, that they may be free."
Ah, yes, it is this love of the future
that is our hope — the future that we
may never share, but in which we yet
believe. We have seen it imperfectly,
narrowly, from angles which bring us
into conflict with the vision of our neigh
bor; but we have seen it, and some day
we shall see it more clearly still. The
little loves will give place to the greater;
the false patriotisms will be replaced by
[ 139 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the true, and in the service of humanity,
as a whole, all lesser aims and tasks will
find their rightful and satisfying place.

[ 140 ]

CHAPTER IV
THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
We have considered the challenge which
the present world crisis presents to
Christian faith, and the principles by
which it is to be met. We have studied
the Christian programme for humanity.
We have seen that Christianity pro
poses to substitute for the present sys
tem of organized selfishness a new social
order, universal and spiritual, a society
in which helpfulness shall be the prin
ciple of action, and the consciousness of
brotherhood the bond of union, and we
have seen no reason to doubt that it
can be realized in fact, if all who believe
in this ideal co-operate to bring it about.
It remains to ask what our part is in this
common task, and how it can best be
[ 141 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
performed. What can we modern Chris
tians do to realize our own ideal? In a
task so vast and many-sided where shall
we begin ?
We must begin where Christ began,
with the individual. There is no substi
tute for Christian character, and Chris
tian character cannot be manufactured
by wholesale. It must be a new creation
in each individual, consciously facing the
ideal of Christ, and consciously making
it his own by a free act of choice. Unless
we have men and women who believe in
the Christian ideal for society enough to
live for it, and if need be to die for it,
society will never be Christian in fact.
There is no substitute, I repeat, for
individual conversion. Public opinion,
that most potent of all forces in our mod
ern world, is what it is because of the
opinion of the men and women who
compose the public. If you would change
it you must change them. And the
[ 142 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
change must begin, as all changes begin,
in persons, in the contact of some indi
vidual with a new ideal, and the surren
der of his will to its appeal. If we are
to have an army, we must have officers;
if we are to have followers, we must
have leaders, and leadership is an affair
of the individual.
Trace back any great social move
ment you please, and you come at last
to some individual man or woman. To
speak of modern nursing means to think
of Florence Nightingale. To mention
United Italy means to think of Mazzini
and Garibaldi and Cavour. What were
Protestantism without Luther, or monas
ticism without Francis of Assisi and Ig
natius Loyola? What is Christianity
itself but the impact upon the spiritual
life of mankind of that supreme person
ality whom we call Jesus ?
But it is just as true that if you are
to have an army you must have soldiers.
[ 143 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
No general can win a battle alone, and
so again we are brought back to the neces
sity of personal work for men. It is not
enough for one man and another to ac
cept the Christian principle, and work
for the Christian end. We must make
these principles common property, and
for that we need missionary propaganda
on a scale more comprehensive and effec
tive than any the world has yet seen.
The work that the churches are doing
in their evangelistic campaigns is work
that needs to be done and must be done
if the Christian cause is to succeed.
One of the most surprising features of
the present situation has been the ex
traordinary unanimity of sentiment in
the different countries at war. There
was at first a disposition to regard the
war as having been forced upon the differ
ent peoples by their leaders, and each
nation flattered itself that it was fighting
not only for its own safety, but to liber-
[ 144 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
ate the enslaved in other lands. But
we see to-day that this is in a true sense
a war of peoples. Only profound con
viction as to the justice of their cause
could move the nations to the gigantic
sacrifices which the war has laid upon
them, and convictions do not spring up
in a night. They are the fruits of a
process of education carefully planned
and long continued. It is because day
by day, year by year, generation after
generation, men have been preaching to
Germans and Englishmen and Russians
and Frenchmen the greatness of their
nation's destiny and the duty of individ
ual loyalty, that the sentiment has been
created which made each government
confident of the nation's support when
the crisis came.
If Christianity is ever to make itself
felt as a world power on a scale as vast
and with results as amazing, it will be
because of a period of preparation as
[ 145 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
painstaking, as intelligent and as long
continued. For a Christian society you
must have real Christians, and millions
of them, and these are not made in a
day or in a year.
But individual conversions alone, how
ever many may be the individuals con
verted, will carry us but a little way.
We must apply the consequences of our
Christian convictions to society. And
that means that we must organize.
At no point is the revolution in our
habits of thought, which has been brought
about by modern science, more far-
reaching than in our conception of the
nature of human society. Time was
when we thought of society as a collec
tion of individual units, each complete
in itself. To-day we know that person
ality is itself a social creation. We real
ize, as it has never been possible to real
ize it before, the extraordinary variety
[ 146 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
and intimacy of the ties that unite in
dividuals one with another, not only in
their economic Jbut in their intellectual
and moral life. We see that in order to
influence an individual effectively it is
not enough to appeal to him directly.
We must attack his environment and
change the forces which enter into the
making of his personality.
And with this new insight modern sci
ence has given us new power. It has
marvellously increased our resources; it
has multiplied in ways that stagger the
imagination the wires that reach from
one man to another, and created the
machinery that for the first time has
made it possible to mobilize all the re
sources of the nations and make millions
of men act with the precision and effec
tiveness of one.
This is something new under the sun.
Here is a new power put into the hands
of man which he has never had before,
[147]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
a power which may be used for good or
for evil, for co-operation or for war.
The leaders of the church, trained in
the habits of the older individualism,
concerned primarily with the forces of
the inner life, have been slower to dis
cover the existence of this power than
men who have been trained in another
philosophy and are working for other ends.
This is the true significance of what
we see to-day. We are witnessing the
mobilization of humanity for common
action on a scale and with an effective
ness never possible before. It is true
that the purpose of this mobilization is
destruction, and its inspiration distrust,
suspicion, and fear. But the same forces
which have been utilized by statesmen
and diplomats to serve their narrow ends
are available for nobler uses if only we
can gain access to the springs of action
and win the nations to loyalty to a higher
and more inclusive ideal.
[ 148 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
Thank God, we are beginning to learn
this lesson. Even before the war came
there were many Christians who realized
the inadequacy of the older individual
istic methods, and were working for
closer and more effective co-operation be
tween the churches. These efforts have
already begun to bear fruit in federa
tions, councils, and continuation com
mittees. We are mapping out the field
to be occupied, cataloguing the resources
at our disposal, laying plans, not simply
for the present but for the longer future.
And this is a great step forward.
For one thing we are beginning to
deal with the social questions which lie
at our own door, questions like the drink
problem, the problem of prostitution,
the industrial problem in its various
phases. We see that these are matters
which concern us as Christians, for which
we cannot avoid responsibility even if
we would. We are no longer content to
[ 149 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
preach or to listen to the gospel on
Sunday while our lives during the week
give the lie to what we say or hear. We
feel that in Christian sentiment we pos
sess a power which might be used to
make the world over if only it could be
properly unified and directed.
This movement toward a social ap
plication of the gospel is world-wide.
Wherever you go you will find that
Christians are aroused to the social need
and are beginning to turn their convic
tions into action.
When I was in Osaka1 in April, 1916,
I found the whole city aroused over
the proposal to establish a vice quarter
in the neighborhood of some of the more
important schools. Public meetings were
called in protest, and the better senti
ment of the community organized so as
to make the protest effective.
1 A great industrial centre on the Inland Sea, which
has been called the Pittsburgh of Japan.
[ 150 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
It was the same in China. In Hang-
chow there are but eight hundred Chris
tians, but when the government proposed
to set apart a quarter for public vice in
the outskirts of the city they conducted
a campaign so effective that the plan
had to be abandoned, and I was shown
with pride the deserted buildings that
were the convincing demonstration of
the power of Christian sentiment when
organized for the common good.
This is as it should be. In the social
application of the gospel the place to
begin is in my relations to my neigh
bor across the street. Unless we can
make our neighborhood Christian we
cannot have a Christian city. Unless
we can Christianize our city, we cannot
hope to have a Christian country. Un
less we can Christianize our country we
must abandon the hope of Christianizing
the world.
This opens up a wide field at which
[151 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
we can only glance. How much it means
to make a Christian community those of
us who have tried to attack even a single
phase of the social problem in a practical
way know only too well. Whether it be
the drink problem or the vice problem,
or the problem of sanitation, or the prob
lem of unemployment, we find that we
are dealing with influences which reach
beyond the immediate environment and
causes that had their origin generations
before we were born. To deal with one
effectively we must attack the others
also, and before we realize it we find
that our attempt to clean up our own
back yard commits us to a programme of
social reconstruction on the most com
prehensive scale.
This is the real root of our present
difficulty. If we want to understand
the causes of the present international
crisis we must seek our answer at home
and not abroad. It is because our own
[ 152 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
social system is so largely selfish and un
christian that it is so difficult to persuade
men to believe that altruism is feasible
on a large scale. The man who in his
domestic relations acts on the principle
that business is business, is not likely
to be a behever in the efficacy of love
as a solution of international difficul
ties. While these pages were being written
there was in progress in one of the largest
cities of the United States a labor dis
pute which involved many thousands of
persons. The industry which was af
fected was one in which the rate of wages
was comparatively low, and the time of
employment irregular. After years of
contention and bitterness both employers
and workers had agreed upon a plan of
operation which provided a regular
method for dealing with questions in
dispute. Representatives of both parties
met to consider the matter in contro-
[153 1

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
versy, and when they were unable to
agree the subject was referred to a
committee of arbitration for final de
cision. Under this agreement the in
dustry had been operating peacefully for
a number of years. But a few months
ago when the committee of arbitration
decided a case adversely to the conten
tion of the employers, they refused to
accept the decision, repudiated their
agreement, and in order to enforce com
pliance with their will declared a lockout
in the dull season of the year, relying
upon hunger to bring the workers to
their terms.
As to the rights and wrongs of the im
mediate matter in dispute the present
writer is not competent to speak. But
from the published utterances of both
sides to the dispute, one principle clearly
emerges which bears directly upon the
subject of our present interest. The
workers contended for some independent
[ 154 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
tribunal to which disputes should be re
ferred for final adjudication. The em
ployers refused to concede this. They
claimed the right to manage their own
business to suit themselves without in
terference or dictation from outside. If
the workers did not like their action they
had their remedy at hand; let them
strike. In other words, the employers
denied the existence of any paramount
social obligation. They were individual
ists out and out, and they accepted with
out flinching the consequence of individ
ualism, which is war. What difference,
one may well ask, is there in principle
between the attitude of these employers
and their sympathizers and that of the
philosophers and statesmen whose un
willingness to recognize any higher sov
ereignty than the individual state makes
war the final arbiter in disputes be
tween nations? If there is not con
science enough in society to deal with
[155]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the lesser evil, what hope is there of our
being able to master the greater ?
But, thank God, there is another side
to the matter. If every failure to live
out Christ's principles at home makes
it more difficult to live them out abroad,
the converse also is true. Every success
at home makes success abroad seem easier
and more credible. The man who has
tried arbitration in his business and found
that it succeeds will be the first to be
lieve in the possibility of its application
to international affairs. The community
which has found it possible to run a city
for the benefit of all, and not simply the
private gain of the few, will not easily
despair of the world.
Twenty-two years ago New York City
was in the grip of a corrupt political
organization known as Tammany Hall.
Things had reached such a pass that
decent men were ashamed of the city,
and yet the power of the organization
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
was so great that it seemed hopeless to
try to break it.
At this juncture it occurred to some
public-spirited citizens to attack the
problem piecemeal. They founded good-
government clubs in the different quar
ters of the city, and began to organize
their neighbors in each district for the
study of local conditions. In the new
interest thus aroused, and the new ac
quaintances formed, they soon found
that they possessed an instrument of no
small pohtical power. And it was these
good-government clubs, co-operating in a
city-wide campaign, which in 1894 suc
ceeded finally in defeating Tammany
Hall and installing a reform government
in power.
It is an example which may well en
courage us in our plans for our future
activity as Christians. When we con
template the magnitude of the task be
fore us we are appalled by its difficulty
[157]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
and its complexity. Who are we, we
ask, to think of Christianizing the world ?
But we do not have to do it all at once.
Our responsibility is only for that part
of the task which lies in our immediate
environment, and is within the compass
of our strength. But we have this added
encouragement in our labor, that what
ever success we may gain in our par
ticular field, will be so much to the
general good. Any triumph of the Chris
tian principle anywhere is so much new
reason for faith in its applicability every
where. These principles may help us to think
our way through some of the practical
problems which face us in the immediate
future. They have their bearing, for
example, upon the question of national
loyalty. As Christians we cannot ad
mit the nationalist's contention that the
nation is the final unit, and that no hu-
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
manitarian considerations should be al
lowed to stand in the way of the national
interest. Are we therefore obliged to
conclude that the nation has no rightful
claim upon our allegiance, and that in
the alleged interest of human brother
hood we must discard patriotism alto
gether ?
To do this would be as unreasonable
as to conclude that because the law of
Christ condemns selfishness in the indi
vidual, and bids us keep ever in mind
our relations to the larger unity we call
the Kingdom of God, the individual has
no independent value for God, and the
Christian is under no obligation to de
velop his own personality? Individual
ism, whether in nations or in persons, is
the perversion of a good. It is self-de
velopment run to seed. But self-devel
opment has its place in the catalogue of
Christian virtues. It is the way we
make ourselves strong for service.
[ 159 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
We have learned this in the case of the
individual. We know that in our per
sonal life we are not shut up to the choice
between selfishness and suicide. There is
a third alternative open to the Christian,
and that is self-development for social
service. The more I have, the better I
am, the stronger I become, the more I
have to give. The same law holds good
in the life of the state. Patriotism is
God's way of training individuals for com
mon action for unselfish ends. With
out national self-development there can
be no effective international service.
But it is easier to admit this in theory
than to follow out its implications in
practice. What does it mean for one
nation to serve another? In what spe
cific ways can this Christian duty be ful
filled? There are some who interpret service
in terms of charity. The rich nation
ought to share its wealth with the na-
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
tions that are poorer; the more advanced
with the more backward; the nation that
has escaped the ravages of war with
those that have experienced its devas
tating effects.
This view of Christian duty has re
cently been put before the American
people in the form of a definite proposal.
Let Congress at the end of the war ap
propriate five hundred million dollars to
be used for the relief of the sufferers in
the different countries at war, and for
the reconstruction of the cities which
have been destroyed. Is it conceivable,
we are asked, that such a proposal would
not be gratefully received? Could we
imagine any action which could give
more convincing evidence of the Chris
tian spirit or prove a more effective agent
in promoting good- will between nations ?
With the spirit which inspires this
proposal one can have only sympathy.
There is a place for charity in the Chris-
[161]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
tian catalogue of virtues, and where suf
fering has been colossal the scale of char
ity should be correspondingly great. But
charity alone is not enough. It has not
proved enough in the relations between
individuals. We have no reason to sup
pose that it will prove enough in the re
lations between nations.
There was a time not so long ago when
individual duty was conceived in terms
of charity. Almsgiving was the Chris
tian duty par excellence. The rich man
gave of his superabundance to the poor
man, and the man of moderate means
to the man who had less, and when he
had done this he conceived that he had
done all that he needed to do.
But we are coming to see that this is
a wholly iuadequate conception of Chris
tian ethics. It is not alms that man
needs but justice; not the alleviation of
poverty but its removal. What we ask
of the rich man now is not that he
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
should be kind to his dependents, but
that he should co-operate with them in
bringing about a social order in which
they shall no longer be dependent. More
precious than gold, more to be desired
than comfort, is personal self-respect,
and personal self-respect is difficult to
the man whose very existence is depen
dent upon the bounty of another. As
has been well said: "He who controls
the sources of a man's subsistence, in
effect controls his will."
What is true of individuals is true also
of nations. What one nation asks of
another is not charity but justice. It is
recognition of its rightful place in the
family of the nations and the granting,
not as a matter of condescension but as
a right, of the conditions which are neces
sary to enable it to fill that place with
self-respect. If we wish really to justify
our claim to be a Christian nation, we
cannot stop with the offer of charity,
[ 163 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
however proper that may be; we must
be willing to co-operate with other na
tions in bringing about such changes in
the social order as shall make the op
pression of the weak by the strong for
ever impossible.
This would involve a change of policy
so radical that it is doubtful if as yet
many even among Christians have ven
tured seriously to contemplate it. It
would mean the abandonment once for
all of the maxim that the policy of any
country can be determined solely by the
welfare of its own citizens. It would
mean the application of the Christian
principle of trusteeship to natural re
sources not simply on the national scale
now contemplated by our advocates of
conservation, but in our international re
lations. It would mean the rewriting of
our tariffs and immigration acts from
the point of view not simply of national
advantage but of world need. It would
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
mean, in a word, doing for the world at
large what no single country has yet
succeeded in doing for its own people,
namely, making them act and feel as if
they were really one.
I say feel as well as act, for in this
matter of social justice feeling counts for
quite as much as action. Why is it that
within the family co-operation is possible
between strong and weak on a basis of
mutual self-respect? It is because they
feel their common unity. Why is it
that to-day Canada and Australia and
New Zealand are sending the best of
their sons to die for England when they
were free to hold aloof if they would?
It is because they feel their oneness
with the mother country. Why is it
that England herself is co-operating with
Russia and France, her ancient enemies,
spending men and money in support of
peoples whom a generation ago she re
garded with distrust and fear? Again
[ 165 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
it is because she has come to feel that in
the interests which count for most they
are really one. If we are ever to change
our present policy of national selfishness
for one of brotherly co-operation with
other nations it will be because we have
first come to feel toward those nations
as brothers.
This does not mean that in our national
pohcy there will be no place for tariffs
or immigration acts; but it means that
the theory on which they are based will
be altered. Where peoples represent dif
ferent types of civilization, as in the case
of America and Japan, unrestricted immi
gration may prove an evil for both. But
if so the restriction will be based upon
grounds of mutual advantage and car
ried out in a way to conserve the self-
respect of both parties. So it may
prove for the advantage of all the world
that those countries which in the upward
march of civilization have attained a
I 166]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
higher standard of living should protect
themselves by tariffs against the com
petition which would drag them down
without uplifting their competitors. But
here again, if this be the case, the con
straining motive for the Christian nation
will be the advancement of the whole
rather than the advantage of a part.
The same principles apply to the treat
ment of dependent peoples. It is ab
surd to treat savage races as though
they were on an equality with those
which have been trained for centuries
in the school of civilization. Such races
are children, and must be treated as
such; but they are children who will
grow up, and the nation which aspires
to be really Christian will not forget this
fact. It will teach them the things they
need to know in order to walk alone. It
will not allow unscrupulous exploiters to
appropriate the natural resources which
are necessary for their development even
[ 167]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
if the exploitation bring temporary ad
vantage to itself. It will so act that when
the child grows up he will not find him
self robbed of his patrimony.
Such a change of policy would have
far-reaching consequences. It would not
only benefit the countries immediately
concerned; it would contribute power
fully to peace among the nations; it
would remove one of the chief causes
which have produced war in the past,
and hasten the time when the conscious
ness of unity which now obtains between
certain groups of nations shall be ex
tended to humanity as a whole.
Will you think me bold if I venture
upon a single concrete illustration? I
have just come from China, that great
country across the Yellow Sea which is
now passing through such a momentous
period in its national history, and every
where I found men asking what was to
be Japan's attitude toward its neighbor
[ 168 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
in this crisis of its history. It is not my
purpose to speak of what has happened
in the past, still less to give counsel as
to what Japan should do in the immediate
future. But I may without impropriety
be permitted as a moral teacher to point
out the alternative possibilities which the
situation holds in solution, and to call
attention to their bearing upon the larger
world situation of which we have been
speaking. One is to follow the policy
of exploitation which, with a few hon
orable exceptions, has been character
istic of European diplomacy in the cen
turies which have passed; to secure such
immediate advantages as may be gained
from China's distress, peaceably if pos
sible, but if need be by force, regardless
of the susceptibility of the nation in
question, and in complete indifference
to what may be for its national advan
tage in the longer future. It is the policy
of the robbers to whom Jesus referred
[ 169 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
in the parable of the good Samaritan,
who finding a traveller upon the Jericho
road set upon him in his weakness, robbed
him of his possessions, and departed leav
ing him half-dead.
This is one of the things that Japan
might do in China, and if she did it she
would do only what European nations,
calling themselves Christian, have done
before. But she would miss her great
opportunity, and surrender the leader
ship of civilization to some other nation
more far-sighted and more courageous
than herself.
The other possibility is that of friendly
co-operation and brotherhood, a policy
which should frankly recognize the right
of the Chinese to the same national
self-development of which Japan offers
so conspicuous an example, and which
should seek to co-operate in every pos
sible way with the men in China (and
there are such men, not a few) who are
seeking in a spirit of patriotism a solution
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
for their national ills. It is, in a word,
the policy of the good Samaritan who
seeing a man wounded, bound up his
wounds and put him in an inn; but mark
this well, as soon as he was well enough
to stand, left him free to take his own
way without dictation and hindrance.
Which policy, think you, will in the long
run prove most to Japan's interest,
the policy of exploitation or the policy
of friendship? Which will bind China
closest to Japan and prove the source
of greatest strength in years to come?
Unless all past experience is deceptive,
friendship pays best in the long run.
You may hold a man down when he is
weak, but when he is strong he will do
the same to you; but help a man up
when he is down, and when you are in
need you will find him your helper. In
our personal relations we have found this
true; we have yet to prove it true in the
relations of nations.
I have taken an illustration from Jap-
[171]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
anese contemporary history because I
am speaking to Japanese; but I might
have applied the principle to my own
country with equal appropriateness and
with equal force. I might have spoken
of the possibilities which face the Ameri
can people in dealing with their neigh
bor to the south. Into the perplexing
questions raised by the present Mexican
situation this is not the place to go.
But distinct from the question of the
specific things to be done and still more
important is the question of the spirit
which should inspire the action. What
shall determine the duty of the United
States to Mexico, the advantage of our
own nation or the welfare of Mexico?
When we have secured the safety of our
own borders and protection for our own
citizens we shall have taken only the
first step in our duty as a Christian na
tion. The question will still remain how
we can best help Mexico to realize her
[ 172 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
own destiny among the nations, to right
the wrongs under which so many of her
own people now suffer, to develop her
undeveloped resources, to educate her
uneducated masses, and so to enter upon
the path of national independence and
self-respect which shall fit her to enter
on equal terms into the family of the
nations. For the cultivation of such a spirit it
is our duty as Christians to work. It
will not prove an easy task. Repentance
is never easy, whether in a nation or in
an individual, and repentance we must
have before improvement is possible.
When it comes to questions of national
policy no nation can afford to say to
another: "I am holier than thou."
I do not mean to say that there are
no differences in degrees of guilt. I do
not mean that in such a world crisis as
we face to-day there are no immediate
moral issues between which we must
[ 173]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
choose. But I do say that when we
take the long look (and I conceive that
to be a Christian means to take the long
look and not the short one, to see the
things of time in the light of the eternal)
— I say when we take the long look and
follow back the present situation to its
remoter causes, we are led to a story
of selfish exploitation and conscienceless
cruelty in which every one of the nations,
without exception, is to a greater or less
degree involved. There is not one who
can say: "I am blameless." To all alike
the call comes to national repentance
and national reformation. Whether we
be Japanese, or English, or Russian, or
French, or German, or American, each of
us faces the same choice between two
alternatives — the policy of national self
ishness and the policy of national ser
vice. For each the choice will have far-
reaching consequences, not only for its
own life but for the life of the world.
[ 174 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
Another vexed question upon which
our discussion sheds light is pacifism.
Here, too, we seem to find ourselves be
tween the horns of a dilemma. On the
one hand is militarism with its demand
for armaments; on the other is pacifism
with its denunciation of war. One tells
us that war is a permanent human neces
sity; the other that it is the sin of sins.
At first sight, indeed, the pacifist posi
tion seems peculiarly appealing. It pre
sents us a plain question of duty, a sim
ple choice between right and wrong. If
God, as we know, is love, asks the pacifist,
how can it be right to fight ? Above all,
how can it be right to kill? Christ, he
tells us, came to save life, not to destroy,
and the true Christian will follow him in
his uncompromising hostility to war in
every form. Let others do what they
will, he will not fight. Better suffer evil
than do it. Better be killed than kill.
And what is true of the individual, he
[175]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
insists, is true of the state. Better to
perish as a nation than to survive at
the cost of the violation of the law of
love. But further analysis shows that the
problem is not so simple. If love and
non-resistance were synonyms pacifists
would be in the right, but it is not clear
that this is true. To refrain from fight
ing when others than myself are con
cerned may be the part of selfishness
rather than of courage. Had Belgium
not resisted Germany, it might have been
better for Belgium, but what would have
been the consequences for France ? This
is a situation in which the logic of paci
fism affords no clear guidance.
The difficulty of the pacifist position
becomes still more apparent when we
consider the case of dependent or sub
ject peoples. What shall we say of a
nation whose rulers deliberately adopt
a policy of extermination, as Turkey did
[ 176]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
at the time of the Bulgarian massacres,
and is doing to-day with the Armenians ?
What shall we say when Mohammedan
slave-traders decimate Africa and leave
the marks of their ruthless progress in
tracks of blood from sea to sea? Have
civilized nations no responsibility in such
a case as this? May force not be used
to prevent such outrages or render their
repetition in the future impossible?
And what of those cases where a great
principle is at stake, such as was involved
in our own war of independence, or in
the struggle for a united Italy? Shall
we condemn Washington and Mazzini
as unchristian because when peaceable
means had been tried in vain they turned
to the sword as the last resort? Shall
we say that Lincoln was no Christian
when he answered the gun fired on Sum
ter with his call for volunteers? To do
this would be to unwrite some of the
noblest pages of human history and rob
[ 177 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
our children of examples by which our
own lives have been inspired.
No doubt war in itself settles nothing
finally. It can at most clear the way for
the spiritual influences to which the future
belongs, but that it has sometimes done
this seems plain, and that the same re
sult could have been achieved in any
other way under the conditions which
then existed is yet to be proved.
The problem here is of a piece with
the larger problem which meets us when
ever we try to apply an absolute ideal to
a progressive society. Progress means
gradual change from the less to the more
perfect, a change in which each particular
step is to be judged in its bearing upon
all the others. In most phases of the
social problem we recognize this and act
accordingly. We see that in organized
society compromise of some sort is in
evitable, and adopt that course of action
which, on the whole, seems to lead us
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
most surely and most directly to the de
sired end. Pacifists accept the princi
ple of compromise in other aspects of
the social life, but in this one particular
they make an exception. To war, and
to war alone, they apply the absolute
standard. They act themselves and ex
pect others to act as if the Kingdom of
God, for which they like other lovers of
their kind are working, were realized in
fact. I would speak with the greatest re
spect of those who take this position.
Among their ranks are some of the
bravest and some of the most unselfish
of men. The taunt that the pacifist is
a weakling or a coward springs either
from ignorance or from motives less
worthy. Courage is no less courage when
it braves public opinion than when it
faces bullets. And the world is better
to-day, and the outlook for the future
more hopeful because in every country
[179]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
there is a little group which in the name
of Christ has refused to compromise with
conscience even though refusal mean per
sonal misunderstanding and social ostra
cism. Nevertheless the fact remains that for
most Christians the arguments of the
pacifist have not proved convincing.
To them the war has come as a clear call
of duty, and in giving their lives to the
service of their country they have found
the satisfaction and peace which are the
natural results of willing sacrifice to a
cause beyond self. To discredit such a
sacrifice or belittle the motive which in
spired it is to act unintelligently. Rather
should we welcome this spirit wherever
it is found, and see in it a foretaste of
the greater loyalty which is some day
to unite all the peoples in the service of
the Kingdom of God.
But if we cannot see our way clear to
accept the pacifist position, it does not
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
mean that we are committed to milita
rism. Here again there is a third alterna
tive possible. A nation may arm in the
interests of peace. Strong enough itself
to repel invasion, it may show such fair
ness in its international relations and
such trust in the willingness of other na
tions to meet it on the plane of justice
and reason that the suspicion and fear
which lead to war may be repelled, and
the new era of internationalism with
its accompaniments in disarmament
and world organization may be ushered
in. The difficulty has been that in the past
military preparedness has been accompa
nied by no correspondingly strong move
ment for the peaceful adjustment of dis
putes between nations. To arm for
peace while you maintain unimpaired
the causes which produce wars is to
involve yourself in a contradiction in
terms. There are more ways than one
[181]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
to wage war, and tariffs and immigration
acts may be as fruitful a cause of mis
understanding between nations as Krupp
guns and submarines. Unite the two
and the result is inevitable. National
armament in the hands of nationalistic
diplomacy can have but one issue. It
spells war and only war.
If then we are to rescue civilization
from the impasse into which it has been
brought by the present system of inter
national relations we must put a new
meaning into the concept of prepared
ness. We must challenge the right of
the militarist to claim this great word for
his own. Those who argue for national
service are quite in the right, but is there
no way to serve but to fight? Surely
he serves his country who removes the
causes which threaten her peace as truly
as he who fights for her when the threat
has become a reality. The teacher who
interprets to his countrymen the higher
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
aspirations of men of other lands, the
economist who exposes the fallacy of the
policy of national exclusion, the lawyer
who devises the machinery for the peace
ful settlement of international disputes,
the minister who reminds men of their
common relation to a common father;
these, too, as well as the soldier and the
sailor, are national servants, preparing
their country to meet the dangers to
which without their help it would be ex
posed. The difficulty has been that we
have thus far left their work so largely to
their own initiative. We have organized
our armies and our navies and equipped
them with all the resources of modern
science. We have left our professors and
our publicists and our economists and
our moralists to deal with their greater
responsibilities in isolation. We have
perpetuated in this most important of
all the aspects of national service the
methods of guerilla warfare. Is it any
[ 183 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
wonder that under the strain of the
world crisis it should break down ?
What is the explanation of so stupid
a policy? It is the lack of an adequate
ideal. In our feeling, whatever may be
true of our theory, we have not yet
outgrown the feudal age. The glamour
of the age of chivalry is with us still,
and we bring up our children to think of
war as the true school of heroism and
soldiers as the ideal patriots. Professor
James is right. We need a moral equiv
alent of war. We need to show that
there is a cause as splendid as any for
which the heroes of old have fought,
demanding virtues as exacting and mak
ing appeals to sacrifice as complete as
any that are being made to-day in the
mountains of the Tyrol or the battle
fields of France. Such a cause Jesus
gives us in his gospel. He summons us
to a new crusade for the Kingdom of
God. It is our part as Christians to give
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THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
form and definiteness to this ideal, to
make it live before the imagination of
men; above all, to show its bearing upon
our own duty as a nation, and the part
we can take in helping to translate it
into fact.
Not less preparedness then but more
should be the national motto — prepared
ness for the tasks that meet us every
day in the year, preparedness not sim
ply or chiefly for the war that may some
day be possible, but for the peace that
is inevitable. When once the imagina
tion of men has been captured by this
conception there are no hmits to what
we may hope to achieve.
Am I giving a counsel of perfection,
a dream out of place in this world of
hard fact, the world of Bernhardi and
Treitschke and Nietzsche? If so it is a
dream that has been dreamed by others
who cannot be accused of being senti
mentalists. Nietzsche to-day is every-
[ 185 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
where lauded as the man without illusions,
the prophet of the will to conquer, the
preacher of the glory of strength for
strength's sake. To Nietzsche then let
us go. This is what he has to say of the
present philosophy of preparedness:
"Perhaps a memorable day will come
when a nation renowned in wars and
victories, distinguished by the highest
development of military order and intel
ligence, and accustomed to make the
heaviest sacrifice to these objects, will
voluntarily exclaim, 'We will break our
swords,' and will destroy its whole mili
tary system, lock, stock, and barrel.
Making ourselves defenseless (after hav
ing been the most strongly defended)
from a loftiness of sentiment — that is
the means toward genuine peace, which
must always rest upon a pacific disposi
tion. The so-called armed peace that
prevails at present in all countries is a
sign of a bellicose disposition, of a dis-
[ 186 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
position that trusts neither itself nor its
neighbor, and, partly from hate, partly
from fear, refuses to lay down its weap
ons. Better to perish than to hate and
fear, and twice as far better to perish
than to make oneself hated and feared.
This must some day become the supreme
maxim of every political community." r
It was Germany's failure to see this
which explains why she has lost the sym
pathy of so many of the thoughtful men
in the neutral nations. More than for
what she has done they blame her for
what she has failed to do. She was
the country to which educated men the
world over had been accustomed to turn
for inteUectual leadership. She had car
ried the ideal of national unity further
than any other nation. She had organ
ized her resources for the tasks of peace
1 "Human, all-too-human," Eng. tr., vol. n, p. 337.
I owe the quotation to Dr. Gladden, "The Forks of
the Road," pp. 83, 84. [187]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
with an inteUigence and effectiveness un-
approached by any other people. Of all
the nations therefore she seemed the best
fitted to realize the ideal of Nietzsche of
the nation strong enough to fight who
yet dared to take risks for peace.
She did not do it; that is her national
sin. It is no excuse to say that in this
she was only following an example which
had been set by other nations in the
past. Even if this were true, it would
not exonerate her. The nation which is
to lead humanity in its upward march
cannot be content to be no worse than
others. It must be actively and aggres
sively better. When Germany put aside
the dream of an international peace,
based on confidence and justice, and
stake'd her all upon the appeal to the
sword she lost her opportunity of in
ternational leadership.
And what is true of Germany will
prove true of every other nation which
[ 188 ]

THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
follows in her footsteps. It will prove
true of England if England listens to the
counsels of her own imperialists. It will
prove true of the United States if we al
low ourselves to be swept from our moor
ing by those who in matters of national
policy would bid us take counsel of our
fears. What will it profit to conquer
the armies of the enemy in the field if
the phUosophy which armed them re
mains unsubdued ? Unless this war bring
changes, not simply in the outward rela
tions, but in the spirit of men, its vast
sacrifices and unexampled heroism will
have been spent in vain.
Is there not here a great opportunity
for the Japanese people? What the
world needs to-day, I repeat, is interna
tional leadership — the example of a great
nation, wise enough to read the signs of
the times and daring enough to follow
what they see. Before you, as before
every civUized people, there open two
[ 189]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
possibilities, and between them you must
choose. There is on the one hand the
policy of imperialistic nationalism, with
its corollary in militarism, and on the
other the policy of international co-opera
tion and brotherhood with preparedness
indeed, but preparedness which is directed
to the single end of promoting good feel
ing between the nations and so removing
the preventable causes of war. The first
promises the more immediate success.
The second looks to the longer future.
Which part will you take? You have
done great things in the past. Are you
strong enough and brave enough to at
tempt still greater? You have proved
yourselves masters of the art of war.
Will you be able to show an equal mas
tery of the greater and the more difficult,
and may I add, the more heroic art of
peace ?

[ 190 ]

CHAPTER V
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
But after all what one nation can do
alone even with the best will in the
world is limited. Between nations as
between individuals, there must be co
operation on a large scale if large results
are to be obtained. It is one of the en
couraging features of the present situa
tion that this is being so generally recog
nized. From widely different quarters
we find the conviction expressed that
the present condition of international
anarchy must no longer be permitted to
continue, but that the common interest
of the different nations in a peace based
upon justice must find expression in
some international organization represen
tative enough to command confidence,
and strong enough to enforce respect.
[ 191 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
But it is one thing to see what ought
to be done, and quite another to devise
means for doing it. Here it must be
confessed that the outlook is not encour
aging. Individuals have been won to
the ideal of a League of the Nations.
Societies have been formed to educate
public sentiment in favor of concerted
action in matters affecting the peace of
the world. But there exists to-day no
organized body able to bring to the cause
of internationalism a support as effec
tive and resources as great as nationahsm
can command within each of the coun
tries which it is proposed to unite.
Did I say that there was no organiza
tion? I spoke too hastily. Yes, there
is one, if only we realized its potentiali
ties and were prepared to use them for
the great ends at stake. This organiza
tion is the Christian church. In the
church we have a body whose member
ship includes all classes and all races,
[ 192 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
which is committed by its very constitu
tion to faith in the unity of mankind,
and which has its representatives in ev
ery quarter of the globe. In the church,
therefore, we have an agency of unri
valled power for realizing the Christian
spcial ideal.
But as yet this great instrument has
never been effectively used. The church
of Christ, great as have been its services
to humanity, has never yet fairly faced
its responsibility for social reconstruc
tion. It has confined itself largely to the
work of saving individuals and in this
limited sphere has not been able to agree
as to the method in which this was to be
done. So we see the lamentable spec
tacle of a divided Christendom, impotent
to realize the unity in which it professes
to believe.
We have already considered the rea
sons which explain this failure. Some
of these reasons are historical, growing
[ 193 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
out of the intellectual environment, and
for which Christians are only in part
responsible; our ignorance of the laws
of social life, for example, the pressing
importance of meeting the primary needs
of the individual soul. But the point is
that we face a new situation to-day, and
can no longer plead ignorance. We know
to-day the power of social organization,
and the greatness of social need. We
hear the call to united action from men
who, for lack of our union, are perishing.
Here is our supreme opportunity as
Christians — to make the church in fact
what in theory it professes to be, the
representative and spokesman of the
spiritual unity of mankind.
It will not do to say that it is too late;
that the church has had its chance and
failed. That is no more true of the
church than of every other international
organization. Socialism, too, has failed,
and international law. Arbitration has
[ 194 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
faUed, and The Hague court — failed,
that is to say, for the time being. But
that does not mean that the failure need
be permanent. The direction of a mov
ing body is determined by the relative
strength of the different forces which
play upon it; and because at any par
ticular time the forces which favor prog
ress have not yet acquired momentum
enough to overcome the forces which
oppose it, it does not follow that they
have no momentum, or that they may
not at some future time gain the mastery.
It is not the situation at the present
moment which wiU prove finally decisive
for the future organization of society,
but the rate at which each of its com
ponent elements is increasing or dimin
ishing, and that is a matter in which our
own activity may play a determining
part. What contribution, then, has the
church to make to the work of social
[ 195 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
reconstruction? In the equation of so
cial progress what particular increment
of power may it fairly be expected to
contribute ?
Three things at least the church can
do, which need to be done. In the first
place, it can remind us of the degree of
unity which we have already attained.
In the second place, it can furnish us a
training-school for common action in the
service of mankind. In the third place,
it can foster that attitude of expectant
faith without which great undertakings
are impossible.
In the first place the church can re
mind us of the degree of unity to which
we have already attained. This is a
service of the highest importance. There
are men and women in every country
to-day who feel their oneness in purpose
and sympathy with their fellow Chris
tians with whom for the time being,
[ 196 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
through no fault of their own, they are
at strife, and who desire nothing better
than to co-operate with them in resist
ing the campaign of bitterness and hate
which threatens the future of all they
hold most dear. But they lack the means
to make their wiU effective in action.
Just before the war broke out there
was held at Constance in Germany a
conference of Christian ministers to dis
cuss international peace. Among those
present were Englishmen and Americans,
Dutchmen and Swedes, Frenchmen and
Germans. They met under the shadow
of the impending crisis, and men who
were there have told me that they will
never forget the solemnity and the ten
derness of their communion together dur
ing the few brief hours before they were
obliged to separate.
There are Christians, I repeat, in every
country with such an international con
sciousness, but their witness is ineffec-
[ 197 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
tive because it does not reach those for
whom it is most needed. The channels
of expression which were open to them
in peace are closed in war. When Dr.
Lahusen of Berlin preaches a sermon on
the necessity of forgiving our enemies,
of which more than fifty thousand copies
are sold in Germany,1 no echo finds its
way across the sea to England. The
papers are too full of Lissauer's "Hymn
of Hate." When Dr. Temple and other
English Christians unite in the publi
cation of "Papers for War Time," 2 in
which the nobler aspects of Christianity
find expression, or bow in prayer for the
brothers across the sea, from whom for
the time the fortunes of war have sepa
rated them, word of it finds its way to
Germany only through some chance let
ter of an American friend, and that
months afterward. Yet it is through
such contacts alone that the unity of
1 Berlin, 1915. 2 Oxford, 1914.
[ 198 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
the Christian consciousness can be main
tained. One of the most pressing duties
before the church is to devise some
method by which this difficulty can be
overcome, and freedom of communica
tion secured between the different bodies
of Christians in time of war.
Let us suppose that when the German
Christians published their open letter at
the beginning of the war, in which they
passionately protested their country's
innocence of any aggressive intention,
and put the blame for what had hap
pened upon their opponents, their fellow
Christians in England, instead of enter
ing into the issues immediately in con
troversy, should have addressed them
in some such fashion as this: "We un
derstand and respect the spirit of patri
otism which impels you to spring to
the defense of your country in her hour
of crisis; we feel a like impulse and
acknowledge a similar duty. What you
[199]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
believe about Germany we beheve about
England, and if this were the proper
time and place we could argue our coun
try's cause with a conviction no less sin
cere than yours, and with arguments
which we believe to be better founded.
But this has been done by others, and to
their statement we are content to refer
you. We who are servants of Christ
have other interests to guard and owe
a higher aUegiance. While this great
issue is being fought out, and until the
verdict of history on the immediate points
in controversy shall be finally rendered,
it is our duty to guard the spiritual in
terests of mankind; to maintain unbroken
the continuity of the Christian conscious
ness; to resist the attempts of men of UI
wUl on both sides to add to our just
causes of quarrel the bitterness of un
just suspicion and malicious falsehood;
to serve as the organ through which the
spirit of faith and hope and love, which
[ 200 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
we are sure is present with you as we
know it is with us, may find effective ex
pression in action.
"WUl you not join us in the attempt
to fulfil this duty effectively? Let us
appoint representatives of the Christian
bodies on both sides of the contest. Let
us request from our governments the
privilege of free communication between
the two. Let us refer to them each story
of cruelty and oppression on either side
for impartial investigation, and so far as
possible for correction or redress. Above
aU, let these representatives see to it
that every utterance of the Christian
spirit, every instance of generous deed
or unselfish thought in each country at
war is brought to the notice of the citi
zens of the others. Do not let us leave to
neutrals in time of war the duty of medi
ating between Christians. Let us claim
our right as fellow members of the body
of Christ to direct access to one another."
[ 201 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
Such an appeal, whether successful or
not, would have had a moral value diffi
cult to overestimate. Its tones would
have echoed around the world. It would
have set a standard for the church of the
future. But what the churches as a whole are
not yet ready to do, groups of Christians
are already doing. There are agencies
actively at work to-day in which the
internationalism implicit in Christianity
finds clear and self-conscious expression.
One such agency is the Peace Movement;
another is the Student Movement. Most
far-reaching in its effect is the Foreign
Missionary enterprise. It is one of the
grounds of encouragement in the present
situation that the bonds which united
the workers in these different causes,
while strained, have not been broken by
the war. Interchanges of sentiment have
taken place between their leaders. Pray
ers have been offered for the comrades in
[ 202 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
the countries at war. Even now plans
are being actively discussed for the re
sumption of the common task as soon as
the war is over.1
It is difficult to exaggerate the impor
tance of this service. We have spoken
repeatedly of selfishness as a cause of
war. But after all this is only part of
the explanation and not the most serious.
Nations fight not only because of what
they suffer, or of what they covet, but be
cause of what they fear. Russia had not
attacked Germany, but Germany tells us
that she is fighting because Russia was
going to attack her by and by. France

1 A brief account of conferences conducted by Pro
fessor Battin, on behalf of the League of International
Friendship, with representative Christians in the differ
ent countries at war, appeared in the Christian Work
for August 5, 1916. Of unusual interest was the ex
perience of Dr. Mott, who visited Europe in the in
terests of the Student Movement in 1914, and again
in 1916. Many individual instances of international
good feeling have been collected in Good-Will, the or
gan of the English Friends. Cf. also the files of Die
Eiche, the organ of the German Peace Movement.
[ 203 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
had not invaded Belgium, but Germany
insists that she invaded Belgium because
she knew that France was going to do so
by and by. And so it goes in a circle
that knows no end. Selfishness breeds
suspicion, and suspicion fear. The un
derlying cause of war is not merely
men's memory of the wrongs which they
have experienced in the past. It is the
dogma which makes the past the mea
sure of the future, and refuses to believe
in the possibihty of any change for the
better in the relations between nations.
It is the denial not simply in fact but
in theory of the cardinal Christian prin
ciple of the brotherhood of man.
Now the only way to meet such an
issue successfully is to bring evidence to
the contrary. We must call attention
to the numbers of men and women in all
countries who do in fact love justice and
follow mercy, and who, if they were but
convinced of the existence of simUar sen-
[ 204 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
timents in the citizens of other countries,
would be glad to co-operate with them
in a policy of international friendliness.
We must resist at all hazards the temp
tation to attribute all virtue to oneself,
and all vice to one's opponents, and re
alize that in spite of all outward differ
ences, in its deepest longings and desires
the human race is fundamentally one.
Who is in a better position to furnish
this evidence than the Christian church ?
To Christians human brotherhood is not
an unproved thing. It is a fact that has
been demonstrated over and over again
by evidence of the most convincing char
acter. For generations the church has
been putting to the proof its faith in the
power of the gospel to transcend differ
ences of race and of class, and it has
found it justified.
On June 7, 1916, there was held in
Constantinople the commencement exer
cises of a women's college. The gradu-
[ 205 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
ating class numbered seventeen in all:
three were Turks, seven were Bulgarians,
three were Greeks, five were Armenians,
and one a Jewess. For years the peo
ples to whom these graduates belonged
had been enemies, and more than once
had engaged in deadly and internecine
strife. The Greeks had fought with the
Bulgarians, and the Bulgarians with the
Turks, and for the Armenians the very
word Turk was a synonym for all that
was most inhuman and damnable. Yet
here in the very storm centre of the
world's strife, with war raging all about
them, and no one knowing what a day
might bring forth, they met on common
ground as members of the sisterhood of
educated women.
This is what Christianity is doing to
day, and what it proposes to do. It is
facing the race prejudice which is so
formidable an obstacle to peace among
the nations, and proving that it is not
[ 206 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
insuperable. It is furnishing a solid
basis in experience for our faith in the
brotherhood of man.
When the war broke out fear was ex
pressed of the adverse influence which
the European strife might exert upon
Christian missions. If even to us at
home the war has proved a challenge to
faith, should we not expect it to prove
a blow stUl more severe to those less
mature Christians whose acquaintance
with Christianity was so much more
recent ?
This fear has not been justified by the
event. The war has shaken faith indeed,
but not in Christianity. It has shaken
faith in the profession of the Western
nations to be Christian nations. To
those of us who have been brought up
from childhood in Europe or America,
the identification of Western civilization
with Christianity may be a natural thing.
To the Christians of China and Japan,
[ 207 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
to whom Christianity has come in its
native guise of unselfish service and sac
rificial love, no such confusion is pos
sible. They see clearly that it is not
Christianity which has failed, but a civili
zation which falsely calls itself Christian.
More powerful than any apologetic of the
schools is the demonstration of the break
down of a purely material civilization.
Against this lurid background the
beauty of the Christian spirit shines with
a purer radiance. Where strife is fiercest
we see love reaching across the barriers
which war has raised. The incident of
the English and German soldiers who
left the trenches to fraternize together
on Christmas Day has its parallel in
many others less well known. From the
letter of a young English officer in Bel
gium I quote these words:
The other night four German snipers were
shot on our wire. The next night our men
went out and brought one in who was near
[ 208 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
and get-at-able, and buried him. They did
it with just the same reverence and- sadness
as they do to our own dear fellows. I went
to look at the grave the next morning, and
one of the most uncouth-looking men in
my company had placed a cross at the head
of the grave, and had written on it:
"Here lies a German
We don't know his name;
He died bravely fighting
For his Fatherland."
And under that, "Gott Mitt uns" (sic), that
being the highest effort of all the men at
German. A French soldier, wounded in a recent
attack on the German trenches, related
the foUowing incident: "Near me,"
he says, "lay two soldiers, mortally
wounded; one, a Bavarian, young and
fair-haired, with a gaping wound in
his stomach, and the other a young
Frenchman, hit in the side and head.
Both were in mortal pain, and growing
paler and paler. I saw a feeble move-
[ 209 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
ment on the part of the Frenchman;
he painfully slipped his hand under his
coat for something hidden away under
his breast. He drew out a little silver
crucifix, which he pressed to his lips.
Feebly, but clearly, he began: 'Hail,
Mary, full of grace.' The Bavarian
opened his blue eyes, which were al
ready glazing with approaching death,
turned his head toward the Frenchman,
and with a look, not of hate but almost
of love, finished in a murmur the prayer,
'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us
sinners now and at the hour of death.'
The eyes of the two men met, and they
understood. They were two companions
in like misfortune, desiring to die believ
ing according to their faith. The French
man held out his crucifix to the other,
who kissed it, and taking him by the
hand said: 'Having served our countries,
let us go to God reconciled.' '51
1 Christian Work, July 22, 1916.
[ 210 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
Such stories could be multiplied a thou
sandfold. Underneath the strife and pas
sion we detect a great hunger for some
thing different, a longing too deep for
words for some new and better form of
hfe, waiting only for the appropriate oc
casion to crystallize into action.
It is for the church to give voice to
this longing, to assemble the evidence
from aU races of mankind which witnesses
to the gain already made in the struggle
for spiritual ideals and holds out promise
of ultimate victory.
This does not mean that we are to
ideahze humanity or shut our eyes to
the ignorance and weakness which play
so large a r61e in human affairs. It does
not mean that we are to condone wrong
doing, or faU to protest against it when
ever we see it. On the contrary, as we
have seen, the effect of Christianity
should be to intensify the conscious
ness of sin and to sharpen the judg-
[211 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
ment passed upon selfishness and cruelty,
whether in ourselves or others. But it
does mean that the judgment which we
pass must be Christian judgment. We
must judge others as we should wish to
be judged ourselves if we had done the
things which we condemn in them. We
remember that we ourselves have done
wrong and repented, and we hope that
our sin has been forgiven. We dare not
deny to others what we claim for our
selves. We must beheve, however hard
at the time it may be to do so, that in
its heart of hearts each people of man
kind wants to do what is right when it
sees what right is, and that in each the
forces of good-will will in the end prove
stronger than the forces for evU. In
spite of all discouragement and temporary
failure we must hold fast to our faith
that the splendid qualities which have
gone into the building of each of the na
tions at strife have not exhausted them-
[ 212 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
selves in this immediate task, but have
their part to play in the building of that
larger citizenship which we call the King
dom of God.
When the returning pilgrims from the
Peace Conference at Constance met the
German officers who had been commis
sioned by the Kaiser to conduct them
to the frontier, the officers could not re
strain their laughter when they learned
the business that had brought the trav
ellers to Germany. But he laughs best
who laughs last. Man is not simply
German or English or Belgian, but
human, born of woman, child of God,
brother of Jesus Christ, and war may
teach this lesson no less than peace. It
is teaching it to-day. In many a hos
pital, on many a battle-field, the love of
kind overleaps the boundaries of race,
and the ministry of Christ makes akin
those who but now were locked in the
death-struggle. Some day this loving
[ 213 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
service will bear its fruit, and the "con
flict of ideals" be resolved in the "har
mony of sacrifice."
But after aU what can be done by the
church in time of war is limited at best.
The true concern of Christianity as we
have seen is with the causes which pro
duce war, and these can be dealt with
successfully only in time of peace. It is
not enough to recognize the ties which
already unite men. We must increase
their number and strengthen their hold
ing power, and this can only be done by
providing some common object definite
enough to arouse interest and appealing
enough to command loyalty.
Here again the church holds a stra
tegic position, for in work for the up
building of the Kingdom of God it
possesses such a unifying object. The
church is not simply a body of wor
shippers conscious of a common relation
[ 214 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
to God. It is a missionary society com
mitted to a world programme. It exists
to make the world over after the ideal
which Christ has revealed. It is a train
ing-school for common action in the ser
vice of humanity.
It is difficult to exaggerate the im
portance of this contribution. One of
the saddest of all the effects of the war is
the division which it has caused among
Christians. We have already called at
tention to this. Men who claim to wor
ship the same God are fighting on op
posite sides, and each prays to the same
Deity for victory over the other.
In part, no doubt, this is due to honest
misunderstanding. Men do not know
the real spirit of their opponents, and
because of this misconception are led
astray. But this is true only in part. When
one studies the utterances which the war
has called forth, one is led to the conclu-
[215]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
sion, reluctantly to be sure, but still in
evitably, that there is a real difference
in the God worshipped. Under the name
of Christ many so-called Christians are
really worshipping a very different Deity.
During the early months of the war I
read an article by a distinguished the
ologian on the ethics of war. In this
article he laid down the principle that
war was God's way of re-establishing the
balance between the real power of a
nation at a particular time, and its po
litical power; and since this was true,
it was manifestly the duty of the con
queror in any war to keep all he could
get, since only under such conditions
could God's purpose be accomplished.
This article happened to be written
by a German, but the philosophy which
it inculcates is not confined to any coun
try. It has its advocates in all. When
men deny that the principles of Christ
are valid for nations, when they turn to
[ 216 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
force as the final arbiter in international
disputes, they are really taking refuge in
a pre-Christian religion. They are wor
shipping Thor or Odin under the name
of Christ.
We have already dealt with the prob
lem which this fact raises for faith. It
is a part of the larger problem of social
progress. History, as we have seen, does
not move in a straight line. It has its
eddies and its backwaters, its failures
and its retrogressions. God has been
training man for Christianity through a
long historic process, leading him up
step by step from the beast to the man,
from the old man in Adam to the new
man in Christ, and the traces of the
earher stages stUl survive.
We can foUow the steps of this educa
tion in the Bible. Before Christ came
there were generations when men thought
of God in terms of power rather than of
love. Jehovah was the God of hosts,
[ 217 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
the Lord of the armies of Israel. He
called upon Joshua to exterminate the
inhabitants of Ai and rebuked Saul for
saving Agag alive. Only gradually was
the lesson learned that God desires re
pentance rather than vengeance, and
that he saves by sacrificial love.
It is not strange then that men to-day
should grasp at the less advanced pas
sages in the Old Testament as an excuse
for their own selfishness or lack of faith,
and invoke Christ to bless the very thing
that he came to destroy. The thing has
occurred again and again in history. We
meet it in Puritanism with its exalta
tion of Old Testament ethics to the level
of the New. We meet it in the Inquisi
tion with its attempt to substitute force
for persuasion in dealing with questions
of personal conviction. We meet it in
the claim of the militant Popes to an
absolute and unquestioning obedience.
Imperialism is not simply a philosophy;
[ 218 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
it is a religion, and one of the oldest.
And imperialism is not less imperialism
when it borrows Christian garments and
masquerades under the name of Christ.
How shaU we meet this situation?
What influence can we command power
ful enough to exorcise this evil spirit?
There is only one influence strong enough,
and that is the Spirit of Christ. The
only weapon with which to fight an ideal
is a higher ideal; the only way to con
quer a loyalty is by a stronger loyalty.
Our supreme need, then, is of a virile
gospel. It is not enough to promise
comfort; not enough to preach salvation.
War's appeal is to the strong. Its com
pensation is spiritual — glory or honor,
or the consciousness of duty done, or
the thanks of a grateful country. If we
are to win men from such a service we
must offer similar rewards, greater glory,
truer honor, a higher duty, the gratitude
of mankind. Safety first may be a good
[ 219 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
motto for a railroad or a savings-bank;
it wUl not do for a country, still less for
a church. The religion that is to con
quer the world must be a fighting re
ligion. It must write on its banner New
Wars for Old.
Such a motto foreign missions offer
the church. Missions are religion's invi
tation to the spirit of adventure. They
show us Christianity in its fighting mood,
the church organized for conquest. In
missions we see the effort to realize the
unity of mankind by the free sharing of
each with all of the highest blessings of
the spirit. We see love going out into
all the world to heal and to serve. But
we see more than this. We see love
appealing to the free spirit to become
its own true self; to break the bonds of
ignorance and sloth and indifference and
unbelief with which it has too long been
shackled, and to join the ranks of the
healers and the sharers. [ 220 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
This definition puts foreign missions in
their true perspective. They are not an
isolated thing, a task to which a man may
give himself for its own sake, without
reference to or regard for other human
interests. They are a part — the most
important and significant part — of that
modern social movement which is so
characteristic a feature of our age. They
are the way the Christian spirit responds
to the Master's summons to refashion
the social order after the pattern which
he has set. In them human brother
hood translates itself from faith into fact.
In a recent address upon the American
spirit1 Mr. Lane, the Secretary of the
Interior, thus interprets the peace-loving
spirit of the American people: "The
spirit of America is against war not be
cause we have grown cowardly and fear
death, nor because we have grown flabby
and love softness; no, not even because
1 The Survey, July 15, 1916.
[ 221 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
we have become conscious converts to
the Prince of Peace. But we in America
have something larger to do. We are
discovering our country. Every tree is
a challenge to us, and every pool of
water and every foot of soU. The moun
tains are our enemies. We must pierce
them and make them serve. The wilful
rivers we must curb; and out of the seas
and the air renew the life of the earth
itself. We have no time for war. We
are doing something so much more im
portant. We are at work. That is the
greatest of all adventures."
It is a true interpretation of the la
tent idealism in the American character.
Business to the American is not simply
making money; it is conquering diffi
culties; it is measuring one's strength
agamst obstacles; it is making some
thing where there was nothing before;
it is refashioning the world after the pat
tern of an ideal. [ 222 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
But there are ideals and ideals. If it
is a big thing to subdue nature, it is a
bigger to conquer spirit. If it be a man's
work to transform the physical universe,
it is no less a man's work to make over
society. But it is this and nothing less
for which foreign missions stand.
There was a time, as we have seen,
when the missionary enterprise exhausted
itself in its appeal to the individual: To
win a convert here and there from other
rehgions; to organize them into little
groups; to draw hard and fast the lines
which separated the Christian community
from its heathen environment — this was
the missionary's work.
But these days have long passed.
Foreign missions have entered upon a
new phase. The appeal to the individual
is no less important than it was before,
but we see the individual in a new set
ting. He is a member of a community
that we wish to transform. He is the
[ 223 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
citizen of a nation that we wish to win.
It is not Chinese simply that we are
trying to Christianize, but China; not
Indians, but India; not Japanese, but
Japan; not Americans, but America. To
men with such an aim there is nothing
foreign. Everything human has interest
for us since everything human bears di
rectly upon our task. Education, indus
try, commerce, statesmanship, whatever
concerns the relation of man to man, or
of state to state, comes within the pur
view of the missionary, is relevant to the
task to which he has set his hand. The
great missionaries have not been simply
preachers; they have been statesmen and
diplomats. Martin gave China its in
ternational law; Washburn was the lead
ing authority on the Turkish question,
the trusted friend and counsellor of the
diplomats of Europe; DeForest inter
preted to the citizens of other countries
the better spirit of Japan.
[ 224 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
Is not this a man's work? Consider
the obstacles to be overcome. There is
selfishness, that oldest and most primi
tive of human impulses, the impulse to
take aU one can get and to keep aU one
has got. We must make this our servant
by releasing that larger self which is latent
in every man. We must make men see
that what Christ wishes is not slaves
but co-workers, and that the task which
we offer men in the upbuilding of his
Kingdom is one in which each man's tru
est self will find its deepest satisfaction.
There is habit, the inertia of the mind
which is content with things as they are,
and resists any attempt at improvement.
If China appeals to the business man as
a field for profitable investment because
of the vastness of its undeveloped re
sources, how much more to the Chris
tian ! What human resources there are
here waiting to be turned to profitable
uses ! What kindliness, docility, patience,
[ 225 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
fortitude, loyalty, if only we could hber
ate their possessors from the ignorance
which now fetters them and open to
them the larger opportunities in which
we ourselves have found our freedom.
There is prejudice, the natural disposi
tion in each country to think its own
civilization the best and to look with
suspicion upon influences coming from
without. What infinite tact is necessary
to deal with such an attitude, what clear
discrimination between the things which
are transient and temporary and the
things which are eternal !
There is a form of missionary activity
more common in the past than to-day,
which awakens just resentment. When
one comes to another country with an
assumption of superiority, and tries to
impose upon men of an ahen civilization
customs and ideals with which their own
history affords no point of contact, it is
not strange that resistance should be en-
[ 226 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
countered. It is one of the salutary by
products of the war that it will make it
easier for us to resist this temptation in
the future. We reahze to-day what we
ought to have known before, that there
is no such thing yet as a Christian nation.
There are nations which have enjoyed
the benefits of the gospel longer than
others, nations which have been longer
under the tutelage of Christ and in
which more individuals have benefited
by his instruction; but there is no single
nation which is not still missionary ter
ritory, not one in which the task which
the foreign missionary faces in India or
in Siam, is not equally faced by the Chris
tian minister at home. The distinction
between home and foreign is a purely
arbitrary distinction. It is a matter of
the atlas and of the missionary report.
There is but one kind of missions, and
that is Christian missions. There is but
one field, and that is the world.
[ 227 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
It is only when we interpret the mis
sionary enterprise in this large way that
we can measure its far-reaching signifi
cance. It is not the concern of one nation
only but of all the nations. It is not the
concern of the church only, but of all
who love their kind. The day of smaU
enterprises has passed never to return.
Only organization can meet organization;
only by working together for the cause
of humanity in time of peace can we forge
the bonds of sympathy and of confidence
that will keep us one when the strain of
war comes.
In this inspiring task of co-operation
and reconstruction, you of the Japanese
church may have an honorable part to
play. It is in your power to assist in
this reorganization of the Christian forces
by giving an example within your own
country of an effective and undivided
Christianity. We who inherit the tradi
tions of the Western world are hampered
in our attempts to come together by many
[ 228 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
obstacles to which you are strangers.
Here on this new soil where Christianity
is stUl comparatively young, it should
be possible for you to unite all Chris
tians in the consciousness of a common
opportunity and a common responsibihty,
and give your fellow Christians who are
stiU divided the example of a united na
tional church.
And here again we must begin at home.
If Christians cannot come together in
Tokyo to express their common brother
hood in Christ, how can we expect them
to do so in Japan as a whole? If they
cannot do so in Japan how can they do
so in the world? The task of Christian
co-operation, important enough surely
from the point of view of the local com
munity, acquires a commanding impor
tance when contemplated from the point
of view of the world.
And so we come back to the place at
which we began, the responsibihty which
[ 229 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
rests upon us as individuals to create the
spiritual atmosphere which will make
possible these great results. Unless we
are the men we ought to be we shall never
have the church we need, or the world
for which we long.
How shall we meet this responsibihty ?
Whence shall we gain the reinforcement
of power we need? There is but one
source which is adequate to the demand,
and that is God.
I have spoken of the resources at our
disposal for the great tasks which he
ahead; the capacity which the war has
revealed in human nature for heroic loy
alty and self -forgetting sacrifice; the
longing for some better world order than
the present system of rivalry and strife;
but after all the most important fact in
the case still remains to be catalogued,
and that is the living God Himself. We
are not obliged to work out the world's
salvation alone. If that were the case
[ 230 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
we might well despair. God, who has
created in us these capacities, and put
into our hearts these longings, is Himself
actively at work in the world to accom
phsh His plan.
Greatest of all Christianity's contri
butions to social progress is faith in the
living God. There is nothing in the
ideal of human brotherhood as such in
which Christians can claim exclusive
proprietorship. It is shared by all who
believe in internationalism in any form.
Whoever is restive under the present con
dition of organized selfishness, miscalled
civilization; whoever recognizes a true
community of interest with men in other
countries who share with him the as
pirations of a higher and more generous
life; whoever refuses to accept the ideals
of nationalism and of imperialism as the
final word for humanity and in spite of
present discouragements still hopes for
the reorganization of society along lines
[ 231 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
expressive of the common interest, what
ever form that reorganization may take;
whoever, in short, regards mankind as
greater than any of its parts and con
secrates his life to its service, faces in
principle the same issue which confronts
Christians to-day.
It is one of the compensations of the
present situation that it has shown us
how many such people there are. Chris
tians of all nations honor the courage
of that minority of Socialists who have
dared to plead the cause of humanity
under the most imperialistic of all the
warring governments, and they in turn
when they wish to drive home their pro
test in the most convincing way borrow
language from the religion which they
had formerly repudiated. We had not
thought of Vorwarts as a Christian or
gan, but these are the words which it
addressed to the German Government
in the momentous days when peace and
[ 232 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
war still hung in the balance: "Let us
understand, then, that we are not merely
Germans, French, or Russians, but that
we are aU men, that all the peoples are
of the same blood, and that they have
no right to kUl one another, but that they
ought to love and help one another.
Such is Christianity, humane conduct.
Man does not belong to one nation only :
he belongs to humanity."1
But whUe in its main lines the issue is
the same for aU, it comes home to Chris
tians with pecuhar force because of their
rehgious interpretation of life. To us
regard for other men is not simply a mat
ter of human instinct, still less of prac
tical expediency, but of religious faith.
Human brotherhood is the corollary of
divine sonship, and the task of organiz
ing the world according to the principles
1This editorial, which was suppressed by the Ger
man Government, was privately circulated and is re
printed in The Survey of August 21, 1915.
[ 233 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
of mutual helpfulness and unselfish ser
vice follows necessarily from the initial
act of redemptive love, on which the in
dividual bases his hope of personal sal
vation. It is here, I repeat, in this faith in
the Father God that we reach the su
preme contribution of Christianity to
the cause of social reconstruction. We
are all facing a common task, but we
differ in our estimate of the resources at
our disposal. Where some see only the
human factors in the case, our faith dis
cerns God at work, and on His inexhaus
tible stores of wisdom and power we base
our hope of final victory.
For it is faith, after aU, on which all
turns, faith in the power of spirit to lift
itself above the flesh, of light to dispel
darkness, of love to conquer selfishness,
of the future to emancipate itself from
the shackles of the past. Where such
faith exists all things are possible. With-
[ 234 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
out it the will falters and effort flags.
Where there is no vision the people perish.
Our primary business as Christians
then must be to keep alive the God con
sciousness in man. We have seen how
this consciousness revives in time of
crisis, but why need we wait for crisis to
discover God? God is as near and as
accessible in peace as in war if we have
only eyes to see Him. It is for the
church to furnish this vision. Greatest
of aU its tasks and most weighty of its
responsibilities is its function as a school
of faith. It must keep ever before our
eyes the struggle for righteousness in
which we are always engaged. It must
remind us of the summons to service that
is forever sounding in our ears. It must
reteU to the rising generations the story
of the triumphs which have already been
won by those who have put their trust
in God and dared to take risks in His
service. In a word, it must foster that
[ 235 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
attitude of expectancy which shall make
no enterprise seem too daring, no under
taking too great.
For whom should this attitude be
easier than for us modern Christians?
We are not facing unfamiliar problems
like those pioneers of faith who had to
venture out into the dark with no ex
perience to guide them. We are the
latest in a long line of experimenters who
have put Christ's promises to the proof
and found their faith justified by the
event. As we look back over the course
of history we see days that looked to
those who lived through them as dark
as these through which we are passing
now, but we see also the hght of the
new day that dawned after the clouds
had rolled away. We remember Calvary
with its dark shadow, but we remember
Easter, too, and we thank God and take
courage. I have come recently from Panama,
[ 236 ]

WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
where it was my privilege to study the
great Canal which represents, I suppose,
the supreme limit of man's achievement
in the struggle against nature. One's
thought goes back to those early days
when the French engineers began their
work. We wonder at the faith which
made them beheve then that their plan
was possible in the face of all the doubters
who declared that it was impossible.
But we do not fully learn the lesson of
their faith until we realize that with the
data then at their command the doubters
were right. If there were no resources
avaUable but those De Lesseps possessed
when he began to dig, the task was im
possible. And yet the canal has been
dug. Why? Because there were un
discovered resources still uncatalogued.
In his arsenal of nature God holds in re
serve new powers which are only gradu
aUy released, as science discovers one by
one the keys which unlock the closed
[ 237 ]

IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
doors. And it is these new powers, an
ticipated by faith before science can gain
access to them, to which the future be
longs. It is so in our task of spiritual recon
struction. In religion as in science the
present can never be the measure of the
future. If we were shut up to the re
sources which we now possess we should
fail. But God has other workers still to
enlist, and new powers still to release,
and these in time — if we but do our part
— will make accomplishment certain, and
usher in the new social order for which
the world still waits.

[ 238 ]

INDEX

Absolute ideal, 178.
Adam, 217.
Africa, 177.
Agag, 218.
Ai, 218.
Almsgiving, 162.
America, 166, 207, 221, 224.
American character, idealism
of, 222.
Amos, 63.
Apologetic 208.
Arbitration, 154, 156, 194.
application of, in labor dis
putes, 154.
Armenians, 177.
Assyria, 55, 102, 103.
Assyrians, 66.
Augustine, 37.
Confessions of, 37.
Australia, 165.
Austria, 6, 60, 132.
Battin, Professor, 203.
Belgium, 60, 103, 104, 176,
204, 208.
compensation to, 79, 80.
Bernhardi, 57, 185.
Bible, 27, 61, 66, 69, 217.
Boston Evening Transcript,
116.
Brotherhood of man, 19, 45,
46, 81, 204, 205.
contribution of Christian
ity to, 206.
Bulgarian massacres, 177. [ 2J

Calvary, 73, 236.
Canaan, 55.
Canada, 98, 165.
Cavour, 143.
Chancellor of Germany,
119.
Charity, 160, 161, 162.
China, 151, 168, 207, 224.
Japanese attitude toward,
168-170.
Christ, 21, 25, 74, 76, 77, 106,
113, 142, 175, 213, 219,
227.
second coming of, 25.
incarnation of, 74.
cross, typical character of,
77.
Spirit of, 219.
Christ in Flanders, 86.
Christian faith, 3.
conscience, 4.
attitude toward war, 5.
religion, a record of growth,
33.
claim, tests of, 49.
ideal, 51.
method, practicability of,
122.
unity, 229.
Christian Work, 203, 210.
Christianity, individualistic
conception of, 4.
practicability of, two senses
of the question, 12;
from the point of view

INDEX

of the individual, 13;
of society 11-22, 38.
principles which deter
mine, 34-47.
attempts to evade issue,
24-29.
premillenarian at
tempt, 24 sq.
mystic attempt, 28 sq.
social interpretation of, 16,
42.
chief tenets of, 17, 18.
internationalism of, 19.
organized, 22.
as a religion of individual
salvation, 24, 32.
a militant religion, 36.
place of struggle in, 37.
influence of, upon charac
ter, 37.
outside the church, 40.
spirit of, 40.
not to be measured by
its institutions, 40.
alternatives to, 42, 44.
not an ascetic religion, 62.
Christmas, 208.
Christmas letter of English
women, 132.
Church, failure of, 3.
lack of definite construc
tive programme, 5, 7,
40, 41, 77.
abnegation of leadership of,
by, 22, 41.
as an institution, 106.
what it can do, 191 sq.
international character of,
192.
opportunity of, 193.

failure of, in the past, 193.
reasons for this, 193, 194.
function of, as a reminder of
unity already attained,
196 sq.
a missionary society, 214,
215.
function of, to foster faith
in God, 235.
Compromise, place of, in re
ligion, 38, 39, 178.
acceptance of, by pacifists,
179.
Concert of Europe, 52.
Conference of faith and or
der, 4.
Congress, 161.
Constance, 197, 213.
Peace Conference at, 197.
Constantinople, 205.
Conversion, 142.
Cramb, 127.
Crisis, magnitude of present,
23.
significance of, as test and
teacher, 33.
Cross, 73.
importance of, for Christi
anity, 73.
isolation of, from other hu
man experience, 74.
social meanmg of, 74.
divine significance of, 83.
the revelation of God's
heart, 83.

DeForest, 224.
De Lesseps, 237.
Dependent peoples, 167.
[ 240 ]

INDEX

Diagnosis, Christian, of pres
ent situation, 49 sq.
Diplomacy, 43, 50.
philosophy of present, 43.
Duty for to-morrow, 141 sq.
East, peoples of, 43.
Easter, 236.
Edinburgh Conference, 4.
Education, 145.
for humanity, 37, 131.
use of, in the interests of
war, 125, 126.
Egypt, 55, 56, 102, 103.
Eiche, Die, 203.
Employers, 155.
England, 6, 29, 104, 120, 129,
165, 189.
English White Book, 52.
Environment, 147.
Europe, 29, 207.
history of, 51.
European countries 50, 51,
52.
Evangelists, great, method of,
92.
Exploitation, 168, 169, 174.
Ezekiel, 70.
Faith, its nature and validity,
3.
reinforcement of, wrought
by the war, 84.
in God revived in time of
trouble, 88.
in God based upon experi
ence rather than logic,
89.
function of, 112, 123.

Fatherhood of God, 18, 19,
234.
Feeling, function of, in so
ciety, 165.
Florence Nightingale, 143.
Foreign missionary ente"1-
prise, 202.
Foreign missions, 220.
true significance of, 221.
social significance of, 223.
contrast between older and
newer ideals, 223, 224.
obstacles to, 225 sq.
Forgiveness of sins, 21, 79.
France, 52, 58, 60, 78, 165,
176, 184, 203, 204.
Francis of Assisi, 143.
French priests, 85. ,
Friends, English, 203.
Garibaldi, 143.
German chancellor, 119.
German peace movement,
203.
Germany, 6, 52, 78, 85, 98,
104, 116, 132, 176, 187,
197, 198, 203, 204.
national sin of, 188.
Gladden, 187.
God, moral government of, 2,
63, 69.
Kingdom of, 10, 19, 45, 57.
mystic view of, 28.
fatherhood of, 30, 46, 59.
Lord of all, 57.
control of history, 58.
purpose in history, 61 sq.
69, 81.
solidarity with man, 81.
immanent, 82.

[241 ]

INDEX

transcendent, 82.
faith in, revived in time of
trouble, 88, 231.
faith in, based upon experi
ence rather than logic,
89, 90.
differences in conception of,
216.
the ultimate source of
power, 230.
God consciousness, 235.
Good government clubs, 157.
Good-will, 203.
Greek, 19.
Grey, Lord, 52.
Guilt, 173.
Hague Court, 195.
Hangchow, 151.
Hebrews, rehgion of, 55.
History, God's training-
school, 45.
Christian interpretation of,
48-96.
Human brotherhood, 221,
233.

Ideal, power of, 137.
lack of an adequate, 184.
Idealism, 136.
Ideals of peace, 11.
Ignatius Loyola, 143.
Immigration acts, 164, 166.
Immortality, 56, 92.
experimental basis for our
faith in, 93.
reinforced by the war, 93.
Imperialism, 218, 219.
English, 189.

India, 224.
Individual, significance of,
142.
Individualism, 148.
inadequacy of, 149.
Individualistic agencies, 6.
Individualistic religion, argu
ments against, 31.
Inland Sea, 150.
Inquisition, 218.
International brotherhood,
136.
Internationalism, 181.
bankruptcy of, 7.
Isaiah, 58, 102.
Israel, 55, 63, 66, 80, 82, 102,
103.
Issue raised by the war, 11.
Italy, 143, 177.

James, Professor, 184.
Jane, Mr., 116.
Japan, 116, 128, 150, 166,
168, 207, 224, 229.
Japanese church, function of,
228.
Japanese people, alternative
before, 189, 190.
Jehovah, 55, 63, 217.
Jeremiah, 58, 70.
Jerusalem, the new, 62.
Jesus, 30, 46, 100, 143.
Jesus' method, 91.
Jesus Christ, 56, 62, 95.
Kingdom of, 62.
Job, 70.
Joshua, 218.
Julius Caesar, 121.
Justice, 163, 165.
[ 242 ]

INDEX

Kaiser, 213.
Kim, 32.
Kingdom of God, 69, 100,
134, 159, 179, 180, 184,
213, 214, 225.
extent of, 101.
nature of, 105.
means of its realization,
107.
Kipling, 32.
Krupp, 182.
Labour Leader, 133.
Lahusen, Dr., 198.
Lane, Mr., 221.
Latimer, 77.
League of International
Friendship, 203.
League of Nations, 192.
Letter of German Christians,
199.
Life after death, 26.
Lincoln, 177.
Lissauer, 198.
Luther, 37, 143.
Martin, 224.
Martyrs, 79.
Mary, 210.
Materialism, 109.
as a philosophic theory.HO.
as a mode of life, 110.
Mazzini, 143, 177.
Messiah, 63.
Method of God, redemptive
love, 71.
Mexico, 172.
duty of United States to,
172, 173.
Militarism, 114, 117, 181.

Military service, universal,
127.
Missions, Christian, 215; ef
fect of war upon, 207.
unity of, 227.
Mohammedan slave-traders,
177.
Monasticism, 143.
Moral government of God, 2.
challenge of God's, 70.
Moral reserves of humanity,
137.
Mott, Dr., 203.
Munich, 132.
Mysticism, 9.
anti-social character of, 28.
meaning of, 28.
relation of to Christianity,
30.
Napoleon, 121.
Nation, Christian view of its
claim upon the citizen's
allegiance, 159.
National selfishness a cause of
war, 51.
Nationalism, 109, 113.
its rejection of Christian
end, 113.
anti-Christian character of,
114, 115.
Neutral nations, 44.
New Testament, 36.
New York City, 156.
New Zealand, 165.
Nietzsche, 72, 95, 185, 186, 188.
Odin, 217.
Official papers, 65.
Old Testament, 58, 218.

[ 243 ]

INDEX

Optimism, 11, 57.
Organization, need of an in
ternational, 191.
Osaka, 150.
Pacifism, 175.
contemporary, 54.
arguments for, 175.
difficulties in, 176.
limitations of, 180.
Pacifists, courage of, 179.
Palace of The Hague, 6.
Palestine, 60.
Panama, 236.
" Papers for War Time," 198.
Patriotism, 160.
distinguished from nation
alism, 113, 114.
Paul, 77.
Paul's method, 91.
Peace, permanent, its nature,
98.
evidences of love of, 118.
Peace movement, 202.
Persia, 55.
Philosophy of history, 69.
Philistia, 56.
Pittsburgh, 150.
Plan of God, social nature of,
71.
Poland, 58, 85.
Popes, militant, 218.
Practicability of Christianity,
rejection of, by many
thoughtful people, 16.
Prayer, spirit of, in the
trenches, 85.
PremiUenarianism, 9, 24.
explanation of, 25, 26.
reason for rejecting, 27.

Preparedness, 181.
need of a new concept of,
182.
need of Christian, 185.
Programme, rivals of the
Christian, 109 sq.
the Christian, for human
ity, 97-140.
Progress, 178.
Prophet of the Exile, 72.
Prophets of Israel, 54, 63.
Protestantism, 143.
Providence, 56, 61.
Public opinion, 142.
Puritanism, 218.
Purpose, the divine, 84.
Race, 20.
Reason, function of, in pro
ducing faith, 89.
Reconstruction, 8.
Redemption through Christ,
21.
Reichstag, 119.
Religion, inexhaustible vital
ity of, 46.
Repentance, 173.
Resources available for the
Christian cause, 131.
Responsibility, question of
ultimate, 67.
Ridley, 77.
Roberts, Lord, 127.
Rome, 60.
Russia, 6, 52, 165, 203.
Russians, 85.
Salvation, 56, 219.
Samaritan, 171.
Saul, 218.

[ 244 ]

INDEX

Savage races, 167.
Science, 147.
failure to remain objective,
7.
Christian attitude toward,
107.
limitations of, 111.
Self-development, 159.
Self-interest the governing
principle of diplomacy,
50.
Self-sacrifice, 135.
Sin, 211.
Christian attitude to, 212.
forgiveness of, 212.
revival of consciousness of,
65.
nature of, in unbrotherli
ness, 66.
national, 66.
Social gospel, 47.
Social ideal, 26, 56.
Social message of Christian
ity, 32.
Social question, Christian in
terest in, 147.
Social service, 160.
Social system, unchristian
character of the present,
153.
Social validity of Christian
ity, importance of ques
tion, 8.
Socialism, 194.
failure of, 6.
Socialists, 232.
German, 132.
English, 133.
Society, modern conception
of, 146.

Solidarity, human, 75.
in sin, 76.
in salvation, 76, 78.
Spirit of God, 92, 96.
State, non-Christian charac
ter of, 20.
ultimate unity of, 20.
Christian view of duty to,
33.
Student movement, 202, 203.
Suffering, Christian attitude
toward, 63.
not inconsistent with love,
64.
meaning of, 71.
not all due to sin, 64.
of the innocent, 70, 71, 73.
mystery of, 70.
Sumter, 177.
Superman, 95.
Survey, The, 221, 233,
Syria, 56.
Tammany Hall, 156, 157.
Tariffs, 164, 166.
Temple, Dr., 198.
Theodicy, 73.
the complete Christian, 84.
Theology, 17.
Thor, 217.
Times, London, 120.
Tokyo, 229.
Treitschke, 127, 185.
Turkey, 176.
Tyrol, 184.

[

Unbrotherliness, 66.
United States, 98, 1 16, 128, 189.
naval policy of, 116.
Unity, 3.
245 ]

INDEX

Value of human life, 94.
Vicarious suffering, 71.
Vorwarts, 232.
War, challenge of, to Chris
tian faith, 1-12, 33, 34.
the denial of brotherhood,
8.
first effect of, 9.
attitude of religious men
toward, 10.
effect of, on faithinGod, 14.
effect of, on belief in immor
tality, 14, 15.
the affirmation of the su
premacy of self-inter
est, 15.
the denial of Christianity,
16.
remoter causes of, 51.
God's method of discipline,
54. ,

Christian interpretation of,
54.
underlying causes of, 53.
brutalizing effect of, 87.
a symptom, 99.
true remedy for, 100.
of peoples, 145.
unable to settle anything
finally, 178.
appeal of, to the strong, 219.
Washburn, 224.
Washington, 177.
Western civilization not
Christian, 207.
White Book, English, 52.
Women's Peace Party, 132.
World citizenship, absence of
consciousness of, 23.
Yellow Sea, 168.
Zion, 59.

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