The Church and Modern Life by Washington Gladden (page 2)

responsibilities.

We may not be identified with any church. If we are not, then it is clearly the part of wisdom for each one to find the church which seems to him to understand its business best, and to give the strength of his life to making its life vigorous and its work efficient.

V

Is the Church Decadent?

The assertion is often made that the church is an effete institution; that its usefulness is past; that it is sinking into innocuous desuetude. That assertion has been current for a thousand years–perhaps longer; there have been many periods in which it was urged much more confidently than it is to-day. This fact would suggest caution in pressing such a judgment. Wise physicians do not hastily pronounce the word of doom. They have seen too many patients return from the gates of death. Men and women who, in their younger days, appear to have a slender hold on life, often reach a vigorous old age. The same thing is true of institutions. It is not prudent to assume that because they are ailing they are moribund.

The Christian church, as we have seen, is far from being in perfect spiritual condition. Some of her symptoms are disquieting. But even as we often have good hope for our friends when their health is impaired, and find that there are good reasons for our hope, so we need not despair of the recovery of the church from the morbid conditions which we acknowledge and deplore. That the patient has a good constitution and surprising vitality is indicated by the experience of nineteen centuries. More than once, through this long lifetime, she has been in a worse way than she is to-day, but she has rallied, and returned to her work with new vigor.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century her case seemed to be desperate; but heroic remedies were used, and while the cure was far from complete, and did not reach the root of the malady, there was at least a partial recovery. In England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in America at the end of the same century, the symptoms were alarming; but she lived through those critical periods, and has done better work since than ever before.

That the work of the church has been sadly misdirected; that she has often put the emphasis in the wrong place; that while she has been doing many things that were worth doing she has largely left undone the main thing she was sent to do, was made plain by our study in the last chapter. And there can be no doubt that this misdirection of her energies, and this failure to exercise her strength in normal ways, have resulted in many morbid conditions, some of which she has partly overcome, but from some of which she is still suffering.

With the disorders from which the church has suffered in past generations we need not now concern ourselves. But the weaknesses and ailments of the present time demand our attention. We must know what they are that we may help to cure them. That responsibility rests upon us all. If the church is to be made whole, it must be by the intelligent and normal action of the men and women who are members of the church. We must know, to begin with, what health is, and what is disease; we must have some clear idea of what would be the normal condition of Christian society.

Men sometimes mistake conditions of disease for conditions of health. In cases of nervous breakdown, patients are often spurred on, by the malady itself, to work when they ought to rest. The less able to work they are, the harder they work. They do not know that this restless activity is a sign of disease, they think it is proof of abounding vitality. And there are many ways in which morbid conditions tend to propagate themselves. The instinctive impulses of an invalid are not safe guides. Yet there are many cases in which, even if the man is not his own medical adviser, he must have an intelligent idea of what ails him, in order that he may be able to follow medical advice, and adopt the regimen which leads to health. His reason must be summoned to discern and resist his morbid impulses, and keep himself in the ways of life.

Equally true is it that if the church, which is the body of Christ, is out of health, the men and women who are the members of that body must know what ails them, and how to supply the remedy. And when they summon their reason and seek to have it divinely enlightened, they are likely to discover that many of their worst disorders are conditions which they have been cherishing; that some of the things they have been most proud of are ills that they must pray and work to be rid of.

1. The first and the worst of the church’s infirmities is unbelief. In one of the moments of vision, when the long obscuration of his light in the future centuries was revealed to him, Jesus sadly wondered whether, when the Son of Man came, he would find faith on the earth. The pathetic query has always been pertinent. Faith is the vital force of Christianity, and the weakening of that vital force is the prime cause of all its disorders.

The unbelief which brings enfeeblement and decay to the church of Christ is not, however, the kind of unbelief which the church is most apt to reprove.

There is, doubtless, in the church of to-day some weakening of faith in the historical facts of the Christian religion, and in the central doctrines of the Christian creed. Science and criticism have rendered incredible some statements which once were universally accepted. Considerable revision of theological belief has been found necessary, and it is probable that in this process the hold of some upon the central verities has been relaxed.

It may even be that the theories of some Christian confessors respecting the person of Christ have been modified, so that his humanity is more strongly affirmed than once it was. To some persons this change of emphasis may seem to be a serious form of unbelief.

Admitting all this, however, these intellectual changes are not the principal cause of the enfeeblement of the church. These changes, however we may regard them, have affected but a small minority of the members of our churches; the great majority of them continue to hold substantially the same theological opinions that they have always held. The trouble with the church is not chiefly a lack of faith in the creeds, it is a lack of faith in Christ. And it is not a lack of faith in the metaphysical theories of Christ’s person, but a lack of faith in the truth of his teaching. It is an unbelief in which the most orthodox people are quite as much involved as those who are considered heretics.

The central question is not, after all, what we think about the nature of Christ. There is good reason to believe that none of the twelve apostles held, during the life of our Lord, opinions which would be regarded as orthodox concerning his person. They believed that he was a great Prophet, a revealer of God; nay, they believed that he was the Messiah, the long promised King, who was to set up his kingdom in this world. Of this they had no doubt. This was the belief that Jesus himself sought to fasten in their minds; and when he had drawn from Simon Peter a confession of this faith he cried out, “Blessed art thou, Simon son of John; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” It was this faith in him as Lord and Ruler of men, as the Founder in this world of a kingdom of righteousness and peace, on which, as he declared, his church should be builded. Such faith as this these twelve men had. They would have found it difficult, probably, to assent to the Nicene Creed or the Athanasian Creed; but they believed in Jesus as Lord and King, and they believed every word of his Magna Charta found in the Sermon on the Mount; and they were ready to do what they could to establish that kingdom in this world. It is just here that the faith of the church is lacking. It believes the Nicene Creed, but it does not believe the Sermon on the Mount. It believes what men have said about Christ; it does not believe what Christ himself said. It does not accept the practical rule of life which he has laid down. It does not believe that the Golden Rule is workable in modern life. It does not believe that it is feasible to love our neighbors as ourselves. It does not believe in the kingdom of heaven as a present possibility. It expects that Christ will come, by and by, in person, with miraculous power, to revolutionize society, and that after that it will be practicable to follow the law of love, in all our human relations; but, for the present, we must let the law of competition control all our practical affairs.

Of course it is not often that the teachings of Christ are directly controverted; they are generally ignored, or passed by, as “counsels of perfection” which we are to admire rather than obey. But we sometimes find arguments in which disbelief in the teachings of Jesus is distinctly justified. In a late volume, one of the great leaders of the German church elaborately contends that we cannot follow Jesus in his social teachings. “Our attitude toward the world,” says Herrmann, “cannot be that of Jesus; even the purpose to will that it should be so is stifled in the air that we breathe to-day. The state of affairs is very clearly described by Naumann, who says with truth: ‘Therefore we do not seek Jesus’ advice on points connected with the management of the state and political economy.’ But when he goes on to say: ‘I give my vote and I canvass for the fleet, not because I am a Christian, but because I am a citizen, and because I have learned to renounce all hope of finding fundamental questions of state determined in the Sermon on the Mount,’ we can detect a fallacy. He regards as painful renunciation what ought, on the part of the Christian, to be a free, decisive, and voluntary act.”[19]

Naumann repudiates, rather regretfully, the counsels of Jesus about economic and civil affairs, but Herrmann says that he does it light-heartedly, because he has found out that these counsels are not applicable to existing conditions.

It is evident that these counsels must be rationally applied,–the spirit and not the letter of them is the essential thing; but what these teachers mean is more than this. How far they have departed from the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount is indicated by the words already quoted. The reason why Naumann does not seek the advice of Jesus in questions of public concern is that he is determined to give his vote and influence for the German fleet; and Herrmann is following the same impulse when he characterizes the call for the disarmament of the nations as a “noble folly.” It is evident that the reason why these teachers feel that the way of Jesus is impracticable is that they are fully committed to the ideas of German imperialism. To conceive that nations could dispense with war is a “noble folly.” And, for the same reason, they conceive that any attempt to substitute cooeperation for competition in the industrial world would be disastrous to modern society. The morality of strife outranks, in their judgment, the morality of service and sacrifice. The law of Jesus may be permitted to hold some subordinate place; it will be found useful in mitigating the savagery of strife; but as the regulative principle of the industrial order it is not to be considered.

The attempt of these German theologians to frame a philosophical refutation of the Sermon on the Mount gives us something of a shock; but, practically, this has been the attitude of the church in all the generations. The hopeful sign is that it does now give us a shock to have the doctrine badly stated.

Through a large part of the Christian era the teaching of Jesus with respect to strife has been flouted by the church. The bitterest and most wasteful wars have been religious wars. The disciples of the Prince of Peace saw no incongruity in the settlement by the sword of such questions as whether Jesus Christ was of the same substance as the Father or of a similar substance; and whether the cup should be administered to the laity in the Eucharist or only the bread. The Thirty Years’ war in Europe was a religious war. Roman Catholic theories still maintain the right of the church to enforce its teachings by the sword.

All these facts show how far, through all its history, the church has departed from the teaching of Jesus. When our German theologians set themselves to prove that the Sermon on the Mount is no sufficient guide for public affairs, they have the whole history of the church behind them.

Nevertheless they might have noted that the drift, for the last few centuries, has been in the direction of the teaching of Jesus. It is hardly conceivable that Christian nations should go to war to-day for the settlement of points of doctrine. Three hundred years ago the whole church thought that necessary; to-day a very large part of the church would think it horrible and monstrous. It is not very long ago that the church believed in the settlement by force of disputes between individuals. The wager of battle was supposed to be a proper and Christian way of determining the guilt or innocence of an accused person. To most of the great Christians of the fifteenth century the proposition to dispense with that would have seemed a “noble folly,” just as the proposition of general disarmament now seems to some twentieth century Christians. But the church has learned that there are better ways of settling personal quarrels than the wager of battle; and it is likely to learn, after a while, that there are better ways of settling international and industrial difficulties than the way of war. The church is beginning to see that the way of Jesus is not, after all, so impracticable as it has always been supposed to be; it is beginning to discern the truth that the law of service is a stronger law than the law of strife. One of these days we shall find the church of Jesus taking its stand on the Golden Rule as the practical rule of everyday life, and insisting upon the organization of the industrial and the political order on the basis of good-will. When that day comes we shall have a right to say that the church believes in Jesus Christ. When that day comes it will be evident to all that the main cause of the church’s enfeeblement through all these centuries has been her unbelief. And we shall marvel that it took her so long to find out what might there is in meekness and what force in gentleness; and that it was so hard for her to understand that the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God stronger than men.

2. The second of the church’s chronic infirmities has been orthodoxism. Perhaps it was the recoil of her unbelief in Christ that sent her over into the intellectual prostration of orthodoxism.

Orthodoxy is defined as correct belief. But when we ask what is correct belief, orthodoxy answers: “That which is generally believed to be correct.” Its demand is, therefore, conformity to current opinion. It assumes that essential truth has been sought out, registered and certified once for all and finally: this you must believe, and you must believe nothing other or more than this. Of course, then, belief must be stereotyped and stationary. There can be no growth of doctrine; no new light can break forth from God’s holy word.

“Orthodoxy begins,” says Phillips Brooks, “by setting a false standard of life. It makes men aspire after soundness in the faith rather than after richness in the truth…. It makes possible an easy transmission of truth, but only by the deadening of truth, as a butcher freezes meat in order to carry it across the sea. Orthodoxy discredits and discourages inquiry, and has made the name of free thinker, which ought to be a crown and glory, a stigma of disgrace. It puts men in the base and demoralizing position in which they apologize for seeking new truth. It is responsible for a large part of the defiant liberalism which not merely disbelieves the orthodox dogma, but disbelieves it with a sense of attempted wrong and of triumphant escape. It is orthodoxy and not truth which has done the persecuting. The inquisitions and dungeons and social ostracisms for opinion’s sake belong to it.”[20]

It is evident that when for loyalty to the truth is substituted loyalty to a prescribed statement of truth, the entire moral order is subverted. Truth for me is what justifies itself to my reason and insight; to that my choices must conform; by that my conduct must be guided. To accept statements to which my judgment does not assent, which are repugnant to my reason, because others seek to impose them upon me, is in the highest degree immoral. “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,” is the apostolic maxim.

Every honest man wants to know what is true, and seeks to have his character and his conduct conform to the truth. But orthodoxy insists that he shall limit his acceptance to fixed and definite statements prepared for him by others. Freedom of investigation is denied him. The limits are set, beyond which his thought must not range. If there is truth outside of the boundaries of orthodoxy, he must not reach out after it; if he does, he shall suffer the consequences.

For there always is a penalty for heresy. Those who diverge from the orthodox standards are always exposed to some measure of censure or discredit. In former days the stake or the gallows was the penalty. John Huss and Michael Servetus, Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer were put to death on the demand of orthodoxy. It was not because they were not lovers and seekers of truth; it was because they declined to assent to the statements which authority sought to impose on them. Orthodoxy has found a great variety of methods of enforcing its demand; in recent times it does not often resort to physical coercion, but it never fails to use some kind of pressure. Those to whom orthodoxy is dearer than truth have ways of their own, even now, of making uncomfortable those to whom truth is dearer than orthodoxy. Thus it is that the progress of truth has been greatly impeded. “Ye shall know the truth,” said Jesus, “and the truth shall make you free.” “Ye shall know,” says orthodoxism, “only the truth that has been prescribed and ticketed by authority; ye shall be taught what is orthodox, and orthodoxy shall keep you safe and sound.” The entire attitude of the mind is changed, under this demand. It is no longer that of free inquiry, of open-minded search for truth; it is that of passive assent, of unreasoned submission to authority.

Just to the extent to which orthodoxism succeeds in forcing its demand is progress rendered impossible. There have always been brave men to whom truth was dearer than orthodoxy, and to them we owe all the gains the church has made. “The lower orders of the church’s workers, the mere runners of her machinery,” says Bishop Brooks, “have always been strictly and scrupulously orthodox; while all the church’s noblest servants, they who have opened to her new heavens of vision and new domains of work,–Paul, Origen, Tertullian, Dante, Abelard, Luther, Milton, Coleridge, Maurice, Swedenborg, Martineau,–have again and again been persecuted for being what they truly were–unorthodox.”[21]

The temper of coercion, physical or moral, which is an essential element in orthodoxism, always produces, in those who do not submit to it, the temper of resentment and rebellion, which largely characterizes what is known as liberalism. Those who are thus flung off into opposition are in no mood to examine fairly the truth that there is in orthodoxy. Their mental attitude is apt to be quite as unfavorable to the discovery of the truth as that of the other party. Between those who affirm, with the threat of the withdrawal of fellowship, and those who deny, with the sense of injury and oppression, the truth has a poor chance for itself in this world. The enfeeblement of the church, in all the generations, has been largely due to this cause.

What orthodoxism produces when it has free course and is glorified, may be seen in the Greek church. More than any other branch of the Christian church the Greek church has put the emphasis upon orthodoxy. The natural and inevitable result has been that that church has destroyed itself and the nation whose life it has dominated and blighted. It is the Greek church that has led Russia to its doom. And it is orthodoxism that has made the Greek church a blind leader of the blind, and has plunged nation and church into the ditch together.

Truth, not orthodoxy, is the sovereign mistress of the human intellect. What I must know, for my salvation, is not what everybody says, but what is true. There is old truth–truth that has nourished the lives of men in many generations; let me cling to that and feed my soul upon it. There is new truth–some fuller outshining of the great revelation of God, in nature or in human nature; let me hail that light and walk in it.

It is often useful for me to know what others have believed and now believe. Not to be influenced by the consenting voices of the great and good of the past would be childish egotism. But it is always needful that my mind should be open to new truth and that I should be free to seek it. Orthodoxism restricts this right and disparages this privilege, and in doing this it has greatly weakened the Christian church.

Several other sources of weakness must be treated much more briefly.

3. Sectarianism is not the least among them. To a large degree it is the product of orthodoxism. Men who venture to think for themselves are driven forth from the fold of the faithful and compelled to organize in separate groups. Sometimes they are not driven out, they go out and slam the doors behind them. The seceders often claim a superior orthodoxy; their separation from the fold is an act of judgment on those they leave behind. The responsibility for these divisions sometimes rests more heavily on those who go out, and sometimes on those who stay in. On the one side or the other, often on both sides, pride of opinion is a main procuring cause. Sometimes men go out because they desire to hold fast in peace the truth which they have found, and sometimes they are thrust out because they will not permit those who are within to hold fast in peace the truth which is their inheritance.

The ambition of leadership also figures largely. Men who are not able to control the church to which they belong are often tempted to lead away a faction in which they may be more conspicuous. Satan, according to the Miltonic mythology, was the founder of the first sect; and his philosophy was that it was better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The leaders of many of the sects have had a similar inspiration.

It would not be true to say that all schisms have sprung from selfishness: they have often originated in a larger vision of the truth, and their testimony, which has cost them many sacrifices, has enlarged the thought and enriched the life of the whole church.

It must, however, be admitted that selfishness, in the forms of ambition and pride of opinion, has had more to do with the multiplication of sects than love of the truth or loyalty to the Master. The existence of such numbers of organizations, differing from one another only in the most trivial particulars, cannot be reconciled with the plain principles of Christian morality. There is no justification, in reason or conscience, for the existence of so many sorts and kinds and classes of Christian disciples. Even if we could admit the wisdom of the larger divisions, what excuse can be offered for the endless subdivisions? What possible need can there be for thirteen different kinds of Baptists, and twelve kinds of Mennonites, and eleven kinds of Presbyterians, and seventeen kinds of Methodists, and twenty-three kinds of Lutherans? Could any rational man maintain that these multitudinous variations on a single string represent distinctions that are useful?

The rivalries and competitions which these sectarian divisions promote are the scandal and the curse of Christendom. The sectarian procedure habitually and brazenly sets aside the Golden Rule and pushes partisan interest, with very slight regard for fairness or equity. Churches are all the while doing to other churches what they would not like to have other churches do to them. “Every church for itself, and the angels take the hindmost,” is the sectarian motto. The competition which exists in the ecclesiastical realm is almost always cutthroat competition; it destroys property and crowds out rivals with merciless purpose.

No argument should he needed to show that the existence of such a spirit and tendency in the church must cripple its power and impede its growth. The sect spirit is the antithesis of the Christian spirit; the sectarian propaganda is an attack upon the fundamental principle of Christianity, which is unity through love. The superior loyalty of every true Christian is due to the kingdom of God. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness!” What makes a man a sectarian is the fact that he loves his sect more than the kingdom of God, and is willing that the kingdom of God should suffer loss in order that his sect may make a gain. Sectarians are doing this very thing, all over the land, every day.

How great have been the injuries suffered by the Christian church through the existence of this antichristian spirit of sect it would be difficult to estimate. How alien it is to the spirit of Jesus Christ one does not need to point out. It is simply amazing that the followers of him who prayed, in his last prayer, that his disciples might all be one, in order that the world might believe in his divine commission, should imagine that they can be pleasing Christ while they persist in these childish divisions.

Some sense of the shame and sin of sectarianism has, of late years, been getting possession of the mind of the church, and the tendencies toward unity are stronger now than the tendencies toward division. Splits and secessions are rare in these times; movements toward unity are multiplying. All this is hopeful, but many generations of toil and sacrifice will be required to recover for the church the ground she has lost by the ravages of sectarianism.

4. Only one more cause of the enfeeblement of the church can be mentioned here; that is her too close reliance upon the principles and forces of the material realm. She too often forgets whence her help must come; she is too willing to go down to Egypt for her allies instead of trusting in the Lord of Hosts. She cannot always understand that she is safer and stronger when she puts her entire reliance on moral and spiritual forces; when she refuses to sacrifice truth for the revenues of the rich or the friendship of the strong.

The church is probably suffering more from this cause at this day than she has ever suffered in any former period. She lives in the midst of the abounding marvels of the materialistic civilization; she sees how much is accomplished through the use of material forces; and the spirit of the time gets into her brain and blood, and she begins to think that money and the things that money can buy are the most essential conditions of her growth and usefulness. Therefore she makes such friendships and adopts such policies as will bring to her the revenues she thinks she must have for the prosecution of her work. And thus her vision is dimmed for the truth she needs to see, and her arm is weakened for the work she has to do.

No influence so insidious as this, and none so fatal, has ever assailed the Christian church. She is passing through her greatest temptation. It is Mammon who has taken her up into an exceeding high mountain and shown her the kingdoms she wants to conquer and the glory she hopes to win, and is saying to her: “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me!” May God grant her the grace to answer “Get thee behind me, Satan; I hear the voice of one who said: Thou shall worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

That the church has suffered serious injury and enfeeblement from the causes we have considered,–from her lack of faith, from her subjection to orthodoxism, from the ravages of sectarianism, from her entanglements with Mammon, no one can deny. But that these evils are tending to increase is not evident. There is reason rather to hope that they are all on the wane, unless it be the last.

That the church is far from being in perfect spiritual condition we will all admit. But that she is growing worse rather than better we need not believe. Most of these maladies are of long standing, but they are less acute now than once they were, and there is better hope of recovery. Above all, we may say that the church knows to-day what ails her better than she ever knew before, and that she may therefore more intelligently proceed to apply the needful remedies.

What kind of treatment is called for will be the subject of the next discussion.

VI

The Coming Reformation

It would be instructive to study the attempts which the church has made, in past generations, to escape from the evil conditions into which she has fallen. For she has been convicted more than once of her sins of omission, of the perversion of her powers, and the misuse of her opportunities, and has bestirred herself to cast off the yokes that were oppressing her, and the bands that were impeding her progress. It cannot be said that she has ever yet become fully conscious of her radical defect. She has never quite clearly discovered that her enfeeblement and failure are primarily due to the fact that she has been neglecting her real business in the world, or making it a secondary concern. When she gets that truth fully before her mind, and that conviction upon her conscience, we may hope for better things.

There was, however, one epoch in her history when she came very near making this discovery. That was the period of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. What happened then is full of interest for us in these days; it throws a flood of light on the problems with which we are dealing.

We have been taught by the historians of the Reformation to think of that event as mainly a theological crisis, as an intellectual revolt against certain doctrines imposed by the church upon the faithful, or a rebellion against the stringency of ecclesiastical discipline. That issues of this nature were deeply involved in it is true; but these were by no means the only causes of that uprising. It was largely a social and economic movement. It was, in its inception, less a reaction against bad theology than a revolt against unchristian social conditions. What weighed most heavily on the people who started the uprising that we call the Reformation was not theological error and confusion, it was their poverty, their servitude, the miseries and wrongs of their daily life. They knew something of the Christ of Nazareth, and they could not believe that he meant to leave them in that condition, and therefore they began to have a dim sense of the truth that the church which bore his name was misrepresenting him, and needed to be reformed. This was the source of the movement known as the Reformation. It was, therefore, a sharp reminder to the church that she had wholly forgotten her main business in the world.

One of the latest of the histories of the Reformation, that of Dr. Thomas M. Lindsay, brings this truth into clear light. His chapter on “Social Conditions” gives us a vivid sketch of the economic and social forces which were operating at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.

It was the time of transition from the old system of home production and home markets to the era of world-wide commerce. Under the old system, industry had been largely regulated by guilds, and there was a fair measure of equality; while trade, though not extensive, was regulated by civic leagues.

But the end of the fifteenth century brought the great geographical discoveries and the beginning of a world trade. “The possibilities of a world commerce,” says Dr. Lindsay, “led to the creation of trading companies; for a larger capital was needed than individual merchants possessed, and the formation of these companies overshadowed, discredited, and finally destroyed the guild system of the mediaeval trading cities. Trade and industry became capitalized to a degree previously unknown…. This increase of wealth does not seem to have been confined to a few favorites of fortune. It belonged to the mass of the members of the great trading companies…. Merchant princes confronted the princes of the state and those of the church, and their presence and power dislocated the old social relations.”[22]

This enormous increase of wealth manifested itself in every form of senseless luxury. Of refinement there was little; pleasures were coarse, indulgence was beastly. “Preachers, economists, and satirists,” says Dr. Lindsay, “denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could drink all rivals beneath the table, and that noble personages seldom met without such a drinking contest. The wealthy, learned, and artistic city of Nuernberg possessed a public wagon which every night was led through the streets, to pick up and convey to their homes drunken burghers found lying in the filth of the streets.”[23]

Such were the manners of the house of mirth at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It might be supposed that when luxury was so riotous the poor would have plenty, but that is never the case. Profusion at the top of the social ladder means poverty at the bottom. The world has never yet been so rich that waste did not work harm to the neediest. Even if the poor had been actually no poorer in these flush days than they had been when manners were simpler, the glaring contrasts would have been maddening. But multitudes of them were, no doubt, not only relatively but positively poorer; the destruction of the guilds of labor, the displacements in industry, had left great numbers not only of the peasantry and the artisans but also of the poorer nobles in practical destitution. The organization of society was giving strength to the strong and weakness to those of no might–thus exactly reversing Mary’s prophecy of what her royal Son should bring; and those who were thus dispossessed and scattered felt, and had a right to feel, that the social organization under which such things could be done was antichristian.

“While,” says Dr. Lindsay, “the social tumults and popular uprisings against authority, which are a feature of the close of the Middle Ages, are usually and rightly enough called peasant insurrections, the name tends to obscure their real character. They were rather the revolts of the poor against the rich, of debtors against creditors, of men who had scantly legal rights or none at all, against those who had the protection of the existing laws; and they were joined by the poor of the towns as well as by the peasantry of the country districts. The peasants generally began the revolt and the townsmen followed, but this was not always the case. Sometimes the mob of the cities rose first and the peasants joined afterwards. In many cases, too, the poorer nobles were in secret or open sympathy with the insurrectionary movement. On more than one occasion they led the insurgents and fought at their head.”[24]

The uprising against the church was due to the fact that the church, instead of being the friend of the poor, had become their social oppressor. Through all these social mutterings runs the outcry against the priests, and this was not because the priests were teaching a false theology, but because they were grinding the faces of the poor. Not only in Germany, but all over Europe this cry was heard. “The priests,” says an English reformer, “have their tenth part of all the corn, meadows, pasture, grain, wood, colts, lambs, geese, and chickens. Over and besides the tenth part of every servant’s wages, wool, milk, honey, wax, cheese, and butter; yea and they look so narrowly after these profits that the poor wife must be accountable to them for every tenth egg, or else she getteth not her rights at Easter, and shall be taken as a heretic.” “I see,” said a Spaniard, “that we can scarcely get anything from Christ’s ministers but for money; at baptism money, at bishoping money, at marriage money, for confession money,–no, not extreme unction without money! They will ring no bells without money, no burial in the church without money; so that it seemeth that Paradise is shut up from them that hath no money. The rich is buried in the church, the poor in the churchyard. The rich man may marry with his nearest kin, but the poor not so, albeit he be ready to die for love of her. The rich may eat flesh in Lent, but the poor may not, albeit fish perhaps be much dearer. The rich man may readily get large indulgences, but the poor none because he wanteth money to pay for them.”[25]

This revolt against priestly oppression was by no means, however, an irreligious uprising. It was characterized by intense religious feeling, with which, as Dr. Lindsay says, “was blended some confused dream that the kingdom of God might be set up on earth, if only the priests were driven out of the land.” Among a populace so ignorant it was, of course, inevitable that the social revolt should take on fanatical forms. Wild zealots arose, drawing the multitude after them, and inciting the people to revolution. Hans Boehm, a wandering piper, had visions and went forth as a preacher of righteousness, railing against priests and civil potentates. True religion, he declared, consisted in worshiping the Blessed Virgin, but the priests were thieves and robbers, the Emperor was a miscreant, “who supported the whole vile crew of princes, overlords, tax gatherers, and other oppressors of the poor.” He predicted the coming of a day when the Emperor himself would be forced, like all poor folks, to work for days’ wages. The people flocked by thousands to hear him preach, but his day was brief.

They burnt him at the stake, but multitudes venerated him, and made pilgrimages to the chapel which had been the scene of his triumph. The “Bundschuh” revolts which broke out in Elsass and spread through Switzerland and Germany were of a similar character. Then came years of famine, which deepened the popular disquiet, and which help to explain the fact that “on the eve of the Reformation the condition of Europe, and of Germany in particular, was one of seething discontent and full of bitter class hatreds–the trading companies and the great capitalists against the guilds, the poorer classes against the wealthier, and the nobles against the towns.”

These were the social conditions in the midst of which Luther appeared. It was on this turbulent flood of social unrest that the Reformation was launched. When the great reformer’s voice was heard, denouncing priestly misrule and hierarchical tyranny, these were the people who listened, and they interpreted his words by their own experience. If his quarrel was largely with theological or ecclesiastical abuses, theirs was mainly with industrial inequalities, but it seemed to them that he was fighting their battle. Indeed, his brave words gave fit utterance to their hopes. For, as the historian reminds us, Luther’s message was democratic. That must have been its character if it was, in any proper sense, a return to “the simplicity that is in Christ.” “It destroyed the aristocracy of the saints, it leveled the barriers between the layman and the priest, it taught the equality of all men before God, and the right of every man of faith to stand in God’s presence, whatever be his rank and condition of life. He had not confined himself to preaching a new theology. His message was eminently practical. In his ‘Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation’ Luther had voiced all the grievances of Germany, had touched upon almost all the open sores of the time, and had foretold disasters not very far off. Nor must it be forgotten that no great leader ever flung about wild words in such a reckless way. Luther had the gift of strong, smiting phrases, of words which seemed to cleave to the very heart of things, of images which lit up a subject with the vividness of a flash of lightning. He launched tracts and pamphlets from the press about almost everything, written for the most part on the spur of the moment, and when the fire burned. His words fell into souls full of the fermenting passion of the times. They drank in with eagerness the thoughts that all men were equal before God, and that there are divine commands about the brotherhood of mankind of more importance than all human legislation. They refused to believe that such golden ideas belonged to the realm of spiritual life above.”[26]

When, therefore, the religious reformation was fairly launched, a great uprising of the poor people speedily followed. It seemed to them that the return to Christ meant, for them, the breaking of yokes and the enlargement of opportunity, and they proceeded to claim for themselves some portion of the liberty that belonged to them. Their demands, as voiced in their “Twelve Articles,” were by no means extravagant, from our point of view. The abuses of which they complained were flagrant, the rights they claimed were far less than are now, even in despotic Russia, fully granted to the humblest people. And they protested most earnestly that they “wanted nothing contrary to the requirements of just authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical, nor to the gospel of Christ.”

It would, however, have been unreasonable to expect that such people would confine their protest within the bounds of law and order. It was, in fact, a revolution, and it discerned no way to its goal but the way of violence. That, indeed, is the path that most of the seekers after liberty have felt constrained to take.

What was Luther’s relation to this uprising? It cannot be said that he had kindled the flame, but he had fanned it to a conflagration. And yet when it began to rage, he found himself unable to control it. It had come to pass, in the exigencies of the warfare he was waging, that his allies were the German princes. Only through them, as he believed, could he hope to win the fight he was making against the Roman hierarchy. If he put himself at the head of the peasants’ movement he would alienate the princes, and it seemed to him that the Protestant cause in Germany would he stamped out in blood. And therefore, after vainly attempting to quiet the insurrection, with whose principal aims he had confessed himself in sympathy, he turned upon the peasants in almost savage wrath, and in his tract “Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants,” he urged the princes to crush the insurrection. “In the case of an insurgent,” he says, “every man is both judge and executioner. Therefore, whoever can should knock down, strangle, and stab such publicly or privately, and think nothing so venomous, pernicious, and devilish as an insurgent…. Such wonderful times are these that a prince can merit heaven better with bloodshed than another with prayer.”

The princes followed Luther’s counsel, and the peasants’ uprising was put down with relentless severity. Thus ended in blood the movement which promised to make the church the champion of social freedom. It seems, as we look back upon it, a tragical issue. What these poor people asked for was really only a crumb or two from the table of the lords of privilege; they thought that the brotherhood taught by Jesus warranted them in expecting it, and they seemed to hope that the church of Jesus Christ, when purified from formalism and superstition, would support that expectation. It must have been a bitter disappointment to them. And it is a sorrowful reflection that the great hero of the Reformation fell, in this matter, so far below the Christian ideal.

Doubtless his strenuous repugnance to revolutionary methods was a good trait in his character; but surely revolutions are sometimes justifiable, and it looks, at this distance, as though this one was as nearly so as most of those that have succeeded. If Luther had put his great heart and mighty will at the head of this movement which he confessed to be most righteous, it might have succeeded, and Protestantism, in its beginnings, might have made a firm alliance with those whom Jesus Christ recognizes as his representatives in the earth. But it was hard for him to believe that the poor of this world, chosen to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, were stronger allies than the German nobles. He thought that he must have the support of the princes, and he turned his back on Christ’s poor.

It was a melancholy conclusion, not only for Luther but for the cause which he represented. “It is probable,” says Dr. Lindsay, “that he saved the Reformation in Germany by cutting it free from the revolutionary movement, but the wrench left marks on his own character as well as in the movement he headed.” One wonders whether success won at such cost is worth having; and whether, if he had gone down with the peasants in their struggle for freedom and opportunity, the sacrifice would not have brought a larger and fairer Reformation.

It was the coming reformation to which your attention was called, and we have kept our eyes for a long time upon the past. But this history has been uttering, through the entire recital, its own prophetic word. Conditions have greatly changed since the sixteenth century; but we are still confronting the same issue which forced itself upon the church in the days of Luther. Many of the disabilities and wrongs under which the common people were suffering then have been removed, but the poor are still with us, and the cries of millions of overworked, underfed, pale-faced men and women and children have entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. There ought not to be any poor people in this country; if it were a thoroughly Christian country there would not be. If there were those who because of mental or physical defect were unable to care for themselves, we could easily provide for their wants, and in the exercise of such compassion we should find an abundant reward. If there were those who because of idleness and vice were indisposed to provide for themselves, we should find a way of inspiring them with a better mind. But, if this were a thoroughly Christian country, there would be no willing workers dwelling anywhere near the borders of want. There are resources here which are ample for the abundant supply of all human needs; if ours were a completely Christianized society, the needs of those who were able and willing to work would be abundantly supplied.

We are often told that this is already done; that there are no poor in this country save those who are either incompetent or indolent or vicious. If that could be proved, the question would still remain whether the incompetency and the indolence and the viciousness may not, to a considerable degree, be the effects of causes for which society is responsible, and which, in a thoroughly Christianized society, would not be permitted to exist. But it cannot be proved that poverty is wholly the fault of the poor. The fact is that a very large number of those who are doing the world’s work to-day are receiving less than their fair share of the wealth they produce.

It is true that there are many laborers who earn large wages. Compactly organized labor unions have been able to secure a favorable distribution of the product of their industry. But we are often reminded that but a small percentage of the laborers of this country are organized; and the wages of those thus unprotected are often lamentably small. Many attempts have been made to find out what is the average wage of the average workman; our census reports contain very carefully prepared statistics. I have taken pains to go over some of these, and here are the results.

In the textile trades, with 661,451 workers, the average weekly wage of all workers is $6.07; of men over sixteen, $7.63; of women, $5.18; of children under sixteen, $2.15.

In the iron workers’ trades, with 222,607 workers, the average weekly wage is $10.46.

In the boot and shoe trades, with 142,922 workers, the average for all is $7.96; for men over sixteen, $9.11; for women, $6.13; for children under sixteen, $3.40.

In the men’s clothing trades, with 120,950 workers, the average for all is $7.06; for men, $10.90; for women, $4.88; for children, $2.61.

These weekly wages are obtained by dividing the annual wage by 52. Often the weekly rate is much higher, but for many weeks the workers are unemployed; the only fair estimate is that which is based upon the annual wage.

Have we any right to be content with conditions like these? Is the average wage of the average worker, as it is here indicated, all that he ought to ask? Should society wish him to be content with such an income? Sit down yourself and figure out just what it would mean to be obliged to maintain a family of four or five on such a stipend as is indicated in any of these trades–even those best paid. Find out how much should have to go for rent, and how much for food, and how much for the plainest clothing, and how much for doctor’s bills, and school books, and street-car fare, and how much would be left, after that, for books and church contributions and the wholesome pleasures which we ought to count among the necessaries of life. Life can be maintained on such an income, but is it the kind of life that we wish our fellow men to live? And is there any need that life, for the humble laborer, should be reduced in this rich land to its lowest terms? With the marvelous productiveness of fields and mines and forests and waters, with the immense development of machinery, by which the wealth of the nation is multiplied, might we not have an organization of industry and a method of distribution which would give to the army of manual toilers a much larger average income?

That is the question they are asking, and it calls for a candid answer. Their needs are not as dire as were those of the German peasants of the sixteenth century, but they are real and serious needs. Now, as then, a tremendous industrial revolution has dislocated industries and demoralized and impoverished many; now, as then, the concentration of capital in great companies has destroyed small enterprises and left many who were once thrifty stranded and discouraged; now, as then, glaring contrasts in condition excite the resentments of the needy; now, as then, the propertiless are wondering whether this is the kind of thing that the church has been looking for when she has prayed that the kingdom of God may come. And there is a feeling now, as there was then, among the millions of the toilers, that the church which assumes to represent Jesus Christ needs to be reformed, in order that through its testimony and its leadership the kingdom of God may come.

It is sadly true that there are many among these toiling millions who are embittered against the church, who have no faith in it, and no expectation that any good will come out of it; but the great majority are not hostile to the church; at worst they are indifferent, and this indifference is due to their belief that the church no longer represents Jesus Christ. Toward him there is often a pathetic outreaching of hope; if the church would come back to the simplicity that is in Christ and would plant itself on the Sermon on the Mount, it would quickly win their loyalty. And I cannot help feeling that now, as in the sixteenth century, there is in the minds of the toiling millions “a confused dream that the kingdom of God might be set up in the land,” and that the time is ripe for it. Nor can I deem it possible that this great expectation of the multitude will now be disappointed. The church of this day must be able to see that this call of the poor and the humble is the call of its Master. It is with the weak and the needy that he is always identified; service of them is loyalty to him; neglect of them is scorn of him. It is his own word.

The coming reformation will be signalized by a great change in the attitude of the church toward the toiling classes. It will not turn its back on them, as it did in Luther’s day; it will not maintain toward them an attitude of kindly patronage, as it has done in our day; it will recognize the fact that its welfare is bound up with them; that the barriers which separate them from its sympathies and fellowships must be broken down, at whatever cost; that it must make them believe that the church of Jesus Christ is their church; that it needs them quite as much as they need it; that it is a monstrous thing even to conceive that a church of Jesus Christ could exist as a class institution, with the largest social class in the community outside of it.

The coming reformation will consist in the awakening of the church to its social responsibilities. It will see more clearly than it has ever yet seen, that those who pray that the kingdom of God may come, and who are responsible, as citizens of a republic are responsible, for the answering of that prayer, must see to it that justice and liberty and opportunity are established in the land. The church of Jesus Christ, with a passion that is born of loyalty to its Master, must set itself to the task of realizing, in the social order, the principles of his teaching. That was what the peasants of the sixteenth century called upon it to do; and for answer it turned and smote them to the earth. It will not repeat that blunder, which was nothing short of a crime. It hears the same call to-day, and when it obeys, as obey it must, it will save its own life and that of the nation with whose destiny it is put in trust.

VII

Social Redemption

The New Reformation will be wrought out with weapons that are not carnal. One of the lessons that the church has learned, in the nineteen centuries of its history, is that it must keep itself free from all suspicion of entanglement with physical force.

That statement needs qualification. It is not universally true. The Greek church, as we have seen, is still fatally involved in political complications; the Roman church, while forced to abstain from the use of the temporal power, has maintained its right to use it; and other state churches, as those of England and Germany, retain some hold upon the political arm. But we are speaking of the church in our own country; and of the American church it is true that it has ceased to rely upon the power of the state. The entire divorce which our constitution decrees between the government of the church and the government of the state has become, with us, a settled policy, which we do not wish to disturb. It is doubtful whether intelligent Roman Catholics in the United States would be willing to have this condition changed, and no other Christians would for one moment consent to it.

What the church does in the way of improving social conditions must, therefore, be done by purely moral and spiritual agencies. Society is not to be Christianized by any kind of coercion. The church cannot use force in any way, nor can it enter into any coalition with governments that rest on force. “It is not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord,” that the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. It is as irrational to try to propagate Christianity by coercive measures of any description, as it would be to try to make plants grow by applying to them mechanical pressure.

Nor can the church undertake to dictate or prescribe the forms of industrial society. Its function is not the organization of industry. It would not wisely attempt to decide between different methods of managing business.

It would not, for example, be expedient for the church, at the present time, to take sides in the controversy between collectivism and private enterprise. The Socialists declare that the wage system, based on private capital, tends to injustice and oppression; the advocates of the existing system contend that Socialism would destroy the foundations of thrift and welfare. The church cannot be the umpire in this contest, nor can it take sides with either party. Questions of economic method are beyond its province. Its concern is not with the machinery of society, but with the moral motive power. Or, it might be truer to say that it seeks to invigorate the moral life of men, and trusts that reinforced life to make its own economic forms. Its business is to fill men’s minds with the truth as it is in Jesus, and to make them see that that truth applies to every human relation; and it ought to believe that when this truth is thus received and thus applied, it will solve all social problems. When employers and employed are all filled with the spirit of Christ, the wage system will not be a system of exploitation, but a means of social service.

Here is an employer of many hundreds of men, at the head of a very large business, which is rapidly increasing. This is not an imaginary case. This employer is a man of flesh and blood, and he is in the very thick of the competitive melee; he is using the machinery of the wage system, but he is governing all his business by the principles of Christianity, and the business is thriving in a marvelous way. This does not mean that the manager is piling up money for himself, for he is not: he is living very frugally, and is adding nothing to his own accumulation; but the business is growing by leaps and bounds. The increasing profits, every year, are distributed in the form of stock among the laborers who do the work, and the customers who purchase the goods. The men who do the work are buying for themselves beautiful homes in the vicinity of the factory; in a few more years they will own a large part of the stock of the concern. This manager is not getting rich; but he has the satisfaction of seeing his business prospering in his hands; he is helping a great many men to find the ways of comfort and independence, and he insists that he has himself found the secret of a happy life. It is evident that if all employers were governed by the same motives, the wage system would be an instrument of philanthropy. Whether this man is a church member or not does not appear, but he is certainly a Christian; he has learned the way of Jesus, and is walking in it. If the church could inspire all its members with this kind of social passion, all social questions would be solved. And this is the church’s business–to inspire its members with this kind of social passion. Without this spirit in their hearts, no matter what the social machinery might be, the outcome would be envying and strife and endless unhappiness.

We have had the inside history of some of the many communistic enterprises that have come to grief, and all of them have been wrecked by the selfishness of their members, most of whom were seeking for soft places, and shirking their duties,–each trying to get as much as he could out of the commonwealth and to give in return for it as little service as possible. These contrasted cases show that the machinery of the wage system cannot prevent the exercise of brotherliness, and that the machinery of communism will not secure it. No kind of social machinery will produce happiness or welfare when selfish men are running it; and no kind of social machinery will keep brotherly men from behaving brotherly.

We are often told by Socialists that the present regime of individual initiative and private capital tends to make men selfish and unbrotherly, while the tendency of Socialism would be to make men unselfish and fraternal. If the church were sure that this is the truth, she would be inclined to throw her influence on the side of Socialism. But, on the other hand, it is urged that Socialism tends to merge the individual in the mass, to destroy the virtues of self-respect and self-reliance, and to weaken the fibre of manhood. If the church were sure that this is true, she would be constrained to pause before committing herself to the socialistic programme.

She knows, in fact, that there is truth in both these contentions. That the individualistic regime has bred a fearful amount of heartlessness and rapacity is painfully evident; that such socialistic experiments as have been tried have weakened human virtue appears to be true. Under which regime the greater damage would be done is not yet quite clear. Therefore the church cannot commit herself to either of these methods. The best work she can do, at the present time, is to inspire men with a love of justice and a spirit of service. She must rear up a generation of men who hate robbery in all its disguises; who are determined never to prosper at the expense of their neighbors, and who know how to find their highest pleasure in helping their fellow men. If the Christian morality means anything, it means all this. A church which represents Jesus Christ on the earth must set before herself no lower aim than this. And a generation of men whose hearts are on fire with this purpose may be trusted to fill the earth with righteousness and peace, whether they work with the machinery of the wage system or with the machinery of Socialism.

There are many good men, outside the church as well as within it, who believe that the existing social order can never be Christianized; that it must be replaced by a new social system. But most of us are still clinging to the belief that the existing social order can be Christianized, so that justice may be established in it, and good-will find expression through it. That it has been sadly perverted we all confess; we acknowledge with shame that it has become, in large measure, the instrument of injustice and oppression. But we believe that it may be reformed, so that it shall represent, in some fair degree, the kingdom of God.

The redemption of the social order is, then, the problem now before us. Can it be accomplished? President Roosevelt thinks that it can, and those who stand with him and support him assume that the existing competitive regime can be moralized and made to represent the interests of equity and fair dealing. If this can be done, nothing more is needed. If it cannot be done, the existing regime must make way for something better. The conviction that it can be done is finding expression just now in the vigorous efforts that are being made to amend and strengthen the laws which restrain plunderers and oppressors, so that opportunities may be equalized and the paths to success be kept open for men of all ranks and capacities. This is simple justice, and for this the church of God must stand with all the might of her influence.

That she has been derelict in the discharge of this duty must be confessed. If she had kept the charge committed to her, the inequalities and spoliations now burdening society would not be in existence. For although it is not the business of the church to furnish to the world an economic programme, it is her business to see that no economic programme is permitted to exist under which injustice and oppression find shelter. The right to reprove and denounce all social arrangements by which the few prosper at the expense of the many is one of her chartered rights as the institute of prophecy. A church which fails to exercise this function is faithless to her primary obligation.

That the church has incurred heavy blame because of the feebleness of her testimony against such wrongs must now be confessed, and the least she can do to make amends for this infidelity is to speak now and henceforth, with commanding voice, against all the corporate wrongs that infest society. It may be that by her testimony the magistrates will be strengthened so to enforce the laws that aggressors shall be restrained, and freedom and opportunity secured to all; and that thus the existing industrial order may become, so far as law can make it, the servant of justice and good-will.

This is the first step toward social redemption. The reenthronement of justice is the primary obligation. John the Baptist must speak first. The conviction of social sin is the beginning of social righteousness. The church has a great work to do in awakening the public conscience to forms of injustice which are so involved and concealed that our attention is not fixed upon them. Professor Ross has just announced a volume with the title “Sin and Society.” It is an illuminating word. The deadliest of the evils which are oppressing the community to-day come under this category. They are hidden from the public view. They assail you from ambush and you are helpless. The deadly missiles smite you on every side, but there is no revealing flash by which you can locate your foe. The social order is so complex that wrongs of this nature are easily perpetrated. Many of the transactions by which we are wont to profit are veiled injustices. They are of a nature so subtle and indirect that the law has not yet defined and forbidden them. Those who suffer these injustices are at a distance from us, and there is a network of legal and commercial relations between ourselves and them; we know that they will never confront us and call us to account; it is safe for us to do wrong, and we keep on doing it until our consciences are dulled, and we are not able to see that any wrong has been done.

The fact is, that such a complex social system as ours needs for its safe administration a kind of conscientiousness far higher and finer than that which men needed for honest living fifty years ago. Unless our minds are trained to see the right and wrong of very intricate transactions; unless our ethical imagination is sensitive enough to discern the nature of far-reaching and wide-spreading social relations, we shall constantly be profiting by the injury of our neighbors.

It is the business of the church to train the consciences of men for the moral problems that confront them, and this work has been but indifferently done. The first step in the redemption of the social order is the education of the Christian conscience to discern the smokeless sins. It is with evils of this character that the nation is now in a life and death grapple; the church ought to be able, by its testimony, to lend effective aid in this conflict.

The nature of the testimony needed may be indicated by a typical instance.

Not many years ago a very prosperous manufacturing company was doing business in a thriving American village, giving employment to fifteen hundred men and women, many of whom had purchased homes, in the expectation of having permanent occupation and livelihood. It was known to be a well-paying business; its stock, which was in few hands, was not in the market.

Suddenly a project of reorganization was announced, and stock amounting to five times the value of the property was placed upon the market. It was eagerly taken, for the reputation of the company was very high. With the proceeds of this sale of securities the managers made themselves very rich men. It was not necessary for them to do business any longer. Indeed, they could not have continued to pay dividends on the amount of stock which they had sold; they had never expected to do any such thing. What they did was promptly to close the business. The price of the stock dropped immediately to the neighborhood of zero, millions of values were canceled, and thousands of investors were made to suffer loss. But the direct consequences were seen in the village whose prosperity was suddenly destroyed. Fifteen hundred men and women were deprived, at a stroke, of employment and livelihood. In many homes there was destitution and hunger; hundreds of men were compelled to seek employment elsewhere, sacrificing the homes whose value had been greatly reduced; businesses that depended on the patronage of the mill hands were ruined; churches were paralyzed; families were scattered; discouraged men fell into ways of dissipation; young women were led into the paths of shame.

All this was done under the forms of law, and yet it would be hard to find in the annals of crime an instance more flagitious. And the men who did this thing were church members–members in good standing, leading members of an evangelical church. Nor does it appear that they suffered any discredit in the church to which they belonged, and to whose revenues they continued to contribute out of the plunder by which they had impoverished and ruined so many. The church had not sufficient moral sense to reprove and denounce this iniquity. What is worse, the church had not had enough moral sense to make these men see beforehand that such an act was infamous.

Undoubtedly they would have promptly justified themselves. “Such transactions,” they would have said, “are occurring every day; what the law does not forbid, and what everybody else does, cannot be wrong. The property was ours, and we had a right to put our own price on it, and sell it for what it would bring. The business was ours, and we had a right to do what we pleased with it, to keep it running or shut it down when we got ready: it is a free country: do you think you can compel a man to go on doing business when he prefers to quit? We never guaranteed permanent employment to these people: we paid them their wages while they worked for us, and that is the end of our obligation to them.”

Some such answer they would, no doubt, have made to any one who called in question their conduct; and by such an answer they would have revealed the failure of the church to which they belonged to bring home to them their social obligations.

The existing social order can never be redeemed unless a fire can be kindled on the earth in whose clear shining light such deeds as these can be seen in all their deformity, and in whose purifying flame such excuses as these will be utterly consumed. We must have laws to make such wrongs impossible; but behind the laws must be the moral insight and the social passion which shall make them effective, and it is the business of the church to furnish these. When this is done we shall have made a good beginning in the work of social redemption.

But it will be only a beginning. The work of John the Baptist comes first, but one mightier than he must follow. The voice of one crying in the wilderness is but the prelude of that larger revelation which is made upon the mountain top. To bring home to men the obligations of the law, and to show them wherein they are failing to obey it, is the first duty of the church in the present crisis; but it is the gospel with which she is primarily put in charge.

Clearer teaching about social morality is fundamental, but the great need, after all, is the vitalization of morality. The moral code, no matter how accurate may be its precepts, tends to become a dead letter, unless it is constantly revivified by the spirit of religion.

The Sermon on the Mount is often conceived of as purely ethical teaching, but the heart of it all is religion. The revelation of the Fatherhood of God is the light which shines through all these words and furnishes the motive of all this morality. If we do the things here commanded, in the way that Jesus expects us to do them, it is because we know ourselves to be the children of our Father in heaven, living in his presence, rejoicing in the great love wherewith he has loved us, trusting in his care, seeking his kingdom, doing his will. The church which represents Jesus Christ in the world will never forget that its business is the leavening of society with the life of Christ; but neither can it forget that the life of Christ can only be maintained by constant communion with the Father. That the spiritual life of Jesus himself was thus maintained, the record makes clear. The central fact of his experience was his living union with the Father. We talk of “the practice of the presence of God;” Jesus was the only man who has ever perfectly realized it. And no one who knew him ever failed to see that it was the Father’s kindness and compassion and grace and truth that were being manifested in his life. It was because he was filled with all the fullness of God that he imparted to those who received him the spirit of good-will, the passion for social service.

The church which represents him in the world will need, for its social service, the same inspiration. Unless its life is fed from this fountain, its stream will soon run dry. There are those who seem to think that sociology can solve all the problems of our modern life. If sociology be sufficiently expanded, this may be true; for a truly scientific sociology would have to explain how men came to be social beings, and what is the bond that unites them. If it finds that their relation to a common Father is the fundamental fact of their existence, then it would know that religion is at the heart of it, and that right relations with God are the spring and source of right relations with men. But a sociology which ignores this primary fact has in it no redemptive power.

The more earnestly, therefore, we contend that the business of the church is the Christianization of the social order, the more strenuously we must maintain that she is powerless to do this work except as her life is fed by faith and prayer. The redemption of the social order is the greatest task she has undertaken, and she needs for it a strength that can only come from conscious fellowship with God. If she ever needed inspiration, she needs it now. If there ever was a time when she could dispense with the divine guidance and grace, that time is not now. The churches which desert the places of prayer, and think to substitute the wisdom of men for the power of God, are not going to give much aid in this struggle.

“It must be claimed,” says one, “on behalf of the passion for God, that where it exists it will–automatically, as has been said–set charity, love, all sweet graces of philanthropic activity, into quick and ceaseless play…. If the emphasis of religious thought be made to fall upon the idea of life, this cannot fail to be; for to have the divine life is to be possessed of and to give out the divine love…. The regeneration of human society is found to come from the dominance of spiritual passion, even though it be not the first thing on which spiritual passion is set; the saint will be–just because he is a saint–a philanthropist too, since a true sainthood must number love among the graces of character it brings. It is a fact–one has to make the sad admission–that religious people, professedly spiritual men and women, have been and still are in some cases eaten through and through by selfishness; these are those who, so that they can declare heaven to be their own, have no care for the present hell in which so many of their fellows spend their days and years. But that is not because they are too deeply immersed in the passion for God,–it is because they have not really immersed themselves in its flood. And in claiming for a Godward passion the regulative and supreme place among the elements of life, we do but secure a fuller tenancy among those elements of a manward love; for the nature which sets itself to receive the whole of God will, ere it knows it, and as an automatic effect of the new life it wins, give itself to its brethren in their need. For God is love, and he must dwell in love who dwells in God.”[27]

We may hesitate to say that when the passion for God is the only thing aimed at it is bound to result in social regeneration; there are too many facts which prove the contrary. The aim must always include both the Godward and the manward obligations; the first and the second great commandments are of equal rank; what needs to be insisted on is the impossibility of divorcing them.

The church which seeks the redemption of society cannot, then, dispense with its religion. Nothing has been made plainer, during the recent exposures of social decay, than the fact that our social morality must have a religious foundation. Even the man on the street is ready to concede that no righteousness is adequate for the present emergency but that which springs from faith in a righteous God. And nothing is more needed, at this hour, than the deepening of men’s faith in the great religious verities.

It is often said that the only cure for existing social ills is a great revival of religion, and this is true. But the revival of religion which is needed is not the kind which the churches are most apt to seek. The religion which needs to be revived is not that which puts the sole emphasis on the safety and welfare of the individual, but that which equally exalts the social welfare; which identifies the interests of each with the interests of all; which makes men see and feel that no salvation is worth anything to any man that does not put that man into Christian relations with his neighbors. Nothing but religion will do this for any man, and the religion which fails to do this is a spurious Christianity.

A great revival we shall see, one of these days, which will have this character. It will bind together the two great commandments of the law, and make men feel the weight of both of them. It will compel them to recognize the truth that, while the root of their religion is faith in God, the fruit of their religion is love for men. It will drive home the fact that the religion which does not hinder a man from being a boodler or a grafter; which permits a man to enjoy religion while fleecing his neighbors by crafty schemes of finance or artful legalized robberies; which allows the love of gain to triumph over truth and honor and brotherly kindness; which sits serene and complacent while social classes make war on each other, and children’s lives are consumed by grinding toil, and women are forced by want into the ways of shame, and the enemies of society are set free to make gain by the ruin of human souls, is a religion which is not worth having. It will insist that a religion which is rightly described as the life of God in the souls of men, would begin in the house of God itself, and kindle there a consuming flame before which such iniquities could not stand. Perhaps it would set men to saying–they might not feel like singing–Thomas Hughes’s great hymn:–

“O God of truth, whose living word
Upholds whate’er hath breath,
Look down on thy creation, Lord,
Enslaved by sin and death.

“Set up thy standard, Lord, that we Who claim a heavenly birth
May march with thee to smite the lies That vex thy groaning earth.

“_We_ fight for truth, _we_ fight for God, Poor slaves of lies and sin!
He who would fight for thee on earth Must first be true within.

“Thou God of truth, for whom we long, Thou who wilt hear our prayer,
Do thine own battle in our hearts, And slay the falsehood there.

“Still smite! still burn! till naught is left But God’s own truth and love;
Then, Lord, as morning dew come down, Rest on us from above.

“Yea, come! thus tried as in the fire, From every lie set free,
Thy perfect truth shall dwell in us And we shall live in thee.”

It is hardly needful to say that the redemption of the social order will not be wrought out without sacrifice. “The redemption of the soul is costly,” says the Psalmist. No man is rescued from moral degradation and death without suffering and sacrifice. Those who are saved are more often saved by the suffering of others in their behalf than by their own suffering. But the price of a soul is apt to be high, and love is sometimes able to pay it.

The redemption of society from the welter of selfishness and brutishness and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking. The church is here, as Christ’s representative, to take up this work; and it must not expect to accomplish it without suffering. “It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord.” If the Church is Christ’s servant, she must not expect to find any better way than his way of saving the world.

It is true, as we have seen, that the present deplorable conditions are due to the failure of the church to enforce the Christian morality. The price that she must pay for the redemption of society is heavy because of her own neglect. But it must be paid. There is no other way of salvation.

Thus it appears that the church which bears the name of Jesus Christ has come to its testing time. It finds itself in the midst of a society whose tendencies are downward. Mammon is on the throne; the greed of gain is eating the heart out of commercial honor; reputations are crumbling; confidence is rudely shaken; the most cynical schemes for plundering the multitudes are daily brought to light; social classes stand over against each other distrustful and defiant; the house of mirth resounds with the mad revelry of the wasters, while the purlieus are noisome with poverty and vice.

Can this society be redeemed? Can this all-ruling commercialism be held in check, and this reign of plunder be overthrown, and all this seething selfishness and heartlessness and suspicion be made to give place to good-will and kindness, to trust and truth, to faith and honor? It will never be done without a vast expenditure of sacrificial love. “This kind goeth not forth but by prayer and fasting.” Is the church ready for this struggle? Is she willing to put forth the effort and pay the cost which is required for the redemption of society?

VIII

The New Evangelism

Those who have followed these discussions from the beginning will not be inclined to hesitate in answering the question with which the last chapter closed. That society can be redeemed, and that the church can and will purge herself from the things that defile her beauty and corrupt her powers, and gird herself for the redemptive work assigned her, is the faith of every loyal Christian. The grievous failures of the church we cannot deny and must not palliate; it is of the utmost importance that she be brought face to face with them, and be made to see how far short she has come of her high calling. Such criticism she has received from the beginning. The seven churches of Asia were sharply called to account by the beloved disciple; their faithlessness and neglect were unflinchingly brought home to them. The churches at Ephesus and Sardis and Laodicea had as hard things said about them as have been said in these chapters of the churches of this generation, and probably deserved them no less. We cannot doubt that that clear-eyed witness, if he were confronting the church of the twentieth century, would be constrained to say: “I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead…. Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased in goods and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art the wretched one, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: I counsel thee to buy of me gold refined by fire, that thou mayest become rich; and white garments, that thou mayest clothe thyself, and that the shame of thy nakedness be not made manifest; and eye-salve to anoint thine eyes, that thou mayest see. As many as I love, I reprove and chasten; be zealous therefore, and repent.” In every generation such chastisement has been needed; the need is no greater to-day than in past generations, and the chastening love no less. What Lowell says of this country, many a Christian believer has been constrained to say of the church:–

“I loved her old renown, her stainless fame; What better proof than that I loathed her shame.”

But this keen sense of her shortcomings is not inconsistent with an unfaltering faith in the recovery of her integrity and in her final triumph. And those who have read the history of the Christian church with sympathetic vision can hardly doubt that her brightest days are still before her.

For while it must be admitted that she has neglected, hitherto, her great work of social redemption, it cannot be said that she is more neglectful of it now than she has been in past years; the truth is that she is nearer to the recognition of it to-day than she has ever been. Derelict as she is to her primary obligation, it must yet be said that a consciousness of that dereliction is beginning to make her uneasy, and that has never before been true of any large portion of her membership. Since the earliest centuries the possibility of transforming the social order by purely spiritual influences has scarcely dawned upon her. So long as society was feudalistic or aristocratic, the problem seemed to be beyond her reach; she might hope to improve society, by inculcating kindness and charity, but hardly to reconstruct it upon new foundations.

The advent of democracy has brought home to her her social responsibilities. Here in America, more than anywhere else, the nature of her social obligation has been revealed. Here the fact cannot be disguised that the people are the sovereigns, and that social as well as political relations are under their direct control. The sovereign people have pledged themselves one to another, in their constitution, to refrain from establishing, by law, any form of religion; but they have also covenanted together to promote the common welfare. This puts the responsibility for social conditions upon the whole people, and the Christian people are among them. They cannot avoid the obligation to apply Christian principles to social conditions. Power is theirs to be used in Christ’s name and for the promotion of his kingdom. To see that society is furnished with right ruling ideas, and organized on Christian principles, is their main business. And while there are many by whom this obligation is still but feebly felt, yet there is a goodly number of those in whose minds the leaven is working, and to whom the nature of the kingdom that Jesus came to establish is being clearly revealed. That this number is destined to grow very rapidly we may reasonably hope.

The present situation is so clearly outlined by a recent writer that we may welcome a liberal quotation:–

“The first apostolate of Christianity was born from a deep fellow-feeling for social misery, and from the consciousness of a great historical opportunity. Jesus saw the peasantry of Galilee following him about with their poverty and their diseases, like shepherdless sheep that have been scattered and harried by beasts of prey, and his heart had compassion on them. He felt that the harvest was ripe but there were few to reap it. Past history had come to its culmination, but there were few who understood the situation and were prepared to cope with it. He bade his disciples to pray for laborers for the harvest, and then made them answer their own prayers by sending them out two by two to proclaim the kingdom of God. That was the beginning of the world-wide mission of Christianity.

“The situation is repeated on a vaster scale to-day. If Jesus stood to-day amid our modern life, with that outlook on the condition of all humanity which observation and travel and the press would spread before him, and with the same heart of humanity beating in him, he would create a new apostolate to meet the new needs in a new harvest time of history.

“To any one who knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs, and the long reaches of time needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems like a fair and futile dream. Yet, in fact, it is not one tithe as hopeless as when Jesus set out to do it. When he told his disciples, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth; ye are the light of the world,’ he expressed the consciousness of a great historic mission to the whole of humanity. Yet it was a Nazarene carpenter speaking to a group of Nazarene peasants and fishermen. Under the circumstances at that time it was an utterance of the most daring faith,–faith in himself, faith in them, faith in what he was putting into them, faith in faith. Jesus failed and was crucified, first his body by his enemies and then his spirit by his friends; but that failure was such an amazing success that to-day it takes an effort on our part to realize that it required any faith on his part to inaugurate the kingdom of God and to send out his apostolate.

“To-day, as Jesus looks out upon humanity, his spirit must leap to see the souls responsive to his call. They are sown broadcast through humanity, legions of them. The harvest field is no longer deserted. All about us we hear the clang of the whetstone and the rush of the blades through the grain and the shout of the reapers. With all our faults and our slothfulness, we modern men in many ways are more on a level with the mind of Jesus than any generation that has gone before. If that first apostolate was able to remove mountains by faith, such an apostolate as Christ could now summon might change the face of the earth.”[28]

The time is ripe for such an apostolate. The old type of evangelism has plainly had its day. Strenuous efforts are put forth to revive it, but their success is meagre. It is easy by expending much money in advertising, by organizing a great choir, and employing the services of gifted and earnest men, to draw large congregations; but the great mass of those who attend these services are church members,–the outside multitude is scarcely, touched by them. Those who are gathered into the church in these meetings are mainly children from the Sunday schools. There may be evangelists who, by an extravagant and grotesque sensationalism, contrive to get the attention of the non-churchgoers, and who are able to report considerable additions to the churches; but the permanence of these gains is not yet shown, and we have no means of enumerating the thousands who, by such clownish exhibitions, are driven in disgust from the churches.

The failure of the modern evangelism is not conjectural: the year-books show it. The growth of membership in several of our leading denominations has either ceased or is greatly retarded; the Sunday schools and the young people’s societies report decreasing numbers; the benevolent contributions are either waning, or increasing at a rate far less than that of the growth of wealth in the membership. It is idle to blink these conditions; we must face them and find out what they mean. This slackening and shrinkage is not a fact of long standing; it represents only the tendencies of the past twenty years.

We hear rather frantic demands for a return to the old methods of evangelism, but that is a foolish cry:–

“The mill will never grind
With the water that is past.”

The old appeal, which fixed attention upon the interest of the individual, has lost its power. It is not possible to stir the average human being of this generation, as the average human being of fifty years ago was stirred, by pictures of the terrors of hell and the felicities of heaven. These conceptions have far less influence over human lives than once they had,–less, doubtless, than they ought to have; for there are realities under these symbols which we cannot afford to ignore. But the fundamental defect of that old appeal was the emphasis which it placed upon self-interest. “Look out for yourself!” was its constant admonition. “Think of the perils that threaten, of the blisses that invite! Do not risk the pain; do not miss the blessedness!” To-day this does not seem a wholly worthy motive. At any rate, it is below the highest. Men feel that the religion of Christ has a larger meaning than this. A presentation of the gospel which makes the welfare of the individual central does not grip the conscience and arouse the emotions as once it did. For the conception of human welfare as social rather than individual has become common; that “great fund of altruistic feeling,” which, as Mr. Benjamin Kidd tells us, is the motive power of all our social reforms, is constantly stirring in human hearts; and although there are few whose lives are wholly ruled by this motive, there are fewer still who do not recognize it as the commanding motive; and a religious appeal which is based upon considerations essentially egoistic does not, therefore, awaken any large response in human hearts.

If the church wishes to regain her hold upon the people, she must learn to speak to the highest that is in them. A man’s religion must consecrate his ideals. A religion which invites him to live on a lower plane than the highest on which his thought travels cannot win his respect. And therefore the new evangelism must learn to find its motive not in self-love, no matter how refined, but in the love that identifies the self with the neighbor. It must bring home to the individual the truth which he already dimly knows, that his personal redemption is bound up with the redemption of the society to which he belongs; that he cannot be saved except as he becomes a savior of others; nay, that the one central sin from which he needs to be saved is indifference to the welfare of others, and a willingness to prosper at their expense.

The time has come for the church to take an entirely new attitude in offering men the gospel. It has been too well content with pressing the personal advantages of religion, with trying to lure them into discipleship with baits addressed to their selfishness. It has been inventing attractions of all sorts,–fine buildings, sumptuous upholstery and decorations, artistic music, brilliant oratory; it has thought it possible to enlist men by pleasing their tastes and gratifying their sensibilities. So far has this gone that the average churchgoer consciously justifies his presence in church or his absence from it on the ground of pleasure. If it pleases him enough, he goes; if not, he reads the Sunday paper or goes out with his automobile. It is a simple question of enjoyment.

The response of those invited shows the nature of the invitation. It indicates that the church has been putting a great deal of emphasis on the attractions which it has to offer. We can hardly imagine such replies to be made by those who were invited to listen to the preaching of Jesus or his apostles. They did not suppose that it was a question of entertainment that they were considering. They knew that it was a summons to service and sacrifice. That, beyond all doubt, was the nature of the appeal of the church in those earliest centuries, when it was marching over Asia and Europe, conquering and to conquer. It was not baiting men with soft cushions and pictured windows, with coddlings and comfits; it was calling them to hardship and warfare, to ignominy and ostracism; the words of the Master to which it gave emphasis were not mere metaphors: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

The call of the cross has never failed. The power of God and the wisdom of God are in it. And it is time for the church to take up this heroic note and sound it forth with new power. This is the new evangelism for which the world is waiting. It is not a call to be “carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease;” it is not an invitation to the sentimental soul to “sit and sing herself away to everlasting bliss;” it is the clarion of battle; it is the challenge to an enterprise which means struggle and suffering and self-denial.

The redemption of society is the objective of the new evangelism. How vast an undertaking this is was indicated in the last chapter. Let us look at it a little more in detail. How much does it signify, here and now, in the United States of America?

It means, first, the reconciliation of races. One thing that must be done is to take this chaotic mass of dissimilar, discordant, suspicious, antipathetic racial elements and blend them into unity and brotherhood. The first Christians had a task of this nature on their hands; they had to bring together in one fellowship Jews and Gentiles. But that was a pastime compared with the herculean labor intrusted to us,–the bringing together of whites and blacks, of Caucasians and Mongolians, of scores of groups divided by the barriers of language, of religion, of custom, and fusing them into one nationality. No task of the same dimensions was ever undertaken by any people; but this is ours, and we must perform it. It is the task of the nation; but the church of Jesus Christ is charged with the business of furnishing the sentiments and ideas by which alone it may be accomplished.

It means, secondly, the pacification of industry. The contending hosts of capital and labor must be brought together, and constrained to cease from their warfare and become friends and cooeperators. It is absurd to suppose that the war of the industrial classes can continue to be waged, as at present, each seeking to overpower the other. Such a condition of things is simply irrational. All warfare is illogical and unnatural. Human beings are not made to live together on any such terms. They are made to be friends and helpers of one another. The elimination of war is the next step in industrial evolution. And it is the business of the church of Jesus Christ to speak the reconciling word. She has the word to speak, and when she utters it with authority it will be heard.

It means, thirdly, the moralization of business. The trouble with business is simply covetousness. The insatiable greed of gain is the source of all the dishonesties, the oppressions, the spoliations, the trickeries, the frauds, the adulterations, the cutthroat competitions, the financial piracies, the swindling schemes,–all the abuses and mischiefs which infest the world of commerce and finance. Against all these forms of evil the church must bear her testimony; but the root from which they all grow is the love of money, and it is this central and seminal sin of modern civilization that the church must assail with all the weapons of the spiritual warfare. “Covetousness is idolatry”–so St. Paul testifies; and a grosser or more debasing idolatry has never appeared on earth than the worship of material gain. Unless the bonds of that superstition can be broken, the race must sink into degradation. It is the one deadly enemy of mankind. And the church of Jesus Christ is called to lead in the battle with this foe. Against no other social evil was the testimony of Jesus so trenchant and uncompromising. Nothing more clearly evinces his unerring vision of moral realities than his judgment upon this encroaching passion. In his day it was an evil almost negligible compared with what it is to-day. It was because he foresaw the conditions which prevail to-day that his words were so hot against the rule of Mammon. The church is face to face with the danger which he discerned, and she must meet it in his spirit and with the energy of his passion. To make men see the hatefulness and loathsomeness of this greed of gain is the first duty of the church. When that is accomplished the worst evils of the business realm will disappear.

It means, fourthly, the extirpation of social vice. When covetousness is conquered, the procuring cause of much of this kind of evil will be cut up by the roots. The greed of gain is the motive which breeds and propagates social vice. But there are animal propensities to which these incitements make their appeal; and some way must be found of quickening the nobler affections, so that the spirit shall rule the flesh and not be in bondage to it. To fill the thoughts and wishes of men with something better worth while than the joys of animalism is the radical remedy for these degradations. And the church ought to be able to supply this remedy.

The redemption of society means, in the fifth place, the purification of politics. The dethronement of Mammon will go a long way toward this also; most of the corruptions of our political life spring from the love of money. Graft is the first-born of covetousness. But the love of power also plays a part in the debauchery of citizenship; and the central sin of using men as means to our ends is exhibited here on a stupendous scale. This is the vocation of the boss and the briber and the political machinist; and a deadlier way of destroying manhood it would be hard to find. It is not only the interest of other individuals, but the interest of the whole community that the corrupt politician sacrifices upon the altar of cupidity or ambition; and when a man has learned to turn the one great privilege of service and sacrifice which citizenship offers into an opportunity of private gain, he has sunk about as low as man can go. What more urgent task has the church upon her hands than that of making men see the treachery and infamy of this kind of conduct? And unless men can be made to see it and feel it, what hope is there for free government? Can anybody imagine that democracy can long endure if the ruling motive of the citizen in his relation to the commonwealth is a purpose to get as much out of it as he can and give it as little as he can? All political reforms which leave the citizen in this state of mind are futile. There is no salvation for a democracy which does not change the direction of the motive in the heart of the individual citizen. And this is the business of the church. Without this, social redemption is impossible, and there is no other agency which even proposes to accomplish this.

And, finally, the redemption of society means the simplification of life. Here, perhaps, we strike more nearly than anywhere else at the heart of the whole problem. The bottom trouble of the world in which we live is the enormous over-multiplication of our wants. In the multitude of ministrations to our senses, the life of the spirit is overlaid and smothered. Jesus said that a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses; it is this elementary truth which the world has ceased to believe. For the most part our life is in our things; our happiness depends on them; our desires do not often rise above them.

The complexity, the artificiality, the profusion of our belongings absorbs the larger part of our interest. The energies of invention are mainly directed to the creation of new wants. As the resources of the earth are developed, life takes on an accumulating burden of cares and conventions and superfluities. We read, with a wonder which is a thinly disguised admiration, the stories of the extravagances of the people of the whirlpool, but most of us are jogging along after them, wishing that we could get into the swim ourselves. Our houses are cluttered with adornments; our social functions are spending matches; our feasts invite to satiation; our funerals are exhibitions of extravagance. This thing has been growing by leaps and bounds, and the time has come when we are fairly swamped by the abundance of the things which we possess. Nay, it can hardly be said that we possess this abundance; it possesses us:–

“Things are in the saddle
And ride mankind.”

In recent years the cry has been rising for a simpler life. It is a voice in the wilderness; in the din and clatter of our complex civilization it seems faint and far off, but it is making itself heard; it begins to be evident to all thoughtful people that we must somehow manage to get away from these entanglements of sense and live a freer life. In these artificialities and extravagances the soul is enfeebled and belittled, and the national vigor is lost. If we want to save our nation from decay we must learn to live a simpler life. And this change will not be wrought out by evolutionary processes; it means revolution rather; not by violence, we may trust, but certainly by choice, by effort, by struggle and resistance we shall turn back these tides of materialism, and lead the current of our national life into safer channels.

We are not going to strip our lives bare of beauty, or to consign ourselves to the meagreness of the anchoretic regimen; we shall have beautiful homes and abundant pleasures; but we must learn to make our spiritual interests supreme, and not suffer our thought to be blurred and our faith enfeebled and our love stifled in the atmosphere of modern materialism.

Such, then, are some of the phases of that great work of social redemption which now confronts us. Other aspects of the work, not less serious, might be presented, but these are some of the outstanding needs of modern society. Certainly it is a tremendous work. To reconcile hostile and suspicious races; to pacify industrial classes; to moralize business; to extirpate social vice; to purify politics; to simplify life;–all this is an enterprise so vast that we may well be appalled by the thought of undertaking it. But this, and nothing less than this, is the business which the church has in hand. For which of these tasks is she not responsible? From which of them would she dare ask to be excused? To what other agency can she think of intrusting any of them? Nay, this is her proper and peculiar work. For this is she sent into the world.

In truth, the one thing that the church needs to-day is to envisage this task,–to take in its tremendous dimensions; to comprehend the overpowering magnitude of the work that is expected of her. It is this revelation that will rouse her. Never before, in all her history, has such a disclosure of her responsibility been made to her. And the enormity of the obligation will set her thinking. It will dawn upon her after a little, that it is for just such tasks that she is called and commissioned; that the achievement of the impossible is the very thing that she is always expected to do; that the strength on which she leans is omnipotence; that she can do all things through Christ who strengthened her. She will see and understand that her progress is not made by seeking the line of least resistance: some such worldly wisdom as this has been her undoing. She will learn that it is only when she undertakes the greatest things that she finds her resources equal to her needs.

This is the heroic note of the new evangelism. The work of making a better world of this is a tremendous work, but it can be done. It can be done, because it is commanded. If there is a God in heaven, what ought to be done can be done. To doubt that is to deny him. And there is one way of doing it, and that is Christ’s way. For all this manifold, herculean labor on which we have been looking, there is no wisdom comparable with his. He said that he came to save the world, and he is going to save it. He has waited long, but he knows how to wait. The day of his triumph is drawing near. This world is going to be redeemed. This social order, so full of strife and confusion, of cruelty and oppression, of misery and sorrow, is going to be transformed, and the love of Christ shed abroad in the hearts of men will transform it. We are not going to wait another thousand years for our millennium; we are going to have it here and now. This is the gospel of the new evangelism which it has taken the church a long time to learn, but which she is now getting ready to proclaim with demonstration of the spirit and with power.

We must not hide from ourselves the fact that some great changes will need to take place in her own life before she can give effect to this great evangel. She must heal her divisions, and fling away her encumbering traditions, and greatly deepen her faith in her Lord and Leader. Above all, she must simplify her own life. She cannot bear witness, as she must, against the deadly influences of our modern materialism, until she utterly clears herself of all complicity with it. This means, in many quarters, a radical change in her administration.

When the church has thus envisaged her task, and comprehended its magnitude, and when, with her heart on fire with the greatness and glory of it, she has laid aside every weight and the sins that so easily beset her, and has girded herself with the truth as it is in Jesus, and has set the silver trumpet to her lips, she will have a gospel to proclaim, to which the world will listen.

It will tell the world, as it has always told the world, of forgiveness and hope, of comfort and peace, of the help and guidance that comes to the troubled soul in believing in Jesus. It will speak, as it has always spoken, of the rest that remaineth, and of the great joys and companionships of the eternal future. But it will have something more than this to tell.

The kingdoms of this world–this will be its message–are becoming the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. It is not an event to be awaited, but to be realized, here and now. Nothing is needed but that men should believe the word of Jesus Christ and live by it. We do believe it, and we mean to show our faith by our works. We believe that by simply living together as Jesus has taught us to live, we can make this world so much better than it now is, that men shall think heaven has come down to earth. We believe that the race question and the labor question and the trust question and the liquor question and the graft question and all the other questions will find a speedy solution when men have learned to walk in the way of Jesus. And we call you to come and walk with us in that way.

It is not a smooth and thornless way. It is a toilsome and painful way. It is the way of the cross. It means hardship and struggle and suffering. Such intrenched and ingrained iniquities as now infest our society will not be overcome without conflict. We are not calling you to a pastime. We are not offering you riches or honors or sensual joys. We are calling you to service and to sacrifice. But we are going to build here in this world the kingdom of heaven. We know that it can be done: we know how to do it, and the glorious thing we have to tell you is that you can have a share in it. Look forward with us to the day when–

“Nation with nation, land with land, Unarmed shall live as comrades free,
In every heart and brain shall throb The pulse of one fraternity;

“New arts shall bloom, of loftier mould, And mightier music thrill the skies,
And every life shall be a song
When all the earth is paradise,”–

and come and help us to bring that glad time. The Leader whom we follow knows the way, and the future belongs to Him.

That is the message of the new evangelism, and when the church learns to speak it with conviction, and to make it good in her life, she will find that the gospel has a power that she has never even imagined it to possess.

IX

The New Leadership

These discussions have failed of their purpose if they have not made a few things clear. Let us restate them:–

1. The roots of religion are in human nature. It is a fact as central and all-pervasive in the social realm as gravitation is in the physical realm. It is no more likely to become antiquated or obsolete than oxygen or sunshine. It is an interest which no intelligent person can afford to ignore.

2. Like every other living thing, religion grows. It is not outside the sphere of operation of Him who said, “Behold! I make all things new!” It is subject, continually, to his wise economy of renewal.

3. Our religion is Christianity. With the other religions of the race it is destined to be brought into closer and closer comparison and competition, and that religion will survive and become universal which most perfectly explains the universe and provides for the wants of the human soul. All the indications are that the religion which survives will include the essential elements of Christianity.

4. All religions are rooted in the social nature of man, but Christianity, more than any other, is a social religion. It depends for its culture and propagation upon the social forces. Some form of social organization, like the church, is necessary to the life of religion. Worship, to be sane and salutary, must be social; and the life of Christianity can find expression only in such cooeperations as those for which the church provides.

5. As the life of religion is nurtured in social worship and service, so its fruit is gathered in the transformation of society. The primary function of the church is the Christianization of the social order. The business of the church is to save the world by establishing here the kingdom of heaven.

6. The church has very imperfectly performed this function. It has but dimly discerned and but feebly grasped the social aims of Jesus. It has tried to do a great many other things, some of them good things; but the one thing it was sent to do it has largely left undone.

7. A new reformation is therefore called for, and that reformation must accomplish what the reformation of the sixteenth century failed to accomplish,–the restoration of the social teachings of Jesus to their proper rank and dignity. As the reformation of the sixteenth century brought the individual to Christ as a personal Saviour, so the reformation of the twentieth century must bring society to Christ as a social Saviour, and must make men see that there is no way of living together but his way.

8. The church is therefore called to the redemption of society. But the work of redemption to which it is called is not a reconstruction of economic or political machinery; it is the quickening of the social conscience, and the reenthronement of justice and love in the place of selfishness and strife as the ruling principles of human society.

9. For the redemption of society a new evangelism is needed. The new evangelism will not emphasize the interest of the individual; it will rather emphasize the truth that the individual can only be saved when he identifies his own welfare with the welfare of his fellow men. And it will not try to win men by offering them ease and safety and comfort, but rather by showing them how tremendous are the tasks before them; what a mighty work there is to do in delivering this world from the bondage of corruption and selfishness; what hardship and toil and sacrifice are needed; but how sure the victory is for those who are able to believe the word of Jesus Christ and follow, whole-heartedly, his leadership.

Such are the characters and conditions under which the church of Jesus Christ presents herself in this new day to modern men. Her record is far from flawless; it is the necessities of logic, not the facts of history, which make her infallible. She has blundered along through the centuries, missing much of the work she was sent to do, and staining her garments not seldom with the soilure of greed and the blood of the innocent; but through all these generations the patient love of her Lord has been chastening her, and through many wanderings and stumblings she has come down to this hour. The light upon her candlestick has often grown dim, but it has never been wholly extinguished; the fire upon her altars has burned low, but it is still burning. She has not done all that she ought to have done, but she has done a large part of all that has been done to enlighten, to comfort, and to uplift humanity. And the discipline through which she has passed gives some indication of the work she has yet to do. It is not credible that a wise Providence should have kept her alive so many centuries, and should have made so much use of her in the establishment upon the earth of the kingdom of heaven, and should have led her into a constantly increasing knowledge of Himself, if he had not meant to make her his servant in the great work now waiting to be done.

Her hour has come, and her task lies before her. It might be urged that she ought to have been better fitted for her work before she was called to undertake it; but that is not God’s way. We get our preparation for great work in the work itself. We are called from the sheepfolds to lead the armies of Israel. We are sent out with a few loaves and fishes to feed the multitude. Our powers are developed and our resources are multiplied by using them. And though the church is far from having the equipment she needs for the redemption of society, the power and the wisdom will come when the work is bravely undertaken.

To whom, now, does this great enterprise of social redemption make its strongest appeal? It ought to appeal to all good men and women. It ought to enlist the powers of those who are in the meridian of their strength. The men whose vision has been widened and whose wills have been invigorated in the great undertakings of industry and commerce ought to find in this proposition something worthy of their powers. It ought, also, to stir the hearts of those who have labored hard and waited long for the coming of the kingdom to hear a great voice saying, “Now is the accepted time: behold! now is the day of salvation!” To many of those who have not much longer to live life never seemed a thing so fair as it is to-day.

But this great appeal ought most strongly to lay hold upon the hearts of the young men and women of this generation. The enterprise is mainly theirs. If the new reformation comes, they will lead it on. If society is redeemed, it will be by their toil and sacrifice. If the church ever