World Missions FROM The Home Base JOSEPH ERNEST McAFEE World Missions From the Home Base A Group of Addresses and Papers By JOSEPH ERNEST McAFEE Author of "Missions Striking Home " New York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 1911, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 123 North Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street To A Woman I know who fulfills a heavenly " mission " by maintaining the " home base " An Introductory Word There is much repetition in this little book,— not so much of language, but there is iteration and re- iteration of certain ideas. I believe they are worth reiterating. Small as the book is none will care to take it at a sitting. The style of platform address is retained in the addresses. Those who find that style unsatisfactory for reading may be more nearly satis- fied with the papers at the close. The volume is a companion to "Missions Striking Home," in which emphasis is laid upon similar and collateral ideas, set forth after a similar manner. Though the sections of the book are disjointed, the title serves more or less vitally to relate the parts. J. E. M. New York City. [7] Contents I. The American People in the Economy of Grace ..... II. America's Spiritual Needs and Mission III. What is Involved in the Evangelization of America ..... IV. What the Foreigner is Teaching Us . V. The Difference Between Facts and Prin ciples ..... VI. Home Missions and Spiritual World Con quest ..... VII. Construction and Reconstruction — Crea tion and Redemption VIII. " The Crisis " in Missionary Method IX. Wanted — An American Church u 22 36 52 65 78 87 96 IIO [9] THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE ECONOMY OF GRACE God is not a respecter of persons. Which is to say that His preferences are not capricious. His choices do not delimit His love. They rather mag- nify His love, and give it scope. The divine choice of the American people is not arbitrary. The focal- izing tendencies of nineteenth and twentieth cen- tury progress have unequivocally marked the direc- tion of the divine preferences ; they have made clear the choice of this people. But they have made equally clear the supremely rational and beneficent basis of that choice. Men are saved to serve ; na- tions are dedicated by the will of God to the fulfill- ment of universal, benign purposes. The physical equipment of our domain for the supreme service to God's world is not the least emi- nent mark of the divine favour. Considering it as a laboratory, the divine physicist has constructed this room upon no mean dimensions. Large purposes must be modelled on broad lines. God has builded His laboratory large. The final man will be shack- led by no artificial boundary lines ; will be no acci- dent of a locality ; will be no puppet of prevailing wind currents ; will be no creature of climates. Here, therefore, are all the climates. The eternal ice of Alaska's arctics calls down the meridians to [11] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE the eternal bloom of Florida's tropics, they and all between joining compact in the service of man. The final man must be no starveling. Here, there- fore, is earth's infinite variety of fruits of soil and water, of lofty altitude and brackish lowland. Across this vast expanse every wind sweeps, every zephyr floats, toughening the fibre of every wood, putting sweetness and strength into every flower and grain. No one race may claim the final man. To pro- duce him the elements must gather from all the races. The crime of Babel must be stoned, ere God may work His final good in man, for man. That atonement is here being wrought. Here the races meet to epitomize the race. Each ship-load brings its element to contribute to the ultimate composite. From the ends of the earth they come, from near and far : Italian, Bulgarian, Bohemian, Moravian, Croatian, Slovenian, Dalmatian, Ruthenian, Rou- manian, Norwegian, Armenian ; East Indian, West Indian ; Lithuanian, Herzogovinian, Scandinavian ; Russian, Servian, Syrian, African, Cuban, Austrian ; Polish, Turkish, Irish, Finnish, Flemish, English, Spanish, Swedish, Danish ; Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese ; Polak, Slovak, Russniak ; French and German, Dutch and Welsh, Magyar and Scotch, Korean and Montenegrin, Greek and Hebrew. And God said, Let the American be ! He scours the antipodes for the final composite of His laboratory ; He gathers them by the ship-load : the fair, the swarthy ; the phlegmatic, the volatile ; the brusk, the suave ; the energetic, the lethargic ; the prag- matist, the mystic ; the idealist, the realist ; the sage, the promoter ; the sentimentalist, the steel- [12] THE AMEKICAN PEOPLE nerved ; the tender-hearted, the iron-willed ; the philosopher, the man of affairs. Be still ; the Al- mighty is at labour in His laboratory, making a man. Babel is being redeemed. Humanity's " one flesh " is being revealed that all may through the human brotherhood find the seal of the divine Fatherhood. Here is an awesome spectacle : God in His laboratory, working out the redeeming proc- esses, by which in the large and through all the nations men are to come into their universal broth- erhood and sonhood. I specify two particulars in which God would fain work out here in the microcosm His macrocosm of grace, would reveal in the miniature the benign purposes of His universal economy. In the first place, men are growing rich here. So, rich the world round, God means men shall become. The knack of making the material resource of air and water and soil and rock yield in an hitherto inconceiv- able fullness to the wants of men is the glory, almost the despair, of this people. With like store God has equipped His world, the nations through ; and such a knack of getting and spending shall one day be an universal human benison. Here is a plenty to min- ister to all those human desires which foolish men have sometimes called gross. God means that all shall share that plenty in their own resources, and learn, through the very abundance, to call none of His gifts common or unclean. God would ennoble all with riches that none may be prostituted by them. Our ever-resourceful Secretary of Agriculture de- clares that henceforth a crop failure in the United States is a virtual impossibility. Every season is a [13] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE record-breaker in some crop or some industry. The so-called natural calamity, this people has learned, is to be utilized, not supinely bemoaned. Nothing is waste. The great American desert, even where in restricted areas it is still desert, is found to be a vast and inexhaustible storehouse of mineral treasure. Yet here the divine Provider has not been more lavish than elsewhere ; He is only seeking here to cul- ture men in the rudiments of His ennobling bounties. Here men are crowding into cities. Thus they may furnish the spiritual currents direct and un- broken circuit. Of the four largest cities in the world, two are already in this domain which only yesterday was vast unpeopled wilderness. Our lux- urious cities are a world-phenomenon. The very wealth of their construction is an expanding factor in the progress of the kingdom of God. Some think it wise to say, ' ' God made the country ; man made the city." For my own part, I discover scant wis- dom in the saying, and only a blundering insight. God made also the city ; made it last, as the crown- ing demonstration of His wisdom. We commit dis- tressing folly when we accept the increasing urban pressure of our civilization as in itself a bane, and supinely endure its abortions as a necessary evil. The City of God is His final boon to men. If man made the city, God taught him how ; and it will be our everlasting disgrace and undoing if we shall have learned that lesson so ill that God's best gift shall be prostituted to the ends of hellishness and damnation. Our incomparable material civilization, its over- flowing plenty, its teeming cities, its throbbing en- [14] THE AMEKICAN PEOPLE ergies, its knack of making the most of the least, its almost magic alchemy by which peasant is trans- muted into prince, its celerities of movement, its stressful zest of living, its fair tragedies of achieve- ment, its strains of industry making impossibili- ties actual and real, — all these, the latest and richest evidences of God's beneficence, we, — shame on us ! — mistake for evils oftentimes, and discover our utmost spiritual zeal in the impotent wail over an alleged materialistic age. A true prophet of God must swell with new indignation every day before the spectacle of our spiritual indolence and cowardice. We content ourselves with deprecations of "mate- rialism," whatever we may suppose that means, while the modern city, God's latest boon, and the mightiest enginery of spiritual forcefulness ever de- vised by man or God, is converted into a hell-hole before our eyes. We set ourselves forth as the ad- ministrators of the spiritual potencies— we of the church do — lay out our elaborate plans for world- saving, and then ignobly balk before the supreme test of our spiritual efficiency ; let our great cities go to rot, allow their vast accumulations of soul-stuff to suppurate, while we moon the horizon, and im- potently bewail the grossness of modern commer- cialism ! I trow we need a new vision of God's eternal purposes. We need the discernment to dis- cover the elements of the divine redemption under our very eyes. We drudgingly travel the long road of grace, and then, through our spiritual blindness, convert that one-time far-off divine event towards which the whole creation has moved into the plague- hole of our civilization. [15] WOELD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE Tut! tut! tut! what weakling world -saviours we do be, when we go down in such iguoble impotence before the final test of the spiritual efficiency of our scheme. Here is that which has cost the birth- throes of the ages. Can we redeem our American cities'? Can we transfuse the forces of this splendid American civilization with the spiritual potencies of the kingdom of God ? That is the end for which this divine laboratory was constructed. God and all the world wait to witness the demonstration. We toy with child's trinkets till we show ourselves equal to that task. In the second place I nominate as the world-re- deeming mission of this people the bringing of men into the essential democracy of the commonwealth of God. The Church has historically been affrighted at political contaminations and entanglements. Very well, let it be so still. This mission of which I speak lies in the realm of the spirit and far tran- scends policies. The commonwealth of God gains its vitality from no political construction. The de- mocracy of the spirit will maintain the human brotherhood, whatever may be the accidents of po- litical formularies- Such a democracy all the sanc- tions of history and of history's God have commis- sioned this people to produce and maintain. It is a holy mission. The enterprise is the essence of the Gospel. It at once transcends and subsumes all our methods of administration in both state and church. The church of a class can never be the Church of Jesus Christ. And any church which permits itself to be considered the society of a class has committed [16] THE AMERICAN PEOPLE a terrible blunder. An organized system of patron- age is a poor travesty upon a church. The common people, who heard Jesus gladly, were not pleased to have Him reach down, away down, pat them com- placently upon the back, and tell them to be good, or to be warmed and fed. He never indulged such a mockery. He knew and cared too much for that. The kingdom of God is not a system of patronage, however well organized and efficient. A public charity function is not the final manifestation of the human brotherhood. The grace of God does not degrade and humiliate ; it ennobles and digni- fies. To declare that such considerations are no part of the Church's concern is to say that the Church has missed the point of its existence. To organize our missionary enterprise on the basis of a charity, an in- exhaustible patronage of the indigent, is to daudle about a business for whose consummation the ages have waited, and God Himself has been in travail of spirit. Our so-called charities and philanthropies do us little credit, whenever they serve only the more effectually to widen the chasm between the classes. We may congratulate ourselves upon feed- ing the hungry with lavish bounty, but the hungry turn away filled to despise us and our system of patronage the more. The common people — make them out never so common — do not fancy ram- shackle, sooty mission houses, builded for their special benefit on the back streets. They are yearn- ing for brotherhood, and they will not find the Christ uutil that brotherhood is revealed. Oh, no ; they do not wish to be fawned upon and fondled ; they [17] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE are not clamouring for a seat in the millionaire's pew. They wish to be included as a matter of course ; to be taken for what they are and have it in them to become in a Christian community. They resent being made the sensation of the Oh's and Ah's and crocodile tears of our missionary audiences, only to find themselves shunned and declaimed against by the squeamish auditors when it comes to the per- sonal contacts. They find little of the sincerity of the Man of Galilee in such a programme. Again I say, it is ridiculous to protest that such considerations are of no interest to the Church. These are matters of supreme interest to a Church of Christ. Unctuous talk of world-saving, and bring- ing on the kingdom of God, has no meaning unless we have a vision of the democracy of man, and seri- ously set about realizing the hope. That realization will not, of course, come through a cooked-up, arti- ficial scheme for the debauch of human passions and ignoble ambitions, but it must come through the genuine spirit and common-sense, immediate impacts of a Christly sympathy and brotherliness. Here is involved, you understand, no merely local issue. The whole enterprise to which the Church is com- mitted the world 'round awaits the fulfillment of this mission with which the American people and the American Church have been signally charged, the realization of the democracy of man in the common- wealth of God. That world strategy commissions this people with a peculiar charge is to-day a truism of statescraft as it has long been among the elemental reckonings of the kingdom of grace. Ever since Commodore Perry [18] THE AMEKICAN PEOPLE consecrated war-ships to an embassage of peace and good- will in Japan, until, the other day, when Presi- dent Boosevelt promulgated the order of the second commitment of self-government to the Cuban people, the sentiment of national self-sacrifice for the good of the whole commonwealth of nations has been pre- vailing with an ever- deepening intensity in Amer- ican diplomacy. It is not alone that this nation holds the balance of power in the councils of nations. It is not enough to preserve the status quo. With a new mastery of self-sacrifice American ideals are more and more assuming the leadership. Colonial extension which tolerates no violence of the con- queror, but which pours out treasure and life-blood in an unrequited ministry for others, is not alone the commonplace of our own political theory ; it is setting an ideal for the nations which will make the rapine of conquest henceforth and forever impossible the world around. The kingdom of God to-day does not wait upon the proclamation of individual emissaries. The world has been put in training for mass movements. National impacts are the enginery for the triumph of the kingdom of grace. One national crime of selfishness and commercial grasping may undo at a stroke the patient labours of a thousand individuals through decades of time. The missionary enterprise will work at cross purposes and frustrate its own ends unless it shall make reckoning of these latter-day de- mands. "What shall signify our sending to the nations to-day ten thousand emissaries to preach Christ, if at once to-morrow through our national impacts upon the world we shall work the works of Belial 1 [19] WOKLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE Without our willing it, scarcely with our knowing it, we have sent to the continents, east and west and south, during the past few months, hundreds of thousands of missionaries in the persons of the emi- grating immigrants. No, no, now, let us not chew words, nor dodge issues. These hundreds of thou- sands returning to Europe and elsewhere are mission- aries whether we will or no. They have not awaited the rigorous examination and the appointment of our missionary societies. But that is what they are, missionaries, gone on a propaganda. They were for a time a part of us, and they have gone out from us to tell what they have seen and heard and felt. And the crucial world-missionary question is, What have they seen and heard and felt ? If the sending out of one of our number here, and a group of ten or a dozen there, to bear the message of our Gospel's power to save, is what we think serious missionary business, what shall we think of this very torrent of peoples pouring into and then out of our life % Shall we not find in this and in similar movements the real missionary test and method of the new age of grace ? Our missionary enterprise is in danger of missing the point of to-day's spiritual strategy. We are in danger of dawdling over little things, and allowing the big opportunities to pass without so much as the discovery that they are opportunities. We are in danger of faring forth with our sprinking cans to refresh the barren world, when by our very side surge the torrents which a Providence wiser than we has prepared for the fructification of earth's farthest wastes. We are in danger of leaving national im- [20] THE AMERICAN PEOPLE pacts out of reckoning in our plans for the extension of the kingdom, when such forces are the instru- ments of the spiritual conquest by the side of which others fall into comparative insignificance. Is it statesmanlike, is it in the least common sense — not to speak of divine inspirations — to frustrate our in- dividual ministries at every turn by Christless mass movements ? to give the lie before the nations to our profession of a saving power by pouring out upon the continents on every side our floods of unmastered life? Can a serious missionary enterprise save its face before God or man while out of the very life from which it emanates to preach Christ it sends forth forces to blast the life of well-nigh every for- eign port with its practices of Belial ? What of our national impacts upon the nations ? how well are we living before the world the professions which we preach to the world ? That is the insistent mission- ary question to-day. This laud of ours is a laboratory of grace. How graciously shall the nations be graced by its grace ? Men and nations are saved to serve. Only a saved life can render an effective saving service. A wise purpose has chosen this land and visited it with supremely benign favours. May God vindicate, through this people's pure ministry to the world, the wisdom of His own choice. May God grant that we, His colabourers, shall vindicate the wisdom of that choice. [21] n AMEEICA'S SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION Some early day somebody will write a book on America' 8 unofficial foreign mission. It will mark an epoch in the production of missionary literature, and will wholesomely enlarge missionary conceptions. The impacts of our civilization upon the life of the world are vastly the most potent influence we exert. They are, for the most part, unconscious forces. At least we are unconscious of them. And our mission- ary programme has been constructed quite too much in disregard of them. Our official foreign missionary programme involves the expenditures of (say) fifteen millions of dollars per annum. The American tourist bill last season doubtless fell not one cent short of five hundred millions of dollars. Tourist influence is not to be included in the spiritual reckonings ? Tut ! tut ! Ask the thoughtful of other nations what they think. Do we not all read the magazines and newspapers to mark the repeated comments of the foreign press ? The whole world discovers that the American tourist is exerting a profound spiritual influence. Our com- merce with foreign nations has reached incomprehen- sible figures. Exports amount to two billions each year, and imports are approximately a billion and four hundred millions. Commerce does not count? Tut ! again. The people of Africa will tell you that [22] SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION rum counts. The outraged Chinaman will tell you that opium counts. And steel rails count, and kero- sene oil, and harvesting machines, and locomotives, and wheat, and cotton, and corn, and ten thousand different articles of manufacture, sent out and brought in, — they all count as spiritual forces one way or the other. These embody much of that process the statesmen of all the nations are describing by the phrase, the "Americanization of the world." Our official force of missionaries numbers (say) ten thousand. The unofficial force runs beyond the million most years, perhaps every year. In a twelve- month recently we sent out more than a million of our foreigners ; our immigrants emigrated in a single year in that number. Missionaries, to the last one of them, they were. We cannot evade the issue, though we might desire to. These embassadors of our Gospel have not, to be sure, yielded to the rigor- ous examination of our theological schools nor awaited the formal appointment of our official mis- sionary agencies. But that is what they are, never- theless ; missionaries gone on a propaganda. For a time they were a part of us. They have gone out from us to tell what they have seen and heard and felt. Can there be a more serious missionary ques- tion than that : What have they seen and heard and felt, these open-eyed, open-hearted folk who care little or nothing for our theories and professions, but have come close up to see and feel the demonstra- tion of the redeeming power for which we claim so much ! The King of Italy told our recent Commis- sioner of Immigration, Mr. Watchorn, that to the remote nook and cranny of his kingdom the com- [23] WOELD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE nranity life of his people is being profoundly af- fected by this Americanizing process. Similar testi- mony comes from every other section of Europe, and even from regions of Asia already. Oar official missionary forces are necessarily in- spired by an alien training, cherish alien sentiments, go preaching what seems in many of its aspects an alien gospel in an alien tongue or in a garbled speech which they themselves are often distressed to realize obscures the truth they seek to communicate. These unofficial missionaries just mentioned carry a homely gospel to a home folk in the intelligible homely tongue, with a sincerity of homely impact which carries straight home whatever truth they know. The very offstripping of officialism often proves the surest guarantee of missionary effectiveness. Nor are these unofficial emissaries the intellectual weaklings which some may be inclined to reckon them. Surely no one will assert that these do not count as a vital and spiritual force. The process has so far developed as to include some of the most pro- found intellectual movements of the present and the coming age. The trooping of foreign youth to our seats of education is an event of profound meaning. This process has in some instances been reduced to a system. We have all noted this instance : The United States declined to accept all of her share of the enormous indemnity exacted of China after the Boxer trouble. And China, not to be outdone by Christian justice and courtesy, has set apart that large sum of money to be used until exhausted in the systematic training of the flower of her youth in American institutions. The first appointments under [24] SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION this provision have been made and the students are here. From now on till at least 1940 China will be sending to us her brightest and brainiest to be trained in our institutions of higher learning, tech- nical and philosophical, to gain the skill of our in- ventive genius in our great industrial centres, to enter into the intimacies of our daily life, to find out how we think, to learn how we do things, — and, all the lessons thoroughly well learned, to return and exert the most potent influence of their generation in shaping the mightiest civilization of the new Orient. Our official missionary programme has, for the most part, left these stupendous spiritual forces out of the reckoning. Why *? Partly because we do not think far and wide, and partly because it is easier not to include them. They are excluded for the very reason that they are so stupendous ; only the farthest- reaching plans can include them. These forces are intangible % Yes, they are quite intangible except in the most comprehensive grasp. They do not yield to organized control 1 No, they do not yield to a timid and petty policy ; they will yield only to such a spiritual mastery as shall encompass every throb and energy of this most puissant people the world has yet produced, the American public. There is danger that we shall narrow our spiritual task of world- saving until it shall come within the compass of our narrow spiritual conceptions ; reducing the proposi- tion to simple terms may make it too cheap. How can we discharge our spiritual mission to the world ? By no method short of the complete spiritualization of the American people and our American civiliza- tion in all the parts and processes of their being. [25] WORLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE Otherwise our official and unofficial missionary forces will work to contrary purposes. This is something of the importance to be attached to our so-called home mission. So much is a rough outline of the task prescribed in the home missionary enterprise. Two great outstanding facts must be reckoned with in the spiritualizing process. First, we are rich ; and, second, we are democratic, — or profess to be. The dominant feature of our civilization is its industry, that knack, almost incomprehensible to the rest of the world, by which we roll up values in material things. Yet our spiritual ministry has so far presumed only remotely to touch this fountain of our life. The atmosphere of achievement, of material prowess, is our common daily breath and speech, — from which we often resort to our religious conclaves to speak an unknown tongue and inhale a foreign atmosphere. Some of us do it because it is a part of the routine, and some of us, perhaps, because our daily conscience makes us uneasy and we crave relief. The minister stands up before the people and fer- vently thanks God that we are given the chance to get away from the realities of our own life. He calls it withdrawing from the world for a precious season, and assures us and himself that by that process we are coming close to God. That is to say, we find God by getting away as far as possible from what is the most persistent reality of our lives. Could we, as a matter of fact, sap our spiritual vigour more effectually 1 And when we take in hand our hymn- books to sing, we seek to conjure up emotional states almost as remote from the only real life we live as if [26] SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION we were two separate and distinct personalities in- stead of the indivisible soul which God Almighty breathed into us. Insomuch is this true that we rarely feel deeply what we are singing. Great crowds of us stand on tiptoe, and shout at the top of the voice, "I am a stranger here, my home is far away," when the very essence of our spiritual value to God and our fellow men lies in making ourselves responsible at home right here. Our prime spiritual obligation, if we might only comprehend it, is taking hold to clean the filth from our own dirty city streets, and to clean up the filthier filth of our dirtier city poli- tics. We dodge the plainest issue of the spiritual min- istry. We think to exalt the spiritual by an insincere repudiation of the material. We often profess a noisy religious scorn of the very element in which we live and move and have our being. We shall enter into the life of the spirit not by an ostentatious spurning of what is most vital in our American civilization, namely, its material forces and achievements. Our spiritual ministry must rather address itself to the task of glorifying the material until it shall partake of the life of the spirit. This is the supreme spiritual ministry appointed the American Church, — to quit expressing our religious life in artificial and meaning- less formulas and to vitalize the life we are actually living, saturating it with the essences of the spirit. We are doomed to be a rich people as surely as we are a righteous people. It is the business of our homiletics not to damn money but to keep that same money from damning people and to make it an in- strument of salvation. The spiritual ministry is not [27] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE properly the weaning of the American people from their money. It should rather be the revelation to them of the spiritual vitality of this element in which their whole life is immersed. No severer trial awaits our wealthy individual Americans than the disposal of their accumulations. Even well-intended attempts to better their fellows' lot are often bitterly resented. Emphases are some- times terribly misplaced. The accumulation of ma- terial values is the American genius. By all the proprieties, human and divine, these accumulations should be made to conserve the American mission in the world. That mission is clear. No true American has ever been confused at this point. Our mission is the establishment and maintenance of essential and vital democracy, to see that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from off the earth. Not government in the narrow, political sense alone, but that essen- tial democracy which saturates and is saturated by religion, and is so divinely human as to be a very sacrament. Wealth is normally the conservator of democracy. Its proper function is to dignify the finer elements in humanity. It relieves the mind of the rudimental, grosser animal anxieties. Hunger has always been the foe of true democracy, and many a time has it gone down before the foe in the unequal fight. There has never been a time in human history when there was bread enough to fill every mouth, — never until now. Now, at least in this land, there is no valid reason why every man, woman and child of our citizen- ship should not have food in such abundant daily [28] SPIEITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION supply as to lift liim above the living scale of the animal, and open before him the life of the Immortal in whose image he was created. Wealth, become the instrument of plutocracy or oligarchy, is the very travesty of its natural function. Wealth is possible in the first place only by the harmonious union of the energies of the many. If riches become the means of the oppression of the many, then does the social order work its own un- doing. The many combine to enslave and destroy themselves. Life itself becomes one grand contradic- tion, and the spiritual verities are converted iuto a lie. No one can fail to discover gross contradictions in our American life. Our amazing wealth is not being utilized in all its energies as an instrument of democracy. Much even of that which is being, with kindly purpose, dedicated to philanthropy is working to the undoing of democracy. Charities and patron- age of the indigent, prompted by no matter how good intentions, tend to blight the spiritual nature rather than to contribute to the social health. The most vexing problem the holders of immense wealth face is how to get rid of their wealth in such fashion as that it shall not damn the recipients and sap the vitality of our social organism. Manifestly there is something serious the matter with a social and economic system which precipitates such conditions. Our rich men dare not hold on to their vast accumula- tions, and no more dare they let go. They are in a predicament which is more than amusing. And their predicament is the indictment of our social order. It is time we quit satisfying ourselves with calling- one or another bad names, and realized that our [29] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE whole system is awry ; that we are deliberately and corporately violating the spiritual verities. So far as I know, the system has not yet been de- vised which is calculated to restore the social balance. I have no pet social or economic theory to advocate which will cure our spiritual ills. I do not know of such a system, and I doubt if anybody else does. I am only pointing out the core of the evil, am touching the sore spot. It now becomes the duty of the spiritual forces to unite in curing the evil. Our many spiritual ills are symptoms of this constitu- tional ailment. It is impossible, in the real sense of the obligation, for the majority of us to practice the essential brotherhood of our religion under present conditions. Doling out benefactions is not practicing brotherhood, and accepting the patronage of money-kings is not reciprocating brotherliness. The damning of half of the people with an excess of money, and the damning of the other half with the lack of it is damnation plus damnation and the result is just damnation. The really Christlike sentiments which struggle for expression on every side do not get their chance. They are being systematically and constitutionally suppressed by the artificialities in which our life moves. A spirit of bitter resent- ment is being generated in the souls of those who have not got the money, and those who have got the money grow equally bitter when their motives and ambitions are so grossly misinterpreted. And yet all the money belongs to all and there is enough of it for all. No one will contend that these conditions are necessary, nor will any maintain that what belongs to [30] SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION all cannot be trusted to all. That would be to doubt the fundamental principles of democracy. I repeat that I do not believe anybody is prepared to pre- scribe offhand a panacea for our ills. The cure of them must come not through some artificial, patched up scheme, but rather through the zealous and open- minded, sincere-hearted endeavour of all. But one who does not find here the canker eating at the heart of our spiritual life lacks, I dare affirm, the true spiritual vision. We must make vital our American democracy until it shall saturate our whole life ; that is the end for which we must call into play the utmost of the spiritual forces at command. It disappoints many, doubtless, not to deplore more specifically the terrible debasement of soul stuff in our great cities, the passing over without mention of the distressing stagnation in broad sections of our older rural communities. One might bewail the fact that people do not go to church with the faithfulness of former generations. But there one should run the risk of sharp contradiction. Statisticians are arising to demonstrate that church attendance never before showed such volume. One can get little satisfaction even in bemoaning the dearth of ministers nowadays, for some one is sure to speak up with the vehement asseveration that there is no dearth, but rather a plethora of ministers. The shocking waste of our denominational duplications, the overlapping of fields and agencies, is sorely distressing many of us who come most intimately into contact with the evils. The general alienation of organized labour from the Church is enough to set us all to serious thinking. But little is gained in any case by bother over inci- [31] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE dents, details, symptoms. I have endeavoured to lead your thoughts to the fundamentals. These two needs pointed out must furnish the aim and goal of whole- some spiritual endeavour : the need of interpreting the spiritual verities in terms intelligible to the common, achieving, money-making American life, and the need of vitalizing our democracy until it shall express the essential brotherliness of our religion. The final word is the reemphasis of these needs in view of the American mission. Money-making is the American genius. We are to-day almost the youngest, yet well-nigh twice over the richest nation in the world. Great Britain's sixty-odd billions of dollars are almost doubled by our one hundred and twenty billions. Our appetite for production is insatiable. We have only begun that career of agri- cultural and mechanical industry which will keep us in the leadership of the world for an indefinite period. And the process accumulates wealth at a prodigious rate. Our cruder wants are already supplied. From this time forward luxury will be added to luxury beyond the range of present conception. We are already unable to consume or even to waste the prod- uct of our industry. Our increasing culture does not limit our production ; it rather adds to its volume by enlarging our productive capacity. One generation has seen the per capita wealth increase from (say) $150 or $200 to $1,500, has seen the aggre- gate national wealth grow from seven or eight billions to one hundred and twenty billions. The most of the accumulations so far have been invested in per- manent implements of civilization, homes, factories, [32] SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION mills, vast systems of transportation. Now that these foundations have been laid, now that the enormous expense of supplying the tools of our modern industry has been met, what is to be done with the wealth which these stupendous investments will at once produce % As already remarked, we are doomed to be a rich people. Astonishing though the present accumulations may be, the accumulations of the future will overshadow them as the mountain the hillock. Again, democracy is the American genius. This is the only soil on earth where democracy is indige- nous ; here alone the air has never been tainted by despotism. Democracy is beginning to prevail else- where in the modern world, but elsewhere it has emerged only from revolution. France is a republic but her democracy was born in awful, horrible cataclysm. The taint of its birth contaminates the life-blood of the French Republic. There was an incident in American history which is commonly called the " Revolution." Dr. Van Dyke in a series of lectures has recently been clarifying the concep- tions of both the French and the American people by pointing out the misnomer. The colonies' war with Great Britain was not a revolution, but a resist- ance to an attempted revolution. The colonies were contending for the conservation of long established ideals, not the introduction of new ideals. Senti- ments of human liberty gave birth to American institutions, and every great spiritual crisis of our history has been the infusion of our democracy with a new vitality. It will always be so. Spiritual ills become acute when these ideals are in jeopardy, and [33] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE their vindication will be the supreme duty of the spiritual forces in each new crisis. To-day the very elements of our American genius appear to be in conflict with each other. Our money power seems to be threatening the divinely ordained power of the people. Our wealth would appear to be overwhelming our democracy. There is apparent schism in the body itself. It is per- haps small wonder that we have lost our spiritual nerve. We shall get back our nerve by cutting bravely at the heart of the evil. The people are not fit to control this modern complicated mecha- nism ? Then we must make them fit, for an American state and an American Church and an American economic system which are not true to the essential principles of democracy are bound for the spiritual Gehenna. We dare not allow the hoi polloi in our churches because their clothes are dirty and they spread disease germs through the fibre of our pew cushions? Then we must fumigate the hoi polio? 8 clothes and kill the germs, for a Church calling itself by the name of Jesus Christ which closes its doors actually or potentially against the common people is spiritually doomed. We dare not send our chil- dren to the public schools among the progeny of the rabble lest their manners and morals be corrupted ? Then we must take the rabble in hand, and their progeny with them, with a seriousness we have not yet attempted, for deliberately to train the rising generation in snobbery is to blight their souls and destroy our American institutions out of hand. We dare not trust the people with the direction of spiritual destinies, with the interpretation of the [34] SPIRITUAL NEEDS AND MISSION eternal verities? Then we must acknowledge the defeat of our political faith and of our religion. I, for one, will not acknowledge such defeat. I profess a faith of unconquerable hope, and align myself with the spiritual forces of invincible might. If there is set for our generation the complete reconstruction of the social order I can only rejoice in the honour of assignment to so stupendous and beneficent a task. I have an undaunted faith in the vitality of both elements of our American genius. I am confident that it is our American mission to teach the world the harmony of these elements, and their transplendent glory and wholesomeness when they are harmonized. Our wealth is meant to vitalize our democratic human brotherhood, and our de- mocracy, in just the degree in which it is pure, is meant to make and keep us materially prosperous. It is our mission to set up the kingdom of God here upon the earth, right here in this land of ours. By doing that we can save the world. If we do not do that our plans for world-saving will turn out but a travesty and a farce. Come on, let us, you and I, do that. [35] in WHAT IS INVOLVED IN THE EVANGELIZA- TION OF AMERICA Each of us is a philosopher, though few of us may have found it out. By the same token, each is a theologian, though fewer still care to have it thrown up to them. Finally, each is a statesman, and each would like to see the man who would dare deny it. What sort of an American would he be who would not freely confess that he knows all about how to run the government % The inductive method is the only one which can gain the approval of a modern science. It is the only conclusive method for the present task. But the induction of all the facts is in this case an ex- ceedingly protracted process. The best we can hope for here is to make a running jump for it, to hit only the high places as we get over the ground. Without attempting consistently to apply the scien- tific, inductive method, suppose I lay down a few general and sweeping deductions at the start, roughly outline a programme based upon them, add a few comments and have done. We must frankly accept the fact that each of us has his philosophy and theology and ideas of statescraft pretty defi- nitely formed. Of course by the proposed method one cannot hope to slip up on the blind side of anybody, and convince him against his own primary [36] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMERICA convictions. This is not an argument, therefore. There will be pronouuced difference of opinion at several points, because I am sure my philosophy and theology and perhaps even my ideas of government are quite different from those of many others. But nothing will be lost by frankness. In the first place, it seems to me clear that no con- sistent individualistic philosophy can furnish basis for an adequate programme of evangelization. We often hear it said that after all the only way to save the world is to save men one by one. I must say that " after all" I do not believe that for a moment. That is not the divine plan of salvation, and it is therefore no worthy human plan. One of our world-famous evangelists is accustomed to dem- onstrate by the plainest reckonings of mathematics that one Christian might save the entire world in a short generation. His method is simple to the point of self- evidence. To-day the one hypothetical saved man sets out and reaches one other with the saving message ; they two reach one each to-morrow ; they four one each the next day ; and the geometrical progression is pursued until at the end of a surpris- ingly short period, and even allowing for a high birth rate the entire population of the globe will have been reached. This evangelist, when in col- lege, was what the boys now call a mathematical shark ; he was careful to mention that fact on the occasion when I heard him make this remarkably simple demonstration. But the patent lack of spir- itual insight seriously compromises his evangel- ism. The plan is impracticable not alone because it is so evidently not being practiced, but because [37] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE the conception of salvation is impossible and the philosophy of salvation essentially vicious. In no final sense of the word is it possible to save an individual man. Indeed a sheer, stark individ- ual is a fabric of the imagination, and even as such has never for long survived. Robinson Crusoe is one of the liveliest pieces of imagination literature of any age has produced, but he perished on the author's hands as an undiluted individual. By the deus ex machina the man Friday was swung in before the story was many pages old. Aristotle made a notable remark to the effect that man is a social animal. He doubtless meant it as in the nature of a definition. Man cannot be practically conceived out of his social relations. Auy system of thought which attempts to define him out of those relations, certainly any method of salvation which attempts to save him apart from those relations, is the frustra- tion of itself, is a self-contradiction. You cannot truly save a man without also saving his social re- lations, since in his very constitution they are a part of the man and he is a part of them. One might as reasonably speak of saving a man's intellect while his will is allowed to go to the devil. Our modern psychology has some time ago put its estoppel upon that process. Much of our evangelism is saturated with this im- possible chimerical notion of salvation. No real progress with our programme of evangelization can be made by such a method, and it should not seem surprising therefore that so little progress should actually have been made. The method at best turns the Church into a sort of sieve to measure liquids ; [38] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMEEICA the leakage naturally about equals the intake. There is uo occasion, to be sure, to discard the term individual from either our philosophic or practical nomenclature ; we shall always have serious need of the word and the idea it conveys. But it is needed only as a partial, tentative description of those to be reached in the process of salvation, and can never serve as a final definition or the measure of a saving process. An individualistic salvation is a nothing, a chimera, a will-o' -the- wisp ; there is no substance in it ; pursuing its processes is trampling a tread- mill ; it furnishes no scheme worthy of serious hu- man endeavour, not to speak of the divine councils. In the second place, invading more directly the realm of theology, it may be remarked that the sec- ond coming to earth of Jesus, formerly of Galilee, for a personal reign over the kingdom of God, can furnish no adequate or proper objective for our pro- gramme of evangelization. A scheme embodied in what is commonly known as premillenarianism must break down. Certain devout students of the Scrip- ture will cry out against such an assertion and declare that no man can know his Bible and make it. There is only to reply as we hurry on that after a searching study of the Bible, I rejoice in the dis- covery of a scheme of salvation so magnificent in its proportions and so vital in its realities as seems to me to make the physical second coming theory wholly unworthy as an objective. The evangelization of our land will never be wrought by our ' ' making Jesus known" as the phrase goes, to each man, woman and child inhabiting our states and counties. "The presentation of Christ m to men is dishonouring to Him [39] WOELD MISSIONS FBOM THE HOME BASE and only a travesty, if we seek by such phrases to exhaust the divine scheme of salvation. True evan- gelization is a perpetual life-producing and life-de- veloping process, which marshals all the forces of physical and spiritual nature for the progressive realization of the divine economy in human society. Surveying also the realm of statescraft, as seems necessary in the present connection, it would, in the third place, be both futile and improper for me to attempt to conceal the fact that I am a democrat. By which it will not appear that I vote the ticket of the Democratic political party. As a matter of fact I believe I have never done that. Nor, on the other hand, have I ever voted the ticket of the socialistic political party, or discovered the inclination. You know what I mean. We are enthusiastically agreed here ; all of us Americans are democrats. But now, perhaps, it does not wholly appear what is meant. I mean that the principle of democracy runs deep into and saturates every part of the scheme of human salvation which a worthy programme of evan- gelization should seek to effect. Our democracy is not merely a political convenience. One often hears the complacent remark, as though the statement were self-evident, "Of course a benevolent despot- ism is the best form of human government if some absolute guarantee of the benevolence of the despot could be afforded.' ' Such a sentiment is an outrage upon true democracy. Even Thomas Jefferson was a poor democrat when brought before the bar. Jef- ferson is often quoted as having declared that "an absolute monarchy in which the monarch is all wise and all powerful could not be improved upon by the [40] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMERICA imagination of man." That is to say democracy is a necessary evil, a way of getting on which under present conditions affords in the long run the least embarrassment and hazard. I submit that that is mighty poor democracy, and betrays very superficial insight, even though the seer be Thomas Jefferson himself. No degree or shade or assurance of benevolence, or any other quality, can save despotism, absolutism, from condemnation as a method of human govern- ment. Our civilization is not founded upon a nec- essary evil ; it is not an enforced hostage to human frailty. It is rather a tribute to the nobility of hu- man nature, and should be so conceived. The main issue is not one of convenience, or even of economic security. It is rather a principle which is the fibre, not alone of our political and economic system, but of our religion, no less. Eeligion itself is a sapless thing, a weak shift, without the abiding, inherent democratic element. The most stressful problem of democracy to-day concerns the distribution of economic rewards and emoluments. No true democracy will attempt to make a flat and equal distribution. It will make ample provision for the superior rewards of superior service to the community. Captains of industry ought to receive captains' emoluments. Every rea- sonable democrat will agree to that. But no blind man even can be insensible to the glaring injustice of many of our present economic conditions. This is a special concern of those eager for the coming of the kingdom of heaven, in which righteousness and justice will prevail. [41] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE I visited a rapidly growing industrial centre not long ago, invited to speak in a church on the immi- gration question. The church people of the com- munity are greatly concerned and eager that some- thing practical shall be done. The chairman of the evening is one of them. I was told incidentally that tbis gentleman, one of the foremost citizens of the region, is head of a manufacturing establish- ment, employing large numbers of foreigners. His company has quadrupled its capital stock in three years without its costing the stockholders one cent, and with no break in the payment of twelve per cent, annual dividends upon the nominal stock. That is, each one of the stockholders has been presented with values four times his original holdings without his turning hand in that interest. And the work- men, partners in the enterprise f Oh, yes, they are members of the great army of American working- men, the best paid labourers in the world, you know. They live on a scale which their friends back in the old country reckon princely. But, now, does that hit the point? Does that settle the question ? Is there any real partnership in that enterprise? You see I say nothing of the much-forgotten ulti- mate consumer, forgotten though ^he is much talked about nowadays, who is manifestly paying three or four prices for his commodities, and who by all the equities must also be reckoned a partner in this business. On any reckoning is there economic de- mocracy in that order of affairs, and can religion which cultivates or even permits that sort of thing hope to keep its vitality ? Church people who live and do business on that basis are casting about [42] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMEEICA to evangelize the poor ignorant foreigners. The foreigners may be very ignorant, but they certainly are intelligent enough, and enough appreciative of the essences of the democracy they have come seek- ing, to discover the inherent incongruity of such a programme. This is not an insolated instance. Indeed it was chosen as one of the mildest of the many within reach of every intelligent person. Times over more fla- grant sacrifices of the democratic essences are prev- alent through the industrial centres all along the At- lantic seaboard. Such injustice saturates the eco- nomic atmosphere of the middle West and the farther West. These conditions are not superficial flaws, the outcropping of individual human frailties. They are tacitly sponsored by the finest of individual spir- its, many of them the best people of our churches. They reveal the need of fundamental reconstructions, revised conceptions not alone in the economic realm but the religious no less. It is not the business of human government merely to get people governed. Its function is to enable people to govern. Despotism in any realm, eco- nomic or other, is inherently incompatible with that aim. Let it do what it sets out to do never so efficiently ; let it preserve order till hot a cock shall crow out of time and tune ; let it supply the mechanism of government or of industry till not a cog shall grate upon its fellow, yet is it inevitably doomed to failure because it does not set out to perform the needful in the first place. Analo- gously, a scheme of salvation which embodies a sys- tem of patronage and which conceives of the ele- [43] WORLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE merits of society in that relationship, must fail to save, from the very fact that it is that sort of a scheme, no matter how lavishly it may rain boun- ties, pour out charities, or seek to interpret the divine compassion under the terms of benefactions to the indigent. In short, just as worthy human government is an essence which issues from the heart of human life and human society rather than an artificially constructed and extraneous scheme of control, so the salvation which really saves is the expression of the individual's and society's abiding life rather than a patronage- bestowing or patronage-accepting institution, however effective. Here is the objective therefore to which a worthy programme of evangelization commits us, this : the transformation of human life after the pattern of the Christ life, the reconstruction of our society after the constitution of the kingdom of heaven as Christ conceived it, the capture for righteousness and God of every force and process of our civiliza- tion, economic, social, political, commercial, indus- trial, communal, national, international. To attempt less is to cheapen our task till it is unworthy of a serious evangel. We cannot attempt more. You and I are church people, let us presume, ac- customed to approach the spiritual problems of our society through the Church. What is the proper function of the Church to-day? What are the out- standing spiritual problems? Where do spiritual problems begin and other sorts of problems leave off? The programme of evangelization so roughly outlined just now makes an accurately constructed theory of the Church a very important consideration. Yet [44] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMERICA important as such a task must be, it is to the side of the road along which our discussion is hastening. It must be sufficient now to say that there is a sound and wholly practicable theory to match the pro- gramme. Many persons can only accept with bewil- derment if not with annoyance the so prevalent talk nowadays in religious assemblages about economic conditions and problems. What concern, ask they, can " purely spiritual " agencies have with industrial complications and labour conflicts and political graft and all that sorry mess? To make direct reply would lead far into that discussion of the theory of the Church from which we must turn aside. But the programme of evangelization, whatever may prove a satisfactory theory of the Church, has necessarily a very intimate concern with political graft and labour conflicts and industrial maladjustments and any distraught conditions which affect our social organ- ism. Our programme is the capture for righteous- ness and God of every force and process of civiliza- tion, economic, social, industrial, commercial, polit- ical, or other. It is no degree short of the setting up of the kingdom of heaven upon earth. That is, to be sure, a staggering proposition, if one is of the sort to be staggered. It is perhaps not un- natural that various attempts are made to avoid the plain issue involved. The temptation to construct a philosophy and theology which will permit saving the face while the issue is evaded is for many irre- sistible. We can here follow only two of these shifts. In the first place, much of the missionary enthusiasm of our day has been rallied by the slogan, "The Evangelization of the World in the Present [45] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE Generation." That cry has in it the appeal of a great and triumphing purpose. When it means what it says, it may indeed marshal the hosts for a genu- ine spiritual conquest. It has been much criticized as too ambitious ; it is so large as to be visionary. Nay, nay ; there is rather to complain because it is too narrow and cheap. That is to say, its frequent interpretation is narrow and cheap. One or another is sometimes heard shouting that slogan in the attempt to rally the spiritual hosts, who forthwith inexpress- ibly weakens his appeal by an insipid definition of the term evangelization. Evangelization implies only that a preaching church shall proclaim its mes- sage. Its sole responsibility is bearing the witness, whether the world shall hear or forbear. It is not our concern that the world as such shall be saved ; our obligation ends with bearing the witness. That duty laboriously performed, we may contentedly await the triumphant descent of our Lord of glory to witness the discomfiture of the unbelieving and the bliss of the redeemed. Oh, oh, oh ! It is not to the present purpose to dwell upon the heartlessness of such a programme ; its cheapness is the point. As though a serious generation should put itself to the strain so that it might lust its ears with the crack of doom ! The best which can be said for such a pro- gramme is that it gains its inspiration from John the Baptist, — though that is doing the good man gross injustice. He was only a witness, a voice crying in the wilderness. The proposed programme does not reckon that the Christ has come, whose function it is to bring things to pass. The story is sometimes told of the British tar who [46] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMEEICA was asked how long a time would be required by the forces of the British Navy to convey a message from His Majesty, the King of England, to each inhabitant of the globe. After some pondering, the matter-of- fact sailorman ventured to estimate that the thing might be done in eighteen months' time. The story is often told to cast reproach upon the heralds of Christ for their dilatory ways. More than nineteen centuries have passed and still millions have never heard, — and so on. Those heralds are doubtless all too dilatory, but the story carries with it exceedingly uncomplimentary implications as to the nature of the programme contemplated. As though the proclama- tion of the Gospel of Christ were something like an eighteen months' job ; as though a certain play of sound waves on the tympanum of men's ears were sufficient ! It would be interesting to know, doubt- less, whether the sailor's calculations are correct, but the results of the test would scarcely have even academic value. Perhaps the Church's signal service corps might perform such a feat, but the newspapers would have more startling news to crowd out the re- port the very next day. A spiritual programme which does not grip and transform lives, and fit them to their essential social relations and which does not employ the means adequate to that end, is too cheap for any serious generation. This shift has an emasculating influence upon home mission endeavour especially, since by its computa- tions the work of evangelization for the United States of America has been already effected, or has been so nearly done that the demand for further effort sinks into comparative insignificance. Jesus has been [47] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE made known, the presentation has been made to practically every inhabitant of our states aud terri- tories ; each has had his chance to hear and believe and be saved, and, in so far, the Church can now be relieved of concern, while more stressful obligations are met elsewhere. The stupendous spiritual prob- lems of our generation, every one of which in this land of ours loom into colossal world significance, are hopeless in just the degree in which our mission- ary agencies are under the domination of such a mis- sionary conception. The discerning have observed that much of our conspicuous missionary propaganda is so dominated. It will of course get us no where on the road to a real goal. The enthusiasm it generates will evaporate to no effect unless it can be captured by a more serious purpose. A ministry of evangeli- zation which lets off the spiritual forces of our Ameri- can life with bearing a witness, and which does not make strict exactions as to the actual bringing things to pass, which does not at every turn test the validity of the message by its powers of reconstruction, is a delusion which no serious people will entertain. The other shift which avoids the plain issue of our programme is directly antithetic to that just men- tioned. It reminds us that humau progress is made by the processes of evolution, which are slow, not to say tedious. At least a thousand years have been con- sumed by the Anglo-Saxon race in its emergence from barbarism, and its rise to the present exalted station. Other, backward races, please take notice. Do not expect too much of yourselves. Nature fails ten thousand times where she succeeds once. The devel- opment of varieties and species of animal and plant [48] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMERICA life has been an inconceivably tedious process. How many millions of years is it now since the first fleck of protoplasm dropped upon the earth, and set about the generation of the life with which the earth now teems ? So many millions, at any rate, that nobody pretends to estimate them accurately. Have patience ; jog along ; peg away. Remember that Rome was not built in a day ; civilizations are not the creation of an instant. All of which cautioning doubtless has its value, but the caution is easily overworked. Allow it true that progress is made by the processes of evolution. Allow it true that nature has consumed cycles of ages in her undirected production of species and varieties. Yet does Luther Burbank, our modern wizard of horticulture, sit by, mooning, while nature produces new varieties and species in his garden 1 Is there no office for divinely inspired wizards of the spiritual horticulture ? Because the development of the rudi- ments of civilization has consumed millenniums does it follow that new millenniums must roll over before civilization shall take on new enrichments? Is history intended as a millstone slung about our necks to plunge us into the slough of inanition, because, forsooth, the generations past have moved upon slow foot ? Is not history rather intended as an inspira- tion to rouse us out of our sluggishness? Our modern science has a far wholesomer lesson to teach than one of stagnation. It is sometimes asserted, as though it were a truism, You cannot hustle nature. On the contrary, that is precisely what our modern science is joining hands with the grace of God to enable us to do, to bustle nature, to pack millenniums [49] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE into years. And, what is more, nature of every realm, physical or spiritual, delights to be hustled. She is arching her neck and champing her bits to be let go upon a merry drive, the thrill of which we have not yet conceived. It is sheer paganism to stand in craven dread or in complacent indolence before the forces of either the physical or the spiritual world. As though God were an angry, fretful Zeus, seeking pretext against the stressful ; as though earth and air and water were teeming with harpies lusting to blast human presumption ! "We have got a different God since Christ, and we live in a different world. We have been taught to pray, Thy king- dom come on earth, and we are poor Christians if we have not the courage of our petitions. If you ask, Is this programme of evangelization possible for one generation ? I also will ask you one question, Can any serious generation be content to attempt less ! The question is tantamount to asking whether we propose to attempt the realization of our ideals. What, pray tell, is the value of ideals, else ? The evangel of any generation is its Christian inter- pretation of things. Can any generation claim to be considered serious or Christian which does not attempt to realize its interpretation ? It does not diminish either the joy or duty of you and me, but rather magnifies them both, that another generation shall in its turn strive for the new realization of its new evangel. I hope we all begin to realize something of the task we have on our hands. I do not see how any sensible man, not to speak of a devout man, could think of exchanging it for a smaller or cheaper. Least of all [50] THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMERICA can respect be accorded the weak purpose and timid faith which interpret evangelization as a smattering process, dribbling questionable virtue over the in- habitants of the earth in haphazard fashion. In the construction of the kingdom of heaven regard must be had of its solidarity, its demand for citizenship —a thoroughgoing citizenship, nothing less, — which com- passes human need, and leaves no essential element of human welfare an alien concern. [51] IV WHAT THE FOREIGNER IS TEACHING US We have so perpetually concerned ourselves with what we shall do for the foreigner, that we may not have apprehended clearly what the foreigner in his turn is doing for us. Or, if we have given this side concern, it has been for the most part to shorten the phrase and complain of how the foreigner is "doing us." Maybe, after all, we are getting the better of the bargain. At any rate, only after seriously con- sidering what he is doing for us will we be most wise to know what we can do for him. Until that dis- covery is made we shall almost certainly be doing the wrong thing. In our high poetic flights we sometimes magnify the artistic temperament and talent of the Italian, for example, or the Russian exile's stern and abandoned devotion to liberty or death, the German's inground reverence for education and the institutions of learn- ing, — and all that sort of thing. None can deny a modicum of prose truth in the fine poetry. Their racial virtues the immigrants of these several races have not left behind ; they have brought them along to enrich our life. And we need the virtues which these and all others can contribute. This glory of the immigration business its ugly features can never obliterate. What a magnificent product will be the American character when the process of amalgamation has gone forward a few [52] WHAT THE FOEEIGNEE IS TEACHING US further stages ! How little any one race expresses the full measure of the human character ! How far short does any one strain of racial nature fall of run- ning the full gamut of human possibility ! And what a splendid product will be the combination of them all in the coming American ! Amalgamation in the crude, physical sense of the term is perhaps repugnant to the most. Few parents fancy the thought of their children marrying the foreigner, — unless, of course, he happen to be a prince, or decorated with gewgaws inherited from his ancestors. Then, let him be never such a rake, there are fond American mammas and ambitious American misses in plenty to bargain for his person, titles, prestige in a decayed civilization, degeneracy, vices and all. Yet, one may feel all the horror to which any of us is accustomed at the thought of in- termarriage and physical amalgamation, and still be thrilled by the thought of what the future is to pro- duce in this land, of an epitome of the human fami- lies, a combination of racial virtues winch shall lift the whole human race to higher levels of realization. All that must be included as a part of the reckon- ing. But perhaps all do not feel in the poetic or prophetic mood. If some one should speak up to remind us of the Italian's dagger as well as his painter's palette, the fact must be admitted that those of the Italian immigrants of whom we read the most in the newspapers are more consummate artists of the stiletto than of the paint-brush. The Black- hand is no fiction, with all of the difficulty the police find in laying hands upon it. Nobody knows quite what it is, but the murders still roll up, and if there [53] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE ia not some organized engine of assassination oper- ating, the results would at any rate do credit to such. Some new victim of the bomb or the stiletto is an- nounced every few days. It requires a deal of ideal- istic philosophizing to discover in the average Russian immigrant that stern devotion to human liberty with which he is accredited. Rather, he has often showed himself a pessimist and breeder of chronic and irreconcilable discontent. Maybe the German loves education and discovers a passion for abstract learn- ing, but it is rather his beer for which he is com- monly observed uncovering a passion. This phase of the subject must always prove di- verting. On the whole, a far better case could be made out for each of the races than the most of us are disposed to allow. These are mighty peoples whose representatives are coming to us; there are among them the hardiest and finest- tempered char- acters the evolution of the ages has produced. Here is a tremendous deal, indeed, which the foreigner is doing for us : he is moulding the American character of the future, and it is easy faith to believe that the future will show it to be the choicest produced upon the earth. But the nearer present : what is the immigrant doing for us right now "i Building our railroads, laying the gas-pipes in our streets, burrowing out our cellars ; driving spikes and digging ditches, doing our dirty work. Pass that by, also. It is all true ; he is doing all that, slaving that our homes and marts may wear their sheen. And he is getting high wages at it, saving money and shipping it by the million to his friends and dependents in foreign [54] WHAT THE FOREIGNER IS TEACHING US parts. Some may rise up to declare the accounts even. The foreigner does work hard, but he does it of his own choice. That is what vastly the larger proportion came for, to work. Hard and high- priced labour they came seeking ; that is what they are getting. Everybody realizes that there is more to be said, pro and con. But pass on. I specify two things the foreigner is doing for us, matters of immediate concern, yet not incidents of passing moment nor of trifling importance. They loom large to-day and run their roots deep into the eternal values. And the first is this : The foreigner is putting to the test our announced principles of human liberty and our philosophy of the social organism. He is compelling us to do what our fathers did at the founding of this Republic, what they did in their own age and for their own age so grandly that history will rank them higher and higher among the great as the years roll on. We have got to turn philos- ophers of human government, we thoughtless Amer- icans have in our generation. We have got to de- cide what we are going to do about things. We have got to learn that letting things slide is no way to land things right side up and where they belong. We have got all this to do. It cannot be delegated to a few alleged statesmen at Washington, nor to the editors of esoteric magazines. Through every val- ley and along every street there must appear thought- ful students of the times. Much of the economic and social theory handed down to us in rigid form has got to be recast and remodelled to meet immediate and practical demands. [55] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE Your natural-born, untainted American is suffo- cated in the crowded city ; stuffing him into a tene- ment is like casting him into prison. The whole of our national history has been one grand breakaway from the trammels of the crowd. There has been a steady march westward to the open country. We have been seizing and occupying a continent in such a rapid movement as to overmatch any similar event of human history. And in this march the native American, and not the uuassimilated foreigner, has invariably led. Each of our new states has been originally settled by native Americans. The purest American population in the entire country to-day is that of Oklahoma. That populous and all but the newest state in the Union has the purest American stock. Eeckon the aboriginal Indian as a " for- eigner," yet is the statement true. Only yesterday the most of the territory was a wilderness ; to-day it contains a million and a half of people. Yet less than six-tenths of one per cent, of the yearly influx of foreign immigration lands in Oklahoma. The native American takes to the woods and the open prairie like a duck to water ; and the foreign immi- grant does not. The American discovers a passion as yet unsatiated for the new country. He must have ten miles square, more or less, to stretch his arms and lungs in. He is true to the original type only when he has all outdoors to spread himself. The immigrant is not of that ilk. When he is the duck the crowded city is the pond. Our cities east and west are teeming with foreigners. The propor- tion of foreign born in the population runs well over half in several of them. [56] WHAT THE FOREIGNER 19 TEACHING US Now this is more than a phenomenon to call forth the desultory investigations of the statisticians. This is serious business for every thoughtful and conscientious citizen. It is a notorious fact that American city government is the worst in the civ- ilized world. Several of our greatest modern states- men have said, and are saying with a more serious shake of the head every day, that the rock upon which our American ship of state will founder, if she should go down, would be municipal adminis- tration, the government of our great unwieldy cities. What is the alternative then f Shall we break out in bitter and uncompromising maledictions of these dirty, good-for-nothiug, rascally foreigners, as the manner of some is 1 That is a senseless way to go at our task. In the first place the charge is not true. The foreigners are not dirty, good-for- nothing rascals. They are good for an immense deal ; they are not rascals ; and they have contrib- uted much thrift to our communities. In the second place, maledictions, however well justified by the facts, can never meet the situation and save our jeopardized social organism. Swearing never even healed a smashed thumb. The truth is we are early getting our chance at a condition which is bound to arise sooner or later, anyway. We would far better attack these prob- lems of congestion, of city life, with a population of ninety millions, than shirk the responsibility and let matters slide until our institutions are overwhelmed by a population of nine hundred millions. A popu- lation about that size will be here some day. One full generation more will establish two hundred mil- [57] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE lions in our domain. The American character has got to produce, to develop into a new type. Now is none too early to begin the serious business. We cannot go on forever scattering into new country. The earth isn't big enough. A man who demands ten miles square to be comfortable in would best modify his tastes. The earth was not laid out upon that extravagant and wasteful basis. It is time the American people realized that there is more to civilization than pioneering, and that the earth was intended for other and more serious purposes than the herding of long-horned cattle. Such wholesome lessons the foreigner has come over to teach us. He is correcting a reckless and extravagant tendency which, if allowed to confirm itself by a few more generations, would, under the laws of the world economy, eventually blight Ameri- can character and wreck American institutions. We have got sooner or later to learn how to live in cities, and make them decent enough to live in. The modern immigrant has come over to tell us we would better get at the business sooner, when there is still good chance of our succeeding at it. The present-day immigrant is notoriously grega- rious, clannish. He soon converts a country village into a city ; if he does not find a city close at hand into which he can crowd he forthwith makes one. The tendency is inexplicable and often maddening to the old-fashioned American. He cannot for the life of him understand why human beings should fancy jambing themselves in so close together. We have never developed systems of sanitation or any other civic institutions to meet such conditions, and [58] WHAT THE FOREIGNER IS TEACHING US many are ready to vote the foreigners beasts aud treat them as such. The most of us do not our- selves comprehend how provincial we are, how in- adequate are our institutions to stand the severe tests of the new world into which the human race is now moving. Our original, all out-of-doors methods of life are as ill prepared to serve in this new world as a clumsy boy is unfitted for the dexterous and masterful achievements of the man. Our demo- cratic institutions are exceedingly delicate ; wrong tendencies must be taken in hand and controlled in time else such intricate mechanism will be hope- lessly wrecked. This great and delicately con- structed Republic cannot go blundering on into new and untried ways, as the older and cruder des- potic civilizations have done. Republics cannot afford to blunder. The immigrant has come to check us early, while we still have room to experi- ment. He is forcing us to solve problems in the small before we are overwhelmed by unforeseen deluges. What is to be the solution of the problem ? That it is the business of every thoughtful and conscientious citizen to help find out. Highly organized democ- racies like ours have never before survived. Re- publics before us have failed. There are no prec- edents of success, therefore ; the most anybody knows as yet is how not to do the business. How to do it will require the combined sagacity and devotion of all to discover and demonstrate. Pass on to the second lesson the foreign immi- grant is teaching us. He is bringing us, forcing us where we do not move willingly, to a truer inter- [59] WOBLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE pretation of the Christian religion. He is uncon- sciously offering the challenge, Here, try your re- ligion on me. He presses his challenge collect- ively with more insistence than individually, for the very reason that he is so gregarious. Christianity is essentially and fundamentally social, has regard to the other man. This challenge is therefore legitimate. The Christian religion is not ultimately concerned with our complacent individ- ualistic experiences, however comforting and sooth- ing such may be. Elaborate introspective analyses of how we feel towards God, the punctilious labelling of our inner states with mystical names may be gratifying to those who fancy indulging in the exer- cise, but such doings do not embody the Christian religion nor reveal its essence. Whence ever came the prompting for the prayer so often uttered in public worship, "We thank Thee, O God, that Thou dost give us the opportunity to withdraw from the world to this place where we may find and commune with Thee." The phrases we have picked up some- where, but the spirit of them certainly did not come from Jesus Christ. We resort to our summer loung- ing places ; we revel in the blessed religious experi- ences of these resorts, Bible expositions and moun- tain-top privileges ; exploit our finely wrought doc- trines ; tell one another and have eloquent speakers tell us how certain it is that Moses wrote down every word of the Pentateuch whatever scholars and scientists and historians or any other atheists may think about it — suppose we are entirely correct, and suppose we follow that programme never so zealously, wherein have we caught the meaning of the [60] WHAT THE FOREIGNER IS TEACHING US Christian religion or embodied the spirit of Jesus Christ ? The truth is, much summer-resort religion has little in it to identify it with Christianity. The power to redeem this throbbing social organism developing before our eyes will never come from lis- tening to hair-splitting lectures on Biblical interpre- tations, nor even from tales of saloon evangelism, marvellous as the incidents may appear. Now, of course, a vacation is a good thing ; every- body ought to take one occasionally. Our summer resorts are a good thing, and there is no reason why one should not gain instruction and inspiration from listening to lectures while on vacation. But to sup- pose that a summer's cramming of exhilarations will clarify religious insights is to be deluded. When one needs a rest, he ought to take it by all means, but to mistake a pathological condition for a relig- ious craving, and to seek to make individualistic ex- hilarations satisfy that craving, is a very serious mistake indeed. Can it appear for one moment that such a programme will so much as touch the insistent spiritual problem of our great hurrying cities, and redeem our puissant industrial civilization to God f The average man on the streets knows or cares about as much for our dreamy, withdrawn-from-the- world religion as if it were all being practiced by the inhab- itants of Mars. We announce that to draw near to God we must withdraw from the world, and the untutored man on the street takes us at our word, and allows us to withdraw, religion and all. Surely no one need be reminded that such a programme was never mapped out by Jesus Christ. It will require the power of the religion of Christ [61] WOKLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE to redeem our civilization, and we above all men ought to be alive to that fact, but many who assume to know best what that religion is are least prepared to bring that power to bear. We are placed in a serious situation. The hustling, matter-of-fact immi- grant foreigner is putting our Christianity to the test, and our Christianity is found wanting, — which is clear enough demonstration that we have not got the true religion of Jesus Christ. I remarked that true Christianity is essentially social. Further, it is democratic. Men and women will never be patronized into the kingdom of God. Much of our missionary zeal has exhausted itself in pitying the poor, benighted heathen. If only some one should carry the gospel light to them, how happy they must be ! God has brought some of the heathen close up to us, to enable us to determine how correct are our conceptions, how clear is this gospel light which we supposed we had to disseminate. This ex- perience ought to correct many an erroneous notion. The foreigner, the brother-man seen in such a delusive light at the great distance, when brought close up will make the missionary enterprise seem a very different thing from what some had supposed it. Perhaps we shall learn, by not over-gentle experiences, what sort of Christianity it actually is which shall redeem the world to God. Can your religion make good, can your Christianity do the business? That is the uncouth question which the foreign immigrant has come close up in his frank way to ask. And it is an exceedingly important question. It makes literally a world of difference what we have to reply. We would best not talk too loudly about saving the world [62] WHAT THE FOBEIGNER IS TEACHING US unless we can make straightforward reply to that question. Such questions as these the foreigner amongst us has not created de novo. The situation he has pro- duced by his coming is not an accident of this par- ticular time and place. These are eternal issues. Facing them is a matter of dateless importance. Their coming to light and pressing to the fore is coin- cident with the immigrant's coming, the foreigner is making us think about them, he is making them the importunate problems of the time, but we had to face them and deal with them sooner or later anyway. And, as already remarked, we ought to thank the foreigner, rather than denounce him, because he has compelled us to attend to them sooner rather than later, when it might be too late. This is not showing how the immigration problem is to be solved. Almost everybody has underestimated the task. Many have supposed it simply a matter of preaching the pure Gospel, as the phrase goes. If only somebody could be found who could preach to them ; perhaps some suppose that all needed is a corps of ministers who can speak their various languages. Doubtless that is a great need. Sut though ten thousand Chry sostoms might be at call able to ring out their eloquence in all the languages of the earth, their effort would be next to futile without our clear understanding of these weightier considera- tions I have referred to, and our determined readiness to meet these demands. First of all, are we sure we know what the Gospel of Christ is? That we must find out before we can preach it. Though we speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have [63] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE not love, have not the wisdom which conies of a deep sense of the human brotherhood, our preaching, in how many so ever languages, is but sounding brass and a clanging cymbal. There is just one language in which this problem is to be solved, the universal language of love and human brotherhood spoken clearly both in church and state, in practice and deep in life purposes. [64] THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FACTS AND PRINCIPLES A familiar legend runs to the effect that once upon a time a great boulder lay upon a certain highroad. It interfered seriously with the traffic. To avoid the obstruction travellers were compelled to make an annoying detour each time they passed that way. Aggravating as it was the community complacently settled down to the acceptance of the situation. Stern necessity was thought to make complacency the only logic. One day a traveller who must often pass that way reached the limit of his patience, climbed down from his vehicle, put to the task the utmost of his strength, and rolled the stone out of the passage, affording a straight course for the highway. The story adds further details which have only incidental connection here, to the effect that under the stone there was revealed a bag of gold. It had been placed there by the lord of that domain, ex- pressly designated as the reward of the traveller who should perform this timely service for the community. And the legend runs on still further to report that, for a considerable season thereafter, there was a prodigious scampering of adventurers throughout all that region who quite marred the land- scape with their persistent rolling over of stones here, [65] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE there and everywhere in the search for other bags of gold. Of course, no others were found. It was only underneath the stone which obstructed the high- way that the lord of the domain had placed the gold, intending it not as the bauble of idle adven- ture, but as the reward of timely service to the com- munity. As before remarked, however, it is only inciden- tally that we are here concerned with the later de- velopments of the story. Mark the main point. If we are short-sighted in our purposes or indolent in our thinking, it is easy to mistake more or less obstinate facts for enduring principles and eternal truths. We fall into the habit of taking conditions for necessary because they exist, and, once conclud- ing them necessary, we settle down to the compla- cent acceptance of them for good and for all. Be- cause obstacles are in the way we indolently adjust ourselves to what we take to be the inevitable, and continue indefinitely to make the annoying detour in our journey. It is both curious and pathetic, the manner in which this tendency has been revealed in history. Men have sought and supposed they found in Scrip- ture itself the warrant of the divine fiat for some of the most outlandish practices, and for the most ri- diculous acceptance of bad conditions. There is the case of the witch chasers. Of course there were witches, because they are mentioned in the Bible, and, equally of course, when they afflicted the com- munity there was only to drown them or burn them or banish them. The slavery of the black man was not only justified by an appeal to Scripture but was [66] FACTS AND PRINCIPLES maintained as inevitable, a moral and spiritual ne- cessity in the proper ordering of human society. There is a lingering conviction in some quarters to that effect still. Many of the most eloquent preach- ers of fifty and sixty years ago could demonstrate beyond a peradventure that God Almighty had or- dained that the black man should be held in perpet- ual slavery. That principle was one of the corner- stones of human society. It was as inevitable as the ordering of the moral universe. And, I repeat, fragments of that conviction still linger here and there. Once in a while even now one meets men and women who appeal to Scripture to prove that a position of servility and social inferiority is the natural and inevitable lot of the descendants of Ham. And, to be sure, we have by painful experiences discovered much which was not apprehended by the enthusiasts of the days of reconstruction just follow- ing the Civil War. Few understood what peculiarly obstinate facts can be created through a thousand generations of tropical savagery and three hundred years of actual slavery. Many of those facts are now coming to light ; reformers and enthusiasts are coming to realize the obstinacy of such facts. The Negro race is inferior : it would be the most unnatural thing in the world if it were not inferior. It is always well to face the facts. But mere facts, how- ever obstinate, ought not to be allowed to consti- tute themselves eternal principles. The fact that a race is inferior can go only as far as any fact goes. The fiat of Almighty God has not doomed the Ne- gro or any other race to servility and social degra- dation. It is not fighting against God to undo ob- [67] WORLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE noxious facts, however obstinate. It is quite the contrary : it is fighting with God. Take that as an offhand definition of the divine campaign which is eternally on : it is the undoing of obnoxious facts, the unmaking of bad conditions. Now, note particularly two illustrations of this truth ; each can supply a hundred other illustrations from his own experience and thinking. Jesus made this remark on a notable occasion : "The poor ye have always with you." Three times the incident is reported in the Gospels which called forth that remark : "The poor ye have always with you." The point I wish to make just now is that the remark upon even so peculiarly obstinate a fact as this does not commit Jesus and has no business com- mitting any one to the acceptance of poverty in human society as inevitable and necessary. There are indeed few more obstinate facts in the experience of human society than just this. Poverty certainly always has been ; I hope we are not indolent enough either in our thinking or in our action to conclude that it therefore always will be. A definite case is made of this not alone because it is a matter of such transcendent economic and social importance in our day, but because we are allowing ourselves to got into such a spiritual muddle at this point. It is oftentimes complacently maintained that poverty is a sort of religious necessity in the social organism. The most of us are consciously or unconsciously af- fected by that theory. Some theology deliberately maintains the poor to furnish that upon which the well-to-do may practice the Christian virtues. Doubtless that theology in its bald form is not now [68] FACTS AND PRINCIPLES in vogue as a theory, but iu practice we are very slow in getting away from it. What would there be left for the Church to do, as the Church uow most vividly conceives itself, if there were no poor to pro- vide charity for, to build missions for, to favour with a modicum of our combined and aggregated patron- age ? In short, what would become of our profes- sional Christian virtues if poverty were abolished from human society % Do not our religious institu- tions and our religious theories consciously or uncon- sciously claim poverty as a religious necessity ? Poverty as a fact Jesus was very prompt to accept, and poverty as a fact the Christian religion may well accommodate itself to. But it would be a most de- plorable issue if Jesus and the Christian religion were made to commit themselves, as to a necessary principle, to what calls in our day by all that is holy and human for abolition and eradication. The abolition of poverty is now at least a mathe- matical possibility. Only now has it become such. Up to recently there simply was not enough food produced to keep all from starving. The arts of food production were far behind the vital necessities. It was inevitable that somebody should go hungry. There were too many mouths to fill to allow the sup- plies of the public larder to go all the way round. That is now happily untrue. In this country at least, mathematically speaking, there is no reason why any man, woman or child should go hungry. Yet of course everybody knows that poverty is our great social scourge ; thousands are perishing for the lack of daily food and shelter. And when some high- flying socialist comes along with a fine-spun method [69] WORLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE of distributing the acknowledged supply so that all may share in it on some equitable basis, what is the stock argument by which we think to reduce him to speechless confusion? His scheme will not work. But why will it not work ? We shall not enter the arena of this modern war- fare. Let the fine- spun theories of socialism spin on. The point is that poverty can claim no virtue from necessity. God does not ordain poverty. It is not created by a law of nature. You may silence the haranguing socialist with asserting that an equal dis- tribution of property to-day would be destroyed to- morrow by the indolence and moral inability of the people themselves. That is doubtless a fact which past experience would seem conclusively to demon- strate as a fact, but there is no religious necessity in the fact. Let the fact be never so obstinate, it has nothing of the value of an eternal principle. Let us by all means relieve Jesus of Nazareth of the reputa- tion of defending by any implication whatsoever the distressing social and economic inequities of our present-day society. Religion does not need to feed upon charities. Religion would on the contrary thrive far more healthily if there were no devastating poverty to call for organized or unorganized charity. So long as one class of society continues to get its religious satisfac- tion from patronizing and doling out benefactions to another class of society religion is bound to develop unwholesomely. Wrong conceptions of God are certain to prevail and false relations between man and man sap religion of its vitality. So far from being a religious necessity, poverty is to-day the [70] FACTS AND PRINCIPLES millstone hanged about the neck of organized religion, threatening to sink our religious institutions into the abyss. As surely as we claim to be a Christian people we have got this bane of our society to abolish. The other illustration of the point at issue which I wish to make lies not very far along. Another pertinent text of Scripture is found in the Old Testa- ment, in the writings of a prophet who had a knack of discovering the deep badness of things. A notable and notorious remark of his is translated in our older English version, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. ' ' That is a profound observation. It presents a fact the most stubborn which the forces of human salvation have to en- counter. But my point is that it is a fact, not an eternal principle nor an enduring necessity. Of course no one who believes in the salvability of human nature at all will maintain that it is an in- flexible principle. The whole Christian scheme of things implies that the heart is capable of becoming something other than deceitful, and that men should become something other than desperately wicked. But my point is that all of us are inclined to stand with far too great complacency before this obstinate fact. The religious calm with which we often accept the perversities and degeneracy of human nature is quite subversive of true religion. Everything on earth which goes wrong is likely at last to be laid up to human depravity, and, once we can justify ourselves in making that observation, the whole story is told, the argument is closed, there is nothing more to say. As a matter of fact we have then only reached the beginning. It does not satisfactorily explain and [71] WORLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE justify bad conditions to say that human nature is bad. It is the business of human nature to be good, what- ever be the fact and it is precisely our business to see that it is good and that all the conditions of human society are good along with it. Abundant evidence is now accumulating of the inadequacy of our redemptive methods. A police commissioner in New York City resigned not long since or was removed. On retiring he pointed with pride to his record and the conduct of his office. It is a remarkable record. There were more arrests and prosecutions for crime than ever before in the history of the city. That is doubtless a complimen- tary showing for the police department, but by the same token it is exceedingly uncomplimentary to the city and the forces which are supposed to make for righteousness. The record is not without its sugges- tion that there has been more cause than ever before for making arrests and conducting prosecutions. The challenge now being so conspicuously offered the redemptive forces of society is well timed : This work of reclaiming men from the gutter is beau- tiful, doubtless, but the gutter is not beautiful. Is not the gutter too expensive an institution to main- tain 1 Does it pay for itself in the religious satisfac- tion to be got from pulling men out of it 1 ? Does not the most of our redemptive work consist in fixing up after a certain fashion a bad mess which ought never to have been allowed to develop % We are expert at the salvage business, but are we really up to the saving business 1 I once knew a doctor who was very insecure in his diagnosis of the most of diseases. Any complication was likely to throw him off his [72] FACTS AND PRINCIPLES bearings. He practiced in a malarial country. And bis uniform procedure, whatever might be the malady, was to administer calomel till be bad got bis patient thoroughly well salivated, when be was on safe ground, for salivation be understood and could treat. In somewhat similar fashion, we still do despite to the grace of God by our redemptive methods. Once a man is in the gutter, we know j ust what to do next. The machinery is in operation to suit the case. We are expert at rescue work. If the vice-mill will only continue grinding out its grist there will always be abundant material on which our redemptive machin- ery can operate. That is to say, the vice-mill is a sort of religious necessity. If we can get men des- perately wicked, we know just how the grace of God operates for their redemption. Of course that is reducing the situation to the ridiculous, but even grace does not stay us always from becoming ridiculous. Is not the motive and aim of much of our religious activity a work of sal- vage and far too little the work of salvation ? It is easy to arouse interest in and collect money for res- cue, salvage enterprises, but when it comes to the real work of salvation, keeping men and women out of the gutter in the first place, — well, it is all too true that the vice-mill is accepted as a religious necessity ; if we cannot get men desperately wicked we scarcely know how to bring a process of grace to bear upon them. And yet it may be asserted with the utmost emphasis that the first demand to-day of religion, pure and undefined, is the abolition of the vice-mill. Religious sentiments and religious institutions which [73] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE are appealed to only by the gruesome product of our moderu social abuses are least of all worthy of the sanction of true religion. Eeligion, to be its real self, has got to prompt us to keep men out of the gutter, not to salve us with satisfaction for having pulled them out after we have pushed them in. That is brief allusion to two illustrations of the truth emphasized. There is quite as much profit doubtless in calling up the hundred other illustrations which each can supply from his own thinking. At every turn we are extracting the virtue of necessity from bad conditions which are not necessary at all. There is no virtue in the dull endurance of what ought to be corrected and abolished. A lot of what we mistake for holy resignation to the divine will is in terser phrase our precious indolence. In the re- port of a missionary some time ago there was a para- graph which read like this : u As I sit here writing in my home I can gaze aloft and see the blue sky through the holes in the roof, and, looking down- ward, can observe through the cracks in the floor the greedy swine rooting in the soil beneath the house." It occurs to the practical mind at once that the good man might have dropped his pen long enough at least to drive the pigs out of the yard even if he could not repair the roof. The family with a heap of garbage rotting at the back door need not wonder long over the inscrutable providence which sends the scourge of typhoid. We set great store in our devotional moments by the ills of our lives which test our spirit of resigna- tion or afford the opportunity of sacrifice. But there is no religious or other value in needless sacrifice. [74] FACTS AND PRINCIPLES Self-sacrifice for the sake of self-sacrifice is at best a species of spiritual priggishness. The Apostle Paul has a cutting remark to make about the "show of wisdom " in will- worship. In another place he draws a sharp distinction between godly sorrow, and other kinds of sorrow. Godly sorrow is immensely prof- itable in that it puts one right with God, but the other sort of sorrow he is frank to declare works only death. Cultivating grit for the grit's sake is about the most thankless task a man ever set himself to, and about the least godly. Grit is a mighty valuable article when it comes as a by-product, but a grit factory — well, that is another name for a stone- crusher, and it is not a fit symbol for the wholesome human life. It may be proper to recall by this time that, in the parable with which we began, adventurers scampered through all the region in the search of stones which they might overturn. They foolishly supposed bags of gold would be found beneath them also. But only under the stone which obstructed the highroad lay the reward of straining effort. Racing about over the hills in out-of-the-way places to roll over stones which are in nobody's way and never will be in any- body's way only disfigures the landscape with ghastly scars. Seeking virtue by profitless deprivations, grinding through a succession of meaningless religious exercises, feverishly perpetuating activities which have lost all significance of piety, — that may be of value in the maintenance of will- worship, but it is the very subversion of true religion. Religion exacts strain, but demands that the strain shall be made to some worthy end. It sets us at the task of overturn- [75] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE ing stones so ponderous that all other forces will balk before the effort, but it is careful to point out the stones obstructing the highway and not those beauti- fying the landscape on some remote hillside. I hope we shall not miss the main point. It is neither good common-sense nor is it good religion to go on forever detouring obstructions to progress. Least of all does religion set up and maiutain such obstacles. Because Jesus and the apostles and the prophets were compelled to face and to accept certain obstinate facts, it does not follow that we also should placidly accept those facts. No mere fact has any business being exalted into the place of an eternal principle. To do that thing is not good religion ; it is the essence of irreligion. There are several bad conditions in our society which have got now to be corrected. It makes no difference how compla- cently they have been accepted in the past. Though all the generations, pious and otherwise, may have taken them for necessary, yet for us they are not nec- essary. Since they are bad and not necessary all the sanctities of religion demand their eradication, their abolition, and religious institutions and sentiments are doomed which do not address themselves to the business. Though such conditions may have been wrought into the social fabric through all the ages clean back to Adam and Eve as they stepped out of the Garden of Eden, yet do they not belong in our social organism, and failure to eradicate them by processes which go to the roots of things will bring us and our redemptive agencies under a moral and spiritual curse. It is the glory of religion that it has inspired men [76] FACTS AND PRINCIPLES to attempt and achieve the uttermost ; it has nerved them to do what by all the laws of likelihood is im- possible. The modem scientific spirit when sancti- fied by reverence is potent to the same end. It stands undaunted and unafraid. It says, These strongholds of evil must yield as others before them have fallen. If we have got the first infusion of the reverent scien- tific spirit, if we have sounded even the shallows of religion's essential puissance we shall have no doubt that what now puts its blight upon our civilization and shames us before God and men can be corrected. It is a spiueless science and a pettifogging religion which balks before tasks even so vast and difficult. This is what faith in God is for, to make us sure that what is bad can be conquered, to give us a conscience restless until the bad is conquered. [77] VI HOME MISSIONS AND SPIRITUAL WOELD CONQUEST World citizenship is the only sort of citizenship which is finally worthy of the Christian. The genius of the kingdom of heaven on earth exacts that sort. There can be no difference between home and foreign missions on that score. Home missions is not narrow and foreign missions broad ; home missions is not a provincial or merely national economy while foreign missions hold in monopoly a world enterprise. The difference, if there is an essential difference, is one of method in the approach to the same comprehensive, universal responsibility. The philosophy of our times is drawing ever more clear lines of distinction between an individualistic scheme and the social interpretation of life, the so- cial measurement of values. One does not need to be a political socialist to discern this distinction. He may indeed be zealous to accept and propagate the deeper conception of the spiritual economy and the truer interpretation of the Gospel which comes with the social vision, while he vigorously repudiates the accepted tenets of political socialism. Thoughtful students of present day spiritual movements will find it more and more apparent that these two conceptions of the spiritual enterprise furnish the lines of real demarcation among missionary forces. Individual- ists lean towards the "foreign mission" method of [78] SPIRITUAL WORLD CONQUEST approach to the world-wide enterprise, and those who have caught the social vision of the Gospel's meaning incline towards making "home missions" the method of that approach. Such minor considera- tions as whether the so-called institutional church is a success, how much politics should be introduced into preaching, how often a minister should intro- duce the subject of temperance or any other phase of social virtue or vice, — those questions are superficial and do not measure the significance of the distinction pointed out. Are individuals or are communities and nations the final units of the divine economy ? That is one of the deep questions. Which is the more potent method of reaching world spiritual need : the sending out of individuals here and there, scattered to the uttermost parts, or the marshalling of a vigorous and growing nation with all the forces of an already dominant civilization for properly qualified leader- ship in world movements ! That question comes at the heart of the difference, so far as there is a differ- ence. By its genius the foreign mission propaganda is more or less consistently committed to the former method, and home missions, so far as they are true to their genius, are zealous in the latter method. Mr. Roosevelt has said nothing more profound than that which has been frequently upon his lips since his return from his recent protracted sojourn abroad. He shows by his every utterance how deeply his sentiments of personal world citizenship have been stirred, and makes no word more emphatic than the conviction that that man is the best world citizen who is the best citizen of the nation to which he be- [79] WORLD MISSIONS PROM THE HOME BASE longs. He assures all that he returns to do his ut- most to help in the solution of our present-day com- plicated social and political and economic problems. One need not accept with complete cordiality Mr. Roosevelt's conception of what the true solution of those problems is to appreciate the worth of the doc- trine of world citizenship which he sets forth so clearly and forcefully. Jingoism is of course wholly unworthy any one who lays claim to world citizenship. No nation exists to prey upon its fellows in the world economy. Each can be properly conceived only in the terms of serv- iceableness to the world's need ; each gains its greatest dignity as an instrument of good to humanity as a whole. And what a mighty instrument of good the American nation may to-day become in the world economy if it shall be intelligently and in good con- science used to that end ! No aggregation of indi- viduals, though they be so numerous that only the world itself might contain them, could perform so potent an office as that the logic of present-day movements commits to us as a whole people acting as a whole. As a great spiritual organism we are worth ten thousand times more to the world than we could be as a rabble of individuals. Home missions, in just the degree in which the cause takes itself seriously, is seeking to perfect this incomparably potent organism. An illustration from the educational world will prove illuminating. No influence has been more pro- found in shaping recent developments in the Ameri- can system of higher education than that of the Ger- man university. Not only has this influence been [80] SPIRITUAL WORLD CONQUEST remarkably profound but the development has been very rapid. What has been the method ! The Ger- man universities have not sent propagandists to America to exploit the German system. Such a case as that of Prof. Hugo Muusterberg, of Harvard, has been very rare. He is a German, trained in the German universities, and he is a powerful force in our present American educational world. But he was not sent as a propagandist ; he was called to his Harvard professorship upon Harvard's initiative be- cause Harvard was intelligently conscious of desiring the splendid impetus to her scholarly life which he has contributed. And even he, splendid as has been his service, does not embody in himself, or so much as represent, the real force which has done so much to Germanize American educatiou. German educa- tional ideals won their real conquest in America by perfecting in the German universities themselves that superior scholarship which has for two generations attracted American students to their faculties veri- tably in crowds. These students have returned to professorships and other positions of leadership in our American colleges and universities, and through them has gone forward the profound Germanizing process which has been so marked throughout this country. Here again, one need not be wholly com- mitted to the German ideals of education to discern the potency of the method employed. But the Germanizing of our American educational system has not been due to a definite and conscious effort on the part of German educators. They and all concerned have simply fallen in with the play of a natural force, which, by the way, as the world is now [81] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE constituted, will operate infallibly even though it be given no conscious direction. All the world is on the lookout for u good things" : all any people need do to make themselves a missionary force in our present world is to develop a high standard of national life, and the whole world will come to sit at their feet to learn their ways. But it will be further suggestive to note an instance of the definite and conscious use of this method of "world missioning." Mr. Cecil Rhodes has gone down in history as an empire- builder ; he is said to have thought in continents while other men were concerned with the village gossip. The final act of his world statesmanship is the most sug- gestive of his career. He conceived that his own be- loved Oxford University in England was able to im- part what world citizenship greatly needed. One method he might have chosen to propagate what Ox- ford has to give the world would have been to endow professorships in foreign universities, and provide the support of other offices of leadership among foreign communities, to be occupied by Englishmen trained in Oxford. The method he actually chose, however, thereby revealing his consummate statesmanship, was to establish in Oxford scholarships and fellowships for the benefit of young men chosen from among the foreign communities he sought to reach with the Ox- ford spirit and ideals. From all the British colonies, therefore, and from the United States, there now go up to Oxford, and there will continue indefinitely to go up, the picked men of their coming civilizations, who will return, are already beginning to return, to their former homes, to disseminate the Oxford ideas with infinitely more force and intelligence [82] SPIRITUAL WORLD CONQUEST than they could have been conveyed by the other method. Of course no intelligent American need be re- minded at length how manifold and rich are the op- portunities now afforded our intellectual and spiritual agencies to do a work of world-wide reach by this same process. China has dedicated that portion of the war indemnity which we had the grace and sense of justice to return to her, to be used until it is ex- hausted in the education of the brightest and best of her youth in our American colleges, universities and technical schools. Appointments are made with all the dignity of the government's formal action. Cer- tain appointments have already been made. Some of these students are already here. And they will con- tinue to come under this provision until at least 1940. A foreign magazine only recently has analyzed in detail the forces which are contributing to a move- ment which some are distinguishing by the phrase, " the Americanization of China," and the writer, while giving due credit to the influence of our Ameri- can Christian colleges established in China, is care- ful to say that this influence is already overshadowed by that of the powerful men, now risen to positions of leadership in the political, economic and social life of the empire, who got their training as youths in our American institutions of learning. So much is the result of the incidental, almost accidental effort of those earlier unconscious years. What may not be the issue of the definite, intelligent effort which is now being put forth through this potent method, — if in- deed the effort shall be conducted intelligently and with the full appreciation of its meaning 1 [83] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE The opportunity thus made so conspicuous in the case of China is afforded us in quite as real a fashion elsewhere throughout the world. Every South Ameri- can republic is sending eager students for our schools, and pupils in our various lines of artisanship. Europe and Asia are vying with each other in seeking at close range the best we have to offer. At one time a few years ago, a single one of our middle Western state universities had in attendance seven Egyptian students, attracted by her superior agricultural col- lege. A wide-spread movement is now sweeping over this country, as among the student population of other lands, in the organization of what are known as Cosmopolitan Clubs. In the most of our American universities, and in many of our smaller colleges as well, they have been organized already, and they em- brace in their membership representatives of every nation under heaven. Large numbers of these stu- dents are here not to remain, but to return, after the Americanizing process has gone forward with them, to carry its values in compounded accumulation to all peoples of the world. Another impressive statement being repeatedly made by Mr. Roosevelt upon his return is that every- where he found the peoples of other lands looking to America for leadership in those movements which make for the larger emancipation of humanity, — and, he regretfully adds, he found a growing feeling of pain and disappointment that their expectations are being so imperfectly realized. There are the pathos and shame of the situation, — for us. Here is the most direct and potent method at our com- mand for meeting spiritual world-need. The oppor- [84] SPIRITUAL WORLD CONQUEST tunity extends far beyond the educational field. It stands open before every force and influence of our civilization. Up to now little or no reckoning Las been made of it. The most of us doubtless still con- ceive of the missionary enterprise in the old individ- ualistic terms : the only way to save the world is the " one by one" method. Without our planning, and quite indeed without our realizing it, a Providence who shapes issues more wisely than do we has been perfecting a method of world conquest which is bound to succeed if it is adequately worked. By the same token He is revealing the essential inadequacy of our earlier and smaller plans. At the last, our own civilization must supply the test of the adequacy of our Gospel and our methods of applying it. If the Church must acknowledge defeat and failure in its own life and throughout our own society, what shall it signify that we have manifested the utmost of zeal in the application to another so- ciety of what has not ''made good" in our own? The test involves more than the Church as an isolated institution. The whole fabric of our American Christianity is on trial. Some of our spiritual agencies are deliberately avoiding the plain issues of the spiritual conquest in our American life. We seek to make ourselves believe that certain bad con- ditions are not the responsibility of the "purely spiritual" agencies. But our whole civilization stands or falls together. It cannot furnish us much comfort to be certain after the failure that our theories were good and that the fault lay only in their appli- cation. We would better learn how to apply them. Yearning humanity looks for demonstrations, and it [85] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE is not likely to accept with much avidity doctrines which we ourselves show ourselves unable or unwill- ing to work out. The "home mission method" must furnish both the test and the hope of our world mission. [86] YII CONSTEUCTION AND EECONSTEUCTION— CEEATION AND EEDEMPTION 1 It would be easy enough to make a world if one only had a pile of new lumber and a kit of tools. The plague of it is that all the lumber is riddled with nail-holes from somebody's tinkering. The plague of it and the art of it. It takes consummate art to build a world out of that sort of stuff. Be- sides, that is the only sort there is ; we would well make the most of it. All the building material has been everlastingly messed over. Oliver Wendell Holmes used to say that the proper time to begin training a child is two hundred years before he is born. That is making the task far too simple. Con- servative science now makes it ten thousand of years. You must have observed that there is nothing doing nowadays in the creation line. Even God has turned His attention to something else. If you are pleased to accept Bishop Usher's chronology, whose notations appear on the margin of our Bibles, it is now some six thousand years since God made anything brand new. And if you ask the modern scientist how long it has been since the beginning of things here in this world he will say ten millions of years or a hundred millions, according to how hard he has worked his imagination. Appeal to the anthropolo- 1 A familiar talk to a company of students ; many colloquial- isms are here retained. [87] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE gist to introduce you to the first man, and he will frankly confess that he has never met him. The fact is he does not know where the first man begins and some preceding form of life leaves off. He sends you off to the biologist. Ask the biologist where life came from and he will mumble out some- thing about primordial germs and the first fleck of protoplasm which dropped upon this earth. But when you ask him where it dropped from he will tell you to run along and not pester him with fool- ish questions. He will then turn and add with a twinkle in his eye, Go to the astronomer ; he is long on imagination. And the astronomer, if he accepts the nebular hypothesis, as they almost all do, being careful, however, to call it an hypothesis, he will talk of whirling gasses out of which suns and stars are made, but he will never even work his imagina- tion back of the whirling gasses. So the ultimate of ultimates for physical science is a whirl. Which is a long way this side of that orderly pile of new lumber we were searching for. The air is full of lumber flying every which-a-way before we get the first chance to lift tool in making our world. Which shows how foolish we are for seeking that sort of thing. Suppose we settle down, like sensible people, to the business which is in hand. Not to create, but to recreate ; not construction de novo, but re- construction is the business of the hour. Even a God who could only create a world would be of no value to Himself or us. The creation business is not in the line of to-day's demands, and there will never be call for the goods so long as the world lasts. We Americans have quite generally gotten into bad [88] CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION habits ; bad for this business now so pressing. Our history has trained us into them. We are born pio- neers and we scarcely find life worth living if we can- not explore and exploit. Each generation has to pre- empt a new farm on which the sod has never before been turned. If the old farm wears out, no matter ; there is more land further west. In the early days when a dozen or twenty crops of cotton had impov- erished the soil, they deserted the old, bag and bag- gage, and cut a new cotton field out of the virgin forest. If the driver of an ox-team out on the plains needed a whip-lash he would shoot down a buffalo bull to get a thong out of his hide. Why not? There was a plenty of buffalo, and, besides, the rottiug carcass would help to fertilize the soil for the oncoming settlers, — though that last was an afterthought. That sort of thing got into the American blood, until to-day it is requiring all the skill and passion of our new order of statesmanship to check the havoc which is making a devastation of our natural resources. Still it is not the wastefulness and reck- lessness of such a method which concerns us at this moment. It is rather the artlessness, the blurred in- sight into the nature of things. We will let pass for the moment the sacrifice of our forests and min- eral stores, and note rather the sacrifice of soul-stuff. That sort of business is the subversion of the divine order of getting things done. A man who must lay hands on brand new raw material every time he sets about making auything will soon be out of a job. Our American heroes have been pioneers for the most part, have blazed the trail through limitless [89] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE virgin territory, and we have all got quite too much the notion that the only way to be great is to spread one's self over the most of creation. The man who must have ten miles square to stretch his arms and legs in would best mend his habits. The earth was not laid out upon such an extravagant basis as to keep him permanently comfortable, and, what is more to the present point, he fails to discover the real beauty and joy of the divine ordering of human society. Such a man does not get the best out of his neigh- bours nor do his neighbours get the best out of him. These considerations are directly apropos of the business of choosing a life-work and ordering one's plans in a life-method. There is danger of the su- perficial conclusion that pioneering, running after raw material and conditions, constitutes the truest heroism and embodies the highest art of living. That conclusion is very superficial and misleading. I received a letter some time ago from a young fellow who had taken charge of a sleepy, easy-going church in a community to match away back in the east. After a few months' experience he wrote, "I cannot stand this ; the devil is so little active here that my ministry is not even entertaining." Within a short time he moved out to a raw, new community where the devil is supposed to keep things on the jump every day in the year. That looks like a very he- roic thing to do, but I am not sure that it was. Perhaps he was only seeking the picturesque in the devil line, does not really know the devil when he meets him, is so unappreciative of real devilish- ness that unless he sees a flash of red paint and hears his tail crack he does not discover that there is a [90] CONSTBUCTION AND BECONSTRUCTION devil nearabouts. My observation leads me to es- timate that the biggest, lustiest devil one may en- counter is stagnation, smug, self-righteous content- ment. That is the sort of devil it takes grit and consummate art to conquer. Not long ago a minister wrote me in this lament : ' ' Oh, these little, ancient, educationless, self-con- tented, poverty-stricken, run-down-at-the-heel coun- try churches of the old east!" Uh-huh, surely enough, when I was down in his section of the country the other day, I was told that he had quit and moved off somewhere else. If you want to know what is the hardest and finest job in church lines, it is just that, the tussle with the problem of the country com- munity of the older sections of the land. I say it is the finest as well as the hardest, perhaps most because it is the hardest, but much because it is in line with the divine method of going at things in this world. Within a few miles of the minister, whose letter I quoted just now, I found a community which a young fellow just out of the seminary had made over in two years' time. For miles around the peo- ple thought he was about the only thing which had ever happened. He certainly was the best which had happened thereabouts ; he had made a new thing out of a lot of old stuff which others had badly messed over. That is what God Almighty is doing every day ; is the only thing He is doing now- adays ; that is where He gets His glory. Another young minister who was in charge of a church in one of our Western states announced dra- matically the other day that he would not spend his life in a town with three churches where there should [91] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE be but one, so he packed up in high dudgeon and went off to China. Now, it is a fine thing to cry out upon a community which tolerates three little, God- forsaken churches when one would supply the need, and it is a fine thing to go as a missionary to China, but the whole setting of the incident makes it clear that this particular man is not so intent upon build- ing up the kingdom of God as he is to evade a diffi- cult situation. The chief attraction of China to him appears to be that China affords an unlimited supply of raw material which he can tinker over. There are about four hundred and fifty millions of people over there from whom he can pick and choose. The king- dom of God will not come in China or any other place on such a programme as that. Our friend will find in China a far older civilization still on which to test his arts of reconstruction. If a man is seeking a really delicate and heroic task and wishes to perform a piece of work which will bring on the kingdom in very deed, only let him tackle that same task which that minister fled so unceremoniously, — and succeed at it ; let him go into a community afflicted with three churches in the place where one ought to be, and let him put two of them out of business right gracefully. That performance will put stars in his crown, and will render a service for genuine Christianity which ought to inscribe his name among the heroes of the faith. The men who are equal to that task are pre- cisely those most needed by the Church of Christ these days. It has often come about that what passed for grand heroism is only thinly disguised cowardice or indo- lence. The pioneering spirit is admirable. The noble [92] CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION achievements of our American sires, who pressed out through the trackless forests and across the wide plains, carving empires out of vast wastes, subduing a continent to the benignant arts of civilization, and on and in that direction, — all that is as grand as our Fourth of July orations make it out to be. Setting up a civilization in the wilderness is magnificent. But running out into the wilds to escape the restric- tions of civilization ; shirking the responsibilities of society by slinking away where there is no society ; camping out in the woods so as to save laundry bills ; taking to the open so as to dodge the tax-collector, — that has been the trick of indolent and cowardly ad- venturers ever since human society began to be or- ganized. After all it requires little brains to eke out an existence upon the supplies of raw nature. Almost any old hunk of soil-scratcher can raise a crop on virgin soil. The agriculture of advanced society has become a science, and only scientists of a high degree of expertness can attain the fullest success at it. Communities known as gospel-hardened require a higher order of genius and spiritual prowess really to regenerate them than is required for a community which has never been touched by Christian influ- ences. The great achievers of every age have been the champions of the forlorn hope. The more nearly impossible the task the grander is the triumph in the achievement. Booker "Washington has repeatedly and devoutly expressed his gratitude to Almighty God that when the time came for him to take his place in human society he was born an American negro. For, says he, the uegro is a race with a prob- [93] WORLD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE lem, and throughout history the races with a problem have beeu the achieving races. That sentiment and the courage to make the sentiment good have set and will set Booker Washington among the great spirits of the centuries. The most of us doubtless never cease to thank God that we were born to some other race than the negro, but if a man is born a negro there is no nobler thing he could say and act upon than just that. It takes a colossal courage to do it. The bigger the task the more the honour there is in undertaking it, — if so be that it is worth the effort. That is an all-important consideration ; that the task should be worth while. This is a good pre- scription for a life programme : pick out a job that is plainly and eternally worth while, and then thank God for making it hard. For the most part only the hard tasks are worth while anyway. Some care should be exercised, however, in defining the quali- ties of hardness. There is no virtue in hard work for the sake of its hardness. The heroism of some who are reputed to support that virtue is of a type peculiar to itself and a battering-ram. You cannot infallibly maul your way into the kingdom of heaven. True heroism mixes a modicum of brains with its sweat. That is invariably the beauty of all the really hard tasks with which I happen to be familiar : they present an unlimited opportunity for the exploita- tion of brains. It is always well for one to have a moderate supply of brains along with him when he tackles one of them. It is pitiful to discover how much which goes by the name of heroism and courageous devotion is in reality a mixture of stupidity and dogged inertia. [94] CONSTRUCTION AND RECONSTRUCTION There is absolutely no virtue iu messing over a bad mess and leaving it still a bad mess. But seizing the forlorn hope and putting courage into it : that is heroism. Putting brains into an enterprise of which blundering tinkerers have made a bad botch : that is precisely the chance for the man who has got the brains and the insight to make himself great in the eyes of God and man. It is idle to search for a brand new world to begin operations in ; there is no such world. Not even God Himself is in that line of busi- ness, — at least in our part of the universe. He finds Himself fully occupied with making over the old world into a better one, and therein He reveals His crowning glory. The finest thing God has ever done, by His own declaration, is not to create the world but to redeem it. I reckon we can do no better than follow His example. [95] vni "THE CRISIS" IN MISSION AET METHOD The Christian missionary enterprise must claim the serious consideration of all thoughtful people to- day. General public intelligence is elicited even where its motives arouse no enthusiasm. It does not longer belong, if it ever belonged, among the inci- dents or accidents of events. It is one of the most significant social movements of the times. Being such, the missionary enterprise inevitably shares with other great movements the effects of the far-reaching social reconstructions now on. The title above is not meant to suggest that there is a crisis imminent peculiar to the missionary movement. As yet the crisis here is indeed less obvious than in the case of other enterprises touching general human in- terests. Even the Church, considered as an institution of American society, is more profoundly affected than is the missionary propaganda, though the latter is esteemed to be so closely identified with the Church's life and activities. To a degree the missionary propaganda is, however, segregated from the Church. Perhaps this segregation is in some particulars be- coming more marked than formerly. The missionary boards, through which the various churches conduct their missionary work, are in some cases increasingly detached from the churches they represent. Of course the detachment cannot be carried to an ex- treme, since the support of such boards would thus [96] "THE CBISIS" IN MISSION AEY METHOD be jeopardized. But not even that consideration makes so powerfully for attachment as formerly. The support of some of the boards from independent sources is greatly increasing of late. Endowments are accumulating, aud the encouragement to individ- uals to contribute through personal appeals rather than through church channels, is affording an in- creasing liberty to boards so disposed to disregard, at least tacitly, the currents of public opinion ruuning through the churches they officially represent. While, therefore, the general social crisis is pro- foundly affecting the Church, the missionary propa- ganda has not felt its influence so directly. To per- haps the most of observers it may not appear that what may be called a crisis is imminent in the con- duct of Christian missions. The issue is inevitable, however, and the more discerning may already dis- cover movements which general ebullitions of enthu- siasm obscure. Christianity stands for world citizenship. No one can be a Christian, as the term has been intelligently interpreted in American churches, and feel no large enthusiasms for spiritual world conquest. It is of the essence of missions, whatever be their method of conduct or whatever may be the geographical range of their responsibility, to organize their activities on a world basis. Any differences which may arise among missionary propagandists must be merely a divergence of method ; the final aim and scope of all effort must be the same, and is the same. Christianity, when rationally construed, has always been on the side of human liberty. Political differ- ences among Christians have always touched matters [97] WOKLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE of method in government ; they have never gone deep enough to touch the essence of human freedom. Christian governments have sometimes been the in- struments of oppression, but all sincere Christians have recognized that in so far as that has been true, government has committed sacrilege upon the name Christian. In the crisis towards which American society is moving all along the line the issue is not the fact of human liberty. At least neither party to the social controversy will for a moment allow that it takes the adverse position. On the contrary each party is zealous to claim for itself that sacred palladium. To be sure, socialism advances its programme as the only security for essential human freedom, but the oppo- nents of socialism, and the defenders of the present order, are equally forward to safeguard society in its enjoyment of jeopardized personal and democratic liberty. Maybe human liberty is indeed the final stake, but it is not such by the mutual agreement of the parties to the controversy. Each is zealously employed in precisely the business of guaranteeing the fullest liberty. Individualism and socialism are two antagonistic schools of governmental method ; there is complete agreement as to the goal of human welfare, and in that sense their aim may be said to be the same, inherently antagonistic as methods though they may be. This is the crisis which is inevitable in the mission- ary enterprise. It is the settling of accounts by the Church and missionary forces generally between indi- vidualism and the social method. The crisis which American society faces all along the line is one of far [98] "THE CRISIS" IX MISSIONARY METHOD deeper significance than the conflict between organ- ized political socialism and its opponents. Political socialism as to-day organized is showing an inepti- tude somewhat similar to that of abolitionism during its rampant ante-bellum career. The historian is now assuring us that organized and political abolitionism actually delayed abolition by much of its activity ; perhaps the net result was to hinder rather than to help the cause it espoused. It may not be surprising if the historian of the future shall with similar con- clusiveness show that to-day's political socialism has been similarly untrue to the ends it would serve in society. But the social recount ruction is going for- ward nevertheless, and the issue must be more and more closely joined in the realm of politics, econom- ics, iudustry, and all along the line, between an un- compromising individualism and the social definition of rights and realities. So stanch an emancipator as Abraham Lincoln was very loath to be classed among the abolitionists of his day. Similarly, there are countless men and women nowadays who decline to accept the programme of the dominant political so- cialistic propagandists, who yet recognize clearly the demand for the socializing process in government, industry, church and everywhere throughout our American life, and who commit themselves with their whole soul to that programme. In the Church the demand for the social interpre- tation of Christianity and the socialization of the Church's mechanism has so far led to little except stagnation. The Church has paused for introspection and for a reconsideration of some of its ideals, and continues for the most part to-day in that attitude. [99] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE It has not yet decided upon the new course to be pursued in the new light now dawning. There is profound dissatisfaction with that type of evangelism which presents merely an individualistic scheme of salvation. Such evangelism is still suffered in most branches of the Church, and, for the lack of anything better and definite to take its place, it is even en- couraged by many. But perhaps a majority of those even who cling to it with a show of conviction are painfully conscious of its inadequacy if not of its false emphasis, and encourage its professional propaganda because they can never be reconciled to a church which makes no attempt at evangelizing, and no other method has been made generally available. Of course this attitude leads and can only lead to stagnation. In this temporary condition the Church now finds itself. There is an immense amount of enthusiasm in the Church. Hosts of its members are sincerely committed to the large ends for which the Church stands, and no degree of devotion is too great an exaction if those ends may be attained. An evangelism with only the individualistic emphasis has the field. The inadequacy of such has become fully apparent to the thoughtful where they see it actually applied, in their home city, in the com- munity for whose spiritual welfare their own church is responsible. But it seems not to have failed in the missionary propaganda at the distance. Indeed, it is marvellously succeeding in certain missionary fields which are much before the public attention. Why it fails close at hand and succeeds at the distance is a matter aside from this discussion. The demonstra- tion of success is complete, at any rate ; is at least [100] "THE CRISIS" IN MISSIONARY METHOD satisfactory to the Church. And the individualistic method is accordingly strongly intrenched with the missionary propaganda, is more strougly intrenched there than is the evangelism of the individualistic type in the esteem of the Church in its own communities. The application of this method shows several well- marked features. A foreign mission, maintained as foreign, requires the individualistic method, and must be conducted permanently upon that basis. The missionaries are sent out as individuals, and only in a limited way can they become a compact, or- ganized force. In the nature of the case the impacts of their lives upon the society of the countries of their residence must be individualistic. The personal Christian graces of character can be conspicuously displayed, and are, of course, so displayed. Chris- tian family life can be maintained. But there the field for the demonstration of Christian social virtues reaches the practicable limit. Small missionary communities in segregated compouuds are doubtless of some value as social demonstration centres, but their necessary artificiality limits their value. Of course the missionary, as a foreigner, must religiously eschew participation in local politics. Some mis- sionaries are so consistent in this attitude as to rec- ommend such renunciation also to the native Chris- tian converts as expedient or, indeed, virtuous. The social embarrassment of foreign missionaries and of the propaganda they represent is marked on every side. It tends all the time to confirm the individual- istic temper and the individualistic interpretation of the system they seek to propagate. Thus the native Christian cannot look directly to [101] WOELD MISSIONS FKOM THE HOME BASE the missionaries for the concrete demonstration of the social Christian virtues so essential in the doubly complicated situation he occupies in local society. If the missionary maintains that the individualistic method is ultimate, and represents an individualistic scheme of salvation as final aud complete, he runs counter to approved world tendencies and repudiates a social theory which the schools of thought in all civilized lauds are successfully establishing. If he frankly accepts the embarrassment of his situation, he is placed in the position of advocating a set of doctrines designed profoundly to affect social condi- tions of all phases, while acknowledging that there is no possibility of affording a concrete demonstration of the value of his theories. Being only a theorist in this all-important realm he can only stand before local society as a theorist. The dilemma is serious. His only recourse is to point to the actual social demonstrations which have been made in acknowl- edged Christian countries. While that recourse is fruitful in a general way, it also is attended by certain poignant embarrassments. Those demonstrations so often subvert doctrines the missionary preaches that they call for his apology or repudiation rather than supply him with the object lesson desiderated. In any event, the situation makes clear what must be the final aud effective method of world missioning. The social obligations carry activities at last back to the arena of the missionary's own society and the commu- nity which sends him out to represent its propaganda. So essential is the individualistic method to a foreigu mission, maintained as foreign, that much of the missionary propaganda has been in the past, and [102] 4 'THE CRISIS" IN MISSIONARY METHOD is still to a remarkable degree, sponsored by that ex- tremely individualistic doctrine which the theolo- gians are accustomed to distinguish by the term premillenarianism. According to this conception the objective of missionary activity is the presenta- tion of Christ to each inhabitant of the earth for his personal acceptance or rejection, which event is maintained to be the condition and precursor of the cataclysmic overthrow of the present world- order and the second coming of Christ in personal presence to institute and preside over a new and vitally differ- ent social order. This doctrine is accepted in vary- ing forms and with varying degrees of consistency. One conspicuous leader of the modern missionary movement a decade ago made reckonings, on the basis of his interpretation of certain Biblical prophe- cies, to the effect that this event would befall at a date near the present, one reckoning fixing 1910. More recent considerations may have led him to set the date forward or indeed to have left it uncertain, as do most premillenarians nowadays, but he still holds most tenaciously to the doctrine. It is fair to others to say that while this individual is still a leader and is conspicuous in the missionary movement, he and his views have not the same standing they had a short time ago. In less consistent forms this premillenarian view is widely entertained, however, among leaders of the missionary movement ; more widely than even the church public is conscious. It presumably gives currency to such carefully worded phrases as that which sets as the objective of missionary activity "to make Jesus known" to each inhabitant of the [103] WOKLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE eai'th. This objective is that often held forth in the expression, " The Evangelization of the World in the Present Generation," though that slogan is used by many who do not entertain the preinillenarian view. The phrase so carefully employed in the official pro- nouncements of the Laymen's Missionary Movement, " the presentation " of Christ to all men during the present generation, is evidently inspired by the pre- inillenarian doctrine, — and has been so interpreted by the editor of at least one of our serious American journals. Certain leaders of the Laymen's Mission- ary Movement, whose conceptions must predominate in its direction, are understood to hold this view with much devotion. Of course the hosts of men compos- ing the Laymen's Missionary Movement are not com- mitted to this doctrine, and in so far are not con- sciously committed to the programme which the offi- cial pronouncements of the movement set forth. It is needless to say that the increasiug majority of the members of American churches will be satisfied with no such ideal nor with the programme which it contemplates. They are not interested in the perpet- uation of such jaw-racking terms as premillenarian- ism, and, what is more to the point, the inherent and extreme individualism which it embodies will gain short shrift from a Christian public which has come to full consciousness in the period of social recon- struction whither American society is now rapidly moving. The Church is increasingly committed in its thought, however deficient may be its programme, to the establishment of the kiugdom of heaven here upon the earth in our American and world society. It is rapidly coming to appreciate the need of a social [104] " THE CRISIS " IN MISSIONARY METHOD salvation equal to this task, and already begins to discover the inadequacy of an essentially individual- istic scheme. There has always been a more or less open diver- gence of interest between home and foreign missions. It has never reached either the dignity or disgrace of a conflict so far as the sincere and serious member- ship of the Church is concerned. Differences have sometimes been magnified which were essentially puerile, but for the most part protagonists of either the home cause or the foreign have been solicitous to maintain the essential unity of the enterprise. Such unity is indeed real so long as the one goal and one method are maintained with only divergences of geo- graphical application. Up to recently the home mission boards have cherished individualistic ideals and pursued individualistic methods hardly less con- sistently than the foreign boards. In the most of cases their field was conceived to be the spiritual ministry through conventional evangelistic means to the isolated frontiers, to the remnants of our aborig- inal population, to the neglected peoples of stagnated rural regions and of submerged city slums. Very few of the modern social-religious enterprises of the cities, for example, have been initiated by the " old-line" church home mission boards. Some of the boards have adopted such methods after they have been originated by independent agencies, but the boards have discovered very little social initiative even of this simple order. And now these church home mission boards are feeling the same pressure of which the Church is slowly growing conscious. The individualistic programme [105] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE is manifestly inadequate, if not in its traditional ap- plication false. And the boards are in an attitude similar to that of the churches they represent : they are at pause, or, though active along traditional lines, are feeling the discouragement of witnessing the inadequacy of the traditional methods and ideals. There is a general awakening to the need of social vision and comprehensive social method, but the sup- ply of the need still waits. Many bureaus or depart- ments of social service have been instituted in imme- diate incorporation with established home mission boards or independently, but it can scarcely be said that any of them has yet found itself. There awaits the needed reconstruction in the sentiments of the churches themselves, and the clarification of that sentiment until backing may be afforded a definite and comprehensive social programme. The home mission boards of the American churches are less effectively organized than are the foreign boards. This is apparently quite the reversal of con- ditions which once prevailed. The reason is not alone that the foreign boards have increased in effi- ciency, but the event is due even more largely to the fact that the fabric of which the home mission boards were constructed has, one may say, gone to pieces. Events are forcing them away from the prevailing individualistic conceptions of the spiritual ministry to American and world life, and are compelling a re- construction which must in the end go deeper than is now comprehended. The foreign boards have not been so much affected by events ; their individual- istic attitudes and methods still suffice for the satisfac- tion of their constituencies, and the day has not yet [106] "THE CRISIS" IN MISSIONARY METHOD come when there is anything like general recognition of the inherent limitations and mal-emphases of a missionary policy maintained as foreign. The importance of the reconstruction of home mis- sionary policy will appear when it is considered that not only is the social method essential for the Church's fulfillment of its mission in American society, but the "home mission" method must more and more sup- ply the medium and measure of American Christian- ity's outreach to the world. Harbingers of that event already appear, and analogies from other fields are suggestive. For example, the influence of German ideals upon the American system of education is uni- versally recognized as profound. 1 This process has not been conducted through the sending from Ger- many of propagandists to our American schools. Not even Professor Munsterberg, Harvard's brilliant and influential German psychologist, has either con- sciously or unconsciously performed that function. The Germauization of American education, so far as that has been brought about, has been effected by Germany's establishing in her own universities such high standards of scholarship and displaying such conclusive demonstrations of her educational ideals, that American students for two or three generations have flocked to the German schools. On their return they, as professors and other leaders in our colleges and universities, have fulfilled the mission. To be sure, this process has been more or less un- conscious and accidental so far as Germany's attitude is concerned. There is no reason, however, why 1 The idea set forth in this and following paragraphs will be found elaborated somewhat more fully in the preceding chapter. [107] WORLD MISSIONS PEOM THE HOME BASE such a propaganda might not be definitely planned, and prosecuted scientifically, — as indeed is being done by Oxford of England, through the Rhodes fellow- ships. Cecil Rhodes was a world citizen of no mean ideas. It was he who was said to think in continents while other statesmen were concerned with village gossip. The establishment of the Rhodes fellowships at Oxford is quite the flower of his consummate statesmanship, if it is granted that the purpose is sufficiently grand. The method is remarkably saga- cious. He conceived that the Oxford spirit and ideals were needed throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. His method was not to endow professorships in foreign universities to be occupied by Englishmen trained in Oxford, but rather the founding of fellow- ships at Oxford where the coming moulders of society in the British colonies and the United States might themselves be moulded by the Oxford ideals and saturated with the Oxford spirit in their unimpaired and undiluted form. The large influx of foreign students to our univer- sities and other schools, and the wide extension abroad of American educational ideals, are even more intimately suggestive of what will be the final and potent method of American Christian missions. China has already begun sending her annual quota of officially appointed students to be supported in our universities and technical schools by the Boxer war indemnity fund returned to her by the United States. The South American Republics are sending us stu- dents in increasing numbers. They come, indeed, from everywhere. The suggestions of a world propa- ganda conducted by the forces of American Christian- [108] "THE CRISIS" IN MISSIONARY METHOD ity through this method and its manifold enlarge- ments are conclusive for their statesmanship and efficiency. In consistency with their individualistic methods our American foreign mission boards have usually discouraged the migration of foreign Christian youth to our American educational institutions, and when they have been sent the effort has been made to locate them iu the more protected and church-con- trolled schools. This policy has been consistent, but it would not seem the most effective means of bring- ing to bear upon foreign society real American Chris- tian influence as it is actually exerted in the mould- ing of American society. American Christianity must win or lose as a mis- sionary force with American civilization. No degree of emphasis upon Christianity as a universal religion, no attempt to detach American Christianity from its own society can controvert that essential spiritual law. Not only must American Christianity be tested by its achievements through its own society, but its world propaganda will find in and through those achievements the most direct and the only finally efficient methods of fulfilling its task. This thorough reconstruction of method will be the issue of the social crisis now impending. It must affect religion no less vitally than it does American industry, and economic and political theory. The policies of both the foreign and home missionary boards of the churches must be reconstructed. The whole missionary enterprise must take on the social consciousness, and missionary methods will inevitably adjust themselves to the adequate expression of the new attitude and ideal. [109] IX WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH In the preceding chapter the statement was made that the foreign mission boards of the American churches are better organized, and administer the interests assumed by them more efficiently, than do the home mission boards discharge their responsi- bility. One of the chief reasons for this state of af- fairs was there also pointed out. The simple in- dividualistic method and ideal are still esteemed satisfactory in the case of the foreign missionary propaganda ; they are manifestly breaking down when applied to the complicated spiritual issues of the home missionary cause. The home mission boards are in the throes of readjustment and recon- struction in which ideals and methods even yet enter- tained must be abandoned. A degree of cooperation between the foreign mis- sion boards has been maintained for fifteen or more years. It is only within three years that organized cooperation between the home mission boards has been attempted. The rapidity with which this co- operation is now advancing is one of the happy signs of the times. Already a discriminating observer who has had opportunity to enter closely into the councils of each of these bodies has declared that the home mission boards have outstripped the foreign in their daring. The home mission boards are feeling keenly the stress of the times and are forced into a unity of [110] WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH effort and policy at close quarters, already grappling with problems which the foreign boards have found it possible so far to evade. The unity of the various denominations in their missionary campaigns abroad has long been the boast of the foreign propaganda and been turned into a standing reproach to the home church, — as well it may be. But at least a partial explanation of the apparent anomaly is afforded in the situation just de- fined. The cooperation of foreign missionary agencies follows lines of comparatively slight resistance. The problems involved are easy and rub the fur of human nature — at least the fur of the human nature im- mediately involved -very slightly, when compared with the situations our complicated American social life forces upon the home mission boards. These social problems must be faced squarely by the latter agencies ; the assumed programme of the former in- volves no serious social embarrassments, so far as the propaganda at this distance from the mission fields is concerned. There are doubtless serious social prob- lems in Central Africa, but they do not greatly tangle the relations of two separate boards of foreign mission control here in America. It is easy enough for me to agree with my brother at the head of a mis- sion board in Atlanta, Georgia, in all the essential details of American missionary administration in the behalf of the Africans in Africa. But when I and my brother in Atlanta sit down to collaborate in the conduct of missionary work for the negroes of Georgia and Alabama, we pine for so simple a plaything as Pandora's box, with which we may toy as a refresh- ing diversion and a gentle surcease from our toils. [Ill] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE The problems involved embody such a tangle of tradi- tions and prejudices, of overreachings and misunder- standings, of hereditary and present-day divergences of policy and principle, that the organization of an expedition to Africa is the simplicity of simplicity in comparison. In short, my brother and I are "up against the real thing " in the way of a social problem, facing the certainty that, at least down to the pres- ent moment, no matter how complete may be our personal and official agreement, neither can hope to gain the backing of his constituency for a common policy. This recent incident punctuates the contrast : The Laymen's Missionary Movement was officially re- quested on three separate occasions by the home mis- sion agencies to include the home mission cause in the purview of the movement. To the lay mind this seems not only reasonable but a self-evident demand upon a movement claiming the general term mission- ary. And so the matter appealed to many of the laymen who constitute the rank and file of the Lay- men's Movement. But the leaders, composing the central committee in control, replied each of the three times with firmness, though with courtesy, to the effect that the vitality of the movement demanded the maintenance of the policy at first inaugurated, and that while the movement gladly affirmed its general sympathy with home missions it could not seem wise to divert direct attention from the one object- ive of foreign missions. The committee has been much criticized by friends of the home mission cause, and by many laymen active in the movement, but their action has at least the grace of consistency, [112] WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH and is a tribute to the clear vision of their objective on the part of the leaders of the movement. It must be apparent to the discerning that to attempt to attach so distinctively individualistic a programme to the whirl of our American spiritual problems would tend to dissipate its energy. The programme of the movement, as officially announced, lays em- phasis upon the ''presentation" of Christ to all the inhabitants of the world. In a general way that task has already been fulfilled in the United States. The missionary obligation set forth in individualistic terms means little or nothing for home missions, and the individualistic programme assumed by the for- eign mission agencies cannot be given consistent ap- plication to a spiritual problem which is one tangle of social concerns. It is manifest that unity and cooperation builded of so fragile material as that which holds our foreign mission agencies together cannot furnish the needed vigour for the strenuous grapple with the spiritual problems the Church faces at home. Preachers, and the orators before our great ecclesiastical assem- blages, are accustomed to extract great satisfaction from the wide-spread unity displayed in the foreign propaganda. The essential weakness of this fair seeming must appear, however, whenever it is con- sidered that it grows out of an individualistic pro- gramme which cannot have final value for the strain imposed upon the American Church at home, what- ever value may be claimed for the programme in the outreach abroad. The unity demanded for concerted action among the churches of the United States must be made of different stuff to endure the real [H3 1 WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE strain of social regeneration, the grapple with our severe social problems, without the solution of which there is no American salvation, and, indeed, apart from which a propaganda reaching abroad must be in the eud sapped of its vitality. So much prepares the way for the statement of the first of three outstanding needs of reconstruction. To succeed in the missionary enterprise in the United States the big energies of the churches must be concen- trated upon the big spiritual issues of the day. The awakening to the demand for federation is already wide spread, but, with all of the effort so far made, the movement is progressing at snail's pace, when reckoning is made of the urgent and extreme need. The meeting of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, held in Philadelphia in 1908, was a notable event. Publicity was given the need of federation, many eloquent addresses were deliv- ered, ringing resolutions were adopted, imposing committees were appointed, — all of which is gain. But adequate power is still lacking. The Amer- ican churches are to-day in a position analogous to that of the American colonies at about 1776. The various dissociated integers — there are unfortunately many more than thirteen in this case — are conscious of profound common interests. The fulfillment of their mission, if not indeed their very existence, makes some real " getting together" imperative. But they are mutually fearful of the issue, are mor- bidly cautious, easily take fright at the suggestion of the mutual surrender of independence and prerog- ative, would gladly see a central unifying agency established but will not hear to clothing it with au- [114] WANTED— AN AMEKICAN CHUECH thority. Thus far lt federation " movements have accordingly limited central agencies to " purely ad- visory " functions. After 1776 the American col- onies were forced into a real federation by more than a decade of exceedingly stressful experiences. Anal- ogously, stressful experiences will not fail the Amer- ican churches, if they insist upon awaiting them. They bid fair to come thick and fast. But it is hoped that more prompt aud clear- visioned response to the demands of the situation may be vouchsafed in this case. Real movement towards the end can- not well be too rapid. Since the churches are at least a century and a third behiud the staudards of American political theory, a degree of speed none can consider intemperate. Certain embarrassments inhere in the nominal pol- ity of many of our American churches, aud in the actual usage of others. Within the given denomi- nation itself there sometimes is no nominal central authority. In one notable instance recently a mis- sionary board of one of the largest denominations was compelled to withdraw even from the loose, " purely advisory" association of one of the federation coun- cils, because it cannot claim authority from its de- nomination even for such an alliance. Such in- stances strikingly illustrate the need of the social ideal and method in the very mechanism of the churches themselves. There is a sort of injustice in the wide- spread criticisms now so common among those who would have the denominations consolidate. There is often not sufficient coherence within the denomi- nation itself to permit anything like consolidation with another body. The spirit is usually willing, [115] WORLD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE but the clothing of flesh is sometimes so delicate as to leave the spirit powerless. The promising fact is that among all the denomi- nations the more substantial centralization of power is forming in the missionary boards. This move- ment should be given freer scope still, and then there should be guarantee of such strict control of these agencies as that they will genuinely represent the progressive life of the churches. This development is already being retarded because there is among some of the denominations distrust of their own missionary agencies. They are inclined to slip away from the control of the churches which created them and which they nominally represent. The centralization of authority is thus feared, and of course the larger federation movements between the denominations go powerless. This timidity will ere long be overcome. The threatened existence of the churches will finally banish the unwarranted fear, if reason and Christian common sense do not suffice. All the churches are dissipating energy at a frightful rate, and all are more or less frightened. It must be confessed, how- ever, that the fright has not yet anywhere reached the degree required to effect the necessary adminis- trative adjustments. The second need I mention is correlative with the first. There must be a more definite fixing and ac- ceptance of local responsibility for local conditions. There is vast need of the centralization of authority, within the range of functions where centralization is effective. On the other hand, there is almost as great a need for the recognition of the limitations of cen- tralized activity. It has come about here and there [116] WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH that a national mission board five hundred or two thousand miles distant has been charged with a more intimate responsibility for the spiritual welfare of a given community than was felt by the strong church of the same denomination within ten city blocks of the needy field. There has been improvement in this regard. Fewer churches are conducting the home mission work at their own door-steps by hiring it done through a central agency operating at long range. The home mission work of the next block prosecuted as a foreign missionary enterprise is al- most the limit of missionary ineptitude. The feeling of local responsibility has been vastly increasing of late. It is marked in the cities. In many the federation movement has taken hold, and naturally has begun to manifest more real power there than where the problems are less uniform and concrete. The effort is so far disappointing in the cities of first magnitude, apparently because statesmen of large enough caliber are not forthcoming to initiate and direct the move- ment. The conspicuous effort of the federated lay- men of Chicago would be of more value if it were more wholesomely social and constructive. Among the states there is great promise. Vermont churches maintain a federation which is not alone a restraining, inhibiting force, but is positive and con- structive. Indiana churches are in the process of federation. The movement in Colorado has made a distinct contribution to church method. The accu- rate survey of the state, and the definite fixing of re- sponsibility upon the several denominations are among the features. [117] WOELD MISSIONS FEOM THE HOME BASE Only recently indeed has the first element of con- structive statesmanship appeared. For years there has been much talk of comity among the churches. The aim was purely negative, and was good, doubt- less, so far as it went. It tended to check duplica- tion and overlapping. But there is little promise in so distinctively an inhibitive process. Now the fed- eration movement in several states has presumed not alone to prescribe what not to do, but to direct the churches in positive achievements. But the fixing of local responsibility must em- brace larger integers even than states. In at least one denomination there is discussion of what, for the lack of a better term, may be styled provincial asso- ciations. Such an order would, for example, greatly simplify the Church's outreach upon the problem of negro evangelization in the South. There are now two separate and distinct denominations among the Baptists, one Northern and the other Southern. Substantially the same conditions prevail among the Methodists and the Presbyterians. When each of these six bodies, not to speak of others, with their varying and even antagonistic ideals, push operations in the territory of the former slaveholding states, there is produced a merry mess whose humour does not inure to the higher spiritual welfare of the ex- slave population, nor to the healthy development of the kingdom of God as a whole. It is certainly time that the responsibility for missionary work among the negroes of the South were more unequivocally committed to the churches of the South. The North- ern churches gained much warrant for aggressive ef- fort among the negroes there while the South was im- [118] WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH poverished and the Southern churches were in- capacitated financially, and perhaps also to some degree spiritually, for the huge task. But the finan- cial warrant no longer exists. The South is able to do this work. At any rate, outside assistance should reasonably be made in supplement of what the Southern churches are doing and in conformance with the policies they maintain. Continued interference, with conflicting policies, can only be construed by the Southern churches as distrust of their motives and spiritual capacity for mission work among their negro fellow citizens. Perhaps such distrust is felt in some quarters, but its display certainly does not make for Christian unity and good fellowship, while per- sistence in antagonistic policies between the Northern and Southern churches offers even less promise of success in the future than has distinguished the past. The Northern churches owe it to themselves and the cause to commit this responsibility to the Southern churches, and the Southern churches have a similar obligation to accept it. The barrier of this difficult situation removed, there would be more hope of unifying each of the three or four large denomina- tions now split in two by the old Mason's and Dixon's line. In which event clarified public opin- ion throughout the churches, both North and South, could be brought wholesomely to bear. If there should be continued neglect, it would be perfectly evident who deserves the censure. The quickened conscience of the churches of the South would thus rise to the occasion unhampered by the annoying conflict in present policies. A large share of the de- plorable spiritual condition among the negroes of the [119] WORLD MISSIONS FliOM THE HOME BASE South may now be justly laid to the charge of the Northern churches, because they persist in the direct assumption of the responsibility. Forty-five years of experiment and the present conditions may reason- ably suggest that some change of policy would be wholesome. A third generic need in the administration of the American churches affects the personnel and func- tions of the executives of the administrative agencies. More than once such recommendations as the follow- ing have been employed in proposing persons for executive positions : This brother has grown old in the service of the Church ; he has been the faithful pastor of this, that and the other influential congregation ; he has always been loyal to the glorious history and doctrines of the denomination : after his lifelong service the Church owes him this honour. That is to say, an office whose duties under modern conditions call for such energy, resourcefulness and vision as all but surpass the power of mortal man, is conceived as a pension for an all but superannuated individual. The Church is much criticized for what some are pleased to call its politics. There is much of this and similar " politics" in the churches ; there is little of graft. Church politics flow with the milk of human kiudness, and full credit should be given them for that quality. But undoubtedly strong meat is de- manded to equip her for the stressful ordeals of to- day. Administrative positions in the churches have too often been conceived as mere clerkships, and initiative and energy have not been sought in the in- cumbents. The most inconsequential considerations have often determined the choice : theological ortho- [120] WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH doxy, old age, inability to maintain a charge in the pastorate, ability for forceful public speaking unac- companied by executive genius, or general intellectual power with no particular concern for specific qualities. Tendencies are, however, on the whole encouraging. There is wider recognition of the fact that as a rule efficiency can best be gained by bringing executive officers up "through the ranks," and especially is there a general desire to avail of the vigour and in- tellectual flexibility of youth. But most notable of all perhaps is the increasing recognition of the expert in executive office. One of the major boards, for example, has as many as seven specialists included in its departmental executive staff. This affords promise of initiative such as has never been known in missionary administration. The missionary board is thus removed from the class of tape-bound bureaucracies, and is given a vivacity and adaptation which promise worthy achievements. The specialist is a dangerous factor when uncon- trolled. He is likely to fill the horizon with his specialty, but the cure of the evils of specialty is more specialization, and a well-organized corps of experts, covering with their activities all phases of the modern board's complicated task, is the surest guarantee of efficiency. A serious embarrassment of all the boards, how- ever, is the jealousy of "administration expenses" manifested by their constituent churches. The dan- ger of excess is real and needs to be carefully guarded against ; it is easily possible to use up too much energy in merely keeping the wheels of machinery revolving, leaving too little for the actual delivery of [121] WOELD MISSIONS FROM THE HOME BASE product from the machine. But on the other hand not one of the denominations has yet come to realize how complete must be the reconstruction of its mis- sionary agencies before real efficiency can be secured. The new social method and ideal lay the emphasis here more strongly than upon any other point. The enormous local energies of the churches now lie stag- nated at countless centres for the lack of expert in- spiration and supervision. Outside money poured into stagnated missionary fields in the form of sub- sidies is the very limit of missionary ineptitude. Yet that is the method for which so many well-meaning persons clamour when they vehemently demand that their contributions to the cause shall go directly into the work on the field, and not be " absorbed in the fancy salaries of high-priced board officials." It is precisely the lack of " high-priced " inspiration and supervision which is to-day costing the churches large sums of money for returns distressingly meagre in quantity and even less satisfying in quality. An intelligent public opinion is vastly needed. Church missionary agencies are conceived too much apart. For many they are mainly serviceable for purposes of criticism, and the consciousness does not dawn upon the critic that inefficiency in their control is an immediate reflection upon himself and his churchmauship. They are his agencies and their efficiency is in direct proportion to the intelligence and strictness with which he holds them to account. An intelligent public conscience will effectively back up the progressive administration now operating and will bring to bear a pressure not to be complacently endured upon the other sort. [122] WANTED— AN AMERICAN CHURCH In fine we need an American Church, or, if the in- dependents are inclined to feel that capital C smells too strong of hierarchy, the concession may be made to churches, which will weave themselves into the very warp and woof of American society. That, or these, we have not now got. All the larger denomina- tions in America, with one apparent exception, are importations from Europe. The same is even more definitely true of almost all of the smaller churches, also. Our civil institutions are a genuine American product ; they were conceived of American brains, and were moulded in close adaptation to specific American needs. Our churches hark back to worthy founders who never saw America, and some of whom never dreamed of American social conditions, even those of primitive times, not to speak of the vitally new problems of to-day. American churches spring from Rome, or Geneva, or London, or Heidelberg, or the Wartburg, or Edinburgh, or some other burg, big or little, here or there, in Europe ; and their re- mote and alien maternity is to this day the undis- criminating boast of our periodic ecclesiastical anni- versary occasions. This is no way to reach the intimate spiritual needs of our modern American so- ciety. Each of our churches is shackled with forms and traditions which can only prove a bondage to ac- cepted American ideals. It is inevitable that the mission of the churches in our society should prove inadequate, and indeed false, in the degree that their ideals and methods are artificial. By the same token, the impact of American Christianity upon the rest of the world must in so far prove insincere and lacking in genuine spiritual force. [123] TRAVEL, MISSIONARY JULIUS RICHTER The History of Protestant Missions in India 8vo, cioth, net $2.50. Dr. Harlan P. Beach says: "The editor of Die Evangel- ischen Missionen has long been known as a chief authority on missions, while his two volumes, one on North and the other on South India, have made him an Indian specialist of the highest order. Dr. Richter's third volume on that Em- pire is by far the most important contribution to the history of Indian missions that has ever been published." SAMUEL MERWIN Drugging a Nation The Story of the Influence of Opium on the Chinese Nation. i.'mo, cloth, net $1.00. "The first real story of the opium curse of China._ During its preparation the author travelled around the world inquiring into the problem at first hand and reading everything avail- able on the subject Mr. Merwin's book is one that will be studied by all who have the interests of China at heart." — Portland Evening Telegram. HORACE N. ALLEN, M.D. Things Korean i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. "If you want some hours of delightful amusement, in which you will find that incidentally you are imbibing a great deal of information about that strange and interesting coun- try and its people, you will buy the book. The book is epi- sodical, anecdotal and affords just that discursive and pleasant reading which everybody likes." — Toledo Blade. MISCELLANEOUS HORACE C. STANTON The Starry Universe the Christian's Future Empire izmo, cioth.net $1.25. A study of what inspiration reveals about the transcendent physical powers, privileges and possibilities of the coming life. All the methods of the future life are little more than sketched in divine revelation. This author attempts to fill in the hopes of the human heart. His work is rational and reasonable and the work is one that will bring comfort to those whose thoughts are especially turned this way by reason of bereavement. The author is a successful pastor and writes to the needs of the human heart as he knows it TRAVEL, MISSIONARY JOHN W. ARCTANDER The Apostle of Alaska lhe Story of William Duncan op Metlakahtxa. Illus- trated, i2mo, cloth, net $1.50. _ A record of the phenomenal life-work and thrilling ex- periences of William Duncan during fifty years among the Indians in British Columbia and Alaska. Marvellous is this story of the reformation in the Indian character and its di- version to useful, practical pursuits as Duncan tells of how he originated industrial enterprises, such as boat-building, saw- milling, and established a large and lucrative salmon cannery, acting all the while as instructor and overseer, besides being school-master, preacher and pastor. It reads like a romance as it narrates the wonderful story of his missionary work and industrial labors among his loved chosen people. GERALDINE GUINNESS Peru: Its Story, People and Religion Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net $2.50. Miss Guinness, from an extended tour of Peru, has pre- fiared a wonderful volume of description. She pictures a and of great extremes of climate; gardens flourishing at altitudes higher than Mt. Blanc and deserts at the sea side, and a people sadly in need of the touch of Christian civiliza- tion. The author s father, H. Grattan Guinness, has provided for the book 45 illustrations, photographs, maps, photograv- ures. G. Campbell Morgan says: "From whatever standpoint I approch this work, I find it impossible to speak too highly in praise of it. Its literary style is full of charm, and withal full of life. Its grouping of facts is superbly done." MANUEL AND U JAR Spain of To-day from Within With Autobiography of Author. Illustrated, i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. An instructive, interesting narrative of a native of Spain, who knows his country well. He was brought up a Catholic, and later on embracing the Protestant religion, he became a minister of the Gospel. The stories of his travels in Spain will be found entertaining as well as instructive reading, as will be his glad narrative of the progress of evangelical work in that priest-ridden nation. The book is delightfully illus- trated, and will be sure to be widely and eagerly read. TRAVEL, MISSIONARY H. G. UNDERWOOD The Call of Korea New Popular Edition. Paper, net 35c. Regular Edition, i2mo, cloth, net 75c. "As attractive as a novel — packed with information. Dr. Underwood knows Korea, its territory, its people, and its needs, and his book has special value which attaches to expert judgment. Particularly well suited to serve as a guide to young people in the study of missions." — Examiner. WILLIAM O. CARVER Missions in the Plan of the Ages Bible Studies and Missions. i2mo, cloth, net $1.25. As Professor of Comparative Religion and Missions ia the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at Louisville, Dr. Carver has prepared in these chapters the fruit of many years' study. His aim is to show that the foundation prin- ciples of the Christian task of world conquest are found in the Bible not so much in the guise of a commanded duty aa in the very life of the Christian faith. ANNIE L. A. BAIRD Daybreak in Korea Illustrated, i6mo, cloth, net 60c. There can never be too many missionary books like this. A story written with literary skill, the story of a girl's life in Korea, her unhappy marriage and how the old, old story transformed her home. It reads like a novel and most of all teaches one, on every page, just what the Gospel means to the far eastern homes. ISABELLA RIGGS WILLIAMS By the Great Wall Selected Correspondence of Isabella Riggs Williams, Mis- sionary of the American Board to China, 1 866-1 897. With an introduction by Arthur H. Smith. Illustrated, i2mo, cloth, net $1.50. "This volume is a little window opened into the life and work of an exceptionally equipped missionary. It was at Kalgan, the northern gateway of China, that a misssion station was begun amid a people hard and unimpressible. It was here that Mrs. Williams won the hearts of Chinese women and girls; here that she showed what a Christian home may be, and how the children of such a home can be trained for wide and unselfish usefulness wherever their lot is cast. No object-lesson is more needed in the Celestial Empire than this. Many glimpses of that patient and tireless mis- sionary activity which makes itself all things to all men are given/' — Arthur H. Smith, Author of Chinese Characteristics, Etc. MISSIONARY ROBERT E. SPEER Christianity and the Nations The Duff Lectures for 1910. 8vo, cloth, net <2.00. Among the many notable volumes that have resulted from the well-known Duff foundation Lectureship this new work embodving the series given by Mr. Robert E. Speer in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, will rawk among the most important. The general theme, "The Rt/lex Influence of Missions upon the Nations," suggests a large, important, and most interesting work. The name of the lecturer is sufficient guarantee of the method of treatment. HENRY H. JESS UP Fifty -three Years in Syria Introduction by James S. Dennis. 1'wo volumes, illustrated, 8vo, cloth, boxed, net $5.00. This autobiographical record of half a century's experi- ence in the mission field of Syria, is rich in color, narra- tive and insight. It is also incidentally a history of the mission work for the period but told with a personal touch and from the innermost standpoint. It is a pioneer's story, and as such never lacks in interest. JULIUS RICHTER A History of Protestant Missions in the Near East 8v °» doth, net $2.50. A companion volume to "A History of Missions in India" by this great authority. The progress of the gospel is traced in Asia Minor, Persia, Arabia, Syria and Egypt. Non-sectarian in spirit and thoroughly comprehensive in scope. "It is truly a notable work and can be endorsed in unqualified terms. — John R. Mott. WILLIAM EDWARD GARDNER Winners of the World During Twenty CentUrieS Adapted for Boys and Girls. A Story and a Study of Missionary Effort from the Time of Paul to the Present Day. Cloth, net 6oc; paper, net 30c. Brief sketches of great missionaries in chronological order, extending down through Augustine and Boniface the apostles to England and Germany, Xavier in Japan, and Brainerd among the_ Indians, to Carey, Moffat and Living- stone and Missionaries of our own day. Intensely stimulat- ing and suggestive. Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 1 1012 01234 3960 Date Due \ .' ■ FES 6 W f