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 Kelman, John, 1864-1929. 
 Some aspects of 
 international Christianity 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 THE LIGHT THAT SAVES 
 
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 Some 
 Aspects of International 
 
 Christianity 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN KELMAN 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1920, by 
 GEORGE R. GROSE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Foreword vii 
 
 Preface ix 
 
 I Rededication 1 
 
 II The Relation of Christianity to 
 
 Patriotism 30 
 
 III Individual and National Morality 61 
 
 IV A League of Nations .... 93 
 
 V Statesmanship in Foreign Mission- 
 ary Work 125 
 
 VI Britain to America 146 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 The following lectures will meet a real and 
 widespread need. They will contribute to a 
 clearer understanding of the obligations of a 
 true internationalism and of the strength of 
 vital Christianity. The author, a preacher of 
 international repute, speaks as a discriminating 
 student of human affairs and with the moral 
 authority of a Hebrew prophet. The convic- 
 tion that the Christian religion is the only 
 solution of the complex and baffling problems 
 of the day, and that it has to do mightily 
 with all the world movements is tremendously 
 strengthened by these lectures. 
 
 The Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw Uni- 
 versity, to which this series of addresses be- 
 longs, was founded by the Rev. Marmaduke 
 H. Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana 
 Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. 
 The object of the donor was " to found a 
 perpetual lectureship on the evidences of the 
 divine origin of Christianity and the inspiration 
 and authority of the Holy Scriptures. The 
 lecturers must be persons of high and wide 
 repute, of broad and varied scholarship, who 
 firmly adhere to the evangelical system of 
 
 Christian faith. The selection of lecturers may 
 
 vii 
 
viii FOREWORD 
 
 be made from the world of Christian scholar- 
 ship, without regard to denominational divi- 
 sions. Each course of lectures is to be published 
 in book form by an eminent publishing house 
 and sold at cost to the faculty and students of 
 the university." 
 
 Lectures previously published : 
 
 1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes. 
 
 1914, The Literary Primacy of the Bible, 
 George Peck Eckman. 
 
 1917, Understanding the Scriptures, Francis 
 John McConnell. 
 
 1918, Religion and War, William H. P. 
 Faunce. 
 
 George R. Grose. 
 President DePauw University. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 While I was preparing my course of Lyman 
 
 Beecher Lectures, which were delivered at Yale 
 in the spring of this year, I received an 
 invitation to give six lectures on the relation 
 of Christianity to International Subjects, in 
 DePauw University, Indiana. At first I felt 
 that the task was beyond me. I am no ex- 
 pert either in politics or economics. The time 
 at my disposal was extremely limited, and 
 much of it was already arranged for. Yet on 
 second thought I resolved to accept the invita- 
 tion with which DePauw had honored me. 
 There are questions of the most vital impor- 
 tance on which every man must form an opinion. 
 The bearings of these questions are not con- 
 fined to the regions of expert knowledge, and 
 there is a place for the impressions of the 
 man on the street — his general sense of moral 
 values, his common sense view of relative im- 
 portances, and the free play of his conscience 
 upon the questions of the hour as he understands 
 them. It is in his name and from his point of 
 view that I have prepared these lectures. 
 
 They were delivered from fragmentary notes, 
 and the form they took owed much to the 
 
 wonderful kindness and hospitality of the 
 
 ix 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 audiences. I shall never forget the thrill of 
 those evenings in DePauw, when the response 
 was so immediate and so inspiring, and the 
 most abstract discussions seemed to change 
 to personal confidences, given and received. 
 But when it came to writing out the book in 
 cold blood, and without the inspiration of the 
 friendly atmosphere of the lecture hall, the 
 task assumed a far more formidable aspect. 
 It had to be performed amid the confusion and 
 distractions involved in my removal from 
 Edinburgh to New York, and without access 
 to many books of reference which in other 
 circumstances I would have consulted. 
 
 Meanwhile, the political and international 
 situation was changing from day to day, with 
 the rapidity of a mountain torrent, and an 
 opinion might be antiquated almost before the 
 ink in which it was written had dried. In 
 view of all this, I must trust to the indulgence 
 of the reader, in the hope that he will find in 
 the little volume at least some reminders of a 
 very stirring time, and that the general argu- 
 ment and point of view may be applicable 
 still, even when the detail of their application 
 may have changed. 
 
 Some of the subjects of these Lectures have 
 already been dealt with in the Lyman Beecher 
 Lectures, though in slightly different form. 
 Several of the present series were delivered also 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, 
 and the friends who heard them there, as well 
 as the congregation of Fifth Avenue Presby- 
 terian Church, where they were delivered dur- 
 ing the present winter, will permit me to asso- 
 ciate them with those in DePauw as I thank 
 them all for the welcome they accorded me — 
 a welcome so cordial and so generous that it 
 has been a permanent enrichment to my life. 
 
 John Kelman. 
 
 New York, March, 1920. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 Rededication 
 
 Before the war had ended there had already 
 come upon the conscience of earnest men in 
 every land a sense that the future life into 
 which peace would lead us must not be identi- 
 cal with, or even very similar to, that to which 
 we had been accustomed in former days. The 
 Great War has been so searching, and has 
 penetrated so thoroughly into every nook and 
 corner of human interest and enterprise, that 
 it must have wrought very serious changes 
 in many of the aspects of life. Now that the 
 peace has come, we find ourselves bewildered 
 by the number of elements, expected and un- 
 expected, which are entering into the recon- 
 struction of society. 
 
 In Edinburgh during the spring of last year 
 there was inaugurated in the churches a move- 
 ment called the Mission of Rededication. 
 That Mission, which created considerable inter- 
 est, dealt with many different questions, not 
 religious only, but political, social, and eco- 
 nomic, and it has left results both in the teach- 
 ing and in the practice of men. The word Re- 
 dedication is striking and very provocative of 
 thought. It at once puts us into the line of 
 
2 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 history, and reminds us that this is by no means 
 the first dedication that has been attempted. 
 Casting one's eye along the line of the past, 
 one sees the great historical dedications of Israel 
 in the Wilderness, Solomon's Temple, the out- 
 set of the Crusades, the Wars of the Covenant- 
 ers, Plymouth Rock and the James River, the 
 American Revolution, and the Great War. 
 In all of these men felt that there had come 
 upon them a new sense of life's solemn and 
 commanding opportunities, and in each particu- 
 lar case they dedicated themselves to some 
 specific task. Now, however, there is a wide- 
 spread feeling that things are farther on than 
 they were on any of these former occasions, 
 and that there is a greater living chance, if 
 only we may be able to avail ourselves of it, 
 for changing things forever. The final end of 
 war has actually seemed to be in sight, and 
 some of us have not yet lost the vision of it, 
 nor the faith that that vision may be realized. 
 The new world arising out of the ashes of the 
 old will undoubtedly have cleared itself of many 
 hampering conditions, and there seems to be an 
 actual prospect of realizing many of these also. 
 When one views the League of Nations in its 
 widest scope, which is, indeed, the only complete 
 or understanding view to take of it, one feels 
 overwhelmed by the stretch of its idealism, and 
 can hardly believe that we have come to the 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 3 
 
 point of attempting to arrange for and organize 
 so mighty an affair. 
 
 Yet so it is. This generation cannot shift 
 its responsibilities without losing altogether 
 the solemn sense of historical unity. Our 
 dead lie upon every battlefield, and behind them 
 the vast company of the dead of other wars, 
 and of all the other men and women who, in 
 their generation, strove to realize ideals which 
 had revealed themselves to them. There is in 
 Edinburgh a legend of the ancient Castle, 
 that a bugler blowing the " last post "ona 
 wild and stormy 31st of March, centuries ago, 
 was killed there and thrown down the rocks; 
 and the legend tells that every 31st of March 
 those that have ears to hear can hear the sound 
 of a fifth bugle, whose notes linger long over 
 the sleeping city. The dead bugler comes back 
 to continue his challenge to living men. When 
 we remember the dead it is well ever to remind 
 ourselves that they without us cannot be made 
 perfect, and that they are waiting in their 
 silent places tojsee how we shall take up their 
 unfinished work, and what we shall make of it. 
 
 It is altogether fitting, therefore, that at 
 such a time as this we should bring out into 
 clear light all that is most sacred in our lives, 
 our minds, and hearts, and dedicate it anew to 
 high ends for future days. In doing this we 
 are able with peculiar vividness to realize the 
 
4 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 unity of history and to see our own efforts and 
 ideals in a higher light because of what they 
 have meant in days gone by. 
 
 With all this in our minds we come to the 
 great taskf of the rededication of our own lives. 
 Again we remember that this is not the first 
 time of dedication. We have all been dedi- 
 cated before; indeed, so far as our personal 
 religious history is concerned, we have been 
 dedicated far too often. When we turned 
 consciously and deliberately to God, at the 
 first celebration of the Communion, or on the 
 occasion of the death of friends very greatly 
 beloved, we have all undergone several such 
 experiences, and about each of them there has 
 always been a sense of conscience accusing us 
 of unfaithfulness to former dedications. Had 
 the early dedication of our lives been complete 
 and deep enough, we would not have had so 
 far to travel back in order to renew our vows. 
 It is right at such a time as this that we should 
 very particularly consider the reasons for the 
 failure of former dedications in so far as they 
 have failed. We shall probably all find that 
 there are two main reasons for those failures. 
 
 The first of these is that our dedicated things 
 were left lying stored and inoperative. We set 
 aside certain purposes and memories, and 
 solemnly laid them on the altars of our spirit, 
 and then turned back from that sacramental 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 5 
 
 act to a life in which the dedicated things were 
 to a large extent forgotten. Such dedication 
 is conceived of too much as static rather than 
 dynamic. It represents a judgment rather 
 than a purpose, an emotion rather than a vital 
 impulse. It is laid aside reverently in the 
 region of dogma, instead of being led out into 
 the field of living experience. 
 
 The second reason for such failure is that 
 often our dedications are too general, and 
 therefore meaningless. They express a real 
 desire to be better men and women, whose 
 spirits are more faithful to the highest things, 
 but they do not particularize what these things 
 are, nor examine what practical points of con- 
 duct are involved. In a word, they lack point, 
 and in all that concerns conduct that is a 
 fatal lack. Now the War has put point upon 
 everything. It has forced us all back from 
 generalities to that which is concrete and 
 definite. Our aspirations in such former experi- 
 ences were often little more than excellent 
 copy-book sentiments to which, of course, we 
 assented, but which never entered the region 
 of practical conduct. Now we feel ourselves 
 seized as it were by the throat, and as we seek 
 another dedication an imperious voice demands 
 of us, " What exactly do you mean? " It is 
 necessary for us now to examine all our convic- 
 tions and principles, in order that we may 
 
6 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 ascertain of them also what their exact meaning 
 is. If our dedication is to be a mere generality 
 to-day, we simply court a repetition of former 
 disappointments. The solemn moment will 
 leave us unprepared for any advance in the 
 future, and when we come to face the pressing 
 questions that will be on us before we know, 
 we shall find ourselves, mentally and spiritually, 
 " all over the place." 
 
 Before we state to ourselves definitely the 
 meaning of our dedication it will be well for us 
 to go to the root of the matter, and ask what we 
 mean by the word " dedication " itself. It is a 
 great word, which we are accustomed to utter 
 with reverence. How noble it seems! How 
 little it often signifies ! Come, let us bring it 
 to a point. What is the " dedicated spirit," 
 and what does it involve? 
 
 Obviously, in the first place, it must involve 
 limitation. In young days we all have passed 
 through a stage in which we understood the 
 words of Robert Browning in Pauline . 
 
 "Iam made up of an intensest life, 
 ... a principle of restlessness 
 Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all." 
 
 It is not long, however, in the case of all who 
 are dirigible in the course of life, before we learn 
 that this radiant vision is but the figment of 
 young enthusiasm. It is not given to mortals 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 7 
 
 to enter fully into every phase of life, and we 
 soon discover that we cannot know everything, 
 nor feel, nor think, nor do everything either. 
 The first requisite for a satisfactory dedication, 
 then, is to select something which we shall 
 know and think and feel and do. In other 
 words, to mark out our province. 
 
 Here we touch upon the vexed question of 
 the two rival ideals for education. The uni- 
 versity education of older days, prescribing its 
 fixed number of subjects identically the same 
 for all students, has been replaced by the 
 modern arrangement of optional courses in 
 which each student specializes along some par- 
 ticular chosen lines. The danger of the new 
 plan is that you may easily produce by it un- 
 educated experts, people who know their own 
 narrow business thoroughly, but who do not 
 know it in relation to the wider world. Such 
 uncultured specialization is a real danger which 
 must be guarded against at the present time. 
 But, on the other hand, we have reached a 
 period in the world's history when mere broad 
 culture is not sufficient to meet the demands of 
 the day. Life is asking us all certain very def- 
 inite questions, and it is incumbent upon every 
 one who would serve his generation rightly to 
 select for himself some limited area in which he 
 chooses to specialize, and to which he dedi- 
 cates his powers of intellect and action. This 
 
8 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 holds good in the choice of a profession, a choice 
 which will be facing many of you very soon, 
 if it has not confronted you already. There 
 are all sorts of reasons which present them- 
 selves to a young man or woman in favor of or 
 against this profession or that, and it is here 
 that one of the great dangers in education 
 arises. One will choose a profession because it 
 appears to him more honorable, or more re- 
 spectable socially, or more likely to provide 
 him with quick returns in money than another. 
 Another will take for the principle of choice 
 the extreme opposite of this, and sensitive 
 consciences have been often tempted to settle 
 the big choices of life upon the principle that 
 one should always choose the more self-denying 
 or strenuous course. These principles of deci- 
 sion are equally misleading. When thinking 
 of the dedication of a life, neither social position, 
 nor money, nor self-denial are questions of first 
 importance. The great question is that of 
 efficiency as it applies to the particular nature 
 of the person deciding. What can you do best? 
 What does your habit of mind lead you toward 
 doing? That will be your best contribution to 
 the public welfare, and that should be the prin- 
 ciple ofyoiir choice. In a later lecture we shall 
 revert to this. 
 
 A similar snare lies set for the feet of every 
 earnest spirit, in the promiscuous desire of 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 9 
 
 doing good. We want to help and bless our 
 fellow men, and we have not realized that it is 
 possible for none of us to do good to everybody. 
 The result is often a life broken into frag- 
 ments of good endeavor, and scattered over 
 innumerable small attempts which neither link 
 on with one another into any concerted whole, 
 nor, indeed, achieve any completeness even 
 along their own various lines. Again it is 
 necessary to mark out your province, by select- 
 ing those whom life has given you as the sub- 
 jects of your special service. In a word, clear 
 up the matter of your possibilities and your 
 limits, and then work within these limits with 
 all your might. Find out what you stand for, 
 and stand for that. This is the first great law 
 of dedication. 
 
 In this there is already involved the second 
 consideration, namely, originality. We all de- 
 sire to be original, but some try to be so in 
 very curious fashions. One of the commonest 
 of these fashions at the present time is that of 
 achieving originality by contradicting obvious 
 and proved truths. I need not remind you 
 that anyone can do that without any great 
 display of genius or much expenditure of effort ; 
 but I would like to point out to you that a 
 considerable amount of what passes for genius 
 and brilliancy in current literature, upon analy- 
 sis turns out to be little better than the exercise 
 
10 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 of this smart trick. Originality does not consist 
 in differing from others, but in thinking things 
 out for yourself. It matters little whether 
 you agree with others or differ from them. 
 Every truth that passes through your own 
 personality, and goes out upon the world from 
 you, will have something of that personality 
 communicated to it and lingering in it. The 
 great thing is that you should refuse the tyranny 
 of fashion and the habit of thinking through 
 other men's minds. " Ye are bought with a 
 price, be not the slaves of men." The price 
 has been bitter and costly in the lives of your 
 comrades. At least answer it by shaking your- 
 selves free, that you may stand independent 
 and think for yourselves. Dedicate your life, 
 not only to certain projects that you wish to 
 accomplish but to that point of view which is 
 distinctively your own, and to that set of con- 
 victions which you have found to dominate 
 your conscience. In a word, find out what you 
 stand for and stand for that. 
 
 Let us now ask what this means in four 
 different departments of our life and interest : 
 
 1 . Personal Religion 
 
 In this the new dedication will, on the one 
 hand, link each of us in with the historic Chris- 
 tian faith, and on the other hand it will discover 
 for us what our individual aspect of Christian- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 11 
 
 ity must be. These two are well embodied 
 in that interesting word sacr amentum. Famil- 
 iarized to us in its English form of sacrament, 
 it has a history of peculiar suggestiveness. In 
 classical Latin it meant the military oath sworn 
 by the soldier that he would be faithful to the 
 Roman army and empire; but when it was 
 taken over into the early Latin of the Church it 
 assumed the new meaning of a mystery, the 
 disclosure of hidden spiritual realities within 
 or along with visible and tangible things of 
 sense. In our partaking of the sacrament both 
 these meanings are implied, and in all dedica- 
 tions of the spiritual life each of them is present. 
 
 On the one hand such a dedication neces- 
 sarily involves the great loyalties. The faith 
 of the fathers and the saints has a claim upon 
 every dedicated spirit, and in our dedication we 
 link ourselves on to that holy succession. "What 
 they believed, I believe; what they hoped, I 
 hope : whither they are arrived, by Thy grace, I 
 trust I shall come." In these great words of 
 Thomas a Kempis he has handed on to us a splen- 
 did formula for the expression of the supreme 
 loyalties involved in all Christian dedication. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, this dedication is 
 one's own, and a man expects to perceive hidden 
 mysteries which no one else can see as he sees 
 them, but whose vision is always more or less 
 determined by his own spiritual powers as well 
 
12 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 as by his personal qualities and experience. 
 Thus, even in the matter of belief we cannot 
 hope to retain all the details of the creed of those 
 fathers and saints who have gone before us. 
 In the swift changes of thought which ac- 
 company the development of the times, and 
 which new learning must always necessarily 
 produce, it is necessary that the statement 
 and interpretation of Christian truth should be 
 elastic enough to assume the necessary changes 
 of form. We cannot dedicate ourselves to a 
 point of view which was possible only to those 
 who accepted the scientific and critical con- 
 ceptions of, say, the fourteenth century or the 
 fifth. The Christianity which claims us is 
 that upon which the light of to-day is beating; 
 and our testimony, while it will always revere 
 the great testimonies of the past, cannot pos- 
 sibly be in all details identical with any of 
 them. As a matter of fact, there will be in a 
 man's dedication to-day a double element. 
 If it be as solemn and comprehending a thing 
 as it ought to be, he will revere much that he 
 does not literally believe ; but, at the same time, 
 he will have discovered a central core of living 
 beliefs which mean absolutely everything to 
 him. I remember passing through the vesti- 
 bule of a large and richly built hotel much 
 frequented by business men. In that vestibule, 
 among many palms and other beautiful plants, 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 13 
 
 there was a collection of fine white marble 
 statuary. The statues were reproductions for 
 the most part of ancient Greek ones, and it 
 was amusing to notice how these men, in a 
 general sense prizing the beauty and the change 
 from ordinary pursuits which the statues of 
 that vestibule afforded them, yet passed out 
 and in, busy upon a few vital interests of their 
 own, not in the remotest degree connected with 
 art of any kind. Such a vestibule is the entire 
 creed of some men, crowded with fair but alien 
 forms. It offers a bosky retreat for the spirit, 
 but it has no connection with any vital interest 
 of life. Doubtless in the creed of all men there 
 will be such a vestibule, but the imperative 
 thing is to discover what part of its beauty and 
 its ideas are really vital to the life and thought 
 of each one of us, and then to count that and 
 that alone our living creed, to which we dedi- 
 cate our lives. In some, this living core of 
 faith still remains considerable in extent; in 
 others it has been reduced to an extremely 
 small number of statements. This central 
 faith, found not now from dogma but in experi- 
 ence, and accepted without reserve, is at least 
 enough for a man to live by. 
 
 2. The Church 
 
 Next to personal religion in a day of dedi- 
 cation there must recur to all loyal spirits 
 
14 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 the thought of that organized expression of the 
 Christian faith represented for them by the 
 church with which they have been connected. 
 The present time is one which should quicken 
 all our church loyalties, and recall us to the 
 greater thoughts of church life which have 
 commanded the imagination of so many genera- 
 tions. It is a common saying that the Church 
 has failed, and that the War has finally pub- 
 lished that failure to the world. I have spoken 
 elsewhere about this measureless fallacy, and 
 I need not repeat the repudiation of a thing 
 so obviously untrue. The church to-day is 
 greater than she ever was before, and she re- 
 tains all those possibilities of spiritual reality 
 and effectiveness which led the apostle of old 
 to call her by the sublime name of the Body of 
 Christ. That body is immortal and has the 
 power of rising many times from the tomb. 
 It may be buried, as it has been buried time 
 and again, in the earth of formality and super- 
 stition and the ambitions of ecclesiastical men ; 
 but it will always rise again in some form or 
 other from the dead, with new powers for meet- 
 ing the exigencies of a new day. Indeed, the 
 church is like that temple of Philae which stood 
 for many centuries on its island in the Nile, 
 and to which pilgrims came from all quarters 
 of the land to pray to the river god for floods 
 and harvests. It stands there still, but it is 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 15 
 
 now submerged. The raising of the waters by 
 the great dam at Assouan has permanently 
 and abundantly fulfilled the prayers that were 
 offered there, and the temple has passed away 
 in the fullness of the answer to its own prayers. 
 So will it be with the Church of Christ. Those 
 benefits to humanity for which the church 
 stood long ago, in days when there was no 
 other institution which could supply them, 
 have been in many instances taken over by 
 other agencies, and to that extent the church 
 has ceased to be required. As in these in- 
 stances she has been submerged in the fuller 
 supply of her own gifts, so it may be that in 
 the end all those spiritual blessings that she 
 has brought to the earth will be supplied in 
 fuller measure, and they that see the City of 
 God will see no temple therein. But that day 
 is still far ahead, and while man's need remains 
 unsatisfied and his thirst unslaked, the church 
 will ever stand upon the earth for the supply of 
 the water of life. 
 
 While we thus disclaim the accusation that 
 the church has failed or that it is going to fail, 
 let us be candid in regard to those things which 
 have suggested such a view to hostile critics. 
 Two things especially need such attention. 
 
 (1) Denominationalism. In this respect the 
 experience of the War has done a great deal 
 toward rectifying erroneous impressions and 
 
16 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 undue emphasis. Some men went out to the 
 front with very strong convictions as to the 
 exclusive validity of their own orders, and many 
 others brought to their new experiences extraor- 
 dinarily strong prejudices in favor of their 
 own denomination. At the front they were 
 drawn close together, and discovered, in men 
 belonging to different churches from their own, 
 high spiritual gifts and an obviously valid 
 power of ministry and call to it. They saw 
 such men at their work and felt the reality and 
 effectiveness of much that they had formerly 
 thought of only to criticize. Besides that, 
 and more potent, was the fact that they and 
 their brethren alike were standing close to the 
 grim realities of the battlefield, the hospitals, 
 and the innumerable graves of the dead. The 
 reality which they felt in this was of so very 
 different a quality from that which they had 
 felt in the questions that had divided them 
 previously, as in many cases to sweep away 
 all such prejudices, and change entirely the 
 perspective and proportion of their views. 
 The impression left upon the minds of many of 
 us was that the denomination to which a man 
 belongs is ultimately a matter of temperament 
 rather than conviction, and that all sectarian 
 prejudice is an instance of temperament mas- 
 querading as conviction. Man's spirit is not 
 guided by abstract principles as a rule, but 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 17 
 
 far of tener by the subtler forces of temperament, 
 strengthened by spiritual experience. So we 
 came to believe that there would always be, 
 in all time, many varieties of church life and 
 forms of worship. There seems no reason to 
 suppose that men will ever cease to group them- 
 selves into such classes as ritualistic and non- 
 ritualistic, or broad and narrow churchmen. 
 And the one thing that is demanded is the 
 widest charity in every church which will 
 admit that there are those whom some other 
 form of worship will suit better than that which 
 it supplies, and will rejoice in the variety of 
 operations of the Spirit to meet the infinitely 
 various spiritual needs of men. Wherever it 
 is possible we should stand not only for unity 
 of spirit but for union of organization. Anyone 
 can see the lamentable waste, not of money 
 only, but of enthusiasm and effort, which is 
 caused by the overlapping of rival churches 
 between whose principles there is no essential 
 difference. Thus, for the mere sake of economy, 
 all possible unions are to be welcomed. But, 
 on the other hand, there are matters which 
 divide certain churches from one another which 
 run so deep that an attempted union would 
 only emphasize the lack of real unity. In 
 such cases it is surely wiser that each should 
 preserve its own individuality as a separate 
 body of believing men. The one great demand 
 
18 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 is for the ending of the spirit of exclusiveness. 
 Arrogance of any sort is one of the chiefest 
 dangers in the Kingdom or the Church of Him 
 Who told His disciples to learn of Him because 
 He was meek and lowly of heart: and there 
 has been no such cause of spiritual arrogance in 
 church history as the violent contentions of 
 one denomination against another for the 
 exclusive possession of the truth. It is im- 
 possible to speak too strongly about this. 
 "Delenda est Carthago": and exclusive arro- 
 gance is our Carthage which must be destroyed. 
 (2) Efficiency. We must lay upon our con- 
 science, above all else, the demand for efficiency 
 in our church work and life. In order to 
 produce and sustain efficiency it will be neces- 
 sary continually to keep our eyes upon the 
 appeal which the church is making to the men 
 and women of the successive generations, in 
 view of their present phases of thought and 
 life. Especially in a time like this, when new 
 conceptions are crowding in upon each other 
 in every department of social, public, and 
 private life, must it be necessary to keep revis- 
 ing the whole situation. There never can be 
 a time when we shall be justified in taking our 
 church methods and messages for granted, as 
 things which have gone on edifying people 
 from time immemorial, and shutting our eyes 
 to the question whether these are bringing us 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 19 
 
 a living grasp of the problems of the present 
 hour. The churches tend always to lapse into 
 the somnolent life of spiritual clubs, which 
 may be excellent places of luxury for the elect, 
 but which have no meaning for the live world 
 of men and women around them. A great 
 American preacher, contrasting the hard and 
 upright pews when he began his ministry with 
 the luxurious sofas on which his congregation 
 heard his later words, told them that when he 
 began to preach there the congregation burst 
 forth into the eager doxology, " Praise God 
 from whom all blessings flow," while now 
 they expressed themselves in the pathetic notes 
 of "Art thou weary, art thou languid?" The 
 spiritual club must always become weary and 
 languid, but that is an abnormal thing in Chris- 
 tianity. The rest which Christ promises to his 
 followers is not a still or idle rest : it is a peace 
 that garrisons the hearts of men girded for 
 aggressive work. Thus it behooves us to-day 
 to clear our decks for action. 
 
 We have already spoken of this in connection 
 with that working creed which is the essential 
 part of our belief. Let us apply it also to the 
 matter of organization. It has often seemed 
 to me that the vision of Ezekiel had an 
 interesting bearing upon the matter of church 
 organization. In that vision the prophet saw 
 the chariot of the Lord, and there were wheels 
 
20 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 in it, and as it were a wheel within a wheel. We 
 all know that chariot, and most of us have some- 
 times been at our wits' end to manage the com- 
 plication of wheels in the church machine. The 
 fact is that most churches have too many wheels 
 in them, and in order to bring our church life 
 back to reality there is a good deal that ought 
 to be stopped. There is no harm in wheels, 
 but then, like the prophet's, there ought to be 
 eyes in the wheels so that the church may see 
 whither it is going; and there ought to be the 
 Spirit of the Lord in the wheels, that effective 
 and purposeful Spirit which can never inhabit 
 or direct useless machinery. Whenever any 
 part of the church organization has become 
 obsolete it should be cut off or changed. You 
 may have met occasionally the ancient church 
 member who is proud of the fact that he has 
 been a regular attendant of the Young Men's 
 Meeting for forty years — and is now almost its 
 only attendant. One respects such a man for 
 his fidelity, but wishes that he had also been 
 granted some corresponding sense of humor. 
 There is no virtue or advantage in perpetuat- 
 ing any society for a day longer than it is living 
 and serves a definite purpose. The preliminary 
 duty in all church organization is to clear 
 off every piece of surplusage, and to end 
 everything that is effete: then with keen 
 eyes to scrutinize the present situation, to 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 21 
 
 strengthen and adapt all existing organiza- 
 tions which can be useful in present circum- 
 stances, and to invent new ones where they are 
 required. 
 
 In this plea for reality we have been dealing 
 only with outward things, but reality always 
 includes idealism as well. Realism is the 
 most unreal thing in the world. The high 
 ideals which the church was created to proclaim, 
 the essential message which she is there to tell 
 — these are the supreme questions for her real- 
 ity and her effect. If, indeed, God has broken 
 silence and given to men in his church definite 
 words to proclaim to their fellows, all else 
 should be held in subordination to the full and 
 effective proclamation of those words. This 
 is a matter for the conscience both of minister 
 and congregation, and we who preach should 
 continually see to it that the thing we say is 
 vital, and is such that we can reverently regard 
 it as the authentic Word of the Lord. All 
 else is of secondary importance to that; and 
 in our rededication we should examine our- 
 selves concerning our message, and certify our 
 consciences that, so far as we are able to judge, 
 it is indeed the Word of God. 
 
 3. The Social Outlook 
 
 In such a day as this it is imperative that 
 we should all realize as we never did before 
 
22 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 that no man liveth unto himself. Indeed, one 
 of the chief effects of the War upon most men's 
 minds has been the expansion of the idea of 
 personality. We are personal within various 
 circles of shorter or longer radius. The most 
 intimate view of personality is that of the 
 individual interests and purposes and destinies 
 which are determined by our own personal 
 and individual life. But there is also a per- 
 sonality which is determined by the conditions 
 of home, the wider circles of friendship, of fellow- 
 workmen, and so on; and beyond that there is 
 the personality which is part of our society, 
 and which is determined for each of us by the 
 social, economic, and moral conditions of every 
 other member of that society. We cannot 
 separate ourselves from men, nor cease to 
 identify ourselves with their social well-being, 
 without ceasing to be fully personal ourselves. 
 The hermit who cares for none of these things 
 is a human being whose personality has shrunk. 
 Only he who lives in the questions of his day 
 and the common interests of mankind can 
 claim to be in the larger sense personal. 
 
 This means, of course, that each of us is 
 called upon to take his share in the play of 
 thought and conscience that is operating around 
 him. The two points at which this necessity 
 needs to be most clearly defined are at present 
 those of home and labor. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 23 
 
 Many things are to-day threatening the sa- 
 credness and, indeed, the security of home life. 
 On the one hand the changed conditions of life 
 are leaving less time and leisure for the cultiva- 
 tion of the old and sacred home loyalties, and the 
 relations between parents and children are in 
 serious danger on that account. On the other 
 hand the complexities of the marriage problem 
 have given rise to many theories, and in some 
 quarters to a very distinct propaganda, which 
 threaten the old loyalties and tend toward a view 
 of marriage which would make it little better 
 than a temporary and convenient contract. 
 
 In regard to labor, amid the bewildering 
 multitude of problems which are clamoring 
 for solution to-day, one can clearly see one or 
 two fundamental principles which must be in- 
 cluded in the dedication of every Christian man. 
 
 On the one hand there is the just demand for 
 a living wage and for equality of opportunity. 
 By a living wage more is meant than a wage 
 which shall be sufficient to keep body and soul 
 together. It must include room in every life 
 for human interests, for beauty and joy and 
 love. Equality of opportunity, as distinct from 
 the impossible demand for equality of posses- 
 sions, means that every human being shall have 
 a full chance of making the utmost of himself 
 and of developing his powers. 
 
 On the other hand, justice and the welfare 
 
24 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 of society demand protection for the govern- 
 ment of the people by the people, and not by 
 any section of the community. They demand 
 that no organization in any country shall over- 
 power the elected government of that country, 
 or tyrannize in its own interest over the nation's 
 liberties and rights. 
 
 These are but two examples out of a multi- 
 tude which might be cited. The world at the 
 present time is in a state of great upheaval. In 
 wartime, strikes which hampered the fighting 
 of men in the field and endangered their lives, 
 taking advantage of their heroism for the selfish 
 ends of men who stayed at home, were cer- 
 tainly among the most despicable phenomena 
 of any age. But now, in the universal rest- 
 lessness, amid the innumerable strikes that are 
 taking place for any reason or for none, it has 
 become imperative to get down to bed-rock 
 principles. The immediate cause of the rest- 
 lessness is, of course, the psychological effect 
 of the War, with its dislocation of all ordinary 
 ways of living and thinking. But these things 
 are symptoms of far wider and deeper facts, and 
 there is a widespread sense of inequality in the 
 distribution, not only of the good things of 
 life, but of the opportunities for living in any 
 full and adequate sense. Now, it is impossible 
 that Christian men can in the act of rededica- 
 tion avoid the responsibility for clear thinking 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 25 
 
 upon these matters. It is not enough to talk 
 bitter generalities about Bolshevism. It is a 
 time not for invective but for understanding. 
 We have too long kept our minds and con- 
 sciences in water-tight compartments, as if 
 justice or love could ever be confined to any 
 one region of human life. I know a city that 
 is built upon several ridges of hill with deep 
 hollows lying between them. The architects 
 of former days bridged these hollows in order 
 to provide a level street running from the 
 suburbs to the center of that city. By a kind 
 of natural gravitation the misery and crime of 
 the city sank to its lower levels, which be- 
 came a sort of moral swamp or morass, fester- 
 ing with the decay of human life. But many 
 of the citizens daily crossed the arches as they 
 went to and fro from business, and thus man- 
 aged to live apart from the wretchedness which 
 had invaded their town. That city is like too 
 much of our modern life. We have been con- 
 tent if we fulfilled respectably our duties to 
 our smaller and narrower personality, and we 
 all have our arches which permit us to remain 
 in ignorance of disagreeable social facts. We 
 have our comfortable houses, and we show 
 them to our friends with pride, saying, " My 
 house." Not until we have gone to the mean- 
 est hovel in our town, and heard amid its misery 
 the voice of conscience say, " This is your 
 
26 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 house/' have we faced the truth of modern life. 
 The strike is your strike, the revolution is your 
 revolution; and at the present day there is no 
 hiding-place so remote or so secure as that a 
 man with any living conscience of Christianity 
 can take refuge in it from the call of his fellow 
 men. Any dedication which, in a world like 
 the present, omits all reference to social con- 
 science and effort, will have a strange reception 
 when it goes up to heaven as the fit offering of a 
 man who owes his life to the blood and death 
 and sacrifice of millions of laboring men. 
 
 4. The International Situation 
 
 The widest circle within which to conceive 
 of our personality is, of course, the international 
 one. As we shall see in a future lecture, the 
 War has done nothing to break down the loyalties 
 of true patriotism, but it has demanded that 
 patriotism shall be no longer exclusive. Inter- 
 national problems are the business of every 
 man who is capable of reading a newspaper, 
 and until he has included them in his dedica- 
 tion he cannot have in any case completed it. 
 The points at which these affect us most 
 directly at the present time are two : 
 
 (1) Our Duty Toward the Vanquished. The 
 collapse of the Central European Powers, and 
 the five years which preceded that collapse, 
 have left many lands in a condition of the most 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 27 
 
 appalling misery that has ever been known on 
 earth. The hunger, disease, and death that 
 are everywhere to-day in Europe, except in 
 one or two favored lands, are a far more clamant 
 fact in the situation than any other that could 
 be mentioned. We do not ask for any prefer- 
 ence or favor to the vanquished over the others; 
 but it is demanded from the conscience of every 
 Christian man that he shall not eat his own 
 bread in contentment, nor shall he dare to give 
 thanks to God for it, until he is doing some- 
 thing toward the feeding of those who, by 
 hundreds of thousands, are starving to death. 
 There is a further duty that we owe to the 
 vanquished. No country will lie crushed for- 
 ever; and they too, whenever they show that 
 it is possible to trust them, must necessarily 
 be admitted to the comity of nations. Every 
 one who pays any attention to the facts of the 
 case must necessarily see that this is so. 
 Now, it is possible to pour contempt upon our 
 fallen enemy, and to continue our reproaches 
 so that he will become further embittered, and 
 will secretly plan future revenges and prepare 
 means to execute them. Those for whom your 
 only attitude is contempt, are not likely by 
 that treatment to be made fitter for the duties 
 which you are already demanding of them in 
 view of future days. The need for self-respect 
 in the vanquished is as important almost as the 
 
28 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 need for bread, and it were well if we were on 
 the outlook for all opportunities of fostering it. 
 We should welcome all expressions of a change 
 of mind in our former enemies. We should, as 
 soon and as far as it is possible to do so, trust 
 them to act on different principles in the future. 
 In the meantime this will only be possible when 
 it is safeguarded by sufficient guarantees of 
 good faith; but everything should certainly be 
 done to hasten the time when that intolerable 
 situation will be over, and we shall all be striv- 
 ing for a common future of human well-being. 
 
 (2) Of the League of Nations I shall speak 
 in a future lecture, but this I shall say 
 to-day. There are those who ask " What is 
 the use of all this talk of Utopia, when so many 
 people have only hovels to live in? " And the 
 answer is that if this Utopia does not come, we 
 shall not have even hovels to live in, but only 
 graves. The ferocity and the extent of the 
 devastation of human life and property in the 
 late War are such as to make the vision of a 
 future war more frightful than any conception 
 of hell that has ever been imagined by man. 
 The only thing that stands between us and that 
 appalling outlook is some arrangement which 
 will be effective for universal peace, and that 
 also must enter into our dedication. It has 
 been abundantly published by those who know 
 the situation best, that the League cannot be 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 29 
 
 manufactured either by statesmen or experts 
 of any kind, but that if it is ever to be opera- 
 tive it must be the expression of the whole 
 conscience and opinion of the people of every 
 land. He who in private conversation or in 
 public speech does anything to bring this great 
 ideal into contempt, or to discourage men from 
 hoping in it, is taking upon himself the most 
 serious moral responsibility that can well be 
 imagined. Our influence may be small and our 
 sphere narrow, yet each one of us may do his 
 part in accustoming the public mind to think 
 in terms of a League of Nations, and so prepar- 
 ing the way for the coming of such a League. 
 
 In all this lecture I have tried to suggest 
 directions in which our rededication should be 
 made. Let us not be satisfied with any mere 
 expression of good dispositions, moral, political, 
 or religious. Let us think out things all along 
 the line, and dedicate our lives to certain clear 
 views and definite purposes. Men and women 
 so dedicated, and knowing what they are dedi- 
 cated to, are the center and source of public 
 opinion in every land. This clarity and de- 
 termination in our thought and purpose to-day 
 is the first duty laid upon us all. The past 
 enjoins it, the present needs it, the unborn are 
 waiting for it, and God trusts us that we shall not 
 fail them. 
 
30 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Relation of Christianity to 
 Patriotism 
 
 There are many false conceptions of pa- 
 triotism, and they have done deep injury to 
 the public life of the present time. We have 
 all heard of the patriotism which is mere jingo, 
 which stands for " one's own country right or 
 wrong," and develops into blind race hatred, 
 the fruit of ignorance and poverty of imagina- 
 tion. Apart from still more serious objections 
 to this false ideal, there is the fact that it is 
 simply provincialism. It has been well said 
 that " the unstrained, fully realized conscious- 
 ness, just as a matter of course, that the region 
 beyond one's horizon is as rich, as colored, and 
 as practicable, as the region that happens to be 
 within it, is liberty." It is obvious that patri- 
 otism of the narrower sort is a most noxious 
 vice passing itself off as a virtue. True patri- 
 otism differs from jingoism radically and com- 
 pletely. It has an open eye to the faults as 
 well as to the good qualities of one's own land, 
 to its defects as well as to its nobilities: it re- 
 gards one's own land as a blessing and not a 
 curse to other lands, and seeks to establish its 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 31 
 
 relations with the world on a basis, not of dom- 
 ination, but of help. 
 
 Patriotism had its origins in very distant 
 primitive times. It began as the enlargement 
 of home and its intimate circle. In one way or 
 other the struggle for existence extended the 
 family bonds to a larger number of persons, 
 and established the family ideal on a greater 
 scale. For purposes of war and defence, for 
 advantages for the huntsman the agricul- 
 turist and the trader, such an extension was 
 absolutely necessary, and gradually it spread 
 to the tribe, the race, and the country. In 
 the early history of civilization these larger 
 companies of men, cemented by race affinity 
 and common origin, had assumed such power 
 over the imagination and thought of the 
 individual that each man tended to regard his 
 own country as the only object of service or 
 of affection, while he looked askance at men of 
 every other race. The lingering relics of this 
 barbaric point of view are seen in the jingo 
 patriotism of to-day. 
 
 In the world which Christ entered, those 
 who lived in the land of Palestine were caught, 
 as it were, among three patriotisms. First 
 there was the Jewish, with its narrow and in- 
 tense belief in itself as the only people of reli- 
 gion and of destiny. Then there was the Ro- 
 man, which had spread through all the known 
 
32 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 world its huge loyalty to the empire, deifying 
 its emperors as an outward expression of the 
 fact that the imperial idea was already divine. 
 Besides these there was the Greek patriotism, 
 whose empire was that of the mind, and whose 
 loyalty was that of all cultured spirits through- 
 out the world. Among these three rival pa- 
 triotisms Jesus lived, and the general impression 
 of his attitude is that it was singularly indiffer- 
 ent to them all. He entered the Jewish world 
 at a time of fierce hatreds. The memory of 
 Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabees turned 
 Jewish men bitterly against the Greek culture, 
 while the memory of the more recent Roman 
 conquest was gall and wormwood to the nation, 
 and the whole country of Galilee was perpetu- 
 ally threatening new rebellions. All this was 
 embittered by the policy of the Herods, who 
 adopted the Greek culture and fawned upon the 
 court of Rome. When they would fain have 
 imposed this point of view upon the nation they 
 were met by the stern denunciation of their 
 subjects, who held that such friendship of the 
 world was enmity against God. It was further 
 embittered also by the system of publicanism, 
 in which Jewish men became tax farmers under 
 the Roman government, and thereby incurred 
 the stigma of treason, which was affixed upon 
 them relentlessly by patriotic Jews. 
 
 In the spirit of Jesus there was much that 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 33 
 
 ran counter to all this. He proclaimed him- 
 self the Son of Man, and stood aloof from petty- 
 hatreds of every kind. He refused utterly to 
 become a partisan, and insisted on doing jus- 
 tice to outsiders in that land of so many bitter 
 hatreds. He carried his independence to such a 
 length that those who desired him as a political 
 leader actually tried to resort to force in their 
 attempts to make him a king. As to the 
 Romans, he made many friendships among 
 them, and showed no animosity to the Roman 
 rule. He excuses his Roman judge, and under- 
 stands how little he can comprehend of the 
 situation he is there to deal with. He speaks 
 words of highest praise to Roman centurions, 
 and says of the soldiers who tortured him on 
 the cross, " They know not what they do." 
 When brought to a definite issue upon the 
 point of tribute, he tells men to render unto 
 Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and gener- 
 ally gives an impression of one whose policy 
 it is to accept the facts of his time and country 
 without resistance. As to the publicans, it 
 was his friendship with them which constituted 
 one of the chief reasons for the hatred and per- 
 secution with which he met. He saw in them 
 not merely renegade Jews, but the bitter reck- 
 lessness of the outcast, the pathos of vulgarity, 
 and the miseries that often go with riches. 
 Pitying them and understanding them, he 
 
34 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 became known as the Friend of publicans and 
 sinners. As to the Greeks, he had, indeed, 
 nothing in common with Herodism, and his 
 words about them that wear soft clothing are 
 scornful and contemptuous. But it was not 
 because they were foreign that he despised 
 them, but because their degenerate Hellenism 
 was so petty and so contemptible in comparison 
 with his own ideal of the Kingdom of God. 
 When Greeks came to visit him one can see 
 evident traces of a mutual attraction, and the 
 record of their conversation is one of the 
 happiest of all the stories of his contact with 
 men. Over all lesser loyalties, including them 
 all in so far as they were worthy, but excluding 
 all their bitter partisanship, there floated in his 
 mind and imagination the great ideal of the 
 kingdom of heaven and the brotherhood of men; 
 and in such a time as his this necessarily de- 
 manded the weakening of lesser patriotic ideals 
 that the higher loyalty might be supreme. 
 
 There must be added to this the recollection of 
 the personal idiosyncrasy of Jesus. The nomad 
 instinct was among the deepest parts of the 
 inheritance of Hebrew men, and one can see in 
 Jesus many traces of that detachment which is 
 so deeply ingrained in the people of Eastern 
 lands. When he said that " foxes have holes, 
 and the birds of the air have nests; but the 
 Son of man hath not where to lay his head," 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 35 
 
 he spoke of that which in him was of choice 
 rather than of necessity. Such a nature is 
 strongly individualistic, and it was not un- 
 natural that the first conception of Christian- 
 ity was confined pretty exclusively to the per- 
 sonal relation of individual souls with God. 
 In the early church this swiftly degenerated 
 into the abuses of asceticism, which shocked 
 the Roman conscience. Turning its back upon 
 public duties of all kinds, it created the same 
 problems of diminishing population (owing to 
 the practice of celibacy), and of lives withdrawn 
 from the service of the state, whose modern 
 counterparts are presented by the self-indulgent 
 practices and habits of certain classes among 
 the wealthy. 
 
 Yet there are undoubtedly strong elements 
 of patriotism in the thought of Jesus. To the 
 woman of Samaria he claims that salvation 
 is of the Jews, and is obviously ready to stand 
 up for His own country as against all others 
 when its distinctive rights are challenged. 
 Nor could anything more clearly express the 
 bitter sorrow and passionate affection of the 
 patriot's heart than His late words about 
 the doom of Jerusalem. 
 
 The early Christian Church presented to 
 the world an unintelligible spectacle, and the 
 expression of the Roman bewilderment was its 
 accusation against the church of the hatred 
 
3G SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 of the human race. No stronger nor more 
 sweeping charge was ever made against an 
 institution, and it was due to the church's 
 preference of the Kingdom of God to the king- 
 doms of this world. Readers of Marius the 
 Epicurean will remember how in early Chris- 
 tianity the new Rome superseded the old 
 imperial enthusiasm with a spiritual vision 
 impossible for any but the initiated to under- 
 stand. It is true, as Professor Dill has said, 
 that the early Christian was a citizen of two 
 cities. Yet the spiritual vision of the City of 
 God was commanding, and it undoubtedly did 
 extinguish for a time the light of the earthly 
 vision in many souls. St. Paul himself mani- 
 fested throughout his writings a significant 
 indifference to earthly ties and associations, 
 and this tended rather to increase than to 
 diminish as the persecutions of the first cen- 
 turies succeeded one another. 
 
 The indifference was increased also by two 
 other causes. The first of these was the 
 expectation of the immediate end of the world. 
 Early Christendom lived upon tiptoe, expecting 
 the momentary return of Christ to take over 
 the government of the earth. To men in this 
 mood nothing mattered very greatly except 
 their relation with Christy and bonds of pa- 
 triotism, no less than those of the family itself, 
 undoubtedly were much relaxed. The second 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 37 
 
 cause for the diminished hold of patriotism 
 upon the early Christians was the identifica- 
 tion of patriotism with the Roman gods. 
 Roman patriotism has been defined as " loyalty 
 to the gods who had kept by them all through 
 their history "; and from the Roman point of 
 view Gibbon's words are not inaccurate that 
 " every Christian treated with contempt the 
 superstitions of his family, his city, and his 
 province." At first this state of mind was 
 treated by the Roman people with incredulous 
 astonishment. It was impossible for their 
 minds to conceive such a point of view. But 
 the astonishment swiftly changed to fierce 
 resentment, and the apprehension of every 
 imaginable danger to the state and to the world. 
 From the point of view of the Christians, the 
 kind of patriotism which they rejected was an 
 intolerable bondage. By its insistence on the 
 worship of that in which they had no belief, 
 it refused them liberty of thought and speech 
 and worship. Thus, as against the Roman 
 patriotism, Christianity meant for them all 
 that was involved in intellectual and spiritual 
 freedom, and that glorious liberty of the chil- 
 dren of God was dearer to them than any 
 country, dearer even than natural ties of blood 
 and of affection. 
 
 It would be, however, a false reading of 
 history to say that it was the spirituality of 
 
38 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 the early church which opposed patriotic 
 sentiments. The two were really quite com- 
 patible, and, as a matter of fact, whenever 
 persecutions were relaxed, patriotism was at 
 once restored. When finally Rome was Chris- 
 tianized, patriotism in Christians, both in 
 the form of loyalty to Rome itself and to their 
 own particular town and province, immediately 
 revived. The Christian apologists emphati- 
 cally defend the attitude of Christian soldiers 
 and citizens on this point. Christianity proved 
 itself averse to patriotism only when loyalty 
 to one's country was clearly anti-Christian. 
 When that obstacle was removed in any in- 
 stance, Christianity at once returned to its 
 patriotic loyalties, enjoining all to " do their 
 duty to the fatherland of earth, while ever 
 mindful of the fatherland of souls/ ' 
 
 In the subsequent development of Christian- 
 ity in all the lands it conquered, the idea of a 
 chivalrous connection between patriotism and 
 religion was strong and constant. Rough as 
 the forms of it may have been, yet we see it 
 developing steadily in every land. The Wales 
 of the Arthurian Cycle, Dante's Florence and 
 Elizabeth's England, all reveal the noblest 
 spirits combining the two ideals. Indeed, as re- 
 gards Elizabeth, it has been noted that on her 
 accession Protestantism became the accepted 
 religion of the nation, so that it came to be 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 39 
 
 the duty of every loyal citizen to uphold it. 
 Roman Catholicism thus became identified with 
 political revolts and with the enemies of Eng- 
 land, while Protestantism became identified 
 with her lovers and supporters. In this in- 
 stance we see patriotism taking over even 
 the ideals of individual churches and blending 
 with them. In the Puritan days it was the 
 same. The Scottish Covenanters offer a bril- 
 liant and conspicuous example, and I need not 
 remind you how deeply the two elements have 
 blended in America, and how clear that fact has 
 been in all the American wars. 
 
 A curious point emerges here. In many 
 wars both sides have identified their particular 
 patriotism with religion and Christianity. This 
 apparent contradiction need not, however, 
 perplex us. Each of the warring nations has a 
 vision of certain great loyalties, including 
 gratitude to their land for all its benefits, the 
 sense of honor to that which is their own by 
 birth, and all the romantic associations which 
 have strengthened and intensified these bonds. 
 Every one of these elements is in itself a Chris- 
 tian sentiment. The mistake arises in the 
 judgment of proportion passed upon the particu- 
 lar causes for which the war is being waged. 
 That is, of course, a different matter, and it 
 does not necessarily interfere with the genuine- 
 ness either of the religion or of the patriotism. 
 
40 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 The Christianity of each nation which takes 
 part in a war takes on special characteristics 
 which belong to national associations. These 
 particular features of national life and loyalty 
 get mixed up with the larger ideal, so that every- 
 thing which can claim to be patriotic seems 
 also to be religious. It is only on such grounds 
 as these that one can understand the utterances 
 of so large a body of the German pastors and 
 professors, and especially of such spiritually 
 minded men among them as Professor Herrman 
 of Marburg, which astonished all the thinking 
 world during the Great War. It is to be noted 
 that small and persecuted states have shown a 
 special tendency to identify God with their 
 own national fortunes, rather than with inter- 
 national or imperial conceptions of the world. 
 God and God's righteousness are continually 
 on their side. That is, righteousness as they 
 see it and on their scale of proportions. In 
 many cases they see it accurately and their 
 scale is just: but it cannot be denied that 
 sometimes they may be blind to larger inter- 
 national considerations, which also must be 
 taken account of if one would form an ade- 
 quate judgment. 
 
 The outstanding feature of modern public 
 life is the rapidity with which the world has 
 been internationally organized in recent years. 
 Labor, science, industry, sport, foreign mis- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 41 
 
 sions and practically all other human interests, 
 have felt the same impulse from local to inter- 
 national ideals and habits of thought. In June, 
 1913, there was held in Brussels a Congress of 
 International Associations, and an international 
 monthly magazine was published which con- 
 tained a list at that date of no fewer than four 
 hundred such associations. This is one of 
 the most important facts with which modern 
 statesmanship has to reckon. Lord Bryce, in 
 his address to the International Congress of 
 Historical Studies, has said that whatever 
 happens in any part of the world has now a 
 significance for every other part. Abraham 
 Lincoln expressed the same view in his day, 
 and now it has become almost a commonplace 
 of statesmanship. 
 
 The War has, of course, increased the mean- 
 ing and the spread of internationalism to an 
 enormous extent, and the steadily increasing 
 rapidity of intercommunication, which has now 
 resumed its former course after five years' 
 interruption, will continually tend toward inter- 
 national rapprochements. 
 
 These international ideals necessarily appeal 
 to Christianity, which, being the gospel of 
 humanity, has always taken for one of its chief 
 watchwords the ideal of the brotherhood of 
 men. The modern movement is in the line 
 of that faith which in early days transcended 
 
42 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 all barriers separating the Gentile from the 
 Jewish world. From the first the Christian 
 ideal was the enthusiasm of humanity, whose 
 obviously broad and generous theory of life 
 has all along been adopted by intelligent Chris- 
 tians. In the words of Mr. J. H. Oldham, 
 " Christianity from its very nature transcends 
 national differences." 
 
 Such views, however, exaggerated and paro- 
 died by non-Christian political propagandists, 
 have become definitely antagonistic to the 
 patriotic ideal. Dr. Johnson's well-known for- 
 mula that " patriotism is the last refuge of a 
 scoundrel " had not been without many modern 
 echoes whose virulence is often untempered by 
 the doctor's wit. Many such quotations could 
 be given. One British writer, for instance, 
 recently stated, in recantation of his former 
 doctrines, that he would prefer an invasion of 
 Great Britain to the coming in of Universal 
 Service. Another writer quotes Maude's book 
 on Tolstoy to the effect that patriotism is like a 
 suit of armor put on by a young man, which 
 no longer fits him in his maturity, and that it 
 is already a gigantic superstition which is 
 fast becoming a hypocrisy. We are told that 
 it obscures our vision, burdens our belief, 
 causes blood to flow in torrents, and has become 
 a perennial spring of hatred, malice, and evil- 
 speaking. Finally we are assured that our 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 43 
 
 welfare lies in the unification and brotherhood 
 of men, that the superstitions which divide 
 men must be destroyed, and that among these 
 superstitions none is worse than patriotism. 
 The net result and impression of all this, after 
 we have allowed for exaggeration and heat, is 
 that patriotism must be considered as old- 
 fashioned, a virtue long out of date and hope- 
 lessly behind the times. 
 
 Yet, after all this is said, we cannot but 
 remember that the main work of Christianity 
 is the redemption of human nature in its com- 
 pleteness, and that it is the protector rather 
 than the destroyer of human instincts. All 
 the troubles and dangers of society in the past 
 have been due to what Matthew Arnold calls 
 " the undue preponderance of single elements." 
 Noble causes which have seen the world with 
 but too single an eye, have ignored and assailed 
 elements on the other side which were equally 
 true to human nature, and by doing so have 
 sealed their own doom. The mark of Jesus 
 Christ is his insistence upon the completeness 
 of our manhood. If crushed, instinct tends to 
 become gangrenous, and to corrupt and poison 
 the whole system of the body politic. Out of 
 every clash of social ideals Christianity in the 
 end emerges, larger than the particular empha- 
 sis of the hour, for the preservation of the 
 perpetual human elements, some of which are 
 
44 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 always threatened by violent temporary reac- 
 tions. I believe that the corporate spirit as 
 embodied in the nation is one of those perpetual 
 elements, and that Christianity will ultimately 
 be found defending and not assailing it. That 
 it is an instinct which has a very deep hold 
 upon normal human nature will hardly be 
 denied by any of its critics. The response which 
 the publication of The Man Without a Country 
 drew forth in America and Britain was very 
 remarkable, and these sentiments still hold 
 their own. There is something in us all, or at 
 least in almost all, which justifies Scott's famous 
 lines about a man's sentiments toward " his 
 own, his native land." A curious instance 
 occurred some years ago, in which a man of 
 education and good social standing found him- 
 self for some trivial offense suddenly within the 
 cognizance of the police. He told afterward 
 the story of his feeling when the policeman's 
 hand touched his shoulder to claim him. The 
 sudden revolution which occurred within him 
 upset the very foundations of his life, and he 
 perceived as in a vision the significance of the 
 fact that his own nation had turned against 
 him. To be in prison in a foreign country 
 may be an inconvenience, or a jest, or even an 
 honor; but when your own land judges you 
 adversely, when all that you have honored and 
 held dear casts you out, the consequent de- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 45 
 
 spair reveals suddenly the grip of the patriotic 
 instinct upon the heart. For " the country is 
 in itself an entity. It is a Being. The Lord 
 God of Nations has called it into existence, and 
 has placed it here with certain duties in defense 
 of the civilization of the world." These words 
 remain permanently true. No nation can 
 afford to do without this sentiment, and no 
 man can afford to do without it. The man 
 without a country, presenting a spectacle of 
 one poor individual pitted against a cen- 
 tury of the life of the United States of 
 America, will remain to the end of time sig- 
 nificant. 
 
 It may be replied that the instinct of pa- 
 triotism is irrational. Why be loyal to this 
 land in particular? Other lands may be greater 
 than our own, with larger opportunities, more 
 spiritual aspirations, and more effective or- 
 ganization. Why should we not choose the 
 land which is best all round, in these and other 
 respects, and call that our country? Let us 
 admit for the time being that the instinct is 
 irrational. I am by no means on the side of 
 those who of recent years have originated what 
 might almost be called a cult of irrationality, 
 but one has to remember that these writers 
 have been taken seriously. Benjamin Kidd, 
 in his Social Evolution, made so strong an at- 
 tack upon the practice of putting one's faith in 
 
46 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 reason as to force the thinking world to revise 
 its whole conception of the relation of reason to 
 faith. Now, the main point of Kidd's book is 
 that religion depends always upon irrational 
 sanctions, and that its demands, which it al- 
 ways has been able to enforce upon faith and 
 conscience, are ultra-rational in their appeal. 
 Personally I am far from subscribing to this 
 doctrine in its entirety, but there is no question 
 whatever as to the importance of that which is 
 entirely beyond the scope of reasoning, in de- 
 termining conduct and establishing principles 
 of faith. We are asked why we should give 
 our loyalty and devotion to this land in par- 
 ticular, and the answer is simply because it is 
 our land. The same thing is true in regard to 
 the family. Why should we be loyal to this 
 particular man because he happens to be our 
 father, or set this particular child who happens 
 to be our own child above the children of other 
 people in our esteem? It is not that these are 
 absolutely the best persons in the world, for 
 there may be other fathers or other children 
 whose moral character is superior to theirs. 
 Nor can we justify our preference by the belief 
 that these are the wisest, or the cleverest, or 
 the kindest of parents and children. The 
 obvious answer that we make to the whole 
 perplexity is, "This father is your father and 
 this child is your child." Nature has assigned 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 47 
 
 these and no others to you as your parent or 
 your child. Your loyalty to them may be as 
 irrational as anybody likes to call it, but it is 
 a fact, and it will never cease to be a fact 
 while your human nature remains sound and 
 normal. Certain extreme forms of Socialistic 
 theory have ignored this, and pressed their 
 rationalism to the length of the subversion of 
 the family ideal. In much recent literature 
 about marriage problems and all that these 
 involve in connection with the family, there 
 has been a tendency to revolt from all the old 
 loyalties and to subordinate the security of 
 homes to the convenience and pleasure of in- 
 dividuals. Mr. Chesterton's well-known an- 
 swer is summed up in three words, " loyalty to 
 life." There could not be a better expression 
 of that instinct, which cuts through all sophis- 
 tries however plausible, and appeals to whole- 
 some natures, apart altogether from reasons 
 that can be given and argued. 
 
 If this be so, patriotic and family loyalty is 
 not irrational after all. If it is a deep and 
 essential element in human nature, which 
 asserts itself independently of any reasoning 
 pro or con, then we may take it for granted 
 that deep and essential reasons ultimately will 
 be found. Nature is very wise and in the end 
 is sane, and she can give a reason for the faith 
 which she asks men to place in her. We shall 
 
48 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 now turn to some of those reasons which lie 
 behind patriotic loyalty. 
 
 1. The Larger Cosmopolitan Brotherhood is 
 too large a unit for all the purposes which it 
 requires to serve. We admit its claims so 
 far as they go, and we admit the advantage of 
 a wider outlook than that of mere family and 
 country, and the duty of a sense of brotherhood 
 with all the world. We admit also that to the 
 end there will be a state of unstable equilibrium 
 and necessary compromise between the larger 
 and smaller ideals which we shall find ourselves 
 compelled to cherish. As Matthew Arnold has 
 pointed out, each nation is in need of elements 
 which abound in some other nation, and the 
 narrow kind of patriotism which would refuse 
 all such accessions to our national inheritance 
 would be a wanton impoverishment of the 
 spirit. Besides all this, we simply cannot 
 escape the wider brotherhood even if we would. 
 Historically, the touch of one nation with an- 
 other has always been the meeting place of va- 
 rious streams of ideas; and the blended stream 
 has flowed from that point, not only richer for 
 the contact, but vitalized by it and fuller than the 
 sum of the two national streams that met. Our 
 British patriotism, for instance, involves loyalty 
 to at least ten different national ideals, for it is 
 extraordinarily composite, and retains elements 
 of everything that went to its making. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 49 
 
 All this tends to the necessary cosmopoli- 
 tanism which must exist in every rightly 
 balanced mind. Yet that wider unit can never 
 take the place of or expel our loyalty to the 
 nation. It has been proved abundantly by 
 experience that there is a point beyond which 
 the expansion of loyalties simply will not work. 
 There are certain limits within which our 
 human forces have to be confined if they are 
 to be effective for practical ends. Beyond 
 these limits the forces grow diffuse and futile. 
 If you have so much water and no more, you 
 may send it down the valley in a narrow channel 
 or allow it to expand into a broad lagoon, but 
 in the one case you will be able to utilize it for 
 practical purposes which you wish to achieve, 
 while in the other case it will accomplish 
 nothing. All ideals of every kind have their 
 limits within which alone they can work effec- 
 tively, and the worst enemies of each ideal 
 are those who try to push it beyond its limits 
 and expect it to do effective work so. 
 
 Of altruism this is notoriously true. As a 
 matter of fact, one does not love one's fellow 
 men with any great intensity unless these are 
 in the nearer groups. A railway accident near 
 our home will cause profound emotion in 
 almost everybody, but we read without any 
 such emotion of a similar railway accident 
 which has happened to take place on the other 
 
50 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 side of the world, in a country which we have 
 never seen and with which we have no personal 
 connection. To love one's fellow men as such 
 is indeed a Christian commandment, but it 
 has required the whole strength of men's per- 
 sonal attachment to Christ to make it possible 
 to obey that commandment, and it has been 
 well said that it is only for His sake that one is 
 able to do it at all. To love our neighbor as 
 ourself is apt to be nothing more than a pious 
 generality, and the young man's question, 
 " Who is my neighbor? " is eminently perti- 
 nent. Christ has given an incalculable in- 
 crease to men's power of imagining, and has 
 flung the horizon of our sympathies far out 
 beyond its former limits; yet the facts remain, 
 and all the most important work of humani- 
 tarianism is done, not on the circumference, 
 but near the center. The strength and patience 
 and loyalty with which we can face the wider 
 problems depend mainly upon the intenser 
 feelings which we experience in the regions 
 nearest to the individual. 
 
 First in intensity comes the marriage bond, 
 which still remains the ultimate basis of all 
 other fidelities. Next to that there is the 
 loyalty to one's family and friends, known to 
 the Romans as pietas; and, third, there is our 
 feeling to our own land and the patriotic 
 traditions and loyalties upon which that feeling 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 51 
 
 rests. These are human nature at the heart of 
 it. By these chiefly human society stands or 
 falls, and by forcing out the bond further afield 
 one is apt to find that all the loyalties are grow- 
 ing weaker. In a word, these three loyalties are 
 the source from which the force for the wider 
 enterprise of cosmopolitanism is supplied. It 
 is a very interesting fact in illustration of 
 this statement that the most successful mis- 
 sionaries have generally been exceptionally 
 patriotic men and women. One has only to 
 read the lives of such men as Livingstone, 
 Mackinnon of Damascus, or Stewart of Love- 
 dale, to realize how true this is. 
 
 The danger of neglecting this bed-rock fact 
 of human nature is that of importing into our 
 public life the element of vppis, that inso- 
 lence, or presumptuous disregard of the facts 
 of nature, which goes with an eye fixed only on 
 far-off things. He that loveth not the nation 
 which he hath seen, how shall he love the 
 nations which he hath not seen? He cannot 
 love them. He can let his imagination indulge 
 itself among them, but he will always be more 
 or less of a spiritual tourist, without those 
 responsibilities which attach to his immediate 
 neighborhood. It is by bearing the actual and 
 obvious responsibilities of his life that a man's 
 disposition will be tempered and trained so as 
 to be able rightly to cope with further and wider 
 
52 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 ones. The only true fire of altruistic enthu- 
 siasm burns from within outward. Thus our 
 argument is that cosmopolitanism is too big 
 and vague an ideal for practical purposes. 
 It tends to a cheap and easy humanitarianism, 
 which is generally ineffective. Humanity at 
 large does not mean much to any of us, and 
 does not ask much from us. But our own land 
 docs ask much — it asks very many and very 
 definite things. He who disparages patriotism 
 in favor of the larger unit may very well find 
 that, consciously or unconsciously, his trans- 
 ference of loyalty involves the shirking of defi- 
 nite responsibilities. In other words, our good 
 feeling toward mankind in general must begin 
 somewhere, and it will be always wisest and 
 soundest when it begins near home and not at 
 the antipodes, among the men we know best 
 and not those we know least. 
 
 It may be added that this has been proved on 
 many occasions to be historically true. Greece 
 produced her best art in the time of her narrow 
 patriotic enthusiasms. Afterward, in the days 
 of a wider and more diffused culture, her 
 originality died out. The intense loyalty of 
 the early Roman days is another example. 
 When she achieved world-wide empire Rome 
 had indeed seized upon an idea of unparalleled 
 magnificence, but even that sublime idea 
 proved itself unable to keep her loyalties alive. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 53 
 
 2. A second argument for the rationality 
 of patriotism is the consideration that patriotic 
 loyalties are, in the last analysis, neither more 
 nor less than the repayment of lawful debts. 
 This is a point of view which cannot be ignored, 
 because it is this which best defines Christian 
 patriotism and reveals its special qualities. 
 The past has done much for us, and the only 
 way of discharging our debt to the past is to 
 pay it over to the future. A large part of this 
 debt is due to our own land and must be paid 
 to that land. This, as it seems to me, is not 
 in the least irrational. The debt is not an 
 affair of fantastic honor, but of plain and com- 
 mon honesty which no one can afford to avoid 
 or neglect. In four different ways this debt 
 may be detailed: 
 
 (1) Your land has fought for you. Even the 
 shortest tour that we take in any of the older 
 lands conducts us from battlefield to battlefield 
 where men have laid down their lives in multi- 
 tudes as the price that had to be paid for the 
 freedom and prosperity which are the inheri- 
 tance of their successors. This debt must be 
 paid, not in vain boasting about the glory of 
 ancient battles, but in the acceptance of disci- 
 pline as the law of our own life. We hold our 
 liberties, our comforts, and our very selves, 
 from hands that were wet with blood when 
 they passed them on to us. There has been 
 
54 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 of late years a very distinct tendency toward 
 that worship of comfort which demands that 
 everything shall be made easy for everybody, 
 and the love of pleasure was certainly tending 
 to soften the fiber of human nature. Lord 
 Morley has expressed this in memorable words : 
 " Far the most penetrating of all the influences 
 that are impairing the moral and intellectual 
 nerve of our generation . . . with new wealth 
 come luxury and love of ease, and that fatal 
 readiness to believe that God has placed us in 
 the best of all possible worlds, which so lowers 
 men's aims and unstrings their firmness of 
 purpose. Pleasure saps high interests, and the 
 weakening of high interests leaves more undis- 
 puted room for pleasure." The Great War 
 has indeed put a fearful check upon any such 
 tendency, but one must remember that in the 
 reaction after great wars there is always a 
 special danger of falling deeper into those evil 
 ways which the war for the time has reversed. 
 Not in the war only, but to the end of time, it 
 remains true that there is no royal road which 
 leads anywhere worth getting to, and that the 
 flowery paths of life are always apt to end in 
 the eternal bonfire. Thomas Carlyle's demand 
 for obedience will never cease to find an answer 
 in the consciences of wise men: " Were your 
 superiors worthy to govern and you worthy to 
 obey, reverence for them were even your only 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 55 
 
 possible freedom." Not in the army only, but 
 all along the line of life, there will be places in 
 which imposed and unchallenged discipline will 
 be necessary. There is no inherent objection 
 to blind obedience. Until a man is competent, 
 his obedience cannot be too blind. No man 
 has any right to hold any position he cannot 
 occupy for the public good, nor to enjoy any 
 privilege he cannot use for the public benefit. 
 
 In fact, the first need is not to enjoy oneself 
 or to assert one's rights; it is to find oneself, 
 and that can be done only through discipline 
 and many defeats. We soon discover that 
 we cannot all be firsts, and he who does not 
 love his work well enough to do his very best 
 in the second place or the third is no true pa- 
 triot. To take a licking and wait your time 
 is the mark of a wise pupil in the school of life. 
 Such discipline seems to be the only way in 
 which we can make any presentable return to a 
 land that has fought for us on many fields. 
 
 (2) Your land has educated you. In my 
 own country of Scotland we know all about 
 that. It is a land where the parish schools 
 have had their " lads o' pairts "; where fisher- 
 men will discuss intelligently the high politics 
 of the day while they mend their nets; where 
 your plowman will talk philosophy to you, and 
 your gardener discuss evolution, and your grave- 
 digger expatiate upon predestination; where the 
 
56 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 diker, building or repairing the walls between 
 the fields, will take from his pocket at meal- 
 times his Latin grammar, or will read theology 
 in the dark of the evening by the light of a 
 knotted fir branch. Scotland has been rooted 
 and grounded in knowledge. Its education 
 has not been merely a cramming with facts, 
 for it has been taught to think. Its education 
 has not been a thing plastered on to it from the 
 outside, but has been the expression of its 
 inner self, springing from a sense of personal 
 worth, and an impulse to communicate its 
 gifts to others. America may justly make an 
 equal claim. 
 
 How shall we pay our debt to such a land? 
 Obviously, the first answer must be that if in 
 the past she has struggled toward education in 
 such fashions as those just mentioned, the 
 least we can do is to accept our inheritance of 
 education and be educated. Our land has 
 written; what do you and I read? She has 
 striven in the sweat of her brow toward knowl- 
 edge; how much and how thoroughly do we 
 know? But we cannot pay our debt to our 
 land by any theoretical education. Efficiency 
 is demanded of us, all along the line of labor. 
 We should be impatient of all policies of 
 " muddle through," which have cost some of 
 us so dear in the last five years, and should 
 insist for ourselves and others upon good work- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 57 
 
 manship as the first demand of industry, re- 
 garding all questions of payment as means 
 toward the grand end of excellent productivity. 
 Lord Rosebery has said that " a man who 
 breaks stones on the road is, after all, serving 
 his country in some way. He is making her 
 roads better for her commerce and her traffic." 
 And if a man asks himself sincerely and con- 
 stantly the question, " What can I do, in how- 
 ever small a way, to serve my country? " he 
 will not be long in finding an answer. These 
 words remind us of the familiar lines of Robert 
 Burns : 
 
 "A wish that to my latest hour 
 Will strongly heave my breast, 
 That I for puir old Scotland's sake 
 Some useful plan or book might make, 
 Or sing a sang at least." 
 
 To be ashamed of cheap success, and to 
 heighten our standard of what success in life 
 really means, to remember that " the demands 
 of our God are hard on every human candidate 
 for a career" — these things are included in 
 the honest payment of our debt to our land. 
 
 (3) Your land has suffered for you. The 
 words of Robert Louis Stevenson are perhaps 
 not too strong, when he said of Scotland: 
 " Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise and constant 
 resolution are fibers of the legend of this coun- 
 
58 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 try's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland 
 have been tragically fated. The most marking 
 incidents in Scottish history — Flodden, Darien, 
 or the '45 — are still either failures or defeats; 
 and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses 
 of the Bruce combine with the very smallness 
 of the country to teach, rather, a moral than a 
 material criterion for life." What is so pre- 
 eminently true of Scotland is in its degree true 
 of every country. In large measure all men 
 owe their lives to the pain of their motherland, 
 and spring to life in their own generation out of 
 centuries of struggle, self-denial, and suffering. 
 The only way of paying this particular debt 
 must be by relieving suffering as it still remains 
 around us. We cannot go back through the 
 centuries and minister to the dead; but we who 
 are what we are by reason of their pain, nobly 
 endured, must find their heirs in those around 
 us who are suffering to-day. The miseries of 
 any land are the worst enemies of patriotism. 
 They have in the past called it forth, and pro- 
 duced much of the finest history in doing so; 
 but that is no excuse for any generation permit- 
 ting them still to torture fellow human beings 
 unrelieved. The sweet uses of adversity are 
 the business of Providence; the business of 
 man is ever to end or to mitigate adversity. 
 In our time this is notoriously true. We all 
 know the magnificence of the response that the 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 59 
 
 working men of the Allied Nations made to 
 the call of the Great War, but it is only some of 
 us who realize that in many of our works and 
 factories there is a strong feeling that the 
 workers have nothing to defend, a feeling which 
 is sapping the very life of patriotism. Lord 
 Curzon not long ago in weighty words expressed 
 this: " You cannot run an empire on empty 
 stomachs. You cannot sustain an empire with 
 discontented citizens. You cannot preach an 
 empire to poverty-stricken homes. If you 
 wish to call upon the patriotism and idealism 
 of the people, you must consider how to make 
 things easier for them in the conditions of 
 their everyday life." The same truths hold of 
 a republic. 
 
 (4) Your land has believed. Great battles 
 have been fought in every country upon relig- 
 ious causes. It is easy to see the grotesqueness 
 of some of these, and the wild exaggeration of 
 the importance of certain of the points fought 
 for, yet the root of it all was faith; and, how- 
 ever exaggerated its expression, the priceless 
 thing that is to be found in the past is the great 
 convictions by which men lived. Truths were 
 dearer than advantages; truth was more pre- 
 cious than life. 
 
 In asking how this debt may be paid back, 
 we are faced with the question, What are your 
 convictions and mine? What are we willing to 
 
60 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 live for without compromise and without ques- 
 tioning? For faith is ultimately at the root 
 of all social problems, as it is also at the root of 
 character. It is faith which makes the struggle 
 seem permanently worth while, and it is faith 
 alone in which a land will ultimately remain 
 great. Thus patriotism, while it does not neces- 
 sarily involve the perpetuity of an ancient na- 
 tional creed, yet does absolutely demand that 
 every true citizen shall retain from the past, and 
 express in his own fashion, a sufficient bed-rock 
 of conviction to enable him to build upon it a 
 worthy house of life. The words of Browning 
 are preeminently applicable: 
 
 " Here and here did England help me; how can I help 
 England? say. 
 Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise 
 and pray." 
 
 These, then, are the ways in which it is fitting 
 that we should repay our debt to the past; 
 but while we are making such repayments it is 
 impossible for anyone to throw off the thought 
 of how they came to be due. They belong to 
 the direct line of our country's history; and 
 the noblest men in any country do these things 
 and cultivate such character, not merely as 
 men at large, but as men of a certain land which 
 has laid upon them definite bonds of honor to 
 act in these ways. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 61 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Individual and National Morality 
 
 Beneath the obvious ethics of the late 
 situation — the broken treaty with Belgium, 
 the atrocities committed under the name of 
 Rightfulness, and the Pan-German policy of 
 empire, with its imposition of German kul- 
 tur upon less favored nations — there is one 
 fundamental difference of opinion. The ex- 
 treme advocates of pacificism applied the 
 precepts of the Sermon on the Mount with 
 rigorous literalness to the situation between 
 the warring nations, and denied that there is 
 any distinction between individual and na- 
 tional morality. The Prussians, on the other 
 hand, founded their whole polity on that 
 distinction. Their argument practically was: 
 " The laws of morality are different for nations 
 from those which govern men as individuals. 
 We are, in this war, acting as a nation. There- 
 fore we need have no respect for moral law, 
 and can do anything we please.' ' The choice 
 between these two positions is a grim one, and 
 the problem of finding a trustworthy via media 
 is certainly one of the most difficult tasks in 
 casuistry that has ever been presented to man. 
 
62 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 ; For the Prussian expression of it we might 
 quote many well-known passages from Bern- 
 hardi's book, Germany and the Next War, which 
 presented in a popular form the philosophy 
 which dominated the national mind. Bern- 
 hardi sometimes hesitates to carry his principles 
 to their full length. Yet the general argument 
 is quite clear. For the state the one virtue is 
 power, the one sin feebleness. Therefore, in 
 the end, everything is right which gives or in- 
 creases national power. Thus the argument 
 merges all morality for a nation in the one great 
 end of war, namely, success. 
 
 By the way, Bernhardi quotes and founds 
 upon Machiavelli. Machiavelli is on much 
 surer ground. He is emphatically not ham- 
 pered with a conscience. The Prince is secure 
 from all questions of right or wrong. They 
 never once occur to him. He is detached as the 
 wind — the heartless wind which overturns 
 navies, or cleanses cities from the plague. 
 Taking for his fundamental belief the baseness 
 of man, he goes on through long stretches of 
 dispassionate immorality to state his case: 
 " Therefore a prince cannot, nor ought he, to 
 keep faith when any such observance may be 
 turned against him." "It is necessary for a 
 prince, wishing to hold his own, to know how to 
 do wrong, and to make use of it or not accord- 
 ing to necessity. " And so on. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 63 
 
 If Henry Morley's explanation be correct, 1 
 surely we have here one of the most remarkable 
 of the ironies of history. According to him, 
 Machiavelli wrote it all in satire. Personally, 
 he was and remained a man keeping faith, 
 loyal and poor all his life, living decently in 
 the country with his wife and five children. 
 He wrote for the corrupt Lorenzo an account 
 of what a man like Lorenzo, wholly void of 
 principles, should be and do, if he " would be 
 master of his country's liberties, and would 
 confound all duties of the children of men in 
 the one object of self-aggrandizement." If 
 this be so, truly there must have been much 
 laughter of the gods in the time of the Seven 
 Years' War. 
 
 But this is beside the point. The Prussians 
 appear to have accepted Machiavelli frankly 
 and in all seriousness, as the authority upon 
 national as contrasted with individual morality. 
 If Bernhardi could not always go with him all 
 the way, there were plenty of others who could 
 and did. The weakness of German thinking 
 before the war was exaggeration, It saw one 
 principle and carried it out ruthlessly to such 
 lengths that its truth became a lie. It did not 
 see it in its relations, nor in the light of any 
 modifying considerations. But the world is 
 not made so simply as that. It is very complex. 
 
 1 See his introduction to Machiavelli's History of Florence. 
 
64 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 In view of the havoc wrought by this exag- 
 geration, it was inevitable that some of those 
 who felt the savagery of it all should be tempted 
 to go to the opposite extreme. Nothing could 
 be more natural than the simple reversion to 
 the Sermon on the Mount as the final solution 
 for all such difficulties. Take that as the 
 Christian law for nations under the present and 
 all other possible periods, and you at once end 
 all controversy. But this also is too simple a 
 policy, and it involves the misunderstanding 
 not of the Sermon on the Mount alone but of 
 the whole mind and speech of Jesus. Those 
 who adopt it are holding the sword of the Spirit 
 by the blade and not by the hilt. Jesus was 
 essentially a poet. When one says that, some 
 people are apt to shake their heads, as if there 
 were an antithesis between poetry and truth. 
 There is indeed an antithesis between the poetic 
 and the pedantic view of things, and in poetry 
 literalism can never be at home. The sensitive 
 delicacy of thought and feeling which charac- 
 terizes a poet's vision of things is always liable 
 to perversion by the meticulous. It is impos- 
 sible for some persons to understand anything 
 otherwise than in minute literalness, and there 
 seems to be no argument that will convince such 
 minds. Christianity has suffered many things 
 from such literalists. For want of allowance 
 for the poetic element in Christ's speech, 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 65 
 
 many who accepted his words literally have 
 found themselves continually being led down 
 blind alleys, and filled with the discouragement 
 of constant and inevitable failure. Others, re- 
 jecting his words upon the same fallacy of 
 literalism, have passed by the whole teaching of 
 Christ as doctrinaire and in the clouds. The 
 fact is that life is too complex for language, and 
 that the poet's exaggeration is the only way in 
 which some truths can be expressed at all. 
 This being so, it is a perfectly justifiable policy 
 to state one side of a truth so vividly, strongly, 
 and exclusively, as to make sure that it at least 
 will never be forgotten, and to trust the intel- 
 ligence of readers and hearers to understand. 
 Thus, in the familiar parable, the mustard 
 seed is described as the least of all seeds, but, 
 in order to vindicate the veracity of Jesus, it is 
 not necessary to search for some unheard-of 
 variety of mustard seed which is smaller than 
 the spore of ferns. The dogma of Transub- 
 stantiation was invented by literalists because 
 Jesus, before His death, said of the bread at the 
 last supper, " This is my body." When we are 
 told to take no thought for food or clothes or 
 any of the exigencies of tomorrow, and when 
 non-resistance is enjoined upon us concerning 
 property and violence, one sees the vision of 
 an ideal world appearing, towards which the 
 spirit must ever strive to approach, but which 
 
66 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 cannot be completely entered here. It is a 
 world of things rich and strange, which draws 
 men after it, saving them as they follow on. 
 But the words in which alone it can be ex- 
 pressed are not the words of this world's usage. 
 Other sayings there are, such as that which lays 
 down the hatred of father and mother as a 
 necessary condition of discipleship, which must 
 be regarded as detonating words whose ob- 
 ject is to stir men's thought and imagination, 
 rather than literal injunctions involving the 
 reversal of any possible standards of human life. 
 The literal appeal to the Sermon on the 
 Mount rests on the ignoring of one great fact. 
 That fact is that, in the present condition of 
 human society, public and national moral 
 standards are lower than those of private in- 
 dividuals. Not only are they lower, but they 
 must and ought to be lower, if we are to deal 
 justly with the situation. This fact has been 
 expressed crudely and objectionably. Bishop 
 Magee's saying is well known, that "it is not 
 possible for the state to carry out all the pre- 
 cepts of Christ. A state that attempted to do 
 so could not exist for a week." Mr. Lecky's 
 words are not less forcible: " In practical pol- 
 itics public and private morals will never ab- 
 solutely correspond. ... In different nations 
 [the national code] is higher or lower, but it will 
 never be the exact code on which men act in 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 67 
 
 private life. It is certainly widely different 
 from the Sermon on the Mount." Such state- 
 ments taken by themselves are inaccurate and 
 misleading, yet they are the attempt to express 
 forcibly a view which is obviously correct. 
 This is the view which Mr. Fielding Hall also 
 expresses in his saying that " the government 
 is always behind the soul of a people." It is 
 this fact, startling as it may be to many, which 
 we must face directly to-day, if we are to arrive 
 at any helpful teaching for the present and the 
 future situation. Let us, then, first of all 
 glance at a few of the more important reasons 
 which may be adduced in favor of it. 
 
 1. Public and national morality must be 
 fixed mainly in accordance with the standard of 
 the average man. National morality is ex- 
 pressed in legislation, and it is evident that just 
 and stable legislation must represent the mind 
 and will of the majority of the people. This is 
 one of the axioms of democratic government. 
 But this means that legislation can never rep- 
 resent the highest ideals of the highest men in a 
 nation. It can only represent the conscience 
 of the average man. To force it, by introduc- 
 ing into the statute book laws by which the 
 saints of a land try to govern themselves, is 
 always and utterly impossible. It is unjust 
 to the majority of the citizens, and in this case 
 the paradox is true — summajus summa injuria. 
 
68 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 In practice, any legislation which could thus 
 be forced upon a nation would be morally as 
 well as politically disastrous. 
 
 This becomes clear when we remember that 
 in every nation, as things actually stand, there 
 are three classes: 
 
 (A) The idealists and saints. 
 
 (C) The criminals and moral degenerates. 
 
 (B) Between these two, and forming in every 
 nation the vast majority, there is the middle 
 class, average man, representing many shades 
 of opinion and practice, higher and lower. 
 In an autocratic or bureaucratic state, legisla- 
 tion is forced upon the majority, and if those in 
 power choose to have it, so they may enforce 
 the laws of the idealist. Yet this will always be 
 regarded as tyrannical, and such government 
 will never be secure. In a democratic state 
 such legislation would not only be tyrannical, 
 it would be impossible. For the majority 
 make the laws, and idealistic laws are above the 
 average man's present capacity, above his con- 
 victions, above what he understands, and con- 
 sequently above his will. If, by some coup 
 d'etat, catch vote, or other such chance circum- 
 stance, laws of this kind are passed, the result 
 will necessarily be pernicious. Good and stable 
 government must have behind it the conscience 
 of the nation. There is no greater curse than 
 that of enforced ideals. They lead directly to 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 69 
 
 all manner of fraud and abuse. They corrupt 
 legislation by making it impossible to carry it 
 out. 
 
 Illustrations to enforce this argument are 
 to be found on all hands. On the largest scale 
 you have the tragic spectacle of those nations 
 which have of recent years attempted forms 
 of government which were in advance of the 
 national stage of moral progress. Turkey, 
 Persia, and Russia introduced parliamentary 
 government before they were ready for it, and 
 in each case it has been a notorious failure. 
 China has been experimenting in republican 
 government, as yet with like result. In regard 
 to morals, the huge experiment of prohibition 
 in the United States only became possible after 
 long-continued and graduated experiment in 
 individual States, whose results convinced the 
 majority that the prohibition law was desirable. 
 
 In this I am referring chiefly to normal con- 
 ditions in a time of peace. In the stress of war 
 much that is abnormal may become necessary 
 for the time being, and such measures as the 
 suspension of the rules of trades unions, and 
 conscription itself, may be legitimately enforced. 
 But these and other such laws can only be 
 enforced in wartime in virtue of the fact that 
 the country has for the time surrendered its 
 right of judgment to those whom it has trusted 
 with the management of the war. It is will- 
 
70 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 ing for the stress of the moment to obey their 
 judgment implicitly, but when the war is over 
 it resumes its own right of legislation. Of 
 course enforced temporary legislation may 
 make discoveries, and may so commend its 
 enforced laws to the general conscience that 
 they will become permanent by vote of the 
 nation afterward, and this will be one of the 
 best fruits of any war. Still, the general 
 principle is true, that in normal conditions the 
 only legitimate standard of legislation is the 
 will, not of the elect, but of the majority, 
 the average man. 
 
 2. The nation is the trustee for its individual 
 citizens. "It is probable," says Lecky, " that 
 the moral standard of most men is much lower 
 in political judgments than in private matters 
 in which their interests are concerned." " It 
 is always hazardous to argue from the character 
 of a corporation to the characters of the mem- 
 bers who compose it." " Large bodies," says 
 Macaulay, " are far more likely to err than 
 individuals. The passions are inflamed with 
 sympathy; the fear of punishment and the 
 sense of shame are diminished by partition. 
 Every day we see men do for their faction what 
 they would rather die than do for themselves. 
 It is the nature of parties to retain their original 
 enmities far more firmly than their original 
 principles." Certainly, all boards, commit- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 71 
 
 tees, public companies — not excluding church 
 courts — tend to act upon a standard lower 
 than that of the private individuals who com- 
 pose them. 
 
 Macaulay has adduced for this fact the lower 
 set of reasons, but there are also higher reasons. 
 The trustee is bound by obligations from which 
 the individual is free. Take, for example, 
 the question of armaments. Nobody can fail 
 to see the extravagant waste which these in- 
 volve. Yet that waste has been enforced upon 
 the nations as trustees of the safety of their 
 citizens. It may be quite legitimate for an 
 individual, obeying what he understands to be 
 the highest law, to talk of putting himself in a 
 defenseless position, and taking the risk. But 
 the nation is the trustee of all its institutions, 
 of all its men, women, and children. It can- 
 not act with the same freedom as the individual 
 possesses, for such action may involve the 
 betrayal of the trust committed to it, and no 
 crime is greater than the betrayal of such a trust. 
 In such cases there sometimes will rise the 
 clash of two consciences — the conscience which 
 would make us as individuals surrender every- 
 thing rather than fight for our rights, and the 
 conscience which demands that we shall protect 
 those whose defense has been intrusted to our 
 charge. Surely it is evident that the latter 
 conscience is that which should prevail. 
 
72 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 For we are here confronted with the whole 
 question of rights, and the morality of insisting 
 or declining to insist upon them. The indi- 
 vidual may find that his highest ideal of conduct 
 leads him to renounce his rights in certain given 
 circumstances. But it does not follow that a 
 nation is justified in following a similar course. 
 The nation is the guardian and trustee of the 
 individuals whose fate depends upon its action. 
 We are commanded to turn our own cheek to 
 the smiter, not the cheeks of those whose 
 guardians we are pledged to be. To demand 
 that a Christian nation ought not to claim its 
 rights and to insist upon them is an utterly 
 immoral demand. 
 
 3. National morality is necessarily clogged 
 by tradition. It must move slowly, because of 
 the accumulated complexity of the legislative 
 machinery, and the far-reaching relations of 
 each enactment with ancient institutions in- 
 volving innumerable individual cases. The 
 individual is free, as the nation is not, to think 
 out things for himself, to throw off custom and 
 tradition, and to follow what new lines of guid- 
 ance appeal to him as right. In this case it is 
 well that the nation is thus hindered. At the 
 present time we have a large number of clever 
 and influential individuals thinking and writing 
 rather wildly. The nation may be far behind 
 the best of these in progressive morality, but 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 73 
 
 at least its immobility is a defense against 
 much dangerous and irresponsible experiment- 
 ing. When men rush at high speed from 
 one phase of morals to another, and write 
 books in advocacy of each phase as they pass 
 through it, it is just as well, for instance, that 
 the marriage laws of England, unsatisfactory 
 and unintelligent as some of them are, neverthe- 
 less are slow to change. The complications of 
 state legislation in America offer an interesting 
 and relevant example here. Everybody knows 
 the variety of local laws in the United States, 
 which makes it extremely difficult for anyone 
 crossing the continent to be sure that at all 
 times he is keeping the commandments. Yet 
 there is a very high value in this somewhat 
 extraordinary state of matters, if we regard 
 America as a great laboratory of legislation, 
 out of whose countless experiments there will 
 come moral wisdom for the future. 
 
 4. By far the most important reason for the 
 point for which I am arguing has still to be 
 mentioned. It is the distinction between The 
 State and states. I believe that it is loose 
 thinking round about this particular point 
 which is responsible for most of the confusion 
 and much of the error which have characterized 
 the discussion of this subject. Writers and 
 speakers have been in the habit of talking 
 about " The State " as if it were an entity as 
 
74 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 clearly defined and as definitely understood as 
 the individual. It has been supposed that 
 " The State has no determinate function in a 
 larger community, but is itself the supreme 
 community, the guardian of the whole world 
 and not a factor within an organized moral 
 world." From this it is but a step to Bern- 
 hardt position, that while the individual is 
 responsible to the state, the state, being the 
 highest social unit, is responsible to no one, but 
 demands the utmost service and sacrifice from 
 all individuals. 
 
 The usual reply which has been made to 
 this by Christian opponents is the question, 
 — " Is there, then, no God to whom The 
 State is ultimately responsible? " But that 
 is not the matter at present before us. All 
 such theory as this which we have quoted 
 ignores the fact that The State, about whose 
 powers and relations so much controversy has 
 been waged, is a conception of purely imaginary 
 existence. As a matter of fact, there is no such 
 thing as The State except in the minds of 
 theorists. The State for each man is really a 
 state, namely his own nation and its govern- 
 ment — Germany for the Germans, Britain 
 for the British, America for the Americans. 
 Public morality means for each individual the 
 law of his own particular nation. There are 
 other nations, some of them in rivalry with 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 75 
 
 his own, and there is always the possibility 
 of these rival national interests and principles 
 bringing the world into a welter like the present. 
 It is easy to say, " Let all such rivalries 
 cease." But in dealing with rival states the 
 problem is unfortunately more complex than 
 that which arises between individuals. It is 
 the duty of the individual to be friendly, 
 humane, and generous to all; and he may 
 find it to be his duty to sacrifice himself 
 for his friend, or even for his enemy. But no 
 such law of sacrifice can justly be applied to 
 states. That is where all those are in error 
 who, either in America or in England or else- 
 where, have advocated the policy of throwing 
 down defenses, abolishing navies, disbanding 
 armies, and trusting to God. It is easy to 
 be rhetorical about the nobility of perishing 
 in such a cause, if matters came to the worst; 
 but the fallacy which underlies the whole 
 argument is precisely that of regarding sacrifice 
 as a noble thing for a nation in the same way 
 as it may be for an individual. Sacrifice for a 
 nation may simply be breach of trust. The 
 nation's first duty is to defend its people and 
 their interests against the cupidity, fraud, or 
 violence of other states. Carried to an un- 
 intelligent extreme this view of national moral- 
 ity will give you on the one hand the German 
 maxim, " Live dangerously "; on the other 
 
76 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 hand it will be expressed in such proposals as 
 those made to the effect that German trade 
 shall after the war be excluded from all markets 
 of the world. No one is likely ever again to 
 adopt the former proposal seriously. As to 
 the latter, the futility of that ought to be ap- 
 parent. Germany is a living national force 
 demanding expansion. If you screw down the 
 lid upon that boiler the future question is only 
 one of time — the explosion is certain. 
 
 But these extremes do not falsify the princi- 
 ple which they exaggerate. While no state 
 can be permitted to tyrannize over another 
 state in such fashions as these, in virtue of its 
 stronger power — that is, while there are 
 limits beyond which the rivalry of nations 
 must not be allowed to go — yet that rivalry 
 is a legitimate and necessary fact which must 
 be reckoned with in discussing national morality. 
 The morality of The State is and must be the 
 morality of a state, part of whose moral ob- 
 ligations is to hold its own against other states. 
 This is necessarily a lower standard of morality 
 than that of the individual, who is, if he chooses 
 to be so, free from such obligations. 
 
 The sum of this whole argument is the 
 proposition that the standards of public moral- 
 ity are necessarily lower than those of individual 
 morality, for these four reasons : 
 
 (1) The state must legislate for the average 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 77 
 
 man and not for the highest man, in order to 
 carry out its essential principle that legislation 
 must be the expression of the conscience and 
 the will of the majority. 
 
 (2) The state, being the trustee of its in- 
 dividual citizens, must make the protection 
 of their rights its first duty. 
 
 (3) The state, being bound by traditions 
 from which the individual is free, has not the 
 same powers of immediate action in new direc- 
 tions. 
 
 (4) The State is really a state, whose obliga- 
 tions are not those of private morality, but are 
 defined partly by its relations to other states 
 and its duty of defending the rights of its citi- 
 zens against their aggression. 
 
 All this must be taken into account when we 
 are considering the present demand that we 
 must Christianize the social order and bring 
 the whole domain under the rule of Christ. 
 To that demand every Christian must consent, 
 but it must also be remembered that that 
 demand does not and cannot mean that pre- 
 cisely the same rules can at the present moment 
 be applied to the public as to the private prob- 
 lems of life. 
 
 Well, let us face this situation. Here is 
 the state, whose moral standards are neces- 
 sarily lower than those of its best individuals 
 and which is nevertheless invested with an 
 
78 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 authority over these as well as over all others 
 of its citizens. This authority is real, and 
 admittedly legitimate and necessary. Without 
 such authority the life of the community would 
 be impossible, for its function is to insure justice, 
 peace, and protection to the individual citizen 
 and to defend his rights. But he who expects 
 political and social benefits is bound to expect 
 along with them corresponding political and 
 social obligations. We cannot all have our 
 own way independently, or else everything 
 would at once fall into anarchy and chaos. 
 Each must sacrifice something of what he con- 
 siders to be the best way if there is to be cor- 
 porate life at all. He may hold that the 
 morality imposed upon him by the state is 
 not so high as to reach his own individual 
 standard, but it is in general his duty to work 
 with it loyally, though for him it is but a second 
 best. While he is accepting protection and 
 other state benefits, it is in general his duty to 
 be loyal to the state. He has, indeed, many 
 other loyalties — to his party, his class, his 
 trade union, etc., each in its own province — 
 but he is immediately and primarily subject to 
 the state, and must count that the first author- 
 ity. The state cannot, indeed, control or alter 
 his principles, but it can determine his actions. 
 When his ideals are higher than the state's, 
 he may still hold these, work for the propaga- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 79 
 
 tion of them, and do all he can to leaven public 
 opinion so that the state will ultimately adopt 
 them. But meanwhile it is his duty in practice 
 to subordinate private opinion to loyal service 
 to the state. 
 
 It is true that this obligation has its limits. 
 On all questions of freedom in religious faith 
 and confession, the battle has been fought out 
 and won for the individual conscience. But 
 beyond that there is a wide region within which 
 the state may legitimately impose its inferior 
 morality upon the higher individual conscience. 
 A recent author has said that Christianity 
 demands that no man do anything of which his 
 conscientious judgment is not persuaded. This 
 statement, however, undoubtedly needs qualifi- 
 cation. A man may be persuaded that the 
 drink traffic and war are immoral, and yet 
 may be living in a land where he is forced to 
 enjoy state benefits which are paid for by the 
 customs and excise, and the protection of an 
 army for whose maintenance he pays taxes. 
 These are but two out of many instances in 
 which the public welfare demands the sub- 
 ordination of private views. We all have to 
 work under many conditions which we would 
 change if we had power to do so. Without 
 that power, which rests on public opinion, any 
 breaking off or mutiny is dangerous and may 
 imperil the state. Open rebellion is justified 
 
80 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 only in cases where it has sufficient backing to 
 give it a reasonable chance of success; without 
 such a chance it is simply murder and suicide. 
 Private isolation is always dangerous, in that 
 it weakens the general authority of the state. 
 An individual confronted with such an alterna- 
 tive must always ask, Which is the greater in- 
 jury and wrong, to fall in with a course which I 
 as an individual would not feel myself at 
 liberty to take, or to injure or imperil the larger 
 interests by disaffection? This is an entirely 
 legitimate question, for morality is, so far as its 
 detailed precepts go, essentially relative and 
 not absolute. The mere act of killing, for 
 instance, is in itself neither right nor wrong. 
 In all ordinary circumstances it is wrong, but 
 in self-defense or in the defense of one's wife and 
 children it may become not only right but the 
 most sacred of duties. In view of this fact of 
 relativity, it becomes the more clear that in cer- 
 tain cases where, in the interests of public wel- 
 fare, the state requires action which would not 
 have commended itself to the individual con- 
 science, the individual may and ought to sub- 
 ordinate his own opinions to those of the state. 
 In further enforcement of this view it may 
 be added that there is always the possibility 
 that the conscientious opinion of the individual 
 may be mistaken. In a pretty wide reading of 
 the transactions of recent tribunals I have often 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 81 
 
 been reminded of that old Scottish moderator 
 who prayed, " God, grant that we may be 
 right, for thou knowest that we are very posi- 
 tive. " Self-will is apt to personate conscience, 
 and it can do this so subtly as to deceive the very 
 elect. In an hour of conflict like the Great 
 War, surely the moral issues are so stupendous 
 that the individual objector may well pause 
 before setting up his private judgment against 
 the safety of his nation and the triumph of 
 righteousness over unspeakable wrong. 
 
 Hitherto we have been considering things as 
 they are and have been : let us now turn to the 
 consideration of things as they may yet become. 
 In discussing the reasons for our assertion that 
 the standards of public morality are lower than 
 those of private morality we found the strong- 
 est of these reasons to lie in the fact that there 
 is no such concrete thing as The State, but only 
 a state in rivalry with other states. Is there, 
 then, no way in which it might be possible to 
 materialize The State, and so, by removing or 
 restricting the element of rivalry, to raise the 
 standard of public morality toward that of the 
 highest individual conscience? It is an ancient 
 hope and a persistent one. Above all the 
 actual states, with their allied or conflicting 
 interests, floats ever the dream of the City of 
 God, the ideal state. Plato's Republic, Augus- 
 tine's City of God, More's Utopia, Bacon's 
 
82 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 New Atlantis — these and many other such 
 idealisms of the corporate life of men upon the 
 earth have handed down the undying hope to 
 those who to-day are attempting to forecast 
 the reconstruction of society. Perhaps the 
 most significant of them all is Dante's De Mon- 
 orchia, that great plea for a single universal 
 temporal monarchy, coexistent with the spiri- 
 tual monarchy of the church. It was his way 
 of conceiving the true imperialism, supra- 
 national and with divine sanctions — an im- 
 perialism in which one nation should no longer 
 grudge nor refuse the welfare of another nation, 
 but all should cooperate for the larger well-being 
 of the world. 
 
 To-day that dream is again shining before 
 the eyes of men. It has been conceived in 
 vague and misty shapes, expressing itself, 
 sometimes simply, in the cry for an end of 
 wars. Again it would embody itself in such 
 conceptions as a federation of European na- 
 tions, a union of English-speaking peoples, an 
 international police which shall limit arma- 
 ments, and use force only to prevent any 
 nation from preparing itself to break the peace 
 and attack a weaker nation. Perhaps the 
 most obvious form which it took was the sug- 
 gestion that the entente cordiale and its allies 
 should form themselves into a permanent 
 nucleus; and this developed into the still larger 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 83 
 
 conception of a League of Nations, to which 
 even Germany in time might come in, for the 
 doing of justice and the consideration of claims. 
 We shall deal with this subject in a later lec- 
 ture. The War is over and the League is as 
 yet an unrealized dream, although we have the 
 promise, and some of us still have the hope, of 
 its realization. Of one thing we may be very 
 sure: national life and national moralities 
 will remain, and patriotism will always be one 
 of the supreme forces in the development of 
 the human race. Yet, while that seems clear, 
 it does appear to be possible that something 
 larger may emerge, capable of restraining pa- 
 triotism from its dangerous tendencies toward 
 war, and at the same time capable of determin- 
 ing international relations authoritatively. 
 
 It is true that even in this supra-national 
 center of authority the government will still 
 remain " behind the soul of the people/' and 
 public standards of morality will continue to 
 be lower than those of the highest individuals. 
 Yet, for the questions it has to decide, the new 
 authority will be able to reach far nearer to the 
 level of the individual conscience than any one 
 state can possibly reach to-day. When state 
 rivalry is eliminated from the highest authority, 
 much that is noblest in the consciences of 
 individual men will come to its own. In this 
 way the conception of The State as the supreme 
 
84 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 authority may be realized. It will not indeed 
 be regarded as supreme in the sense in which 
 Prussia conceived it, without reference to God; 
 but it will be regarded as supreme in the sense 
 that it will be subservient to God alone. It 
 will not be supreme, as the Prussian state is, 
 under the master idea of power, in consequence 
 of which it became the monstrous and bloody 
 idol in whose worship men and nations lost 
 their souls. It will not even be supreme under 
 the master idea of justice, as most states have 
 professed to be in modern times. Love will 
 be its master ideal. How such a future is to be 
 brought about, it is not yet possible to prophesy, 
 but it is surely high time to think. It does 
 seem as if, in view of such hopes, we were mov- 
 ing toward the fulfillment of the great promise 
 that the kingdoms of the world shall become 
 the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. For 
 the Kingdom of Heaven in its ultimate realiza- 
 tion is just a form of society in which the 
 highest individual ideals are at last made ap- 
 plicable to public institutions. 
 
 The most important practical question for 
 us all in this connection is the question, What 
 are the forces that can be used to raise the 
 standard of public morality nearer and nearer 
 to the standard of private morality? And the 
 answer is that if, along the whole line of our 
 interests and efforts, we were all to take this 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 85 
 
 as a conscious aim, there is not a single existing 
 institution which might not be used as a means 
 toward the desired end. As individuals we 
 all have high responsibility for this, primarily 
 by adopting the highest possible ideals for our 
 own character and so indirectly leavening 
 society, and then by propaganda which will in 
 every legitimate way forward and spread those 
 higher conceptions of life by which we, indi- 
 vidually, have chosen to live. The church is 
 supposed to stand for the highest idealism in 
 the direction both of public and private charac- 
 ter, but it would be well if the church were more 
 consciously to adopt this policy, and to state 
 more clearly both to itself and to the public 
 its definite aim at the raising of public moral- 
 ity nearer to the standards of private. The 
 Church must ever work for the most part upon 
 individuals. But it should bear in mind that 
 the Government shall be upon the shoulder of 
 its Lord. While, like its Master, it must often 
 refuse to interfere in political disputes directly, 
 yet it is its duty so to influence individuals as 
 to bring His principles ultimately to bear upon 
 the state. The press will always wield a mighty 
 influence for good or evil in all such matters, 
 and an incalculable amount of good might be 
 done through the press if it were definitely to 
 pledge itself to these aims. The newspaper is 
 not a device for the amusement of the people, 
 
86 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 a chessboard on which the game of popular 
 politics is played. It is a wonderful instrument 
 of education, which may, if it so choose, bring 
 the noblest ideals home to the conscience of the 
 nation. As regards the state, while it is true 
 that legislation can never venture far above 
 the average morality of the nation, yet it may 
 always tend to go above rather than below that 
 average. The State should be Adventurer as 
 well as Administrator, within certain limits of 
 possible advance. The temptation of all pol- 
 iticians is to appeal to the baser side of their 
 constituents, or at least to the side which is 
 morally more commonplace and less ideal. 
 They should regard themselves not merely as 
 servants but as educators of the people; and 
 in doing so, they will certainly be excused if 
 they go judiciously beyond their election pro- 
 grams instead of falling, as is so often the case, 
 lamentably below them. Probably, however, 
 the strongest of all the forces that may be used 
 toward these high ends is that of education in 
 schools and universities. We have seen in 
 Germany but too terrible an example of the 
 degradation of the standards of public morality 
 being systematically carried on in an education 
 which aimed at the fostering of the crudest kind 
 of illegitimate patriotism. Let the schools 
 give clear teaching upon this and cognate sub- 
 jects, and set the mind and conscience of every 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 87 
 
 adolescent citizen at work upon them, and 
 there is no question that the distance between 
 the standards of public and private morality 
 might be enormously diminished within even 
 one generation. 
 
 In these and many other ways it is possible 
 to go a great length in this direction, and no 
 duty could be more pressing at the present time. 
 There is, as we have stated, the most serious 
 danger in attempting to force ideals; but there 
 is an equally serious duty and necessity for 
 cultivating them most assiduously. The King- 
 dom of heaven is an ideal which tends to draw 
 all men after it if their eyes are kept looking in 
 its direction, and the supreme duty of all who 
 have influence upon others of whatever kind 
 is to direct their eyes thitherward. 
 
 NOTE l 
 
 In discussing the question of public and 
 private morality we have presupposed the 
 normal conditions of a time of peace. In war 
 everything suddenly becomes abnormal. New 
 moral values and judgments are introduced and 
 old ones abrogated, so that in many instances 
 the crimes of peace become the virtues of war. 
 This need not surprise us. It is an axiom of 
 ethics that all the detail of moral precepts is 
 necessarily relative and dependent upon the 
 circumstances of the case. In war many of 
 
88 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 the relations of individuals to one another are 
 reversed and abnormal, and the detailed appli- 
 cation of the precepts of morality are changed 
 accordingly. To bring about such a change 
 is the heaviest moral responsibility possible to 
 man. Those who provoke war, or wage it with- 
 out moral necessity, are guilty of an unspeak- 
 able crime. The rest must accept the situation 
 for which the aggressor alone is responsible, and 
 act on the new principles which it evolves. 
 
 Yet here again the German habit of exag- 
 geration must be combatted. War does not 
 reverse all moral principles. There remains a 
 morality of war. Germany has disavowed any 
 such morality. She has swept the Ten Com- 
 mandments and all the Christian virtues over- 
 board, and boasted of the principle that any- 
 thing is legitimate which leads to victory. 
 That is the course which ruined Germany. We 
 have seen that to legislate upon the standard 
 of the idealists and saints is disastrous; but to 
 legislate upon the standard of the criminals 
 and moral degenerates is devilish. 
 
 It is true that, in such an ethical upheaval 
 as war produces, it is extremely difficult to 
 draw the line and fix the standard of the interim 
 applications of morality to details. All pre- 
 vious Peace Conferences and International Con- 
 ventions have been trying to do this, with the 
 curious result that they have given the impres- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 89 
 
 sion rather of associations for redefining the 
 rules of war than for establishing peace. All 
 the results that they have achieved were calmly 
 disregarded by Germany, who went on with 
 her gas, her Zeppelin attacks upon civilians, 
 her bombardment of unfortified cities, her 
 sinking of unarmed ships, her inhuman cruel- 
 ties practiced in the name of frightfulness, and 
 her cynical dismissal of a sacred treaty under 
 cover of the " Scrap of Paper " epigram. In 
 this she was consistent in the thoroughness of 
 her reversal of moral standards. Yet all the 
 civilized world repudiates and disclaims her 
 conception that war has no standards of mor- 
 ality left to it at all. Where then can we find 
 such standards? 
 
 I believe we owe them to the playing grounds 
 of our public schools. The one principle that 
 remains firm in the hearts of all the noblest of 
 the fighting men is that of sportsmanship. It 
 is true that this will never yield a perfectly 
 consistent code which may be written out in 
 black and white, like the terms of an interna- 
 tional agreement; yet it is to be remembered 
 that in the whole of life such compromises are 
 continually necessary. Life reaches out be- 
 yond all our theories and judgments of it, and 
 the only absolutely consistent persons are some 
 of the inhabitants of our lunatic asylums, who 
 carry their fixed idea ruthlessly out to its 
 
90 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 furthest ends. The great principle of our boys' 
 and young men's morality is that of playing 
 the game. It is the one unfailing appeal to 
 any audience of British or American young 
 men. It is an unwritten law and probably an 
 unwritable one. But it is deep in these na- 
 tions' hearts. We were proud of it in the 
 sports of former days, but we never dreamed 
 that it would count for so much in the most 
 tragic hour the world has ever seen. 
 
 NOTE 2 
 
 When we come to consider the League of 
 Nations we shall see that that is the most 
 considerable attempt that the world has ever 
 made toward the realization of the ideal of 
 drawing up the standard of public to that of 
 private morality. We must not, however, 
 count entirely to that agency, but must defi- 
 nitely set before us the aim of this unification, in 
 our education both in schools and universities, 
 and as part of the new program of the church. 
 The moral development of nations must ever 
 be attained through the patient handling of 
 individuals, until public opinion has been af- 
 fected. Owen Wister and Benjamin Kidd 
 have shown how amazingly the ideals of the 
 German nation could be changed for the worse 
 within one generation by systematic education. 
 It must also be remembered that Prussia has 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 91 
 
 had only two hundred years of civilization, as 
 compared with the many centuries through 
 which Britain and America have been learning 
 the same lesson. Now, we must all together 
 accept it for our steady aim, to work out high 
 national ideals through individual consciences, 
 by means of the inculcation of a high standard 
 of honor in all the relations of life. Such ex- 
 periments as the modern coordinate school and 
 the Woman's Auxiliary Army Corps, which ap- 
 peared to many conventional minds so daring 
 as to be dangerous, have already proved them- 
 selves extremely successful in introducing high 
 standards as to the relations of the sexes. 
 The system in schools and colleges which sub- 
 stitutes, as far as that is possible, trust for 
 supervision, has met with the same success. 
 It is to be hoped that through these and similar 
 agencies there may be implanted in the rising 
 generation a contempt for " graft," and a sense 
 of the vital necessity for honor whether it seems 
 to pay or not, which may work wonders upon 
 the public life of future days. All such at- 
 tempts are bound to meet with opposition from 
 people who will either say that this or that sys- 
 tem has never been used before, or who will 
 foredoom any such attempt by the dogmatic 
 assertion that it will not work. To the former, 
 one may reply confidently that if it were true 
 that such attempts have not been tried before, 
 
92 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 then the sooner they are begun the better; to 
 the latter, pointing to the results of experiments 
 already tried, we are able already to reply that 
 such systems do work. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 93 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 A League of Nations 
 
 The eyes of the whole world have been turned 
 of late to the construction of a League of Na- 
 tions, which would be the perfect realization 
 of the conception of the state discussed in the 
 last lecture, and the perfect form toward which 
 all the minor attempts at that realization which 
 we have already noted would finally merge. 
 The Conference of Paris has come and gone, 
 and the League of Nations is included in the 
 Treaty of Peace. In the confused and tran- 
 sition stage of the world's history through which 
 we are passing, there is a widespread tendency 
 to regard the League of Nations enterprise as 
 a failure. Some look upon it as already a 
 dream of the past, while others look forward to 
 the future, expecting a speedy end to all its 
 high-sounding promise. I am bold enough to 
 believe that so far from being in any sense a 
 failure, it has already been able to establish in 
 the conscience of the world a new set of demands 
 that shall never again be forgotten, and to point 
 toward an altogether unprecedented set of pos- 
 sibilities for the fulfiling of these demands. The 
 
94 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 subject is, of course, an extremely wide one, and 
 all that is proposed in this present lecture is to 
 point out some general considerations which 
 are apt to be overlooked, and yet without which 
 the idea of the League cannot be understood. 
 I shall not attempt to deal with the economic 
 side of this vast question, but shall, rather, con- 
 fine myself to that which directly concerns war 
 and peace. The economic developments must 
 largely be left to shape themselves as the need 
 for such adjustment arises from time to time. 
 
 The first thing to note about the League of 
 Nations is that it is not only an unusual but a 
 unique conception. By this I do not mean 
 merely to reiterate the well-known words, 
 " The world has dreamed of lasting peace 
 before, but wishing for it is one thing, willing it 
 another. " Apart from this fact that the world 
 has come to a further stage in the definiteness of 
 its determination to achieve this thing and to 
 achieve it now if it be possible, there are es- 
 sential differences in the thing itself from any- 
 thing else that has ever been before the judg- 
 ment of the world. 
 
 The issues are to-day at once simpler and 
 more complex than they have been in any of the 
 former various peace proposals and discussions 
 that have taken place. All that has ever been 
 said against an inconclusive peace holds good 
 now. The terms of peace were indeed stern, 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 95 
 
 but not more so than was absolutely necessary, 
 in view of the spirit of the enemy. Nations 
 recover from great catastrophes, and there is no 
 security for the future without the absolute 
 defeat of that spirit in the Central Powers 
 which was responsible for this war. When that 
 spirit has changed, many things may be altered 
 and many relaxations made; but until that 
 change has taken place these would be not only 
 premature but supremely dangerous. 
 
 In considering the uniqueness of the present 
 League of Nations we must also remember that 
 this is not the time for following precedents but 
 for making them. The hour of history and the 
 conditions of the world are unique, and the 
 arrangements which must be made for these 
 must be equally so. We have not been fighting 
 merely Prussian militarism, but the whole sys- 
 tem of international diplomacy and ideals which 
 has obtained throughout the past among Euro- 
 pean nations. 
 
 The League of Nations has sometimes been 
 regarded as a repetition of the Holy Alliance. 
 There is no ground for this whatever, except 
 the entirely unreal one that both attempts 
 claimed to have for their object the final ending 
 of war. But the league which was formed after 
 the fall of Napoleon by the sovereigns of Russia, 
 Austria, and Prussia, had nothing in common 
 with the present League. It was nominally 
 
96 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 formed to regulate the relations of the states 
 of Christendom by the principles of Christian 
 charity, but it soon proved to have for its real 
 object the preservation of the power of the 
 existing dynasties. Its collapse and failure 
 have no bearing whatever upon the fate of the 
 present League. Again, General Smuts, be- 
 fore he had accepted the League idea and 
 worked it out into his very remarkable and 
 able draft in detail, stated on one occasion that 
 the British Commonwealth was the only League 
 that has ever existed. As a matter of fact, the 
 British Commonwealth is as radically different 
 from the League of Nations as the Holy Alli- 
 ance itself was. Again, in many utterances of 
 distinguished men one has found statements 
 to the effect that the nations included in the 
 group of the entente and its allies, if they were 
 to band themselves permanently together, 
 would realize the idea of the League of Nations. 
 Such statements are the result of an inadequate 
 grasp of the unique elements in the present 
 League, and they have thrown much confusion 
 upon the whole subject. It is quite true that 
 any such groups of nations as might be allied 
 together in the British Commonwealth, or in 
 the band of the entente and its allies, or in the 
 English-speaking races, or in an alliance between 
 America, France, and Britain, would be valu- 
 able in the highest degree, but they would 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 97 
 
 be valuable only as a basis for further and more 
 complete union. If America, France, and 
 Britain definitely set their hearts upon the 
 realization of the League, it will at once 
 become possible, and to the extent to which 
 these three nations have accepted the idea 
 it has become possible already ; but any partial 
 alliance of whatever kind can only insure the 
 possibility of permanent peace by leading on 
 to that fuller union of the League of Nations 
 which, as we have already said, is unique. 
 
 The great question which the League is 
 facing is the end of war. President Wilson 
 has said that " The people of the world want 
 peace, and they want it now," and has called 
 the ending of war " This final enterprise of 
 humanity." Wars have always hitherto ended 
 in compromise, and it has been the chronic mis- 
 take of nations and of men to imagine that that 
 compromise was the final solution. In 1853 
 there was a firm conviction in England that 
 war was over forever. In 1854 the Crimean 
 War broke out. Dr. Clifford has pointed to the 
 failure of all those enterprises which in the 
 past have sought to end war. Commerce has 
 been again and again trusted to fulfill this end, 
 and, in such conspicuous instances as the Cru- 
 sades and the International Exhibition of 
 1851, it has tended rather to create wars than to 
 end them. Anarchism has been advocated by 
 
98 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 Tolstoy and others as the one agent that can 
 accomplish the great end, and the present 
 tendency in some quarters is towards a colossal 
 repetition of past experiments in anarchy. 
 It is amazing that any intelligent man can 
 look in that direction for such an end. The 
 whole of history and the very make of human 
 nature proclaim its futility. Disarmaments 
 have been attempted in various nations, and 
 international conferences such as that of The 
 Hague have been held, but these were swept 
 overboard by the great wave that broke in 
 1914 upon the world. The lesson of all these 
 facts is this, that " the one thing that will 
 produce disarmament is a sense of security, 
 and the League of Nations will produce that." 
 It is for lack of a sense of security that all 
 attempts to end war hitherto have failed, and 
 nothing which is not able to restore and per- 
 petuate that sense of security need attempt that 
 mighty task. 
 
 When we come to consider the League of 
 Nations with a view to ascertaining what those 
 elements are that make it unique, and encourage 
 us to hope from it for results which no past 
 attempt has been able to secure, we touch the 
 heart of the whole business. It is free from all 
 party cries of any kind, for it has been adopted 
 by Laborists, Radicals, Old Liberals, Union- 
 ists, and Conservatives in Britain, and by 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 99 
 
 many of the leading minds, both Republican 
 and Democratic, in America. Further, it has 
 nothing whatever to do with the principles or 
 the policy of pacifism, for its chief advocates 
 have been men who not only believed that the 
 Great War was the duty of the nations which 
 sought to defend the liberties of the world, but 
 actually undertook much responsibility for the 
 management of that war. In one sense we are 
 all pacifists. No sane man who knows the 
 facts could be found who would advocate war 
 as such, and who does not desire the final 
 ending of it. But in another sense there are 
 many of us who believe that pacifism has been 
 among the greatest hindrances to peace that 
 the world has had to reckon with, and that 
 the War itself, as circumstances were at the 
 time, was the only road by which the world 
 could travel toward any peace which would be 
 either just or permanent. 
 
 The two main points on which to concentrate 
 attention in seeking for the unique character 
 of the League of Nations are: 
 
 1. The Universal Pooling of International 
 Interests. L 
 
 l The word " pooling " needs to be guarded from misunder- 
 standing. It does not necessarily imply the merging of all 
 the national interests and defensive forces, nor the removal 
 of these from the command of the nations which contribute 
 them. It means the uniting of them for a common purpose 
 upon winch all are agreed. 
 
100 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 2. A Common Armed Force for Policing the 
 World. 
 
 1. The Universal Pooling of International 
 Interests 
 
 President Wilson said in Manchester that 
 " the United States of America will join no com- 
 bination of power which is not a combination 
 of all of us." When he said that, it was im- 
 possible for him or for anyone to foresee how 
 very complicated and difficult a matter such 
 a universal combination is. The lesson of the 
 past months is not that it is impossible ever to 
 hope for such, but a profound conviction that 
 it must necessarily come gradually, and that it 
 cannot by any possibility be rushed. While 
 we fully admit that, and in virtue of it wait in 
 hope for the ultimate consummation, yet we 
 must not forget that until the League is com- 
 plete and all civilized nations are included in it, 
 it cannot really exist at all, nor can the results 
 of its imperfect beginnings be fairly judged. 
 Until all the peoples are united it cannot pos- 
 sibly be safe to complete the work of disarma- 
 ment. We all remember the groaning and 
 dismay with which we viewed the spectacle 
 year by year of enormously increasing arma- 
 ments and saw no end to it except universal 
 financial ruin or a stupendous war. The war 
 has come, and it is to be hoped that the world 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 101 
 
 has learned its lesson. If we are going to dis- 
 arm, or even if we are going to cease the mad 
 rivalry of former days in national armament, 
 we must have security against aggression. All 
 armaments are either a guard or a threat to 
 frontiers. The one and only safeguard in 
 this matter will ultimately be found to be the 
 universal pooling of national armaments. 
 
 This definitely implies that Germany sooner 
 or later must be brought into the League of 
 Nations. Until she and all other great na- 
 tions have joined it, the League, as we have 
 already stated, will not yet begin to exist. 
 At the same time we must go on preparing for 
 it. It cannot possibly be born in a day, but 
 must come gradually and, as it were, piecemeal ; 
 and it will take great patience and calm wisdom 
 of judgment to see this imperfect instrument 
 gradually being constructed, and to expect from 
 it little or no result until it is complete. 
 
 For very obvious reasons it would be im- 
 possible to admit Germany to it as yet. Under 
 the old regime, Bethmann Hollweg on Novem- 
 ber 9, 1916, said, " Germany is ready at all 
 times to join the Union of Peoples and even to 
 place herself at the head of such a Union as will 
 restrain the disturber of peace " — a statement 
 which being otherwise translated, meant sim- 
 ply, " Will you walk into my parlor? said the 
 spider to the fly." It is perhaps unnecessary 
 
102 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 now to remind ourselves that this was the man 
 who had already acquired notoriety as the 
 author of the " Scrap of Paper " epigram. 
 At the time when he uttered the proposal 
 above quoted, Turkish Pan-Turanianism was 
 destroying its million and a half of Armenians, 
 preparations were on foot to carry Belgian 
 citizens by the thousand into slavery, uni- 
 versity students from Britain were already at 
 work in German salt mines, and a virulent 
 propaganda was being actively conducted both 
 in Italy and America. The subsequent Brest 
 Treaty showed the value of any such offer as 
 Bethmann Hollweg's. The fact is that in that 
 offer the German chancellor had not meant 
 the same thing as the American President. 
 It is well known that Germany has always 
 hated internationalism in the past, and it 
 is impossible to conceive imperial Germany 
 in any true League of Nations. In 1918, 
 Erzberger constructed a sketch of a League of 
 Nations which would have satisfied him. That 
 was just before the final defeat of Germany, 
 and when it was examined it turned out to 
 be no League of Nations at all, but simply a 
 sketch of German terms of peace. 
 
 Now, let us clearly face the situation. In 
 such matters as these there can be no word of 
 letting bygones be bygones. We are dealing 
 with the most frightful dangers to unborn 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 103 
 
 generations in every country, and any senti- 
 mental forgiveness would be an unchristian 
 and insane forgiveness. Here, as everywhere 
 else, conversion must be demanded as a condi- 
 tion of forgiveness. Nations may be converted 
 as well as individuals. Germany was con- 
 verted to the principles that led her to her doom 
 within two generations, as we have seen. She 
 must be brought back to such a state of mind 
 as will make it either safe or righteous to en- 
 trust her with the responsibilities of a place in 
 the League of Nations, before any well-wisher 
 to humanity could venture to propose her 
 admission. 
 
 There are, indeed, signs that such conversion 
 has begun, and these should be welcomed and 
 cherished in every possible way. The German 
 people have discovered the delusions which 
 had been put upon them, and there seems to be 
 a very true reaction, accentuated by defeat and 
 shame and a desire to think and act differently, 
 on the part of some of her former spokes- 
 men. When that is completed, when Germany 
 has found a form of government which may be 
 relied upon for future stability, and when the 
 new Germany has given evidence of good faith 
 and good will — then, and not till then, can the 
 League of Nations be made complete. Sup- 
 posing that in the meantime preparations for 
 it have gone forward as they have already been 
 
104 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 planned in Paris, we may hope that when the 
 time shall come for the entrance of Germany, 
 the League, including all the civilized nations 
 of the world, will suddenly prove an effective 
 instrument for guarding the world's peace 
 forever. 
 
 America also must come in. I am anxious 
 to avoid all questions of American party pol- 
 itics, but yet I trust I may be permitted to say 
 a few words on this momentous question. For 
 her own sake America must come in. She 
 lives under the beneficent shadow of such men 
 as Washington and Lincoln, and their spirit 
 lives on in her. But these were men of the far 
 horizon. They were not local politicians, but 
 world-statesmen. It is impossible to conceive 
 of these men staying apart from this universal 
 ideal, which would make impossible for ever 
 such evils as those which they devoted their 
 lives to end. As to the future, no man can see 
 far into the years, nor anticipate the destinies 
 of nations. Yet certain it is that no land on 
 earth can long remain in isolation. The dawn 
 is ominous, and the morrow will bring new 
 combinations and massed forces against which 
 a united civilization must be prepared to stand. 
 Even for her own sake America must come 
 in — but how much more for the world's sake! 
 No alliance which other nations might achieve 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 105 
 
 could be effective without her. To tell the other 
 allies to go on with the League of Nations upon 
 their own account is to ask for an impossibility. 
 Without America there can be no League of 
 Nations. Its universality is its unique char- 
 acteristic without which it can never exist. 
 
 The reasons for America's hesitation are not 
 only intelligible, but many of them are entirely 
 reasonable. Any fair-minded judge can under- 
 stand her reluctance to have European powers 
 interfering with her action, say, in such affairs 
 as her relations with Mexico. Still more can 
 we understand her refusal to send troops across 
 the world to aid in settling every little difference 
 between European or Asiatic states. But all 
 that is asked is that in case of local disputes all 
 the world shall declare itself against the ag- 
 gressor, not that all the world shall take action 
 and resort to arms. In cases where the matter 
 in dispute is small, there will be no call nor need 
 for universal action: and if any matter should 
 assume world-wide proportions, America will 
 never hesitate to play her part. 
 
 One sometimes hears phrases which are 
 courteously intended, but which seem to me 
 to be dangerous. Britain and her European 
 allies are told that in their hour of need America 
 was glad to come to their help, but now that 
 the danger is over she would not further inter- 
 fere with their affairs, but would retire and no 
 
106 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 longer hamper them in their settlements. 
 Americans! my brothers! when men talk like 
 that I fear your courtesy more than I have ever 
 feared your blame. This whole situation is 
 misunderstood by such speakers, and they do 
 not realize the meaning of the universal League. 
 The League of Nations is not interference; it 
 is the union of the world. 
 
 As to the detail of possible joint action which 
 may be involved, I do not wonder at your 
 hesitation, especially as the decision has come 
 upon you at so very difficult a time. No 
 British man who knows the situation will 
 misunderstand or grudge you the most volu- 
 minous examination and discussion of the points 
 involved. Viscount Grey's letter voices in 
 magnificent clearness and truth the best mind 
 and feeling of British men. As to the ultimate 
 result of your deliberations I cannot and I do 
 not entertain any doubt whatever. 
 
 2. A Common Armed Force for Policing the 
 World 
 
 In the late war the nations came together 
 for the defense of the world, each bringing as 
 much as by the strongest measures it could 
 induce or compel into its service. But how 
 clumsy, how late, and how costly a business it 
 all was! and, above all, how illimitable! Each 
 nation stretched out after the last man she 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 107 
 
 could secure, and no one knew how many 
 would be needed before the end. The new 
 idea which has come to us with the League 
 of Nations is that it shall be made effective 
 by a sea and land police force, armed with all 
 the most powerful weapons procurable. Four 
 things are necessary for this force. First, it 
 must be made irresistibly strong, so that no 
 private individual national enterprise would 
 dream of competing with it. Second, it must 
 be recruited by volunteers only, the volunteers 
 being drawn from each nation up to the limit 
 of a quota fixed by all. Third, munitions and 
 arms for arming this force must be produced 
 only in national arsenals, and all manufacture 
 or sale of these by private firms or companies 
 must be abolished. Fourth, the international 
 police force must always be mobilized and 
 ready to check the first beginnings of aggression 
 upon the shortest possible notice. Such a 
 police force would exclude national jealousy, 
 for all interference with the existing conditions 
 of any nation would be done at the initiative, 
 not of a rival nation or group of nations, but of 
 the world. 
 
 Many points of difficulty confront the League 
 of Nations, and we need not be surprised at 
 that. Anything conceived on such a huge 
 scale must necessarily be difficult. Where so 
 
108 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 many minds and interests are involved, and 
 so many men are educated and prejudiced in 
 various opposing directions, we need not look 
 for an easy task in the reconstruction of the 
 world. On the whole the progress that has 
 been made is surprising, and if people every- 
 where will be patient and far-seeing enough to 
 take the large view and concentrate on the 
 essential elements, the thing may be done 
 sooner than many of us expect. 
 
 The first point of difficulty that used to be 
 urged against it was the opposition of France, 
 which was expected and prophesied. We need 
 not now go into that belated subject further 
 than to remind ourselves that it was looked 
 upon by many as an insuperable barrier at the 
 outset, and that it absolutely disappeared. 
 
 The second point of difficulty was in con- 
 nection with the strategic points of the world. 
 Take the British strategic points for example. 
 Under the conception of pooled interests and a 
 limited international police, it might be ex- 
 pected that Britain would be asked to give up 
 her sole control of Gibraltar, Suez, and other 
 such points, and it is difficult to see how a 
 League of Nations could possibly be brought 
 into being except upon a basis of the interna- 
 tionalizing of these. In view of such a possi- 
 bility it should be remembered that Britain 
 is not asked to give up any such points to an- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 109 
 
 other nation or to a group of nations, but to 
 merge them in a supernational control in 
 which she retains her own share. It would be 
 impossible to bring forward any valid reason 
 why this sacrifice, if it is to be regarded as 
 sacrifice, should not be made. Nor would 
 it be in any real sense a loss to Britain. From 
 such points as the Rock of Gibraltar, much of 
 their significance has already been taken away 
 by the invention of aircraft and submarines. 
 In regard to the surrender to the International 
 League of the Suez Canal, it is to be remembered 
 in compensation that the Kiel and the Panama 
 Canals must come under the same principle of 
 internationalization. In fact, on all such sub- 
 jects we are apt to transfer to the details of the 
 new situation, conceptions to which we have 
 been accustomed under the old. Were the 
 nations in rivalry as they are to-day, then no 
 loyal British man would consent for a moment 
 to the surrender of any strategic point: but 
 if the world can be unified, and that unity 
 permanently secured by the arrangements of 
 this League, that alters the matter entirely. 
 It would then be no longer in the interest of 
 any nation to claim exclusive rights in the 
 strategic points which were absolutely neces- 
 sary to it of old. 
 
 A third difficulty that has often arisen in 
 the minds of men is that of the relative status 
 
110 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 of the great navies of the world. In this re- 
 spect our very victory has threatened British 
 naval supremacy, It has been said, " If Brit- 
 ain could write into international law the power 
 of destroying hostile and neutral commerce, 
 which it did in 1916, then no European power 
 could dispute with her." The revelation that 
 the British navy gave to Britain the power of 
 life and death over other nations awakened 
 the world to a new view of things which was 
 extremely far-reaching and has already had 
 consequences. To every naval power it may 
 seem strange and disconcerting that the League 
 of Nations should propose a pooled navy for 
 the maintenance of the world's peace, in which 
 it, like the rest of the powers, should only have 
 a share. However large that share might be, 
 some will fear that it could not awaken the 
 sentiments which are so dear to seafaring na- 
 tions and which have expressed themselves in 
 so much of poetry and prose in their literature. 
 But the facts must be faced. Without the 
 League, in the rivalries of future years, one can 
 only look forward to ruinous competition in 
 rival shipbuilding for the purposes of war, 
 whose immediate effect would be financial dis- 
 aster, and whose ultimate end loses itself in 
 sheer horror. Under the League each Power 
 would require a naval quota proportionate to 
 the demands of its physical and political geog- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 111 
 
 raphy. Thus the naval requirements of each 
 nation of the world would be limited within 
 reasonable compass. There would be no rival- 
 ries in shipbuilding, and yet the pooled navies 
 would be amply sufficient for all possible con- 
 tingencies that might ever arise. 
 
 A fourth point of difficulty which has often 
 been urged against the League of Nations is 
 that of those who tell us that any such ar- 
 rangement is going to substitute cosmopolitan 
 for patriotic ideals. In a former lecture we 
 have already discussed this point, and main- 
 tained that patriotism must always remain 
 the most powerful and commanding of large- 
 scale social ideals. Among other reasons for 
 this belief it was there stated that the cosmo- 
 politan ideal gives us a unit too large and vague 
 to raise anything equivalent to the enthusiasm 
 associated with patriotic loyalty. Here it 
 need only be added that there is no such abso- 
 lute contrast between patriotism and cosmo- 
 politanism as is sometimes supposed. The 
 leading advocates of the League of Nations 
 are among the foremost patriots of their time, 
 and they evidently intend that the patriotic 
 ideal must still remain strong as ever in the 
 new cosmopolitan arrangement. Dr. Clifford 
 has said that " each nation will remain inde- 
 pendent, self-determining, sovereign and free, 
 save in those matters expressly and freely 
 
112 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 given up on entering the compact of interna- 
 tional comity.' 5 In other words, the League of 
 Nations proposes to pool the national interests 
 only for specific purposes, and leaves the es- 
 sential nationality of each intact. " The ques- 
 tion is not really between nationalism and 
 internationalism, but between disorderly and 
 orderly internationalism.' ' We have been try- 
 ing in the past to solve international problems 
 with national machinery, and that must always 
 fail. By passing over to the international 
 League some matters which were formerly 
 nationally managed, we shall each surrender 
 something, but we shall gain infinitely more, 
 and all those causes which have incited pa- 
 triotic loyalties in the past will continue to 
 render his own country dear to every man of 
 good will and right mind. The new arrange- 
 ment will certainly cost each nation something, 
 but sooner or later we must all learn that the 
 words, " He saved others, himself he cannot 
 save," apply to nations as well as to individual 
 men; and it will ultimately be found that the 
 only possible salvation, even for oneself, is 
 to be achieved through the saving of others. 
 
 As regards America, this aspect of the ques- 
 tion presents some extremely difficult and in- 
 tricate problems, bearing upon the Constitution 
 of the United States. The new proposals have 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 113 
 
 appeared to some to give ultra-democratic 
 powers to America's representation in the 
 League of Nations. It is not for me to express 
 any opinion on such matters, which are outside 
 my province or my knowledge. I admit that 
 on such vital questions the utmost care and 
 the fullest deliberation are imperative. Yet 
 I may be permitted to remark that one of the 
 chief glories of the League is its adaptability, 
 and that some way can be found of so arrang- 
 ing matters as to safeguard America from any 
 such danger to her Constitution. Certainly 
 you will not find us or any of your allies slow 
 to understand the delicacy of the situation. 
 
 But the end in view is so colossal, so vital to 
 the well-being of every nation and of the world, 
 that I am certain the true heart and resolute 
 conscience of America will not fail to find means 
 for so supreme an end. The world trusts you 
 for this: it is the greatest trust that has ever 
 been committed to you in all your history. 
 
 After all these considerations have been dis- 
 cussed there remains one which is in the end 
 overwhelmingly the greatest point to be con- 
 sidered on this subject: What is the alternative 
 to the League of Nations? We admit that be- 
 fore the League can come into operation it will 
 have to encounter immense difficulties, but 
 this is a case in which huge difficulty is con- 
 fronted by blank impossibility. Without the 
 
114 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 League, the situation of the world is absolutely 
 desperate. In the first place there are such 
 considerations as those which have been already 
 touched upon regarding the rivalries between 
 the navies of different nations, and the ruinous 
 cost of competition in construction. Then 
 there are many side issues, like that, for in- 
 stance, of Zionism, and the occupation of 
 Palestine by the Jews. It is probable that 
 some arrangement will be made whereby 
 Mr. Arthur Balfour's forecast will be fulfilled, 
 in which he gave his sanction to the prospect of 
 a national settlement of the Jews in Palestine. 
 This cannot, of course, mean that all the 
 thirteen and a half millions of Jews will remove 
 to Palestine and occupy its territory, but it 
 probably will mean that Jerusalem will become 
 in some sort the Jewish headquarters for the 
 world, uniting the scattered fragments of 
 Judaism not only into a religious but a political 
 whole. Palestine is the focus of the world 
 geographically. It is the center whence Jewish 
 influence in future days could immediately 
 touch all the continents of the eastern hemi- 
 sphere. A concentrated national power, backed 
 by the enormous wealth which would be repre- 
 sented by the Jewish headquarters at Jerusalem, 
 might easily become a grave menace to the 
 future peace of the world. Various safeguard- 
 ing measures have been proposed, but it is very 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 115 
 
 questionable whether these would have any 
 adequate or permanent power to check such 
 dangers as might arise. Under a League of 
 Nations a concentration of Jewish influence in 
 Palestine would be safe, because it also would 
 form part of the League, and would share with 
 the rest of the nations at once their responsi- 
 bilities and their limitations. Without that 
 we might soon find that we were facing a new 
 and serious danger. 
 
 The insidious and almost world-wide spread 
 of Bolshevism is another fact that must be 
 reckoned with in the immediate future. It is 
 a secret power, as yet little known. On the 
 one hand it is feared by many as a power that 
 threatens life, liberty, and humanity in general. 
 On the other hand many welcome it as the 
 liberator of the world. For my own part, with- 
 out necessarily fixing upon the whole system 
 the worst crimes which have been committed in 
 its name, it appears to be a system under 
 which the powers of government are com- 
 mitted to those elements in the community 
 which are least qualified to use them in- 
 telligently. Of this at least there can be no 
 question, that at the present time it is an inter- 
 national and world-wide influence. As yet it 
 can only be dealt with in each nation according 
 to that nation's lights and powers. There is no 
 unity in the world's attitude to it or plan for 
 
116 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 dealing with it. Surely, it is evident that the 
 only way in which the world can either judge it 
 justly or defend itself against its attack, must 
 be by some international and world-wide in- 
 stitution such as the League of Nations. 
 
 There is also the question of the next war. 
 Mr. H. Stead has quoted responsible opinion 
 to the effect that the expenditure upon arma- 
 ments after the Great War will be ten times 
 as large as it was before. We have already 
 touched upon this often but it is impossible to 
 give any adequate conception of the meaning of 
 it. Without the League of Nations, the next 
 war will come. There is no alternative what- 
 ever between universal disarmament to the ex- 
 tent which the League proposes, and ultimate 
 war. The status quo is not now a living alterna- 
 tive : it cannot be maintained for a day. But 
 if a next war does come, it will be beyond all the 
 power of words to describe its horror. It has 
 been said that " another world-war would 
 mean the extinction of civilization," and the 
 words are not too strong. Science has not 
 completed its work in rendering war terrible. 
 When the armistice was proclaimed, it seemed 
 that science was only on the threshold of infinite 
 discoveries in destruction. The League of 
 Nations bristles with difficulties, but surely 
 there is no one, unless he be possessed with 
 suicidal mania, who would not prefer to 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 117 
 
 accept it, however difficult, rather than to 
 accept the destruction of the world. Now 
 is the moment, as Viscount Grey has said, 
 when " the world must learn or perish." The 
 prospect is more dismal than Dante's Inferno, 
 if wars are to go on increasing in ferocity 
 upon the earth. For such a life it is not 
 worth while to breed children in any land. 
 It was well worth while to breed them and 
 send them forth upon one glorious sacrifice 
 which would save the world to the end of time ; 
 but if that sacrifice is to be in vain, and the 
 destruction of each generation in its youth is 
 to be the normal and continually repeated 
 prospect of our homes, then it were better that 
 the race should perish at once from the earth. 
 There is a danger to-day of our having the 
 trophies of victory, but the battle lost. Those 
 who will think carefully over the present situa- 
 tion will agree with Sir Edward Grey that " the 
 past struggle is in vain if the League of Nations 
 is not secured." Therefore this League is in 
 the strictest sense practical politics; indeed, 
 it is the only practical politics before the judg- 
 ment of the world. In December, 1918, Mr. 
 Wilson said in London that while at first he had 
 been accused of being academic in his interest in 
 the League, now we find the practical leading 
 minds of the world determined to get it. No 
 such constancy and unity of purpose has ever 
 
118 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 been witnessed in the world before. As time 
 goes on we see more clearly the new difficulties 
 and complexities that arise, but it is our first 
 duty not to let these arising difficulties blind 
 our eyes to the momentous issues which we 
 are facing in the immediate future. 
 
 It is, however, in connection with Christian- 
 ity that we reach the highest ground for con- 
 sidering the League of Nations. The Prince 
 of Peace is still the Lord of the world, and it is 
 in the light of his will that all considerations of 
 peace must finally be judged. Had the church 
 demanded a patched-up peace, as some claimed 
 that she ought to have done, during the last 
 five years, she would have betrayed Chris- 
 tianity. Now she will betray it if she does not 
 forward the influence of the League of Nations, 
 for this is essentially a Christian ideal. Indeed, 
 it is the only Christian ideal before us at the 
 present time. The spirit expressed in the 
 balance of power and in secret diplomacy was 
 essentially a selfish and unchristian spirit, 
 which every now and again suddenly revealed 
 itself as an unblushing worship of the devil. 
 We have experimented with all the ideals of 
 paganism. In the League of Nations we are 
 coming back at last to Christ, to see whether 
 the world may not learn of him. As we shall 
 see in a future chapter, the League of Nations 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 119 
 
 indorses the wider church outlook which has 
 long been expressed in her foreign mission 
 enterprise. The alternatives before the world 
 are either Christ or a godless civilization, which 
 is infinitely worse than any heathenism. The 
 League of Nations definitely accepts the golden 
 rule as the law of its being and the object of its 
 labors. One of your countrymen has said, " We 
 are actually adopting the ideal of the world- 
 wide Kingdom of God as a national policy, 
 pledging our Republic to the unselfish teachings 
 of the Son of Man." There never was a time 
 when Christianity had so remarkable an indorse- 
 ment from the best political authorities as 
 today. In theory the church has given her 
 sanction. Now is the time for practice. If she 
 is to show herself a living force in the present 
 generation, she must not only agree to but must 
 champion this great ideal. 
 
 Against all this it is sometimes urged that 
 the tendency to war is characteristic of human 
 nature, and that on this account there is no 
 real chance of the end of wars upon the 
 earth. Longinus long ago asserted that " strife 
 is good for mortals," and Bernhardi has most 
 abundantly indorsed his statement. There will 
 always be two types of mind upon this subject. 
 It has been said that to Napoleon war was a 
 splendid game, while to Wellington it was a 
 stern duty to be got through as quickly as 
 
120 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 possible. But that it is an essential element in 
 human nature, which can never be eradicated 
 or replaced, is an assertion which runs contrary 
 not only to the whole genius of Christianity 
 but to any scientific view of the evolution of 
 the race. To those who on any ground believe 
 in an ultimate decency of things, war is neces- 
 sarily doomed. To those who believe in an 
 intelligent and realizing way in Christianity, 
 the question resolves itself into a very simple 
 issue. We may grant a certain truth to the 
 assertion that war is inherent in human nature, 
 which derives this among its many mingled 
 inheritances from the brute; but we must ask 
 the further question, Is Christ or is he not a 
 match for human nature? Can he manage it, 
 and lead it out from the slime of its origins 
 into the nobility of its destiny? Upon that 
 question depends our belief in the failure or 
 success of Christianity. For believers in Christ, 
 to ask that question is already to answer it. 
 We have ground for believing that there is a 
 limit to the reign of brute human nature, that 
 Christ transcends it, and that His ideals, which 
 have already conquered its cruder forms, will 
 ultimately triumph over all things and lead 
 mankind out into the glory and nobility of the 
 sons of God. 
 
 Hitherto we have only treated of the League 
 of Nations on its negative side, as a movement 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 121 
 
 which has for its object the end of war. It 
 remains to be pointed out that this is by no 
 means its only content and intention. In its 
 positive, as contrasted with its negative as- 
 pects, it has still a closer alliance with Chris- 
 tianity. No Christianity which is merely 
 negative is worthy of the name. Christ's 
 great contention with the Pharisees was for a 
 positive as contrasted with a negative faith. 
 To be a Christian is not to be a man who does 
 not do this and that, although there have been 
 those whose main idea of Christian manhood 
 was a catalogue of things which it would not 
 permit a man to do. It is only when we come 
 past the negative out into the positive side of 
 Christianity that we see it in its rich fullness 
 and promise; and, all along the line, the League 
 of Nations strives to keep pace with it in this. 
 It aims not merely at the end of war between 
 nations, but at the establishment of love and 
 good understanding. Intelligently conceived, 
 it deals not merely with alliances and treaties, 
 but with the spirit which underlies all such 
 agreements. It would establish good will as 
 the foundation of all relations, and it would 
 interpret the brotherhood of nations, not 
 merely in the sense of tolerance and the absence 
 of aggressive wrong-doing, but as a positive 
 friendship and intercommunion for the purposes 
 of mutual aid and the furtherance of each 
 
122 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 other's interests. One of the consequences of 
 this positive spirit is that it proposes to deal 
 with the economic and industrial problems of 
 the world, and to deal with them from this 
 point of view. In all these ways it is seeking 
 not a negative end merely, but the positive 
 establishment of good relations; and in doing 
 this it is showing itself to be imbued with the 
 essential spirit of Christianity as revealed by 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 It will be obvious that the task it has set 
 itself is indeed a most comprehensive and far- 
 reaching one. It is no wonder if, with such 
 ends in view, the new order will take some 
 time to find itself and establish its position. 
 When one feels overwhelmed and discouraged 
 by the thought of so gigantic a program, it 
 is a comforting reflection that the League of 
 Nations is not conceived as a thing fixed and 
 stationary. Lord Robert Cecil has pointed 
 out one of its greatest merits, in his explana- 
 tion that it is an elastic conception, which may 
 be modified so as to deal with new situations 
 and requirements as they arise. Its first task 
 will probably be to codify international law in 
 a more complete and authoritative fashion 
 than that in which it has been already codified 
 by Fiore or by Borchard or by The Hague Con- 
 ferences of 1899 and 1907. Even if its codifica- 
 tions were complete — which they are not — 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 123 
 
 they would still remain in need of sanctions 
 which would be able to enforce them. Such 
 sanctions the League of Nations provides, as 
 we have already seen ; and its elasticity enables 
 it to face the future in the confidence that, as 
 new contingencies arise, it will be able in 
 virtue of its universality and its safeguards to 
 face these also. 
 
 There are some who imagine that they have 
 only to speak the word " Utopia " in order 
 to discredit any such scheme as this. Their 
 attitude has perhaps been provoked by those 
 who have in the past coquetted with ideals, 
 and recklessly uttered high-sounding words. 
 Utopia may either stand for ev toVos or ov tottos — 
 " the place of well-being " or " the place that 
 does not exist." For my part I am not afraid 
 of the word, nor of the power of God in his prov- 
 idence to call things that are not as though they 
 were, and so to create them. When in faith 
 Christian men are sufficiently daring to trust 
 God to that extent, they will certainly have 
 their reward. One remembers the words of 
 Cleon, that Paul's doctrine " could be held by 
 no sane man"; and one remembers also that 
 the madnesses and the wildest idealisms of an 
 age live on, while its practical sanities and 
 materialistic politics die daily into oblivion. 
 In any case, this League of Nations is the 
 greatest act of faith the world has ever seen, 
 
124 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 for it believes that Christ's kingdom is an ever- 
 lasting kingdom, and that his dominion is to all 
 generations. It has dared to believe in the 
 power of Jesus Christ. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 125 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Statesmanship in Foreign Missionary 
 
 Work 
 
 In the bewildering number and rapidity of 
 the changes that have come over every aspect 
 of modern life, none is more striking and none 
 will ultimately show more far-reaching results, 
 than the transformation of our view of Foreign 
 Missions. A few years ago foreign missionary 
 enterprise belonged to the region of sentiment: 
 now it has been transferred to that of states- 
 manship. Formerly Christian thought wan- 
 dered out in a romantic and irresponsible way 
 among lands far distant, and the result was 
 infinitely picturesque, but in many cases it 
 was hardly taken seriously beyond the inner 
 circles of the devout. Somewhere in the in- 
 finite distance there was a missionary, dressed 
 in clerical garb, sitting under a palm tree with 
 black gloves and a Bible, surrounded by a 
 touchingly grouped band of more or less naked 
 savages. Piety was graded then, as it is still 
 in many quarters, and the picture of the mis- 
 sionary under his tree appealed only to 
 extremely religious people. To the ordinary 
 man, who was religious enough to satisfy his 
 
126 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 conscience along the usual lines, this was en- 
 tirely a work of supererogation. To-day every 
 intelligent believer in Christianity knows that 
 such a view as that is not only unchristian but 
 is also obsolete. He knows also that mere zeal 
 is not all that is required for effective work in 
 the foreign field, nor is he much moved by such 
 curious motives as the desire to hasten the end 
 of the world and the coming of Christ by com- 
 pleting the preaching itinerary of the world. 
 Instead of that he takes foreign missions 
 seriously as a necessary department of all real 
 statesmanship. 
 
 Statesmanship means neither more or less 
 than common sense upon a large scale. Its 
 fundamental demand is a clear view of all 
 things of which it takes cognizance. Pfleiderer 
 has said that " in order to conquer the world the 
 first thing necessary is to get a correct view of 
 the world," and it is this which modern foreign 
 missions accept as their first task. In 1899, 
 the late Dr. Stewart of Lovedale, then modera- 
 tor of the Assembly of the Free Church of 
 Scotland, advocated, in his moderatorial ad- 
 dress, what he called a " policy of missions." 
 The phrase created much interest at the time, 
 but the majority of those who heard or read 
 his speech confessed that they did not fully 
 understand what he meant by it. The great 
 Missionary Conference of 1910 helped to clear 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 127 
 
 up the situation, and interpreted much that 
 he had advocated; and since then it has been 
 gradually dawning upon Christian men every- 
 where that the foreign mission enterprise must 
 be accepted as a definite policy and reckoned 
 with in the statesmanship of the world. 
 
 The first aspects of any such view as this 
 must concern certain questions of detail. 
 In the first place, in the choice of the field we 
 have to distinguish between races that have a 
 future before them and races which are obvi- 
 ously dying out. The means of reaching the 
 population of the world with Christian propa- 
 ganda are lamentably limited, and since we 
 cannot at the present time hope to reach all, 
 we must select those among whom we shall 
 labor. Under these circumstances it is neces- 
 sary to consider the future value of the various 
 races. Work among those which are soon to 
 become extinct has been, and is, heroic in the 
 last degree; but statesmanship demands that 
 the gospel shall be sent to the fountainheads 
 of future civilization, and to lands which will 
 in a generation or two exercise the strongest 
 influence upon the world. If it be objected, 
 as it used to be, that there is an irreverence in 
 counting heads in this fashion, surely the 
 answer is clear enough. As individual souls 
 all men may be equally valuable to Christian- 
 ity; but, as a mere matter of numbers, is it 
 
128 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 not wiser and more effective to win ten thousand 
 people for Christianity than ten? And, as 
 those who are employing foreign missions as 
 an instrument of the Kingdom of Christ, must 
 we not see to it that that instrument is employed 
 in the places where it will ultimately do most 
 work? 
 
 A second matter of detail is the choice of 
 missionaries. In the days when missions were 
 a sentiment the only requirements for a foreign 
 missionary's career were piety and zeal. But, 
 when one comes to reflect upon it, it is surely 
 obvious that the work of a foreign missionary 
 is one of the most highly specialized of all the 
 professions, and that further qualifications are 
 necessary to insure fitness for effective work in 
 it. The only reasonable principle upon which 
 a man should choose his lifework must be his 
 fitness for the special lines and tasks which he 
 purposes to face. It is better to sweep a cross- 
 ing perfectly than to preach a crusade badly, 
 for the world is permanently benefited only 
 by those labors, of whatever sort, which are well 
 performed. In making the choice of a profes- 
 sion many things must be taken into account, 
 but the paramount consideration must be the 
 call of God as revealed in the nature, the tastes, 
 and the powers of the individual for work 
 along particular lines. Anyone who knows the 
 history of foreign missions must see how widely 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 129 
 
 this principle is proved by the effect of mission 
 work upon the workers. There have been 
 those who found in the foreign field that they 
 had no special aptitude for the work they had 
 undertaken; and it would be impossible to 
 imagine circumstances more terrible in their 
 discouragement, or lives more shattered in 
 their adventure, than foreign missionaries who 
 discovered too late that they were equipped 
 only with zeal and not with fitness for their 
 difficult and complicated task. On the other 
 hand, who does not know of the magnificent 
 effect in character which is produced by foreign 
 mission work upon those who prove really fit 
 for it? Men and women who previously had 
 shown no very distinctive gifts, have in count- 
 less instances developed into superb evangelists, 
 surgeons, explorers, educators, and administra- 
 tors, as they rose to the opportunities given 
 to their latent powers, and proved their fitness 
 for the enterprise they had undertaken. Lines 
 are drawn deep upon such faces, for their work 
 is arduous and exacting, but they are the lines 
 of greatness of manhood and womanhood. 
 
 Third, a very essential part of statesmanship 
 in the whole business of foreign missions is 
 that of patience. There has sometimes been 
 a craving for immediate results which has 
 brought disappointment abroad and criticism 
 at home. The statistics of conversions and 
 
130 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 baptisms are no sort of measure of the effective- 
 ness of the work achieved. In many lands the 
 baptism of a convert has meant his ostracism 
 and has deprived him of any means of making 
 a living, yet complaints have been made that 
 an insufficient number of conversions were 
 tabulated in the returns sent home. It is 
 extraordinary that it did not strike the critics 
 that it would be wise in such lands to provide 
 agencies whereby converts could be assured of 
 a living and kept from starvation. The con- 
 sequence in such cases has been that countless 
 conversions have been achieved while no open 
 profession was made. As one missionary has 
 put it, " Many a Christian will rise in the last 
 day from a Mohammedan grave." It was with 
 such things in mind that Jesus spoke of his 
 doctrine and kingdom as leaven working 
 secretly and unobserved, but yet eventually to 
 leaven the whole lump. There are many kinds 
 of lie, but everybody knows that statistics may 
 easily be the very worst kind of all, and it is 
 well that all who are interested in foreign mis- 
 sions should remember that. One of the most 
 touching of all missionary stories is one con- 
 cerning the late Master of Balliol. A certain 
 Geronimo of Genoa, having heard that the 
 Australian aborigines were the lowest type of 
 savages of the earth, went out and worked 
 among them for twenty years without making a 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 131 
 
 single convert or even an approach to one. 
 The story was told to Dr. Jowett, and he re- 
 plied very earnestly, " I should like to have 
 been that man." 
 
 A fourth consideration is the necessity for 
 distinguishing between causes and effects, and 
 putting the stress of our work upon the former 
 rather than the latter. Heathenism, with all 
 its miseries and superstitions, is due to certain 
 easily ascertained causes. The peoples are 
 perishing from lack of knowledge, and from 
 lack of ability to deal with existing conditions. 
 The practical intelligence and directed will of 
 such peoples have never been trained to play 
 upon their life as it actually is, and the whole 
 superstitious incubus of heathenism is the 
 result. This fact should give us the point of 
 view from which to look at educational and 
 medical missions as agencies in the foreign 
 field. There is a tendency to consider these as 
 more or less secular, and to set up over against 
 them the purely evangelistic missions as the 
 ideal type. But in a land of gross ignorance 
 and universal unhealed sickness, the evangelis- 
 tic mission is to a large extent dealing with 
 results while the causes remain untouched. 
 It is a profound mistake to imagine that educa- 
 tional and medical work is to be regarded as in 
 any sense a bribing of the people to come and 
 receive religious instruction, by offering them 
 
132 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 benefits which they can understand. These 
 are really no bribes, but the direct attack upon 
 the causes of heathenism; and they should in 
 every case be encouraged to go hand in hand 
 with the evangelistic teaching which they are 
 rendering possible and fruitful. 
 
 The fifth matter which must be included in 
 this survey is the necessity for appreciating the 
 value of pagan worship. To laugh at it, to 
 rail at it, or still worse to ignore it, is fatal 
 policy. To regard it as the work of devils is 
 to be ignorant of human nature and the origins 
 of human faith. It is not in vain that centuries 
 of worship, however mistaken or imperfect, 
 have engaged the heart and mind, and, to some 
 extent, the conscience, of all the races of man- 
 kind. None of the races has lived in vain, and 
 none has worshiped in vain. Each has dis- 
 covered something in its worship which has 
 increased its national value and its spiritual 
 wealth. We in the restless and hurrying 
 West, where peace in any deep sense has almost 
 died out, may well turn with a sigh to the calm 
 that still broods over the Eastern mind. We 
 who have ceased to wonder at anything, sated 
 with the miracles of modern science, may well 
 view with reverence the spectacle of childlike 
 peoples who wonder at everything. We with 
 our Western commercialism may surely con- 
 fess that we have something to learn, of beauty 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 133 
 
 and gentleness and simplicity, from nations 
 less fortunate in respect of positive faith. In 
 a word, our task is not to bring God to foreign 
 countries in our ships, but to find Him there 
 already, and to reveal him to those children of 
 His to whose homes we go. We should intro- 
 duce Christ to them as the true Interpreter of 
 their own ideals, the Appreciator of their own 
 endeavors in the religious life. We are not 
 there to westernize the East, as if Jesus had 
 said, " Suffer the little white children to come 
 unto me." We are there to fulfill rather than 
 to supplant the imperfect life of pagan lands, 
 to show them by their very virtues and beauties 
 the sad and tragic lack and failure that are 
 theirs, and to supply that lack out of the fullness 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 No point of view is more easily parodied 
 than this. " Quite so," says a certain type of 
 man. " Let us appreciate the reality of all 
 religions, and leave each nation to its own — 
 Buddhism for the Buddhist, Mohammedanism 
 for the Mohammedan, Christianity for the 
 Christian." I need not say that the apprecia- 
 tion of other religions of which we have spoken 
 does not mean this, or any other such cheap and 
 foolish thing. The whole difficulty, and yet 
 the whole value, of thought on such subjects, 
 lies in fine distinctions which require a certain 
 delicacy of mind and a certain amount of pains- 
 
134 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 taking thought to make and to preserve. It is 
 one thing to say that the religion of each land 
 has a value of its own, and it is quite another 
 thing to say that the religion of any land is 
 sufficient for the spiritual needs of men. There 
 is nothing comparable with Christ in all the 
 world, and the more precious any substitute 
 for him is, the more imperatively do we hear 
 the cry of the human heart for just that which 
 He alone can give. Christ is not a rival of the 
 gods of the lands, to be weighed over against 
 them as greater or lesser than they. Literally, 
 " He judge th among the gods," as the old 
 phrase has it; and among them, as among 
 men, he comes for k/omtis. In his light we see 
 the relative worth and beauty of the various 
 heathen cults, and the same light that shows 
 us their beauty shows us also the deep defects 
 of each one of them. 
 
 The trouble with them all is this, that their 
 conception of the Highest has become localized, 
 and so, hopelessly dwarfed. The curse of 
 heathenism everywhere is the curse of local 
 gods. The consequent religion is bound to be 
 petty, wanting in imagination, and full of the 
 immorality of a favoritism which can be se- 
 cured by bribes or lost by giving offense to the 
 touchy gods. The great business of the Chris- 
 tian missionary is to delocalize the gods of the 
 heathen, and to reveal instead of them the 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 135 
 
 one God over all, blessed forever, revealed in 
 Jesus Christ — in Jesus Christ, who is neither 
 a child of the East nor the West, but is the Son 
 of Man forever. Seen thus in His light, it is 
 safe to gather and preserve the true and beau- 
 tiful elements in all attempts at worship, and 
 it is easy to reinterpret these in a nobler and 
 more helpful way than had been possible in any 
 heathen worship. 
 
 Turning now to the more general considera- 
 tion of our subject, we find that the war has 
 complicated the whole problem of foreign mis- 
 sions in many ways. It has been said often 
 that it must necessarily have presented a very 
 perplexing spectacle to heathen lands. Chris- 
 tianity had come among them as a gospel of 
 peace, and had set itself on every mission sta- 
 tion to end family disputes and tribal feuds. 
 It seems natural to ask and difficult to answer 
 what justification will be possible for the church 
 to present to heathen men who are perplexed 
 by the spectacle of a war between Christian 
 lands, compared with which the most violent 
 of their native conflicts have been but children's 
 games. Yet, on the other hand, it must be re- 
 membered that we are apt to underrate the in- 
 telligence of pagan minds. The non-Christian 
 troops at the front understood quite well the 
 meaning and necessity of the war, and the spec- 
 
136 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 tacle of it presented no difficulty to them. They 
 had not accepted our teaching, but they under- 
 stood that we were fighting for that which we 
 had taught, and that our entire warfare was in 
 order to preserve alive the principles of Chris- 
 tianity upon the earth. Indeed, the chief 
 difficulty and stumbling-block of this kind 
 which has presented itself to the pagan mind of 
 modern times has not been the Great War, 
 which was fought for obvious and unques- 
 tionable principles. It has been the war 
 which, in its incessant guerrilla fashion, unfor- 
 tunately has been waged between certain of 
 the Christian churches on the mission field. We 
 may trust the intelligence of mankind to under- 
 stand the Great War, but what reason is there 
 why they ought to understand any worthy 
 principle in that infinitely little war? Punch's 
 famous picture of half-naked savages singing 
 their own version of Handel's great anthem, 
 " Why do the Christians rage so furiously 
 together? " is one which ought to cause in- 
 tolerable shame to every Christian heart. 
 Any bitterness between Christian people in 
 foreign lands, or any strife either upon ec- 
 clesiastical or individual grounds among mis- 
 sionaries, is capable of undoing years of patient 
 labor in the building up of faith ; and any states- 
 manlike view of the foreign mission enterprise 
 of to-day must necessarily view with the stern- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 137 
 
 est condemnation the pettiness and dispro- 
 portion which have sometimes characterized 
 the church's handling of ecclesiastical ques- 
 tions on the foreign field. 
 
 One effect of the war has been the broadening 
 of the horizons of the average man. Young 
 men who in former days would have lived and 
 died without visiting any lands but their own 
 have now learned something at least of the 
 width of the world, and the spirit of adventure 
 has come upon them. It must be this which 
 is accountable, in part at least, for the extremely 
 interesting fact that the soldiers in the allied 
 armies so often manifested an interest in 
 foreign missions. Few men would have ven- 
 tured to think beforehand that a missionary 
 address would be welcomed in a hut or camp : 
 yet there was no kind of lecture to which they 
 would listen with greater eagerness. The 
 reason for this must have been that they had 
 already seen a wider world, and come to be- 
 lieve that there actually were heathen lands. 
 They had now met and fought side by side with 
 men who worshiped strange gods, and the whole 
 fact of paganism, instead of being a fairy tale 
 of parsons, had exhibited itself as an actual 
 piece of the live world which passed before their 
 own eyes. 
 
 On a colossal scale the lands have mingled. 
 At the moment when men of Christian lands 
 
138 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 have been taken out by the million into a 
 nearer contact with heathen countries, these 
 countries have wakened into a totally dif- 
 ferent life of ideals and of prospects from that 
 which they ever had before. Even before the 
 war the world was wakening. China was trying 
 to waken, stretching her hands and opening 
 her eyes for a moment, as it were, after the 
 long deep sleep of centuries. Japan was 
 already broad awake, and most keenly alive 
 to her own secular interests. India was be- 
 ginning to put in her claim for a larger and 
 fuller development of self-government and 
 native rule. The Mohammedan world was 
 already the most active missionary force on 
 the face of the earth, and was propagating 
 the faith of the Prophet in many lands with a 
 thoroughness and success which were bound to 
 have serious consequences in the future. While 
 these things were going on, commerce and 
 diplomacy, easier means of travel together with 
 swifter means of communication, were linking 
 up the world into one, and making it impossible 
 for any man anywhere to be completely inde- 
 pendent of any other man. As the result of 
 all these forces, the phenomena of the Crusades 
 and the Renaissance were being repeated and 
 exaggerated before our eyes. New govern- 
 ments were rising upon all sides, most of them 
 premature and all of them precarious. It 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 139 
 
 took Britain more than a thousand years to 
 bring her parliamentary system to its present 
 very imperfect condition, but nation after na- 
 tion of the Near and Far East leaped for 
 the top of the ladder, and imagined it could 
 manage parliamentary government by a mere 
 decree. In every case it turned out that the 
 ancient East had adopted the methods of the 
 West too suddenly, and had failed with them. 
 But that does not mean that the failure must 
 necessarily be permanent, or that some adapta- 
 tions of the one form to the other may not end 
 in a stable constitution. As we have seen 
 before, great civilizations have already risen 
 at the meeting-points of East and West, and 
 this may prove to be the case again on a scale 
 hitherto unparalleled. We had entered upon 
 a period which was essentially creative, when 
 the Voice which sounded over all the lands kept 
 repeating the solemn words, " Behold, I make all 
 things new." 
 
 Such judgments of the importance of one's 
 own generation are apt to be exaggerated. 
 Every day and period bring novelties to those 
 who live in it, and because they have not seen 
 such things before, they hail them as the very 
 Day of Judgment and the restitution of all 
 things. He who takes a wide survey of his- 
 tory soon learns that every day is a day of the 
 Lord, and does not take too seriously the esti- 
 
140 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 mate of contemporaries when they judge the 
 novelties of their own time. But even before 
 the war we had come to see that we were living 
 in an altogether exceptional and peculiar epoch. 
 Civilization had reached a point whose critical 
 importance no man could possibly exaggerate. 
 Never in the history of the race had there been 
 anything comparable with it, and the immediate 
 alternative, from the Christian point of view, 
 was the universal spread of an absolutely ir- 
 religious civilization or the conquest of the 
 earth by Jesus Christ. The War, breaking 
 forth at such an hour, furiously increased and 
 hastened the play of these tremendous forces. 
 We in the West suddenly discovered how inti- 
 mately the nations to whom we send our mis- 
 sionaries are bound in with our own destiny 
 in the immediate future. To-day we are dis- 
 covering how deeply we are entangled already 
 in questions which concern the relations of 
 Christian with non-Christian lands; and as 
 yet, especially in connection with Japan and 
 China, no solution has been found to some of 
 the most ominous and fateful problems with 
 which the world ever has been confronted. 
 New problems are also arising in consequence 
 of the threatened withdrawal or restriction of 
 Christian education in India by the British 
 government. But Christ holds the balance 
 between two alternatives. Either this War is 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 141 
 
 the last of the Crusades, preparing the way for 
 that reconstruction of the kingdoms of the 
 world which Christ called the kingdom of 
 Heaven, or else the War is the blast of the last 
 trumpet, announcing the dissolution of all 
 things and the end of the human story upon 
 the earth. Which of these two alternatives is 
 to be the true one depends entirely upon the 
 measure in which we of this generation can 
 bring the principles of Christ to bear upon the 
 international politics of our time He must be 
 blind indeed who does not perceive the essential 
 connection between statesmanship and foreign 
 mission work to-day. 
 
 When we ask for practical applications of 
 these ideas, and seek for an answer to the 
 immediate question, " What part can you and 
 I take in these matters? " the first obvious 
 answer leads us back to the League of Nations. 
 Here is, ready to our hand, the proposal of a 
 machinery which is to be at once universal and 
 Christian. Its principles are identical with 
 those of Christ, and it is the first time in politics 
 that this could be said of any large piece of 
 statesmanship. In the League of Nations we 
 have seen government baptized with the Holy 
 Ghost, returning to the earth, not in the form 
 of a world-empire of force, or of a league and 
 bond of empires, but as that Kingdom of God 
 
142 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 which Christ lived and died to establish. But, 
 as we have seen, Christ, who first preached the 
 Kingdom of God upon the earth, is the only 
 source of the wisdom that can manage it. The 
 universal League ol Nations is only safe or 
 possible or true to its essential idea so long 
 as it is universally Christian. No land which 
 does not from its heart accept the principles 
 for which Christ stood can safely be intrusted 
 with a place in this new government of the 
 earth. Christianity is presupposed in the 
 League from first to last, and the more clearly 
 that fact is perceived and acknowledged by 
 those who are responsible for its promulgation, 
 the sooner we may expect to arrive at some 
 stable and permanent condition. In the light 
 of all this we can see the urgent need of for- 
 eign mission work today. It is already almost 
 too late. 
 
 In the second place, we who call ourselves 
 Christian nations must take cognizance of 
 our own religious point of view. We have said 
 that missionary enterprise goes out to foreign 
 lands in order to delocalize the gods of the 
 heathen; but they who do such things must 
 see to it that they have first delocalized their 
 own God. As a matter of fact, the God of 
 Christian lands has in many cases become identi- 
 fied with strictly limited sets of interests there. 
 Not confessedly but unconsciously, Christians 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 143 
 
 have often worshiped him as the God of their 
 own sect, church, or party, and failed to realize 
 that religion has other aspects than those in 
 which they may happen to have seen it. Until 
 Christendom in all its various branches has 
 recognized that the Love of God is as wide as 
 humanity and all human interests, and that 
 the compassions of God and the appreciations 
 of Christ are over every man and all that con- 
 cerns him throughout all the countries of the 
 earth, we shall not be fit to achieve the Chris- 
 tianization of the world. 
 
 In the third place, a new call is made upon 
 us to take note of the other agents that are 
 operating in the foreign field besides those of 
 Christian missions. The missionary enterprise 
 must now with a new thoroughness adjust its 
 relations with international politics, industry, 
 and commerce. We must realize that the mer- 
 chant and the diplomatist are missionaries 
 wherever they go, spreading the service either 
 of God or of the devil across the lands; and we 
 must begin our attempt at the influencing of 
 the ends of the earth in our own offices, and be- 
 side our own firesides and cradles, from which 
 these missionaries are to go forth. No man 
 should be allowed to leave a Christian land for 
 any sort of service in a land as yet unchristian- 
 ized until his mind has been imbued with such 
 high, humane, and yet sensible ideas of the 
 
144 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 relations of men of different civilizations, as 
 will insure that his work and influence abroad 
 will be worthy of the Christian name and will 
 forward the Christian life. 
 
 Lastly, it must be borne in mind that there 
 is demanded of us all a higher appreciation, 
 not only of man as man, apart from his na- 
 tionality and antecedents, but a higher appre- 
 ciation also of Jesus Christ. There are subtle 
 and mysterious connections between the various 
 parts of the Kingdom of God, and it is probable 
 that the prosperity of foreign mission enterprise 
 depends directly upon the spiritual condition 
 of the land that sends it forth, and especially 
 of the professed Christianity of that land. 
 It is for us to cherish and to spread abroad a 
 profounder belief in the incomparable value of 
 Christ our Master for the salvation of the 
 world. Our interpretation of Christ may be 
 good enough for establishing a life of faith and 
 hope in our own souls, and yet may be ill- 
 adapted to conquer and to triumph over the 
 vast forces of the world. Defective faith of 
 this kind is hindering the work of every mis- 
 sionary in the foreign field; and every increase 
 of faith in the churches of Christendom is 
 forwarding the advent of the Kingdom of 
 Christ abroad. It is for us more and more to 
 read the charter of the Kingdom in the face 
 of the King, to believe in Christ so fully and 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 145 
 
 generously that we cannot be contented until 
 we have shared his benefits with every human 
 being in the world ; and continually to measure 
 our estimate of the value of foreign mission 
 enterprises, not by the poor standards of ap- 
 parent success, but by the debt we personally 
 owe to him, and the unspeakable appeal to 
 every honest conscience of every opportunity 
 of paying that debt. 
 
146 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Britain to America 
 
 The occasion on which these lectures were 
 delivered in the spring of last year was one which 
 brought to the lecturer a unique opportunity 
 of coming in contact with many different types 
 of university life in the United States. From 
 Harvard and Yale he passed to universities in 
 the Middle West — Delaware, DePauw, and 
 Cincinnati — and everywhere met with the 
 same abundant welcome, and felt the same keen 
 delight in the contact with every one of these 
 varied spirits of university life. To a British 
 man, traveling thus over large areas of the 
 States, the first feeling is that of an almost 
 incredible hospitality and kindness. He is 
 welcomed personally and taken for granted as a 
 friend before he is even known ; and, to use a 
 colloquial phrase, "it is up to him " to justify 
 the frank trust and confidence which have been 
 extended to him in so generous a welcome. 
 Yet there seemed to be indications of some- 
 thing deeper and more significant than even 
 this instinctive good will, which is so characteris- 
 tic of the American reception of strangers. 
 The political and commercial relations between 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 147 
 
 our two lands offer some of the most complex 
 and even dangerous problems in the world. 
 Yet he who travels among the university circles 
 of America cannot fail to discover a tendency 
 toward a closer union than has for many years 
 subsisted between our countries, a new fondness 
 for the old land and a new willingness to meet 
 cordially in frank approach. To-day I wish 
 to give you some sort of an idea of how an 
 average British man thinks about all this. 
 Some of my impressions may be erroneous and 
 others disproportioned, but they are impres- 
 sions founded upon a pretty w^ide contact with 
 American men and minds, and I give you them 
 to-day in perfect frankness for what they are 
 worth. 
 
 First of all I think you will agree with 
 me that it is time for us to go back beyond the 
 American Revolutionary War in order to find 
 the origins of things. After all, that war was 
 not the beginning of the heavens and the earth, 
 and much had happened before its lamentable 
 outbreak. Certain books seem to have been 
 written as if history began in 1776, or at least 
 as if the history of the relations between 
 America and Britain began then. Let us 
 remember that long before that war tore us 
 asunder we were united in a common fight for 
 freedom. The liberties of Europe, guaranteed 
 in the Magna Charta, in the establishment of 
 
148 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 the great guilds, and in all the early battles 
 of its age-long struggle, were common to us 
 both. The foundations of freedom were laid 
 by your fathers and ours, fighting and working 
 side by side, and the instincts which prompted 
 them and the ideals which appealed to them 
 remain the deepest instincts and the highest 
 ideals of men of good will on both sides of the 
 Atlantic. The seas were wider then than they 
 are now and more estranging, and men who 
 crossed them became alienated from those who 
 remained on the other side, through lack of 
 contact and the impossibility of frequent 
 interchange of the ideas under whose dominance 
 life is carried on. When the Revolutionary 
 War broke out, it was not a war between our 
 two peoples at all. The finest intellect and 
 the vast mass of the conscience and opinion of 
 the British people were entirely against it. 
 Burke was against it, and so was Pitt. It is 
 not fair that it should be remembered as an 
 expression of the mind of my nation, although 
 it was waged in my nation's name. 
 
 There have followed after it one hundred and 
 fifty years of varied history in both our lands. 
 In one sense we were too far away from one 
 another, and in another we were too near akin; 
 and the result was a tendency toward misun- 
 derstanding which has poisoned much of our 
 relations with each other. We have often 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 149 
 
 irritated one another and we have often misun- 
 derstood one another. In the Civil War the 
 British attitude to America was such as to 
 satisfy neither the North nor the South, and 
 such instances as that of the Alabama, and later 
 on that in connection with Venezuela, were 
 fraught with terrible danger. Even in the 
 present war in its earlier phases, such matters 
 as our blacklisting arrangements, our cen- 
 sorship, and our searching of ships, were bound 
 to cause friction of a dangerous kind. When 
 later on you discovered how necessary some of 
 these arrangements were, not to our safety 
 only but to your own, I think they may be 
 said to have passed completely out of mind. 
 When, after the long and inevitable time of 
 waiting, you were able at last to come into the 
 war unitedly and effectively, not only these 
 recent estrangements, but all others that had 
 gone before them, were wiped out forever in 
 our brotherhood in arms. 
 
 The debt was mutual and we have both paid 
 in full. We got our chance first, and I think you 
 will acknowledge that we took it satisfactorily. 
 We were called upon to give the lead, and with- 
 out calculating chances we sent our ' contempt- 
 ible little army' across to the field. You know 
 what our navy did for the guarding of the seas, 
 the provisioning of troops, and the blockade 
 of the enemy. There were times when we 
 
150 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 held the lines against the armies of Germany 
 with a single thinly-manned front trench, and 
 our guns answered a twenty-four-hours bom- 
 bardment with their allowances of half-a-dozen 
 shells a day. Yet by the grace of God we held 
 the lines. They were your lines as well as ours, 
 for, as you know very well to-day, the menace 
 which threatened our extinction would not 
 have ended there. The final objective of the 
 enemy was on your side of the Atlantic. 
 
 Then you got your chance, and you and we, 
 cooperating brought the legions of America to 
 the European battlefields. I was with your 
 first fifty thousand in Gondrecourt in 1917, 
 and I wish I could tell you how deep a debt of 
 gratitude we owe to them. We had been fight- 
 ing for three years, and our dauntless troops 
 were hanging on grimly; but the mud had 
 entered into the very soul of them, and they 
 were weary to death. They went out, led by 
 high ideals that flamed like beacons calling 
 them to service and to sacrifice for the noblest 
 ends that man can achieve or strive after. 
 But in dreary monotony and discomfort, re- 
 lieved only by periods of deadly and horrible 
 danger, men cannot retain the clear vision of 
 the ideal lights of life. Your coming relit 
 our lamps. We remembered what we were out 
 for, and knew again that it was worth while, 
 and blessed God for your coming. In 1918, 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 151 
 
 during the most dangerous months of all the 
 war, at the time when our undaunted general 
 sent forth the one message of the kind that ever 
 reached the ears of British soldiers during those 
 five years, telling them that our backs were at 
 the wall, we stood against the awful floods of 
 the enemy. There was no element which so 
 strengthened us thus to stand, as our knowledge 
 that you were with us, that you would not 
 leave us till this thing had been seen through, 
 and that, while we had lost well-nigh a million 
 men, you would continue the steady stream of 
 reenforcements so long as a man from America 
 was required in France. I need not speak to 
 you of Chateau Thierry, St. Mihiel, and, above 
 all, the Argonne. That was a campaign that 
 will be recorded among the great events of 
 battle on the earth, a record of which any coun- 
 try might well be proud. 
 
 As to the present situation, God knows it is 
 complicated enough, and I am not now going to 
 discuss it in all its bearings. All that I would 
 like to point out is this: that any misunder- 
 standings which may arise are due to details 
 which are of relatively no importance. Per- 
 sonal criticisms of the character and conduct of 
 statesmen, in this connection or in that, need 
 concern us little, though in an hour like this 
 they are apt to confuse the issue by drawing 
 away men's attention from the things that really 
 
152 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 and permanently matter. To us you have 
 stood for two things which have nothing what- 
 ever to do with party politics, either American 
 or British. First, you have stood for the essen- 
 tial principles of the League of Nations, of 
 which I have already spoken to you; and, 
 second, you have stood for the return of sim- 
 plicity in diplomacy and the end of secret 
 treaties. Late events in Italy and in China 
 and elsewhere have shown the dire danger of 
 the old methods of diplomacy in Europe, and 
 especially of secret treaties. It has been said 
 that it was inconsistent in the Peace Confer- 
 ence to conduct its business in secret while 
 objecting to the secrecy of former diplomacy, 
 but these are totally different matters. All 
 business must be conducted in secret until it 
 is ready for presentation to the public. There 
 is no possibility of carrying through anything 
 anywhere, on a large or small scale, while the 
 whole world is looking on and making com- 
 ments. To the end of time men who have to 
 conduct affairs will be bound to claim that 
 they shall do their business among themselves 
 alone, until it is ready for complete presenta- 
 tion to the criticism and the judgment of the 
 public. But the point on which we must insist 
 to-day is that it shall be completely presented 
 when it is ready for presentation. We de- 
 mand that there shall never again be reserva- 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 153 
 
 tions in the publishing of completed diplomacy 
 between nations : that never again shall nations, 
 knowing only as much as the diplomatists see 
 fit to tell them, be suddenly confronted with 
 documents which have been kept secret, which 
 nullify the effect of the things they knew, and 
 which may, indeed, entirely change the situa- 
 tion. This aspect of the present day is of 
 supreme importance. It is not concerned with 
 this or that awkward situation in the history of 
 politics. It is a matter of principle, and it has 
 introduced fresh and direct moral considera- 
 tions into a region which, it must be confessed, 
 had previously been singularly devoid of them. 
 There have been certain difficulties of a 
 more or less political character which have 
 tended to foster suspicion and hesitation into 
 the mutual approach between us. From the 
 British side there were misgivings, mostly of a 
 rather vague kind, founded upon the different 
 point of view which characterized American 
 as contrasted with British mentality. Our 
 whole history, and the conditions of our na- 
 tional life, had in some respects put us apart, 
 and it was impossible but that we should view 
 certain questions that arose, in very different 
 lights. Some British men were afraid that 
 America would demand changes, or would seek 
 to produce them, which we were not prepared 
 to make. Especially was this the case in regard 
 
154 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 to the interpretation of democracy. On the 
 whole it may be safely said that the American 
 interpretation of democracy demands greater 
 liberty for the collective state, and allows less 
 to the private individual, than the British 
 interpretation of it does. This radical differ- 
 ence is of very far-reaching importance, and 
 it will prevent the two lands from ever adopting 
 identical institutions in many things. Every- 
 one who has traveled in both countries will 
 recognize many details which would be only 
 possible in Britain, and others which must 
 be equally confined to America. All this, and 
 the traditions and sentiments which cling 
 around the memory of a throne on the one side 
 and of a republic on the other, gave cause 
 for certain anxieties in British minds. It is 
 with profound thankfulness that one can view 
 the situation to-day, perplexed and difficult 
 as it is. You have not demanded of us im- 
 possible modifications. You have made al- 
 lowances for our differing institutions, and large 
 numbers of matters which seemed fraught with 
 danger have passed away in a quite astonishing 
 unanimity. 
 
 On the other hand, there were difficulties 
 that seemed to threaten from the American 
 point of view. Your soldiers were brought in 
 contact with the visible greatness of the British 
 Empire, and a great many of them realized for 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 155 
 
 the first time how great it is. It is not to be 
 wondered at that American men should have 
 hesitated, lest they were being called in to 
 rehabilitate the British Empire in the hour of 
 its danger, and thus to become accessories to 
 British greatness. It was quite reasonable 
 that you should hesitate before accepting so 
 ambiguous a situation. 
 
 To all this, however, there is a clear and 
 simple reply, and in virtue of that reply the 
 threatened dangers entirely disappear. It is 
 true that you did come to our aid at a moment 
 when the resources of the British Empire were 
 taxed to their very utmost point, and we shall 
 be eternally grateful to you for coming. Be- 
 lieve me, we know the value of the thing you 
 did, and never till the end of time shall it be 
 forgotten. Yet I do not think that any of us 
 mistook the meaning of your coming, or ac- 
 cepted it in any sense of which you would not 
 fully approve. The cause for which you and 
 we alike were fighting was so great as to 
 swallow up the consideration of the fortunes 
 of our individual nations altogether. It 
 was the cause of world-wide democracy and 
 freedom, of eternal humanity and righteous- 
 ness. These are greater than the British Em- 
 pire. They are greater than the American 
 Republic. They are as great as the human 
 race itself. They are the rescript of the will 
 
156 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 of God for man, in which you and we are 
 but humble and honored instruments. 
 
 Then, again, it must be remembered that the 
 British Empire has understood itself in an 
 increasingly democratic sense. There was a 
 time when imperialism and jingoism were 
 practically synonymous, but that time has long 
 gone by. Even then, in the early days of the 
 empire, the true measure of its greatness was 
 the help and benefit it brought to the lands 
 which it included; and while our past history 
 is no more free from blemishes and immorali- 
 ties than the history of other countries, yet we 
 can truly say that, upon the whole, the object 
 pursued by Britain in other lands has not been 
 to exploit them but to benefit them. It may 
 be replied that in many cases they did not de- 
 sire our benefits, and that it is tyrannous to 
 force even benefits upon lands that do not 
 desire them. To this the reply has been made 
 by the empire itself. Had its members viewed 
 the mother country in this light, they would 
 not have come to us from every region where 
 our flag has flown, nor have laid down their 
 lives by thousands in willing sacrifice for the 
 safety and the victory of British arms. 
 
 Now, when the war is over, we are in such a 
 welter of politics that it is impossible to see 
 very clearly any distance into the future, but 
 one thing is absolutely certain, and that is that 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 157 
 
 our relations with all our colonies are being 
 democratized in a fashion which has never 
 been seen on earth as yet. They will share our 
 councils upon all crucial and important matters 
 as they never yet have shared them. The 
 whole conception of empire will more clearly 
 found itself upon generous and altruistic aims, 
 and will more definitely disclaim any notion of 
 exploiting the earth for selfish ends. 
 
 From the point of view of religion there has 
 all along been a very great deal in common to 
 our two countries. The Puritan stock was 
 certainly as strong a leaven as ever was hidden 
 in the lump of any national life, and to this 
 day, even among non-religious Americans, one 
 can see the effect of it in many respects. On 
 the other hand, America has faced the world 
 during all her history along distinctively practi- 
 cal and modern lines, and you have not been 
 without a race of religious teachers who have 
 applied the same principles to their religious 
 thinking, and founded schools of distinctively 
 humanist thought. These two schools, side 
 by side, have corresponded with the narrower 
 and broader schools of religious teaching in the 
 old country, but until recently there has been 
 wanting that most characteristic of all our Brit- 
 ish religious institutions, the fusion of the two 
 in a humanist evangelicalism. To-day there 
 
158 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 appear to be signs that this is coming in America 
 also, and that the present hour, with its mani- 
 fold upheavals, is that in which it is to appear. 
 In such an hour men feel the necessity for 
 getting away from formulae and words, hallowed 
 by custom, but no longer applicable. In 
 their search for reality they seek to combine 
 all the results of modern scientific methods 
 with a religious earnestness equal to that of 
 the older and narrower days. The war seems 
 to be fusing the religious spirit of the United 
 States of America into something which is 
 at the same time broadly human and passion- 
 ately evangelical. 
 
 These are all interesting aspects of matters 
 political and religious in which we differ and 
 agree, but the real question between us, after 
 all, is one of temperament. Alliances are all 
 very good, and are sometimes urgently neces- 
 sary, as they were in the late war. Differences 
 of opinion may be reconciled as time throws 
 new light upon old questions. But the real 
 question deep in the heart of all our relations is, 
 Do we love one another or do we not? 
 What is the real feeling of your land to mine, 
 and mine to yours? The chief dangers lie 
 in suspicions and misunderstandings which 
 hold back the affection of nations and leave 
 them apt to quarrel. Even commercial differ- 
 ences are not so dangerous as temperamental 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 159 
 
 ones. Rival traders understand one another, 
 and although there may be sore feeling over 
 this transaction or that involving loss on one 
 side or the other, yet in the give and take of 
 commerce a modus vivendi may be arrived at. 
 But who shall bring together the differing souls 
 of the Oxford Don and the Buckeye or the 
 Hoosier? The one is reticent beyond belief, 
 and camouflaged at every moment under masses 
 of pretended indifference: the other, frank and 
 hearty as God's mountain winds, warm-hearted, 
 approachable, and approaching. These races 
 talk a different language, and they think 
 far differing thoughts. Now, however, all 
 these men have fought side by side, and the 
 incidents of the long war will not be forgotten 
 in this generation. There is an island in the 
 west of Scotland, the Isle of Islay, famous in 
 the annals of the war for two great shipwrecks. 
 When from the wreck of the Tuscania the 
 corpses of the American dead were washed 
 ashore, a flag was needed under which they 
 might be borne to their burial. On one of the 
 bodies there was found a silk handkerchief in 
 the pattern of the stars and stripes. The 
 girls of the island brought out all they pos- 
 sessed of garments, red, white and blue, and 
 after working all night they finished at the dawn 
 of day a gigantic American flag, under whose 
 cover the bodies were laid to rest. On the same 
 
160 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 island the Otranto was driven ashore, and young 
 boys from the cottages plunged time and again 
 into the raging waters, until they had saved 
 many of the drowning. It is by such things 
 that men live, by such things that nations are 
 born ; and there is more significance in one such 
 tale as these than in many treaties. The great 
 question of the hour is how we shall preserve 
 through the difficult times of peace that unity 
 of heart which, in so many instances, the War 
 has evoked. It was a day of great emotion 
 when Londoners saw the American flag hoisted 
 for the first time on Westminster Tower, and 
 many of us discovered then the value of the 
 union of the English-speaking peoples. We had 
 been talking about the League of Nations and 
 doing our best to secure it for the world, but 
 then we began to realize that the League of 
 Nations has a center which is already and im- 
 mediately achievable. If Britain and America 
 stand together, a united power is formed which 
 can absolutely dominate the world in the 
 interests of freedom and of high ideals. Other 
 nations may for a time secede, but no one of 
 them, nor any group of them, is strong enough 
 to stand against our combination. We are the 
 central steel bands that reenforce the concrete 
 of the League of Nations, and no greater re- 
 sponsibility was ever laid upon man, than ours 
 is to-day in virtue of that fact. 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 161 
 
 When we ask what all this practically means, 
 and what Britain asks of America at the present 
 hour, I am reminded of that former visit, three 
 years ago, when I answered that question by 
 the request for men and money and ships. 
 These things you supplied in profuse abundance, 
 and your timely lavishness brought the war to 
 a speedy termination. Thank God, the need 
 for these is over, and now our requests are 
 different. 
 
 In the first place, we ask for opportunities of 
 mutual knowledge and understanding. With 
 the ocean between them, men and nations will 
 inevitably fall asunder. When we look into 
 each other's eyes, and come to know each 
 other's hearts, we soon find how much good will 
 there is beneath whatever seeming estrange- 
 ment. Men of all sorts, and in all possible 
 capacities, should cross the Atlantic at the 
 present time — politicians, business men, minis- 
 ters of religion, professors and students from 
 the universities. The more exchanges we have 
 among these and all other classes of the com- 
 munity, the better for the world; and every 
 organization for mutual exchange ought to 
 be regarded as a matter of high politics and 
 encouraged to the utmost. 
 
 In the second place, the rearrangement of 
 the world will have to be organized in many 
 quarters under the system of mandatory 
 
162 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 protectorates, in which stronger nations under- 
 take the responsibility for weaker ones during 
 the present stress. In many quarters in 
 America there is adverse criticism of the idea 
 of America interfering further than she can 
 help, in European politics. Far be it from me 
 to venture to express any opinion as to the 
 Monroe Doctrine, or to give any advice about 
 it to an American audience, but I do venture 
 with great earnestness to plead that you will 
 not withdraw from cooperation with us in 
 some of the regions where we have been fight- 
 ing together, but will take your share with the 
 rest of us in mandatory powers. There are 
 certain regions where you can do this as no other 
 nation can. In the Balkans, in Macedonia, in 
 Constantinople, and in Armenia it may be 
 said without fear of contradiction that no 
 European nation enjoys such prestige as you 
 do. Your whole contact with these lands has 
 been of the missionary kind. The things which 
 have introduced you to that part of the East 
 are your mission schools and Red Cross hospi- 
 tals. In the confusion of European affairs 
 which prevails at present, no European nation 
 could accept mandatory powers in any of these 
 regions without some risk of suspicion of 
 territorial or other desires and ambitions of a 
 selfish kind. No such suspicion would attach 
 to you, and I do very earnestly trust that you 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 163 
 
 will see your way to take some such share as 
 this in the work of reorganizing the world, and 
 administering certain territories. You would 
 not wish to give advice and yet withdraw from 
 the responsibility of acting on it. You have 
 given us much advice. You have advised some 
 of the wisest and noblest courses that the world 
 has ever seen advocated, but that advice of yours 
 involved high responsibilities and serious dan- 
 gers. May we not count upon you to see this 
 thing through, and to stand side by side with 
 us as we seek to carry out into practice those 
 ideals for which we owe so large a debt to 
 you? 
 
 In the third place, there is the whole social 
 problem with its enormous industrial and 
 economic complications. In the backwash of 
 the war the world is restless, and all that 
 seething mass of dissatisfaction and sense of 
 injustice which has been smoldering for many 
 years has burst suddenly into flame. On both 
 sides of the Atlantic it is now realized that in 
 many respects the social order is going to change. 
 At such an hour it is of supreme importance 
 that you and we should stand and face these 
 things together. No Christian conscience is 
 satisfied with the social order as it has been or 
 actually is. On the other hand, it will take 
 all the wisdom and all the conscience of our 
 united statesmanship and experience to create 
 
164 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 a social order founded upon justice and stable 
 for the future. 
 
 In the fourth place, we ask you for the 
 precious gift of your idealism. Perhaps the 
 greatest contrast between America and Britain 
 lies just here. We are both idealists, but we 
 differ in this, that while you are always hitching 
 your wagon to a star, you always tell us the 
 name of the star and point to its guiding light. 
 We too have stars for our wagons, but it is a 
 national point of honor to pretend that we have 
 none! When you came to us in the day of our 
 distress and proclaimed to the war- weary men 
 in Europe the ideals that had brought you 
 across the sea, we may not have received you 
 always with effusion; but in our hearts we 
 loved that star, and blessed God for those 
 who reminded us of the things which had 
 brought us also out. A British man cannot 
 express his ideals for himself, but, in the stout 
 heart of him, he is grateful to any one who will 
 express them for him. We are a peculiar 
 people, and we are apt to be offensive when we 
 meet with anything in the way of spread-eagle, 
 or conscious rectitude which is not backed by 
 deeds. But, if you proclaim your ideals, you 
 also make them good, and that makes all th e 
 difference. We can remember the boasting 
 of the Germans, and the high-sounding words 
 that were meant to terrify the world. These 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 165 
 
 words sound contemptible enough now, when 
 we remember the midnight flight of the em- 
 peror who so freely used them, and the sur- 
 render of that fleet which was to do such mighty 
 things. You made good your ideals and you 
 rekindled ours, once again reminding the world 
 that ideals are the real powers in life, the real 
 makers of history. These things you did in 
 war, and we beseech you to continue to do them 
 in peace. Let us, each in our own peculiar 
 fashion, live consciously for the highest things 
 we know, and dedicate ourselves to such living. 
 Your franker expression will find deep echoes 
 in our hearts and consciences, and will tend to 
 keep us up to our best. 
 
 If I am not mistaken, it is the case that the 
 main lesson of your own Civil War, the lesson 
 which after fifty years seems to hold its essential 
 meaning, is this, that freedom and unity must 
 necessarily go together. When kindred men 
 fall apart, their separation impairs the freedom 
 of both parties. If that was seen in the rela- 
 tions of the North and South in 1861, how much 
 more evident is it to-day, upon the large scale 
 of East and West? In such an hour one sees 
 clearly the supreme value and necessity for 
 this high union of hearts. We are both out for 
 democracy, although we define it in somewhat 
 different terms, and in this ultimate ideal and 
 aim we are united. It is lesser things that 
 
166 SOME ASPECTS OF 
 
 divide us; the great things, the ideal things, 
 continually unite our lands and hearts. 
 
 Think of the bonds that bind us, and then 
 ask who shall separate us who are bound with 
 such bonds. To begin with there is the bond 
 of blood. And although you have fused the 
 blood of many nations into the great American 
 people, yet you have managed so to absorb it 
 as to produce a new race, enriched by contribu- 
 tions from all the world, but still keeping for its 
 main characteristic that democratic and freedom- 
 loving quality for which we and you together 
 stood throughout the struggles of early centu- 
 ries. We have also a common language, and 
 that counts for something. It must be re- 
 membered, indeed, that many of the bloodiest 
 wars have been fought between men speaking 
 the same tongue. Yet, if the union be truly 
 one of hearts, we shall be able the better to 
 consolidate it and to understand one another 
 because we need no interpreter. It is true that 
 words have different values in American usage 
 from those they bear in Britain, and that will 
 always tend toward misunderstandings between 
 unfamiliar representatives of each land. The 
 need is all the greater. for that system of ex- 
 changes for which I have already asked that in 
 this literal sense we may the more fully under- 
 stand one another's speech. 
 
 There are other bonds, however, greater 
 
INTERNATIONAL CHRISTIANITY 167 
 
 and more effective than these to-day. The 
 bond of a common service to the world, which 
 sprang from a common conscience, and was 
 sealed in the blood of a common sacrifice, may 
 well provide us with a common purpose as we 
 go forth into the future days. Only let us keep 
 clear before our eyes, let us write deep upon our 
 conscience and our will, the supreme necessity 
 for understanding, mutual allowance, and agree- 
 ment. It is the greatest day that ever dawned 
 on earth, and the most fateful hour of that day 
 has now struck. Its opportunity and its 
 responsibility are almost terrifying to con- 
 template. The fate of the world's future hangs 
 mainly upon our unity. The blood shed in the 
 past by many of the noblest of our sons demands 
 it. It demands an intelligent grasp of the 
 significance and of the necessity for our fellow- 
 ship, and a passionate determination on the 
 part of us all to retain and further it. For 
 high ends in his own great purpose God has 
 made one again at last. That which God hath 
 joined together let not man put asunder. 
 

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