What Does Christianity Mean? THE COLE LEG TTJRES 1912 What Does Christianity Mean? By W. H. P. Faunce. Cloth net 1.25 1911 Some Great Leaders in the World Movement By Robert E. Speer. Cloth net 1.25 1910 In the School of Christ By Bishop William Fraser McDowell Cloth net 1.25 1909 Jesus the Worker By Charles McTyeire Bishop, D.D. Cloth net 1.25 1908 The Fact of Conversion By George Jackson, B.A. Cloth net 1.25 1907 God's Message to the Human Soul By John Watson (Ian Maclaren). The Cole Lectures prepared but not delivered. Cloth net 1.25 1906 Christ and Science Bv Francis Henry Smith, University of Virginia. Cloth net 1.25 1905 The Universal Elements of the Christian Religion By Charles Cathbert Hall. Cloth net 1.25 1903 The Religion of the Incarnation By Bishop Eugene Russell Hendrix. Cloth net 1.00 The Cole Lectures for 19121 APR?.?, delivered before Vanderbilt University \>^v What Does Christianity Mean? By William Herbert Perry Faunce President of Brown University New York Chicago Toronto Fleming H. Revell Company London and Edinburgh Copyright, 191 2, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 125 N. Wabash Ave. Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W. London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street THE COLE LECTURES THE late Colonel E. W. Cole, of Nashville, Ten- nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and conditions of which gift are stated as follows : "The object of this fund is to establish a foundation for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib- lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its scope to a defence and advocacy of the Christian religion. The lectures shall be delivered at such intervals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the Board of Trust; and the particular theme and lecturer shall be determined by nomination of the Theological Faculty and confirma- tion of the College of Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Said lecture shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the manuscript of the same shall be the property of the University, to be published or disposed of by the Board of Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising therefrom to be added to the foundation fund, or otherwise used for the benefit of the Biblical Department." Foreword A MASTER-WORKMAN in the field of religious history pub- lished twelve years ago his volume: "What is Christianity?" and multitudes who could not fully accept his answer were stimulated and ferti- lized by Harnack's vivifying thought. The following lectures attempt the far humbler task of asking: What does our faith mean? Touching briefly on the question of " essence," they pass at once into the broader inquiry: What does Christianity intend, imply, in- volve? What is it trying to do in the modern world? Does Christianity mean any one thing, — one thing that can be stated? or does it mean every- thing, and therefore nothing? Our current conceptions of the Christian faith not only lack unity, but they often revel in diversity and di- 8 FOREWORD vergence. But uncoordinated think- ing means disorganized and incoherent living. We cannot achieve serenity and conquest, until we know what we are really trying to give the confused and struggling world. Of course any attempt at a unifying conception may succeed only by sacri- ficing what some consider vital. Cer- tainly we cannot include all things that all Christians have thought needful. We must leave many cars standing on side-tracks if we are to keep the main line open for through trains. Some men will doubtless mourn that their private car was left on a siding. But others may welcome a simple attempt to show what one busy man believes the main line to be. W. H. P. Faunce. Contents I. The Essence of Christianity 13 II. The Meaning of God . . 59 III. The Basis and Test of Char ACTER .... IV. The Principle of Fellow ship .... V. The Aim of Education . VI. The Goal of Our Effort 97 135 211 LECTURE I THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY May we know what this new teaching is? Acts 17:19 Let him take the best and most irrefragable of human notions, and let this be the raft upon which he sails through life — not without risk, as I admit, if he cannot find some word of God which will more surely and safely carry him. Plato : Phaedo The Christian religion has been tried for eighteen centuries ; but the religion of Christ re- mains to be tried. Lessing LECTURE I THE ESSENCE OF CHRIS- TIANITY TO define a little and obvious thing is often easy. To define a great and pervasive thing is often so hard as to be impossible. All of us could define, or at least describe, the house-key we carry in our pockets. We hold the shining metal in the hand, we are perfectly familiar with its size, shape, weight, and use. Because it is so small, so definite, so sharply limited, so useless for all pur- poses save one, we can define the key. So we could define the house to which the key admits us — possibly forty feet by thirty, and three stories high. But when we try to define the family that dwells within the house, to define the heredity which binds the children to their parents, to set forth the nature 13 14 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? of parental affection and filial obliga- tion and the relation of the family to the conservation of the state — at once we are moving among magnitudes too big for our little formulas, forces so impalpable and spiritual that they " break through language and escape." A realization of this difficulty has led many writers in recent years to adopt an agnostic, or at least a " positive " point of view, in dealing with the deeper problems of life. Our modern literature is all centrifugal — it flees from any central reality, and is quite content to touch a few points on the outer rim of things. It has re- acted from the bold syntheses of for- mer generations, and on the really great problems it is significantly silent. Our historians modestly narrate events, but are loath to pronounce on causes and tendencies and destinies. Our geologists will tell us of the strata in any region and of the obvious work of erosion; but about the origin or pur- pose or meaning of the physical globe they are deliberately dumb. Our THE. ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 15 students of international law tell us what the custom of modern nations has been and is, — as to what it ought to be, as to ideals of diplomacy, they have little to say. Even our school books reflect the change. The tremendous inquiry that startled the childhood of Robert Louis Stevenson, " What is the whole duty of man?" has vanished from our edu- cation, in favor of questions about the number of pennyweights in an ounce or the pints in a gallon — that startle and summon nobody. The old-fash- ioned school geography began in de- ductive fashion with a definition of the globe on which we live, its shape and size, and later proceeded to discuss localities around the pupil's home. The new geographies have reacted from all that. They often start with a description of the child's door-yard; then they consider the village street, then the city, the state, the nation; but long before the pupil reaches any thought of the world as a whole, the end of the term has arrived and the 1 6 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? study is over. Modern knowledge has been so subdivided and partitioned off that no one worker can see the whole realm, and each is very shy about any opinion as to the meaning of the whole. Each of our many sciences shrinks from the central questions of life, clings to its little garden-plot, and conscien- tiously evades the thing the world most longs to know. Now it is the peculiar gift and glory of religion that it deals with the mean- ing of life as a whole. It will not iden- tify itself with any particular occupa- tion, or science, or art. It has a message for fishermen and for philos- ophers; for oriental rabbis and for " Caesar's household. " It can flourish under Ptolemaic or Copernican astron- omy, in the cornfields of Galilee or the purlieus of imperial Rome. " This thing was not done in a corner," and it refuses to stay in any corner of human life. It declines to be modest — modesty belongs to the part and not to the whole of things — and deliber- ately intends to inherit the earth. It THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 17 is not an additional piece of furniture to be thrust into an already crowded room; it is the inflowing sunshine that shows us the use and value of all the furniture we have long possessed. It refuses to concern itself mainly with the characteristic question of science: What is the fact? and passes to the vastly deeper question: What is of abiding significance and value? Hence to define so vast and vital a power as Christianity, so world-shak- ing an innovation, may be quite be- yond our abilities. Happily for us we do not have to define Christianity before we can live by it — any more than we have to define the X-ray be- fore we can use it. Yet a definition is always a help, both because it clears away wrong conceptions, and so wrong uses, of any power, and be- cause it makes us feel at home with a power on which our lives may de- pend. What, then, is Christianity? I. It is not ritual. All the early forms of religion current among sav- age or barbarous tribes, consist chiefly 18 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? of ceremonies, incantations, and mag- ical rites. A vast amount of natural magic everywhere preceded spiritual faith. Certain objects, stones fallen from the sky, poles graven with sacred symbols, certain ceremonies, such as bathing in a special place, or eating special food, certain forms of speech used by the forefathers in the crises of life — all these seemed to possess an intrinsic efficacy to ward off evil, or to win the favour of the deity. Of course such beliefs were sheer superstition, since they are a clear denial of the law of cause and effect. Yet they still survive amid all the lights of civiliza- tion, and penetrate every stratum of society. The man who will not begin a journey on Friday, or will not occupy a room bearing the number thirteen, is denying that effects are really due to causes. He believes they are due to magic. The man who wears an amulet to ward off disease is denying all modern science and all Christian faith, and asserting his irra- tional belief in the magic power of a THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 1$ bit of stone or metal. Both rational and spiritual religion affirm that no material object carried in the pocket or worn next the skin can possibly affect the spiritual life of man for weal or woe. But superstition — belief without evidence — disregards both sci- ence and religion, and remains a bun- dle of foolish fears and futile hopes. Religion has never entirely extri- cated itself from this belief in the magic power of material things or set forms of speech. Multitudes of excel- lent people still hold to the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius or the healing power of the bones of St. Anne's wrist. Multitudes still believe that an infant dying before some cere- monial has been performed over it is a lost child, or that a dying man is somehow not sure of eternal bliss un- less some anointing is performed by an authorized official. Many men have journeyed to the Jordan that they might bathe in its sacred waters. Others even in our own time treasure bits of olive-wood from Gethsemane or 20 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? stones from Calvary, with the childish hope that in some mysterious fashion " virtue " will come out of the wood or the stone that Christ once touched. Of course the use of these things simply as symbols or memorials is fully justified. So a man may carry with him the photograph of a dead father, simply to refresh his memory and keep him in constant touch with happy days that are no more. So the wife wears her marriage ring, and the sol- dier carries aloft his banner, and the college uses its seal. So family heir- looms are handed down from father to son, and the old silver plate of a past generation is worth far more to us than its weight in sterling metal untouched by those whom we revered and loved. So religion may and must have her symbolic objects, as the cross, the crown, the dove, the letters I.H.S. They rivet attention, they utter much in little, they are a kind of shorthand by means of which we can pack the story of two thousand years into a THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 21 little space. But if we imagine that the cross on the church spire will save the building from the lightning, or the making of the sign of the cross over a dying man will affect his spiritual status, we have perverted the symbols of religion into the tools of credulity and superstition. The marriage ring may and does help the wife to remem- ber her vows, and remembering, to keep them. But the ring itself has no intrinsic efficacy in the soul of woman- hood; it cannot work apart from her consciousness and volition. The paint- ing of doves in the chancel of the church may help the devotion of the people, but cannot insure the presence of the eternal Spirit. No physical object is of any spiritual value save as by using it a man enters into new desire and will. Persons may use things, but things cannot save per- sons. This principle holds in all symbolic action. The putting on of the uniform cannot create the soldier. The don- ning of cap and gown cannot make 22 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? the scholar. First there must be an inside, an experience, — then we can have an outside, a symbolic garb. Doubtless the academic garb does help scholarship. But the garb is primarily effect, and not cause. The application of water to the body as the symbol of the cleansing and purification of the soul is as old as history. All oriental lands are filled with ceremonial washings. Moham- medan, Buddhist, Brahmin, living in hot climates, find the washing away of dust from the body the inevitable expression of the renunciation of sin. Christianity, originating in the Orient, laid hold of the same natural and beau- tiful symbolism. John the Baptist summoned all Judea to a physical rite as " meet for repentance," and Jesus found it natural to bow in the waters of the Jordan. While Jesus declined himself to baptize anyone (as Paul seems to have usually declined) yet his disciples went everywhere baptizing the nations. Obviously some of those disciples confused the outward act with THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 2$ the spiritual conversion. Such phrases as " Baptism doth now save us," or " Arise and wash away thy sins," are surely phrases Jesus himself would not have used. The only worship he re- quired was worship in spirit and in truth. Controversies about the mode of baptism, however interesting his- torically, do not touch the central problem. The real question is this: Can the application of water in any form, to any person, by any person, in itself cleanse the soul from evil? Can baptism usher a man into heaven, or insure present acceptance with God? He who answers " yes " to that question thereby breaks with all the teachings of science and all the deeper meanings of religion. He is returning to paganism, with its naive trust in the offering of beast and bird, or in the vain repetition of prescribed words. So primitive Christianity availed it- self of the universal symbolism of a common meal. To eat together al- ways has been, always will be, the out- ward and visible sign of the commun- 24 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? ion of spirits. It may greatly assist such communion. But to believe that without such an outward and visible sign the highest communion with our fellows and with God is impossible, to hold that grace is locked up in the bread and wine and is otherwise in- accessible — that is belief in magic, and thus is far removed from Christian faith. Ritual acts are natural, often beautiful, sometimes necessary; but they are never rigid, stereotyped, coercive. None of them can be of per- petual validity. In the presence of any form that would forever enchain the conscience we must say as St. Paul daringly said of the most sacred cere- mony of his race: " Circumcision is nothing." No ritual act, even the most appro- priate and venerable, can ever take rank with a moral and spiritual act. The obligation to love our enemies is eternal, written in the soul of man, though never fully realized till Jesus made it articulate in his teachings. But an obligation to use wine or bread THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 25 or water in a certain way is not dis- coverable in the soul of any man, is not eternal, and our only knowledge of such an obligation comes from a very few ancient passages about whose translation there is much dispute. The teaching of Jesus about God and prayer and forgiveness and the social order and eternal life is so abundant that no textual or historical criticism can ever weaken it in the slightest de- gree. The teaching of Jesus about ritual is confined to two occasions in his life, and the reports that have reached us are so various as to con- fuse the most loyal followers and give rise to nineteen hundred years of con- troversy. Three facts regarding all Christian ceremonial stand out clear and sharp: (1) No ritual act can change the soul of man, but it is the soul of man that alone gives value to the ritual act. (2) No command to perform a ritual act can ever rank with the com- mand to maintain spiritual attitudes and relations, since one is written on 26 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? parchment, while the other is written in the conscience of all men. (3) No ritual can ever remain in its exact original form, since we can never be sure exactly what that form was. We may have changed the hour of cele- bration of the communion supper, may have changed the number of cups used, the posture of the communicants, the nature of the wine. But the exact form of any ceremony cannot be essen- tial to him who believes that it is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profit- eth nothing. Christianity has its ritual acts, sanc- tioned by its founder, made venerable by history, rich with memory and sug- gestion. We need them, for we are flesh as well as spirit. A religion of pure thought or pure feeling may be enough for angels, but not for us. We dwell in the realm of the visible, the natural, the symbolic, and for us the word must become flesh. But Chris- tianity is not ritual; and if through some failure of translation or trans- mission it should lose every shred of THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 2J its original ceremonies, it would straightway create new forms and carve new physical channels for its spiritual and eternal message. 2. Christianity is not a series of propositions. It is not intellectual assent to a logical conclusion. Chris- tianity is not a philosophy of the un- seen; it is not an articulated creed. Here we come against the oldest and most persistent of heresies, and in dealing with it we need clear discrimi- nation. Of course Christianity has a creed. Every great experience of humanity is capable of rational interpretation. It can be thought out, and must be thought out, if it is to be held as valid for all men everywhere. The repudia- tion of theology is the repudiation of intelligence, for theology is simply the religious experience analyzed, traced back to its causes, brought into rela- tion to the historical and natural order of the world. The simple faith of the fishermen of Galilee was quite suffi- cient for Galileans. But it could never 28 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? have conquered Antioch and Rome and Alexandria, had it not been trans- lated into Greek forms of thought by the Apostle Paul. To him it was not enough to see the blinding light on the road to Damascus and be convicted of sin. At once his intelligence demanded " Who art thou, Lord? " and soon in the silence of Arabia he was thinking out the logical implications and sequences of his great spiritual upheaval. A Christianity which is incapable of intel- lectual formulation and rational de- fence is surely an illusion. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind " as well as with all thy heart. Yet it remains true in the life of the individual and the race, that religion comes before theology, as stars come before astronomy, as flowers before botany. Theology is the effect, reli- gion the cause. We must have the religious experience before we can ex- plicate and vindicate it in proposi- tional form. And millions of men have had that mighty inner experience, that THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 29 opening of the soul to God, who are totally unable to translate it into a satisfactory creed. If Christianity were creed, surely somewhere in the New Testament we should find a compact and convenient credal formula, the signing of which might give one admission to the King- dom of Heaven. But the New Testa- ment seems wholly indifferent to any such formula. It is definite and urg-- ent on questions of duty. It has explicit directions for slaves and their masters, for parents and children, for bishops and deacons. But as to the theological questions that form the backbone of the creeds of the church the New Testament is eloquently silent— either the writers have little knowledge or little interest. If Christianity were creed, then or- thodoxy would mean Christ-likeness, and those men and women who are most sound in the faith would be most unselfish and generous in char- acter. But history shows no such con- stant relation of theology to life. The 30 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? heretics in every communion have often been the most lovable of men. Granted that their theory was wrong, their hearts were right, and pectus est quod facit theologum. If Christianity were creed, we should be forced to believe that eternal bliss depends for every man on his possessing a logical mind, and so arriv- ing at a set of correct opinions. " Whosoever will be saved/' says the creed of Athanasius, " before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catho- lic faith. . . . And the Catholic faith is this, that we worship . . . neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. " But such teaching is not only with- out support in Scripture or Christian character, it is directly opposed to all Scripture and all experience. ' What doth the Lord thy God require of thee," cries the Hebrew prophet, " but to do justly, to love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?" "Come, ye blessed," says Christ in his picture of the last judgment, " for I was an THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 31 hungered and ye gave me meat." Opinions are the offspring of varying temperament, growing apprehension, changing environment. It is impos- sible that a believer in the Copernican system of astronomy should interpret the ascension of Christ, when " he went up into heaven and a cloud re- ceived him out of their sight," in the same way as a believer in the Ptolemaic idea that the earth is the centre of the sky. It is impossible that the idea of demoniacal possession should mean the same thing to Simon Peter on the one hand and to the devout Christian Louis Pasteur on the other. The " spirit of 1776 " was a vital reality long before it crystallized into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The spirit of Jesus controlling the hearts of men was a vital power long before Chalcedon or Nicaea, and will survive the disappearance of all the formulas of all the councils. Chris- tianity has a creed, but Christianity is not creed. 32 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? 3. Christianity is not history. The Christian faith indeed entered the world at a definite time and place and took its position in the historic order. If the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, it must have had a birthday and a birthplace. If it is expressed through a crucifixion, a resurrection, a Pentecostal assembly, a series of mis- sionary journeys, a conquest of the Roman Empire, surely these things must historically condition it. No faith can remain forever in the clouds. Its visions must become concrete in human action, and its spirit unfold in the institutions of society. The history of Christianity is the most important section of the history of the world. But if the Christian faith be for each of us dependent on historical study, then for most of us Christian cer- tainty has departed. Few men are competent to undertake such study, fewer still have the time, and none of us can postpone the Christian life un- til the results of our historical investi- gations are complete. Thirty years of THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 33 special study would hardly suffice to enable a man to give an expert opinion on the historicity and genuineness of the books of the New Testament. Meanwhile what becomes of a man's religious faith? Was the closing chap- ter of Mark's gospel a part of the original document, or did the Revised Version rightly question its right to hold its place? Was the great com- mission, with its fully developed trini- tarian formula, uttered by our Lord in exactly its present form? Was Paul ignorant of the story of the virgin birth, or did he designedly ignore it? These are questions of exceeding in- terest and importance, on which final truth may not be reached for many generations, and on which no demon- stration can ever be reached by any human mind. History deals with the contingent and the probable, never with the demonstrated and indubitable. The sure conclusions of mathematics are possible only when we retire from the real world of men and things and deal with imaginary quantities and 34 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? ideal relations. History knows no cer- tainty, but only greater or less prob- ability. But religion is a dream unless it can give the soul of man a joyous cer- tainty that his deepest trust shall not be put to shame. A religious faith which depends absolutely on a doubt- ful reading in an ancient manuscript, a faith which is bound up with the question whether a fish could swallow a man, or whether dead men actually rose and walked about in Jerusalem at the time of our Lord's crucifixion — such a faith is necessarily contingent, uncertain, timorous. It is never sure of itself until it has heard of the latest discovery in Egypt or Assyria, never at peace until it has read the morning paper. It is made anxious by any new interpretation of the narratives in Genesis, becomes angry at the sugges- tion of documents to be found in the Pentateuch, and cannot tolerate any discussion of the going back of the sun's shadow on the dial of Ahaz. Such a faith is at the mercy of all his- THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 35 torical study — or else historical study is at the mercy of such faith. The great victorious souls of the Christian centuries have not so learned Christ. Augustine's faith was not the result of any acceptance of historical facts, but of a following of the inner voice. Luther's faith was not based on the historicity of the book of Esther, which he condemned as with- out religious value. Bunyan's faith was not based on ancient or modern history, but on an experience wrought out in his own soul and quite inde- pendent of critics high or low. If the plain man is to depend absolutely on our professors of history for his Chris- tianity, he is indeed in evil case. If we revolt from the domination of priests, only to come under the domi- nation of specialists, we have merely exchanged one tyranny for another, with no increase of certainty or joy. Deeper than all questions of ancient texts lies the inexpugnable reality of the life of God in the soul of man. " One thing I know, now I see " — that 36 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? is the starting point and foundation of all religion. Christianity has a history, both bright and dark; but Christianity is not history. 4. Christianity is not a series of good deeds to be done or bad deeds to be avoided. Christianity is not mo- rality. Possibly the best example of honest endeavor to achieve character apart from religious impulse and en- thusiasm is to be found in the auto- biography of Benjamin Franklin. His sincere laborious efforts at self-im- provement by the daily practice of de- tached virtues are naYve and instruct- ive. He conceived character as made up of certain common-sense virtues, which he desired to possess or to pos- sess more fully. It never occurred to him, apparently, that the springs of action needed to be touched by any power coming from the unseen. That a human soul could be transformed by a great consecration, that it could be bathed in any tide of spiritual emotion, and energized by a divine impulsion — all that was outside the THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 37 purview of the " religion of common- sense " which flourished in the eight- eenth century. Rather to the men of that period religion was a highly rationalized system of ethics, and the way to inner peace was through rais- ing oneself by sheer dead-lift into vir- tuous habits. Hence he devised that famous list of thirteen distinct virtues, each one to be practised for a week, and at the end of thirteen weeks the treadmill round to begin again. Thus in the fifty-two weeks that made up the year he could go four times over those thirteen cardinal virtues, giving to each separate virtue four separate weeks of assiduous practice within the year. The virtues were arranged by him in order of difficulty, and the last two in the list were chastity and humility. Certainly those two virtues were never attained by any human being through such a self-conscious process. A little knowledge of either psychology or religion would show us that those virtues, like all the others, are attained not by self-polishing, but 38 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? by surrender of self to some higher vision or nobler inspiration. To get them we must forget them. But Franklin has benefited the world by his confessed failure. He has shown us that the complacency of the prac- tised moralist is not the door to the Kingdom of Heaven, and that he that is least in the realm of self-dedication to a higher power is greater than all the advocates of self-improvement since the world began. Religion has indeed its moral codes and its commanded virtues. The lar- gest part of the teaching of Jesus is devoted to individual and social duty. The message of the Old Testament prophets is alive with the demand for personal and national righteousness. A large section of nearly every New Testament epistle is given to the es- tablishment of the right relation of man to man. But behind all the scathing arraignments of Amos and Isaiah lies the vision of one " high and lifted up." Behind the Pauline exhor- tation to " steal no more " and to " re- THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 39 member the poor" is the declaration: " It is not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me." And behind every com- mand of Jesus to " love one another " is the consciousness: " He that sent me is with me." To the greatest teachers of humanity duty comes not as a list of things to be done or avoided, but as an overwhelming pas- sion for an ideal. The passion for rightness springs up in their souls " like the volcano's tongue of flame, up from the burning core below." Re- ligion has indeed its moral code, but religion is not morality. What, then, is Christianity? Daring to express it in a single phrase, we may say : Christianity is purpose. It is the revelation of the persistent loving purpose of the eternal God, and the implanting of that same purpose in the life of man. Again we must remember that no single phrase can hold all the aspects, or reach all the heights and depths of so great a power as Christianity. Any definition we can frame may be partial, 40 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? may need much explication and adjust- ment. We shall not catch the whole sunlight in the little mirror where we try to reflect its brightness. Yet the smallest mirror may give back a true image of the sun. And I believe that no truer language can be found to describe the Christian faith than that we have just used: Christianity is the revelation throttgh Jestis of Nazareth of the eternal unchanging purpose of God, and the developing of that same purpose in the lives and institutions of men. Why do we say this? Simply be- cause the entire life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth affirm it, and he knew what his religion was. The un- varying emphasis of Jesus in all his parables, proverbs, prayers, instruc- tions, is on the attitude, the settled desire, the persistent disposition, the purpose, of men; and the hope of Jesus, for himself and his Kingdom, is "ac- cording to the eternal purpose. " If we would know anything about the essence of Christianity, we must surely go to Christ. The apostles after THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 4* him could translate and expound and amplify in the languages and phi- losophies of Europe — they could not originate or create. Christ knows what Christianity is. If we are Christians we do not merely believe things about him ; we believe him. That is, what he held to be right we have by instinctive sympathy adopted; what he repudiated as wrong we have felt to be worthy of repudiation. What he held to be real and vital has become vital and real to us. The great realities of his consciousness are through the Chris- tian experience made real to all his disciples. He is not an authority in astronomy, or archeology, or literature: he is by virtue of his character the supreme authority of the ages on the question what sort of life is worth while. What stood out for him as central, vital, supremely important, is surely the essential element in the Christian religion. If ritual were central in Christianity, could Jesus have said: "Neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem 42 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? shall ye worship, — but in spirit and in truth "? Would he have found greater faith in the Roman centurion than in Israel? Would he have given so meagre directions regarding the sacra- ments of the church that Protestant and Catholic in their interpretations are still far asunder? If correct credal statement and be- lief were central in Christianity, could Jesus have failed to leave behind him some compendium of essential truth? If history, rightly narrated and be- lieved, is central in Christianity, then Jesus did not himself teach or preach the Christian faith, since the history was not wrought out except through his life and death and the events which immediately followed.* * One of the most dangerous of heresies is that re- cently avowed by an orthodox champion, Dr. T. P. Forsyth, in his pungent and paradoxical volume, " The Person and Place of Jesus Christ," where he makes an absolute separation between the faith which Christ held and that which he gave his disciples. He does not hesitate to represent Christ as "practising one type [of religion] and prescribing another" (p. 51). THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 43 If the practice of desirable virtues is Christianity, then Christ's religion is simply an advance on Platonism or Confucianism, and Christ is the suc- cessor and rival of Socrates, not in any sense the " Son of God with power." But in every fragment of his teach- ing that has survived Jesus emphasizes the attitude and purpose of men as decisive in character and destiny. He lays enormous stress on the will: " Whosoever willeth to do . . . shall know " — making volition the door into knowledge. He rouses the sluggish and unresolved: " What will ye that I should do unto you?" His only condemnation of the rejected, in the parable of the last judgment, is : " Ye did it not unto one of the least of these Again he distinguishes sharply between "the religion Christ presented in his vocation, and that which he cherished in his most private soul" (p. 35), and con- cludes : " It is impossible to live the religion of Jesus " (p. 56). Here extreme orthodoxy goes over bodily into the camp of those it most fears and repudiates. If Christ did not teach the Christian faith and live the Christian life, the Christian world must shift its whole allegiance from Christ to Paul or Peter. 44 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? my brethren " — where the very variety of duties unperformed (" ye fed me not . . . visited me not," etc.) shows that the evil was the lack of an all- embracing purpose. Most of his parables are parables inculcating purpose as essential to life. At the close of the story of the Good Samaritan comes the question: " Which was neighbour?" — and forever after neighbourhood became a matter, not of vicinity, but of intention. The Prod- igal Son appears as rescued the mo- ment he sincerely resolves that he will " arise and go." Jesus repudiates not the ignorant or poor, not the harlot or the publican, but the malicious and selfish. He is very patient with the " brute-like sins " — those of fleshly appetite, — and scourges the " fiend-like sins " — hate and scorn and pride. He has no list of good deeds to be done or bad ones to be avoided, no manual of moral eti- quette with its series of " don'ts." He drives with immense energy at the centre of the soul. Almost regardless THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 45 of what the man has done or may do, he bears down with resistless force on the disposition, the attitude, the in- tention seated in the citadel of per- sonality. He insists on the inwardness of character, as something far deeper than all its manifestations in posture and garb and gifts to the poor and forms of worship. When he finds the anti-social spirit masquerading behind religious ceremonial, the gentle Naza- rene lifts his " whip of small cords " high in the air. To hard-hearted wor- shippers he thunders: " Leave there thy gift before the altar! First be recon- ciled to thy brother," then talk about religion. All his beatitudes unfold the blessedness, not of conquering or pos- sessing, but of being — of being patient, and merciful, and hungry and pure. What purity involves, when translated into schools of manners and codes of law — on that Jesus has little to say. He leaves the ages to work that out, as one who opens up an overflowing spring may leave others to bottle and label the water. What " merciful " 46 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? means, whether it permits the use of animals for food, or for experiment — on that Jesus of course is silent. He emphasizes the disposition, and leaves all details untouched. Who the " peace- makers " are, whether we shall find them now among the Quakers or the military captains or the inventors — on that question Christ will not help us. He is nobly and instructively vague; or rather he is so persistently central that he will not be diverted to the margin of life. Some men have imagined that vir- tue would be greatly advanced if we had in the New Testament a sort of dictionary of conduct, so that we could open at the word " charity " or " amusements " or " politics " and find our duties neatly listed and defined. But no man is inspired or uplifted by perusal of a dictionary. The Bible be- longs not to the literature of knowl- edge, but to the literature of power. Jesus is silent regarding a thousand duties, that he may impart the sense of duty. He lets others catalogue our THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 47 sins, while he gives us the realization of sin. He launches his invective at the hardened disposition, he blasts with moral lightning the self-seeking atti- tude, resolutely commits to the outer darkness the unpitying and anti-social purpose. But he claims for his fellow- ship the cheating publican who has determined to " restore fourfold," and the sinful woman who will " go and sin no more," and the blundering apostle who can honestly say: "I am ready to go with thee to prison and to death." Not what the man has at- tained, but whither he is tending, is interesting to Jesus. Not how far a stumbling mortal has risen, but whether he is trying to rise; not what he can show of accomplishment, but what he is struggling to become — this is the test of Jesus. " What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me." Now this purposive life, which Jesus inculcates in humanity, is precisely what he reveals as existing in God. 48 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? What he wants of us is that we shall become what God forever is. It is a commonplace of our religious litera- ture that Jesus emphasized the Father- hood of God. But fatherhood, as Jesus conceived it, is simply and essen- tially purpose. " If ye give good gifts unto your children " — in such giving lies the essence of fatherhood. " Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth," and that pity creates the fatherhood. The phrase " off- spring of God " would have been im- possible to Jesus. Not what God did on creation's morning, but what he does and feels to-day makes him our Father. Jesus does not care to go back to the Garden of Eden and repeat the long genealogy: "which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God." He says nothing about man's being " created in the image of God." His interest is not in any metaphysical or original relation of God to men, but in God's present, gracious, benefi- cent attitude. When we say: "I be- lieve in God the Father Almighty," we THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 49 really say: "I believe that eternal beneficent purpose is at the heart of the world. " Fatherhood is established, not by the first chapter of Genesis, but by the Sermon on the Mount and the fourteenth chapter of St. John. It is not a philosophical theorem, but a re- ligious insight. It is against this eternal back- ground of loving purpose in God that Jesus holds up before us a life of loving purpose as the thing supremely worth while for men. Everywhere Jesus in- sists that the purpose which he re- quires of his disciples, and which he cherishes in himself, is identical with the eternal purpose of the Father. In one breath Jesus demands that his disciples shall follow him, and in the next he declares that he is at one with God. " If ye love me keep my com- mandments " is followed by the decla- ration: "I do always those things that please him." The duty of the Chris- tian to be Christ-like is thus founded on the declaration of the Christ-like- ness of God. Men are to enter into 50 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? the secret of Christ just because Christ- likeness is central in God. If God sent forth Jesus, then God must be as good as Jesus is — that is the conviction that has revolutionized the moral world. When men looked at Jesus they began to say: "God is not Baal, or Moloch, or Zeus, or Mars, not a tyrant, or a government official, or a celestial ac- countant — he gave us Jesus and he must be as good as his gift." We may readily admit that there were things Jesus did not know, for his biographers affirm it. We may con- fess that a thousand problems that now puzzle us he never faced. Yet in the single short Galilean life we see the divine quality, and quality is all that counts. Looking at the daily attitudes of Jesus, we can say: "God must be like that!" and at the same instant we say: "That is what we must become! " Beholding Jesus touching the eyes of the blind men, weeping at the grave of Lazarus, scourging the hypocrites, driving out the money-changers, bless- THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 51 ing little children, we see the char- acteristic quality of God; but we see also what should be characteristic in human life. What Jesus commanded, that he himself was. But what he was for thirty-three brief years in a single far-away province, that — as good as that — God must be throughout all ages. Those brief years are as a little rift in the clouds, through which we get a glimpse of the blue firmament beyond. The rift was small and soon was closed again. But we know the sky which overarches all is of the same color and quality as the little patch of blue that was visible. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." The language may stumble in which we try to say it; the cumbrous nomenclature of the historic creeds we may utterly re- ject, as Saul's heavy armour was re- jected by the stripling David. But somehow — say it in whatever phrases you will — the great all-conquering assurance of Christianity is that in quality and temper, in undying sym- pathy and purpose, what Christ was God 52 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? is. And then follows that great illumi- nation of life, that vision which, once seen, never departs: the religion of Jesus is nothing more and nothing less than the revealing of the pur- pose which is eternally in the life of God, and the implanting of that pur- pose in the minds and lives and laws, and institutions of men. When once we accept this insight, a vast sense of relief may well come to a perplexed and burdened church. If this is the centre and core of Chris- tianity, a multitude of other things are relegated to a subordinate position on the circumference. A score of prob- lems regarding the Christian docu- ments are at once seen to be less than central. The documentary theory of the Pentateuch or of the prophecy of Isaiah is indeed interesting and im- portant, but must never be so exalted as to obscure questions lying at the centre of faith and life. Questions of date and place and method of com- position of the New Testament books are all of interest. But no vagaries of THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 53 criticism — and its vagaries at times have been fantastic and astonishing — can hide from us the central quality in the life of Jesus. Even if we were to follow the extremest criticism of the four gospels, and resign all but the nine " pillar-passages " of Schmiedel, those passages would leave our faith un- touched and clear. That faith does not depend on any single passage, not on any manuscript discovered or yet to be discovered, not on any critical theory old or new. It is a faith which is writ- ten in all manuscripts, which shines out of every parable, sermon, saying of our Lord, which is woven as a scar- let thread into all the texture of Christ's conviction and utterance. It is a faith in the present Christ-likeness of God, and the future Christ-likeness of perfected human society. Criticism can no more rob us of that than it can render uncertain the light of Arcturus and Orion. So there are a multitude of other questions regarding ceremonial obser- vance, regarding the organization of 54 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? the church and its function in the world, regarding the accounts of the birth of Jesus, the method of the resur- rection and the ascension, the reality and mode of the life beyond, — matters of intense interest to the church, mat- ters to which no Christian can remain indifferent. Some of them may be of great importance in apologetics, in theology, in history. But never for a moment must we allow them to be- come central in our conception of the Christian faith. The moment they do become central, our faith begins to waver and share in all the fluctuations of literary and historical research. We are then as one who steps off the rock and stands on a raft moored to the rock but rising and falling with the waves of the sea. Then the air is at once filled with cries of alarm. " If the sun did not stand still in Ajalon, my Bible is gone," cries one distressed literalist. " If the fourth gospel is not the work of the apostle," cries an- other, " your faith is vain." But an- other voice is heard across our con- THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY 55 troversial storm : " O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?" It is the man of little faith who stakes it all on one precarious text, one his- torical theory, one philosophical for- mula. It is the man of broad deep faith who makes central in his thinking what was central to Jesus and holds to that, while the theories of literary and historical criticism are " as dust that riseth up and is lightly laid again." When a great storm descended on our New England coast a few years ago, scores of vessels were wrecked and the list of casualties was carefully studied. What ships were safest at the height of the hurricane? Not those that were moored at their docks on the shore — many of them were pounded to pieces. Not those ships, surely, that were without any anchor- age, drifting on the high seas, — some of them vanished and were never heard from. But those ships were safest that were anchored at one point by one stout cable, and then left free to sway 56 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? and swing with the changing winds and tides of the ocean. The men that are most secure amid the religious fluctuations of our age are not those who are stoutly fastened at every point to the laborious creeds of the past, not those who drift unattached and aim- less, but those who are anchored by one great loyalty to our Lord, and then are free to adapt themselves to the changing needs of their generation. Tenacious loyalty to the purpose of Christ — that is stability and strength. Constant readjustment to the needs of humanity — that is efficiency and service. LECTURE II THE MEANING OF GOD Through the thunder comes a human voice Saying: O heart I made, a heart beats here; Face my hands have fashioned, see it in myself. Browning In this entire world God sees himself lived out. This world, when taken in its wholeness, is at once the object of the divine knowledge and the deed wherein is embodied the divine will. Josiah Royce. Ob Alles in ewigem Wechsel kreist, Es beharret im Wechsel ein ruhiger Geist. Goethe LECTURE II THE MEANING OF GOD TO multitudes of men the word God conveys no meaning whatever. It is like x n — a printed symbol of things unknown. The name of God, when uttered, may induce a vague sense of awe or terror, as it did in the ancient Hebrews, who refused to write or speak the word Jehovah. It may bring us a sense of endless time or limitless space, like the haunting repetition of the word " Nevermore," in Poe's poem " The Raven." It may be to thoughtless minds as void of all significance as the word " jabberwock " or " bander- snatch " or any other of the names of curious creatures seen by Alice in Wonderland. Yet the fact remains that until we know what a man means by " God " 59 60 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? we do not know what he means by anything else. His attitude toward the universe is vastly more important than his attitude toward any little section of it. His centre is more significant than any point on his circumference. What a man thinks of philanthropy, of reform, of politics, of industry, is all determined absolutely by what he thinks of God. If he believes in no God, then he has no centre, and all the world for him is shreds and patches, a thing of many colours, but dislocated and unmeaning. If he believes in a celestial tyrant, he will believe in tyranny, — ecclesiastical and political and financial. If he believes in a pantheistic mist, a benign ethical con- fusion, he will prove incapable of anger or martyrdom. No pantheist could " hew Agag in pieces before the Lord/' or follow any master to prison and to death. All men admit to-day that only the fool can say in his heart: "There is no God." Any limited human intelligence, facing the vastness that science has THE MEANING OF GOD 6l revealed, and assuming to deny a uni- versal intelligence, is par excellence the fool. He is assuming omniscience in order to deny that omniscience exists. But it is not the denial of God that ails our generation, it is the slow fad- ing of the vivid sense of God out of men's lives. They do not deny him, they forget him. They cannot dis- prove, so they overlook him. They grant the theistic argument, but live an atheistic life. They still believe that God is, — somewhere, — but they question if he cares for them or hears their cry, or stoops to interfere with a world of law and order. They hesi- tate to call him a person. They cease to pray, except perhaps in church. Their very reverence tends to stifle their petition. The difficulty is that our concep- tion of the universe has grown faster than our thought of God has grown. We no longer believe in the little world of our childhood, made out of nothing in six days just about six thousand years ago. The light which 62 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? reached us last evening from some of the fixed stars started on its journey through the deeps of space before Abraham was born. We have caught a glimpse of the " dark background and abysm of time." And all through those millions of years, living creatures have come into being, lived their few days, and vanished, creatures as many as the drops in the ocean, or the mole- cules in the atmosphere. How can God care? How can there be any per- sonal oversight or sympathy for bil- lions and trillions and billions of tril- lions that have been flung into momentary consciousness, as clouds of dust are flung into brief visibility by the revolving wheels of a motor-car? Our world has grown so vast in time and space and number of organisms that our God has not kept up with our world. Recently I received a letter from an intimate friend who had just buried his only child. He wrote: " I am greatly troubled. I am losing my religion. . . . I do not want my wife to know it, THE MEANING OF GOD 63 her faith is so simple. I am only one man out of so many millions, and things must take their natural course. If the doctor is successful, we are glad. If you are shrewd, you succeed in business. Does God direct all the millions of doctors? Does he make you shrewd in business? We belittle him when we think so. These things are of small importance to him, when you consider the millions. . . . Yes- terday my wife and I went down to see the big steamship sail. We had to go through the slums. The gutters were filled with babies, most of whom will grow up and go to the devil. . . . For months we prayed together every night for our little one, and it died — it was not God, it was nature." " So many millions," my friend wrote. His thought of the world had broadened out, and his idea of God was still the same as when he was ten years old. He cannot believe that the God of his childhood is great enough to dominate the world of his manhood. He perceives universal law, unending 64 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? process, measureless space, and he can- not yet see that this tremendous phys- ical universe is to God what man's body is to his soul. He has not yet realized that the stars may be but the blood corpuscles in the inconceivable immensity, that all human history is but a single word or " accent of the Holy Ghost," and that the laws of nature are merely the habits of God. The Old Testament writers, like all Semitic minds, naturally conceived God as an oriental potentate. Isaiah saw " the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up," and all the prophets saw him in the same way. Here and there in the prophets' stern messages are gleams of faith in the divine Father- hood. But oriental royalty was the basis of the doctrine held by Israel, transmitted to Constantine, to Hilde- brand, to Cromwell, to John Knox, to Jonathan Edwards, and faithfully ex- pounded by American divines during the century of static orthodoxy that has been called the " glacial period of New England." THE MEANING OF GOD 65 But this oriental majesty came to us modified by the influence of Roman law and Roman administration, so that our later American theologians con- ceived the universe as a sort of con- stitutional monarchy, where the chief care of the sovereign is to uphold a government. Later this monarchical idea of God was softened and human- ized to the idea of a judge keeping a celestial account of the deeds of every mortal man. John Fiske tells us that in his childhood, whenever the word " God " was mentioned, he saw the image of a venerable bookkeeper, with white flowing beard, standing behind a high desk and writing down the bad deeds of John Fiske. Is it strange that a child, joining the church under such a conception of the relation of God and man, subsequently and tempo- rarily found all religious faith impos- sible? But if our thought of God could keep pace with our understanding of the world, religious faith would be as deep and satisfying as ever. In a certain New Hampshire town 66 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? years ago five boys lived in one home and attended school across the street. At recess the whole five came running back, and, as they burst into the house, the cry was often heard : " Mother, I want something to eat ! " Our thought of her was mainly that of one who controlled the pantry, and kept in sun- dry stone jars things very delicious to a boyish palate. But when her sons had grown to manhood and she still lingered with us, her hands folded from toil and her face turned toward the setting sun, we no longer thought of her in that way. ,We saw in her a spiritual presence and benediction. We asked not for things to eat or to wear, but for the gift of her peace, her unquenchable love, her faith in the un- seen. The larger thought of what she really was had quite changed the tenor of our petition. Never again can we speak of God as literally and physically walking in one garden in the cool of the day, apparently neglecting all the other regions of the world. Never again THE MEANING OF GOD 67 can we ask God to break his laws for our advantage, to work a miracle when our child is sick, to remove a disease from our household and transfer it to a household in the slums — is that the meaning of some prayers? He has a greater purpose than any I have dreamed of. His ocean has some greater object than to sail my little boat. His Hudson or his Susquehanna has some grander aim than to fill my drinking-cup. His sun has some vaster mission than to shine in at my window and light my breakfast table. He governs by law, inflexible, irre- sistible, but behind that law is a pur- pose so vast and beneficent that I can rejoice in it, even when my cup is un- filled and my boat is wrecked. To accept that purpose is to enter into peace. To incarnate it in daily life is to find what life really means. Not as last resort but as first desire, not in submission but in exultation, we say: " Thy will be done." A well known graduate * of Brown * Sam Walter Foss. 68 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? University left behind him when he passed into the unknown a suggestive little poem, called " Two Gods." A boy was born 'mid little things, Between a little world and sky, And dreamed not of the cosmic rings Round which the circling planets fly. He lived in little works and thoughts, Where little ventures grow and plod, And paced and ploughed his little plots, And prayed unto his little God. But as the mighty system grew, His faith grew faint with many scars; The Cosmos widened in his view — And God was lost among His stars. II Another boy in lowly days, As he, to little things was born, But gathered lore in woodland ways, And from the glory of the morn. As wider skies broke on his view, God greatened in his growing mind; Each year he dreamed his God anew, And left his older God behind. THE MEANING OF GOD 69 He saw the boundless scheme dilate In star and blossom, sky and clod; And as the universe grew great, He dreamed for it a greater God. In the last half century has come the inevitable reaction from crass and vulgar thoughts of God, and men have been telling us that we must conceive God as the metaphysical absolute. In Mr. Bradley's thought * of God we get away indeed from the anthropomor- phism of John Fiske's childhood, but have we found the God and Father of Jesus Christ? If it be wrong to think of God as a magnified man, is it better to think of him as an exhalation — or as a principle — or as an impersonal somewhat? Apparently the God of Mr. Bradley is so shadowy and remote that the only affirmation we can make about him is that all affirmations are misleading. We come back, therefore, with re- newed confidence to Christ's idea of God as Father of our spirits. This * " Appearance and Reality," F. H. Bradley. 70 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? conception is frankly non-philosoph- ical, and definitely ethical. It does not imply, as we have already said, any- thing about the creation of the globe or of man. Jesus is interested not in God's " essence " or " substance " — those distinctions came later when Greek speculation invaded Christian faith — but in God's attitude and God's will. That the central thing in God is intelligent, conscious, loving purpose — that is what Jesus means when he bids us say: "Our Father." But this purpose may be conceived in two ways. We may think of it as the filling out of a preconceived plan — in which case we have Calvinism in re- ligion and determinism in philosophy. Or we may conceive it as a vital impetus (ilan vital, in the phrase of Henri Bergson), an onward movement like that of an artist painting a picture, whose purpose unfolds as his work proceeds — then we have freedom in God and man, real contingency in events, and a genuinely growing world. Into the ancient and somewhat musty THE MEANING OF GOD 71 debate between determinism and free- will we have no wish to enter. Modern science is essentially Calvinistic. It proclaims laws quite as fixed as any divine decrees, a heredity more pitiless than any natural depravity, while its " natural selection " is far more ruth- less than any doctrine of election known to Geneva or to Scotland. Modern philosophy, on the contrary, is in large sections of it essentially ideal- istic, tolerant, making room for free- dom, finding in man vast undeveloped powers, and daring to attribute at least a real experience to God. The modern conception of God as pro- gressive purpose " fulfilling himself in many ways " casts a flood of light on many current problems, and while it cannot settle the world-old enigmas, it makes us quite content to ignore some of them as irrelevant. For one thing, it compels us to be- lieve in the continuous revelation of God. If that vast purpose is now un- folding in the unfolding world, we can- not conceive that all communication 72 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? of God to men stopped at a certain date near ioo A.D. We cannot believe revelation was confined to one Syrian province, and one happy century. We cannot believe that inspiration ceased with the apostles, or miracles came to an end when some Christian prophet gave up the ghost. To deny that God is now speaking to his world is the first step toward denial that he has ever spoken. Of course a certain race may for pedagogic reasons be chosen as special light-bearers — the Greeks to show us the world of beauty, the Romans to expound the value of law, the Hebrews to exalt righteousness. Of course a single personality may be chosen for the culminating expression of some truth — as Hosea or Micah or Savonarola. But to say that when the race or the person or the period has vanished, all communication of the divine ceases, and henceforth we can only make commentaries on the past — that is the crowning heresy possible to man. Rather must we believe that the universe is the " continuous con- THE MEANING OF GOD 73 versation of God with his creatures." The older orthodoxy, like the older rationalism, put God at a distance. Paley's world was like a watch once wound up, now left to run down ex- cept when the maker interfered. It is precisely that interference which has now become incredible. We cannot grant that the creation was so bungled and misshapen as to need any be- lated interference. We cannot be- lieve in a Deux ex mac /una, or a God who comes and goes, coming in at emergencies like a policeman or a fire patrol. We cannot believe that he appeared once at the creation of the world and again at the dawn of life on the planet, and again intruded into the cosmic order to establish conscious- ness or to create man. For us he is everywhere or nowhere.* His action indeed is not like that of gravitation, always the same because always blind. *"May we not be looking at the working of the Manager all the time, and at nothing else? Why- should he step down and interfere with himself? This is the lesson science has to teach theology — to look for the action of the Deity, if at all, then always; not 74 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? It may vary vastly from century to century and land to land. But the unchanging purpose behind all the variation is ever present — " Raise thou the stone and there am I." The absentee God of the Deist, the retired God of the older orthodoxy, the God outside his world as spectator, complacent or wrathful, drawing near at critical moments to steady a halting world-machine — all these conceptions have had their day. Purpose means the interpenetration, permeation, sat- uration of the whole creation with the divine. It means the immanent Will in every object in nature and every human spirit. The permeation of nature with mind is constantly becom- ing clearer as the old mechanical con- ception of the world yields and retires in the presence of biology and psy- chology. The seventeenth century through its dominant thinkers made in the past alone, nor only in the future, but equally in the present. If his action is not visible now, it never will be, and never has been, visible."— Sir Oliver Lodge, " Ideals of Science and Faith," p. 30. THE MEANING OF GOD 75 the universe a mechanism; the eight- eenth century made it a government; the nineteenth century made it a growth; the twentieth century is in- terpreting the world as growth di- rected by immanent purpose. Often those thinkers of our time who hold no brief for any religious faith are compelled by the facts to bow before something behind and within all the facts. So the naturalist, John Bur- roughs, writes: " It would seem as if all nature were permeated with mind or mind-stuff. As science has to assume the exist- ence of an all-pervasive ether to ac- count for many physical phenomena, so it appears to me we have to postu- late the universal mind to account for what we find all around us." * Again, after explaining how the cells act in the growing plant or animal, Mr. Burroughs writes: " There must be a plan which is not in the keeping of the cells. These unite, act together as the men of an * The Outlook, May 2, 1908. 7& WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? army act together in battle, carrying out a system of manoeuvres and of tac- tics of which individually they know nothing. Who does know? Whose plan is it? Who and where is the general who is conducting the cam- paign? " * Here is the " wider teleology," from which no thoughtful man can really escape. The argument from design has indeed lost much of its force. It went too far, and it made the infinite design to consist of a series of petty contrivances. It assumed that if the sun lights up my school-room, then it was created for the sake of lighting up school-rooms; that if the gulf-stream gives Great Britain a milder climate than Labrador lying in the same lati- tude, then the gulf-stream was created for British benefit; and that if from the cork-tree are produced stoppers suitable for glass bottles, then the cork-tree was designed to supply the needs of bottle-makers. That kind of reasoning led men into absurd at- * Atlantic Monthly, Dec, 1911. THE MEANING OF GOD 77 tempts at interpreting so-called " spe- cial providences/' If a vessel threat- ened with shipwreck was saved by a change in wind or tide, that was provi- dential. But if the vessel went upon the rocks the " providence " was ap- parently absent or inoperative. If a wasting disease attacked a neigh- bour's household, but left my house unharmed, I was expected to discern the divine protection. But if it at- tacked my home while sparing my neighbour's, then there was nothing providential in the course of events. If lightning struck the theatre, it was meant to be a token of divine dis- pleasure. If it shattered the meeting- house and slew the preacher, then there was no attempt to interpret the in- scrutable decree. All such easy and presumptuous reading of events as if they were wrought to advance or to thwart our petty human ends is both ludicrous and pathetic. A world which is but a series of contrivances is only a magni- fied carpenter's shop after all. That 7§ WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? is the world of Homer, where in the morning of history men could believe that Neptune raised a storm, or that Juno rushed into battle to save her favourite from death. Such a naive method of explaining storms and bat- tles suited the childhood of the race and suffices for childish minds now. But to our maturer thought no such small and accurate — accurate because small — interpretation of the purpose behind and within the world is possi- ble. We cannot say of any single object that we know why it was made, or of any single event that we are sure why it occurred. But that all these objects and events taken together are spelling out a form of self-expression for God, and so have eternal meaning for men — of that we are ever-increas- ingly sure. "This world's no blot or blank To us ; it means intensely and means good. To find its meaning is my meat and drink." When we listen to a symphony of Beethoven, we may not be sure that THE MEANING OF GOD 79 we comprehend his meaning in any single phrase of the music. Did he intend in a certain passage to rep- resent the song of birds, or the rippling of a brook, or simply to convey the idea of peace and hope? The tremen- dous chords with which he opens the Ninth Symphony — are they " the knocking of fate at the door " of humanity, or are they the beating of waves on the shore, or do they mean something else beyond our ken? Only the rash or petty mind pretends to have fathomed and compassed the musician's full intention in every bar of the music. But far more rash and petty would be the man who should dare affirm that Beethoven had no meaning, that all the notes arranged themselves by chance, and that a symphony is merely a wild dance of unintelligible noises. Only the fool could say in his heart: " There is no aim or meaning in the Ninth Symphony/' To find its mean- ing is the musician's " meat and drink." We must, then, conceive of the 80 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? world as a continuous revelation of God. All objects — from the spray of golden-rod by the road-side to the spiral nebula blazing in the midnight sky, all events — from the falling of a sparrow to the migration of a race — are but a dim articulation, in poor broken syllables, of what God is and wants us to be. Science can give us the causes of things, religion alone can interpret their value. But the world is not only a con- tinuous revelation, it is a continuous creation. The conception of an essen- tially unfinished world is one of the great gains of the last half-century. If the world is finished, it indeed is hopeless. If what we see is the best that God can do, then he is less than omnipotent or less than good. If " nature is red in tooth and claw " and God is " kind unto the unthankful and the evil," how, then, can nature be the garment of God? Only because it is an unfinished garment, still being woven, whose checkered pattern is dimly seen as the shuttles leap back THE MEANING OF GOD 8l and forth, binding many-coloured threads in strange design. The thought of the world as process rather than as flat, as a " becoming " rather than a " has been " or an " is," is at once a vast relief to religious faith and a vast inspiration to heroic endeavour. The poets have indeed always refused to think of the world as a dead thing. To them the sea has always been more than a saline solution, and mountains more than masses of rock and earth. Wordsworth has told us that he could perceive a " Something far more deeply interfused, A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." Tennyson's " Higher Pantheism " gives us the " vision of him who reigns." Bryant makes us perceive in the flight of the " Waterfowl " a guid- ing presence that produces the " cer- tain flight." Singers as well as prophets have always insisted that the 82 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? world has a soul. Now the modern study of society is making us perceive corporate meanings behind all individ- ual action. Is there a soul of the family — a something that, bequeathed from parent to child, produced in one case the pitiful Jukes family, and in another case produced the illustrious line of the Edwards family? Is there a soul of the nation, so that France and Germany, for example, are simply the collective incarnations of two op- posing temperaments and ideals? Is there a soul of the world, as Plato thought, and as Fechner in our time has reaffirmed? * Certainly this at least is clear, that the unfinished creation is plastic to the unfolding purpose of God. Not until he gets through with it can we pass *No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his ringers spin, A thing extern; my God must rule within, And whom I own for Father, God, Creator, Hold nature in himself, himself in nature; And in his kindly arms embraced, the whole Doth live and move by his pervading soul. Goethe. THE MEANING OF GOD 83 final judgment upon it. " We see not yet all things put under him." We see now all things " confused as on a darkling plain." We find all good en- tangled in bad, all truth enmeshed with error, all joy bound up with pain, all high achievement haunted by sense of failure. We see to-day a world that is like one of Rodin's sculptured figures, rough-hewn, and only in part emerged from the marble. We see a human race that is like Milton's half-created lion, "Pawing to get free his hinder parts." But this confusion of transition is the most hopeful feature of the world as we know it. On the obvious incom- pleteness and chaotic condition of the world our faith is built. If the world were a finished thing, finished six thousand years ago, our only duty would be to adjust ourselves in grim submission to an unchangeable mis- fortune. But if the world is now in process of becoming, — natura naturans 84 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? not natura natural a — then its imper- fection is the opportunity of God and the hope of man. This great expanse in space — cities and towns and deserts and swamps and " salt, unplumbed, estranging sea " — this is not the best that God can do! It is the refractory material on which he is at work. This expanse in time — migrations, battles, sieges, epidemics, delusions — this is not the Master- workman's completed thought. It is an " unfinished symphony," or rather it is the strident tuning of the instru- ments now being brought up to pitch and prepared for music that is to be. The whole world, which would oppress us as a nightmare, if we thought God was through with it, now fills us with the sense of boundless possibility, and keeps us alert for glimpses of the Mas- ter's plan. It is not carved out of nothing and left to itself; it is created, exuded, deposited from moment to mo- ment by the immanent life of God. It is not a finished block to be ap- proved or condemned; it is a block THE MEANING OF GOD 85 now on the whirling lathe, subjected to the cutting process by the pressure of an unseen hand, and we who watch may get " hints of the tool's true play." A finished world would be the death of faith; a world now rising, unfolding, now being stressed and moulded into a divine shape, and therefore half- divine, half-devilish to-day — that is the world that enables us to believe in God. "Ever fresh the broad creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds ; A single will, a million deeds." But if God be thus conceived as immanent Purpose achieving expres- sion through a plastic growing world, is not the divine life itself as yet un- realized? To put the question bluntly and crudely, does not an unfinished universe imply an unfinished God? In answering such a question we must say, first of all, that even such a God would be a higher object of worship than the solid block of imperturbability that metaphysicians call " the Abso- 86 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? lute." Nothing can possibly be less worthy of worship than a being from whom are excluded by hypothesis all feeling, thinking, striving, intending, all love and hate, all experience warm and vital — a majestic simulacrum, a gigantic and incredible abstraction! We cannot yield our souls in affection- ate surrender to the binomial theorem, or to a logical deduction, or to the Hegelian Absolute. Philosophy, in at- tempting to exalt God above all change, has depressed him below all living reality. To make a golden calf, and cry: " These be thy gods, O Israel," was indeed a stupid and degrading per- formance. But equally futile and fatuous is it to imagine a " world- ground " beyond good and evil, be- yond approval and regret, beyond all joy and grief, and then to cry: "This is thy God, O emancipated mortal ! " We can understand why the heathen rage, but not why philosophy should imagine so vain a thing.* *"This whole false notion of the unchangeableness of God goes back to a metaphysically false and aban- THE MEANING OF GOD 87 But to answer the question more directly: an unfinished world does not imply an unfinished God, except as all true life is self-developing and self- completing. He is the same yester- day, to-day, and forever. But that sameness is one of consistent achieving of purpose, not the sameness of stolid existence. It is the sameness of a flowing stream, not that of a granite obelisk. " A God without changeable inner states," says Lotze, " would answer to no religious need." And the inner states are reflected in the outer process of the world. He is forever seeking the same end through means that forever vary, through species that live and die, through dynasties that wax and wane, and worlds that are forever created and destroyed. From this point of view the universe doned notion of an ever identical stuff or substance, and should no longer be allowed to obscure our reli- gious thinking and living. We are to believe in a really living God, who is in realest reciprocal action with all the finite."— Henry Churchill King, "The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life," p. 73. 88 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? is a continuous divine achievement, and its coarse material elements are ever becoming more and more subservient to spiritual ends. God is in the thick of man's spiritual fight; as the He- brews said, " the battle is the Lord's." The Lord not only commands the bat- tle, he shares it. That there are real obstacles to the divine will is obvious. Men may cease to believe in Satan, but the presence of an " adversary " in human experience no man has ever doubted. The will of God is resisted by perverse human wills, and doubt- less by wills infra-human as well. The will of God is opposed, it may be, by space and time, by the in- ertia and opaqueness of matter, cer- tainly by the incapacity and frailty of our human nature.* At least we know that in all human afflictions he is afflicted. " Unless the Absolute * " Evil is an actual injury wrought to the life-pur- pose of God — an actual defeat, for the time being at least, of his dearest ideal. A suffering God, bearing the burden of the evil in his world — this must be the conception of the coming theology." — Gerald Birney Smith, " Biblical Ideas of Atonement," p. 312. THE MEANING OF GOD 89 knows what we know when we endure and wait, when we love and struggle, when we long and suffer, the Absolute in so far is less and not more than we are." * He is no distant com- mander viewing the struggle from a celestial retreat. The great apostle spoke of " his working which worketh in me mightily." That same pur- posive working is present in the en- tire Christian church. It is the leaven in all human governments. It lies within the migrations of peoples and the conflicts of nations. It is a per- petual " creative thrust," forcing its way through crass materials and gross minds, slowly triumphing over blind- ness and stupidity and hatred, chang- ing the quality of human lives by draw- ing them into itself, and moving irre- sistibly toward its glorious consum- mation. But this eternal purpose is not a mere blind striving, a cosmic urge, un- conscious and unloving. In that case the world would be a frightful tragedy. * Royce, " The World and the Individual," I, 364- 90 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? It would be like a locomotive whose engineer had pulled the throttle wide open and then deserted the cab. The creative force is not mere exuberant vitality overflowing in all directions at once. It is the onward thrust of spiritual being, conscious, loving, pur- posive, and sure to attain its full ex- pression. Does the divine purpose then grow as it realizes itself in and through the resisting world? Cer- tainly Tennyson thought so when he affirmed that " through the ages one increasing purpose runs." Certainly the divine purpose as we here conceive it is vastly more than a divine " decree. " It is infinitely closer to our lives than any " plan " worked out before the foundation of the world. It is the ex- pression of a present immanent God, making humanity's cause his own, gathering up into the sweep of his great progress all our hopes and fears, and making us sure that " He that shares the life of God With him surviveth all." THE MEANING OF GOD 91 Does not this conception bring God far nearer to us than all the older abstractions could do? Our heart and our flesh cry out for the living God,— not for a First Cause, or a metaphys- ical Absolute, or a World-ground, but for a living personal power achieving the realization of himself through the universe as we achieve our own ex- pression in our daily task. In this con- ception of the Eternal Purpose, slowly, irresistibly fashioning nature and hu- man nature, we find release from a thousand difficulties. Instead of in- finite substance, we have infinite pur- pose and love. Instead of discussing the nature of the attributes of God in the mediaeval way, we seek to learn in what way God is moving, and to move with him. Instead of a change- less spectator of a finished world, we see God forthputting infinite energy and sharing in our toil — "my Father worketh hitherto and I work." In- stead of a God who once entered the world by signs and wonders and then retired, we have a God who can never 92 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? enter, because he constantly fills the world he constantly creates. Instead of an external superintendent and governor, we have an internal spiritual presence from whom no man can flee. Instead of a self-centred and self- sufficing ruler, we have an immanent personal spirit, whose essence is not contemplation but activity, whose un- folding purpose is the explanation of all that is and the assurance that the universe shall not fail. When, therefore, a man rises in spirit to declare: "I believe in God the Father Almighty," he is not merely reciting a creed, he is laying the foun- dations of a worthful life. He is not affirming that he knows anything about cause or substance or infinity. He is affirming that his own experience has convinced him that there is mean- ing at the heart of the world; that a spiritual presence, conscious, pur- posive, personal, pervades all nature and all history. Such a faith co-ordi- nates and vitalizes all our broken at- tempts at being good and doing good. THE MEANING OF GOD 93 It nerves us for the moral battle. It irradiates drudgery and redeems failure. On the darkest day it enables us to say: "O living Will, that shalt endure When all that seems shall suffer shock, Rise in the spiritual rock, Flow through our deeds and make them pure." LECTURE III THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER There exists one supreme, typical, perfect Person, and there also exist innumerable in- cipient adolescent persons, getting their person- ality as they go, growing up into his likeness. William Newton Clarke Right and wrong are determined for us not so much by a standard established by the past, as by a purpose affecting the future. William Adams Brown LECTURE III THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER WHAT is a good man? Our generation is urgently de- manding a fresh answer to this old question. We have grown a little uncertain about our old classifica- tions, and question our ability to run a sharp dividing line between the sheep and the goats. The definitions of the past are plainly inadequate to the present situation. The Hebrew Psalm- ist pronounced happy the man who could seize Babylonian children and " dash them against the stones." The ideal man of the fourth century was represented by Simeon Stylites, stand- ing erect on his pillar through rain and sun. The ideal of Bunyan was a flee- ing pilgrim bent on saving himself from doom. All of tfrese conceptions 97 98 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? have in them elements of truth, but they are pathetically partial and have been at times tragically misleading. But it is not simply the ancient standards that fail to satisfy; the standards of a half-century ago seem almost equally out of date. The good man of the year 1850 could do a multi- tude of things which now shock our moral sense, and are forbidden by statute-law. The oldest meeting- house now standing in the City of Providence was erected partly by the proceeds of a lottery, to which neither state nor church felt any serious objec- tion, and gambling for charity has en- dured down to our own day. New standards have in our time created hundreds of new crimes, and have enormously enlarged the sphere of law, and so increased the possibility of breaking it. The result of the " in- surance investigations " of the last dec- ade has been to pillory before the public men whose conduct was pre- viously regarded as quite in accord with accepted standards of business THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 99 morality. For the last ten years America has been branding the men it formerly crowned, and investigating and exposing what it formerly called " success. " The " pure food law " has turned the daily procedure of thou- sands of men into a statutory crime, just as elevating any standard creates glaring deficiencies. We no longer allow industrial corporations to make contributions to a political campaign; we demand publicity where once we advised secrecy; we compel the in- spection of milk; we order the carry- ing of lights on a moving vehicle at night, and we affirm the principle of employers' liability even when it con- travenes the common law of centu- ries. The almost innumerable statutes passed annually by our legislatures are simply the enactment of the novel demands of the modern conscience. Each new law regarding marriage and divorce, or the liquor traffic, or the sale of firearms, or the building of tenements, or the licensing of motor- cars, is the registration of a new ideal 100 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? — sometimes a mistaken and blunder- ing ideal — of what a good man should be amid the complex relations of mod- ern society. None of the great moral leaders of the past could satisfy the standards of the modern church, or even of the ordinary police-court. Those leaders may have lived up to their own standards far more bravely and successfully than we live up to ours; but their standards are now antiquated and are relegated to the ethical museum. But have we, who call ourselves " foremost in the files of time," now reached a height where we can so define a good man that our definition will last? Will our children be any more content with our standards than we are with the standards of 1850? Certainly we cannot define a " good " watch in that way, or a good battle- ship, or a good picture. The once good watch is now a curiosity; the once good battleship — if it ever was good — is now scrap-iron; the good picture of Giotto or Cimabue registers a stagre THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER IOI iii the development of art. If we, then, are called upon to describe the ideal man, can we give a bill of particu- lars, a permanent inventory of virtues, a code of rules to be held binding semper et ubique et ab omnibus? To ask the question is to answer it. What- ever set of rules we lay down in this year of grace, whatever formulas of personal or social virtue we announce, our grand-children will regard them as we regard the ethical code which sanc- tioned the duel or the persecution of heretics, or the sale of indulgences, or the former maintenance of distilleries by leaders in the New England church. Shall we, then, admit that all stand- ards are passing illusions? Must we surrender the moral imperative be- cause of its varying interpretation? Multitudes of men are feeling to-day the relaxation of the old standards, and have found no new standards which can compel respect and obedi- ence. They have scoffed at the nar- row virtues of the psalm-singing Puri- tans, at the parochial piety of the New 102 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? England deacon; but they have no other ideal by which to live and die, no inner compulsion stronger than the love of pleasure. Ethical confusion has meant for our generation moral debility. The flux of standards has brought about flabbiness of intention. How shall we recover the magnificent moral intensity of our fathers? If we cannot now define the good man with the ease and assurance and finality of a former generation, what can we do? We can substitute, in place of the old static idea of formulated duties, the dynamic idea of purposeful character. We can lead men away from goodness conceived as the precise observance of a code of rules to goodness con- ceived as the steady pursuit of an ideal. We can ponder the deep insight of the saying of Paul that " law is not made for a good man," and we can proceed to show that " what the law could not do," is done wherever Christianity goes, by the compelling vision of a progressive and unfolding ideal. We may readily admit and insist that THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 103 moral rules, enforced by pains and penalties, have their place in dealing with children, or with childish and im- mature races, or with crude and child- ish minds of our own race. But we must lead all men steadily away from the idea of external obedience to a prescribed and particularized code, into the thought of the inner conquest of a moral ideal. We must turn the thought of men away from the cata- logues of deeds to be done, to the thought of a righteous purpose which alone gives to deeds any meaning and value. To carry men through this dangerous transition — from conformity to a code into loyalty to an ideal, from outer observance into overmastering purpose — that is the ethical task of our generation. The idea of goodness as obedience to a code is a very ancient one. It is not to be found in the writings of the ancient Greeks. Greece had no decalogue, and felt no need of any divinely formulated law. The Greek language contains no word exactly 104 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? corresponding to our word " duty," and Greek philosophy had little to say regarding moral obligation. Plato has clearly pictured his magistrate-philoso- pher, and Aristotle has carefully de- scribed his " great-souled " hero. But neither Plato nor Aristotle, nor any of the Greeks, conceived virtue as obedi- ence, but rather as knowledge. They assumed that any man who knew the right would choose to do it. The idea of virtue as obedience we find in the oriental religions — in the code of Ham- murabi, in the maxims of Confucius, in the explicit directions of Buddha, and above all in the austere morality of the Hebrews. The oriental mind has every- where conceived true life as subjec- tion to authority. The religions of Asia have been filled with an awful reverence, a vision of sovereignty, and their summons to mankind has been a summons to obey. It is Hebraism that has given to modern nations — especially to the Teutonic peoples, closely allied in temperament to the Hebrews — the sense of the majesty of THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 105 the moral law. Moses affirming that his " ten words " had come from heaven, was the direct ancestor of Kant affirming the splendour of the " starry heavens above and the moral law within. " Our Puritan fathers always exalted the legal portions of the Old Testa- ment at the expense of the prophetic messages. In the canon of the Old Testament as they found it, the law- books came first. The origin of such books was attended by extraordinary portents, and detailed legislation sur- rounded Israel's life with a fine net- work of ceremonial regulation. More- over the legal code was largely nega- tive in form, presenting holiness chiefly as abstinence, as avoidance of con- tamination. Ceremonial purity and moral goodness were closely associated in the Mosaic law, and — as to-day in Hinduism — virtue consisted largely in keeping away from things. " Come ye out from among them, be ye separate," was the characteristic demand of the Old Testament morality. 106 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? And the Puritanism of our English- speaking fathers was simply a develop- ment of the Hebrew idea of goodness. It was mainly a protest, at a time when protest was deeply needed. It registered the perpetual protest of serious, godly souls against an easy and " unexamined life." But its weak- ness was in its contentment with nega- tion and rejection. The line between the church and the world a century ago in New England was almost al- ways drawn according to abstinence from so-called " amusements." He who indulged in such things was of the "world"; he who conscientiously re- frained -witt prima facie of the " church." The particular sin against which we were most stringently warned in our New England childhood was that of attending the " circus." Just why the circus was fraught with moral peril we could not discover, nor can we dis- cover to-day. We only knew that the annual parade through the village streets, the annual blaze of colour and blare of trumpets, the annual alluring THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 1 07 expanse of tent-cloth — all was tabooed as leading directly to the infernal regions. Even to-day — so long do our sentiments survive our judgments — even to-day I cannot carry a child to see the performing beasts without the uneasy stirrings of old-time com- punction as I pass under the flapping tent-cloth! It is a pathetic fact that the main strength of the church was often spent in the protest against mer- riment, rather than in the summons to ethical action. In the Puritan college the curiously negative character of the early regula- tions is familiar to all students of the history of education. The prohibitions were so minute as to suggest forms of insubordination which youthful minds otherwise might never have thought of. Even forty years ago the struggle of two college classes for a cane, or the attempt to build a bonfire on the campus was punished far more severely than any real lapse in scholarship or character. Thus college immorality was largely an artificial creation, a 108 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? technical disobedience to arbitrary statutes, rather than disloyalty to any inner voice, and those students who underwent college " discipline " often became in after life the moral leaders of their time. All American education has been dominated by the idea of obedience to rules as the essential thing in character formation. The good boy has been the one who does not make a noise, or disturb others, or play truant. And after school-days are over, the good citizen has been thought of as one who does not injure others in their legiti- mate pursuits. Our statute books are rilled with prohibitions. Freedom is conceived as doing what one pleases, provided one does not injure others. Our courts are filled with the legal protests of individuals against the in- jurious acts of their neighbours, and the function of the judge and jury, of the jail and the prison and the fine, is not to encourage human action, but effect- ively to restrain it. Thus the legally praiseworthy man is the harmless THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 109 man. He may have done nothing for his neighbour, his family, his nation; he may be colourless, cold, self- absorbed, morose. But if he has ab- stained from what the law condemns, he is a correct and blameless citizen. He is not only "law-honest"; he is law-pure, law-neighbourly, law-admi- rable. Thus in church and school, in court and life, the old Hebraic conception of the good man as the obedient man, of virtue as conformity to the authori- tative code, came to have well-nigh universal acceptance. Is this a truly Christian attitude? Is conformity to statutory requirements the ideal and test of goodness? For answer we must go back to the ethics of Jesus. If we find him dis- satisfied with the divinely given moral code of his church and his nation, if he sought to deliver men from the ancestral yoke of a stereotyped con- formity, it may be the ominous moral rebellion of our age will simply drive 110 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? us back to a new appreciation of good- ness as understood by Jesus. Christianity came into Palestine with one great command : " Repent ye"; or as we should translate it: " Change your mind." It was not a change of garments, or opinions, or customs, or rules, that the prophet from Nazareth demanded, but a change of mind, of temper, of attitude, of disposition. Jesus issued no index of mala prohibita. He did not propose to uplift society by enlarging the statute-book. He gave no new com- mandment, except " that ye love one another " — a command magnificently devoid of all detail, a command to feel rather than to do. He issued no list of old things to be avoided, or new practices to be laboriously maintained. He gave no directions regarding at- tendance at synagogue or temple, re- garding fasting or tithing or making prayers or abstaining from meats or feasts or festivals. He was perplex- ingly, amazingly silent on the prohibi- tions of the national religion, on the THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER HI whole Levitical legislation, on the practices which for the church of Judea constituted piety. His clearest com- ment on the abstinences so popular in his day was this : " Give alms of such things as ye have, and behold all things are clean unto you." No wonder his teaching seemed to undermine morality. A teacher who reduced the ten commandments to two, who minimized or disregarded the entire Old Testament ceremonial, who allowed sinners and lepers to touch him, who lodged with publicans, who worked on the Sabbath day, who called long prayers " a pretence," and the moral leaders of his day " hypo- crites " — is it any wonder he was feared and hated? The objection to Jesus, made by the national church of Judea, was not theological, it was moral. It was not his opinions, but his character that men hated. They did not want to be such a man as he was; they disliked and spurned the kind of goodness he embodied. If that was goodness — that emancipation 112 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? from venerated regulations, that in- dependence of the settled code, that elusive spirituality claiming that sacred laws were made for men and not men for laws — if that was goodness, then they would have none of it. If the foundations were destroyed, what could the legally righteous do? But Jesus was content to overlook many things that he might emphasize the one thing needful — a change of mind. He did not mean to insist on punishment for the past. The trans- lation of " repent ye " by the words " do penance " in the Douay version is more than mistranslation — it is a gross perversion of our Lord's entire attitude toward human sin and its for- giveness. By repentance Christ does not mean mere useless brooding over a wrongful past. He would have us look at the sins of yesterday just long enough to recognize and repudiate them. Mere mourning over yesterday is a devitalizing process, incapacitating one for present service. But Jesus strikes at the roots of THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 1 13 character in his demand for a " change of mind." The modern science of criminology too often forgets this, in demanding simply change of environ- ment. The criminologists have done excellent service in insisting that we must do more than punish evil-doers with dull mechanical uniformity; that we must not " fit the punishment to the crime/' but rather fit it to the criminal. But what is fitting to the criminal? Not chiefly better food or housing, not merely new rules and regulations, but a new purpose — a change of mind. That prison is bad — though it be hygienically perfect — which does not focus all its effort on a psychological and moral change as the only guarantee for the future. And all schools and colleges, and all modern society must come to accept Christ's doctrine that the essential need of man is not more regulation but more purpose. The rules of the household are necessary for children, but we must as soon as possible teach 114 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? the children to do without them. A life of repression is never as strong or as safe as a life of expression. The aim of the school or college must be to bring about as soon as possible student self-government. No govern- ment is really for the people unless it is by the people. The aim of the state is not to make the people rely on the mayor or the governor for help, but to make the officials rely upon the people. As De Tocqueville said: "No phi- losopher's stone of a constitution can produce golden conduct out of leaden instincts." No laws against fraud will permanently restrain a nation that wishes to cheat. No stricter marriage laws will uplift a people that really longs for freedom in divorce. No laws against lottery and race-track will en- noble a society that prefers gambling to industry. No regulations against Sunday desecration will hinder a so- ciety that really wishes a day of labour and sport. High above all our legis- lative devices, and our ingenious re- forms by act of Congress, sounds still THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER n5 the clear summons of the Nazarene: " Change your mind ! " This demand of primitive Chris- tianity found new utterance and un- folding fifteen centuries later in the Reformers' doctrine of " justification by faith." No other doctrine has been the source of so much misrepresenta- tion, and no other has brought greater moral strength and gladness. Justifi- cation by faith is something vastly more than a forensic acquittal; something vastly more important than a matter of celestial book-keeping. No theolog- ical fiction can produce strength in the moral life. No teaching of the divine willingness to reckon essentially bad men as good men can bring permanent gain to humanity or honour to God. " To justify," whatever it may mean according to the lexicons, surely does not mean to blink moral distinctions or confuse good and evil. It does not mean to uplift man by degrading God. Justification by faith is simply classi- fication by fundamental intention and tendency. It is the declaration that he Il6 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? who in the central chambers of his soul is already aspiring toward good- ness is a good man, whatever his outer attainment may be. It is the clear apprehension and affirmation, that he who steadily intends righteousness is righteous, and should be classed with righteous men. Never was there a falser proverb than that which slurs all good intentions. The way to heaven is paved with good intentions. Mere languid desire to be somehow better indeed means little. That may simply mark " the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.' , But when in the centre of the personality a man whole-heart- edly chooses the right, the outer con- formity to the inner choice cannot be long delayed. Kant was right when he said that " the only good thing in the universe is a good will." The doctrine of Luther, so easily misunder- stood and perverted, is really the bul- wark of moral reform, the hope of every soul struggling on life's moral battlefield. A good man is one who steadily intends to be good. Out of THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 1 17 that root-intention will surely grow all the fair fruits of individual and na- tional character. And as to Luther's age came that great insight, so to our own age has come fresh perception of the value of the Christian ideal. " The new feel- ing for Christ " which Principal Fair- bairn finds in our age, is really a new realization of the necessity of replac- ing codes by personal ideals. The cry " back to Christ " is not a true ex- pression of the Christian aspiration of our time. We cannot turn back the twentieth century to the outlook of the first century. " Forward to Christ " would be a better battle-cry, since his ideal still marches far in the distance before us. The destruction of Jerusalem in A. D. 70 was a benefit to civilization and religion. It was the destruction of the entire Levitical legislation as a practicable scheme of life. And the trampling of Palestine by the armies of Titus and Cceur de Lion and Na- Il8 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? poleon, obliterating the shrines where Christian faith might linger and stag- nate, was a boon to all religion and ethics. God has permitted marching hosts to pass over Palestine, as a moist sponge is drawn over a school- boy's slate, wiping out the paths where Jesus walked, the villages where he taught, the very hills where he prayed, so as to render it forever impossible for us to attempt the mechanical repetition of his earthly life. Christian history cries to Chris- tian ethics: "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" The external imitation of Christ in garb, or custom, or ceremony, or verbal formula, is futile. Obedience to commandments, even though they be his commandments, is not enough. It is rather liberation from every code, and growth toward an ideal, that we need; in St. Paul's phrase: "that ye may grow up into him." Christian goodness is not the goodness of a copy- book, but that of a growing tree whose seed is in itself. The tree develops THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 1 19 not by imitation of the parent tree, but by participation in its life. Our goal is not conformity to a law, even though it be written with the finger of God. Goodness is to intend what God intends; it is to go as he is going. It is not to act as Judson or Living- stone or Simon Peter or Jesus acted. It is to cherish steadily the purpose ex- hibited in the life of Jesus, and find the current of our whole desire min- gling with his. Such an ethics is uni- versal; it will bear transportation. It may constrain us to refuse to live where Jesus lived, or worship as he worshipped, or act as he acted — all in the supreme desire to be what he was. Thus the Christian life becomes no servile conformity to an oriental code of law. It rather becomes steady ap- proximation to an ethical ideal which the dispassionate judgment of the world has pronounced unsurpassed and unsurpassable. Even the critical mind of John Stuart Mill was con- strained to admit: "Nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbe- 120 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? liever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than the endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life.^ * If what we have said be true, it is apparent that goodness is a form of energy, and that the highest gift of Christianity is its dynamic. When Christ came into the world force was everywhere supreme, and Christianity, in protesting against the reign of brute force, was compelled to exalt the virtues of sympathy and pity and love. But we are totally wrong if we imagine that Christian goodness is therefore a passive quality. Tolstoi, with all his flashes of wonderful in- sight, misreads the Sermon on the Mount, as well as the whole life of Christ, when he makes non-resistance the core of Christian ethics. We need not quote specific examples of our Lord's militant opposition to evil — like the wielding of the whip in the temple, and the withering rebuke to * " Essays on Religion," p. 254. THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 121 the soldiers, so that " they went back- ward and fell to the ground." We need only to remember that his entire life on earth was one long resistance to evil enthroned and defiant. But it was not the cheap physical resistance which depends on fist and sword. It was not the futile anger which madly wields the axe or the bludgeon and then dies away. It is the higher and nobler resistance, which is strong enough to disdain the mailed fist, and to rely on spiritual powers alone. It does not depend on the bayonet, be- cause its weapons are sharper and more poignant. It does not trust in musket or cannon, because it is " mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." Christian non- resistance is the rejection of modes of warfare that are futile, in favour of a telling and life-long fight against evil. Christianity exalts not the pass- ive virtues, — for there are none; all virtue is active and achieving. It ex- alts the silent virtues, which rely not on bayonets or battleships, but on 122 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? that irresistible spiritual energy which overcomes evil with good. Our strenuous occidental life cannot therefore reject the Christian ethics, as oriental and mystical. For it is Chris- tianity itself that insists on action as the test of character, and emphasizes volition as the heart of the personality. Doubtless there are some sayings in the teaching of our Lord that only the oriental mind can fully appreciate. Such sayings as, " Take no thought for the morrow,'' or " Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth," are not easily entered into by men who daily walk past banks and mills and department-stores. But the bulk of Christ's teaching was so far opposed to his race and his time that it appeals to us with far greater cogency than to dwellers in Capernaum or Nazareth. We are just beginning to appreciate its truly dynamic and almost revolu- tionary quality. Mr. John Morley speaks of the " volcanic elements that slumber in the Sermon on the Mount." Those volcanic, cataclysmic elements THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 123 are to be found all through our Lord's teaching. The national leaders around him were not deceived as to the dan- ger. They were disciples of the status quo, and Jesus was not. They wanted to prolong; he wanted to regenerate. They wanted more statutes, more obedience; he wants more achieving victorious life. Christian virtue pass- ive? ^ It is the most active, restless, aspiring, achieving type of virtue the world has ever seen. Such an ideal of goodness is peculiarly fitted to cope with our rest- less, ambitious western life. Modern life places special emphasis on action, and on the executive type of charac- ter. The so-called industrial virtues — fidelity, promptness, truth, power of initiative— are exalted in all occidental nations. These virtues are indeed easily prostituted to the greed for gain; but they are also easily har- nessed into the service of the King- dom. The virtues of punctuality and order and cooperation, of accuracy and loyalty— those virtues which our 124 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? civilization forces to the front and on which it depends — are all qualities with a religious basis. It is not strange that many of Christ's parables are illustrations drawn from the world of finance and trade — the banker, the steward, the owner of the vineyard, — a world in which Jesus found moral principles clearly at work, a world which he would claim as a portion of his Kingdom. America is the home of an industrial civilization, setting peculiar value on an active type of character. But the Christian ideal has set before us true life as more than contemplation, more than knowl- edge, — as victorious and achieving purpose. The good man is, then, one who faces the future. He does not hark back to finished standards, but reaches forth to unfinished ideals. He be- lieves he can in some measure control the future, in his own life and in the lives of others. He feels the romance of goodness, its challenge and summons to adventure. A life like that of Sam- THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 125 uel Gridley Howe, who gave himself to the emancipation of Greece, to the teaching of imprisoned Laura Bridg- man, and to the freeing of the Ameri- can slave, is a life that shows us the romantic career which awaits all abso- lute surrender to an ideal. A life such as that of Chinese Gordon or Florence Nightingale demonstrates that goodness is interesting — and if it is not, it cannot long command us. The newspaper reporters seem to be- lieve that only the abnormal is in- teresting. They are right; but they forget that the abnormal is not always the tragic or the hideous. There is an abnormal courage, an abnormal devotion, an abnormal faith — seen in the lives of apostles and prophets, and these qualities, wrought into deeds, are the most interesting elements in the story of the world. Goodness of the Christian type — which means heroism, adventure, abandon — is the most fas- cinating thing on earth, and the lives of the Knights of the Holy Grail have more of thrilling episodes than all the 126 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? lives of pirates and buccaneers since the world began. But some of you who have followed me thus far, feel, if I mistake not, a certain misgiving. You say: "I want to accept this view of loyalty to an ideal rather than submission to a code. I feel its attraction, its emancipation. But where is its imperative? It may be that the old law-books have gone; that the thunders of Sinai have ceased; that we no longer are moved by re- ward and penalty. But what shall move our generation with command- ing voice? What power shall stand over our heedless age, and compel obedience? What can take the place of the authoritative and explicit com- mands of our childhood? The doc- trine of the ideal is beautiful; but what can make it imperative?" Every teacher or preacher has asked this question. There are a few teach- ers who say that only by return to corporal punishment can we again create in our children reverence for authority. There are preachers who THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 127 hold that only by return to the lurid preaching of a century ago can we make men tremble at sin and turn to righteousness. And all of us must ask at times : " How can we in a world of freedom make goodness imperative?" But in the life of an ordinary boys' school, which is more truly authori- tative, the rules of the school or the ideals of the school? When the rules of the schoolroom conflict with the boys' ideals of honour and manhood, it is always the rules that have to give way. No demerits, no threats of flogging or expulsion, can prevail against the authority of the boyish ideal of what is right. In all athletic sports we vainly surround our students with rules of " eligibility "; it is the student ideal of what is fair or just that gives moral quality to all student games. In the well-known " Boy Scout " movement, it is the " honour of a scout," not the order of a military captain, that is effective. In commercial life, which is more influential, the laws on the statute- 128 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? book or the current notions of business integrity? Slowly but inevitably the statute-book changes, yielding to the convictions current among the people. The ideals of the church are vastly more potent than the laws passed in any ecclesiastical assembly. The truth is that our ideals, which seem so fragile, so impalpable, so helpless, are the most powerful agents known to history. The ideal of " cer- tain inalienable rights " belonging to every human being has proved mightier than all armies and navies. The ideal of tender affection represented in Mary and the child Jesus, pictured during the Middle Ages in thousands of churches and palaces and homes, was far more potent in subduing the fierce barbarians of Northern Europe than was Charlemagne or Alcuin or King Alfred. The ideal of mediaeval knighthood moulded the literature and civilization of centuries. The ideals cherished by our young people to-day — ideals of truth and honour and chas- tity and courtesy and manliness and THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER 129 womanliness — are more imperative to them than all the manuals of etiquette, the regulations of the police, the laws of the church, and even the command- ments of the Bible. Each of these ideals is grounded in a fundamental instinct of human na- ture, and the instincts are the driv- ing powers of life. The instincts, which are earlier in development than our reason, can be directed but never eradicated. They stand as unconscious powers behind the growing life, and project themselves forward into the conscious ideals that summon us to follow. Thus the instinct of imitation, deeply based in every one of us, leads to hero-worship, i.e. the conscious choice of some model. The blind in- stinct of curiosity, natural to all of us, may project itself forward into the spirit of scientific research to which a man consciously and deliberately de- votes his life. The instinct of sex, blind and unreasoning, projects itself into the spirit of chivalry with all its tender devotion to idealized woman- 130 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? hood. The instinct to co-operate with others, which we see even in brutes and insects, becomes in developed manhood a conscious and deliberate altruism. Thus the instincts, so pow- erful that they seem to threaten the very existence of character, are the basis of those still more powerful ideals which create and support character. Instinct, operating as blind irresistible force, compels the bird to build its nest and the bee to construct its hexagonal cell. The human instincts, just as powerful, are transformed into pur- poses of tremendous potency, into ideals that command us in a voice we dare not disobey. Humanity is abso- lutely governed by its ideals of good- ness and truth. To shape those ideals is to do more than to summon armies or fashion codes of law. Here, then, is our answer to the question: What is a good man? A good man is one whose fundamental purposes and ideals are good. If it be further asked: What ideals and pur- poses may be called good? We an- THE BASIS AND TEST OF CHARACTER I3 1 swer: Nineteen centuries of human experience have demonstrated the supreme value of the ideals held by Jesus. If it be further suggested that ideals and purposes are vague and feeble, while commandments are defi- nite and imperative, we answer that even commandments graven on stone in the thick darkness could not secure Israel's obedience. The " laws of the twelve tables " have long been obsolete. But the purpose of Christ is visibly and inevitably drawing all men to itself. Lieutenant Peary made many jour- neys in search of the North Pole, not because of orders from the govern- ment, not because of any outer impera- tive. His own simple explanation is the best: "Something keeps calling, calling, calling, night and day, until you can stand it no more, and you re- turn, — spell-drawn by the magic of the North." The ideal of Jesus, still call- ing across all the distances and bar- riers, is the mightiest imperative in the modern world. LECTURE IV THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP You cannot express one God in a split church. Robert E. Speer Let us never cease to be pained and penitent about this sin of separation. Let us face the facts, let us protest against them, let us repudiate them. ... I pray you, set your face like a flint against all such captious, specious arguments for a divided Christendom. ' Speak, exhort, rebuke with all authority ' those who still stand out against this clear and urgent duty of Christian brotherhood. Henry M. Sanders LECTURE IV THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOW- SHIP ONE of the most suggestive and perplexing facts in the pres- ent development of Christian- ity is this: the old historic denom- inations into which the church has long been divided are still large and steadily growing, but the finest reli- gious life of our generation frequently flows around them and over them, rather than through them. A great body of Christian impulse and devo- tion flows through the centuries like a mighty river fed from unseen sources. But as the Mississippi in the spring cuts away its own banks, and carves out unexpected channels, so the ^Christian life of our time has a sur- prising way of ignoring the old fa- miliar dykes we have built to restrain 135 136 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? it, and often prefers to create for it- self methods and instruments of which the world has never heard before. A glance at the United States census will show any man that in numbers and in property the historic divisions of American Christianity are still im- portant and impressive. Two or three of them, which have never emphasized the missionary impulse, are dwindling, content to become select circles of in- tellectual culture and social courtesy. But on the whole the historic denomi- nations are still massive, steadily in- creasing their roll of membership, their compactness of organization, and their material equipment. No one of them shows any sign of ability — though it may possess the wish — to absorb all the rest. No one of the larger Christian bodies intends to re- tire from the King's business. All the historic churches which existed in America in 1776 are here to-day, and most of them vastly larger and more effective. But at the same time we are con- THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 137 fronted with the curious and ominous fact that the purest Christian aspira- tion, the deepest Christian devotion of our day frequently makes no use of these historic channels, disregards all denominational organizations, and cre- ates its own modes of expression and achievement. The contrast between the old chan- nels and the new was brought home to me most forcibly one summer after- noon when I was making a journey through the cathedral towns of south- ern England. We had been attending the venerable service of " evening prayer " in the cathedral of Ely, where noble architecture, " windows richly dight," a clear-voiced choir and stately procession combined to hush the soul in awe and worship. To us as stran- gers the entire service was uplifting and memorable. Yet not more than twenty persons were present, scattered through the majestic nave. As we came out through the great portal into the even- ing twilight, we heard the beating of a big drum and strident voices 138 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? struggling to keep the pitch of a mar- tial tune. There before us on the vil- lage green stood a detachment of the Salvation Army, in unkempt and glar- ing garb, breaking all the laws of har- mony and rhetoric, but with a larger congregation and far greater moral passion than we had found within the noble cathedral behind us. That sight set us questioning. Why must those simple men on the village green ignore the venerable church in order to fulfil their mission? Why must they reject ordination by a bishop, and then seek absolute submission to a "general"? Why could not the Christian church find a place for the superb organizing genius of William Booth and his gifted family? Why in England and Russia and America are millions of Christian believers habitually going outside the church in order to perform the Chris- tian task? The Young Men's Christian Asso- ciation in this country is one of the most wisely conducted and effective organizations the world has ever seen. THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 139 Its growing strength is most encour- aging to all those who would see Christianity prevail in our great cities. It has steadily put first things first. It has emphasized, not differences but identities, not doctrine but life, not prestige but service. It is constantly on the watch for promising young men of our schools and colleges and is steadily lifting the type of its effort. Yet no leader in the Christian church can look upon the achievements of the Young Men's Christian Association without asking: "Why?" Why must all this splendid passion for saving and moulding human lives be diverted from church channels and made to flow through a novel society created for the purpose? Was it because of dis- loyalty to the church? The whole his- tory of the Association disproves that. Was it because the churches had too narrow a conception of their mission, too much fear of one another to co- operate, too close adherence to methods outgrown, too little space for original and inventive minds to work in? 140 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? The great growth of the organized charities in our modern cities chal- lenges in similar fashion the Christian church. In most cities the charitable effort of the church has dwindled to a shadow — a mere monthly collection for the indigent among its own members. The entire relief of the blind, the deaf, the sick, the crippled, the feeble-minded in the modern city is administered without troubling the church in the least. Formerly the fact that the lep- ers were cleansed and the deaf made to hear and the blind to see was given as the clearest evidence that the King- dom was at hand. Now such things are simply evidence of the existence of a district nursing association or an anti-tuberculosis society or an efficient municipal government, and organized Christianity has been stripped of the task and the credentials which were once its pride and joy. Does this mean progress, or not? If the city and the state will do these things, why should the church be longer burdened? But if the church loses its burden, will it THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 141 also lose its mission? After we have organized a score more of these great societies for the helping of humanity, or have vastly enlarged the function of the state, will the church become super- fluous? Is the church being emanci- pated from a needless burden, or is it being discharged from service? The great Christian Endeavor move- ment and the remarkable Chautauqua movement are both of them provoca- tive and challenging. Are their objects so foreign to the life of the church that the church must decline any official responsibility? The summer assemblies annually held at Northfield are as directly reli- gious in aim and scope as any in America. They seek nothing so much as the deepening of the spiritual life. Why then was it necessary to leave all church buildings, all denominational leadership, and organize the meetings around a single unique personality? Recently our country has been swept by an extraordinary movement called " Men and Religion. " The very name 142 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? omits all mention of the church or even of the Christian faith. It is the deliberate attempt to go outside of all historic names, methods, organizations, and leaders, and summon the men of our generation with a voice more virile, more vital, more convincing, than that which now comes through the regular services of any church. Constantly the question is asked "why people do not go to church? " A multitude of reasons are assigned — all showing that we have not reached the real reason. The real reason for di- minished attendance in many churches that were once thronged is that the people are persuaded that the vital issues of modern life are not now being discussed in our churches, but rather in our hospitals, our charitable societies, our municipal leagues, our colleges, our periodicals, our educa- tional conventions. Religious litera- ture is having to-day an enormous cir- culation. Even the demand for the old-fashioned " tracts " is still con- stant. Devotional works, manuals of THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 143 prayer and meditation, volumes of sermons and religious addresses, are poured from the press each winter, and are eagerly devoured by a people that is obviously hungry for religious solace and stimulus. The best of our popular magazines are now de- voting much space to religion, its achievements at home, its missionary effort abroad. Many popular novels turn on religious issues, and the drama often attempts to picture on the stage what would happen if one should con- sistently live out primitive Christianity amid the conditions of modern life. There is more religious aspiration abroad in our land to-day than ever before, more hearty response to the setting forth of Christian standards of action, more sincere desire to translate the life of Christ into the life of the struggling world. Why, then, do churchmen find it so hard to get together in effective plans of effort? Why are the most fertile minds obliged to go outside the church and create new instruments before they 144 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? can attempt the new tasks? Why is the church so often left on a sidetrack, while other swifter trains go thunder- ing past it to their goal? Why are the best educated members of our churches contenting themselves with pro forma attendance at " divine service " once a week, while their ethical enthusiasm, their finest altruistic passion, is poured through other channels? Is the church big enough for its task? The real difficulty lies deep and will not be removed by small measures. The difficulty is not that the Christian church is divided, but that it is divided on the wrong principle, so divided that the people who belong together cannot find one another out. The obstacle to our progress is not that denomina- tions exist, for as long as there are various historic movements, various temperaments and points of view, there must be varieties in religion. If all men could be combined in one great homogeneous body, all thinking the same thoughts and worshipping in the same way, a solid block of orthodoxy THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 145 and conformity, the world would gain little and lose much. The trouble is not that we have divisions, but that those we have are often irrational and unchristian. Every one of us knows what it is to feel nearer, in sympathy and ideal, to some men outside our own denomination than to most men within it. Every one of us knows that the foreign missionary movement in Europe and America began not by persuading any church to begin, — that proved impossible — but by selecting like-minded souls from all the churches, and banding them together in little missionary societies. The Young Men's Christian Association has pro- gressed, not by securing the official endorsement of any denomination — that would even to-day be difficult — but by selecting from many churches those fired with similar zeal for up- lifting young manhood. These various organizations, exter- nal to the church, may be unwisely planned or administered; they may work at cross-purposes; they may 146 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? prove transient in their results. But they are immensely effective in pro- viding channels for ethical passion that can find no outlet through traditional methods. They enable like-minded men fired with a common purpose to get together, regardless of the barriers, social or ecclesiastical, which held their fathers asunder. If half a dozen men, members of six different churches in an American town, wish to do some- thing concrete to help the boys who stand nightly on the street corners, they may find it quite impossible to work through a divided Christian church. Formidable questions at once arise. One church may be profoundly interested in philanthropic work, while others may deem it wholly secular. If any minister is to direct the work, of what denomination shall he be? If any church building is to be used, which church shall secure this ad- vantage? If any meetings of the boys are to be held on Sunday, what form of service shall be used? If the boys, after being civilized and instructed, are THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 147 to become church members, which church shall they join? How shall the expense of the entire movement be apportioned among the churches, and how shall each church be enabled to reap its share of the results achieved? In hundreds of places these questions have brought to a standstill the finest aspirations of Christian men. But if those six men go outside the churches and form an entirely new organization, focussed on the immedi- ate and specific task, at once a score of hereditary burdens slip away and van- ish. All who believe in the object of the organization can be allowed to join it, regardless of the mode of initia- tion. All who want to help may do so without examination as to their social or political or theological standing. Whether the boys reached through the new endeavour shall join any other as- sociation later need not be discussed, since the boy is regarded as an end in himself and not a means for upbuilding anything. Through the new organiza- tion men who are filled with the same 148 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? desire are enabled to find each other out, to ignore a thousand divisive questions and get together for effi- cient action. The novel society, what- ever we call it — " Boys' Club," " Boy Scouts/' " Junior Christian Endeav- our," or " Social Settlement," — may be short-lived and inadequate to its task. But it has this immense advan- tage — it enables men who share the same purpose to join in the same great effort. Never will the Christian church achieve its full joy and power of serv- ice until it everywhere proclaims that all who share the Christian purpose are thereby made members of the Christian fellowship.* Various other principles have long * Some of our leading American churches, unable to open their doors as widely as Christ has opened his Kingdom, have recently adopted the device of " associate membership." In effect they say to mil- lions of Christian disciples: "We recognize you as de- voted followers of our common Lord. But since you are ceremonially or doctrinally ineligible to our local fellowship we place you in our annex and print your names in our secondary list." To such pathetic straits is the Christian spirit reduced by its struggle with tradition. THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 149 been tried as the basis of fellowship. For example, there is the principle of submission to authority. That idea, which has played so large a part in history, is that all those who agree to submit in action and in thought to the divinely appointed custodians of the faith are thereby admitted to the com- pany of the faithful. This theory is worked out with perfect consistency in the Roman Catholic church. Rich and poor, learned and ignorant, Aryan and Semite can all sit side by side in her worship and her fellowship — provided they make full submission, even in their most secret thoughts, to the in- fallible authority of the Roman pontiff. The advantages of a fellowship based on authority are of course clear to us all. The benefits of a centralized or- ganization that can survey the whole field and act swiftly are obvious when we face the problems of a metropolis. Congregational independency breaks down when compelled to grapple with highly organized evil in a large city. When we are scandalized by the eccen- ISO WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? tricity of individuals, when some ill- poised clergyman defies the united common sense of all his colleagues, then we long for an authoritative hand that can reach out, and silence or banish the trouble in Israel. But in our wiser moments we realize that they that take the sword perish with the sword. There is nothing the church more dreads to-day than a trial for heresy. Ecclesiastical authority finds it quite impossible to-day to pro- duce uniformity. The church of Eng- land has always found it necessary to admit the distinctions of view-point that we describe as " high " and " low " and " broad." The Roman Catholic church is to-day rent by the great- est heresy since Luther's revolt, — the " modernism " which is as irresistible as the melting of the snow in April sunlight. Authority as a principle of fellowship is efficient indeed, but it is fatal to freedom of thought, honesty of speech, and spirituality of life. " One is your Master and all ye are brethren. " If any man is exalted by THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 15 1 the church to a place of temporary power, he is the servant of the church and not its ruler. His authority is functional, not structural or perpetual. In a democratic age ecclesiastical authority must more and more give way to ecclesiastical leadership. The time is soon coming when in religion we shall have guides but not governors, trusted leaders but not autocratic com- manders, and when intermediaries between the soul and God shall be no longer tolerated by God-fearing men. But another principle of fellowship has had wide acceptance among Prot- estants, — the principle of intellectual conformity. It has been held by many churches, sometimes explicitly and sometimes quite unconsciously, that identity of religious opinions is the basis of Christian fellowship. The word " believe," of which the New Testament makes so much, means " have confidence," and refers never to the assent of the intellect alone, but to the consent of the entire personality. 152 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? It never means acceptance of a prop- osition, but always devotion to a per- son or a cause. But it has been under- stood to mean " accept opinions," and oneness in theology has been held to be the necessary condition of oneness in life. It has indeed been explained that this identity of opinion must be re- quired only in " essentials," but still the fact remains that the basis of Prot- estant fellowship has usually been found in the agreement of ideas. The church has used the word " heresy," — which in the New Testament always means " faction," — as if it meant mere intellectual divergence, and therefore it has been tempted to set orthodoxy, right thinking, above orthopraxis, right doing. But under such circumstances intel- lectual agreement has often been pur- chased at a heavy price. Sometimes it has been maintained only by stifling scholarship. When a scholar in a church college or theological seminary knows that all his opinions have been formulated for him before he begins THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 153 to teach, he is in a pitiful position. He can survey the field of unfettered thought, but he is shut from it — like a gold-fish circling in a glass globe, look- ing through the walls he cannot pass. Students cannot really respect any teacher who they know would be penalized for any change of mind. They cannot be summoned to earnest thinking by a man who must not think himself. The churches of such a de- nomination are churches that in- sensibly come to fear openness of mind and plainness of speech and come to exalt the " safe and sane " type of ministry as the highest. They uncon- sciously emphasize the thing they fear, and an intellectual disagreement as- sumes the proportions of a mortal sin. But the chief damage resulting from insistence on identity of opinions is the driving out from the church, by swift exclusion or by slow pressure, of its most original and creative minds. The inert and flabby mind is seldom hereti- cal — it is too timid to strike out and blaze a new trail. The mind con- 154 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? tented and wooden finds it easiest to follow the average opinion, and takes its colour from the mood of the crowd. But it is precisely the energetic and dynamic spirit that is most likely, es- pecially in its early years, to jump the track of conventional opinion, and make its independent way across the fields. I do not mean that the heretics are always constructive and creative men. On the contrary they may be merely eccentric, volatile, half-baked. Heterodoxy does not mean ability, but ability is quite sure at some point on the vast intellectual horizon to mean heterodoxy. It is inconceivable that any strong original mind, facing the deepest problems of life and their his- toric solutions, should be content to state its own solution wholly in the phrases of another century or another race. Any denomination that insists on such conformity, whether through the decrees of councils or through trial by religious — or irreligious — newspapers, will steadily " lose at the top/' will drive from it the men of THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 155 intellectual and moral courage and re- tain the docile and stagnant minds. Again and again we hear men say: " I cannot accept the whole creed of my brethren; I diverge here and here; ought I to leave my church?'' The answer derived from all Christian his- tory is : " Stay in your church till the last possible moment! Unless you are actually compelled in conscience to oppose and denounce your church, stay with and help it." The men who are steadily searching for " more light to break out of God's word " are the very men the church most needs. The unsatisfied and eager minds are those we can least spare. If they, and all men like them, leave the church, what can save it from decay? Let them stay to the last moment and help the church to find and to proclaim the farther ranges of truth. It was the Huguenots, driven out of France for daring to think, who fer- tilized religiously many other parts of Europe. It was the heretical Pilgrims of England who sowed the seeds of 156 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? religious freedom in America. The humiliation of modern Spain is chiefly due to the policy pursued for centuries, of killing or driving out original and conceiving men from the counsels of the nation. Scotland by its ironclad orthodoxy compelled Carlyle to proph- esy outside its pale, as the Anglican church earlier had compelled John Wesley to leave its temples for the green fields of England. On the foreign field the missionary work of the church is hindered and sometimes completely blocked by the attempt to perpetuate occidental diver- gences in oriental life. What if an American denomination did split into two bodies a century ago as the result of a theological controversy? Must that controversy be carried over sea, explained to minds that would never have thought of it, and embalmed in institutions forever? Must the differ- ence between " regular " and " free " Baptists, between Episcopalian and " reformed " Episcopalian, be ex- pounded and made eternal in India and THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 157 China? The oriental races have troubles of their own. They have suf- fered enough from occidental diseases; must they also be inoculated with occidental sectarianism, ere they can enter the Kingdom of Heaven? May they not work out an oriental appre- hension of Christianity better and truer than ours? May not the lands that produced the Bible be competent to understand it? Amid such divergences of opinion combined with insistence on opinions as the basis of fellowship, many of our foremost thinkers and ethical leaders are to-day standing aloof from the church. Their attitude is represented by the frank utterance of one of the leading American teachers of philos- ophy, a man possessed of a deeply religious spirit. He claims that a gen- uine philosopher may well remain out- side all churches, just as a justice of the Supreme Court would remain out- side all the movements of partisan politics. While we receive such an utterance 158 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? with respect, we cannot concede its wisdom or insight. It is a reaction into sheer individualism in religion. It is blind to the necessity of union among men of faith, as among men in industry or art or politics. It puts the spectator at life's great game above the brave men who plunge in and try to play it. It is the counsel not of perfection but of isolation and despair. In union is not only strength, but insight, progress, joy. Isolation means partial vision and the blurring of the judgment. A solitary individual must lose his fervour, as a single coal on the hearthstone loses its fire. But he loses more than fervour; he loses the understanding which comes from sympathy. He knows his own intel- lectual caste, but is cut of! from the diversified communion of saints. If Christ had never contemplated a church, it would have come into being by sheer necessity. We cannot reject all visible Christian fellowship merely because dissatisfied with the bases of fellowship around us. THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 159 If then submission to authority can no longer serve as the principle of fel- lowship, if identity of opinion is mani- festly impossible, if the attitude of isolation is self-defeating, what can we do? We can return to the attitude of our Lord when he said: " Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother." That is to say, whoever lives for what God lives for, whoever cherishes the purposes of God made known to humanity through Christ, — whatever his organization or formula may be, — is in the Christian fellowship, in intimate and eternal re- lation to Christ and all who belong to him. In our hymn-books we already have this principle of fellowship frankly adopted. No denomination would dream of excluding from its hymnal any lyrical utterance of devotion be- cause of the ecclesiastical connection or the doctrinal beliefs of the singer. L When the Anglican priest conducts 160 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? worship, he uses the hymns of Charles Wesley just as freely as the Methodist preacher uses those of Bishop Heber or Bishop Ken. The Baptist sings the hymns " Nearer my God to Thee," and " In the Cross of Christ I Glory," both of them written by English Unitarians, as gladly as the Unitarian sings the hymn of the Baptist teacher, " He Leadeth me." Quaker and Presbyte- rian are grateful for " Lead, Kindly Light " and care nothing for the fact that the poem was one of the first utterances of Newman after breaking with the Protestant Church. The wid- est divergences of " belief " are for- gotten when the church begins to sing. Just as in the New Testament we have three different aspects of the truth — the Pauline, the Petrine, and the Johannine — and Peter affirming that in the writings of " our beloved brother Paul " are " some things hard to be understood," so in our Christian hym- nology we have unity underlying all varieties of apprehension. And it is the variety that makes the unity rich THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 161 and significant. A hymnal confined to the utterance of one denomination would be a poor and provincial collec- tion. Sectarianism in song has, hap- pily, never been achieved. Is there no way in which those who can sing together and pray together may be able to work together? Is there no method by which unity of devotion to Christ may become unity of action for Christ? Is there no pos- sibility that all those who have sworn allegiance to the purpose of Christ shall find out one another and achieve a co-operating fellowship? I well know the obstacles, the bar- riers ancient and strong. If we pro- pose any definite measure of co-opera- tion, thousands of men rise to protest against condoning error, against dis- loyalty to the past, against surrender of truth to pleasing sentiment. " How can we join any Federation of Churches?" some excellent men say; " Do we not thereby acknowledge as full churches some Christian bodies not organized on the New Testament 1 62 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? model? How can we engage in union services? Will not our young people be drawn away from the church of their childhood? How can we ex- change pulpits? Do we not thereby logically sanction what our standards repudiate? " But if each branch of the Christian church continues to main- tain these barriers of logic and custom, one thing is certain: the great tide of Christian devotion in our generation will sweep around the church, flow through other channels, and leave the church logical, dry, and deserted. But all the great branches of the church are to-day growingly impatient of the barriers that have kept asunder what God hath joined together. They refuse to spend their main strength henceforth in keeping the fences in repair. Reasons indeed can be given for all the separations of the past, but greater reasons can be given for co- operation now. We are coining to- gether, not because one church has out- argued another, not because we have answered all the objections that intol- THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 1 63 erance has raised, but because we have found such arguments unprofitable and such objections unimportant. The general longing for visible co-operation and fellowship does not spring from growing intellectual agreement. I hope and believe it does not spring from growing indifference to religion. It springs from sheer necessity. Bigo- try has not been convinced of its error, but it is being starved out. The churches that will not recognize their brethren of other communions are being left behind, as specimens of des- iccated and barren consistency. They may be logically correct, but they cer- tainly are jejune and impotent. If the church is to recover its leadership in the modern world, and to speak again with commanding voice in ethics, in philanthropy, in education, in gov- ernment, it must recognize this new impulse of spiritual brotherhood as divinely sent. It must, without sur- rendering any truth, open its doors as widely as Christ has opened the doors of his discipleship, and seek to make 164 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? the church of God co-extensive with the Kingdom of God. Those who are joined to Christ in a common allegiance belong in a common fellowship, and whatever theory denies that fact must soon give way. Those who cherish the purpose of God revealed through Christ are as our brother and sister and mother, and ought to be — soon shall be — visibly and publicly joined in Christian fellowship. We cannot call Christ Lord, and treat any one of his disciples as outside the family circle. Many men have imagined that this future fellowship would abolish the his- toric fellowships that already exist, and that some mighty organization of the Christian host would entirely super- sede the existing churches. That ex- pectation is such stuff as dreams are made of. Not only do our present divisions represent historic movements that cannot be ignored, but they rep- resent permanent varieties of mental habit, of social ideal, and of moral dis- position. It is not necessary or even desirable that Canon Liddon and Jerry THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 165 McAuley should use the same forms of speech when they pray. It would be as futile to impose the service of the Ely Cathedral on a rescue mission, as to transfer the Salvation Army exhor- tation into the choir of the cathedral. The sermons of Horace Bushnell would have been as useless to the circuit- riders of early Methodism, as the Anglican prayer-book would be to-day to the rough-riders of a Nevada ranch. The existing religious denominations are still strong and growing, be- cause they tend more and more to represent permanent psychological types, permanent modes of men- tal attitude and behaviour. If we should succeed in abolishing them and transferring all Christians into one huge all-embracing church, could that church be held together without tyranny? It is difficult enough for the papal power, armed with the doctrine of infallibility, to hold its clergy and laity in leash. Could Protestantism succeed as well? Could it without sur- rendering its right of private judgment 1 66 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? hold all Christians under one liturgy, one school of theology, one method of organization? The question answers itself. But without attempting that impos- sibility, we can do that for which the time is fully ripe — we can insist that all those of every name and faith who wish to co-operate in the King's business shall have opportunity and invitation to do so. If our various denominations can be enabled to plan together the en- tire Christian enterprise, the question of organic unity can be indefinitely postponed. All signs point to a grow- ing impatience and even resentment in the presence of barriers that keep asunder those already united in spirit- ual purpose. A conviction of ecclesias- tical sin is rapidly spreading through all denominations. The Protestant Episcopal Convention of the United States only two years ago adopted a report containing these memorable words: "We believe that all Christian communions are in accord with us in our desire to lay aside self-will and THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP 167 to put on the mind which is in Christ Jesus our Lord . . . We would place ourselves by the side of our fellow- Christians. . . . With grief for our aloofness in the past and for other faults of pride and self-sufficiency which make for schism, with loyalty to the truth as we see it and with respect for the convictions of those who differ from us, we respectfully submit the following resolution": (calling for a conference of all Chris- tian communions throughout the world). Almost on the same day the National Congregational Council affirmed its faith: "We must set before us the Church of Christ as he would have it, one spirit and one body, enriched with all those elements of divine truth which the separated communities of Chris- tians now emphasize separately. . . . This Council voices its earnest hope for closer fellowship with the Episco- pal Church in work and worship." Less than a year later the Northern Baptist Convention went on record as 1 68 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? follows: "With both willingness and humility to learn from others any as- pects of the way of life which we may not have held in due proportion, we will gladly enter into a Conference of all the churches of Christ looking to- ward a more perfect understanding and a clearer insight into the mind of our Saviour." No Christian, no lover of humanity can read such utterances without a beating heart, as one who, after a dark and stormy night, sees the unmistakable gleaming of the sun- rise. The dangers that come with this larger conception of fellowship are not all imaginary. There is a real possi- bility of the surrender of vital truth. There is obvious danger that all in- tense belief will be lost in mere good- nature, and that we shall merge our great convictions in a general mush of sentimentalism. In the same way schemes for international arbitration may weaken the strength of a certain type of patriotism. All the great unities of life are in danger of blurring THE PRINCIPLE OF FELLOWSHIP i6g useful distinctions in thought or diver- sities in action. But in spite of all dangers that loom up out of the future, and all the diffi- culties that stretch their protesting hands out of the past, the new ideal of fellowship is steadily rising in the sky and flooding all the fields with light. The Federation of Churches recently achieved is but a beginning. There must be federation not only in programmes and conventions but in actual service of humanity, in the pur- lieus of our cities, in the farmhouses of the country-side, in the care of the blind and the sick and the poor, in the protection of womanhood and child- hood. A federated church will be great enough in horizon and leadership and resources to attempt many tasks in philanthropy and reform which no de- nomination alone might dare to under- take. It can determine by conference with the state what shall be the par- tition of territory, what human service can best be handed over to the officials of the state. But it will be powerful 170 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? enough to hold the state itself to Chris- tian conceptions of the value of man- hood, the responsibilities of brother- hood, the pursuit of justice, the pro- tection of the weak and the poor. A united Christian church will ensure such diffusion of Christian ideals as to constitute a truly Christian state. LECTURE V THE AIM OF EDUCATION \ What boots it that for thee Justinian The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle? Dante: Purgatorio VI, 88 My purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson: Ulysses If we were to recast Descartes' formula in the light of all that has come and gone in philosophy since his day, not Cogito, ergo sum, but Ago, ergo sum is the form his maxim would take. Andrew Seth LECTURE V THE AIM OF EDUCATION MODERN psychology makes the will the core of the personality. The old psy- chology made the reason, the ratio- cinative power, central. It was be- lieved that the divine image was in some special sense resident in human reason. " O God," cried Kepler, as he swept his telescope through space, " I think thy thoughts after thee." Truly the power to think is that which most obviously differentiates men from beasts. While the brute lives for the moment, man looks before and after, he forms concepts, plans, generaliza- tions, theories, he reasons from point to point; and so marvellous is this power that many have said with Sir William Hamilton: "In man there is nothing great but mind." 173 174 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? But modern psychology accepts that dictum only with reserve. To our fore- most students to-day the emotions seem far more important than ever be- fore, and that precipitation of emotion which we call volition is the most im- portant of all the processes in man's interior life. The image of God, after all, is not to be found in a man's reason, — can we believe that God reasons from cause to effect, from part to whole, from premises to conclu- sion? — but is to be found in man's creative will, his power to bring to pass what did not before exist. Perhaps the noblest thought of God we can form is not that of a being who eternally reasons, but a being who is in eternal and irresistible movement toward righteousness. A righteous will-to-power and will-to-love may be our highest thought of the Highest One. But whatever theology may hold central in God, modern psychology cer- tainly holds that the will is the central and determining factor in the human personality. Hence the central task of THE AIM OF EDUCATION 175 education must be the "training of the will. But the will is not a faculty which can be separated out from the per- sonality and separately educated. The old " faculty psychology " has disap- peared from our books and our labora- tories. We no longer believe that a man's mind is a " bundle of faculties " as his body is an assemblage of bones and organs. The surgeon can open the human body and remove certain organs and later place them again in position. But no psychologist can segregate a man's memory or his will and give it a separate training. The memory is the man remembering, and the will is the man willing. The will is the personality in movement. Sometimes the man is remembering, and then we find it convenient to talk of his memory. Sometimes the man is imagining, and we find it useful to speak of his imagination. The per- sonality certainly has powers which can be exercised in various ways, now perceiving, now admiring, now hop- 176 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? ing, now choosing, and when we find the man's interior self moving de- cisively toward some person or object or idea, we say his " will " is exerted. This power to move decisively toward — or away from — the good, the true and the beautiful is the power which to-day most needs development and training. To make the will strong, flexible, tenacious, and to supply it with adequate motives is the highest aim in education. Yet, strangely enough, this is not the aim of most teachers or schools to-day. And there are many things in modern life which conspire to make the will flaccid and wobbling. All around us multitudes of young people are growing up undisciplined and sprawling, like a vine spreading in all directions at once, but remaining un- pruned and shapeless. What are some of the hindrances to-day to the development of efficient will- power? I. The emphasis of education dur- ing the last hundred years has been on THE AIM OF EDUCATION 177 the receptive rather than the motor powers. The best public schools of New England even thirty years ago never taught us to do anything, save to write and speak English. Doing was taught on the farm, remembering was taught in the school. The only training of the hand in the old-fash- ioned district school was that which came from pushing a pen along the lines of the copy-book. The appren- ticeship on the farm was excellent training. It included a score of occu- pations, it called for ingenuity, ver- satility, persistent toil, fearless facing of heat and cold, storm and drought, wild beasts and birds of prey, it forced men to plough and reap and build and paint, to fell the forest and watch the sky and acquire a stock of homely knowledge which was constantly tested by novel emergencies. It was not a knowledge of facts so much as of proc- esses and modes of action. Whittier has described this homespun education, this training for action given to every farmer's boy: 178 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? "Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools : Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild-flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well, How the robin feeds her young, How the oriole's nest is hung; Of the black wasp's cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay, And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans. For, eschewing books and tasks, Nature answers all he asks; Hand in hand with her he walks, Face to face with her he talks." But all this knowledge, botanical, zoological, agricultural, architectural, — knowledge of how things are done by creatures around us — was rigidly ex- cluded from the " little red school- house " of a hundred years ago. With- in that schoolhouse " the three Rs " — mere symbols of knowledge — reigned supreme. Knowledge was to be found THE AIM OF EDUCATION 179 in books, and to absorb " book-learn- ing " was to become educated. The school was thus not participation in real life, but only preparation for life. It was completely enmeshed in what Miss Jane Addams calls " the snare of preparation." Not one of the tasks im- posed by the school teacher was significant and beautiful in itself, but only to be patiently endured in the meek hope that it would lead to some- thing significant and beautiful in after life. The spelling lesson was a study of curiously lawless and irrational forms — as it is still. The multiplica- tion table was a sheer drill in memory — as it forever must be. Worst of all, the child in the schoolhouse was re- quired to spell without any object in view, to a person who already knew how to do it, or required to reckon when there was nothing to buy or sell or to reckon about. Education in that day was saved from complete failure by the many tasks outside the school which did force the growing boy or girl into decisive and creative action; i8o WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? but the school itself was quite separate from the inventive, constructive work of the farmer, the merchant, the manu- facturer. To-day our schools are be- ginning to see a new light. They are pulsating with a new ideal. We may call the new method by various names — manual training, industrial training, vocational training, " learning by do- ing," — the essential idea of it all is a new and vital relation of learning to life. But that relation was for a cen- tury ignored and forgotten in Ameri- can schools. 2. A second cause of our difficulty is the general decay of authority in our civilization, especially in the home. It has been remarked that there is just as much authority in the home as ever there was, but that now it is exercised by the children. Is it that the doctrine of evolution, superficially understood, has taken the heart out of the cate- gorical imperative, so that duty of any unconditional kind is now resented? Certainly parental authority is now feebly asserted and stoutly resisted, THE AIM OF EDUCATION l8l church authority has waned, and the majesty of the law hardly survives the current explanations of its origin or the current criticism of its administra- tion. But the child who has not learned to obey has been deprived of one of the best parts of his heritage. Unless he has learned in infancy to re- strain himself for no other reason than because he is ordered to do so by su- perior wisdom, he remains a wild, un- civilized force, a menace to the com- munity. Such menaces are all about us to-day. Better the harsh military discipline of Germany, requiring of every young man two or three of his most precious years for military serv- ice — better that, than a generation which resents all authority and con- fuses liberty with anarchy. 3. Weakness of will is promoted also by material plenty and luxury. " Endure hardness as a good soldier " has a queer and far-away sound, when spoken to the youth lolling in a friend's automobile or attending the elaborate banquet of his fraternity. The auto- 1 82 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? mobile we cannot condemn as of the evil one, but the evils that flow through it into young lives are patent and mani- fold. Only parental blindness can al- low a college Freshman to have a high- powered motor-car constantly at his disposal. It gives him too long a radius. This evening he is in one city, to-morrow in another, the next day in another state, and his rapid change of place may mean change of friends, or habits, or convictions, or moral code. A soul, like a tree, needs some physical rootage. A man, at least in his youth, must be thrust in somewhere, and made to stay put, until his character is formed. But even when the boy does remain in one home or one school, it is not easy to keep the sturdy Puritan char- acter amid luxurious surroundings. " It is possible," as Marcus Aurelius said, " to be noble, even in a palace," — possible, but difficult. Where there are no household " chores " to do, it is hard to inculcate the idea of per- sonal service. When the child knows THE AIM OF EDUCATION 183 that he can never by any possibility come to want, the great natural in- centive to effort is removed. " Why should I learn to write?" grumbled one millionaire's child; a when I am older I can hire somebody to do it for me." 4. But one of the most potent forces in weakening the will is the crowding of the population and the crowding of tasks. Dwellers in tenement houses and flats do not naturally develop the independence which comes with sep- arate dwellings, separate responsibili- ties, and a visible place in the social order. " Strap-hangers " in street-cars not only are forced to violate respect and courtesy toward others, but they cannot demand it for themselves. They lose respect for their own personality after being daily buffeted and shoved by their fellow-men. And the crowd- ing of tasks means that many men lose their life in making their living. They are relentlessly driven by engagements, weighted down like beasts of burden. " Things are in the saddle and ride 184 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? mankind." The amplitude of person- ality which characterized " the scholar and the gentleman " of fifty years ago is now so rare as to seem quaint. One writer has called attention to the con- trast between the faces of the founders of the republic as seen in their famous portraits, and the faces of our public leaders to-day. The contrast between the physiognomy of Washington and Adams and Jefferson — so calm and self-contained and finely poised — and the nervous tension seen in the faces of our present leaders is surely not imaginary. We do not say that one type of men is better than the other, but we are sure they are not the same. It is a hurried world we live in. And there is less need of hurry in our age than in any preceding, because we have steam and electricity to hurry for us, while we sit calmly giving them our orders. In an age of such complete apparatus for living, there is no pos- sible excuse for fretting and anxiety. But we seem to serve our machines in- stead of making them serve us, and THE AIM OF EDUCATION 185 so wejsee around us men of haste with- out resolve, of hurry without an object, of swift travelling but never arriving, of much ambition and little will. We see men intensely active by fits and starts, but whose wills are untrained, immature, and either flabby or violent, when they should share in the calm- ness of the stars above us: "Unaff righted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see." But enough of diagnosis. What shall we say of remedy? How can we give strength and direction to the will- power of our generation? Nothing can be more effective than the deeper absorption of the message of the Bible. For the Bible is essen- tially dynamic. It belongs — to adopt De Ouincey's distinction — not to the literature of knowledge but to the lit- erature of power. It aims straight at man's power of volition. It cares com- paratively little for the spread of knowledge. It has, of course, no scien- 1 86 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? tific interest. Whether the Old Testa- ment classification of the animals that chew the cud and divide the hoof is scientifically correct or not, none of us care to discuss. Whether the cos- mogony of Genesis is in accord with geology is a question far less impor- tant to us than to our fathers. The Bible has no interest in geology, or astronomy, or even in psychology. It is bent on one thing — moving the will to righteousness. Every historian in the Bible has a point to prove, and an effect he is trying to produce. Every writing in the Bible is a Tendenzschrift. The Biblical historians belong to the school of Froude, not that of Freeman. They care nothing for scientific im- partiality — which in history has often meant dulness and insipidity — but they write, as Macaulay, and Gibbon and all the great historians, to support a certain theory of life and to produce in their readers a certain attitude to- ward life. Jesus makes eternal life or death to hang on action or non-action. " Inas- THE AIM OF EDUCATION 187 much as ye did it not," is the pre- lude to the outer darkness. ' Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life " is Christ's condemnation of reli- gious leaders around him. ' Thy will be done as in heaven so on earth," is his greatest prayer. He has no inter- est in knowledge in the sense of mere cognition, separate from action. Or rather would I say that to him, as to the pragmatist of our time, knowledge is a species of action, is the soul in movement, and not merely in recogni- tion or contemplation. Thus the whole Bible mightily re- enforces man's power of moral voli- tion. Its heroes are all men of action. Through faith they did not draw up creeds, or define metaphysical terms — that was the task of later Christian centuries — " through faith they sub- dued kingdoms, wrought righteous- ness, put to flight armies of aliens." The first apostles conceived their gos- pel as the power of God unto salvation, and they thought of it not under philo- sophical categories, like " person " and 1 88 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? " substance " and " attribute/' but in dynamic forms — the " giving of a cup of cold water," the " doing of signs and wonders in the name of Jesus." None of the writers of the Bible were phi- losophers, if we except the Apostle Paul, and his theology was the by- product of his missionary labours. Those men were all absorbed in the problem of creating righteous human wills, and so establishing a righteous society which shall reflect and incar- nate the will of a righteous God. They have a passion for conduct. Indeed the Hebrew and the Teutonic races have been the great bearers of conscience in the ancient and the mod- ern world. The modern Latin peoples of southern Europe have followed the ancient Greeks in keeping alive the love of beauty. But it was the soul of the Hebrew race that uttered the audacious cry : " Must not even the judge of all the earth do right? " and it was the soul of all the Teutonic peoples that spoke through Luther when he cried: "I can do no other: God help me!" THE AIM OF EDUCATION 189 American life is steadily acquiring new regard for beauty of form, of colour and material. It is for us to insist that it is so fed from the great moral leaders of the past that it shall not cease to be strong in moral energy, in strength of will. It is for us to see that our flamboyant speeches about American destiny shall give way to the higher thought of American duty, and that our whole nation shall dare to say: " I come to do thy will, O God." But far outside the Biblical message we may find vast stores of material for educating the feelings in which the will originates. The heart is at last com- ing to its own in education. We now see not only that it is impossible to dissect out a boy's mind and educate that alone, but that his purely mental part, if we could separate it, is not what most needs education. It is the sentiments, the hidden sources of char- acter that most need training. Those sentiments are the driving wheels of the soul. If they are feeble and im- poverished, there is only a feeble re- 190 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? action on experience and a feeble will to move in any direction. If they are vigorous and swift, then there is a strong will which can be turned toward virtue. An old proverb says that " it is not the rearing, but the dead horse, that is hardest to drive. " Surely no sane teacher tries to " break " a boy's will. No wise teacher thinks that a good boy means one who sits still, and always has clean hands, and never causes any trouble to anybody. If that is all you can say of a boy, be sure he is in moral peril; he may be the first to go to the devil. Goodness is energy. It is not the absence of faults, it is the presence of moral dynamic. /The boy who has deep strong passions / has the raw material out of which heroes are made. He at least has something to educate. He is no tabula rasa, he is a steam-engine standing on the track with steam up. The prob- lem is not to make him go — nature has attended to that — but simply to make him go in the right direction. The education of the feelings is then THE AIM OF EDUCATION 191 the first task of the moral trainer. The act of willing cannot be severed from the feelings that go before it. The constantly recurring feelings wear channels in the brain. The angry feeling, if it persists, will eventuate sooner or later in the angry deed. The lustful images, accompanied by ever recurring pleasure, will at last issue, almost automatically, in the lustful deed. No one can permanently feel one way and act another. No one can think habitually about the evil and act the good. Hence to cultivate right feelings and attitudes toward what- ever is lovely and of good report is to make it sure that in the end the deeds will be noble and worthy. We have grown foolishly afraid of emotion, partly because of inherited Puritanic disdain for effuse expression, and partly as a reaction from the senti- mental books of our childhood. Yet a man's feelings are the source both of his opinions and his volitions. Out of the heart are the issues of life. We must stir up in our children vigorous 192 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? likes and dislikes, for these are em- bryonic volitions. Furthermore, we must reconceive and restate the aim of all study. We must insist that all studies in school and college are " instrumental," are intended not merely to put us in touch with the past, but to give us control of the future. The traditional idea of teaching has been that the function of the school is to hand down a body of knowledge, to put the child into the possession of a certain valuable herit- age. But why is the heritage valuable — valuable for what? Surely valuable in enabling the child to solve his own problems, to control his own situation and to serve his own generation. There is nothing that is worth knowing ex- cept as an aid in doing. A life of mere cognition or consideration is de- void of all worth. Merely learning things, with no sense of their value, and no desire to use them in action, is a machine-like and immoral process. The whole object of the school training is to put us in possession of knowl- THE AIM OF EDUCATION 193 edge as a means of control, as equip- ment for serviceable living. Nothing is worth knowing unless it is trans- lated into life. " Knowledge for its own sake," like " art for art's sake," is a delusion and a snare. Knowledge for life's sake is the only aim that can justify the existence of a school. From this point of view all think- ing is purposive, and all study is an attempt to get control of environment, and all the studies in every school are instruments whereby the student be- comes socially efficient. This concep- tion is in many of our schools working a revolution. Why does a boy study elementary German? The old educa- tion answered: "Because he needs discipline, or because all educated men read German, or because he will find life-long pleasure in reading it, or be- cause his sentiments will be refined and his imagination strengthened by reading it." But the new education answers: "Because by this study he will acquire a valuable instrument in social service; because he will thereby 194 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? become a more useful citizen, a more efficient helper, a wiser guide and leader of men." If we adopt this sec- ond answer, our entire method of studying German — and studying every- thing else — will be opposed to the re- ceptive and passive attitude encour- aged by the purely cultural ideals of the last century. We shall hold that no subject in school or college curric- ulum is sacred or eternal, but that every study is merely a means to an end. We shall conceive all studies, all scientific theories, all objects used in study as instrumental and pur- posive.* " A unit of subject matter," says Professor Charters, " is a way of acting. . . . Tennyson's Crossing the Bar is a way of thinking and feeling about death. . . . Multiplication is a short * " The definitions, axioms, propositions, with which Euclid makes us familiar, are instrumental concep- tions whose validity is guaranteed by no independent existence, but by the extent to which they answer in experience to the demands we make upon them." — Professor J. H. Muirhead in "Ideals of Science and Faith," p. 98. THE AIM OF EDUCATION 195 way of adding, as division is a short way of subtracting. ... A hammer is a way of driving nails. A clock is a way of telling time. . . . The map is a way of exhibiting geographical facts. . . . An institution (e.g., Presbyterian- ism) is a way of acting." From the same standpoint Professor Bagley writes: "My concept of water is simply the centre of a vast number of possibilities of conduct — drinking, bathing, swimming, drowning, pour- ing, sailing, looking at, admiring, etc."* All around us are helpless people whose knowledge is a decoration, a badge of social standing, a personal luxury, and not an instrument of action. We see them sitting in libraries and reading rooms, endlessly absorb- ing printed matter as blotting paper absorbs ink. They drink in vast quan- tities of novels, newspapers, stray scraps of useless information, but they are dreamers only, mental sponges that produce nothing and change nothing. The more knowledge they acquire the *" Methods of Teaching," p. 25. 196 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? worse is their condition, since every idea carried in the mind without re- action, without motor response, tends to render the mind feeble and inca- pable of action. Men and women are ends in themselves, but books, studies, schools are simply instruments by which human beings are trained to appropriate, efficient, virtuous action. But another necessity, quite distinct, is the acquisition of the power of vol- untary attention. Involuntary atten- tion we all possess. When the boy in the schoolhouse spies through the win- dow a balloon slowly rising into the sky, there is no trouble about atten- tion. Everything that he has known or felt disappears instantly, while his total inner self is focussed on the dark object climbing in the sky. But when the balloon has faded into the clouds, can the boy then turn back to the problem in arithmetic, and without the stimulus of the visual object concen- trate his attention on the task in hand? If he cannot, he is still an infant, not only mentally immature, but morally THE AIM OF EDUCATION 197 in danger. Voluntary attention means the power to hold an idea in the focus of the mind and keep it there until it has done its work; to hold it there in spite of distaste, or weariness, or pain. In other words, it is a species of courage. In other words, attention is morality. Perhaps, as many students say, our free will, so much discussed, is simply the power to attend to an idea and hold it steadily before the mind. If held long enough and clearly enough and vividly enough, action must follow. And precisely at this point our gen- eration oftenest fails. Our children are far more interesting and versatile than we ourselves were at the same age; they have far greater range of knowledge, more curiosity, and more contacts with the world. But they do not begin to equal their fathers in power of voluntary attention. Our whole generation suffers from what it calls nervousness and restlessness, but what Professor Miinsterberg affirms is merely lack of the power to attend 198 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? steadily to the thing in hand. He says: "That from which the people really suffer, and perhaps suffer more I than any other nation is weakness of attention. . . . The real development of mankind lies in the growth of the voluntary attention which is not pass- ively attracted, but which turns act- ively to that which is important or significant and valuable in itself. No one is born with such power. It has to be trained and educated. Yet, per- haps the deepest meaning of education is to secure this mental energy which emancipates itself from haphazard stimulation of the world, and firmly holds that which conforms to our pur- pose and ideals. " The lack of this power is the com- plaint of all our teachers to-day. Dean Shaler, so long a beloved teacher at Harvard University, wrote: "The youths of to-day have far less capacity for serious work than their fathers. There has been a serious degradation of the capacity for attention in the less studious half of the college men." THE AIM OF EDUCATION 199 Recently I met a college Sophomore in a college library, bending with a puzzled look over certain volumes from which he was vainly endeavouring to extract the meaning. " How in the world," he said, " does a man learn to sit down with a book for a whole hour at a time? After the first five minutes I find myself looking out of the window." He was trying at twenty years of age to form the ele- mentary habits of attention and con- centration which he should have formed at ten. Yet he was personally one of the most versatile and delight- ful of young men. He was simply the victim of an inefficient school, sur- rounded by a distracting social life. It is the general conviction of the college teachers who take our boys at eighteen or nineteen — it is too soon to generalize regarding girls — that they know about far more things, but think less closely and clearly than did the students of thirty years ago. One reason for this is doubtless to be found in the universal reaction 200 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? from the formal drill, the constant reiteration, and the persistent review which characterized the teaching of the earlier time. In some schools the pendulum has swung so far that the clock has almost stopped. We would not revive the abstractions and tor- tures of Colburn's " mental arithme- tic," but we may be allowed to ques- tion the sufficiency of a method which teaches arithmetic without a multipli- cation table, Latin without declension and conjugation, Greek without a lexi- con, English without grammar, and in general, conquest without strain or struggle. To induce struggle for its own sake is indeed absurd; it is akin to the paganism which puts peas in one's shoes in order to win heaven by a painful journey. But to banish strug- gle as essentially evil is both unpeda- gogical and immoral. In a famous school I saw many small children who had been engaged for nearly two years in playing with coloured worsteds and cardboard, in novel games and songs. I said to the THE AIM OF EDUCATION 201 teacher: "What does the modern school do to prepare boys and girls to face the disagreeable things of after life?" Opening wide her eyes in surprise at my innocence, she an- swered: "But there are no disagree- able things in life to one who views it rightly!" That was a fine bit of Emersonian transcendentalism. But a far sounder educational philosophy is to be found in the virile optimism of Robert Browning: "Rejoice I can Be crossed and thwarted as a man, Not left in God's contempt apart, To live a ghastly smooth life dead at heart." The object in using the gifts and games of Froebel is to train the child as soon as possible to do without them. It is beautiful indeed to see the children handling bright-colored yarns and leaping about the room while they pretend they are butterflies or birds. Yet human life has in it something sterner than bright yarns, and in one 202 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? or two important respects the life of a boy, or even a girl, should differ from that of the butterfly. Gifts and games are valuable; the old education was sadly defective without them. But the question still remains whether the boy can fall downstairs without crying, and tell the truth when it hurts him, and learn the multiplication table without whining, and master a difficulty without the promise of sugar, and face the little, but real, battles of his own intellectual and moral life without running away. We cannot of course lay the blame for all the defects of our generation at the door of the school. Super- ficiality in the school is only the diminished shadow of haste and super- ficiality in our national life. The newspaper habit has taken for most men the place of serious reading. Our age demands " snap-shots " at knowl- edge rather than " time-exposures." The short story, vivacious and piquant, has supplanted Thackeray and Scott. The lecture must be illus- THE AIM OF EDUCATION 203 trated by calcium light, or we think it dull. The preacher must not exceed twenty-five minutes, or we pull out the watch. The magazine must teem with pictures, and have a purple and gold cover, or it will never be purchased by the man running for a ferry-boat. We have to battle with the failings of our age, whether in school or church or society. But these things must not discour- age us. These are the defects of our qualities. The new world in which we live is so marvellous that it has daz- zled us. We have stood crying, like Shakespeare's Miranda: " O, brave new world! how goodly mankind is!" We have had thrust upon us more new facts than we could attend to, and we are bewildered. In due time we shall find our way to an ordered and organized life, with poise and re- pose of spirit. Meanwhile if we want to develop the strong wills that shall be competent to control the vast forces of our civilization, here is the way to do it. It is useless to exhort 204 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? men to be strong, useless to attack the weak will with punishment. We must begin with the deeper interests of the soul and cultivate them. Hun- dreds of teachers are now bidding us appeal to the " interest " of our pupils. But the real and permanent " inter- est " of the soul is something far deeper than its transient desires. The real interest of man is in doing hard things for the sake of a distant end. The real interest of the boy is not in an easy life in a cosy corner. The most interesting thing in the world is effort. When Captain Macmillan, the com- panion of Lieutenant Peary, after the long months of Arctic isolation and cold and darkness, at last reached, on the return, an outpost of civilization, he telegraphed to his home: "Best year of my life.'' Evidently to him the best year was not the easiest one. When we demand of our students that they accompany us in difficult intel- lectual adventure, that they put aside ease and sloth and luxury and con- centrate their attention on arduous THE AIM OF EDUCATION 205 endeavour, we are appealing to the permanent interests of humanity. Interest and attention, which are the roots of the will, speedily pass — we cannot help it if we would — into action. Action repeated becomes a habit, and habit soon deepens into character. Action, visible and public action, greatly strengthens the will by committing the man irrevocably to a certain kind of life. The public pro- fession of religion is from a psycho- logical standpoint of great value in strengthening the will, just as the put- ting on of the uniform is an extraor- dinary re-enforcement of the loyalty of the soldier. A man might say: " I want to be a soldier, but I refuse the meaningless trappings of patriotism. I want no uniform, no flag, no martial music. I scorn such material em- blems, and rely on my own will-power alone." Such a man is ignorant of himself and of humanity. The public commitment beyond recall, the public declaration made by banners and bugle and marching host, has profound 206 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? effect in strengthening each individual soldier's will. So the college diploma and the college colours and the col- lege song strangely re-enforce the de- sire of the college student for an edu- cation. So the church with its solemn pub- lic consecration confirms the feeble will in paths of loyalty and service. Every public act by which a man utters his religious conviction deepens that conviction into a more lasting and victorious force. To say " I will " in the secret chamber and say it once is not enough. We must say it a thousand times in public and private, say it in solemn symbol and venerable formula, say it with every sunrise and every sunset, until any reversal or retreat is impossible and inconceivable. The great leaders of men have been those who possessed this power of the ceaseless reiteration of themselves in high resolve. The men we need to-day are those who have gotten out of school and church not only pleasant thoughts of a pos- THE AIM OF EDUCATION 207 sible goodness, but the power of self- dedication to a worthy and distant end, the power to yield irreversibly to goodness and beauty and truth. He who does that can say not only: "I think thy thoughts after thee," but " I share thine eternal purpose with thee.' , Here is the goal and crown of Christian education. LECTURE VI THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT He seems to hear a Heavenly friend, And through thick veils to apprehend A labour working to an end. Tennyson: The Two Voices dio? 6 J ere\ehro fiovXr/. (And the plan of Zeus was working out its fulfillment.) Iliad I, 5 By faith we may feel ourselves citizens of an eternal and glorious cosmogony, of mutual help and cooperation, advancing from lowly stages to ever higher states of happy activity, world without end. Sir Oliver Lodge Looking for and hastening the coming of the Day of God. // Peter 3:12. LECTURE VI THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT OUR generation is remarkable for having an immense num- ber of tools to work with, and for being quite uncertain how to use them. The apparatus of living has been multiplied beyond all prece- dent, but the goal of life, perfectly clear to our Puritan fathers, now seems obscured. Our generation is like a child sitting before a dissected map or a "picture puzzle"; the child faces a mass of dislocated pieces, but has no clue to their arrangement and meaning. The equipment of civiliza- tion has amazingly advanced, from the stage-coach to the aeroplane, from the tallow candle to the incandescent lamp, from the quill pen to the type- writer. Never did any former age have such wealth of things to work 211 212 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? with. The men of our time are put- ting forth feverish energy in handling the pieces, shifting them about, com- bining and rearranging them; but still for most men there is no clue, no pattern to work by, no vision of the completed task. "Denn hat er die Theile in seiner Hand, Fehlt, leider! nur das geistige Band." In some quarters there is an at- tempt to remain permanently without any goal. Our great teachers of to- day are usually content with facts and shy of any inquiry as to their mean- ing. Physical science long ago heard Bacon's warning that " final causes " are barren as the vestal virgins, and has been devoting itself chiefly to the study of origins. Anthropology has looked backward rather than for- ward, and had far more to say about the cave-man than the super-man. Psychology has become genetic in method, and refuses to go beyond plain facts of observation and tables THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 213 of statistics. The study of law has become quite distinct from the study of justice, and sociology does not care to picture any Utopias or millenniums. In educational theory we have at present a truly chaotic condition. Is the goal of education discipline, or culture, or efficiency, or adjustment, or citizenship? — no one seems quite sure. In industry is the aim to re- store competition or to abolish it? In philanthropy we have a thousand novel schemes to alleviate a thousand ills. We have ingenious plans to miti- gate blindness, deafness, tuberculosis, desertion of families, child-labour, cruelty to animals — an endless list of specific evils and specific remedies. But the relation of these schemes to one another and to any abiding moral order is not clear. " I wept much be- cause no man was able to open the book." Now the outstanding mark of the whole Bible is its forward gaze. The Bible is eschatological to the core. It starts out indeed with a picture of 214 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? a beautiful garden, but the picture is speedily forgotten. No Hebrew prophet, and only one New Testa- ment apostle, makes any reference to the Garden of Eden. All Israel's leaders are straining forward to a " far-off divine event." Every writer stands, as it were, on tiptoe, eagerly facing the sunrise. Moses, Isaiah, Hosea, Malachi, all are dreaming of " the day of the Lord," and every New Testament apostle eagerly expects the " city of God." The men of our own generation feel a frank repugnance to this whole eschatological element in the Scrip- tures, and therein the men of our time are plainly provincial.* Our genera- tion is repelled by fantastic oriental imagery, and prefers the plain prose propositions of the Occident. It ac- cepts the Sermon on the Mount, but can make nothing of the " horns " * " If any age should be able to understand that apocalyptic element, it is our own, — an age which aspires after a humaner social order and a universal peace."— D. S. Cairns, "Christianity in the Modern World," p. 225. THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 215 in Daniel's vision or of St. John's angel with a millstone standing in the sun. The men of to-day point out that Israel's prophets were not al- ways consistent with one another, and that their expectations were frequently disappointed. Men of to-day are re- pelled by apocalyptic visions that are from our modern standpoint so com- plicated, so grotesque, so susceptible of a thousand varying interpretations. They tell us we may safely disregard this whole eschatological cloudland, and give ourselves to the ethical teach- ing of common sense. But in this attitude our generation is going too far, and showing lack of historic sympathy. An ethics with a forward gaze, an ethics striving to- ward a goal, will produce a wholly different life from an ethics concerned only with the study of the customs of savage tribes. Eschatology in its parti-coloured forms may be indeed fantastic, in its detailed anticipations may be mistaken, in its vagaries may become ludicrous or pathetic. Hun- 216 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? dreds of times it has deluded whole communities, has assembled multi- tudes in their " ascension-robes " and cast discredit on useful labour. Yet whenever the church drives it out of the door it comes in at the window. In every age theories of the impend- ing judgment-day have proved base- less and delusive; yet they are as numerous and ingenious to-day as ever. There is something in human nature that cannot be content with origins, but demands an outcome that shall justify the process. Men are not satisfied to accept the tribal cus- toms of Tasmania and the totem- poles of Alaska as an explanation of religion. They demand and expect some definite hope of a real transition from the world of the is to the world of the ought to be. The eschatological habit of the Bible has given two priceless ele- ments to Christian thought: — it has imbedded in all our thinking a per- sistent faith in God's to-morrow, and it has made our expectation of that THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 217 to-morrow communal rather than in- dividualistic, social rather than per- sonal. We grant at once that specu- lations as to the number of the beasts in the Apocalypse are unedifying and puerile; we look with pity or con- tempt on the chiliastic theories that have deluded the faithful and wrecked their faith. But behind all these in- substantial pageants faded lies the great gift of the forward gaze, the optimistic outlook and unconquerable evidence of things not seen. If es- chatology means indomitable faith in a divine order of society yet to be set up on this earth, then without eschatology Christianity would cease to be. Just because of this element in the early records of Christianity, the church has believed in " Hope that can never die, Effort and expectation and desire, And something evermore about to be." Jesus adopted in his teaching con- siderable of the apocalyptic dress that was used by his nation. He clothed 218 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? his thought in that oriental garb as he clothed his body in tunic and tur- ban. We can cast aside the imagery of the " twelve thrones," and " coming in the clouds of heaven/' and the " great sound of a trumpet," as we cast aside other garments now an- tiquated. But the essential fact of a coming Kingdom of God to be estab- lished in the life of humanity, — if we cast that aside there is no Christianity left. Nearly every one of Christ's parables begins: " The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . ." In the centre of the Lord's Prayer is the petition for the Kingdom. In the centre of the Lord's life is deathless determina- tion to erect that Kingdom on the earth. What he has in mind is a union of all souls that are in union with God, a world-order in which the will of God shall be reproduced in all human lives. To establish that King- dom in east and west and north and south, in trade and industry, in philanthropy and education and gov- ernment and religion, in home and THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 219 school and church, among all nations and all races— all that, whether fully anticipated or not, is now seen to be involved in the great over-mastering vision of Jesus of Nazareth.* It is obvious that here is an aim so large and lofty that one cannot possibly outgrow it. Many of the ambitions that mightily attract men are in due time surpassed and left behind, as one sails past a familiar headland on the coast. But we can no more sail beyond the Kingdom than we can sail beyond the North Star. Cecil Rhodes cherished for many years his great dream of a union of all English-speaking peoples under one organization. He reduced his dream to writing and carried it in his coat-pocket. When worn down by the ♦"The [early] church had the conception of a thor- ough social regeneration. To that extent religion was prophetic and outran the political intellect bv many centuries. But Jesus stood almost alone in the com- prehension of the gradualness of moral conquest. The millennial hope was the modern social hope with- out the scientific conception of organic development." —Walter Rauschenbusch, " Christianity and the So- cial Crisis," p. 196. 220 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? petty details of his daily task, he would suddenly pull out the document that contained his dream, and rest himself by thinking of what he was aiming at. The man with a hoe, or the man with a purse, we could much more easily spare than we could spare the man with a vision. All the great thinkers of the world have carried such a vision with them. They may have called it a " Republic, " as did Plato, a " City of God," as did Augus- tine, a " Utopia," as did Sir Thomas More, or a " Kingdom of Ends," as did Kant. The German thinker has returned almost to the phrase of Jesus. To " treat every man as end, not as means " is to come close to the Golden Rule, and a " kingdom of ends " is surely an approximation to the King- dom of God. But we need to remember that the Kingdom of God is a flying goal. It is not a terminus where all things come to rest, as the railroad trains roll into some distant station and cease to move. It is an ideal which THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 221 forever recedes as we approach it, an organism that grows and unfolds while we are trying to describe it. Christianity has suffered much harm from the unfortunate phrase " the end of the world." The idea of an end of the created universe is as far from the New Testament as it is impossible to philosophy. The New Testament refers of course only to the " end of the age," with the added implication of a new age then to begin. But the whole of European thought has been affected — we might say infected — by the idea of a static Kingdom of Heaven some day to succeed the growing kingdoms of earth. The popular mind has believed in a heaven of marble fixity, as if some enchanter's wand were to be waved over growing, striving men and women, and suddenly transmute them into a statuesque and hopeless monotony. Thus men have conceived the completed Kingdom of God as a realm where all change has vanished, all growth has been arrested, and the risk and toil and adventure of 222 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? real living have subsided into the pal- lid pleasures of psalm-singing. It may need some centuries still to enable the world to conceive the future Kingdom as an endless unfolding, a continuous and hard-won victory. But we are at least beginning to realize that when we banish from the future all effort and struggle and danger, all surprise and adventure and vicissitude, we make it intolerable to humanity. No future could be less inviting than the picture of Dr. Watts: " No midnight shade, no clouded sun, But sacred, high, eternal noon." From such a pitiless glare we may well pray to be delivered! The idea of unending change must be accepted and embodied in our con- ception of the future, whether it be in this world or elsewhere. That change is indeed under law; it is the working out of an ideal. But that ideal ever recedes and rises higher, as some mountain range gradually reveals it- self through the mists to the moun- THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 223 tain-climber. We vainly imagine that some day we shall reach the highest peak of moral attainment and stand motionless upon the summit. But there is no summit. Each new moral height surmounted becomes the step- ping-stone to another height beyond. Christianity has brought the sense of the infinite into the humblest life, the sense not only of infinite power, but of infinite process. It opens before us an unending moral task. It scorns Aris- totle's doctrine of virtue as a " mean " between two extremes. To Chris- tianity virtue is always an extreme — " until seventy times seven. " To Christianity goodness is never a nice balancing of considerations, but an unreserved abandon, a total self-dedi- cation to an infinite task. We smile at the Adventist who an- nounces that on a particular day, a few months hence, the world will end. But do we advance far beyond him by placing the end of the world ten thou- sand years away? His fundamental error is not in wrongly fixing the date, 224 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? but in expecting that at any date, near or remote, the moral battle will cease, character become fossilized and the flowing world harden into the stiff- ness and chill of an art-gallery. Christ's picture of the future king- dom has in it much more than orien- tal calm. " Have thou authority over ten cities " is the announcement to the faithful servant. The administration of even one city would be task enough for most of us! A world-order in which the divine purpose shall be ever more and more completely realized — that is the Kingdom of God. And that means tasks far more delicate and sublime than any we have yet at- tempted, tasks involving initiative and executive ability, tasks that mean the anxiety of struggle and the joy of combat, world without end. To aim at such a goal means vastly more than the rescue of a few souls from a wrecked world — the concep- tion of some of our fathers. But it also means vastly more than the relief of individuals who may be in physical THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 225 distress — the conception of some of our neighbours. To reduce religion to the idea of mere " mutual helpful- ness " is to cheapen it beyond repair. Some good men seem to believe that if all men would drop their individual tasks and begin to help somebody else who is cold or hungry or sick, that the Kingdom would immediately arrive. But such a conception may degenerate into mere altruistic fussi- ness and interference with other men's lives. " What are we here in the world for?" said a Sunday-school vis- itor to a bright child. When the child was silent the visitor confidently sup- plied the answer: 'To help other people." ' Then what are the other people here for?" queried the child, and the visitor suddenly began to think. Christianity is more than handing out a dinner to a man who in six hours will be just as hungry as before. It is more than miscellaneous helpfulness to everybody who will accept help. It is the enthronement of the divine purpose in the social 226 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? order of the world. To do that we must see each man as related to so- ciety and so to God. Many a time I have gone through the tenements in the lower part of Manhattan Island, in the company of followers of the Ethical Culture move- ment. A nobler devotion to the poor than those men showed it would be impossible to find. But again and again they said to me: "What do you Christians mean when you talk of helping the sick * for Christ's sake/ or giving a cup of cold water ' for Christ's sake'? Is it not enough to give the water for the thirsty man's sake? Why drag in one who died long ago, when it is the living who really need us? " Our answer is very clear. We are not interested in handing the cup of water to an isolated man who will be just as thirsty again to-morrow. Such superficial charity is endless and futile. But if we can come to see that thirsty stranger as a member of a great world-order, as related to the Christ THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 227 who is the spiritual head of the human race, then to act for Christ's sake is to act for the sake of all humanity. Then our chief task is not to quench a passing thirst, but to recover a man, and to reinstate him in the social and spiritual order of the world. Then we try to give not only water, but courage, strength, and sense of the universal brotherhood. Unless in this sense modern charity acts " for Christ's sake," it blesses neither him that gives nor him that takes. But let us analyze a little more closely this idea of the Kingdom that is to be. Briefly we may say: it is the realm of truth, of justice and of spiritual unity. One of the surprising elements in the New Testament is its emphasis on the value of truth. The virtue of veracity is a late arrival in human history. It was not a prominent vir- tue in ancient Israel, as witness the deception practised by Abraham and by Jacob. The duty of truth-telling is not included in the Hebrew Deca- 228 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? logue, save in judicial cases, where falsehood becomes " false-witness." Truthfulness was not highly prized by the Greeks, who admired the " crafty Ulysses." Aristotle's cardinal virtues are Wisdom, Justice, Courage, Temperance — not Truth. Plato tells us that in the ideal Republic certain officials will be authorized to use false- hood " as a medicine." Among oriental nations to-day truthfulness is a subordinate virtue, of much lower rank than serenity or courtesy or filial piety. It is impos- sible to explain to many orientals what the Englishman means by commercial honour. To evade difficulty rather than to attack it, to escape from trouble rather than to face it frankly and valiantly, has been the oriental method — a method quite in harmony with the pantheistic philosophy of the Hindu, or the Buddhist satisfaction with Nirvana. But though the Bible is mainly the product of the Orient, it sounds forth in all its later scriptures an absolute THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 229 demand for truth in speech and truth " in the inward parts." The fierce denunciation of falsehood by the Old Testament prophets is echoed in the psalmist's cry: "Let lying lips be put to silence. " Christ says of him- self: "I am the truth," and promises that after he has vanished the " Spirit of truth shall come." In the early church the sudden deaths of those who " kept back part of the price " profoundly impressed the whole Chris- tian community. Into the completed Kingdom, as pictured at Patmos, there shall never enter " whatsoever loveth or maketh a lie." That an oriental literature should place such novel emphasis on truth is one of the clearest evidences of its lofty origin. The establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth involves at every step unreserved devotion to the " God of things as they are." Any closing of the eyes to the naked facts, in nature or society, in education or religion, is not only cowardice, but is a species of 230 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? atheism. To slink away from reality on the plea that it is unsafe or dis- concerting, is to repeat Israel's atti- tude at Sinai: " Let not God speak with us lest we die." Genuine faith demands that God shall speak with us, lest we die. It wants to know the plain fact, however grim and tragic the fact may be. For the church to love peace more than truth, to preserve its organization at the expense of its can- dour, is treachery to God and man. In the last generation what we called the scientific spirit was a noble contribution to the moral life. Hux- ley's memorable exhortation: "Sit down before the fact as a little child; be prepared to give up every precon- ceived notion; follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads," is almost a paraphrase of the New Testament. " As a little child " was spoken by one greater than Huxley. Thus science and religion, building their structures far asunder, are en- tered by the same lowly door. The superb devotion to truth shown THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 23 1 by many leaders in the modern world is one of the clear signs of the com- ing of the Kingdom. It shines forth in the lives of Lord Kelvin and Pasteur, as clearly as in the lives of Judson and Paton. It has banished malaria from parts of Italy and swept the yellow fever from Cuba and Panama. It has shown us how to conquer tuberculosis and diphtheria, and made us believe that the great physical scourges of the world may be finally driven out of it. The love of truth in commerce and industry and government has produced the demand for what we call " pub- licity." It is an axiom of the occi- dental world to-day that whatever fears the light is evil. Unswerving devotion to truth is indeed not yet triumphant among good men. The love of truth, we sorrowfully confess, has not yet become an ecclesiastical virtue. It is still a subordinate con- sideration in many " religious " publi- cations. The charlatan still follows on the heels of the prophet, and Simon Magus shadows Simon Peter. But 22,2 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? taking the world as a whole we see a mighty tide of truthfulness irresistibly rising, and into vast sections of mod- ern civilization we dare to say: " He, the Spirit of Truth, is come." Out of this devotion to truth comes the second characteristic of the King- dom, the demand for justice. In the New Testament this word justice is often translated " righteousness," and so its meaning is obscured. It would do us good to go through the New Testament again and in scores of pas- sages substitute the more vital modern word with its social implications: " Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after justice"; " Except your justice exceed the justice of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of Heaven." The passion for justice is the most deep-seated and irresistible impulse in the modern world. It will either surge through the church, filling its ancient channels with new energy, as melting snows swell an ancient river, or it will cut out new channels and leave the THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 233 church like a forsaken river-bed in August. The call for justice rises daily from all parts of the world. It sounds in our ears now faint and dis- tant, from the steppes of Siberia or the burned villages of Armenia, now coming nearer in the resistance to mil- itarism in Germany or the revolt against the House of Lords in Eng- land, now strident and determined in American strikes and lockouts, or in American impatience with antiquated laws and technical decisions of the courts. There is a ground-swell in civilization, an impulse more imperious than the demand for bread, a spiritual uprising that heaves aside formula and precedent and even government itself, if government shall fail to reckon with it. The term " insurgent " is no longer a political designation only. We have insurgents in education, in economics, in philanthropy, in church life. All these men are borne forward on a surging wave of demand that no conventionalities and respectabilities and technicalities shall longer prevent 234 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? humanity from arriving at social jus- tice. We can imagine how the Old Testa- ment prophets — pictured as Socialists by the fancy of Renan — would have delighted in this world-wide insur- gency. We can almost imagine Amos in the streets of Berlin or New York crying once again : " I take no de- light in your solemn assemblies . . . take thou away from me the noise of thy hymns ... let judgment roll down as waters and justice as a mighty stream." It may be questioned whether Amos the herdsman would have made a successful governor of Jerusalem. His economic ideas may have been confused and his administrative ability slender. Rarely is the prophet a successful organizer or leader; he is only a voice crying in the wilderness. None the less the prophetic voice is needed to rouse and sting men broad awake. The prophet is needed to-day to articulate the modern demand for justice and claim it as part of the com- ing of the Lord. That coming may THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 235 be in the clouds of heaven; but it surely must be in the homes and work- shops of men. That divine coming means vastly more than the rectification of in- dividual conduct. Too often in the past the church has con- fined itself to inculcating a list of pleasing personal virtues. It has pointed out what the good man must not engage in, and conceived goodness as a kind of religious etiquette. But a million good men living together would not make a good society unless they were living in good relations, un- der just laws, expressed in just institu- tions. A million saints assembled in one place would not guarantee a saintly community; the saintliness would soon vanish under institutions and laws that invite and protect op- pression and vice. " Thy will be done " must be written not only in the church but in the law court, the senate chamber and the cotton-mill. That will must be done in the creation of an honest civil service, a fair system 236 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? of transportation, an industry that shall not only make goods but make men, and a government that shall fur- nish economic as well as political free- dom. The primitive Christians, who be- lieved that in a few years the heavens should roll together as a scroll and all human administrations vanish, might be pardoned if they felt no interest in the government. We can forgive them if they were not enthusiastic over al- legiance to Herod or Nero. But we, who believe that America is chosen as the future leader in the world's civili- zation, and who believe also in God, have a duty that is written on the sky and that calls aloud in every soul. We need to supplement the individualism of the New Testament by the magnifi- cent social zeal and corporate con- sciousness of the Old Testament. We need to see Moses standing in the court of Pharaoh, or ascending the mountain to cry in audacious devotion: " If thou wilt not forgive this people, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book! " THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 237 We need to see Elijah defying Ahab, and Nehemiah building the walls of the city, and all the Old Testament prophets aflame with zeal for civic righteousness. We need to remember that the atomistic virtue of the eight- eenth century is as far from the Bible as from the spirit of the twentieth^ century. The good man of the fif- teenth century was Thomas a Kempis, whose " Imitation of Christ " has no faintest allusion to any wrongs in this world to be righted. The good man of Bunyan's dream was one who thrust his fingers into his ears to stop the cry of wife and children while he started on his long flight through the world to the celestial gate. But the good man of our time is the one who turns back into the city of destruction and resolves never to leave it until he has transformed some portion of it at least into the enduring City of God. But the chief problems of our age are not political, they are economic. How can the ever expanding industrial and commercial activity of our time 238 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? be shot through with Christian aim and Christian principles? How can modern business be made Christian? The question is not how we can Christianize the results of business. We all believe that the money which men make out of business should be devoted to Christian ends, that some of it should be given to the poor, to the sick, to education, to religion — we all believe that. The question is not how to Christianize the product of business, but the process itself, so that whether money is made or lost, the daily toil of all the millions who work in factory and shop and mill and office shall be Christian toil. We need to be Christian citizens, not after business hours are over, but while the business is being done. Many a citizen who would willingly die for his country in time of war is quite willing to work against his country, to circumvent its laws, elude its officials and prey upon its citizens in time of peace. The chief stealing of our time is not done by the foodpad or the burglar; it is THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 239 done by every man who profits by adulteration in manufacture or de- ception in trade, or by accepting wages for which he has not rendered full equivalent. Dishonest labour, whether it goes into shoes or cotton cloth, into the making of life-preservers or im- pure food, into the building of a capitol at Albany or at Harrisburg, is not only individual falsity, but social treachery and a subtle attack upon the state. All false and deceitful craftsmanship is to be classed with the work of the brigand and the pirate, and all true genuine work is part of the coming of the Kingdom of God. All legitimate business is a form of social service. " My business " says the owner proudly, as he looks about his mill or his store. But in the closely woven net-work of modern in- dustrial life, what possible enterprise is there of which a man can truly say "mine"? In the days when one man alone made a pair of shoes, the pos- sessive pronoun had some significance. But when thousands of pairs are daily 240 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? turned out of one factory, no living man can in the sight of God look upon the thousands and say " mine." " When ye pray," said Jesus, " say Our." Not only when we pray, but when we organize and administer and produce, the modern world is slowly learning to say " Our." We talk of some enterprises as " public utilities." But such distinc- tions are rapidly becoming shadowy and unreal. The smallest private un- dertaking, as it expands, becomes either a public utility or a public dam- age and impediment. None of us man- ufactures to himself. If the plumber shall say: " I am not responsible for so- ciety," is he therefore not responsible? If the switch-tender shall say: "I am not of the social body," is he there- fore not of the body? If the vender of milk shall say: "I am not of the state," is he therefore free from the state? "Every man," says a recent writer in the London Spectator, " whether he is tilling the soil, heaving coal, laying bricks, writing books, or- THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 24 1 ganizing business, or planning some industrial work great or small, must accustom himself to feel that he is doing it not for himself, or his family alone, but partly for his country. In every form of activity, the mother- land must be the silent partner who calls upon him for an extra mar- gin of effort, energy, and self-sacri- fice." The idea of doing work purely for pecuniary gain is one that we no longer tolerate in certain forms of social effort. If we suspect that to be the chief motive of the physician, we do not ask him to enter our homes. If we find it in the clergyman, we pay no heed to his message. If the teacher should confess that he had no interest in the children at their desks, but was working merely for his wages, we should think of him as a traitor in the camp. Yet we expect the con- tractor who builds the schoolhouse to do it solely to put money in his own pocket. If the sailors on a battleship should own that they were in the serv- 242 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? ice merely for financial reward, we should dismiss them from the service. But for the steel-magnates who con- struct the battleship have we a lower code of morals, devoid of patriotic motive? Why should the man who fights on the deck of the ship act from any higher motive than the man who ploughs in the furrow or sells goods in the country store? All such distinc- tions are conventional and meaning- less. All men must live for the social order or against it. Private business is as inconceivable to-day as private fighting in the army. No man be- comes lawfully rich unless he enriches society in the very process of enrich- ing himself. If he rises he must rise as a mountain rises, lifting forests and homes and villages on its broad shoul- ders into new light and air. The sav- ing of the individual becomes meaning- less except as it implies and involves the salvation of society. What vast changes would come over the modern world, if this conception of the realization of social justice as THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 243 the aim of life could come home to all men. Then the bells on the horses would be marked: "Holiness to the Lord." Then men would not exist for the sake of the mills they work in, but mills would exist for men. Then every home would be a sanctuary, every meal a sacrament, and the place of merchandise the Father's house. When truth and justice are achieved, the third mark of the Kingdom always appears — spiritual unity. All over the world to-day men who are inwardly akin are finding or inventing a vital fellowship. Time was when the bar- riers between the churches were insu- perable, when every nation was against all others. But to-day men who belong together are getting together. The men who are inspired by the great purpose to make the Kingdom come are declining to stand asunder for any reasons whatsoever. Creeds and vest- ments may divide us; ceremonies may still be barriers; theologies may be as barbed wire fences in the garden of the Lord. But high above all obstacles 244 WHAT DOES CHRISTIANITY MEAN? real and imagined flows the tide of unifying Christian purpose. The man whose spirit is most akin to mine may be a missionary in Rangoon, a poet on a ranch in the Sierras, a physician in an open boat on the coast of Labrador, an invalid in the island of Samoa, a settlement-worker in the Chicago Com- mons. It matters little what he may be doing, or where; if only he be doing it ad major em gloriam Dei, then he is my brother and sister and mother. The highest road in Europe, the Stelvio Pass, winds slowly upward to the height of ten thousand feet above the sea. At the summit is a plain granite shaft. If the traveller asks the meaning of the stone, he is told that it marks the meeting point of the territory of three nations — Italy, Austria, Switzerland. On the plains below their armies have many a time clashed in fierce encounter. But up there on the heights, under the silent blue, the three lands meet in amity and peace. Altitude is the secret of unity! On the lowlands we contend THE GOAL OF OUR EFFORT 245 and fall hopelessly asunder. 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