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 HQ 1221 .R69 1923 
 Royden, A. Maude 1876-1956. 
 Women at the world's 
 crossroads 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/womenatworldscroOOroyd 
 
By the Same Author. 
 Books: 
 
 Women and the Sovereign State. 
 The Hour and the Church. 
 Blessed Joan of Arc. 
 
 Sex and Common Sense. 
 
 Pamphlets: 
 
 Votes and Wages. 
 
 Physical Force and Democracy. 
 How Women Won the Vote. 
 The True End of Government. 
 Women and the Church. 
 
 The Great Adventure. 
 
 Part Author in: 
 
 The Making of Women. 
 Downward Paths. 
 
 Towards a Lasting Settlement. 
 

Copyright, Lena Connell, 12 Baker Street, London 
 
 A. MAUDE ROYDEN 
 
Women at the World’s 
 
 A. MAUDE ROYDEN 
 
 THE WOMANS PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 1 9 2 3 
 
Copyright, 1922 , by 
 The National Board of the 
 Young Womens Christian Associations 
 of the United States of America 
 
 Printed in the United States 
 
 Second Printing 
 
I Dedicate 
 This Little Book 
 to 
 
 The Young Womens Christian Associations 
 in the United States of America, 
 
 WITH GRATITUDE FOR ALL THEIR KINDNESS AND FOR 
 THE INSPIRATION THAT THE OPPORTUNITY OF 
 WORKING WITH THEM, EVEN FOR SO SHORT 
 A TIME, WAS AND STILL IS TO ME, 
 
The material in this book was first presented as 
 addresses given at the seventh national convention 
 of the Young Womens Christian Associations of 
 the United States of America. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The World at the Crossroads ... 11 
 
 II. Christian Patriotism.29 
 
 III. Woman’s Service to the Race ... 49 
 
 IV. Woman’s Service to Theology ... 75 
 
 V. The Law of Life.101 
 
 VI. Love, the Fulfilling of the Law . . 123 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, 
 and death and evil; therefore choose life, that 
 thou mayest live, thou and thy seed” 
 
The World at the Crossroads. 
 
 There is a choice before us as people who live in 
 a great world, so knit together that even America 
 cannot stand quite outside it, or act as though it 
 were situated somewhere in the moon! That 
 choice is a choice—let me put it quite brutally— 
 between heaven and hell. Sometimes when 
 people go to preach what is called a mission, 
 they lay before their hearers a choice between 
 a future in heaven or in hell. In a sense, that is 
 the choice the world has to make to-day. But it 
 is not a choice between a heaven or a hell beyond 
 the grave; it is a choice between making heaven 
 or making hell on this side of the grave, and in 
 this world, here and now. 
 
 To-day the world is at the crossroads. 
 
 Perhaps it is partly because I come from a 
 country which stands halfway, spiritually and 
 geographically, between the New World and the 
 
 11 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 Old, that I feel so conscious of the choice that is 
 before me. 
 
 There is a great verse at the closing of the 
 Book of Deuteronomy: 
 
 “See, I have set before thee this day life 
 and good, and death and evil; therefore 
 choose life, that thou mayest live* thou and 
 thy seed/’ 
 
 I suppose that choice has really been before the 
 world always, ever since it began. I remember 
 hearing Professor Arthur Thomson say that the 
 whole story of evolution was simply a record of 
 “trying all things, holding fast that which is 
 good”; and that has been the story of every 
 species that has survived. Of course, some have 
 not survived, as you know. 
 
 I do not know whether that amusing publica¬ 
 tion (it was, of course, much more than amus¬ 
 ing), Mr. H. G. Wells’ “Outline of History,” 
 has been read in this country as it has in my own. 
 In England it has had an enormous circulation. I 
 remember when I first picked it up and looked at 
 the drawings in it, I thought that I had picked up, 
 
 12 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 accidentally, a copy of “Alice in Wonderland,” 
 for I saw there creatures, called the gigantosaurus 
 and the brontosaurus, the diplodocus and all sorts 
 of names, that looked like the animals in “Alice in 
 Wonderland.” 
 
 The gigantosaurus was about two hundred feet 
 long and half a dozen of them would have made a 
 good audience in a lecture hall. Why are these 
 creatures not to be met to-day, either in England 
 or America ? Why have they not survived ? Here 
 is the human race, which, compared with these 
 gigantic creatures, seems quite unfit to survive. 
 For these creatures were, in some cases, of enor¬ 
 mous size and great strength; some were heavily 
 armed, and some of them were armed for offense 
 as well as defense; they had skins that you could 
 not pierce; or they had tusks and claws and teeth 
 and every kind of weapon which, one would sup¬ 
 pose, would enable them to survive in what we 
 are accustomed to call the battle for existence! 
 Yet they have disappeared! There is not one left! 
 And the reason is not that they were not strong 
 enough or fierce enough or heavily armed enough; 
 it is simply that they were too stupid. 
 
 13 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 If you remember the pictures, you will remem¬ 
 ber how small their heads were, how stupid they 
 looked. Such creatures could not develop enough 
 brain capacity to meet the difficulties with which 
 life was surrounded. And the reason why you 
 and I have survived is because our forefathers 
 had enough brains, on the whole, and enough 
 courage and enough moral capacity to make the 
 right kind of choice when they were confronted 
 with a new situation. 
 
 If you will think back over the history of our 
 race, you will see how new factors have come into 
 the life of Man, new difficulties, changes of cli¬ 
 mate or of food,—something that has altered his 
 surroundings; and generally, you will find that 
 in face of that difficulty or that change, he learned 
 so to adapt himself as to go forward instead of 
 backward. The whole history of mankind is 
 summed up in that capacity for choosing the right 
 path. 
 
 “See, I have set before thee this day life 
 and good, and death and evil; therefore 
 choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and 
 thy seed.” 
 
 14 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 Even in the short period of recorded history 
 that choice has been made many times; and some¬ 
 times men have chosen wrong, and then empires 
 fall and civilizations pass. If you were to travel 
 around the world to-day, around the shores of the 
 Mediterranean and right across Asia to your own 
 Pacific Coast, you would find, would you not, the 
 traces of one great civilization after another, 
 which has risen by its power to meet its difficul¬ 
 ties, and fallen before some change with which 
 it could not cope; something has come into its 
 history, some new danger, some new power or 
 some new opportunity, and at that point it could 
 not go forward. 
 
 But in this world you must always go for¬ 
 ward or back; you cannot stand still and, there¬ 
 fore, when any civilization reaches a point at 
 which it cannot or will not go any further, it 
 begins to decline. Although the history of the 
 world shows us Man growing more and more 
 majestic, more and more the master of the world 
 in which he lives, more and more godlike in his 
 power over nature, yet it has always happened 
 that the time has come when that particular race 
 
 15 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 or civilization has grown tired or lazy or stupid. 
 The hour has come when a fresh difficulty has 
 arisen and it could not meet it and, therefore, 
 it has perished. 
 
 I believe that to-day there is a choice before 
 the human race so great that it is not one civiliza¬ 
 tion or one race alone, but the whole future of 
 humanity which is in the balance. That is my 
 excuse for asking you to look a little further even 
 than the bounds of your own great country. 
 Humanity itself is at the crossroads. There is a 
 path that will lead to a human race which shall at 
 last reach the measure of the stature of the full¬ 
 ness of Christ; but there is also a path which, 
 if we choose it, can lead to nothing less than the 
 suicide of Humanity. Let me show you why. 
 
 I said that at every great epoch of the world’s 
 history, some great change has confronted a race 
 or a civilization, and everything for it then de¬ 
 pended upon its capacity to meet that change. 
 Well, to-day there are two great changes, and 
 those two together present us with a choice which 
 is literally—quite literally—a choice between a 
 world so beautiful, so noble, so full of beauty 
 
 16 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 and life and health that, in the words of a 
 scientist (not a theologian but a scientist!), it 
 would be “like the Garden of Eden,” and a world 
 so full of fear, of hatred and of destruction, 
 that to call it hell is not to use language too 
 strong. 
 
 What are these changes ? They are these: first 
 of all, the world to-day is one thing. It is not now 
 a question of one nation or another, of one part 
 of the world or another; it is that the entire world 
 has been so linked together by commerce, by 
 scientific discovery, by travel, by the extraordi¬ 
 nary ease with which one can pass from one part 
 of the world to another, that even in great and 
 prosperous America, the wreck of a continent on 
 the other side of the Atlantic reflects itself in 
 conditions here. 
 
 I could give you, and you could imagine for 
 yourselves, half a hundred examples of the way 
 in which the United States prospers or suffers 
 with the changes that take place in Europe and 
 in Asia, but I suppose that the most obvious and 
 the most serious one just now is your number 
 of unemployed. 
 
 17 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 You are, practically, from a material point of 
 view, independent. You produce almost every¬ 
 thing that you want, here within the bounds of 
 your own country, and yet even so, and even at 
 your vast distance from that distracted, tortured 
 Old World from which I come, it is still true of 
 you that the world is so knit together that you 
 cannot disregard what is going on on the other 
 side of the world. 
 
 That is something new in the world’s history. 
 A civilization could rise and fall hundreds of 
 years ago and the people on the other side of the 
 world might never even have heard of it. To¬ 
 day, that is impossible. Russia cannot perish 
 from starvation and the people of the United 
 States remain absolutely untouched. Europe 
 cannot suffer economic dislocation, cannot be, so 
 to speak, dying on her feet as she is to-day, and 
 leave you altogether unaffected. Not only your 
 human feelings for those who suffer, but your 
 economic position, your trade, everything, is so 
 linked together that the world cannot any longer 
 suffer in one part without suffering everywhere. 
 “If one member suffers, all the body suffers with 
 
 18 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 it”; in a sense, that is even more obviously and 
 tragically true than it was when it was spoken 
 two thousand years ago. 
 
 The other factor is this: the extraordinary ad¬ 
 vance of modern science. It is, of course, in a 
 sense, another aspect of the same thing. It is 
 because modern science has given us the cable and 
 the telegraph and wireless telegraphy and rail¬ 
 ways and steamships and aeroplanes that the 
 world is knit up into one. Modern commerce 
 would not have been possible without modern 
 science. But science has done more for us, and 
 to us, than this. It has given us a power over the 
 world in which we live, which will enable Hu¬ 
 manity to cut out altogether some of the great 
 problems that have puzzled it in the past. I do 
 not know whether the name of Professor Soddy 
 is familiar to Americans, but he knows more, per¬ 
 haps, about radium and radioactivity than any 
 other scientist on the other side of the water. 
 Professor Soddy, in speakingof the powers which 
 modern research is putting into our hands, uses 
 these words: “To-day science has reached a point 
 from which it is possible to look out on a world 
 
 19 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 full of energy and power, compared with which 
 gas and steam and electricity are like the toys 
 of a child’s nursery. We are on the threshold 
 of knowledge which will enable us to rid Hu¬ 
 manity of four-fifths of the diseases that scourge 
 it; to lift from its shoulders the crushing burden 
 of its toil; to wrest from the earth riches beyond 
 the dreams of avarice; to make of the world 
 something like the Garden of Eden.” 
 
 If I were quoting from an election address at the 
 next presidential election, you would not believe 
 it, would you? But I am quoting the words of 
 a professor of the sober science of inorganic 
 chemistry; and he tells us that science is already 
 on the threshold of powers which can make the 
 world something like the Garden of Eden, which 
 “can eliminate forever the struggle for existence 
 on its material side.” 
 
 You will see that to release Humanity from that 
 terrible and sordid struggle, will be, if we choose, 
 to release it for the nobler spiritual and intel¬ 
 lectual struggle which belongs to that which is 
 truly human, and which raises us above the 
 animal. It is the struggle for existence which 
 
 20 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 makes it seem almost impossible for one to gain 
 except by another’s loss; which induces that 
 horrible sense that when you rise you do so by 
 standing on someone else’s body in the mud; that 
 dilemma which, translated into ordinary life, 
 makes it difficult for you to get a job without 
 taking that job away from somebody else; which 
 makes it hard for you to rise in your profession, 
 in your work, whatever it is, without feeling that 
 you do so at the cost of another. That is the 
 struggle for existence, interpreted in terms of 
 ordinary life. To cut that out, to free mankind 
 from that horrible competition, would be to set 
 him on an entirely different moral level; would 
 be to release him for the great spiritual develop¬ 
 ment which makes him human, which raises him 
 above the brute creation; and this, says Professor 
 Soddy, is what science is making possible. 
 
 Then we come up against such a thing as this: 
 Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking at the City Temple 
 about three years ago in London, on the subject 
 of atomic energy, used these words: “We must 
 be thankful that Germany did not know how to 
 use this great power in 1914. What a use she 
 
 21 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 might have made of it! And God forbid that 
 any nation should know how to use it, until 
 some nation is morally fit to use it.” Surely it 
 must be the first time in history that a great 
 scientist, pursuing a certain line of research— 
 for Sir Oliver Lodge is now giving all his time 
 to the investigation of atomic energy—should 
 pause in his work and pray to God that he should 
 not yet succeed in it, because there is no nation in 
 the world that is morally fit to use the power 
 that he is learning to put into the hands of Hu¬ 
 manity ! And is he not right in that hesitation ? 
 Germany is not the only nation in the world that 
 can put the great forces of nature to a diabolical 
 use. 
 
 It is possible for science to make the world like 
 the Garden of Eden! Amen. But it is also 
 possible, and sometimes it seems more probable, 
 that science will make the world a very good 
 imitation of hell. Some of you have been East 
 since the war began. You know that modern 
 science, instead of wresting from the earth its 
 riches, instead of abolishing disease, has blasted 
 the surface of the earth so that there is famine 
 
 22 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 where there was plenty, and disease where there 
 was health. 
 
 “Science,”-says Soddy, “can abolish four-fifths 
 of the diseases that scourge mankind.” And 
 instead, in Europe and Asia, science has almost 
 created new diseases, has at least, by its appalling 
 powers of destruction, created conditions so 
 abominable that people die of influenza, die of 
 rickets, die of tuberculosis in weeks or days in¬ 
 stead of years. This is what modern science has 
 done, and this is the choice that is before us: 
 
 Are we going to use the powers that we are 
 being given to-day, powers before which the 
 imagination reels, to make heaven or to make 
 hell? To eliminate the struggle for existence 
 and set Humanity free for its spiritual develop¬ 
 ment, or to turn the world into a cockpit where 
 we shall destroy each other on such a scale that 
 there is nothing before us but the suicide of 
 Humanity? That is the choice that is before us 
 to-day. 
 
 Do I exaggerate when I say that the world is 
 indeed at the crossroads? This very man of 
 whom I speak, Professor Soddy, who is to-day 
 
 23 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 giving the whole of his wonderful genius to 
 researches which he believes will benefit Hu¬ 
 manity, was offered by the British Government 
 an endowment if, instead, he would use his 
 genius to explore the possibilities of poison gas! 
 That is not the fault of any one government. 
 The countries of this world have the governments 
 that they deserve. Believe me, that is true! We 
 have the government that we deserve, and if the 
 genius of our great scientists is turned to pur¬ 
 poses of destruction instead of creation, it is our 
 fault, ours as a nation, and not that of any gov¬ 
 ernment in the world. 
 
 In democratic countries, the governments are 
 what the people make of them, and that is why I 
 appeal to the rank and file of the citizens of the 
 United States, when I say that it belongs to you, 
 to all of you, to decide whether Humanity shall 
 take the step forward which shall make this 
 twentieth century an epoch in the history of the 
 whole world, or go backward into destruction. 
 
 In the past, perhaps, we did not see when the 
 moment of choice had arrived; the hour struck 
 and we did not know. Civilizations rose and fell 
 
 24 
 
The World at the Crossroads 
 
 but did not understand why they rose or why 
 they fell. To-day we have no such excuse. To¬ 
 day we can see what we do. We stand at a 
 point at which we can look before and after, 
 knowing what we do; and if we choose wrong, it 
 is a deliberate choice. 
 
 “See, I have set before thee this day life 
 and good, and death and evil; therefore 
 choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and 
 thy seed.” 
 
 25 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
“Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know 
 that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion 
 over them, and they that are great exercise au¬ 
 thority upon them. But it shall not be so among 
 you: but whosoever will be great among you, let 
 him be your servant ” 
 
Christian Patriotism. 
 
 Patriotism has been made the excuse of such 
 appalling crimes in the past that, in the Old 
 World, which has so lately been the battlefield of 
 the nations, patriotism has almost become, among 
 thoughtful people, a discredited virtue. People 
 are apt to say that we ought to love Humanity 
 in such a way that we do not prefer one nation, 
 even our own, above another. They dread the 
 patriotism (so-called) which finds its expression 
 in oppressing other nations and exalting itself. 
 
 Too, often, patriotism has indeed been invoked 
 to justify crimes. Rarely has any nation accepted 
 Isaiah’s conception of the “Suffering Servant” or 
 desired to be “as those that serve.” The Jews, 
 as you know, resented that idea and looked for¬ 
 ward to the time when their race should be ac¬ 
 claimed by Humanity as its master. They con¬ 
 soled themselves during the time of their oppres- 
 
 29 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 sion and servitude with the hope that the time 
 would come when God’s chosen people should be 
 the lords and governors of the world. 
 
 The prophet Isaiah, in that most moving and 
 inspiring passage of the Suffering Servant sug¬ 
 gests to them that they have misunderstood the 
 purpose of God, and that Israel was to serve the 
 world, not in magnificence and in power, but in 
 suffering and humility. And our Lord says to 
 his disciples, “Whosoever will be great among 
 you, let him be your servant.” 
 
 It is easy to think that patriotism is not com¬ 
 patible with Christian teaching, if national ambi¬ 
 tion is patriotism; and when you consider what 
 so-called patriotism is doing to-day in Europe, 
 and what it has done for the last six or seven 
 years, when you see every little nation trying to 
 arm itself to the teeth in order to commit aggres¬ 
 sions against its neighbor in the name of patriot¬ 
 ism, you may easily feel, as many thinking people 
 do in Europe, that patriotism is not a Christian 
 virtue; that we ought to love the whole of Hu¬ 
 manity in such a way that it is not possible for 
 us to prefer our own nation above any other. 
 
 30 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 Yet I believe that this is as unreasonable as to 
 claim that, because our Lord taught us to love all 
 the world, we ought not especially to love our 
 own people. The Christian ideal does not con¬ 
 flict with family love; on the contrary, I often 
 think that a Christian home is really the greatest 
 success that Christian teaching has yet produced. 
 Going up and down the world as I do, and sleep¬ 
 ing often night after night in a different home, 
 I am often conscious, the moment I enter a house, 
 of an atmosphere of such grace and courtesy, 
 such gentleness and consideration and love, that 
 it seems to me that the kingdom of heaven really 
 has been realized in the Christian home. Of 
 course, there are homes which are the opposite of 
 all this, but all of us at least know some such 
 homes as I have described; many of you, I hope, 
 live in such homes, where the whole atmosphere 
 is one of consideration and love, where the strong 
 serve the weak and where each expects the best 
 of the other—where there is an atmosphere so 
 gracious, so lovely, that it makes one realize that 
 the Sermon on the Mount is not an impossible 
 
 31 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 ideal, but that the kingdom of heaven has indeed 
 touched earth in some Christian homes. 
 
 Yet I have no doubt that, at first, it seemed to 
 many people that Christian teaching must destroy 
 the home. If you think of the old family idea, 
 when the family was the property of the head of 
 the household, when the father governed his wife 
 and children, having over them powers of life 
 and death, I expect that it seemed to them—and 
 I am perfectly certain that if they saw American 
 homes to-day, they would be confirmed in the 
 idea—that Christianity was destroying the pos¬ 
 sibility of family life. If they saw how American 
 parents hold their children in awe instead of the 
 children holding their parents in awe, I am sure 
 that they would say, “You see the result of this 
 destructive teaching!” And, in a sense, it is true 
 that what seemed to them the very essence of 
 family life has vanished under Christian influ¬ 
 ence. Instead of the idea of property, of power, 
 of authority, there is the feeling that the home is 
 based upon love, and that love desires service 
 more than authority. There is a certain freedom 
 in a Christian home which comes, undoubtedly, 
 
 32 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 of devotion to an even greater than earthly love, 
 a love which makes us understand how a spirit so 
 gracious and lovely as that of Christ could say to 
 his disciples: “He that hateth not his father and 
 mother .... cannot be my disciple.” 
 
 In just the same way, Christianity has trans¬ 
 formed our love of country. I do not believe that 
 Jesus Christ had that abstract love of Humanity 
 which rules out personal friendship; He was 
 far too gloriously human not to have personal 
 friends; and, in the same way, I am persuaded 
 that He had a deep personal love for his own 
 people, his own nation. 
 
 The most tragic cry that sounds to us out of 
 the pages of the past is the cry of Christ’s disap¬ 
 pointment with his own people, and you cannot 
 help feeling, I think, as He looked down on 
 Jerusalem and uttered those moving words: 
 “How often would I have gathered thy children 
 together, as a hen gathers her brood under her 
 wings, and ye would not. Behold your house is 
 left unto you desolate!”—that those words are 
 tragic and moving, just because they are so pro¬ 
 foundly human. They make you feel that Christ 
 
 33 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 was moved to tears not only because the world 
 had cast Him out, but because his own people 
 had done so. 
 
 I remember reading a short time ago a little 
 poem by an English sailor, a man who was in 
 the Jutland battle, in which he describes his sense 
 of his own narrow little heart, which can only 
 love the people it really knows, compared with 
 the great passion for Humanity which animated 
 our Lord; and yet, he says, “Although this is 
 true, and our Lord loved all the world, yet surely 
 there was in his heart, even in his heart, a 
 peculiar love for his own people.” 
 
 “I would not mind to die for them, 
 
 My own dear downs and comrades true; 
 
 But that great Heart of Bethlehem, 
 
 He died for men he never knew. 
 
 “And yet I think, on Golgotha, 
 
 When Jesus’ eyes were closed in death, 
 
 He saw with a most passionate love 
 The little streets of Nazareth.” 
 
 Does not that appeal to one’s sense of what is 
 fundamentally true? Our Lord loved his own 
 
 34 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 people, and the tragedy to Him of his failure was 
 deepened and intensified by the fact that it was 
 his own people who had failed. He was the 
 embodiment of that old idea of the Suffering 
 Servant. To Him, every nation had its great 
 gift, given to it by God, but not for itself—for 
 the world! And the supreme gift of the Jewish 
 race was a spiritual and religious genius which 
 taught the Jew that God made man in his own 
 image, that there was in man something divine 
 which makes him the child of God; and his 
 limitation lay in the fact that he conceived this 
 only about the Jewish race. 
 
 Our Lord’s mission was first of all to the 
 Jews: “I come to the lost sheep of the house of 
 Israel.” “These,” He implies, “are my people; 
 these are the ones whose gift I understand. 
 Their supreme genius is their sense of the 
 Fatherhood of God and, therefore, their service 
 to the world is to teach the world that God is a 
 Father. They know that God has led them 
 throughout the ages. They know that in them 
 there is a divine spirit which makes them the 
 children of God. That is theirs to give to the 
 
 35 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 world, not theirs to keep to themselves, to make 
 them spiritually arrogant, to make them desire 
 to dominate the world; but theirs to share. He 
 that is greatest among you, let him be your 
 servant. 
 
 “This gift,” He says, “this religious genius, 
 which has taught you that God is your Father, 
 is now yours to give to the world; and your glory 
 shall be, not that you alone are God’s children, 
 but that to you has been given this great gospel— 
 that all mankind is of the family of God.” 
 
 Now the Jews were furious at that conception 
 of patriotism. To them the Christ was to be a 
 conqueror, a king in the earthly sense. Through¬ 
 out his ministry you can see how they hoped that 
 Jesus of Nazareth was going to be that great 
 conqueror; and when they found He would not, 
 when they tried to force Him into the position of 
 a leader and a king, and He refused, then they 
 turned against Him and said, “Not this man, but 
 Barabbas.” 
 
 Again and again in the history of the world, 
 the anger of the world against Christians has been 
 aroused, not because they believed this or that or 
 
 36 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 the other about God—the world is not interested 
 in what we believe—but because the Christian 
 has seemed to be a bad citizen. You see, our 
 Lord, from the point of view of the Jews, was a 
 bad Jew; He wanted the Jews to serve the world, 
 and they wanted the Jews to rule the world. He 
 conceived of patriotism as a spiritual service, and 
 they thought of it as a magnificent earthly 
 ambition. 
 
 Early in the history of the Church, you will 
 find that the persecutions of the Christians under 
 the Roman empire were not against Christianity 
 as a body of religious belief, but against the 
 Christians because they were bad citizens; they 
 would not worship the Roman emperor. Any 
 educated person in the Roman empire knew that 
 the emperor was not a god, but to throw a little 
 incense on his altar was just an expression of 
 loyalty. It meant that you were a “hundred per 
 cent” Roman citizen. To refuse meant that you 
 were a bad citizen who should be thrown to the 
 lions. 
 
 Over and over again in the history of the 
 world, the conception of Christian patriotism, 
 
 37 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 which is service, has seemed to the world bad 
 patriotism or an absence of patriotism; and the 
 transforming power of Christ, which teaches that 
 real love of country should be an understanding 
 of one’s country’s gift to the world, and a desire 
 to serve, has always seemed, at the time, to be a 
 wicked and treacherous ideal. I say, at the time, 
 because as the nations recede into the past and 
 our angry passions die, and other nations rise to 
 take their place, everyone can see that what 
 Christ taught was true. 
 
 What service does the world owe to the Jews? 
 A spiritual one. What does the world owe to 
 Greece ? Does the world care what battles Greece 
 fought and won? How many of you know the 
 names of her battles or whether or not she won 
 or lost them ? Greece is to the world the ideal of 
 beauty, and all the world pays homage to Greece 
 because of her great genius for beauty. So it is 
 with all nations. It is not the conquests that 
 they made, it is the service that they rendered, 
 which, as they recede into the past, we can see 
 was their real greatness and their glory. 
 
 Can we to-day rise to the ideal of a patriotism 
 
 38 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 which is not that cold and colorless thing which 
 rules out all especial love of country, which 
 teaches that people should love everyone alike,— 
 a thing impossible to the human spirit—which 
 asks us to love Humanity with a capital “H,” 
 and not to love our own country more than 
 others? Can we reconcile our belief that we 
 have not only a right but a duty to love our own 
 country, with that spiritual understanding of 
 what love of country ought to mean? Can we, in 
 fact, conceive at last of a Christian patriotism? 
 It is that which alone can save the world to-day. 
 
 Many of those who think and feel as I do, on 
 the whole, on most national and international 
 subjects, regard nationalism as a passion so per¬ 
 verted that we must seek to rise altogether above 
 it. I think they are wrong. Love of country is 
 a passion so deeply rooted in the heart of Man 
 that I cannot believe it is wrong or base. I am 
 certain that like the love of friends, like the love 
 of parents, like the love of children, it is essen¬ 
 tially noble and sacred. But if this is so, and if 
 you cannot and do not desire to cast it out of 
 the human heart, you must transform it, unless 
 
 39 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 the world is to be forever the tragic battlefield of 
 nations that so large a part of it is to-day. 
 
 “Wider still and wider, let her bounds be set,” 
 writes a modern English poet of the British 
 empire, “God who made her mighty, make her 
 mightier yet.” But that ideal, though so nobly 
 expressed, must, if it remains in our hearts, for¬ 
 ever bring us into conflict with all the other 
 nations of the world. It is an ideal which makes 
 battle and war inevitable. “God who made her 
 mighty, make her mightier yet.” At whose ex¬ 
 pense? At the expense of some other nation, 
 some other people, the loss of whom leaves all 
 Humanity poorer; at the loss of some national 
 gift, some national genius which, though it be 
 enshrined in some small and weak nation, is not 
 the less precious to the spiritual experience of 
 humankind. 
 
 Some of the smallest nations, the Jews them¬ 
 selves, have given the greatest gifts to Humanity ; 
 and that nation whose patriotism takes the form 
 of desiring forever to be mightier and mightier, 
 engenders in the hearts of its citizens contempt 
 
 40 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 for the genius of other nations and a determina¬ 
 tion to dominate them at any cost to Humanity. 
 
 Now is it possible for you of America to give 
 to the world a nobler conception than that? It 
 seems to me sometimes as though it were pecu¬ 
 liarly your vocation. In the Old World we are 
 so torn with war, our spirits are so poisoned 
 with suffering and hatred that it seems, humanly 
 speaking, impossible for a newer, saner, more 
 human conception, a more Christian idea of pa¬ 
 triotism to be born. I have no desire, even in the 
 remotest corner of my mind, to suggest to you in 
 what way your country should come to the help 
 of the world. I am perhaps fortunate in this, that 
 I have truly no prepossession as to any particular 
 political or economic entanglement which might 
 help us and cost you something. I cannot my¬ 
 self see what it is that in actual, practical terms 
 of politics or economics, you ought, as a nation, 
 to do or not to do. But I am certain that there 
 is a spiritual gift that you can give to the world, 
 and I do not see from what other nation that 
 gift to-day is possible. In the history of the 
 ages, is it not possible that the United States will 
 
 41 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 stand for something more wonderful, more 
 glorious than greatness in numbers, size or 
 wealth ? 
 
 That you are great in numbers and in wealth 
 and in the vast area of your country is absolutely 
 nothing to Humanity, except an opportunity. In 
 itself it is nothing, absolutely nothing! Greatness 
 does not consist in your numbers or your wealth. 
 Do not be proud of these things. But there are 
 two things that you have, and one of them is 
 opportunity; for what a nation so great mate¬ 
 rially does in the world comes to the world with 
 an added prestige because of its material great¬ 
 ness. It is a stupid judgment, if you will forgive 
 my saying so, a very stupid judgment, for the 
 smallest countries have sometimes done the great¬ 
 est things. But it is a fact that that which comes 
 from a country so great materially does come 
 with peculiar prestige and authority. What you 
 do here is of enormous importance, just because 
 you are materially so impressive. 
 
 Secondly, you have not—will you forgive my 
 saying it?—suffered quite so much as the Old 
 World has. You have known what it is to be 
 
 42 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 at war for a little while, and that must have 
 left—as modern war does leave—a shadow on 
 your hearts. But if you will try to realize what it 
 means to have lived in that shadow for nearly 
 four and a half years, you will also realize, I 
 think, that your comparative immunity gives you 
 a certain responsibility for the world’s future. 
 
 I cannot help sympathizing deeply with the 
 feeling that some of you have, that the Old World 
 is too rancorous, too vindictive, too cruel, too 
 blood-thirsty for you to be able to help it. Yet 
 I would like to convince you that, if we do not 
 forgive one another in Europe to-day, it is not 
 our hearts that refuse, nor is it our judgment; 
 it is our nerves. It is because we are in such 
 grief; because the wounds of war are so terrible 
 and so recent, that we are like people who have 
 got on each other’s nerves. Such nervous ten¬ 
 sion often leads to greater cruelty, to a greater 
 vindictiveness and wickedness, than there seems 
 any reason or excuse for. 
 
 To-day what is the matter with the Old World 
 is the impossibility of reacting quickly from so 
 great a nervous strain. In such an atmosphere, 
 
 43 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 people hate as easily as, normally, they loved, and 
 the new world cannot be born out of hatred. 
 They hate, and they despair. What strikes me 
 most, in coming to your country out of that at¬ 
 mosphere, is that hope is so easy to most of you. 
 Hope is a virtue that is almost dead outside 
 America, and despair is the characteristic vice of 
 the war-stricken countries. 
 
 Your service to the world is in some way, 
 which is for you to find, to convince us that love 
 is still a practicable virtue and that hope is the 
 normal condition of mankind. Can you solve 
 your own problems by love? You have problems 
 as great as ours, in some respects even greater. 
 The great strike which is going on at this moment 
 is symbolic of labor troubles more full of the 
 possibility of disaster than even the labor troubles 
 of the Old World; your long line of unemployed, 
 your color problem, all the problems that you 
 have to face—you know them better than I— 
 seem to me, in some respects, even greater than 
 ours. But you have hope to solve them with, 
 and your spirits are not poisoned with hatred. 
 Therefore, you ought to be able to solve them, 
 
 44 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 and, therefore, you should be determined to do 
 so. The vastness of their scale, the great size 
 of the country with which you have to deal, your 
 distances, your crowds, ought not to depress 
 your spirit, because your spirit is still capable of 
 hope, thinks of hope as a normal, an ordinary 
 state of mind. 
 
 This is the spiritual debt that you owe to the 
 world: to keep alive here in the United States 
 that spirit of love which is comparatively easy 
 to you (and if it does not seem easy to you, I 
 ask you to consider how impossible it must seem 
 to us), to keep alive here in America not only 
 hope but that on which hope is built—achieve¬ 
 ment. 
 
 You should not rest content to leave any of 
 your problems unsolved. This is the spiritual 
 opportunity of America; all the rest is a little 
 thing—your material greatness, your wealth, 
 your power, all those things that constitute “one 
 hundred per cent Americanism,” are nothing but 
 your opportunity. They are to you simply the 
 chance of giving a leadership, a spiritual leader¬ 
 ship to all the world. 
 
 45 
 
Christian Patriotism 
 
 I repeat, I am not dictating to you or even 
 suggesting to you in what way such a spirit of 
 Christian patriotism can be worked out in prac¬ 
 tice. But I beseech you to remember that of all 
 the peoples in the world, you have the greatest gift 
 of hope; love is to you most possible. To give 
 to the world that hope, to convince the world that 
 love is still the normal condition of Humanity, to 
 purify the atmosphere so that our poisoned spirits 
 shall at last recover the possibility also of love 
 and hope, this is to conceive of patriotism as 
 Christ did; this is to render to the world a service 
 which will constitute your claim to the immortal 
 gratitude of all the world. This is indeed to 
 give to the world a new gift and to civilization 
 new wealth. 
 
 O God, to Whom every nation is holy, make 
 this great nation holier yet. Amen. 
 
 46 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
“Who knoweth whether thou art come to the 
 kingdom for such a time as this?” 
 
 \ 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race. 
 
 “The modern world has been dominated by man, 
 it has been a world of conquest, of force, of war. 
 No one will be able to tell us whether or not the 
 physical evolution of the race made such a course 
 essential, but there is nothing surer thaii the fact 
 that the continuance of a world order based on 
 force means annihilation. 
 
 “The force which woman represents is not 
 that of arms or of physical combat, but rather the 
 force of love, of spiritual power; either we try 
 to work out a new society based on love, or we 
 destroy each other from the face of the earth.” 
 
 How literally true that has been and is. It is 
 literally true that the great difference in the re¬ 
 sponsibilities of men and women during all the 
 past ages, has been that the burden of conflict, 
 the duty of the soldier, the responsibility of de¬ 
 fense or attack, has been on the shoulders of the 
 
 49 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 men: that of cooperation and conservation, on 
 women. 
 
 Whatever difference there has been in the civi¬ 
 lization of one race or another, in their religion, 
 their politics, their social ideal, their economics, 
 everything else that you like, this broad and 
 fundamental distinction has always persisted be¬ 
 tween the sexes. The men have done the duty of 
 the soldier. There are, here and there, startling 
 exceptions, like the regiment of women that was 
 raised in Russia just before the revolution. 
 There has been, here and there, a fighting saint, 
 like Joan of Arc. But throughout the ages, with¬ 
 out any exception that counts at all, and in civi¬ 
 lizations the most various, this broad distinction 
 has always persisted; the man has been the de¬ 
 fender and the fighter, the woman has made the 
 home. And it has not yet been realized—outside 
 the narrowest circles of scientific study—how com¬ 
 pletely that which is spiritual in the human race 
 has depended upon the creation of the home. 
 
 It is a paradox, is it not, that the human race 
 should owe its supremacy over the lower animals 
 and its proud position in the world of created 
 
 50 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 beings really and honestly to the helplessness of 
 its children. It is because the human baby is so 
 absolutely helpless for so long a time that Hu¬ 
 manity has learned to cooperate, to practise the 
 virtues of altruism, to learn the meaning of love, 
 to spiritualize itself. Indeed it owes to that 
 simple physical fact, humanly speaking, all that 
 which differentiates it from the brute. 
 
 “Love came down at Christmas.” That is one 
 way of putting the fact that all altruistic love is 
 born, begins, with the love of a mother for a 
 child. You see, a human baby is so very help¬ 
 less ! There is not one single thing that it can do 
 for itself. When a baby comes into the world, 
 well, it can shriek—it starts doing that at once— 
 but that is all it can do. I suppose, really, to the 
 scientific eye, it is not even an extraordinarily 
 attractive object; many of us wonder sometimes 
 how if our mothers had not believed that we were 
 prodigies we should have got a chance of grow¬ 
 ing up at all! It is the surrender of the strength 
 of the older generation to the absolute helpless¬ 
 ness, the prolonged helplessness, of human in¬ 
 fancy that has created the spiritual value of 
 
 51 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 human love. It was born because human babies 
 are helpless. 
 
 When a mother is carrying her child, before 
 it is born, everything that she receives in the 
 way of nourishment goes first to that child. 
 When it has received all that it wants, she can 
 have what is left over, but everything goes first 
 to the child. Over and over again, people in 
 very poor and even famine-stricken districts in 
 Europe, since the war, have been struck with the 
 fact that a woman may herself bear all the signs 
 of underfeeding, almost to the point of starva¬ 
 tion, and yet bear a healthy child. Of course, 
 the process may go too far; there may not be 
 enough even to keep the child in being; but you 
 can, again and again, see a child born quite 
 healthy, quite plump, quite viable, quite fit for 
 life, from a mother who is obviously underfed. 
 The reason is that, no matter what she receives, 
 the nourishment goes first to that child. 
 
 Is not that a parable of motherhood? That 
 all the rights of the stronger are subservient to 
 the rights of the weaker? That all a mother re¬ 
 ceives goes first to make that which is being 
 
 52 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 created out of her flesh and blood ? It is an un¬ 
 conscious process, not subject to the will, and yet 
 it has often seemed to me one of the loveliest 
 facts about motherhood—this unconscious giving 
 all the time, this unconscious putting first of the 
 life that is to come. And when the child is born, 
 it has not a single right that it can enforce, not 
 one; yet in almost any home that you like to 
 think of, it is the baby who is sovereign over 
 the household, the baby to whose rights every¬ 
 thing else has to give way. Nothing surprises a 
 child more, as it begins to grow up, than the 
 startling discovery that there are other rights in 
 the world than its own! That is inevitable be¬ 
 cause at the first, and as long as it is helpless, 
 everything gives way to the child’s good. 
 
 Out of that altruistic love, which seems so 
 idealistic and so impossible, and yet which is 
 seen every day and every hour so that nobody 
 thinks anything of it, Humanity, as higher than 
 the brute, was born. For it is the genesis of 
 spiritual love which has made Humanity in the 
 image of God, and which, in fact, is responsible 
 
 53 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 in Humanity for all that raises it from the lower 
 creation. 
 
 Because of the child there comes into the home 
 the necessary element of permanency; there 
 arises the love of the father, who is himself only 
 a step away, so to speak, from that most intimate 
 tie of mother and child. He realizes that be¬ 
 cause the child is helpless, the woman must devote 
 herself to it, and, therefore, he must defend and 
 protect and support the home. So we get that 
 lovely trinity of father, mother and child, whose 
 beauty arises from the surrender of strength to 
 weakness. 
 
 The young of any animal are fit in quite a little 
 while to look after themselves. The lower they 
 are in the scale of being, the more quickly are 
 they ready for the battle of life. But the human 
 child takes not days and weeks or months, but 
 years to grow into maturity and, therefore, the 
 link between the father and mother persists and 
 must cease to be a merely physical attraction, as 
 between the lower animals, must have in it that 
 which is spiritual, because it is compelled, for 
 the child’s sake, to be permanent. The father 
 
 54 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 ceases to be merely the fighter and defender of 
 the race; the mother ceases to be merely the re¬ 
 producer of the race; and the two together pro¬ 
 vide that spiritual environment for the child, 
 without which the child is not really happy. 
 
 All women know that a child has not got all 
 it needs when it has food and clothing and a 
 roof over its head. You know that a child does 
 not flourish, generally speaking, in an institution, 
 however well run, as it does in a home. The 
 mother of the child may not be so well trained, 
 may not have so good an education as the head 
 of the institution; but there is some power 
 within her to do that for her child which the 
 head of an institution can hardly do. And this is 
 simply the power of love. 
 
 I remember, when I was looking for a baby to 
 adopt, I went down to a nursing home run by a 
 friend of mine who is a doctor, to see a baby 
 that had been born there, whose mother died at 
 its birth. It was such a pathetic little specimen, 
 very thin and miserable, and looking almost as 
 if it could not live. 
 
 I was feeling very ignorant about bringing up 
 
 55 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 babies, and I asked, “Is there anything really 
 wrong with the child?” The doctor looked at 
 me, rather amused, and said, “There is nothing 
 wrong with it, it only wants somebody to love 
 it!” Here was a child in a beautiful nursing 
 home, looked after by a woman-doctor of great 
 skill and experience, with any number of trained 
 nurses to look after it, and it could not flourish 
 because it wanted somebody to love it! 
 
 It is not enough to give a child the material 
 things that will build up its body; it must have 
 that spiritual environment which meets the needs 
 of its immortal spirit. Out of these needs of the 
 helpless human child has grown up that Hu¬ 
 manity of which we may dare to say that it was 
 made in the image and likeness of God. 
 
 All the crafts and arts of civilization have 
 been born in the home, out of the need to pro¬ 
 vide the child with the right kind of surround¬ 
 ings ; weaving and dyeing and the making of 
 clothes and the making of food; almost every 
 art and craft which to-day is carried on, perhaps 
 in great factories and by the hands of men, was 
 started in the home. That is a literal fact. It 
 
 56 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 was to surround the child with the right kind of 
 answer to its demands that civilization grew up; 
 that we learned to be orderly and loving and 
 unselfish; that we have decorated our homes with 
 what we believe to be beautiful; that we have 
 created with our hands the crafts and the arts 
 of civilization. All that which makes us human, 
 all that which dififerentiates us from the brute, 
 has been created out of the need of the human 
 being for a home. 
 
 Now this is a universal law. And science 
 has taught us that if a certain power operates 
 in a certain way in one place, it will always 
 operate in that way— always. You remember the 
 old story of James Watt, sitting by his mother’s 
 hearth and watching the steam lift the lid of the 
 kettle. He realized that it did so because when 
 water is turned into steam it expands. I suppose 
 that all the women in the world have watched 
 kettles boiling on the hearth, and in northern 
 countries the singing of the kettle is the very 
 symbol and expression of all that is homely and 
 dear. Millions and millions of women, genera¬ 
 tion after generation, had watched their kettles, 
 
 57 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 had seen the steam lifting the lid; and they 
 waited until a young man came and told them 
 what the significance of that movement was! 
 This boy (he was only a boy) sat there and 
 watched until, I believe, his mother boxed his 
 ears; she was so impatient with him, watching 
 the steam rising from the kettle! 
 
 Women had not realized that there, in their 
 own homes, before their very eyes, was operating 
 a power which would drive the ships of the world 
 across the sea and give the needed power to our 
 great modern machinery which would so increase 
 material wealth that it would develop an en¬ 
 tirely new order of society. They did not under¬ 
 stand that, by a universal law, the steam that is 
 in the kettle on the hearth will operate in the same 
 way when it is in the boilers of the Majestic or 
 the Aquitania, or in great power machines in 
 factories and mills. 
 
 In the same way, every woman, since the world 
 began, has watched love creating Humanity. 
 Every woman in her home has realized that it is 
 by the power of love that children are able to 
 grow into human beings. They know it so well 
 
 58 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 that they regard a home which rests on anything 
 but love as a failure. 
 
 Children may be governed by coercion, they 
 may be governed by fear or the power of the 
 purse, but everybody knows that in so far as 
 that is true, the home of those children is a 
 failure, and that you get the best human being, 
 the best human results, in a home which is gov¬ 
 erned by love. We have all known that since 
 the world began. Are we to wait until some man 
 comes to tell us that the same power can run the 
 world? Or shall we ourselves, this time, gen¬ 
 eralize a great spiritual law and proclaim that, 
 as love in the home has made Humanity, so love 
 in the world will operate in exactly the same way ? 
 That you cannot really think of a home or a 
 nation or a city as a success unless and until it 
 is based upon and governed by love? Can we 
 not proclaim to the world (before some man 
 comes to teach it to us!) that each little home is 
 made by a power that can make a nation or the 
 world? That this power which we have seen 
 with our eyes must operate in the same way 
 wherever Humanity is gathered together? 
 
 59 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 It is not possible, I think, for us to resist the 
 conclusion put before us in the extract with 
 which I began: that the world cannot any longer 
 pause to choose between conflict and cooperation, 
 if it desires to survive at all. But what women 
 can do especially is (from our own observation 
 and our own experience, going back through all 
 the ages since the beginning of Man) to show 
 what the scientist shows in his experiment in 
 his laboratory, the way in which the spiritual 
 law works. We have to bring about the delivery 
 of a nobler Humanity. Once more, Humanity is 
 in the throes of birth. 
 
 It has been said that we stand to-day between 
 two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born. 
 Powerless to be born! I have seen babies some¬ 
 times (I worked in a maternity hospital during 
 some part of the war) “powerless to be born,” 
 who were indeed delivered into the world and 
 who lived only through the sacrifice of the 
 mother. Again and again I have seen a woman, 
 uneducated, with no great spiritual opportunity 
 one would have thought, come into that hospital 
 to bear her child, whose sole desire—a desire so 
 
 60 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 single-minded and single-hearted that it left in 
 her no other desire at all—was that her baby 
 should be born well and strong. 
 
 I did not know, until I went into that hospital, 
 how very much depends, even in these days of 
 modern science, on the intelligence, the courage 
 and the fortitude of the mother. And how very 
 rarely did it fail! How very rarely did you see 
 a woman who thought of anything at all, in that 
 moment of anguish and travail, but that her child 
 should be born whole and well! It is for such 
 an hour that we are come into the kingdom— 
 for the birth-hour of a new Humanity. 
 
 Men have given to the women of to-day and, 
 above all, to the women of this country, a power, 
 a freedom, a responsibility, greater than at any 
 other time or in any other country in the world. 
 It is of you women that we may say, “Thou art 
 come into the kingdom for such a time as this.” 
 
 There are, in the history of the world, again 
 and again, dramatic moments, when a great and 
 swift development becomes possible. We are 
 always going forward or backward, it is true. 
 But there are times when the movement forward 
 
 61 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 or backward becomes dramatic, catastrophic, 
 extraordinary; w hen, looking back on the history 
 of the world, we can see that an epoch was 
 made. The coming of our Lord Christ was 
 such an epoch supremely, of course, but other 
 great episodes in the world’s history have meant 
 also definite and striking advance. 
 
 I am persuaded that at this moment it is ab¬ 
 solutely essential that there shall be born into the 
 world a nobler, a greater and a more powerful 
 Humanity. You women have in your hands the 
 children of the world. They have always been 
 in the women’s hands; the infancy of Humanity 
 is yours to train. But in a wider sense, also a 
 more significant and fundamental sense, this is 
 true: Humanity itself is in your hands, and 
 now when we are confronted with an intellectual 
 advance which is stupendous, with powers for 
 good and evil which, on the one hand, can heap 
 up wealth like mountains and, on the other, 
 destroy it until the face of the earth is blasted 
 with the broken and the dead, it is necessary that 
 there be born a generation which shall have a 
 
 62 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 spiritual power equal to the intellectual and mate¬ 
 rial advance that has been made. 
 
 It is the hour when women must, once more, 
 and this time consciously and deliberately, create 
 that atmosphere both in the home and the world 
 wherein that which makes us human, that which 
 is spiritual, that which is civilized, shall be im¬ 
 measurably more developed than it has been in 
 the past. 
 
 Let me show you quite definitely what I mean. 
 Take, for instance, the Young Women’s Chris¬ 
 tian Association as typical of the great organiza¬ 
 tions through which you as women are endeavor¬ 
 ing to make your contribution toward social 
 progress. Here are you women in this, the 
 biggest association of its kind in the world, with 
 an organization so vast that it almost staggers 
 imagination; having to deal with cleavages in 
 your social system so deep that to the outsider 
 America seems to be characteristically the land 
 of multimillionaires, and yet, on the other hand, 
 contains poverty as extreme as in any of the 
 older countries—with racial cleavages deeper 
 still. 
 
 63 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 For leaders you will have to develop a type of 
 woman whose imagination and insight and spirit¬ 
 ual vision is so great that, though she be at the 
 head of a great organization, she must be able 
 to understand the needs of the rank and file of 
 girls at the other side of the United States, living 
 in circumstances utterly different from her own, 
 with needs quite different, younger in years, 
 perhaps a different social class, or of a different 
 race. She must understand the needs of women 
 all over the country, enter into their position, 
 understand them. If she cannot do that, she is 
 unequal to the vast responsibility she bears. Who 
 is sufficient for these things? 
 
 They demand something more than intelli¬ 
 gence ; they demand spiritual vision, the power to 
 see what is not visible to the eye, to reach with 
 sympathetic understanding across the three thou¬ 
 sand miles of your great country, itself almost 
 a continent. They demand a power to control 
 the details of the use of time, to be always busy 
 and never distracted, employed continually yet at 
 leisure in the heart. They demand a spiritual 
 
 64 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 discipline and insight which any woman might 
 dread to claim. 
 
 You must also produce that kind of leadership 
 in your rank and file. You will have to have 
 students who not only desire to know but who 
 are capable of knowing what it means to be an 
 industrial girl. You will have to have industrial 
 girls who not only desire to express but who are 
 capable of expressing their point of view so that 
 it shall be understood, without resentment, with¬ 
 out harshness, without prejudices, without bitter¬ 
 ness, yet with passion and with power so that 
 the world is moved to better things. Your older 
 members must be able to understand young 
 women and your younger members must know 
 how to use the experience of older women. 
 Women in business life will have to meet sym¬ 
 pathetically the problems of women in the home, 
 and differing races will bring their unique contri¬ 
 bution and receive each from the other. 
 
 Who is sufficient for these things? Yet the 
 very vastness of the problems before you de¬ 
 mands them and unless you can produce that type 
 of leader and that type in the rank and file, you 
 
 65 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 will be crushed by the very immensity of the 
 task. 
 
 That which is true of you here is even more 
 true in its way of the world itself. Science has 
 given us power and sight and faith. Science has 
 given to the service of Humanity instruments by 
 which it may see the stars to which our fore¬ 
 fathers were blind. Where they saw three thou¬ 
 sand stars in the heavens, we count three millions. 
 Science has enabled us to peer into the structure 
 of the atom and to reason about things we can 
 neither see nor imagine. In other words, science 
 has increased our sight so that we can measure 
 immeasurable space and use the things that are 
 invisible. 
 
 Can you do that spiritually? You can see 
 some star countless billions of miles away. Can 
 you see a child in the slums of New York who 
 starves? Can you see the people of Russia who 
 die, thirty or thirty-five millions of them? Is 
 that visible to you ? Is there any spiritual instru¬ 
 ment by which you can be made to see things 
 like that? You can live in the wealthy parts of 
 your cities, many of you; you can shut out from 
 
 66 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 your physical sight those who are poor and who 
 are spiritually as well as physically underfed. 
 But you must create a Humanity whose under¬ 
 standing and pity the mere walls of a house, the 
 mere distance of a city, or the distance of half 
 a world cannot baffle, to whom it shall be intoler¬ 
 able that any human being should suffer without 
 help. 
 
 We have already created a Humanity which 
 cannot endure to see a child starve before its 
 eyes. You do not think that it is a great virtue 
 to say of a man that he could not live comfort¬ 
 ably in a house with his family and have there 
 a child dying from starvation! You would 
 rather say that if he could, he would be a monster. 
 You would say that he could not be human, for 
 no human being could suffer the sight of a child 
 literally starving before his eyes. 
 
 But we must go further since we have created 
 a world in which we cannot do a cruel thing in 
 one place without its reverberating across the 
 world. We must have a spiritual imagination 
 which will make it impossible for us to be cruel 
 merely because with our physical eyes we cannot 
 
 67 
 
Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 see the effect of what we do. It must be as im¬ 
 possible for the Humanity of the future to live 
 comfortably and happily on Fifth Avenue in New 
 York while there are people on the East Side who 
 starve, as it is even more impossible for a man to 
 see a child starve before his eyes. 
 
 Not long ago, I was put up for a night by one 
 of the kindest of hostesses in my own country. 
 Nothing could have been more considerate than 
 the way in which she treated me. But when I 
 asked her if she was going to Dr. Nansen’s meet¬ 
 ing about the Russian Famine Fund the next 
 week, she said: “I don’t see the use of that. I 
 think it would be much better to let them all 
 starve!” Yet she was not an unkind woman. 
 She would have done anything in the world for 
 an individual suffering child in her own house. 
 But she could not imagine thirty millions of 
 people in such agony. They were too far away; 
 she could not realize them, and she herself had 
 never known what it was to be without food. 
 
 I often think that when Dr. Nansen appealed 
 before the bar of the League of Nations for five 
 million pounds from all the world—that little 
 
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Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 sum for Russia!—if he had been confronted not 
 by the great and the mighty, but by the poor, he 
 would not have gone empty away. People who 
 understand what it is to be hungry cannot en¬ 
 dure that others should be hungry. But can we 
 not develop a Humanity which, zmthout that 
 experience, has such spiritual vision that the pain 
 of everyone is present to itself; that a man can¬ 
 not, literally cannot be happy as long as other 
 people are starved and stunted ? 
 
 You must produce that Humanity in your 
 homes, or else the world will perish under the 
 weight of its own intellectual and material great¬ 
 ness. We have learned how to send our trade 
 across the world. We have created a civiliza¬ 
 tion so complex that one of your magnates in 
 New York can shake the financial markets 
 throughout the world. We have created a world 
 such that disease and health are mingled up and 
 knit together across the continents; that no one 
 can prosper without helping others to prosper, 
 and no one can suffer without causing others 
 to suffer. 
 
 If we have made that world, as by our intel- 
 
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Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 lectual advance we have done, we must create that 
 spiritual power which will make us as spiritually 
 sensitive as we are intellectually efficient; which 
 will enable us to visualize, to understand and to 
 hope for all the world. 
 
 Science, I said, has given us faith, and that 
 may seem to some of you a very strange claim. 
 But is it not true that the scientist does not doubt 
 his ultimate power to deal with any problem— 
 material problem—that faces him? There is 
 something magnificent about the attitude of the 
 modern scientist in the face of any problem, in 
 his conviction that ultimately it will be solved. 
 Cannot those who care for the things of the 
 spirit have the same faith in Humanity, the same 
 boundless conviction of ultimate triumph, the 
 same certainty that we shall make out of all our 
 opportunities something glorious? The march 
 of the spirit must equal the march of the intellect, 
 or we perish. 
 
 Can such a generation as I described—for it 
 means nothing less than a new Humanity—be 
 born of the women of to-day? Is it possible that 
 out of the intimate knowledge of their own ex- 
 
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Woman’s Service to the Race 
 
 perience of the power there is in the world to 
 civilize, to redeem, to ennoble, by Love, there 
 may be given to us a new and nobler and more 
 civilized Humanity, able nobly and rightly to 
 deal with the problems created by an older civi¬ 
 lization? God grant it! 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
“One of his disciples said unto him / Lord, teach 
 us to pray. And he said unto them, When ye 
 pray, say, Father ” 
 
Woman’s Service to Theology. 
 
 At first sight, when one begins to study theol¬ 
 ogy, it does not seem as though there were any 
 particular point of view or any particular con¬ 
 tribution into which sex enters at all. One of 
 the very few things that our Lord says about sex 
 suggests that it is not an eternal and, therefore, 
 not a fundamental thing, that there is no sex in 
 the spirit. When He was asked a question ob¬ 
 viously designed to entrap Him, about a woman 
 who had married a succession of brothers, He 
 said, “In heaven they neither marry nor are 
 given in marriage, but are as the angels of 
 heaven.” That assurance that in the spirit there 
 is no sex, is, I think, for women one of the most 
 glorious and significant things in the whole of 
 Christ’s teachings. 
 
 In all the other great religions of the world— 
 some of them very spiritual and very lofty—there 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 is some special teaching about the nature, the duty 
 and the ideals of women. Sometimes it is very 
 beautiful teaching; sometimes it is very poor 
 and narrow. But I believe I am right in saying 
 that in all the great religions of the world, there 
 is special teaching about women as distinct from 
 men, except in the religion of Christ. In the 
 Christian religion—that is to say, in Christ’s reli¬ 
 gion, which is not invariably the same thing!— 
 in Christ’s religion there is no teaching at all that 
 is especially designed for women. 
 
 If I were to take our Lord’s words out of their 
 context in the gospels and repeat them to any 
 person who had never read the gospels, that 
 person could not tell whether any given sentence 
 was addressed to a woman or a man. If you 
 leave out the actual words of address, there is 
 absolutely nothing in the essential character of 
 any passage in our Lord’s teaching which belongs 
 to one sex more than to another. There is not a 
 trace of intellectual condescension. There is not 
 a suggestion that women have a narrower sphere 
 or a different ideal from that of men. There is 
 no list of virtues which women are especially to 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 aim at as distinct from that list of virtues which 
 is offered to men. 
 
 In a great deal of modern religious teaching, 
 we are told, for instance, that women should be 
 chaste and men should be brave; that women 
 should be gentle and men should be strong; that 
 women should be submissive (which is a very 
 convenient doctrine for men) and men should 
 be independent. There is an admirable little 
 double list of virtues for men and women which 
 has often struck me as singularly resembling 
 the double list of virtues for rich and poor. 
 Patience, unselfishness, humility, resignation,— 
 these are the virtues commended to the favorable 
 consideration of the poor; and these are, on the 
 whole, the virtues which have been commended to 
 the consideration of our sex. But in that distinc¬ 
 tion of class or sex, there is no authority to be de¬ 
 rived from Christ. 
 
 In his teachings, there is not a word, not a 
 phrase, which is especially adapted to one sex 
 rather than the other. • I do not believe that we 
 have yet sufficiently grasped the profound signifi¬ 
 cance of that. Our Lord is the ideal not of one 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 sex or another, not of one class or another, but 
 of all Humanity, and I often think that that 
 rather effeminate presentation of our Lord which 
 tradition has created, has a reason which explains 
 its weakness. One does feel, I think, that there 
 is very often in that traditional representation 
 something a little effeminate. One feels that a 
 stronger character should be depicted than that 
 which is suggested by the popular pictures of 
 Jesus of Nazareth, especially in modern art. Yet 
 I believe that the artist has only failed to do what 
 was in itself a right thing to aim at. He has 
 been trying to express the fact that though Jesus 
 of Nazareth was born a man (since He had to be 
 born in the body either of a man or a woman) yet 
 He is, in fact, the ideal of all Humanity; for 
 women as well as for men the Way, the Truth 
 and the Life; and that from no virtue that He 
 lived or preached, of strength or gentleness, of 
 power or purity, can either sex dispense itself 
 without breaking the whole ideal. 
 
 So—to be personal for a moment—when I first 
 began to preach, I felt very strongly that people 
 ought not to treat sex as though it were of 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 eternal significance; that the things of the spirit 
 should be proclaimed by men and women alike; 
 that if God gave a message to any human being, 
 she should not be forbidden to deliver it, because 
 she was a woman. That I still deeply and 
 passionately feel. 
 
 But I have also learned that there is, notwith¬ 
 standing, a certain point of view which will 
 enable women to give to the world not only in 
 practical service but in theology—in the world’s 
 
 idea of God Himself—some fresh understand- 
 
 «• 
 
 ing, some new light. After all, it does matter in 
 what kind of body your spirit is enshrined. The 
 point of view (as I have said already) of India, 
 of China, of Africa and of America has a cer¬ 
 tain difference, and we all feel—those of us who 
 think of it at all—that our understanding of 
 Christ and of God is not complete until every 
 race has brought its peculiar spiritual genius, and 
 its special spiritual experience, to the understand¬ 
 ing of our great and universal religion. 
 
 In the same way, I have become convinced 
 that from their actual experience, from the fact 
 that to be a woman gives one a rather different 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 angle of vision to certain things in life, some¬ 
 thing can be given even to our conception of God 
 Himself, some new understanding of the great 
 teaching of Christ, when women begin to take 
 their full share in thinking out their faith. 
 
 Women have always been among the great 
 saints, the great servants of Humanity, the 
 practical Christians; but, on the whole, the theol¬ 
 ogy of the world is the work of men. There have 
 been a few great women theologians, a Catherine 
 of Siena, a Teresa of Spain, but these women 
 have always been the exceptional women, the 
 women whose experience, so far as that is pos¬ 
 sible, has rather been like the experience of a 
 man than the experience of the normal woman. 
 That is to say, they have not been wives and 
 mothers, and though motherhood has been in 
 them expressed spiritually their contribution to 
 theology has-* been rather more like that of a 
 great man, in some respects, than representative 
 of the experience of the normal, average—I use 
 the word in its best sense—woman’s life. It is 
 this particular contribution to theology, not that 
 of the exceptional woman, but that of the woman 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 whose life is preeminently that of her sex, that 
 I believe is going to add such wealth of under¬ 
 standing to the theology of this generation. 
 
 The gospel of St. Luke is believed by students 
 of the Bible to owe a great deal to some woman 
 or some group of women. It has been believed 
 for a very long time, for example, that the first 
 two or three chapters of the gospel must have 
 been given to the evangelist by our Lord’s 
 mother; they so obviously represent a woman’s 
 point of view, and are expressed in a way which 
 suggests the mind of a mother. Have you 
 noticed one most intimate little touch, which 
 seems to me so maternal and so like a woman and 
 really not very like a man (I do not believe St. 
 
 Luke could have thought of it all by himself!), 
 when we are told that our Lord “increased in 
 wisdom and in stature and in favor with God 
 and man.” Our Lord’s mother knew that He 
 was growing up not only in his wonderful mind 
 but in his lovely little human body; He was 
 growing out of his clothes, I suppose! “In 
 wisdom and in stature and in favor with God 
 and man.” 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 It is now believed by many people that not 
 only these first chapters but a very large part of 
 the gospel was collected by St. Luke from the 
 records and memories of women. Chapters eight 
 to nineteen, that is, eleven chapters right in the 
 heart of the gospel, were perhaps given to him 
 by the little group of women who ministered to 
 our Lord as He went about teaching and preach¬ 
 ing; either by one of these women, possibly our 
 Lord’s mother again, or possibly Joanna, or by 
 the little group of women together. They told 
 St. Luke, who was collecting from various people 
 who had known our Lord in the flesh, the teach¬ 
 ing that they remembered, the events and stories 
 and sayings that struck them most. 
 
 You will realize, I think, if you read the gospel 
 again from that point of view, that there is a 
 certain difference in the way in which a woman 
 interprets and remembers the teaching of Christ 
 and the way in which a man does. It was Bernard 
 Shaw who said, “It is the Christ of St. Luke Who 
 has conquered the world.” Not the Christ of the 
 fourth gospel, who, I always think, is more 
 wonderful to those who already know almost by 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 heart the first three gospels; not the Christ of 
 St. Matthew or of St. Mark, preeminently; but, 
 above all, the Christ of St. Luke. I believe that 
 Bernard Shaw is right in saying that, ani. that 
 the reason is that there is a certain humanity, a 
 certain intimacy of touch in the sayings in this 
 gospel which is hardly found in the same perfec¬ 
 tion in any of the others. 
 
 Christ, to the mind behind St. Luke, was, above 
 all—no, not above all, but at least equally—the 
 human Christ and the divine Christ; and his 
 divinity expressed itself to that mind, above all, 
 through his human personality. 
 
 You will notice that our Lord recognized that 
 difiference in his teaching between women and 
 men. I have said that He gave no especial teach¬ 
 ing for women. Well, it might be argued that 
 that was because He was so much a man that 
 He forgot women! It is very easy for men to 
 forget that women exist when they start out to 
 teach one another; they think in terms of men, 
 they think in terms of boys. And it might be 
 argued that if our Lord gave no especial teach¬ 
 ing for women, it was because He forgot them 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 altogether, but for another equally striking 
 quality in his teaching, that is, his frequent appeal 
 . to women’s experience. 
 
 He gave to both men and women the same 
 teaching, but He enforced it by applying it to 
 their different lives. He made it so real to 
 them that I often think any public speaker who 
 studied our Lord’s speaking just from the point 
 of view of a speaker, would be struck by the per¬ 
 fection of the way in which He makes his appeal. 
 He looked at the people He was speaking to and 
 saw, perhaps, some shepherd standing there (I 
 suppose He taught in the open air a dozen times 
 for once in the synagogue), and He said, “The 
 kingdom of heaven is like unto a man who has 
 a hundred sheep and one is lost, and he leaveth 
 the ninety-nine and goeth into the mountains 
 and seeketh the one that is lost.” Then his eyes 
 fell upon a woman and He said, “The kingdom 
 of heaven is like unto a woman who has lost a 
 piece of silver and she sweeps her house until she 
 has found it.” 
 
 Again and again you will find that double 
 appeal: 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 “Two men shall be in a field, one is taken, and 
 the other left.” 
 
 “Two women shall be grinding at the mill, 
 one is taken and one is left.” 
 
 Again: “What man of you, having a hundred 
 sheep, and having lost one of them, doth not 
 leave the ninety and nine, and go after that 
 which is lost?” 
 
 “What zvoman, having ten pieces of silver, if 
 she lose one piece doth not light a lamp, and sweep 
 the house and seek diligently until she find it?” 
 
 Again: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a 
 grain of mustard seed which a man took and 
 sowed in his field.” 
 
 “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven 
 which a woman took and hid in three measures 
 of meal.” 
 
 Again: “The Kingdom of Heaven is as a man 
 travelling into. a far country zvho called his 
 servants and delivered unto them his goods.” 
 
 “Then shall the Kingdom of Heaven be likened 
 unto ten virgins who took their lamps and went 
 forth to meet the bridegroom.” 
 
 Again: “There were may lepers in Israel in 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 the time of Elisha and none of them was cleansed 
 but Naaman .” 
 
 “There were many widows in Israel in the time 
 of Elijah, and unto none of them was he sent 
 but to Zarephath.” 
 
 Again: “The men of Nineveh shall rise up in 
 judgment with this generation and shall con¬ 
 demn it; for they repented at the preaching of 
 Jonah, and behold, a greater than Jonah is here.” 
 
 “The Queen of the South shall rise up in 
 judgment with the men of this generation and 
 shall condemn them; for she came from the 
 ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, 
 and behold a greater than Solomon is here.”* 
 
 Christ knew that the woman looks for her 
 lost property in her house, for that is where the 
 Jewish woman was; but the man has lost his 
 sheep—he goes out into the mountain to seek for 
 it. There is a consciousness of the different ex¬ 
 perience of those to whom He appeals that makes 
 one realize how intensely He was aware of all 
 their personal lives and personal experiences. 
 
 * These instances were collected by E. Picton-Turber- 
 ville in her book “Christ and Woman’s Power.” 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 And the experience of the average man and 
 woman is different. 
 
 When, then, you come to the gospel of St. 
 
 Luke, you find that there is something at the back 
 of much of it that suggests a woman’s mind; and 
 among these instances is the passage so familiar 
 that I suppose most of you know it nearly by 
 heart, a passage of which it has been said that if 
 all the rest of the gospels were lost and there re¬ 
 mained to us only the story of the Prodigal Son, 
 we should still have the heart of the teaching of 
 Christ. 
 
 This supremely beautiful parable, which to all 
 the world is familiar, which moves the hearts of 
 men all over the world and in all the ages, is only 
 recorded in the gospel according to St. Luke. 
 
 Many of the parables are recorded three times, 
 most of them perhaps twice, but this one which is 
 the supreme parable, of all our Lord’s teaching 
 the most adorable, this one has only been recorded 
 once, and it comes in that part of St. Luke which 
 scholars now attribute to the suggestion and the 
 teaching of a woman. I wonder why that is! 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 One would have thought that no one who had 
 ever heard it could forget it. 
 
 Our Lord put his teaching into these little 
 stories that we call parables, because He was 
 speaking to people who could not read or write, 
 who must have their teaching given to them in 
 such a form that they could easily remember 
 it. Everyone remembers a story, so our Lord 
 put his great truths in these lovely little stories, 
 and this one, which is the loveliest of all, was 
 remembered only by some woman or some group 
 of women who recorded it and gave it to St. 
 Luke. 
 
 Think what the heart of that parable is; it is 
 the idea of God as our Father. “When ye pray, 
 say, Father.”* If you are a flagrant and open 
 sinner, if you are a man who has spent all his 
 living, all that God gave him of talent, of wealth, 
 of power, of personality, in a waste of shame, if 
 you are that kind of sinner, God is still your 
 
 * It seems certain that this was the form in which 
 Christ gave the prayer to his disciples: not “Our 
 Father,” but “Father.” 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 Father, and when He sees you a great way off, 
 He makes haste to come to meet you. 
 
 If you are another kind of sinner, an alto¬ 
 gether respectable, narrow-minded, censorious 
 prig, who is always judging other people, who 
 cannot just be glad of somebody else’s happiness, 
 but must always be thinking how much more he 
 deserves it himself, if you are that extraordi¬ 
 narily disagreeable person, the prig, still God is 
 your Father. 
 
 I often think that the attitude of the Father to 
 the elder son is even more wonderful than his 
 forgiveness of the younger. It is so much more 
 difficult to be loving to the self-righteous than it 
 is to the prodigal son! People often say to me, 
 “I wish that end of the parable were not there. 
 I should like it to stop at the point where they 
 all begin to rejoice, “This my son was dead and 
 he is alive again; he was lost and he is found.” 
 But whenever I find myself guilty of some harsh 
 judgment, some censorious, narrow-minded atti¬ 
 tude toward other people, I thank God for the 
 last part of that parable that tells us that God 
 still loves us, whatever our faults, whether they 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 are flagrant or whether they are merely dis¬ 
 agreeable ! Well, that is the center of this para¬ 
 ble—the Fatherhood of God, which nothing can 
 destroy. 
 
 In that parable, which has been described as 
 the supreme parable, which, if we had it, would 
 give us the heart of Christianity though all the 
 rest were gone, there is no Christ at all. Is not 
 that strange? Did not Christ want to make us 
 understand that it is not God who requires a 
 mediator between Himself and his children, but 
 the children who have so misunderstood and so 
 wandered from their Father that they require a 
 mediator to make them understand what He is 
 really like. “God was in Christ reconciling the 
 world unto Himself,” not reconciling Himself 
 unto the world, for God never was alienated 
 from us; it was we who were alienated from 
 God. 
 
 So Jesus Christ gives to us this supreme ex¬ 
 pression of the Christian religion, in it no media¬ 
 tor, no advocate, because the supreme revelation 
 of God is that his love is so perfect that He 
 requires no one to stand between Him and his 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 children; it is He himself who comes to meet us; 
 for a moment Christ leaves out of account our 
 own desperate need of a mediator to stand be¬ 
 tween us and God. 
 
 We need Him indeed, for without Christ 
 what should we know of God? Our need we 
 cannot overestimate. It is Christ who makes 
 us “at one” again with our Father. This is the 
 true doctrine of the Atonement, which is the 
 very heart of the Christian faith. Had we 
 always thought of the Atonement thus,—as the 
 revelation to us, forlorn and hopeless, of the 
 nature and the love of God,—it would never 
 have become the hard and terrible doctrine it has 
 been made by those theologians who have inter¬ 
 preted it in the terms of the law-court rather 
 than the home, of the judge, rather than of the 
 father. 
 
 Well, that is the supreme expression—is it not? 
 
 —of the Fatherhood of God, and the Fatherhood 
 of God was the supreme teaching of Jesus of 
 Nazareth. That is the heart of the Christian 
 religion, the love of God for the world; that 
 God is love, that love is the fulfilling of the law, 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 that to love God and your neighbor is greater 
 than anything else in the world; that on these 
 two hang all the law and the prophets, that “he 
 that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God 
 in him.” That is the heart of the Christian 
 religion. You do not find it in any other gospel. 
 
 It is true that there are many other aspects of 
 God which our Lord taught to us in many para¬ 
 bles. God is our judge, He is our creditor to 
 whom we owe more than we can ever repay. 
 He is sometimes shown to us as an officer in a 
 court, as a legislator who lays down the laws by 
 which we must live, as our captain, our host, or 
 our king. The parables which give us the idea of 
 God as a judge or a legislator or a captain or a 
 leader or a creditor, are reported by all the 
 evangelists again and again, for these things are 
 easy for a man to understand. When our Lord 
 looked over his audience, He saw those who, 
 from the beginning of time, have been engaged 
 in making laws and administering them, people 
 who have created states, who have built up king¬ 
 doms, carried on wars, have been interested in all 
 that side of life, and He said to them, “God is 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 your captain, He is your leader, your legislator, 
 your eternal judge,” and into the consciousness 
 of every man present that teaching entered and 
 was not forgotten. 
 
 But the woman has lived in the home, and when 
 Christ said, “When ye pray, say, Father,” He 
 was saying the thing that was most real to her. 
 
 She had not been making states or laws or wars; 
 she was not an officer administering the laws of 
 her country; or a creditor, for she rarely had 
 any property; she was not in that side of life at 
 all. But all her life, in all the world and in 
 every civilization and before civilization, from 
 the very beginning of humanity, she had made 
 homes and, therefore, when Christ says to her, “A 
 certain man had two sons,” she understood, and 
 the thing stayed in her mind. 
 
 When teaching is given to you, it must meet 
 with some response in you, must it not? If some¬ 
 thing is said to you that has no relation to any¬ 
 thing in your life, it passes by you; you do not 
 remember it. That is why our Lord is so careful 
 to give an instance from the man’s life and from 
 the woman’s, so that each may remember. So 
 
 93 
 
Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 this fundamental principle of Christianity fas¬ 
 tened itself upon the minds of that little group 
 of women, and the one thing among all that they 
 remembered best was that God was like a Father 
 who forgave his children always, whatever they 
 did, and that the relationship between God and 
 man is the relationship that you find in an ideal 
 home. 
 
 Now that parable, humanly speaking, would 
 have been lost to the world but for the women 
 who remembered it. God gave it to them to re¬ 
 member what all the other evangelists had for¬ 
 gotten, though it was fundamental; for although 
 God is our judge, our creditor, our legislator and 
 our captain, He is supremely our Father. Other 
 religions have taught that God was our captain 
 and our judge and our lawgiver; it did not need 
 Christ to come into the world to tell us that. We 
 could have learned that from smaller teachers. 
 But that God was our Father!—that was the 
 supreme thing, and that was remembered best of 
 all by women. 
 
 That is what I mean when I say that I believe 
 that women have an especial contribution to give, 
 
 94 
 
Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 not only to the practical affairs of life, but to its 
 thinking and to its idealism. And is it not true 
 that the supreme need of the world at this hour 
 is a more vivid conception of the Fatherhood of 
 God? Is it not true that the one change that we 
 want to make in the hearts of men to-day is that 
 change which shall enable them to cease thinking 
 of the world as a battlefield and to begin thinking 
 of it as a home? If we could grasp the idea 
 above all ideas, that God is our Father and that 
 the brotherhood of the nations and the brother¬ 
 hood of man is the supreme consequence of this 
 supreme truth, should we not already have 
 created an entirely different atmosphere for the 
 new world to grow up in ? 
 
 The duty of warfare, as it has been conceived 
 in the past, conflicts to-day with our new concep¬ 
 tion of the world as a whole. For generations, 
 we have been content to sit in our homes and to 
 make them as lovely, as divinely gentle and 
 human and beautiful as possible, but we have not 
 yet given to the world that wider conception 
 which makes this world of God simply one vast 
 home for the nations that live in it. 
 
 95 
 
Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 If we had got that simple conception of God, 
 which is that, supremely, He is Love; that love is 
 the fulfilling of the law; that no sin can stand 
 against it and no doctrine be weighed in com¬ 
 parison with it; that Christ is the Way, the 
 Truth and the Life above all in this, that He was 
 the supreme expression of Love, and that, “He 
 that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God,” surely the 
 whole world would already begin to be changed. 
 
 Put into your religion your intelligence, put, 
 for God’s sake, your brains into your faith, and 
 when you are helping to work out the theology 
 of Christianity, you will, I am certain, be able 
 to bring to it a certain depth and a certain sim¬ 
 plicity which must move the world. 
 
 After all, though it was a woman probably 
 who alone remembered this parable, all the 
 world has seized on it as the very heart of the 
 teaching of Christ. If we could realize from that 
 parable the essential simplicity of the gospel, 
 would it be possible for us to persecute one an¬ 
 other, to divide the Church of Christ into warring 
 sects, to make of things that are not fundamental 
 barriers between Christians? 
 
 96 
 
Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 I do not for a moment deprecate the impor¬ 
 tance of clear thinking. The idea that holiness 
 and silliness ought rightly to go together is ab¬ 
 horrent to me; the idea that Christians are all the 
 better for being slightly mentally deficient is one 
 of the most blasphemous doctrines! Christians 
 ought to be the most clear thinking, the most 
 efficient people in any state. 
 
 But let us distinguish between what is funda¬ 
 mental and what is not. Let us follow Christ 
 because we love Him. Is not that the heart of 
 his appeal: What did He ever ask of anyone but 
 that they should look at life through his eyes, 
 think of God and man and serve them as He did ? 
 
 Love Him! You will not find anyone who came 
 to follow Him, who came desiring to follow Him, 
 offered any other test than that. Could they 
 drink of the cup that He was to drink? If so, 
 they were his disciples. 
 
 As we love our Lord more and more and fol¬ 
 low Him more and more closely, we realize more 
 and more who and what He was. To that appeal 
 He Himself trusted absolutely. Love was to 
 Him not only a gospel, a principle, a sermon, it 
 
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Woman’s Service to Theology 
 
 was a life, and He said to us, “Love is the ful¬ 
 filling of the law. He that dwelleth in love 
 dwelleth in God.” 
 
 That translation of the world’s values into the 
 value of life is very, very hard for narrow, selfish, 
 limited human imagination to make, but it is, I 
 believe, the supreme need, both of the Church and 
 the world at this hour, and it is because I believe 
 that women, from their very experience through¬ 
 out the ages, do instinctively seize upon that 
 aspect of our Lord’s teaching as the one eternal 
 truth for them, because they responded as pos¬ 
 sibly men could not in the same degree respond 
 to his teaching that the world is a home, that 
 men are brothers and that God is our Father, 
 that I believe passionately that the women of this 
 generation have in their hands, if they will 
 choose to use it, the power that will change the 
 world. 
 
 98 
 
The Law of Life 
 
''When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall 
 guide you into all the truth.” 
 
 “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from 
 above, and cometh down from the Father of 
 lights, with whom is no variableness, neither 
 shadow of turning.” 
 
The Law of Life. 
 
 In the great discourse at the close of the gospel 
 of St. John our Lord promised his guidance and 
 the guidance of God to those who should 
 come after Him; “When he, the Spirit of 
 Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” 
 And then in the Epistle of St. James there is this 
 verse: “Every good gift, and every perfect gift, 
 is from above, and cometh down from the 
 Father of Lights with whom is no variableness, 
 neither shadow of turning.” 
 
 First of all, there is a promise that we shall 
 advance in knowledge of the truth; and secondly, 
 there is the assurance that it is not God who 
 changes, it is not the truth that varies, for God 
 is always the same,—“In Him is no variableness, 
 neither shadow of turning,”—it is in us that the 
 change takes place, it is we who advance in the 
 knowledge of God who is always the same. 
 
 101 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 I sometimes think that when I die there will be 
 found written on my heart these words, “Put 
 your brains into your religion!” We are called 
 upon to understand God; and I believe that our 
 perplexity, our difficulties, would all vanish if we 
 would receive the light that God is always giv¬ 
 ing us. I believe that to every generation there 
 is given light enough for the problems that face 
 it. You know that at the bottom of the sea there 
 are little living organisms, in the deep places of 
 the ocean where there is no light, where it is 
 always dark, for the light never penetrates to the 
 depths of the sea; and those minute organisms 
 that live at the bottom of the sea have no vision, 
 no organs of sight, no eyes, because they do not 
 need them. There is no light and therefore there 
 is no sight. But when we come to those more 
 highly organized beings that live on the shore, 
 we find that they have developed eyes or some 
 rudimentary organ of sight; and when we get to 
 the higher creatures, we find the perfection, the 
 perfecting, rather, of the sense of sight. 
 
 Now you see my point: the light is always 
 there, the sun is always lighting the earth, but the 
 
 102 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 creature develops the organ of sight as his method 
 of existence demands it and as the problems 
 which he has to face demand it. I believe that 
 the problems which seem to us so tremendous 
 and so complicated—which are indeed very com¬ 
 plicated, very large—are not beyond the light of 
 the spirit of God and not beyond our power to 
 solve if we will only develop, in proportion to 
 our needs, our understanding of the mind and 
 the purpose of God. 
 
 To every generation comes its light, and per¬ 
 haps the greatest light that has come during the 
 last century and this century is the advance of 
 modern science. I know that there are people to 
 whom it seems, strangely enough, that there is a 
 conflict, even a necessary conflict, between scien¬ 
 tific discovery and religion. Let me then remind 
 you that if God made the world , the more you 
 know about the world the more you know about 
 God. If only religious people realized that, they 
 would not have gone into such a panic when 
 modern science began to teach us its great truths. 
 
 It is true that when science goes outside its 
 own province, it is not always very wise. It is 
 
 103 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 possible that when theology goes outside its own 
 province it occasionally makes mistakes also! 
 But within its own province, which is the descrip¬ 
 tion of the material universe in which we live, 
 science, in teaching us about the universe that 
 God made, is inevitably teaching us something of 
 the nature and the purpose of the God who made 
 it. Let us get hold of that idea, without panic, 
 and we shall then be able to take from science the 
 great lessons which it can teach, without losing 
 anything whatever of our sense of the mystery 
 and the wonder of life. 
 
 I think the most impressive sermon that I have 
 heard preached in a long time, was preached in 
 London by professor Arthur Thomson, our 
 greatest English biologist—let me hurriedly admit 
 that he is really Scotch, like all our great Eng¬ 
 lish people! Professor Thomson preached on 
 “the wonder of the world,” and he said to us: 
 “The idea that the more you know about the 
 world, the more the sense of wonder and awe dis¬ 
 appears, is a complete mistake. The more you 
 know about the world, the more you are amazed 
 at the wonder and the beauty of it, the more your 
 
 104 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 spirit is smitten by a sense of the ‘infinite imagi¬ 
 nation of God/ ” 
 
 Science has certainly taught us one thing; it 
 has taught us this about the world—that it is sub¬ 
 ject to law. There are many people who, like 
 myself, are not scientists, who are perhaps not 
 even students of one branch of science, who 
 could not formulate in scientific terms one scien¬ 
 tific law. Yet the one thing that you and I have 
 grasped is that the universe is governed by law. 
 As Dr. Stanley Hall has said, “The world is 
 lawful to the core.” 
 
 You know that if you are going to set out on 
 any enterprise that requires material power, you 
 have first to know the laws under which that 
 power operates. Gas and steam and electricity 
 were in the world from the beginning, but we did 
 not understand the laws by which they worked 
 and therefore we could not control nor use them. 
 The vast achievements of modern science, the 
 amazing mastery that man has acquired over the 
 material world, is due not to the invention of 
 new powers, but to the discovery of their laws 
 and the knowledge that these laws are never 
 
 105 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 broken. If steam expands on one day it will ex¬ 
 pand on another; if it expands in your mother’s 
 kettle so as to make the lid dance, it will expand 
 in the power machines that drive ships across the 
 sea and work great factories. It always operates 
 in such a way that you can rely upon it. Power 
 acts according to its own laws. Machines are 
 reliable in proportion as the law of the power that 
 works them is absolutely understood. 
 
 The realization that you cannot evade scien¬ 
 tific law or swindle it or bribe it, that it is not 
 open to graft, that you cannot really do anything 
 with it except understand it and work with it 
 instead of against it—that simple discovery is 
 really the root of the enormous growth of power 
 which has made man almost like a god in the 
 material world. 
 
 To-day man looks for the cause of the thing 
 he wants or the thing that he does not want, and 
 when he has found the cause, he is master of 
 the effect. In nothing, I think, is the power of 
 man over the world more remarkable than in 
 this particular—that he takes the world, he lives 
 
 106 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 in it and forces it to be what he wants. Let me 
 give you an instance: 
 
 The great canal that has been driven through 
 the Isthmus of Panama was sought to be driven 
 a long time ago. I used to think that the great 
 French engineer, De Lesseps, failed to make that 
 great canal because the engineering difficulties 
 were too great at that time for the skill of the en¬ 
 gineer. That, as many of you know, was not the 
 reason. The real reason was that the engineering 
 work was such as demanded highly skilled work¬ 
 men and could only be carried through by white 
 engineers. But white men could not live on the 
 Isthmus of Panama. They caught yellow fever 
 and died. And workman after workman was 
 brought over to carry out this work, being per¬ 
 fectly competent to the task but unable to endure 
 the climate. 
 
 Well, in the old days, I suppose people would 
 have regarded that as the will of God. I notice 
 that when anything very terrible happens, people 
 always believe it is the will of God! There is a 
 phrase in some insurance policies which says 
 that if there is some accident that is very fright- 
 
 107 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 ful, it is the “act of God.” That was the old 
 idea. 
 
 Now modern science sits down and asks why. 
 Why do these people die of yellow fever? Be¬ 
 cause they are bitten by a mosquito which carries 
 the organism of yellow fever. Where does that 
 organism breed ? It breeds in swamps. Drain the 
 swamp and the organism cannot breed. Yellow 
 fever disappears, the white engineer is able to 
 live there, and the Isthmus of Panama is cut 
 by the great canal. 
 
 That is just an instance of the way in which 
 man—not armed with any really new powers, 
 because there are no new powers since all the 
 powers in the universe that are here now have 
 always been here—but by this understanding of 
 the laws of cause and effect, of the way in which 
 energy works, has become so much a master of 
 the world he lives in that the wealth of modern 
 civilization has become almost staggering. 
 
 When I travel through a new country like 
 yours, a great country full of youth and energy, 
 my spirit is almost overwhelmed by the im¬ 
 mensity of your material achievement and the 
 
 108 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 heaped-up evidences of your wealth. Then my 
 mind turns back to Europe, and I realize that 
 the great promise of modern science has failed. 
 
 Look at the world and see it famine-stricken, 
 diseased, unhappy. Even here where there is 
 peace and not war, I sometimes ask myself 
 whether the spirit of the American nation is 
 strong enough to dominate its amazing material 
 wealth; whether the intelligence of man has not 
 outrun his spiritual power; whether the “iron 
 man,” as you call him over here, is not almost 
 too strong and mighty for the spiritual man; 
 whether it is not possible for modern science 
 with one hand to destroy our very means of sub¬ 
 sistence so that we starve and fight and die in 
 poverty, and with the other to heap upon us 
 such material wealth that the spirit is smothered 
 under it. 
 
 Let us then go a little further. Science has 
 taught us that the universe is governed by law. 
 These laws are not like the laws passed by any 
 particular parliament or congress, but laws which 
 you cannot escape, which you cannot break, 
 against which you can only break yourself. The 
 
 109 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 man who falls over a precipice and the man who 
 flies in the air are both alike obeying natural 
 law; the law of gravitation is not broken either 
 by the man who flies or the man who falls, but 
 one man breaks himself against it. That is what 
 you can do with scientific law. You cannot 
 escape it; you cannot change it; you cannot find 
 any part of the world’s surface where it does 
 not act; you cannot find any day when it gets 
 tired; you cannot find any nation which can defy 
 or evade it. Everywhere and always and all the 
 time, natural law is operating, and all you can do 
 is to work with it or to break yourself against it. 
 
 If that is true of the material world, which 
 God made, does it not throw a great light upon 
 the nature of the God who made it? In the 
 spiritual world, is God a different God from 
 the God who made the universe that science has 
 revealed to us? The Lord our God is one God, 
 and if the material universe is governed by 
 majestic and unchanging law, so is the world of 
 the spirit; and our too common idea that the laws 
 of God can be broken, that we can dodge them 
 or evade them, or deceive God or get round Him, 
 
 110 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 or find some weak moment in which He will let 
 us do what we like without taking the conse¬ 
 quences, all that is as futile, as imbecile, as if a 
 person should set to work to build a great build¬ 
 ing in defiance of the laws of building, and expect 
 God to hold it up because it was a church. It 
 would fall down exactly as if it were a cinemato¬ 
 graph theatre, if it is built on a wrong foundation. 
 
 The man who tries to get a harvest by sowing 
 the fields with salt and then sitting down to pray, 
 is not a religious man; he is a fool. You know 
 it. And you know that the whole universe is so 
 governed by law that to seek to evade it is not so 
 much wicked as childish. What you have got 
 to do is to understand it and when you do that, 
 you find in your service powers so gigantic that 
 it makes one realize that man is indeed made in 
 the image of God, that there is something god¬ 
 like in the human intelligence. But when we 
 come to the spiritual world—I suppose because 
 we were frightened by science, because we re¬ 
 fused the light, because we were afraid, and fear 
 is always the most debasing and cruel of human 
 passions—we fail to grasp the fact that there are 
 
 111 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 here energies compared with which the powers 
 in the material universe are like the playthings 
 of a child’s nursery; energies which act accord¬ 
 ing to immutable law, laws which we can never 
 break, never evade; laws against which we can 
 only break ourselves. 
 
 I wish that we could give up altogether the 
 habit of talking about people “breaking the laws 
 of God.” You cannot break the laws of God; 
 you might as well talk about breaking the law of 
 gravitation. The laws of God are not like the 
 laws made by Man, nor is God mocked. The 
 spiritual universe, which is the soul of the mate¬ 
 rial universe, of which this material universe is 
 only a beautiful but still inadequate expression, 
 is governed by laws which none can evade. When 
 you set yourself to break the spiritual law, when 
 you think that, for you, hate will do what only 
 love will do, when you try to injure one member 
 and hope that the whole body will not suffer, 
 when you try to make Satan cast out Satan, 
 when you try to serve both God and Mammon, 
 when you seek to violate any of the great princi¬ 
 ples laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, I feel 
 
 112 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 almost inclined to say to you not so much that 
 you are wicked, as that you are stupid! 
 
 You cannot break the laws of God; you can 
 only break yourself against them. “Therefore, 
 I say unto you, whosoever heareth these sayings 
 of mine and doeth them not shall be likened unto 
 a foolish man that built his house upon the 
 sand.” If you would translate that great saying 
 into the language of the Old Testament, where 
 the great truth of God’s power and wisdom is 
 given to us without the perfection of the revela¬ 
 tion of Christ, I think you might be told that 
 there was something in the nature of sand which 
 made it peculiarly holy, and that if people built 
 on sand, God would be angry with them and 
 would smash their house. But when you get 
 Christ’s teaching, you find that He appeals to 
 those immutable spiritual laws which are the very 
 expression of the being of God. He does not tell 
 you that God will be angry. Is God ever angry 
 with his children ? I doubt it. He says, “If you 
 build on a bad foundation, your house will fall, 
 because it is on a bad foundation. If you build 
 on a good foundation, it will stand, because it is 
 
 113 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 on a good foundation.” And if you build your 
 civilization in defiance of the spritual law, all the 
 good intentions in the world will not hold it up, 
 because it is built in violation of the eternal laws 
 of God. 
 
 These precepts of Christ, which the world has 
 held in contempt, as being so remote from exist¬ 
 ence, so apart from life, so impossibly and ab¬ 
 surdly idealistic,—“We cannot govern,” said the 
 Lord Chancellor of England, “according to the 
 Sermon on the Mount,” and everybody laughed 
 at the idea,—these principles which the world has 
 derided, which the world has perhaps given the 
 passing homage of calling them beautiful but 
 always with the reservation that they are im¬ 
 practicable, are, in fact, statements of funda¬ 
 mental spiritual laws which civilization can no 
 more evade than it can evade the operation of 
 material scientific law. 
 
 The time has come for us to grasp that “God is 
 without variableness or shadow cast by turning”; 
 that you cannot get Him to change his plan, be¬ 
 cause it is a perfect plan; that you cannot deceive 
 Him or get Him to make an exception; but you 
 
 114 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 can place yourself alongside his will instead of 
 against it. And if you do so, you find yourself 
 filled with spiritual power which can transcend 
 the difficulties with which you are faced. This is 
 the meaning and the power of prayer. 
 
 What are our difficulties to-day? They are 
 difficulties, I suppose, chiefly of enormous com¬ 
 plexity. The world for us is so vast, so complex, 
 that its very size constitutes a difficulty. It seems 
 all beyond the brain of man. Well, man made it. 
 He created this complex civilization. And if we 
 could find those guiding principles which underlie 
 the vast heap of accumulated knowledge, if we 
 could put our hands upon those great funda¬ 
 mental principles, all the difficulties would fall 
 into their proper place; as, when the scientist dis¬ 
 covers a scientific law, all the facts and knowl¬ 
 edge of other students fall into their proper place, 
 and guide the student of science through the vast 
 mass of his accumulated knowledge without any 
 sense of confusion, without any sense of that 
 paralysis which to-day so clogs our spiritual, reli¬ 
 gious, social, economic and industrial life. 
 
 Wherever you touch science you touch power. 
 
 115 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 Some of you, perhaps, are students of science; 
 do you not feel with me that when you get into 
 touch with the work of modern science, you find 
 yourself in the possession, or in the presence at 
 least, of power; whereas, when you come into 
 touch with religious life, or industrial, political 
 or economic life, you have a tragic sense of in¬ 
 competence, a feeling that the world is too great 
 for us, that the passions created by the war 
 are uncontrollable, that you cannot master your 
 own civilization? What causes the difference 
 between these two worlds ? It is not that science 
 has a smaller field. The instruments of modern 
 science have enabled us to bridge the distance 
 between ourselves and the remotest stars, to 
 record the existence of stars which the human 
 eye can never see, and to measure distances in 
 figures that are merely fantastic to the human 
 imagination: or, on the other hand, to peer into 
 the secrets of the universe so that things too 
 small for any instrument to reveal can still be 
 understood and reasoned about by the human 
 mind. The field of science is not smaller, it is 
 immeasurably greater than the field of the politi- 
 
 116 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 cian or the social reformer; and the sense of 
 power that is present in the mind of the scientist 
 is due to his apprehension of natural law. 
 
 Let us, in our idea of God, realize that He is 
 trustworthy. That is really the secret of modern 
 scientific advance—the discovery that the uni¬ 
 verse is trustworthy, that it will not fail, that 
 power always acts according to law. How many 
 of us worship a trustworthy God? How many 
 pray still to a God so capricious, so uncertain, so 
 mysterious, that we cannot attempt to understand 
 Him ? There is no phrase, I suppose, more com¬ 
 mon in the presence of misfortune and grief 
 than this, “We must be resigned to the inscrutable 
 will of God.” Inscrutable? Well, in some ways. 
 Of course, God is so infinitely and immeasurably 
 beyond the comprehension of our little human 
 minds'that, in a sense, at least, He is and must 
 always be mysterious, just as to the scientist life 
 itself is an unfathomable mystery. But where 
 God touches our human lives, there He calls us to 
 understand Him. 
 
 Our Lord often reproached his disciples, not 
 because they did not love Him, for He knew they 
 
 117 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 did love Him; but because they did not under¬ 
 stand Him. “Are ye also without understanding; 
 how is it that ye do not understand?” And to¬ 
 day it seems to me as though that cry were ring¬ 
 ing in the ears of modern civilization. Our 
 civilization was indeed built in defiance of the 
 principles of the Sermon on the Mount, and it has 
 fallen, and great is the fall of it. Yet there are 
 people who will set to work to rebuild the new 
 world on the same principles of hate and indiffer¬ 
 ence, of selfishness and cowardice and suspicion, 
 as the old. When war comes and our civiliza¬ 
 tion crashes about our ears, who is it that will not 
 say, “We must submit to the inscrutable will of 
 God” ? The will of God! God who taught us 
 that if we defied spiritual law, our house must 
 fall over our heads as certainly as a house built 
 in defiance of material law. Yet when we built 
 it so and it falls, we will not admit that we defied 
 spiritual law! No—it is the “inscrutable will of 
 God”! 
 
 To me, one of the most beautiful of all sayings 
 is that saying of Christ, “Henceforth I call you 
 not servants (or as the real word is, ‘slaves’), 
 
 118 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 for the slave knoweth not what his lord doeth; 
 but I have called you friends, for all things that 
 my Father has given me, I have made known unto 
 you.” How is it that ye do not understand? 
 How is it that religious people have made a kind 
 of idol of not understanding, have preached that 
 it is a virtue to be “resigned to the inscrutable will 
 of God,” when God gave us our intelligence and 
 calls us through his Son, Jesus Christ, to under¬ 
 stand his great purpose ? 
 
 I believe that when we once realize that God 
 is trustworthy, that He is as reliable, as un¬ 
 changing in the spiritual as in the material world, 
 when we set ourselves no longer to evade or to 
 defy the spiritual law, but to understand it and to 
 work with it, there will come a spiritual revival in 
 the world compared with which the scientific ad¬ 
 vance of the last century will seem a little thing. 
 
 Is it not conceivable that it is your part above 
 that of every nation to make that discovery and 
 to lead that revival? You are indeed in danger— 
 believe me, it is true—of being crushed under 
 the very heap of your material prosperity. But 
 there is in your hearts the possibility of love and 
 
 119 
 
The Law of Life 
 
 of peace. Can you not confront this problem 
 with the certainty that the spiritual world is surg¬ 
 ing with energy, if you can only understand it 
 and use it? Can you not transcend the great 
 heap of your material wealth by a spiritual power 
 even greater? If you can do that, you will create 
 in the world the greatest spiritual revival since 
 the coming of Christ, for you will have begun 
 to enter into that understanding of the laws of 
 God which makes men the “friends of God and 
 prophets. 1 ” 
 
 120 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
“In the beginning God created the heavens and 
 the earth” 
 
 “Never wouldst thou have created anything if 
 thou hadst hated it.” 
 
 “God is love.” 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law. 
 
 I suppose if we had always put our brains into 
 our religion, we should have known from the first 
 verse of the Bible what the last must be; for if 
 God created the heaven and the earth, God must 
 be Love. 
 
 When we speak about God as law, I know 
 that to many people that idea brings a sense of 
 strength and peace. To realize that God is not 
 capricious, that He is not uncertain, that He can 
 be relied upon with the same absolute assurance 
 as the scientific laws of his universe, brings to 
 many distracted souls a sense of great serenity. 
 But to some it seems rather a cold conception, 
 and I want to remind such people that if God is 
 law, law can only be understood in the sense of 
 love. 
 
 Love is the fulfilling of the law, and when we 
 say that God is unchanging and unfailing, that 
 
 123 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 He is not capricious, that we can rely upon Him, 
 it is his love that we mean—his love that is un¬ 
 changing, his love that is never capricious, his 
 love of which we can feel the same absolute as¬ 
 surance as we can of the operation of any scien¬ 
 tific law, indeed, much more so, for what scien¬ 
 tific law yet has been perfectly and finally stated ? 
 
 God is Love. What proof have we of that? 
 The world is full of cruelty! I have said that we 
 can tell something of God if we know something 
 of God’s world. Well, the world is full of cruelty 
 and suffering and I suppose no one has ever yet 
 been able to explain how there could be suffering 
 and wrong in the world God made if God is Love. 
 There are many things that we cannot yet explain. 
 Wisdom will not die with us; there is much yet 
 for those who come after us to learn. 
 
 Yet I feel increasingly that the difficulties of 
 explaining this world in terms of the love of 
 God, great though they are—and I do not under¬ 
 estimate them—are nevertheless smaller, immeas¬ 
 urably smaller than the fundamental difficulty of 
 believing that the world could have been made 
 at all, except by love. For there is no way of 
 
 124 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 making anything except by loving it; there is no 
 other creative power. 
 
 To say that God created is to say that God 
 loved. There is not any other power in the 
 universe that can create, except the power of love. 
 
 You all know that. Some of you perhaps are 
 artists ; do you suppose that beauty was ever 
 created by any person except by someone who 
 loved beauty? Is it conceivable that Beethoven 
 wrote a great symphony without loving music? 
 
 Or that Michael Angelo painted the Sistine 
 Chapel without a love of beauty? Or that any 
 beautiful thing was ever created since the world 
 began except by lovers of beauty? 
 
 Some of you have in your hearts—all of you, 
 
 I trust—a great love for your country. Do you 
 think that any country was ever built up except 
 by its lovers? That any man could make any¬ 
 thing of his country merely by despising it or 
 criticizing it or hating it? You know it so well 
 that you do not realize sometimes that you do 
 know it—you take it for granted that it is not 
 possible to create anything at all except by love. 
 
 The divinest fact in human nature is the fact 
 
 125 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 that human life comes into the world through 
 human love; that God has made us such that, 
 by the love of two human beings for one an¬ 
 other, a third human being is born into the world. 
 Is it not true that God made us in his own image, 
 since He made us like that? Life comes into the 
 world through love, and everything that we know 
 of comes into the world through love, and what 
 we must realize is that there is no creative force 
 in the universe except love. 
 
 Do you know that wonderful passage from 
 Keats’s Endymion in which the poet declares that 
 he cannot blame people who forget everything 
 else in their love for one another, because, though 
 it may seem selfish, love itself is so priceless a gift 
 that perhaps they do enough for the world merely 
 by loving. 
 
 As does the nightingale, up-perched high, 
 
 And cloistered among cool and bunched leaves— 
 
 She sings but to her love, nor e’er conceives 
 How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood. 
 
 Just so may love, although ’tis understood 
 The mere commingling of passionate breath, 
 
 Produce more than our searching witnesseth: 
 
 126 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 What I know not: but who, of men, can tell 
 That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would 
 swell 
 
 To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, 
 
 The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, 
 
 The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, 
 
 The seeds its harvest, or the lute its tones, 
 
 Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet, 
 
 If human souls did never kiss and greet? 
 
 That may easily seem to you the mere fancy of 
 a poet, but the world has taught us during the 
 last few years that it is indeed love that creates 
 and hatred that destroys. What a fanciful idea 
 that flowers would not bloom nor fruit ripen nor 
 the earth be beautiful, “if human hearts did never 
 kiss and greet”! Well, those of you who have 
 seen Europe during the last few years, know that 
 it is not a mere fancy. When men hate each 
 other, the flowers do not bloom and the corn does 
 not grow. The corn did not grow in Flanders 
 during the war, there were no flowers, there was 
 no color. 
 
 Some of you may have seen Nevinson’s war 
 pictures and will remember that there is in them 
 an almost total absence of color and beauty and 
 
 127 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 life; nothing but stretches of dreary mud, nothing 
 but a few human beings in mud-colored clothes, 
 nothing but dreariness, destruction and waste. 
 
 If you cannot believe that love creates, look at 
 the other side of the picture and you will see how 
 hatred destroys. It is of the nature of hatred to 
 destroy. If you want to destroy, hate; but if 
 you want to create, you must love. If you cannot 
 love, if there is in your heart so much pain, so 
 great a resentment at the cruelty of society, that 
 you must hate either a nation or a race or a 
 class, I do not condemn you. What human being 
 will dare to condemn one who has suffered such 
 intolerable things that he finds in his heart noth¬ 
 ing but hatred? 
 
 There are people whom I have known, of 
 whom it would amaze me if they could feel any¬ 
 thing but hatred. I do not for a moment con¬ 
 demn such people. God forbid. Only I say to 
 them: “Do not deceive yourselves. If you have 
 nothing in your heart but hate, stand out from 
 the progress of the world. You cannot help it 
 perhaps. But unless there is love in your heart, 
 you can do nothing. It is as senseless to hope 
 
 128 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 it as to dream that with your hands full of salt 
 you can raise a harvest. It may be that you have 
 nothing in your hands but salt; it may be that 
 you have nothing in your heart but bitterness; 
 perhaps that is not your fault; but it makes you 
 a useless person in the building up of the world.” 
 
 Remember that it is as certain as the material 
 law that you cannot raise a harvest without seed, 
 that you must have love when you want to raise 
 a harvest of that which has in it the mysterious 
 quality of life. What is the difference between 
 the living grain and the dead chemical thing 
 with which you might imitate it? Who knows? 
 
 No scientist can tell you. No scientist can make 
 life where there is not life. He cannot tell you 
 what it is, this mysterious principle out of which 
 comes life, but he can tell you that unless life is 
 present in the seed, you cannot grow your har¬ 
 vest. To offer things that are dead, dead chemi¬ 
 cals, lifeless salt for seed, and ask a harvest 
 from them is senseless. 
 
 In the same way, in the spiritual world, those 
 who are filled with hatred are useless. Pity them, 
 but do not expect from them anything, for they 
 
 129 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 have nothing to give that has in it the divine 
 quality of creation. That is to be found only in 
 love. To my mind, the most pitiful thing on 
 earth is to see human beings, disappointed by the 
 tragedy of war, setting to work to build up a 
 better state of things by hating somebody else. 
 They cease to hate Germany and they begin to 
 hate capitalists; they cease to hate Russia and 
 they begin to hate France; they cease to hate a 
 nation and they begin to hate a class. And they 
 always hope in some way, out of this dead de¬ 
 structive quality of hate, to create a new world. 
 What is tragic in them is not so much their 
 wickedness—for those of you who know what the 
 suffering of the last seven years has been, will not 
 be ready to condemn them—it is the utter, hope¬ 
 less futility of trying to create a new world with 
 that which is the very instrument and principle 
 of destruction. 
 
 Do you remember the dialogue between Shy- 
 lock and his accusers in Shakespeare’s great play, 
 “The Merchant of Venice” in which Bassanio 
 asks the Jew—“Kills every man the thing that he 
 does hate?” And Shylock answers, “Hates any 
 
 130 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 man the thing he would not kill?” I used to 
 think that was a debating point. I see now there 
 lies in it a whole philosophy. If you hate, you 
 want to destroy. “Hates any man the thing he 
 would not kill?” You want to destroy a man’s 
 body or his happiness or his soul, for hate in itself 
 is the very principle of destruction. In the same 
 sense, love is the principle of creation and it is 
 more difficult to explain how the work could come 
 to be at all, except from the heart of a God of 
 love, than it is to explain any of the cruelties that 
 mar God’s world. 
 
 To explain these cruelties is difficult enough; 
 but nothing could be so senseless, so stultifying, 
 nothing would make one feel the world more 
 chaotic than to suppose that the creation of this 
 great universe, or the creation of any single thing 
 in the universe could come except by love. For 
 love alone can create. 
 
 Now, there is another side to all this. God is 
 Love. “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in 
 God, and God in him.” God creates us in his own 
 image, but that image has been distorted and 
 blurred, and what we have now to do is to create 
 
 131 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 that nobler Humanity, that more sensitive, 
 stronger, more spiritual Humanity, that shall be 
 able to cope with the great problems of our 
 twentieth century civilization. I say more sensi¬ 
 tive as well as stronger, for one of the things 
 that women must teach the world, I think, is 
 that sensitiveness is a sign of spiritual power 
 and not of spiritual weakness. 
 
 Blake’s great poem, “Jerusalem,” came from 
 the same mind as a little couplet that expresses 
 just what I want to say about the sensitiveness of 
 those who are spiritually strong: 
 
 “A robin red breast in a cage 
 Puts all heaven in a rage.” 
 
 That lovely little expression of tenderness ex¬ 
 presses a conviction that sensitiveness to suffer¬ 
 ing goes along with a nobler and a more power¬ 
 ful civilization. I have suggested to you that it 
 is your business to create a type of Humanity 
 which shall be adequate to the needs of the world, 
 and you perhaps ask yourselves, “How is that to 
 be done?” 
 
 Well, we have our divine pattern. Christ came 
 
 132 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 to show us not only what God is, but what man 
 should be. When Pontius Pilate brought Him 
 out to the people and said, “Ecce Homo” (Behold 
 the Man), he meant no more than—“Behold the 
 man of whom we speak, the man to whom you 
 have preferred Barabbas.” It was Pilate’s last 
 appeal to the better judgment of the people. 
 
 He hoped by bringing Christ out to them to move 
 them to something like remorse. He brought 
 Him out in all his majesty, and said, “Behold the 
 Man!” That was all the words meant to Pilate; 
 but Humanity has seized upon that phrase which 
 meant so little to the speaker, and read into it, 
 
 “Ecce Homo—Behold Mankind!” Behold the 
 Man —The Man, that which Humanity should 
 be, the perfect conception of God. And the man 
 of the future, the Humanity for which we are 
 looking, must catch the spirit of this Christ, and 
 grow up to the measure of his stature. That can 
 be done as all creation is done, by love. 
 
 To grow like Christ, it is only necessary to 
 love Him, and to love Him it is only necessary to 
 know Him. I defy anyone to read the gospels 
 and not love the Personality that is there de- 
 
 133 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 picted. It is not possible to get into the mind of 
 Jesus of Nazareth; to follow Him as He went 
 about the world; to read his words; to read the 
 record of his acts; to get inside his mind, as 
 far as that may be, to look at God and man 
 through his eyes, and not to love Him. And 
 love is creative; love creates us in the image of 
 that which we love. 
 
 In the beginning, God created us in his own 
 image, but He has never ceased to re-create us in 
 his image, and He does it by the same means— 
 which are indeed the only means—by love. To 
 those of you to whom the great ideals of world- 
 service are attractive and inspiring, I would say, 
 do not lose touch and communion with that great 
 Spirit which moved the world as no one else has 
 ever moved it; Who did what you and I would 
 give our lives to do; Who lifted the world out of 
 the rut and set it on a new course; Who did, 
 I repeat, what we would die to do—gave the 
 world a new angle of vision, a new conception of 
 God. 
 
 It is possible for every one of you to serve Hu¬ 
 manity, and whatever are your circumstances you 
 
 134 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 can always look at your life as a service to God 
 and Humanity. There are no circumstances in 
 which that is impossible. 
 
 But to serve Humanity, enthusiasm and hope 
 are not enough. Anyone may be carried away by 
 a wave of emotion, anyone may be inspired by 
 the idea of working for Humanity; but such 
 enthusiasm, such inspiration are not enough. 
 
 There is no life so difficult, there is no experience 
 so searching, as the life that is lived in the service 
 of Humanity. It requires a self-denial more 
 fundamental and more searching than mere self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Our Lord said, “If anyone would be my dis¬ 
 ciple, let him deny himself.” That is something 
 infinitely deeper than to sacrifice yourself. There 
 are people who have developed such an irritating 
 habit of sacrificing themselves that it is almost 
 impossible to live with them! I have known 
 people who, in the name of religion, are always 
 doing what they do not want to do. I have 
 known an entire family of which every member 
 persistently does that which he does not want 
 to do, so that the other members may do what 
 
 135 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 they want to do; and as all of them have this same 
 persistency in doing what they dislike doing, all 
 of them live in a state of nervous strain. 
 
 It is sometimes your duty to assert yourself, 
 and it is often nothing but sloth and moral 
 cowardice that prevents you from doing it. Self- 
 sacrifice is sometimes the easier way. Self-denial 
 is never easy. It means that you can so silence 
 your clamorous egotism, so put yourself out of 
 your own reckoning and your own consideration, 
 that you can look at your own problems, your 
 own personality, and your own work as though 
 it were someone else’s. 
 
 You are to love your neighbor as yourself; 
 you are to love yourself as your neighbor, not to 
 hate yourself. That is the asceticism of other 
 Eastern religions. But you must deny yourself — 
 deny yourself—treat yourself with the same jus¬ 
 tice that you seek to give to others. That is in¬ 
 comparably harder than merely to choose always 
 the thing you do not want to do, always to take 
 the disagreeable path! I have known scores of 
 people who have said, “I chose to do so and so, 
 because it was what I did not want to do.” That 
 
 136 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 * 
 
 is stupid and futile. It is not Christianity—it is 
 a lack of moral courage. 
 
 When you desire to serve Humanity, you some¬ 
 times have to sacrifice yourself and sometimes to 
 assert yourself. You have to be an instrument 
 in the hands of God for whatever He desires you 
 to do; you may be forced into the limelight when 
 you hate it, or kept in the shadow when you 
 hate that. 
 
 How much public work has been ruined be¬ 
 cause the people who did it were not fine enough 
 for the service of Humanity! Every weak place 
 in your character, every inclination to be slothful, 
 every tendency to be dishonest, every unwilling¬ 
 ness to put your work before yourself, every atom 
 of moral cowardice will come out under the 
 strain. Over and over again, as you face your 
 problems, you will realize that if you had been 
 finer in the past, if you had the habit of denying 
 yourself, if you had nothing in your mind but the 
 glory of God and the service of man, you would 
 see what was the right thing to do. You would 
 be able to do it just so, and just right; and you 
 cannot because you are not fine enough. 
 
 137 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 It is a spiritual discipline of the most searching 
 kind, to serve your fellow men. In many people 
 to-day, the appeal to save their own souls strikes 
 no responsive chord. If all the world goes down 
 into hell, what does it matter if you and I go 
 down also? But when you realize that you 
 could have saved the world from hell, that you 
 could have set it on a better path, if you yourself 
 had been more like Christ, had been a finer and 
 a stronger person, then there comes that agony 
 of repentance which St. Peter felt, when he cried 
 out to our Lord, “Depart from me, for I am a 
 sinful man, O Lord!” 
 
 At that moment, recall to yourselves the fact 
 that love is still, as always, creative; that what¬ 
 ever your failures, your weaknesses, your limita¬ 
 tions, it is still, and always, possible to make of 
 your life not that decent, possible respectable 
 thing which perhaps almost all of us are begin¬ 
 ning to hope for, but that glory which enables 
 us to say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in 
 me!” 
 
 The power by which God created us in the be¬ 
 ginning is still in the universe and is still all- 
 
 138 
 
Love, the Fulfilling of the Law 
 
 powerful, and my last word to you would be, not 
 of those great problems, those universal world¬ 
 wide hopes and dangers and doubts which we 
 know so well, but rather to remind you that the 
 solution of all these things depends upon the in¬ 
 dividual seeing and following God; that to every 
 one of us there is given the glorious possibility of 
 having born in our own hearts the spirit of Christ. 
 
 “In the beginning, God created the heaven and 
 the earth.” .... Never could He have created 
 
 anything if He had hated it.“God is 
 
 love.” .... “He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth 
 in God and God in him.” .... “Beloved, if God 
 so loved the world, we ought also to love one 
 another.” 
 
 139 
 
Sex and Common Sense 
 
 BY 
 
 A. MAUDE ROYDEN 
 
 These much discussed addresses by Miss 
 Maude Royden are, to use her own words, in¬ 
 tended “to provoke discussion and engender 
 light.” Much of the book, therefore, is of a 
 controversial character, and Miss Royden does 
 not hesitate to attack what she believes to be 
 wrong, whether it is with regard to our laws 
 about marriage, our refusal to let light in on the 
 problems of sex, or the more recent tendency to 
 preach moral anarchy as their sole solution. 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 Chap. 1. 
 Chap. 2. 
 Chap. 3. 
 
 Chap. 4. 
 Chap. 5. 
 
 Chap. 6. 
 Chap. 7. 
 Chap. 8. 
 Chap. 9. 
 
 Chap. 10. 
 
 The Old Problem Intensified by the 
 Disproportion of the Sexes. 
 
 A Solution of the Problem of the Un¬ 
 married. 
 
 Consideration of Other Solutions of 
 the Problem of the Disproportion of 
 the Sexes. 
 
 The True Basis of Morality. 
 
 The Moral Standard of the Future: 
 What Should It Be? 
 
 A Plea for Light. 
 
 Friendship. 
 
 Misunderstandings. 
 
 Further Misunderstandings : The Need 
 for Sex Chivalry. 
 
 “The Sin of the Bridegroom.” 
 
 Published by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, New York 
 
Princeton Theological.Seminanj,,Libraries 
 
 1012 01207 9655 
 
 
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