I and Human Relaillls THE STEPHEN GREENE I'Sim H (I ,A '4''m\MMmm\m BR 115 .S6 C5 1922 The Christian faith and human relations THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND HUMAN RELATIONS STEPHEN GREENE Founder of the Stephen Greene Lectureship in the Newton Theological Institution THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND HUMAN RELATIONS \V -i ■ 1922 BEING THE LECTURES DELIVERED ON „ " ""^.aS THE STEPHEN GREENE FOUNDATION —^ IN THE NEWTON THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTION 1920-1921 PHILADELPHIA THE JUDSON PRESS BOSTON CHICAGO ST. LOUIS LOS ANGELES KANSAS CITY SEATTLE TORONTO Copyright, 1992, by GILBERT N. BRINK, Skcrhtary Published May, 1922 Printed in U. S. A. FOREWORD THE STEPHEN GREENE LECTURESHIP (In The Newton Theological Institution) Through the generosity of Mrs. Stephen Greene of Newton Center, Mass., and of her four sons — Mr. Edwin Farnham Greene, Mr. S. Harold Greene, Mr. Everitt A. Greene, and Mr. F. Hartwell Greene — a lecture fund of $10,000 has been established in The Newton Theological Institution, Newton Center, Mass., in memory of the late Stephen Greene, who was a trustee of the Seminary from 1893 to his death in 1901, and singularly devoted to its interests. The income of this fund is to be devoted to courses of lectures by scholars who can make valuable con- tributions to the present aspects of our common Christianity. The present volume, the first in the series, con- tains the lectures given during the academic year closing June, 1921. The timely discussions of vital topics, which it contains, fulfils the purpose of the Foundation in a way that it is believed will be generally recognized. George Edwin Horr, President The Newton Theological Institution. CONTENTS LECTURE PAGE I. The Christian Faith and the Family. . 1 II. The Christian Faith and the Life of THE Community 49 III. The Christian Faith and the State. . . 71 IV. The Christian Faith and Industry 105 V. The Christian Spirit and Interna- tional Relations 125 I THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE FAMILY By William C. Bitting, D. D., Minister Second Baptist Ciiurch, St. Louis. SYNOPSIS Introduction The Hebrew family. The name. The members. The home life. Positions of wives, children, other members. Religious and educational aspects. Jesus' use of the family institution as a Christian parable. I. Jesus Glorified Family Life : 1. Was a member of a family. 2. Visited homes. 3. Loved children. 4. Sympathized with afflicted families. 5. Attended weddings. 6. Illustrated from family life. II. The Family Gave Terms and Ideas to the Christian Faith : 1. The Old Testament idea of God's Fatherhood. 2. The Christian idea of God — Father : (1) Of Jesus. (2) Of disciples of Jesus. (3) Of all men. (4) The " Kingdom of God "—the Father's rule. 3. The term " Brother" derived from family life: (1) Use among Christians. (2) Extension to all mankind. 4. Need for sane Bible study — Paul and the family. 4 The Christian Faith and Human Relations III. The Christian Faith Transfigures the Family: 1. Sanctifies marriage. 2. Gives spiritual meaning to parenthood: (1) A means of discovering God. (2) An interpretation of God to offspring. (3) A provision for spiritual opportunity to children. (4) Parental self -enrichment. 3. Glorifies motherhood. 4. Exalts filial life. 5. Establishes exclusive rule of love in the home. 6. Extends the family idea to all realms of life. IV. The Message of the Christian Faith About the Family : 1. The opportunity of the pulpit to teach, and of the Christian family to illustrate the Christian Faith. 2. The demand for religious education. 3. Need for a theology based on the family idea : (1) In Christian lands. (2) In foreign missionary work. 4. Relation to God above family interference. 5. The social order and the family idea. 6. Sin is unfilial and unfraternal. 7. The family idea in salvation. THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE FAMILY THE family is our oldest social institution. He- brew family life was much superior in character to that of other nations of antiquity. A comparison is outside the scope of this lecture. It will be well for us first to sketch the Hebrew family. Then we shall note the sanctification of the family by our Lord ; the contributions of family life to the Chris- tian Faith ; the contributions of the Christian Faith to the family; and finally some messages to the world that come from such a survey as the limits of this lecture will allow. The Hebrew Family The background of our study must be the Hebrew conception of the family. Of course there were developments during its history. Furthermore, it is important always to bear in mind that we must judge this institution by the standards of the ancient East, and not by those of the Christian home today. There is no Old Testament word corresponding to the English word family. The term " house " is used. Relations between the members of the family are mostly described in terms derived from physical sources. We read of Noah and his house,^ of the house of David, of Israel. The material building that sheltered the group gave its name to the group. »Gen. 7:1; 12 : 1. 6 The Christian Faith and Human Relations The Hebrew family was very much larger than ours. It consisted of all who were dependent upon the one man who was the head of the house. Embraced in it were the man's mother, if a widow ; his wives and concubines and all their children; sometimes the offspring of other women, as in the case of Jephthah ; ^ the daughters-in-law ; sons-in-law ; other free Israelite relatives; dependents; resident for- eigners; male and female slaves, both Israelite and foreign, home-born and purchased. The large size of the family was partly due to polygamy, partly to the need for protection and the necessities of labor, and partly to other causes which need not be given here. The husband's mother was often the most important member of the household. A man might have many wives, but he could have only one mother. Obedience to her was rigorously enforced during childhood, and sons grew up with a high sense of honor for mothers. Wives, however, were property, and subject to the husband's authority. Mothers often selected wives.^ Mothers of kings are fre- quently mentioned in giving the succession of mon- archs, but never their wives. Many of these moth- ers had large influence during the reigns of their sons.* Wives were obtained by the normal process of love, but also by capture in war,^ or by purchase.^ The only free woman in Israel was a widow. One name for husband was haxil, "master"; and for wife beulah, " married." Divorce' was at the discre- tion of the husband, although there were some limi- 2 Judg. 11 : 1. 3 Gen. 21:21. * 2 Kings 24 : 8, 12, 15 ; Jer. 22 : 26. B Dent. 21 : 10-14. « Gen. 34 : 16 ; Exod. 22 : 16, 17 ; Deut. 22 : 29 ; Ruth 4 : 10 ^ Deut. 24 : 1. The Christian Faith and the Family 7 tations. A woman was entitled to receive a bill of rights ^ which protected her from being again un- der subjection to the same husband. A wife could not divorce her husband. She was entirely at the mercy of her haal. There were other female residents in the home. Often there were concubines, and the body of each female slave belonged to the head of the house.'' All children born of wives, concubines, and slaves were the property of the master, but the children of the wives could inherit a larger part of the estate than the other children. Sarah, Rachel, and Leah had slave girls.^^ Polygamy was recognized in the law and is also described in the history of Israel. Many kings had harems." Solomon's establishment is con- spicuous.i- In the nature of the case the overwhelm- ing majority of the population must have been mo- nogamous both because the supply of women probably did not exceed the number of men, and be- cause of the expense of maintaining polygamy. There were monogamists whose lives contrast with those of polygamists. Adam, Noah, Lot, Isaac, and Joseph each had only one wife, while Abraham,^'' Jacob,^^ David, and Solomon ^^ had more than one. There were frequent family quarrels because of the disagreements between the mothers and off- spring of the sub-families in the same household. We all recall the cases of Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah, Hannah and Peninnah,^« and the history of the household of David. Sometimes brothers * Isa. 50 : 1 ; Jer. 3:8. i3 Qen. 25 : 1-7. • Gen. IG : 1, 15. " Gen. 20. 10 Gen. 20. 15 i i^iQgg u . j.g "2 Chron. 11:21. i« 1 Sam. 1 : 1-4. ^-1 Kings 11 : 1-3. 8 The Christian Faith and Human Relations married their half-sisters. This is the statement concerning Abraham and Sarah. ^^ In the develop- ment of the law there came to be a statute against such a marriage. The lot of the children is interesting. The father was supreme in his household. He could give his daughter in marriage/^ and could even sell his daughter to be a concubine, and his children as slaves.^^ He had the power of life and death over the lives of all children of the household. This is illustrated in the proposed sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham,2o in the vow of Jephthah,^^ and in the sacrifice of children to Molech, a Canaanite custom against which it was necessary to protest until a late period of Jewish history.^^ The utmost respect for parents was insisted upon.-^ The book of Prov- erbs is fertile in injunctions of filial respect. Smiting or cursing a parent was punishable by death.^* A curse was pronounced on disrespect to parents.-^ A son who was stubborn, or rebellious, or a glutton, or a drunkard, could be stoned to death on the testimony of parents given to the elders of the community. A large family was considered a great blessing,-^ and childlessness was looked upon both as a misfortune and a disgrace." In the early civilization out of which most of these conditions grew there were economic reasons " Gen. 20 : 12. " Gen. 29. i» Exod. 21 : 7. 20 Gen. 22:9, 10. 21 Judg. 11 : 30-40. 22 Lev. 18 : 21 ; 20 : 2-5 ; 2 Kings 23 : 10 ; Jer. 32 : 35 ; Micah 6 : 7. 23 Exod. 20 : 12 ; Lev. 19 : 3 ; Deut. 5 : 16 ; Prov. 1:8; 6 : 20 : 19 : 26 ; 20 : 20 ; 23 : 22 ; 28 : 24 ; 30 : 11, 17 ; Ezek. 22 : 7 ; Micah 7 : 6. 24 Exod. 21 : 15, 17 ; Lev. 20 : 9. 20 pg. 127 : 4, 5. 2« Deut. 27 : 16. 27 Qen. 15 : 2 ; 1 Sam. 1 : 9-11. The Christian Faith and the Family 9 that were influential. Where families had to defend themselves in war, where labor was needed for the household, the herd, and the farm, and where capital consisted exclusively of concrete property, the mem- bers of the family were great assets to the baal of the house. The girls were valuable for domestic work, and could bring money to their father when sold as wives or concubines, and could promote offen- sive and defensive alliances when given in marriage. Sons, however, were the chief desire of the parents. All the confessed children of the head of the house were considered legitimate. Jephthah's mother was a prostitute.-^ The sons were the heirs of the father, and the first-born was the preferred lega- tee.-' Even when the sons were married they remained in a sense members of the father's house. When Jacob went into Egypt he took with him all his sons and their families.-^*^ The religious condition of the family was under the care of the head of the house. Originally he was the priest of the home. He erected altars and offered sacrifices. The Passover was a family rite.^^ Chil- dren were to be instructed in religion.^- There is no indication that there was any effort made to educate the children. The Jerusalem Talmud states that the first school for the instruction of children was estab- lished a century before Christ, and there are indica- tions that by the year 65 of the Christian era there were schools in every Palestinian town. Such was the family when Jesus came to establish 28.Tudg. 11 : 1. » Gen. 27 : 20. '"Gen. 46 :G. 7. "Exod. 12. " Exod. 12 : 21-27 ; 13 : 5-9 ; Dent. 4:9; 6:7, 20. B 10 The Christian Faith and Human Relations the kingdom of God. The family was interwoven with the Jewish life. It was bound up with the social and political conditions, and shaped national life. It is well for us to remember that there must have been multitudes of families in Israel where there was tender love, and where the natural and beautiful outgoings of the human heart found their expression. It must also be remembered that the family as an institution was in process of develop- ment away from many features it had in common with the families of other nations, and again it must be emphasized that we must not judge Oriental fami- lies, Hebrew or Gentile, by the standards of Ameri- can Christian homes. I. JESUS GLORIFIED FAMILY LIFE The incarnation exalted every normal human in- stitution and process. Industries have been forever made sacred by the hand of the Carpenter of Naza- reth.^^ Commercial processes have been sanctified because our Lord engaged in them. Social gather- ings have become holy because he participated in them. Likewise he glorified the family. 1. Jesus came into the world as a member of a family, and not as a sudden apparition.^* Every Christmas celebrates this august event. He lay on the bosom of a mother, and rested in the arms of a father. He was obedient to them,^° not only because Jewish law and custom required such respect, but because of his natural love for his parents. He worked in his father's business. Some think that 33 Mark 6 : 3. 8* John 7 : 27. 85 Luke 2:51. The Christian Faith and the Family 11 Joseph died before Jesus entered upon his public work, and that the burden of the family support fell on our Lord. He was the eldest of seven children in that Nazareth home. The names of his four brothers are given to us, and he had more than one sister.^** It must have been a great grief to him that the members of his own family did not understand him, and did not appreciate his work.^^ They re- garded him as insane.^^ Nevertheless, he appears not to have broken the family ties. The Biblical accounts of his mother's interest in him are full of beautiful suggestion.^^ 2. Jesus visited homes. No one would want to sacrifice the sweet stories of his visits to that Beth- any home which he cheered and hallowed so fre- quently by his presence, and of his tender love for its sisters and brother who were his intimate friends.^^ Nor can we forget how he went to the home of Jairus,^^ of Zacchseus,^- and Peter,^^ and his interest in the Syrophenician woman,** and the centurion's servant.*^ 3. Jesus was interested in children. He watched their games,*^ and no doubt had participated in them. He did not think that their sports were trivial, but from them got at least one illustration of the Jewish nation of his day. He rebuked those who would prevent children from coming to him.*^ More than once he set a child in the midst of the ambitious Twelve and used its life as a text for « Mark 6:3, «2 Luke 19 : Iflf. " John 7:5; Mark 6 : 4. "Mark 1 : 31 and parallel. "Mark 3:21. " Mark 7 : 25ff. «» Luke 2 : 48 : John 2:3. « Matt. 8 : 5 and parallel. ♦^ John 11 : 17CF. : 12: ICf. *» Luke 7 : 32. " Matt. 9 : 18 and parallel. «t Mark 10 : 13-16. 12 The Christian Faith and Human Relations humility.*^ Perhaps his greatest saying concerning the spirit of receptivity and continual open-minded- ness is the declaration that none could enter God's kingdom, nor remain in it, who did not possess the open receptive soul of a little child. *^ 4. Especially noticeable is Jesus* compassion for afflicted homes. All three of his raisings from the dead reveal his interest in homes broken by death.^^ There is no doubt that his heart entered thoroughly into the grief that bereavement brought. 5. Jesus' presence at one wedding is recorded. His participation in the efforts of the host to make the occasion conform to the standards of the day is of great interest.^^ No doubt he was present upon many other similar occasions. His parables of the marriage of the king's son,^- and the ten virgins^^ indicate his familiarity with nuptial occasions. 6. Jesus illustrated spiritual truth from the proc- esses of family life. It was inevitable that, since the home even in his day afforded the most beautiful exhibition of love and of sacred relationships, our Lord should use it in his teaching. The genius that saw illustrations of spiritual reality in all life's proc- esses could not overlook the family. Recall his par- ables of the two sons,^* the householder who brings forth things new and old from his storehouse,^^ the midnight visit of the friend in search of bread, the father waiting for the return of his son,'^'' the servant who confesses that he cannot exceed his duty," the *» Matt. 18 : 1-5. « Matt. 18 : 3 ; Luke 18 : 17. »« Matt. 9 : 18 and parallel ; Luke 7 : 11-15 ; John 11 : 1-46. 61 John 2 : 1-11. « Matt. 22 : 1-13. »» Matt. 13 : 52. 68 Matt. 25 : 1-13. ^e Lu^e 15 : llfiE. 6* Matt, 21 : 28-32. " Luke 17 : 7-10. The Christian Faith and the Family 13 woman mixing the leaven with the flour,^^ the mother patching garments.''^ The kitchen and the parlor, the bedroom and the dining-room,*'*^ the pantry, and the front door all alike were made to yield illustra- tions of spiritual reality. The touch of a dear one can make sacred a book or an ornament. It is only natural that all disciples of Jesus should feel that the home is forevermore made holy by the incarnation, and the glorification of it just indicated. Every wedding witnesses to our desire for his presence thereat. When the shadow of death comes across our households we retreat for comfort to the words of the Christ who revealed his sympathy with the bereaved. There is not a stage of home life from its establishment by marriage to its dissolution by death that has not been sanctified by Jesus Christ. 11. THE FAMILY GAVE TERMS AND IDEAS TO THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 1. The word " Father" is used in the Old Testa- ment of Jehovah. He is frequently called the Father of Israel ''^ and of Israelites,"- and Israel is called God's son.*'^ Occasionally, though not often, the word ** Father " may have application to individual Israelites, but such passages are usually only com- parisons at most,''^ and furthermore always are based upon the covenant relation to Jehovah through 68 Matt. 13 : 33. "OMark 2: 21, 22. «« Luke 22 : 27. " Deut. 32 : 6 ; .Ter. 3 : 4, 19 ; 31 : 9. 02 Isa. G3 : IG ; G4 : 8. 03 Exod. 4 : 22 ; Ilosea 11:1; Ps. 89 : 27. 0* Deut. 1 : 31 ; 8 : 5 ; Ps. 103 : 13. 14 The Christian Faith and Human Relations membership in the nation. In the Old Testament God's Fatherhood was a general conception of his special interest in Israel, and brought only a sense of national privilege. Jesus gave new content to the word. 2. " Father " was Jesus' exclusive term for God. He did not use philosophical terms, such as the In- finite, the Absolute, the Great First Cause. Nor did he employ any legal names for God, such as Judge or Law-giver. Nor did he use any of the terms con- nected with the sacrificial ritual of the Old Testa- ment to describe God. Everywhere and always God is " Father." We cannot be grateful enough to him for taking the thought of God away from the law- court, and from the bloody sacrifices of the Temple, and from the fogs of philosophy, and putting it at the hearthstone of the home. All men have been children, members of homes. In shifting the idea of God to the home Jesus made provision for a univer- sal understanding of the nature of God. If the social condition of women in the first cen- tury of our era had been what it now is in America, Jesus probably would have made use of the mother's love and care to describe some attributes of God. The Old Testament has several passages that use the mother-love to portray the love of Jehovah. " As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.''«^ " Can a woman forget her nursing child? Yet will I not forget thee." «« There is none in the New Testament which refers to mother-love as an illustration of the divine affection. God's nature is paternal. He is parental. The word " Father " best describes the love, providence, <» Isa. 66 : 13. «« Isa. 49 : 15. The Christian Faith and the Family 15 compassion, and kindness of the divine Being. Jesus used the idea of father as the basis for deductions. The heathen do not conceive of God as a father. Therefore they are anxious about food and raiment, but those who realize the parental nature of God should have no anxiety over such matters." He declared that God can never tantalize us, that the disposition of a father to give food to his children is the measure of God's willingness " to give good things to them that ask him."^^ We cannot fail to notice the tremendous implications of the words " How much more ! " ""^ The market-price of spar- rows in Jesus' day was two for one farthing."^*^ But if a poor widow expected a guest for lunch and gave the butcher two farthings, expecting in return four sparrows, she received five. " Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is for- gotten before God." ^^ " And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." ^^ j^ other words, the Father attended the funeral of the extra bird which the butcher gave to the woman who wished two farthings' worth of sparrows. And each of us, in the Father's esteem, is worth more than many sparrows. (a) God was the Father of Jesus. The beautiful story of the twelve-year-old boy who answered his seeking parents with the question, " Wist ye not that I must be in my Father's house? " " shows his unique consciousness of his relation to God. Always in his prayers^* and in his teaching he referred to God as his Father. His Father did not leave him in loneli- er Matt. 6 : 26-33. " Luke 12 : 6. «• Matt. 7 : 8-11. " Matt. 10 : 29. 6« TToo-oj fiaWov. " Luke 2 : 49. •0 Matt. 10 : 29. '* Luke 10 : 21 ; 22 : 42. 16 The Christian Faith and Human Relations ness,'^ showed his Son what he was doing,^^ told him what to say,'^ and blessed him with an intimate com- panionship"^ unbreakable by any experiences of life.^^ He and his Father were one.^^ (b) He is the Father of disciples of Jesus. Those who become followers of Jesus share in the blessings of his filial relation to God.^' To this blessed reality witnesses the great prayer he taught his disciples,^- and God's providential care for trusting Christians.*^ We should not be anxious about material things pre- cisely because God is our Father. " We cannot drift beyond his love and care." (c) God is in a real sense the Father of all men. The " crown and pearl " of all his parables,^* usually referred to as the story of " The Prodigal Son," is really the story of "The Waiting Father." The three beautiful stories in Luke 15 are Jesus' defense of eating with publicans and sinners. He said he was doing only what a shepherd does when he seeks a lost sheep, or a woman who sweeps the house to find a lost coin, or a father who daily watches for the return of a wayward son. The point of all three parables is that it is natural to seek our own lost property, precisely because it belongs to us. Jesus was with these social outcasts because they were his Father's wayward children. Men can never go so far away into sin that God's heart does not follow them with solicitude. Indeed, in this parable the phrase, *' while he was yet a great way off," ^^ has »» John 8 : 16, 29. " john 1 : 12. " John 5 : 20. 82 ^att. 6 : 9. " John 8 : 28 ; 12 : 49 ; 14 : 10. s^ Matt. 6 : 8. " Matt. 11 : 27. s* Luke 15 : 11-32. '^ Luke 23:6. 85<,AutoO fiaKpav ane\oi>TO^." 80 John 10 : 30. The Christian Faith and the Family 17 been literally translated " While he was holding himself off." While the boy was walking back and forth in front of the house, going some distance on either side of the door, his father saw the hesitating steps of the penitent soul, not yet wholly able to overcome misgivings, and rushed out of the house to claim his own child. When Jesus talked to the woman by Jacob's well, he told her that " the Father " seeks worshipers whose spirits adore in reality and not in form alone.^*^ He meant to tell that woman of many husbands that God was her Father, and sought her. In his divine philippic against phariseeism he spoke to the multitude, as well as to his disciples, and to both he said : " Call none your Father upon earth ; for one is your Father, which is in heaven." ^"^ The divine disposition toward all men was such as to be aptly described by the word " Father." Paul had the same idea when he quoted a heathen poet approvingly, " For we are also his offspring." ^^ James declared that " Every good gift and every per- fect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights." ^^ The writer of Hebrews used paternal discipline to express the training that God gives us : " Shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of spirits, and live? "^^ It does not at all affect the supremacy of the teach- ing of Jesus that Paul used the word " adoption " derived from the Roman law of his day.^^ The civilization of his time was such as to make that word particularly intelligible to his readers. The 8« John 4 : 21-23. s^ James 1 : 17. " Matt. 23 : 9. ■»« Heb. 12:9. s8 Acts 17 : 28. »» Rom. 9:4; Gal. 4:5; Eph. 1 : 5. 18 The Christian Faith and Human Relations point of his use of the word is that even this process of Roman law illustrates the great reality that we can have the spirit that cries, " Abba, Father." ^^ j^ is his conception of the Fatherhood of God that he wished to express. The Christian faith regards all persons as in some sense the children of God. In the Old Testament the conception of sonship was national, and was in concord with, if not derived from, the great concep- tion of God's marriage to Israel.^^ The nation was composed of his children. In their sins they were " children in whom is no faith." ^^ But this idea of sonship to God Jesus developed and brought into the realm of individual faith. "As many as received him, to them gave he the right to become the sons of God." ^^ The peacemakers would earn the name " Children of God." ^^ Those who love their enemies were to be " the children of the Father who is in heaven." ^^ The Kingdom of God in which men are the sons of the Father was to be open to all nations,^^ and also to all sinners.^^ This sonship consists in moral likeness to God, in ethical oneness with the heavenly Father.^^^ It is to be of the same ethical and spiritual nature as the relation which Jesus himself held to his Father. Here is the ideal for every man's life. In all relations he is to live as a child of the heavenly Father. He is to take this con- sciousness of sonship into business, politics, social life, and every other realm he enters. The high sense of dignity, privilege, and obligation which this con- " Rom. 8 : 15. " Matt. 5 : 45. o^Ezek. 16. »8M^att. 8 : 11. 0* Deut. 32 : 20. »» Matt. 9 : 12, 13. 05 John 1 : 12. i«o John 8 : 33-44. w Matt. 5 : 9. The Christian Faith and the Family 19 ception of our lives affords is never to be absent. Jesus found a legal conception of sonship. He made it vital and spiritual. With the religionists of his day God was the Judge, and every act of obedience had his reward. With Jesus God was the Father, and men are to find the rewards of sonship in the consciousness of it, in the character it develops, and in the service that it compels. Jesus found a na- tional and exclusive idea of sonship to God. He made it universal, inclusive, and spiritual. (d) While the ideal of Jesus for human society was stated in a term derived from monarchy, " the kingdom of God," he never allowed it to be forgotten that this kingdom is the rule of a loving Father.^^^ The term was used in his day to express the national hope of a social condition in which the righteous God would be the real sovereign. In the mind of Jesus it meant a state of human society in which every person lives as a child of the heavenly Father, and therefore as brother and sister to every human being. Ideally mankind is to become the Father's earthly family. 3. Likewise the family furnished Jesus with his illustration of the highest relation between men. Because God's nature is paternal the new social order which Jesus came to establish was to be fra- ternal. Our Lord pushed the word " brother " over national and domestic boundaries, which limited its Old Testament use, and made it the universal term to describe all human relations. (a) It became the word prevailingly used for the relation between Christians.^^^ xhe goodly bond of those in the churches is described as the fellowship »" Matt. 13 : 43. ^02 Matt. 5 : 22-24 ; 23 : 8 : et al. 20 The Christian Faith and Human Relations of brethren/«3 Philanthropy, as the word itself means, is based upon this brotherhood. ^^^ Those who became disciples of Christ were in a real sense his brothers. Even after his resurrection he sent a message to his " brethren." ^<^^ (b) Moreover the term was extended to include all mankind. We are all brethren."^ In the august description of the last judgment Jesus described even the heathen who did not know him as "my brethren." We must not miss his use of the expres- sion "all nations." 10^ On his lips idpo^ always re- ferred to the Gentiles.108 ^u nations will be gathered before God, and judgment will be according to their unselfish ministry among themselves, every sufferer and needy person being a "brother" of Jesus Christ.^o^ The conception of Jesus was that man- kind is God's family. Thus Jesus Hfted the words "father" and " brother " from a mere domestic and national use, and made them describe the manifold relations of God and men. He used the ideas that underlie the family relations to express the ethical and spiritual content of the Christian faith. They were the reality in his personal life, and therefore gave form and substance to his teaching. Every word of our Lord was spiritual autobiography. He taught what he was, and he was what he taught. Every deed, utter- ance, and relation is a window through which streamed the light that was within, and through which also we gaze into the interior recesses of his soul. The Christian Faith is truly the personal faith W3 Luke 22 : 32 ; Acts 9 : 17 ; 1 Cor. C : G ; 8 : 13 ; Col. 4:9. i»* James 2 : 15. W? '. ^^^^^^ ra idyrj." 105 Matt. 28 : 10 ; John 20 : 17. ^os Matt. 6 : 32 ; Mark 10 : 42. i«8 Matt. 7 : 3-5. we Matt. 25 : 40. The Christian Faith and the Family 21 of Jesus himself reproduced in us, so far as our sinful and undeveloped spiritual natures will allow. Thus we see how the family made its vast con- tribution to the Christian Faith. Our Lord turned aside from the monarchy, which up to his day had molded the conceptions of God and of human rela- tions to him, and of men and their relations. He preserved all ideas of sovereignty and of dignity which belonged to the thought of God as king, and men as his subjects, but he paternalized these con- ceptions. He entirely thrust aside the external- isms which belonged to forensic relations, and displaced them with the thought of the inner filial and fraternal spirit. That new idea was to shape all externalisms. He did not sew the new family cloth upon the old garment of legalism, nor would he put the new wine of God's Fatherhood and man's brotherhood into the skins of monarchical concep- tions. ^^° Straight to the family life our Lord went with an unflinching courage that dared to exalt humanity's oldest and most sacred institution into the position of a great parable of God's relation to men, and their relations to one another. There is profound significance in the fact that the central teachings of Jesus Christ concerning God and men, and all their relations, were based upon the family. He would translate all factors in religion into terms that everybody could understand. 4. No part of the Bible can be understood without proper regard for the historical situation in which it was produced. This is strikingly apparent when we study Paul's teaching about the family. While Paul in his messages to the heathen world and to the early "OAfaik 2 : 21, 22. 22 The Christian Faith and Human Relations church used the family relations as vehicles of the new religion, he nevertheless shared the Messianic expectations of his time. In his earliest letters, those to the Thessalonians, the family is ignored. The only allusion to any event that could be consid- ered as domestic is the comparison of the impending world cataclysm to the suddenness with which birth- pangs come to the mother."^ About four years later he wrote to the Corinthians urging celibacy. While he introduced his comments by stating that he gave his own judgment, and did not speak by command- ment of the Lord," 2 he also said that he thought he had the mind of the Spirit. "^ At that time he con- templated a destruction of the existing social order which would attend the return of Jesus to this world."* He therefore advised marriage only to avoid the peril of incontinence. He said it was bet- ter that young ladies should not marry, and declared that the unmarried could care more for the things of the Lord."^ Much later, near the close of his life he wrote, " I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary for their railing." "^ Hus- bands are to love their wives " as Christ also loved the church.""^ Yet, though he had some years pre- viously announced the ideal that in Christ " there is neither male nor female,""^ he still held to the head- ship of the husband over the wife."^ The Pauline ^^ 1 Thess. 5 : 3. ^' 1 Cor. 7 : 6, 25. "3 1 Cor. 7 : 40. 11* 1 Cor. 7 : 29-31 ; 1 Cor. 16 : 22, Maranatha. »i» 1 Cor. 7 : 8-40. 118 1 Tim. 5 : 14. ^^ Eph. 5 : 25-29. "« Gal. 3 : 28. ^^ Eph. 5 : 22-24 ; Col. 3 : 18. The Christian Faith and the Family 23 utterances must be studied in the light of modifica- tions of his views, due to the delay of the return of Jesus. If Paul's letters be arranged in chronological order and studied with reference to the subjects of marriage, and the family life, and other matters also, the modifications of his views will become apparent. When he wrote his earliest letters, he expected Jesus to come and be with him.'^*^ When he wrote his second letter to Timothy, he expected to go to be with Jesus.'-' The early Pauline utterances have been used by some as a basis of argument for an unsympathetic attitude toward the family life. When, however, one studies Paul historically, the development of his ideas will be seen. There is no reason why modifications should not have occurred during the twelve to sixteen years of experience and literary activity. Only sane methods of New Testa- ment study will yield wholesome fruits to the Chris- tian faith. Jesus' teaching about the family must be authoritative for us. PauFs utterances need to be contemplated as just indicated. III. THE CHRISTIAN FAITH TRANSFIGURES THE FAMILY While the family made great contributions to the Christian Faith, it received greater gifts. Jesus did not leave the family where he found it. In his use of it he transfigured it. The vast difference between the Christian family today and the Old Testament Hebrew family is due entirely to Jesus Christ. The soil of the divine heart profoundly affected the fam- ily flower and fruit. In its passage through the 120 1 Thess. 4 : 15-17. "^ 2 Tim. 4 : 6. 24 The Christian Faith and Human Relations septum of his soul all that could not convey the high- est spiritual truth was eliminated. The boy's loaves and fishes in the hand of Jesus multiplied/-^ but the family idea in the heart of Jesus was transformed and glorified. 1. The Christian Faith sanctifies marriage. It moralized the relations between the sexes. When one turns from the pages of classic Greek and Ro- man literature to those of the New Testament, and also to Christian sermons, essays, and poetry con- cerning the general relations of men and women, especially in the conjugal life, it seems as if the word " love " had almost entirely changed its mean- jj^g 123 i^ Greece, ** Almost all their great men . . . were impure." ^^^ When Greek influences entered Rome, " domestic chastity and morality almost wholly disappeared." No more stupendous change in the social order has been wrought than that by the Christian faith concerning the relation of the sexes. Not yet has the church of Christ, much less the world at large, reached the single standard of Jesus, the same for both sexes.^^s r^j^jg relation be- tween the sexes seems to be the one exception he made to his habit of treating social conditions only by uttering general principles. In this region his teaching is specific. The origin of the family is in marriage. The teaching of Jesus gave the death-blow to polyg- amy,^-*^ which had been tolerated and practised in 122 John 6 : 9, 13. "3 See " Gesta Christi," by Charles Loring Brace, Chapters III, IV. Also Uhlhorn's *' Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism," Chapter II, Section 2. 124 Uhlhorn, op. cit. The whole section should be read for a picture of heathen ideas. 1-5 Matt. 5 : 27-30. i2« Matt. 19 : H, 6. The Christian Faith and the Family 25 Old Testament times. God is the Creator of all life. Human beings are his agents in the perpetuation of physical life. All forms of sexual unchastity are therefore criminal waste by trustees of divine life, are sequestrations of divine property, violations of heavenly trust. While in the Old Testament mar- riage was the figure frequently used by the prophets of the relation of Jehovah and the nation, in the New Testament it is the figure of the union of Christ and his church.^-^ Marriage is essentially holy. There is no New Testament ground for regarding it as a sacrament. Nevertheless, the sacramental concep- tion comes nearer to the Christian view of the holy relation than much of the prevailing Protestant practise. Husband and wife in the home, and before the world, should be the exponents of the love that exhibits God's creative function, and of the unity, affection, and service existing between Christ and the church. There can be no more sacred or effective parable of the relation of the living Christ to his earthly disciples than husband and wife realizing the ideals of the Christian Faith concerning mar- riage. Think of Paul being compelled to write to those recently redeemed from heathenism, " Hus- bands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them." ^-« Christian ideals so highly exalt marriage that it should be entered into only for the holiest reasons. Jesus teaches that marriage can be broken only by a sin which by its very nature destroys the union of souls and bodies it was intended to exhibit. There is urgent need today for strenuous protest against ^^ Eph. 5 : 23-31. '28 Col. 3 : 19. c 26 The Christian Faith and Human Relations the degradation of this most sacred human relation- ship. Conjugal alliances are sometimes formed for physical, financial, and social reasons. Our divorce courts dissolve a large percentage of marriages. Moreover, there are separations and desertions that never reach the courts, and cannot be stated in sta- tistics. And there is reason to fear that not all cases of unfaithfulness come to the light. If the home fails, Church and State alike are doomed. There is not time here to describe the divorce evil, nor to discuss the limitations our Lord puts upon it,'-^ nor the lack of agreement concerning the causes for it as exhibited in the various statutes of our different States. The Christian Faith yet faces the gigantic task of shaping our social ideals and practises con- cerning marriage. We cannot hope that the world will feel the holiness and power of Christian ideals until ministers and church-members themselves come to know and be faithful to Christ's ideals. 2. The Christian Faith gives spiritual meaning to parenthood. It is vastly more than a convention- ally decent way of sustaining the human species. Here also Jesus transfigured a normal human ex- perience and made it shine with the gleams of heav- enly messages. (a) Parenthood is a means of discovering God. In his letter to the Ephesians,'^^ Paul used a remark- able expression : " For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father from whom every Fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named." One cannot escape the play upon the words father and fatherhood.^^^ ^ Matt. 5 : 32 ; 19 : 9 ; Mark 10 : 11, 12 ; Luke 16 : 18. i«> Eph. 3 : 14, 15. 181 «' Upb? TO*' naTepa . , . naaa naTpia." The Christian Faith and the Family 27 Every fatherhood is of the nature of God's father- hood. He would not let mankind multiply as the beasts of the field, or the fishes of the sea, or the fowl of the air, miscellaneously. He melts two human hearts in love, lays the fruit of that union against the mother's breast and in the father's arms, and thus awakens the parental feeling. This is the high- est interpretation of his own eternal parenthood. The holiest heart on earth is a mother's, and the right kind of a father's soul closely approaches it. Every parent in his love, care, training, and provi- dence for his own offspring reproduces within him- self something of the spiritual nature of God's divine parenthood. Thus God made provision for the universal discovery of himself through the proc- esses that perpetuate the human species. The pos- sibility of the universal knowledge of God cannot be denied, since parental hearts may look into them- selves and find in their holiest, tenderest, and most sacrificial experiences the message of God's father- hood. Jesus told us that in those periods of our love's most intense yearning over our children, and also in the unfailing consciousness of our parental relation to them, we might whisper to ourselves about God's love for us, " How much more." ^^^ Lean, indeed, are our parental souls if we do not read the divine story of the heavenly Father's interest in every human being when we feel our own holy and inexpressible love for our offspring, our highest de- sires for their development and culture, and exercise continual, providential care for the physical, mental, and moral welfare of our sons and daughters. This conception was wholly absent from the Hebrew idea is^Matt. 7: 11. 28 The Christian Faith and Human Relations of the family. Heathenism never dreamed of it. It seems very strange to us, but it must have been nec- essary, according to the standards of the day, that Paul should write to Titus, "Teach the young women to love their children." ^^^ But if we realize what motherhood spiritually meant to Paul, and that these young women were being emancipated from heathen conceptions, it will not seem startling that he told the young preacher to educate these young mothers in the love of their offspring in order that their own hearts might come to understand God. (b) Parenthood should interpret God to children, not only by religious teaching, but by the quality of parental life. Jesus insisted that parental willing- ness to minister to children and the inability of parental love to mock offspring is the parable of our heavenly Father's eagerness to serve humanity. God cannot tantalize mankind by whims and caprices, and will not mock the needs and expectations of those whom he has created. ^^* Jesus bids us know the divine attitude toward mankind from our pa- rental dispositions. " How much more ! " The rela- tion of parents to children is the domestic interpreta- tion of our heavenly Father's love.^^^ At one of the New England camps a father visited his son about to sail for France to take part in the World War. Just before their separation they drew aside from all others. The boy said to his father: " We are all alone. Have you anything to say to me? " The father answered, " Only this, remember that I love you and trust you." The boy reached out . ^^ Titus 2 : 4. 13* Matt. 7: 7-11. 135 See III, 2, (a) ut sup. on Eph. 3: 14,15. The Christian Faith and the Family 29 his arm and put it about his father's body, hugged him close and said : " I shall always honor your love and trust. I thank you for all you have done and have been to me. I shall never say the Lord's Prayer, nor hear God called Father without thinking of you. You have interpreted God to me." May we not well ask whether there could have been any higher function of fatherhood, or a more successful paternal relation than to have produced such a say- ing from a son about to face the experience of army life, and possibly death. (c) Parenthood provides spiritual opportunity to children. Jesus rebuked his disciples when they for- bade parents to bring children to him.'^^ Paul told parents to bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and not to provoke them to wrath.^" The cultivation of a good temper in the child, and the opening of his eyes to see the spiritual meaning of home life is a duty that the Christian Faith imposes upon all parents. Here life must illus- trate words, or the door of opportunity will be closed to the child. The Forerunner was " to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children." ^"^^ The embar- rassment of parents in talking to children about re- ligious matters is often due to discrepancy between life and lip. Yet how many have crowned parental ministry with the testimony that father's prayers and life, and mother-love and character have led them to the Christian life. When our children walk in truth we may well be congratulated.^'^ Parents are expected to open doors to their children in social, educational, and commercial realms. Why not in the ^30 Matt. 19 : 13-15. ^^ Luke 1 : 17. "' Eph. 6:4; Col. 3 : 21. »»> 2 John 4. 30 The Christian Faith and Human Relations Christian region also? Who will defend the idea that opportunity for the child is everywhere obliga- tory upon the parent, except in religion? Home evangelization should be the Christian parents' highest privilege, as it is their most solemn respon- sibility. (d) Parents are themselves enriched by virtue of parenthood. They are educated by their children. There are remote recesses of the soul that can be reached only by baby fingers. There are heart- strings that make no music until they are swept by the hand of a child. There are visions never awak- ened until one beholds his own offspring. There are sacrifices never contemplated, much less endured, until parental love gives itself. Even after our chil- dren are married and scattered, or when death has robbed us of their presence, we yet retain the heav- enly riches they brought us in those large expansions of soul, and the sacred experiences that parenthood enjoyed. Our pain at separations and our griefs are the witnesses to our wealth of spirit. How often children are the bonds of conjugal union and joy when otherwise differences of temperament and am- bition would destroy the married life. Often the child is the savior of the home. Parenthood is the divine remedy for domestic selfishness. It is the source of sympathy and sacrifice. In our World War millions of persons whose sons and daughters were given to the conflict first came to understand the words, " God so loved the world that he gave his gQj^ »»i4o rpj^g enrichment of life through parenthood is the normal experience of the home. The Christian Faith amplifies and intensifies our soul wealth "0 John 3:16. The Christian Faith and the Family 31 through parental experience. Every human being is broader, better, more spiritual for having been a parent. The childless home is incomplete. The childless are unfortunate. If that condition is de- liberate and purposed, it is wicked. Efforts to prevent the establishment of a family due to selfish considerations, or to the love of plea- sure, are condemned by the Christian Faith. Appar- ently no way has yet been found by which public remonstrance against sins that prevent parenthood can be made with becoming delicacy. It is not only " race suicide," as a great American has called it, but moral suicide for any who wilfully shirk the responsibilities of parenthood, or deliberately deny themselves its pleasures and educational values. 3. What the Christian faith has done for mother- hood would take volumes to express. Beautiful as was the motherhood of some Hebrew women such as Hannah,^*! and even Rizpah,^*^ ^j^^ Jochebed,^" and Mary,^** and Elizabeth,^*^ the glorification of motherhood by the Christian Faith has so exalted it in the hearts of countless millions that every day is mother's day. Jesus Christ has put a halo about the brow of mother, jeweled her fingers with holy ministries, made her bosom the sweetest, softest pillow on earth, given music to her footsteps, and made her soul the holiest place this side the throne of God. Mothers would still have been loved had he not come, but now every true son and daughter canonizes the Christian mother. At her knee we say our first prayers, and from her lips first hear the "1 1 Sam. 1. 1" Luke 2 : 46-55. "» 2 Sam. 3:7; 21 : 8-11. »» Luke 2 : 25. "3 Exod. 2:2, 3. 32 The Christian Faith and Human Relations name of God mentioned. It is her sweet voice that sings us songs about Jesus. It is her unselfish hand that soothes our troubles. It is her imperishable faith in us, stedfast when all other has vanished, that becomes God's redemptive power. And when her form is laid away, the world for us has lost com- fort and power that can never be replaced. Because Jesus had a mother, loved, served, and cared for her,^*^ and because of his teachings, the Christian Faith has exalted maternity as mankind's supreme physical experience, and has extolled its glory in countless sermons, poems, and memorials. 4. The Christian Faith exalts filial life. Jesus reaffirmed the commandment " Honor thy father and thy mother," ^*^ but into the word honor he put a new content, namely, the conception that filial reverence makes its own contribution to the spiritual signifi- cance of the family. We are God's children. Our filial life is the parable of our relation to our heav- enly Father. In the midst of heathen unfilial dis- respect Paul urged children to obey their parents, for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.^** This rev- erence was not to be a mere matter of youth, but was to continue through life. How scathing is Jesus' denunciation of those who would set aside filial duty by " corban."!*^ There can be no honor paid to God by a gift that prevents us from ministering to the needs, comfort, and happiness of those who brought us into the world, gave unstinted care to our early days, and are God's largest factors in making us what we become. If parental love reveals to fathers and mothers the divine affection of the heavenly i^« John 19 : 25-27. "^ Eph. 6:1,2. "^ Mark 10 : 19. "» Mark 7 : 9-13. The Christian Faith and the Family 33 Parent for his earthly children, no less would proper filial reverence in the Christian family show parents their own normal relation to God. The love, obe- dience, confidence, and fellowship that all parents seek from their children will become the daily par- able of parental ambition Godward. The Christian Faith regarding the family enables sons and daugh- ters to make their specific contribution to the re- ligious meaning of the home. 5. The Christian Faith has brought the home under the exclusive sivay of love. In the Hebrew family there doubtless must have been love, yet the binding power of the home had in it elements of force and selfishness. The Christian Faith has ban- ished these from the ideal home. The members of the Christian family are in no sense property of the head of the house. No despotism nor exploitation is permissible. We cannot take the Old Testament family as a model. Such homes as those of Abra- ham, Jacob, and David would not be tolerated in a Christian church today. The Christian Faith builds the home on love exclusively, and depends on the power of affection. Unselfish service is the ideal for every member of the family. Fidelity is based upon union of hearts. No more complete transfigu- ration has ever taken place than that of the home because of the Christian Faith. The New Testament gives us no picture of a Chris- tian home. The reasons are not obscure. The new faith was struggling to establish itself, and Jesus predicted a division of families in the process.^^'^ Moreover, the early Christians were expecting the existing social order to be demolished, and a new one »»« Matt. 10 : 35. 36. 34 The Christian Faith and Human Relations to be established at the parousia, and no existing social institution arrested their attention. Even Paul, as we have seen, advised against marriage,^^^ the only way to establish a home. The New Testa- ment books did not deal with conditions in a settled Christian civilization, but with situations they thought would be immediately changed. Neverthe- less, the Christian ideals for personal character and social relations have dominated our homes far more than commerce, or the state, or any other institution. Millions of Christian homes, and countless books, poems, and persons bear ample testimony to the exclusive sway of love in the family as the ideal in all Christian lands. At the beginning of this lecture we had occasion to note that the Hebrew language had no word equivalent to our word " family." We must now note that the Greek language had no such word; 1^2 nor the Latin.^^^ Originally the Latin familia, from which our word family is derived, meant the servants in a household. The ideal of the exclusive sway of love has made even our En- glish word " family *' to become almost a Christian term, certainly one without parallel or synonym in any ancient tongue. 6. We have already alluded ^^* to the family idea as the ultimate conception of 7nanMnd's relation to God, and of the relation of men to one another. That is the kingdom of God. Today we seldom think of social relations in terms of monarchy, but rather of mankind as a vast family, and of the heavenly Father as its head by virtue of his holiness and love. "* 1 Cor. 7 ; see also Sec. Ill, 1, of this lecture. ^^^ See oiKia, ot«o?, otKeios, oiKtaKo? ==Heb. heth. ^^^ Domua. ^"Sec. II, 3, (a). The Christian Faith and the Family 35 For the realization of this family idea in world life the church itself exists. The historical evolution of government from monarchical to democratic forms has made a place for this Christian conception of humanity. It is yet far from realization. Amid the present chaos, race prejudice, and international gropings the need for this conception of mankind must be met by those who hold our precious faith. Not the least of the triumphs of our holy faith is the substitution of the family idea for the monarchical as the noblest conception of mankind's highest rela- tions. IV. THE MESSAGES OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH ABOUT THE FAMILY Such being the brilliant transfiguration of the family by the Christian Faith, what messages should it send to the world? Its utterances must grow out of itself. Its vitality shapes its words. 1. The Christian Faith concerning the family should vigorously propagate itself. It must keep itself constantly before the world. Many concep- tions prevailing in homes connected with Christian churches need to be corrected and clarified. Our pulpits must tell our families their vast spiritual significance. However beautiful may be natural family aflfection, the entrance of Christian ideals will bring new illumination, add fresh power to homes, and enrich domestic life. Our problems of evangelization would be much simplified if Christian families in our parishes tried honestly to exemplify Jesus' teachings in their homes. The minister has a golden opportunity to let two souls at the time of 36 The Christian Faith and Human Relations marriage know the divine significance of their act. When the home is gladdened and sanctified by birth there is another open door for the pastor. Why not enter with the gospel of the spiritual meaning of parenthood? No empty ceremony could approach in power the minister's intelligent appeal to the hearts that feel their first parental ecstasies. As families grow the pastor finds his best opportunity to interpret to both parents and children the holy parable of their home life. He can reveal to parents their priesthood to which they are ordained of God by virtue of parenthood. He can, with parental help, teach the children the Christian meaning of their lives, train them for the higher meaning of their home lives, and prepare them to become exam- ples of brotherhood in the larger relations of life. Is the average pastor trying to develop Christian homes? Here is a field for pastors that would yield great harvests for the church school, the church- membership, and for world betterment. What are our deacons doing for this desirable result? Their function according to the New Testament is spir- itual. Is their office today much more than an eccle- siastical ornament? Institutionalized religion in churches, Sunday schools, and young people's socie- ties is vastly better than no religion at all. But re- ligion domesticated in homes will produce personal and social results far exceeding those of agencies external to the home. But if our Christian homes are yet at such a lam- entable distance from these ideals, what shall be said of homes where a believer and an unbeliever are unequally yoked together, or those where Christ has not entered at all ? What are the fruits that our The Christian Faith and the Family 37 beloved America has reaped from such homes? Alas that some of these results also come from any homes connected with our churches ! Variant divorce laws in our different States ; inadequate protection of the welfare of children by the state; diverse laws con- cerning marriage; the disintegrating tendency of wealth in the home; the separating and often de- grading passion for pleasure ; the vision of fathers devoted to money-making and recreation to such an extent that we have to rally families in father-and- son banquets; the spectacle of mothers devoted to fashions, parties, and diversions so thoroughly that today the daughters seem to raise the mothers in- stead of the mothers raising the daughters — these things suggest the appalling need for the propaga- tion of the Christian Faith concerning the family. Unless our homes are Christianized, the state, and our schools and churches must inevitably suffer, and our very civilization will deteriorate. 2. The Christian Faith insists upon religious edu- cation, which does not mean the impartation of dogma, but the unfolding of both the parental and filial life according to the standards of Jesus Christ, It is sad to think that many parents are either in- competent through ignorance, or are so devoted to other things that they commit to alien hands the sweetest privilege they could have, the religious edu- cation of their children. Deplorable as this fact is, and fatal to the highest home life as persistence in such a course will inevitably be, it calls all the more strongly for efficient church schools. These must supplement the home. They should not supersede it. The days when Timothy was educated at the knees of his mother and grandmother have largely 38 The Christian Faith and Human Relations passed.^55 Children are hurried off to Sunday school where they go in many cases reluctantly. Their spiritual lives are put in the care of ministers, too often spoken of as being " hired," to make Christians out of sadly neglected boys and girls that come from supposedly Christian homes. Their religious wel- fare is entrusted to teachers who fortunately for the most part have a deep interest in discharging their duties. But no stranger can so love a child as a parent. Parents seek to do this holiest of all nor- mally parental work by ministerial or educational proxies. The condition has become critical. Or- ganized training for teachers is rightly insisted upon. But, all this effort is an attempt by those who have at heart the welfare of children to supply the deficiencies of the home. Is it not true as Bushnell said that children in a Christian home should " grow up Christians, and never know themselves as being otherwise"? Parents are exhorted to raise their children in the full rounded culture of mind and morals that the religion of Jesus requires, with such exhortation as he approves.^^^ Why should a home, or a church-school, feel the obligation to develop the physical, intellectual, and social ca- pacities of a child, and neglect the spiritual capaci- ties equally inborn, and of far greater value? Re- ligious education aims to enthrone these developed spiritual qualities over the unfolding physical, men- tal, and social powers. If homes are to remain Christian, if the Church is to perpetuate itself, if the State is to feel the atmosphere of Jesus Christ, Christian education must primarily be in the home itself. Supplemental agencies also must be sup- ^" 2 Tim. 1 : 5. «« Eph. 6 : 4. The Christian Faith and the Family 39 ported for supplying the inability, deficiency, and lack of consecration in the home. The highest edu- cational influences are those that come from life. Oral teaching by parents may be offset by lives in- consistent therewith. The opinion of Jesus concern- ing those who " talk and do not '' ^" is not compli- mentary. Grace at meals should make every repast a eucharist. Family prayers cannot be dispensed with without domestic injury. Christian living by all Christian members of a family is fundamental. Conversation at meals about religion in its experi- mental, intellectual, and practical aspects should be as natural in a Christian home as chatter about amusements, gossip about society affairs, or discus- sion concerning the daily demands of mammon wor- ship. Why should not the Bible be as intelligently and as interestingly considered at the dinner-table as the scandals and murders recorded in the news- paper, or the novel and magazine, or the drama? What golden opportunities are lost by the exclusion of the world's greatest life, literature, and enter- prises as topics of conversation at mealtimes! What priceless chances for the religious education of both parents and children are thus within our reach ! 3. The Christian Faith concerning the family has a message to theology. We have theologies based on legalism. Philosophies and metaphysics also have shaped our thinking. We have tried to define God and man, and their relations, in terms that satisfy our speculations. Why should not Christian the- ology return to the thought of Jesus? Principal Fairbairn has said : " If we attempt to construct a »- Matt. 23 : 3. 40 The Christian Faith and Human Relations theology which shall be faithful to the consciousness of Christ, the Fatherhood must be the determinative principle of thought. It is the architectonic idea ; out of it the whole system must grow; with it all ele- ments and deductions must be in harmony; all else is body ; it alone is the informing soul." ^^^ It is un- necessary to attempt to describe theologies that have prevailed. Beneath any theology must be the vi- tality of the Christian Faith. It must be livable. A theology that can be understood by all is a great help to life, and such a theology is the one that springs from our Lord's use of the family relations. (a) This is needed in Christian lands where the family is at its best. There is godlessness enough in every such land. Any country is today called Christian only by courtesy, or to distinguish it from lands where Christianity has not become the prevail- ing religion. The pulpits of our own land should preach a theology based upon our Lord's teaching. Myriads of earnest hearts crave an intelligible inter- pretation of their religious experiences. Let us frankly confess that they have not had it in meta- physical theology, or in Roman legalism, or in Jewish ritualism. They can get it if we will follow the teachings of our Lord who parabled the family. (b) Such a theology is still more needed in the message of the gospel to heathen lands. Among primitive peoples ignorant of our philosophy and metaphysics, of our Bible, of Roman jurisprudence, and of Jewish ritualism, theologies based on these will be thoroughly meaningless. There is no land where the family does not exist. Just so far as the missionary can use the basal elements of family life 158 " Tiie Place of Christ in Modern Ttieology," p. 452. The Christian Faith and the Family 41 as a starting-point he should do so. God has laid in the human heart, in family love, elements to which an appeal can always be made with power. The story of the Prodigal Son and of his Waiting Father will reach the densest savage consciousness. There is no one in any benighted land so irrevocably sub- merged in error, ignorance, or superstition that our Lord's use of the family will not reveal to such an one tangential points between himself and God. 4. Not even family life must be ^permitted to inter- fere with the highest relations to God. This most sacred earthly institution cannot stand between souls and the heavenly Father. This was the mean- ing of some events in the life of our Lord. At the marriage at Cana, Jesus, who honored his mother as no son ever honored a mother, said, " Woman, what have I to do with thee? " ^'^ When our Lord's mother and his brothers thought that he was insane and wished to obtain possession of him, his reply concerning real kinship has forevermore emanci- pated the duty of the soul to God from family con- ^j.q1 160 When some woman felicitated the womb that bore him and the breasts that nourished him, he declared, " Yea, rather blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it." ^''^ This intimate rela- tion between each soul and God must be preached fearlessly as part of the Christian faith concerning the family. No merely hereditary religion can stand before this truth. Any attempt on the part of a parent to coerce or force the faith of his child, or the effort to prevent the child from the free and vol- untary exercise of its own faith in God, is contrary "9 John 2:4. i«o Mark 3 : 21, :U-:^r> ; Matt. 12 : 4G-48. i«i Lnko 11 : 27, 28. D 42 The Christian Faith and Human Relations to the Christian faith concerning the family. It is sad but true that parents, sometimes themselves not Christians, frequently prevent their children from public confession of faith in Christ. Many times such desires by boys and girls in their wonderful adolescent period are thwarted, with untold damage to the hearts that are disappointed. The attempt of parents to control children in matters that ought to be decided beween the child and God is a usurpation of divine rights.^^^ There are times today when it must be said, " Whosoever loveth father or mother or wife or children more than me, is not worthy of me." ^^^ We are closer to God than to our parents. This is the priceless intimacy that makes redemption possible, and puts within our grasp freedom from the burden of heredity, independence of environ- ment, and deliverance from our own sinful past. It was an Old Testament prophet who represented Jehovah as saying, " As I live, saith the Lord Jeho- vah, behold all souls are mine." ^^* Our relation to the heavenly Father is more intimate than to our nearest earthly kin, and must not be interfered with. 5. The Christian Faith concerning the family has a message for the social order. In these days of fer- ment the thought of readjustment is in the air. In the regions of industry, commerce, and internation- alism, and in all realms of society, we find chaos, per- plexity, and blind groping. We wander hopelessly through legislation, and through the mazes of educa- tion. If it be true that all the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ,^«-' that the realms of home, education, science, "2 Rom. 14 : 12. '"* E^^ek. 18 : 3, 4. M3 Matt. 10 : 37 ; Luke 14 : 26. ^°^ Rev. 11 : 15. The Christian Failh and the Family 43 politics, industry, internationalism, and all others are to be permeated by the spirit of God revealed in Jesus Christ, the work of the church, the Christian ministry, and the Christian home is gigantic, and far remote from realization. The kingdom of God means the family of God. Filial relations to God and fraternal relations among men are Christ's ideal for society. The extension of the family idea of religion through all the earth is the supreme task of Christian agencies. We must say to all men: " You are brothers; why should you strive? " We must say to employers in the realms of industry, " Your men are not slaves but brothers." ^«^ We must say to trades-unions and federations, " However fraternal you are among yourselves, your spirit of fraternity must be extended to your employers." '*'' We must declare to the dark underworld of vice that no man has the right to claim the low pleasure of sensuality at the expense of his sister's body. We must say to our stormy, selfish, partisan politics that however variant may be economic ideas, all strife and rivalry should be fraternal in its spirit, and with the one great idea of burying personal and party ambition, and of exalting the welfare of the nation. We must say to the world that all races are of one blood, made to feel after God if haply they might find him,^''^' and that no matter what may be the color of skin, or geographical location, or past traditions, all are brothers. It is inconsistent for Christians to send missionaries to Japan and China and Africa and Continental Europe to preach the family idea of Christianity, and then to vote for i«« Philem. 16. i^s Acts 17:26, 27. J" Eph. 6 : 5-7. 44 The Christian Faith and Human Relations America's isolation from other nations, as if the ideal of Jesus were empty and vain. We must rid ourselves of the hypocrisy of professing to believe in the brotherhood of all men and at the same time legislate against the spirit and realization of frater- nity. The stereopticon slide of filial relation to God and fraternal relations between men is to be pro- jected upon the screen of the world. 6. Sin is unfilial and unfraternal. There can be no adequate conception of sin that ignores these aspects. However legalism may define sin as law- lessness, its essentially and thoroughly destructive nature is best felt by us when we realize its horrible nature as an unfilial break with our heavenly Father, and a fracture of brotherly relations. Both these frightful ideas of sin appear in the story of The Prodigal Son. The wilful wayward boy tears himself from the father's fellowship. The selfish elder brother had lost all compassion for his blood kin. These concepts derived from the family rela- tions help us, as perhaps no other, to realize the " exceeding sinfulness of sin." To trample upon a parent's heart, upon paternal love that never wearies ; to be unbrotherly in attitudes and deeds, is to present glaring unnaturalness. Sin is abnormal because it is unfilial. It is antisocial because it is unfraternal. It wounds and grieves the heart of infinite Love, and fractures all ideal relations of brotherhood. Out of history with its wars, vices, cruelties, selfishness, troops the vast procession of illustrations of the unfilial and unfraternal character of sin. 7. The Christian Faith concerning the family bears upon our conception of salvation. This, ac- The Christian Faith and the Family 45 cording to Jesus, was not getting into heaven, nor was it escaping from hell. Untold harm has been done to the world's welfare by this other-worldly notion of salvation that has dominated the church too extensively. It has promoted false and sacra- mental means of salvation. It has established an ecclesiastical caste as the custodians of post-mortem happiness. It has emphasized crass individualism, and almost smothered the social aspects of the gospel. Salvation is right relation to God and our fellow men, in this world. Here and now we may have eternal life, which is not mere everlastingness of existence, but the life of the Eternal One in us.^«^ It is mediated to us only by Jesus Christ, and con- sists in each person's filial life with God,^^"^ and his fraternal life with all men.^'^ Only such an idea of salvation satisfies the teachings of our Lord. He bids us share his own filial life of faith in the Father, obedience to his holy will, communion with him in spirit and life, and also the life of righteousness and sacrificial love in dealings with and relations to men. Jesus asks all men to share in his own personal re- ligion. Only through the gate of repentance can we begin. Surely none can mistake his ideal, nor shift it upon either a legal or ritualistic basis. It was the family idea that he preached, because he lived it. There is no place but the Father's home ''~ for his children to go when death ends our filial life here. And no child of such a Father could ever be sepa- rated from him in any sort of hell of which we can conceive.^ '-^ In this intelligible and Christly concep- i«9 John 17:3. »" John 14:2. i'« Matt. T) : 4.'). »" Rom. 8 : 35-39. >" Matt. 7 : 3, 4. 46 The Christian Faith and Human Relations tion of salvation each of us may rest. God grant that our home lives may make the family relations indeed a parable to us, and to our dear ones, and to the world of the parental, filial, and fraternal content of our divine Lord's holy gospel. BIBLIOGRAPHY The Bible. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible; articles: "Family," " God," " Marriage." Rauschenbusch, " Christianizing the Social Order," Chap- ter II, VI. James Stalker, " Imago Christi," Chapter II. James Stalker, " The Ethics of Jesus," Chapter XV. H. H. Wendt, "The Teaching of Jesus," Third Section, Chapter II. A. B. Bruce, " The Kingdom of God," Chapter IV. A. M. Fairbairn, "The Place of Christ in Modern The- ology," Div. Ill, Chapters I, II. A. M. Fairbairn, " Religion in History and in Modern Life," Lecture III. W. N. Clarke, " The Christian Doctrine of God," Chap- ter 11. C. F. Kent, " The Student's Old Testament, Israel's Laws and Legal Precedents," pp. 51-73; 110-118, 291. H. C. Vedder, " Socialism and the Ethics of Jesus," Chap- ter X. Alvah Hovey, " Christian Teaching and Life," Chapters I, VL C. L. Brace, " Gesta Christi," Chapters II, III, IV, VI, VII, XI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI. Gerhard Uhlhorn, " Conflict of Christianity with Heathen- ism," Chapter II. II THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE LIFE OF THE COMMUNITY V By Shailer Mathews, D. D., LL. D. Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE LIFE OF THE COMMUNITY THE nineteenth century gave us Society; the twentieth has discovered the Community. The difference between the two achievements is that between abstractions and folks. A few years ago men were leaving the ministry to save society ; today they are concerned with the less ambitious task of serving the religious and moral needs of the com- munity in which they live. The change of attitude reflects a change in sociology. The searchers for a definition of society long ago abandoned analogies born of biology and turned to psychology. Today they are coming to think of society as a combination of groups organized not only to meet certain needs but also to give expression to a common purpose. As a galaxy is a combination of solar systems, so society is a group unifying groups. And among these is the Community. It is hard for any one irrepressibly philosophical to realize that the community is really worth his attention. It is not universal enough. Just as an actuary never undertakes to say that any given man is an illustration of his actuarial tables, so your thor- oughgoing idealist, whether he be a poet, clergyman, or sociologist, is superior to folks. They offer too many exceptions to his formula. Saving society per- mits one to announce a program ; one can be a rad- ical. Saving a community means that one must deal 52 The Christian Faith and Human Relations with Mr. A. and Mrs. A., and all the little a's — not to mention the rest of the alphabet. A community is not an abstraction. It is the alphabet of individuals united in more or less elabo- rate social words. It has an identity of its own. It influences its members, it inhibits or favors pro- gress, it is miserly or spendthrift. To realize this mysterious social personality one needs only to pass from one town to another. Worcester builds turtle- roofed apartment houses and Los Angeles bunga- lows. I have in mind two small country towns of approximately the same age and size. The one has two banks, a brick town hall, a street lined with brick stores, a hotel, a high-school building with laboratories, gymnasium, domestic science kitchen, and an assembly hall. Its citizens are not wealthy but are full of community spirit. They have feder- ated two churches, support an energetic woman's club, and throughout last summer had a community night with band music, games, and dancing in the main street (they have no park). The other town has no bank, several stores, good schools of the type of twenty years ago, no hotel, churches dying of rivalries of forgotten origin, a band, but, except a small library, no community life except commercial dances. You will see that both communities have much in common, but they are thoroughly unlike. It is iiard to describe their difference, but it is easily felt. The " spirit," we say, of each is different. And in saying that we disclose a point of contact between Christian Faith and the community life. Without yielding to the ever-present temptation The Christian Faith and the Community 53 to personify communities, it is permissible to say that they have different characters. Or to use a more technical term, each has its own social mind — that complex of ideas, prejudices, ambitions, likes and dislikes, which mark a community and tend to reproduce themselves in its members. Social minds express themselves in many ways, but in none more potently than in customs. Indeed customs might almost be described as the charac- teristic contents of a social mind. If the Christian Faith is to touch the community in other ways than the indispensable transformation of individuals, it must concern itself with customs. For customs arc morals in the making. It is difficult for each generation to approve the customs and the resulting morals of its successor. If in some communities the successors of one genera- tion are immigrants with novel social habits, appre- ciation is also threatened with contempt. But in all communities youths develop or reject social inheri- tance. And the older folks cannot understand them or their ways. All of us forget that at some time in our youth we thought to change the world in which we lived. Some of us may even venture to believe that we have changed it somewhat. But these individual revolts and reformations are as nothing compared with the effects produced by wide- spread economic and political change, universally accepted forms of amusement, world-wide styles in dress, literature, and music. It is hard for those of us who cling to mid-Victorian manners and ideas, to understand, much less approve, these new mores. But understand them we must if we are to be wel- comed advisors. The generation that fought the 54 The Christian Faith and Human Relations war has no great admiration for the generation that brought the war about. It demands and invents new Hterature (if indeed it be hterature) , new music (if indeed it be music), new clothes (if indeed they be clothes) . It sees no more need of chaperones at home than in the devastated regions of France. Its motto is Honi soit qui mal y pense, and it does not stop to think. It is restless unto toddling, loqua- cious unto " lines,'' bound to be rich between week- end parties, and bound to spend more on the parties than it earns during the week. At all events that is the picture we are apt to paint of those amazing young people who wait, not too patiently, to take over our parts upon the stage of life. But they themselves have no such opinion of themselves. They frankly tell us we misunder- stand them. And perhaps we do. Our parents seemed occasionally to misunderstand us ! But mis- understood or not, our children are already making new customs for the new age we have promised them. Every community in the nation is engaged in the adventure. Can our Christian Faith survive the tension ? We have only to look about us to see that there is real danger that, unless new power comes to them, churches will not survive. Religious statistics are slow to respond to actual social forces, for pastors and church clerks dislike " losses " as badly as sem- inary trustees dislike deficits. But the ebb of church life begins to show. Each of us has his explanation, most of us have our panaceas. We advise every- thing from newspaper advertising to theories of inspiration. But the desiccating process continues in Protestantism at large. We may well ask whether The Christian Faith and the Community 55 we have yet been given the correct diagnosis of the complaint. In my opinion there is one general explanation of the present situation. The church of the past has bequeathed us a morality insufficient for the evolv- ing social order. It is good as far as it applies ; but as actually expounded by its representatives it reaches hardly further than respectability. The church of today has to Christianize the new social mind that already is precipitating its morality in the customs of each community. Failure waits upon the attempt to limit the morality of the Ten Com- mandments and the Sermon on the Mount exclu- sively to individuals. Atomistic individual activity no longer exists, if indeed it ever existed. As never before we act as members of economic classes and local communities. Christianity has little meaning for the world unless it can evangelize, that is, altru- ize, social forces. We can never make our com- munity life better simply by denouncing dances we dislike and our children approve, social customs un- like those of our youth which our children invent, moral standards that were bizarre a generation ago but are conventional today. We have bigger tasks on our hands. We must check in the making customs which tend toward moral disintegration through making pleasure the sole antidote for ennui and fatigue. We must remove the causes which explain social excess. We must frankly see that economic condi- tions are as much a matter of religion's concern as they were when Moses forbade stealing and covet- ousness. We must make personal welfare rather than profits the test of industry. We must show 56 The Christian Faith and Human Relations women that to gain full personal rights makes all the more weighty their duty to consecrate their womanhood to the welfare of the race. We must fear neither change nor conservatism, sacrifice nor achievement. We have the custom-making of in- dividuals, communities, nations to inspire with the spirit of Jesus Christ. And one point of contact is the actual community in which we live. II A most discouraged person is an idealist who has discovered that people put practical interests above ideals. It is a rare man who, under such circum- stances, does not grow cynical or despondent. So long as he has been able to play the part of a gen- eralizing oracle, his pictures of a better world prob- ably gain a sort of non-committal assent. The idealist is therefore tempted to forget that humanity cannot be reduced to algebra — to x + y equals z ; for you have to know what *' x " and " y " really are. What sort of reality would z represent if x represented Capitalism and y represented Bolshe- vism? You can program ideals; you have to per- suade folks. And such persuasion is an act requir- ing patience and often threatening the cross. It would be foolish to deny the need of ideals, but ideals should not obscure real people. We must needs talk about the kingdom of God, although, like Paul, we may very well be aware that its prospective members can more safely be addressed as those " called to be saints " than as " saints.'' We believe in democracy, even though we have difficulty in find- ing approved democrats. Refuse the practical world the lure of unobtainable abstractions, and much of The Christian Faith and the Community 57 the driving power of altruism will disappear. Tasks compel us, but ideals justify tasks. Even an agnos- tic will capitalize the word " Absolute." But, grant- ing all this, whoever devotes his life solely to ab- stractions finds himself hard pressed when he meets men and women who question his right to utter oracles. The community refuses to become the king- dom of God. Thereupon your idealist grows dis- couraged. He finds the seeds of pessimism in the morning newspaper. His neighbors do not want to go to church, and do want to go to the movies. His city seems fecund of hold-up men, declines to adopt reforms which seem to him axiomatic, its young people seem careless of safe conventions, its busi- ness men seem neglectful of the fine arts, its women dress immodestly, its voters prefer normalcy to the League of Nations, and its ministers no longer preach the pure gospel ! Your disillusioned idealist sympathizes with Elijah under the juniper tree. Yet that is the experience through which we are threatened passage. Face to face with a real community, men of Chris- tian Faith gravitate in one of two directions. There are those who are convinced that the community and society itself are helpless and fit only to be destroyed, and that presently Christ will appear for the pur- pose of destruction. In the meantime, the only course open to men of faith is to announce the com- ing doom, ameliorate human suffering, and rescue from its approaching ruin such persons as may be elected by God for that deliverance. With Christians of such predilections it is useless to argue. To hope that civilization is to be destroyed and the earth cleansed with fire in order that upon E 58 The Christian Faith and Human Relations it may be established the community of the saints, is to abandon reason. To limit the love of God to mere rescue is to Hmit his power to save. From such a point of view Christian Faith has about the same relation to the community as had monasticism; the church stands over against the community as a place of refuge and a dispenser of charity and good works. It has no social gospel and, to quote a pro- nouncement made by English premillenarians dur- ing the War, would make " all human schemes of reconstruction subsidiary to the second coming of our Lord because all nations will be subject to his rule." Other Christians see in the community a sphere of operation of the Christian Faith — the same Chris- tian Faith that John had — ^namely, that God sent his Son not to condemn but to save the world. With this faith such Christians undertake to discuss the means and methods by which such salvation is to be accomplished. It may be argued that this faith in the salvability of a real community is not necessarily Christian — that it is possessed by sociology as well as by the gospel. In a sense this is true, and fortunately. A gospel inconsistent with the real world could not be treated seriously. If the God of Jesus were other than the God of the universe and of history, we might well despair. It is only what an intelligent Christian would expect when he finds the salvability of a community affirmed by the investigator. Ill The most obvious and at present, perhaps, most emphasized aspect of the application of the Chris- The Christian Faith and the Community 59 tian Faith to the life of the community, is the social work of the church as an institution. Not that such a situation is ultramodern. In fact, little is ultra- modern to a historian. When one recalls the care of the early church for prisoners, the poor, the sick, widows, strangers, and children; the work of the medieval friars and sisters; the ever-discoverable self-devoting ministry of charity-workers, mission- aries, and pastors; the foundation of universities, schools, and colleges ; the prodigality with which the church of the nineteenth century established hos- pitals, orphanages, young people's societies, and means of scientific amelioration of poverty; the social zeal of the church of the twentieth century seems anything but a sociological Melchizedek. Nev- ertheless, we realize the new impetus to be zealous in community service that is firing forward-looking Christians. Faith, as never before, is being ener- gized by love. And certainly we must believe that the church has a community mission as well as message. The better we understand religion the more clearly comes the duty of the church as social engineer. The institu- tional church may not be needed by all types of com- munities, but the fundamental principle upon which it is built is universally true: every phase of life must either be opposed or developed by the church. Of course it is impossible for such a sweeping gen- eralization to be administered; but, so long as re- ligion is a phase of life, so long it cannot be disso- ciated from the forces which go to determine what life shall be. So long as the individual is partly the product of community life, so long the church must be interested in the factors of the community life. 60 The Christian Faith and Human Relations It requires, for example, no particular skill as a sociologist to discover that every community in America is interested in moving pictures. But they are only one of the forces which are stirring the mind through the appeal to the eye. It is always easy for the reformer to overestimate the danger of the evil which he is endeavoring to reform ; but, after all due allowance has been made for this like- lihood, the fact remains that it makes very decided difference whether the community is constantly being subjected to suggestions which are antisocial or even vicious. The church cannot be indifferent to such an element in the shaping of the point of view of the community. Similarly, the church finds a legitimate field of reform in all forms of commercialized play from the theater to the prize-fight. It has had no mean part in prohibiting the sale of intoxicants and the per- sonalizing of women in industry and politics. The utterances of religious conventions have been of late almost uniformly in favor of giving specific rights to working men. Our missionaries have founded schools, built hospitals, and are now spreading the gospel through agricultural experiment and teach- ing. Swimming-pools and gymnasiums, hikes and cook-stoves are already means of grace. The next generation will expand this social service to the very limits of community life. Too often, let us grant, the Christian feels that his duty is done when he has exposed an evil and de- nounced it. Such action is necessary, for there are practises and institutions in the community life that cannot be reformed — they must be destroyed. We v/ant no compromise with gambling-houses and The Christian Faith and the Community 61 brothels. Constructive tasks, however, though more difficult, are quite as important. Speaking gener- ally, churches must introduce certain elements of the community life which later will be taken over by the community itself. I have in mind particularly playgrounds and the general recreational life of the community, especially if it be a small town. Play, we are now coming to see, is as normal as work. Such initiative on the part of the church, it goes without saying, must be intelligently exercised. Leadership in recreation is in many particulars highly specialized. The church that will be really significant in this field will need a man who possesses not only common sense and the human spirit of play but also some instruction in the conduct of com- munity play. And the same can be said of the church's relation to other non-economic aspects of the community's life. Libraries and study-classes, lectures and con- certs, are not outside its initiative and nurture. In many communities the churches are the only con- tinuing centers of social life. Our own distant ancestors were unconsciously community workers when they so arranged their church services that the scattered farmers might get a touch of social solidarity in the luncheons eaten in the adjacent graveyards. Of course, the minister does not need to monopo- lize leadership in such community activity, although it is likely he often will have the larger responsi- bility. No small part of the church's task is to arouse a sense of cooperation in the community itself in establishing proper agencies that will make its members enjoy life as well as earn a living. We 62 The Christian Faith and Human Relations ought not to let the churchyard be populated with persons who might have done much if much had been required of them. Into the details of this community leadership by the church I do not mean to enter. It is now so gen- erally recognized that little argument is necessary to convince forward-looking minds that the church must be a social engineer. One thing, however, needs to be said: a community church is a church for the community, not a community considered as a church. The significance of this distinction will be apparent to all who have kept in touch with the agitation now abroad to induce the community to have the same relation toward the church as it has toward the schoolhouse, except that the minister's salary will not be added to the taxes. Such a policy is, of course, not new — it is as old as the colonial period. But, in my opinion, under only one condi- tion can it possibly be more successful now than it was two hundred years ago. That one exception is, however, more dangerous than the general truth, for it is that the church may function as a com- munity when as a church it ceases to be religious. And a church that has lost its religion is salt that has lost its savor. It is conceivable that a community might be com- posed of genuinely church people, and that its mem- bers might transform the community into an eccle- siastical organization. But practically no such expectation is warranted. A community will contain many persons who are not interested in the church as a religious organization, however much they might desire it as social headquarters. There are undoubtedly many persons who would prefer to The Christian Faith and the Community 63 have a community house to a community church, but, in the very nature of the case, there can be no question as to whether the church is to exist for certain rehgious or moral aims to which its recrea- tional and social activities are subordinate, or be simply a social club holding meetings on Sunday but without any serious conception of a religious mis- sion. There is a specious interest in the church which demands no particular religious experience on the part of its members, and emphasizes as lib- erality what is, in effect, an easy-going indifference. If such a church maintains a social hall, a gymna- sium, and a swimming-pool, and other social agen- cies, it may very likely find that the families of the community will send its children to church on Sun- day and occasionally come themselves. I would not say that a community with such a church is not better off than if it were lacking. A nucleus for social life which emphasizes the better aspects of the community is highly desirable. But I cannot feel that such a church is really grappling ulti- mately with the question which the community life propounds to the Christian Faith. Important as is the transformation of social forces by the church, it is vastly more important that these social forces be carriers of spiritual and moral idealism. A church fails miserably of fulfilling its mission when it per- mits community service to become an anesthetic for moral and religious aspiration. Sociology can never be a safe substitute for the gospel. Community ser- vice is a good servant but a poor master of faith. The most needed service which men of Christian faith can render a community is much more than physical. 64 The Christian Faith and Human Relations IV The elemental forces in human history are spir- itual. The effort to reduce human life to a mech- anism and history to economic and geographic de- terminism, is certainly far enough from complete success. I cannot believe that such efforts will ever succeed. We have fought and won a war to protect a world from the philosophy of the will to power. But far more dangerous than a Nietzschean philos- ophy in a community is its loyalty to a Nietzschean practise. Despite the preaching of two thousand years the world is not yet fully persuaded to live according to its professed ideals. Just as men may be rational but too seldom reasonable, may they hold to the vocabulary of virtue and possess the efficiency of vice. When this hypocrisy is sufficiently blatant, it is easy to condemn it. When, however, it takes the form of praising the theory and denying the practise of the Christian view of the world, it is more illusive. The hypocrite, himself, is unaware of his hypocrisy. Self-ignorance is by no means the greatest danger facing those affected by community interests. Hy- pocrisy, whether conscious or unconscious, is con- temptible, but the infusion of disbelief in the prac- ticality of Christian ideals is poisonous. And it is precisely this poison that is eating into one com- munity after another. Agnosticism is altogether too intellectual a word to apply to the religious attitude of the rank and file of respectable people. They cannot think enough to be agnostic. What they pro- fess as liberality is a form of intellectual laziness. It is no more agnosticism than a fat man fanning The Chrislian Faith and the Community 65 himself in the sun is an athlete. One can respect the doubt which comes from a realization of the audacity of the Christian Faith ; but only a spiritu- ally lazy man praises comfort-seeking as the rule of life. It is this moral laziness, this indiiference to things of the spirit now sweeping through communities, that causes me most concern. There are policemen for thieves, courts for profiteers, gossip for gossips ; but what sort of nemesis is there for a generation that prefers extravagance to thrift, profits to eco- nomic justice, Cabell to Thackeray, jazz music to the *' Messiah," Mutt and Jeff to the Last Judgment? Its difficulty is one of morale. And what is the difficulty with its morale? Is it not a fundamental disbelief in the ultimate values of life as great prophets, great poets, and great souls have set them forth? Is it not a debilitating indifference to the real fundamentals Christianity proposes? No com- munity can be saved merely by substituting educa- tional movies for pictures of the " eternal triangle," or by basketball teams or swimming-pools. Such measures make for a better social hygiene, but they do not make implacably for a self-sacrificing and self-disciplined community. For that, men need to believe that there is a divinely established moral order, that it is better to be honest than to be suc- cessful, to be chaste than to be sexually indulgent, to be kindly than to be masterful — in a word, to be like Jesus than to be like Pilate. The Christian Faith is not without its doctrinal expression, but it is more than doctrines. It is even more than a confiding trust in a Saviour from the results of sin, precious as that is. From the days 66 The Christian Faith and Human Relations of Augustine men have seen that such trust impHes a view of life and imagination-daring convictions. That God is good and fatherly, that there is a moral order as infrangible as the cosmic force, that broth- erliness is life in accord with the divine will ex- pressed in that order, that destruction and v/ide- spread misery waits upon the defiance of justice, that God will help men and communities when once they seriously undertake to live in accordance with the way of love revealed in God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ — these are the elements of a faith the Christian alone fully possesses. Such a faith makes men hopeful as well as brotherly. To them life in accord with such a faith is not a forlorn hope of heroes doomed to defeat, but new progress in the development of powers and happiness implicit in a race that is more than chemical compounds or ani- malistic survival. Such a faith grows with knowl- edge as the awful depths of a star cluster are re- vealed by the telescope and spectroscope. The world over, communities are suffering just because they do not believe these fundamentals of the Christian Faith. Social confusion will continue until men possess this faith. Social amelioration does not necessarily mean social progress. If the Chris- tian Faith is to have an influence in any community it must begin by the production of lives which will make that community more than a collection of men and women indifferent to supreme values and de- sirous of " enjoying " life. Communities like in- dividuals need to be convicted of sin and righteous- ness and the judgment. Our attention has often been called these last two months to the Pilgrim and the Puritan. I find my- The Christian Faith and the Community 67 self wondering how large a residuum of positive moral idealism and power our celebrations and lec- tures concerning these worthies have deposited. Judging from such observations that I have been able to make, these celebrations look a good deal like the children's building tombs for prophets their fathers killed. Three centuries too often are a non- conductor between ourselves and Plymouth Rock. The moment an ideal becomes the exclusive property of the historian and the archeologist it is likely to appear an anachronism. Something of that fate has befallen the ideals of the seventeenth century. We have been told we need to have them; but the rank and file of people have said in effect : " To have such ideals means to live in log houses, to suffer from cold and hunger. We are thankful to these ancestors of ours for all they endured ; but by the power of our right hands and the comfort-producing machinery of our economic order, we do not propose to under- take any such discomfort ! " We are trying to make the ideals of the Mayflower travel in vast steamships with dancing salons, and the ideals which men car- ried in ox-carts travel in Pullman cars. I do not mean to say that we altogether lack persons with the Pilgrim's hope and the Puritan's conscience. Let us be thankful they are scattered throughout the land. But I do mean to say that no community will be a Plymouth colony or a Massachusetts Bay colony, if it does not have the pervasive and inde- structible faith of those who dared suffer in order that they might have what was worth more to them than creature comfort. The Christian Faith of men and women must break the control by hedonistic morals over young 68 The Christian Faith and Human Relations and old. That means the conversion of individuals as an indispensable condition of a better community life. The new conditions of life, the new phase of our economic development, the new personal status of women, the new spirit of organized labor are all demanding that we take again an inventory of our moral and religious assets. Are we sufficiently equipped with unswerving confidence in the things of the spirit to Christianize the social order which is in the making? No satisfactory answer can be given to such a question if we neglect real men and women. Abstract ideals must be made concrete in human action. Men and women of influence in the labor movement as well as among the intelligentsia must be persuaded that the Christian religion is something more than an appendage of bourgeois democracy and that the words of Jesus are more than an esthetic appeal to sentimental souls. Such an end cannot be accomplished by advertising, bud- get-making, " intensive drives," mass-meetings, and resolutions. These have their value ; but in the long run a community will be a proper place in which to live when it has been made so by the people who live in it. This sounds paradoxical but it is the truth. A church is the expression of the Christian Faith when it can transform individuals in its community to believe with all their might, mind, and soul in God and justice, in Jesus Christ and brotherliness. Chris- tian Faith of this sort can be and must be incarnate in folks. When a man becomes intelligently like Jesus his attitudes become contagious. He injects into friendship the values that are more than pass- ing pleasures. He reenforces belief in others that self-discipline is better than self-indulgence, that The Christian Faith and the Community 69 human development lies along the line of spiritual struggle rather than of sensuous pleasure, that to improve the mind is better than to learn a new dance step, that to organize life for the benefit of others is more profitable than to grow rich, that to give justice is better than to fight for rights. When the church has produced people of this sort, and has nurtured and educated them in the acceptance of such moral ideals, it has made its greatest contribu- tion to the life of the community. Its Christian Faith has found incarnation in persons who make the com- munity. This may appear to some men old-fash- ioned religion, but it is indispensable if our modern life is to be saved from moral debility. The mission of the church will not be the mission of Christian Faith until it makes people safe for community life. The kingdom of God cannot be built of communities composed of those who neither forgive nor aid one another. Thus by afl^ecting customs and individuals the Christian Faith can help the community grow Chris- tian. In no better way can it make itself felt. For thus alone can it inspire permanently efforts at re- form and community improvement. Dynamic is what reformers particularly need just now. For there are not only open doors before them, but many contenders. We need the Christian's faith in God if we are to have power to make the sacrifices proper com- munity life enjoins. We need the Christian's faith in the possibility of saved individuals if we are to work for men and women who are socially listless 70 The Christian Faith and Human Relations and economically hopeless. It is men and women with this sort of faith that the community needs. It is the Christian Faith which will make the leaders of a community Christlike. Only with its aid can the community be led to take Jesus Christ seriously. Who can be faithful without him or who can be fear- ful with him? This is indeed the victory that over- comes the world — our faith. Ill THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE STATE V By William Douglas Mackenzie, D. D., LL. D., President of Hartford Theological Seminary THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE STATE THE Founder of the Christian Faith was involved from the first in a situation which was created by the presence in Palestine and Syria of the represen- tatives of the Roman Emperor, and the continuous struggle of the Jewish nation to free itself from an alien yoke. From that day to this, throughout the history of the Church, the Christian Faith has been kept in continuous contact with the governments of all regions which it has invaded. For three cen- turies it lived as the victim of imperial hostility, seeking to crush its life. In the Middle Ages the position was almost reversed when the Church sought to be the ruler of all the rulers of Europe. In modern times the Church has assumed many different types of relationship with the multiform governments of the whole world. Into the history of the relations between the Christian Faith and the successive forms of govern- ment through two thousand years we cannot enter here. It is with the modern situation that we are to be concerned, and historical references will be only such as are necessary to illustrate definite points in our discussion. We shall therefore confine our statements to four main topics : I. The Nation and its varied Forms of Life. II. The Christian Faith and its Place in the Na- tional Life. F 74 The Christian Faith and Human Relations HI. The Relation between the Christian Faith or Community and the Modern State. IV. The Christian Faith and the New Interna- tionalism. I. THE NATION AND ITS VARIED FORMS OF LIFE During the last twenty years there is a significant change, at least in the English-speaking world, in the manner of discussing the fundamental questions suggested by the words, the State and the Nation. Before that we had works like Bluntschli's famous treatise on "The State," and Bosanquet's "Philo- sophical Theory of the State." By these writers the primary approach to the problems of the na- tional life was found in an exposition of the mean- ing of the state. That method arose naturally in an age when dynasties ruled, when a man could say, L'etat c'est moi,^ and peoples existed for their kings. Nationality was then understood through the range of power exerted by the rulers of the day. Boundaries were fixed by wars and their resultant treaties, and nations were looked upon as the realms over which certain men ruled. It seemed inevitable in such conditions to speak as if the idea of the state is logically prior to that of the nation, as if the state is a power which produces nationality and controls all interests. But a vast change has swept over these discus- sions. Recent works on the subject have such titles as "The Great Society" (Graham Wallas), "The Society of Nations " (Lawrence) , " Social Purpose " 1 " I am the State." The Christian Faith and the State 75 (Hetherington and Muirhead), "The Pschology of Nationality and Internationalism" (Pillsbury), "The Morality of Nations" (C. D. Burns). All these books discuss the state through the nation and not the nation through the state. The change is of very great significance. For it means that we must first understand what is meant by a nation, we must first consider the fulness of the modern national life, before we can understand and define the nature and functions of the state. It would lead us too far from our present task if we attempted to describe the various conditions under which the nations, which are recognized as such, have developed, or their varieties of organization and of political relationship. We must take the modern Western nation as it exists with the power of self-government, self-direction, in all the vital affairs of its internal life. For this purpose Canada is a nation, though within the British Empire, as truly as the United States. If we look closely into the life of any modern nation we are struck with the immense variety and complexity of its active life. That life is charac- terized by spontaneity. It not only creates its vast forms of industry, its innumerable institutions and forms of education, its means of transportation, its ever-increasing agencies of philanthropy, its modes of producing and disseminating art in all its many forms of expression, its religious ideals and the or- ganized associations for the pursuit of those ideals ; the modern nation also creates its mode of govern- ment. The modern nation does not receive the varied contents of its life as gifts from its govern- ment. The state does not produce them, and the 76 The Christian Faith and Human Relations state cannot in any full and real sense control them. They arise from the spontaneous action, the creative faculty, of the national consciousness. Even the state itself is in modern days looked upon not as a fixed quantity, but as a definite form of organiza- tion which itself is created out of national life and which is therefore plastic in its form, in its rela- tion to that national life, and in its relation to all the other institutions which are equally essential to and the product of the same life. It is not as to its form created from above either by God or king. It is simply the agency by which the nation seeks to fulfil its fundamental purposes and through which it aims at bringing all the organized expressions of its life into harmonious relations with one another and its whole life into harmonious relations with the whole life of other nations. For this reason the state, or national government, is the one institution with which all the citizens must reckon, the fountain of all public law, the guarantor of justice and liberty, the creator of that order with- in which the people can pursue their legitimate callings and their personal ideals. Further, because the state, that is to say the na- tional government, is accepted as the highest of all the forms in which the national spirit takes definite shape, it follows that in great crises of national life, especially when it is brought into competition with other states and nations, it is treated as if it were in fact identical with the nation as a whole. It then becomes the symbol of patriotism and the supreme instrument for defending and realizing the life of each citizen and the whole nation to which he be- longs. This apparent identification of the modern The Christian Faith and the State 77 state with the nation is, however, only apparently complete in times of inward stress, in its relations with other peoples, and especially in times of active warfare. Internally the state, taken as the form of supreme self-government, is always treated as a variable organ, liable to repeated change in its per- sonnel, and even to fundamental changes in its con- stitution. Hence it is that the modern state, in spite of the vast power which is committed to it, finds itself increasingly considered as a very definite and limited organ of the national life. This is due in part to the obvious fact that the national life has become so complex and vast that no one group of men can have cognizance of all its acts and move- ments, can be prepared to consider in advance all its interests or to interpret accurately from day to day and year to year all its purposes. No one man has brains enough, even when assisted by a powerful cabinet of a dozen or twenty men, to take the initia- tive and maintain the complete active direction of all the interests and of all the organized activities of a whole people. Hence it is clear that the old-fashioned form of communistic theory according to which the state must own all the fundamental resources and control all the developments of national life, is a mere sur- vival of a dead conception of the state. It is the attempt to carry over the theory of the state which arose in Europe after the Middle Ages into an en- tirely different age, where it is completely inappli- cable. Apart altogether from the truth of its ideals, a fully developed communistic theory is simply ab- surd when it tries to establish a commonwealth of the ancient type. The state as an organized form 78 The Christian Faith and Human Relations of government does not and cannot be the equivalent of, cannot reflect completely and direct with the omniscience and omnipotence it would require, the whole spiritual and material life, the entire action of a vast people. Any attempt of a modern state to do this would result simply in stifling that creative spontaneity which we have seen to be the charac- teristic of the modern national consciousness. No civil service and no group of politicians, even when they are freely elected by the people, can be con- ceived of who can invent and create for the whole people. As a matter of experience it is found that even with the best intentions and even in times of war, when all men are working patriotically and at the top of their power, men placed in authority cannot keep up with the explosive energy of the people. That energy, working in the life of every citizen, creates all the varied organizations from a small club of people met for esthetic pursuits to a vast industrial organization. These various institutions have their right of existence as truly as the state. They are the products of democracy as really as the government with its constitution. They are as nec- essary to the life of the modern nation as the state itself. We must therefore more boldly than ever and in presence of all the facts insist that the state in its meaning and activities can never be coterminous with the nation in its meaning and activities. If the state is the supreme form which the national consciousness assumes both for regulating its in- ternal life and its external relations, it must be recognized that the national life has many other The Christian Faith and the State 79 ways in which it does the same work in both direc- tions. The state exists not to create these great provinces of action but only to devise and enforce those general conditions of law in which the energy of the nation shall operate. One writer has put it,^ " The modern state generally does not supply re- ligion or food or clothing, even though it makes the supply of such needs possible by law and order." And again the same writer says,^ " The modern life is an orderly democracy of varied interests, and the relation of the institutions which supply those interests is therefore democratic." When a national demand is clear and a definite need is proved, as in the case for example of education, the state can do much to guide the aim of the people and to stimu- late the ardor with which it is pursued. But even in such a matter experience proves that paralysis will come if the state so completely controls educa- tion or art or industry as to stifle originality. That is to be found not in the selected group even of wisest statesmen, but in the vast commerce of the people with one another and in the free concentration of the attention of many individuals upon this or that liv- ing interest. Amongst the supreme interests of the national life we must name religion. For human nature is fundamentally spiritual. Man does not exist to employ his intellectual, moral, and spiritual powers merely for the sake of his material experiences. He exists that he may use and control his natural life for the purpose of his spiritual. Religion is coeval and coextensive with the human race, and the re- »C. D. Burns, "The Morality of Nations," p. 34. •Ibid., p. 37. 80 The Christian Faith and Human Relations ligious life of a nation is at least as dear to it as the authority and dignity of its national government. The national life throws up as it were one kind of organization for industry, another kind of organiza- tion for the culture of the mind, and another kind of organization for the regulation of its life as a whole, which we call the state. It also throws up another kind of organization through which alone it can express and realize its moral ideals and its consciousness of spiritual relations, and a spiritual destiny. And that organization is known in Chris- tendom as the Church. In the modern world with which we are imme- diately concerned the national consciousness on its spiritual side receives its form from and expresses itself in the principles and ideals of the Christian religion. Our special task, with the background which we have sketched of the state in its relation to the life of the nation, is to discover how the Chris- tian faith which is thus related to the essential life of the people stands related to the state, and how the state must be expected in the future to relate itself to this faith and to the organizations which it has created in the midst of the national life. II. THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND ITS RELA- TION TO THE NATIONAL LIFE We have seen that the state exists in a modern world as the definite creation of the national life. It exists for the common political good of the whole people in their internal life and in their relations with other peoples. We have also seen that there are other forms of " good " which the nation pursues The Christian Faith and the State 81 through other organizations. These the state does not create. They spring from the fundamental needs of human nature in its relations to " good " and to the world in which we live. They include all that we mean by religious, esthetic, scientific, industrial, economic, and educational institutions. The state we have seen to be of supreme importance because it is created to establish the general conditions of justice and order, on the basis of freedom, within which the other institutions can operate securely and obtain those forms of good for which the na- tional life has produced them. It is from this point of view that we must ap- proach the fact that in the midst of modern nations we find the Christian church as the organization through which the Christian Faith operates. The Christian Faith appeared in a world where Church and State were so to speak one. Alike the theocracy of the Jews and the Empire of Rome were unable to separate in idea or in practise the organization of the national life for government and for religion. Jesus separated them. He did this partly by his new and even catastrophic em- phasis upon the relation of the individual soul to God which he revealed as being direct, immediate, and momentous. Partly he did it by the manner in which he formed his new community, establishing the conditions and aims of its existence. He created it out of those individuals who in response to his call on their souls came into direct dealings with God. On the basis of their relationship to himself as the revealer of God he formed them into a definite community. I speak here thus definitely and concretely because 82 The Christian Faith and Human Relations much of modern discussion of this subject is charac- terized by vagueness and an air of unreaHty which results in darkness rather than light. For example, let me take the following paragraph : * From the point of view thus reached there can be no essen- tial opposition between the spirit of citizenship and the spirit of religion. The one means the soul's response to the most concentrated and coherent embodiment of the Will to Good which the human spirit has yet been able to realize. The other is itself a response to those features of the world at large — its beauty, goodness, and truth — in which the capa- bilities developed in and through this embodiment find the highest field of their exercise and the guarantee of their essential value. No thinking on the relations of Church and State can be clear and real which thus dissolves the Church into a mist of ideals and speaks of it in the vague as " a response '* of the soul, a pursuit of " the true, the beautiful, and the good," while it describes the State as a concrete embodiment with really exag- gerated functions. One must deprecate the air of unreality which haunts discussions like this. The state can never be what these authors say it is. Its functions can never be as all-inclusive and as morally penetrating as they seem to suggest. On the other hand, religion can never penetrate the whole life of motive and character if it can only be described in misty verbiage like that. With Jesus there is no such vagueness. Con- fronted with political organizations on every hand, several of which united to crucify him, he creates not an abstract system of ideals, not even an unem- bodied spirit. He creates the new community. His * Hetherington and Muirhead, " Social Purpose," p. 310. The Christian Faith and the State 83 community does indeed possess ideals and is imbued with the spirit of religion. But it is a concrete com- munity established on definite principles. It cannot be political because the very nature of its relations with God makes it in essence international and interracial. It came to be spoken of, as Harnack has pointed out,° as the ** new nation " destined to penetrate all nations and to fill all states with a new form of the human spirit. Our Lord met the pres- sure of a political situation with the famous utter- ance about rendering " to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." He there definitely acknowledges the authority of the state as truly as the authority of God. He does not enter upon any discussion of the way in which in the times to come the one authority will deal with the other, but he insists that his community shall be one that acknowledges both. It would be shallow thinking to suggest that Jesus there described the authority of Csesar as having no relation to God. His great apostle Paul, in a pas- sage which reveals his knowledge of this saying of Jesus, or something like it, asserts in round terms that ** the powers that be are ordained of God " (Rom. 13 : Iff.). This great Christian thinker has discovered, as none of the philosophers of Greece or Rome had been able to discover, the ultimate basis of the state. It is of divine origin, established to preserve order, to administer justice. Hence it is Christian piety to honor the king and to obey him when he acts for God. But with this insight a new power has entered into the history of nations and states. For, if rulers act under the authority of God, 5" The Expansion of Christianity." 84 The Christian Faith and Human Relations then they are pledged to act according to the char- acter of God. The apostles themselves had suffered much at the hands of the state when they wrote such words. " The powers that be " had done them gross injustice time after time. But the marvelously clear mind of the great thinker was able to discriminate between the ideal of an institution and the misinter- pretation of that ideal, the misuse of the power in- herent in that institution when those in whose hands its work was placed did wrong. Throughout the history of the early church we fmd this double movement of feeling and thought. The Christian folk cherished a profound reverence for and even confidence in the authority of the very emperors whose injustice they proclaimed. They continued to protest against the acts of wrong that were done, but they never suggested that the cure /of evil thus done could be gained by the overturn iOr annihilation of the state. They appealed from I the injustice of an emperor to his true function as the representative of the law of God. The new fact in the world was this, that the Chris- tian Faith had created a community of persons who knew God, while the ancient state with which they had to do consisted of men who knew not God. In ignorance and darkness, with only glimmering lights upon the great laws of righteousness and mercy, these ancient rulers acted, unconscious of the high- est dignity of their office, even when their ambi- tions soared highest, unaware of the august throne in the light of which their thrones were erected. The new organization arose as a community whose mem- bers owned Jesus Christ as King and Emperor of their souls. This allegiance was supreme, and all The Christian Faith and the State 85 other loyalties received from it at once their meaning and their consecration. After Constantine the Christian Faith entered into a new relation with the State, and from that day to this Church and State have made many ex- periments which have created a large part of the intricate history of European peoples. At the one extreme we have had Erastianism, with its doctrine that the Church is merely a function of the State; at the other extreme the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire, according to which the State should be under the complete direction of the organized Church. Into that history we cannot go. We must ask ourselves only what is the position today of the per- ennial problem of the relation of these two supreme institutions to one another. In attempting to do this we must once more restate the function of each. The state exists as the embodiment of the conscious unified life of the nation. It is an or- ganization created primarily in relation to the tem- poral interests, individual and social, of its citizens, with authority over the organizations which they create. Its function is to establish those conditions under which the peaceful and harmonious pursuit of all these varied ends may be carried on. For this purpose it uses legislation and force. It cannot exist, it cannot accomplish its ends, in a world like ours where the explosion of individual selfishness is so constant and so mighty, without the power to exact a penalty for deliberate breaches of the law. On the other hand the church, as the organized embodiment of the Christian Faith, has become in Christendom the chief expression of that fundamen- 86 The Christian Faith and Human Relations tal human consciousness that we live in a spiritual universe with definite spiritual relations. It also is organized on definite principles which are the laws of its being, without which it cannot maintain its life and do its work for human nature. It cannot be described in mere abstract terms in an effort to find a community of purpose and meaning between the Christian Faith and other religions. That effort, justified in other discussions and for other ends, has no place when we are discussing the relation of Church and State in a Christian land. It is not a group of casual enthusiasts who have met to discuss far-off ideals of a purely personal or esthetic kind, and to wonder where and how they can begin to realize them. The Christian Church is as truly an embodiment of a definite form of life as the State. It has inherent principles which are actual, real, living forces. It is not merely flying skywards after the true and the beautiful and the good : it is walk- ing upon the earth with solid tread in the conscious possession of an actual power of life. Emersonian transcendentalism can never describe it, nor general philosophical summaries of the meaning of all re- ligions. The Christian Faith means the organization I of a definite community on definite principles which 1 are the laws of its existence. Ideals for other in- stitutions, they are the fundamental realities of this institution. Primary powers in it, they must become the controlling ethical qualities of all organizations whose sources lie in other regions of man's compos- ite nature. Industry has its own origin and princi- ples, esthetics springs from needs that are other than religious ; but neither industry nor esthetics can be pursued by individuals or by organized communities The Christian Faith and the State 87 without coming under moral conditions which re- ceive their supreme illumination from that com- munity which penetrates them all with its own prin- ciples of character and of conduct. The church which thus springs as truly from the national life, from a fundamental need of human nature, as any other institution, has yet come down from God. It has a distinctness of historic origin which distinguishes it from all others. Moreover, it lives as the embodiment in human experience of the mercy of God, and it lives on that mercy. It is founded in an act of divine sacrifice and can only live its life and do its work for men in the spirit of that sacrifice. It is consciously responsible to One whose authority is supreme and whose presence in its life is constant, who needs no vicar and has no successor since he is the same, ever-living, ever- active, yesterday, today, and forever. It cannot and _(. dare not use force, as the State must, any more than the State can condone crime in the name of mercy "^ and remain a living State. The Church can only love, and endure, and forgive. If the State is ever to embody the principle of love it can only be when the entire mass of the nation has become penetrated by that spirit which is the very life and sole essen- tial being of the Church. III. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE CHRIS- TIAN FAITH OR COMMUNITY AND THE MODERN STATE It is plain from what has been said that in each national life two supreme institutions confront each other, namely, the State and the Church. Each 88 The Christian Faith and Human Relations exists for the good of the nation. We have taken the view that each is the expression of the national Hfe in certain of its deep necessities, and that each has a profound influence after its own kind upon all the other interests and institutions of that life. Neither of these institutions can subordinate itself to the other. As Forsyth has put it : "^ " The democ- racy will recognize no authority but what it creates. The Church none but what creates it.'' The same writer again says : ^ " The sovereignty of the people was from autonomy in their civil and secular affairs, and not in all ; it was arrested at the threshold of the Church. . . So that we have the sovereignty of the people in worldly affairs and Christ in spiritual." The State is subordinate to the law of its own nature, which is that it exists as the expression of the realized unity of the nation. Citizens obey it as long as it fulfils its function. The nation is the ulti- mate authority over both the form and action of the State. The Church, on the other hand, is subor- dinate to the law of its own existence, which lies in its consciousness of the indwelling of the divine life and of the authority of the spirit and will of Jesus Christ, its Founder and its continuous Lord. While the Church cannot employ the force wielded by the State to promote the spiritual aims of the Church without destroying its own work, denying its own spirit, and abandoning its original methods, which are purely spiritual and moral, personalistic and persuasive, neither can the State employ the meth- ods of the Church for the promotion of its ends. The State must do much more than persuade, it « p. T. Forsyth, " Faith, Freedom, and the Future," p. 192. ■' Ibid., p. 110. The Christian Faith and the State 89 must enforce obedience to its laws; the Church can only persuade. If one could conceive of a condition where the entire nation was vitally and sincerely of the Chris- tian Faith, some of the points of contrast and oppo- sition which we have described would no doubt be modified. It was in fact the assumption that such a condition had been obtained which led the medieval Church to seek a coalescence of Church and State. But the situation never has been and is not today of that kind. The divine life is not consciously present in all members of a modern nation. However de- plorable the fact may be, we must face it, that there are multitudes in every modern democracy who lie outside the conscious possession of this spiritual life, and too many who have simply no interest in it. Of these some are even intensely hostile. Hence it is that problems arise of a most important and acute kind in the working out of the relations between these two supreme institutions of the national life. Let us see what these are. First, There is a wide field where the Church and State can be of mutual service to one another with- out interfering with each other's nature or spirit. The Church can by its teaching and the example of its members encourage and sustain all the efforts of the State to legislate wisely and to enforce its disci- pline justly. If it is true, as the authors of " Social Purpose " affirm,^ that " Laws and institutions de- rive whatever authority they have, not from the force that lies behind them, but from purposes that lie deep in the soul of the nation and form the largest and most potent part of its will," then the task of •* Hetherlngton and Muiihead, " Social Purpose," p. 20. G 90 The Christian Faith and Human Relations the Church is plain; for it is just to inspire true purposes in human hearts that the Church exists. The Christian Faith seeks to cleanse the fountain- heads of impulse and motive, to purify the aims of all human beings. Its work, therefore, is a pre- supposition of the work and functions of the State in a modern democracy. It is Christianity indeed which created governmental democracy. All society has been called an " embodiment of will and pur- pose,'* and that is the region into which the State cannot penetrate, but which is the home field of the operations of the Church. It is true that the State cannot interfere in the region of conscience, it can- not impose religion upon its people against their will. It cannot therefore under modern conditions attempt to establish or to enforce the authority of a State Church. But on the other hand, it must not facilitate opposition to the Church. Sometimes in the name of freedom of conscience people have imagined that the secular authorities have the right to create or allow conditions of life or the erection of institutions whose ultimate effect is to stimulate prejudice against the religious life. Many delicate questions arise at this point which would take us into minute discussions inappropriate to the present hour. But the position must be very firmly and clearly maintained that if secular authorities are not allowed to enforce religion upon the conscience of the people, they are also forbidden to establish or encourage conditions which affront the conscience of the religious people and hinder that type of work which the Christian community alone can accom- plish for the good of the nation. On the other hand, it is no contravention of the The Christian Faith and the State 91 principle of freedom, no interference with con- science, that the State should in various ways recog- nize religion as the supreme interest of man, and within the realms of Christendom, recognize Chris- tianity as the only effective embodiment of the re- ligious spirit. But this relationship can only be healthily main- tained if it is clearly understood that no section of the Christian church shall " play politics," as we put it. By this it is not meant that Christian men in the spirit of the church of Christ, nor even offi- cials of the church who have the direction of its affairs, shall not seek to influence public opinion on all important matters of morality and freedom. It means simply that no organized church shall employ political means for furthering its own organized interests as over against the interests of other organized sections of Christianity. It means fur- ther that even if the Church were completely united within itself, it must not seek to displace the au- thority of the State by the exercise of the direct authority of its own officials as if they were func- tionaries of the State. Its influence can only be pure and truly Christian when it is confined to the sole and yet greatest task of all, namely, that of molding opinion in the community at large on all subjects in which there can be no difference of opinion amongst men as to the fundamental principles of right and wrong. No doubt difficulties in interpreting this principle must arise. Happy must the Church be which rather falls short by avoiding even the ap- pearance of evil than the Church which in name of its desire to see the right thing done takes hold of the machinery of the State to apply its own interpreta- 92 The Christian Faith and Human Relations tion of immediate duty. The principle of democracy is being thwarted in so far as any Church organiza- tion seeks to usurp the power of the State or any part of its organization. Secondly, In addition to the fields of mutual ser- vice there are certain fields of active cooperation where the Christian community and the state can openly and confessedly work together for good. In the vast fields of philanthropy, the state may and does appeal to the Christian community as such for aid in the establishment and sustenance of institu- tions which the state cannot properly create and which it cannot most effectively conduct. There are many institutions where the security of success lies as much in the elements of sympathy and insight, in the exercise of spiritual qualities, as in any other features of the work. No state can supply these. The tendency of all state organizations is to produce officialism, with its hardness of temper towards the failings of the individual. Tender sympathies are not born within its regulations, are not provided for by legislation, can hardly be looked for in the admin- istration of its institutions. So far as anything of sympathy and pity has entered into the operations of the state, these have sprung from the hearts of Christian folk, from the agitations which they have carried on, and from their ceaseless vigilance over the operations of state officials. In another field the State can depend upon the Church, and that is in the enforcement of the laws of justice between class and class. Where justice is won merely by the rebellion of the oppressed, we must fear that it can only be a partial justice and temporary in its life and value. It is only when the The Christian Faith and the State 93 love of justice is spread throughout the hearts of all classes, when continuous rebuke is maintained of all that is tyrannous and oppressive, when the moral standards are maintained before the eyes of the people, and that in terms of the highest sanctions known to man, that justice can be conceived of as spreading throughout the whole range of organized society. This again is not work that the state can do. Nor can it be left to the unguided and unor- ganized forces of the purveyors of publicity, whether on the platform or in the press. Only one form of life can do this thing for the people, continuously, lawfully, and that is the community of Christ. But in this field the church must rouse itself to speak now. There are powers abroad in every direc- tion which are fighting for the rights of certain sec- tions of the industrial world in a selfish and brutal spirit. The church must lift up its voice calmly but steadily in the name of justice. It must rebuke every effort of every class of men to use force for the aggrandizement of their own material interests. The suppressed civil war which characterizes a great deal of the political fighting between capital and labor must give place to the war of fair and open discussion, the foundations of righteousness must be explored among the industrial and social relations of all classes of people. Ministers as such cannot possibly be right judges at many important points of what the best step is which must be taken at any one time to correct an injustice or to rebuke a tyranny. But it is their function wisely, persis- tently, fearlessly to exalt the ideal of fairness, to press the everlasting and august principle of equal justice towards all men. This principle underlies 94 The Christian Faith and Human Relations practically all the great problems which we are con- tinually discussing, passes out of direct industrial situations into other relations of life, into the treat- ment of the dependent and the defective, into the treatment of women and children, into the problem of the sustenance of the incapacitated and of aged per- sons ; in every direction the luminous Christian prin- ciple of justice with fairness is sent, and its light made to shine by the Christian church upon every dark corner of national life, upon every controversy and struggle. There is a third field of action where the two in- stitutions come into the closest relations of all, and in some respects the most vital ; that is education. With the use of the word education we come upon that point at which the functions of the State and of the Church respectively are of vital importance to each other and yet seem at present to be incon- sistent with one another. That the matter may be clear, let us very briefly state the facts underlying the particular issue : 1. Education is becoming universal and compul- sory in every country in the world. This is a mod- ern and momentous feature of the evolution of the human race, one whose magnitude and all of whose qualities we have hardly begun to measure or to understand. We are only as yet experimenting with a force whose range and intensity are incalculable. It is not to be wondered at that in every direction the question of education is alive with problems. The gravity of the situation opens upon our minds only as we begin to grasp the range of influence which this universal and compulsory education must exert upon the nature of mankind. The Christian Faith and the State 95 2. In the meantime, one of the most notable fea- tures of the situation is that ecclesiastical control of education has ahivost completely vanished from the earth. Few are the countries where this control is tolerated. The history of this matter is long and intricate. One who knows it even partially cannot wonder that the fear of ecclesiastical control of the course of human thought and of the development of science is profound and justified by past events. It is perfectly clear that ecclesiastics as such are no more competent to guide the development of science and philosophy, and therefore no more competent to control the schools in which these are developed and taught, than state officials as such are competent to preach the gospel. 3. It is a corollary of the former position that the Church is determined that the State shall not control religious education. Here again we come upon the incompetence of a certain class of officials to conceive of and to do justice to or to direct oper- ations in another sphere than that which is pri- marily their own. The church must ever be ex- tremely jealous of any attempt on the part of secular institutions, whose leaders own and feel no religious responsibility, to take control of any part of the work of religious education. Whether they seek to guide the instruction of little children or to train grown men for the ministry, their interfer- ence with these fields of operation is as dangerous as the interference of ecclesiastics in the work of scien- tific research. 4. The source of all our chief perplexities is dis- covered in the fact that the state control of education inevitably produces very powerful effects in the 96 The Christian Faith and Human Relations religious life of the people. The state can break down religion, not because its teachers attack it, or attempt to teach it, but because they ignore it. When the state aims at logical thoroughness in avoiding all teaching of or about religion, it begins to eliminate in its instruction of the young whole sections of history, whole vistas of reality. It is bound to avoid when giving instruction in practical morality all reference to religious motives, sanctions, or aims. When it is inculcating social and patriotic ideals it is again logically compelled to avoid all reference to the Church as an institution or to the relation of its ideals to those of the nation as a whole. When the State seeks to carry this negative attitude out thoroughly, and the attempt has been made in several parts of this country, it is training up a generation of secularists. The entire weight of its supreme authority is molding the child mind and the convictions of youth to believe that the church and its message are unessential to the com- plete or healthy and normal life of an American citizen. No agitation of secularistic authors, no learned scepticism wide-spread among academic circles, no blatant materialism out in the active fields of life, can so completely undermine the spiritual life of the country as the completely secularized training of the children under the authority of the state. If and when the weight of the state in, say, a university is thrown against the Christian Faith or against institutions of that faith, the state has be- come the enemy of the faith, and disaster lies ahead. No solution can be proposed in this lecture, for the simple reason that many solutions are being tried and none yet has gained the hearty approval The Christian Faith and the State 97 and confidence of any large number of earnest people. That any hostility between State and Church in the field of education must be overcome is perfectly evident. Modes of cooperation must be found which shall reserve to the State its rights, to the Christian Church its integrity, and also its opportunity of contributing the highest form of moral life to the community which has established the State. Each of these institutions is a servant of the nation, and each is necessary to the full well- being of the other. The nation must see that its servants do not quarrel, that its household is at peace, and above all that those whose functions are most vital to the life and health of the nation shall discover the secret of complete and harmonious co- operation. For the sake of its own life and its most sacred and vital work, the Church must both honor the State and serve it in its own way and on its own principles. The State, for the sake of its own great functions, and in the name of the national life which it seeks to conserve, must recognize that that life is not being conserved but destroyed if the policy of the State, as to a wholly secularized mode of educa- tion, does actually undermine the influence and au- thority of the Church. IV. THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE NEW INTERNATIONALISM No greater result has come from the great war than the world-consciousness, as we may call it, which has been awakened among the vast masses of mankind. Even the private citizens of all peoples that have any civilization at all are aware in a new 98 The Christian Faith and Human Relations way of the life of other peoples and their mutual relations. Hence a deep modification of the national consciousness is rapidly developing before our eyes. For one thing, people are awake to the fact that apart altogether from formal state relations, the nations have become very closely intertwined in the main interests of their life. Many institutions of an international kind which existed before the war have received access of energy and in some cases fresh illumination of their meaning and their oppor- tunity. Even in the midst of discussions about the League of Nations and the Treaty of Peace people are aware that the life of each of the leading coun- tries is intimately bound up with the life of the others. In the fields of industry and commerce, of intellectual and artistic pursuits, this inner connec- tion of nation with nation is being broadened and deepened. The effort, therefore, to establish a League of Nations through governmental action is simply the effort to establish the means by which an international life can be regulated and made more effective which is already widely realized. That the League of Nations so gloriously established has yet stormy days before it may go without saying. But it cannot be destroyed, and the gradual improvement of its constitution and the progressive effectiveness of its operation must be assumed. Increasingly this marvelous association of the governments of the world will illuminate and confirm all the other modes of interaction between nation and nation. The operation of the League of Nations will bring them into clearer light, and will help to keep them before the eyes of all citizens publicly, constantly and extensively. The Christian Faith and the State 99 The unity of the race is not a matter of mere animal inheritance. It is much more than the dis- covery that the nations are commercially interde- pendent because they possess interchangeable com- modities. The unity of the race is an achievement of the spirit, it is a revelation in history of the iden- tical moral and spiritual nature of all mankind. It implies the consciousness of a common destiny toward which all the races move for the fulfilment of the purposes of God. Now the League of Nations is the greatest step yet taken by the world as a whole towards the attain- ment of that unity. Its birth it is our happiness to see. It is the supreme glory of our day to have brought it forth. Behind this most wonderful hour of history there lie eighteen centuries of the history of the Christian Faith. We have already seen that from its begin- ning the community created by that faith recognized itself and was recognized as international and inter- racial. Throughout those centuries it has been working, often in darkness and confusion, toward the great end which begins to take shape before our eyes. It has always carried in its heart a message to the whole world, it has always maintained that the same principles must govern the conduct of all peoples both in private and in public relations. It has always been the foe of divided standards of morality. It has always, even though at times feebly and confusedly, maintained the ideal of the brotherhood of man. Wherever it has gone it has delivered alike to ancient civilizations and to the most backward peoples its divine and august mes- sages of righteousness and peace; and here in the 100 The Christian Faith and Human Relations history and in the formal proceedings which have produced the Covenant of the League of Nations two great principles leap to the light as above all others vital and important for the world today. The first of these is that righteousness or justice must characterize the dealings of governments with one another as the dealings of individuals with one another. No longer will the world tolerate that governments should be held guiltless if they lie and murder and steal, even in the name of their country's honor or for the advancement of its com- merce or territory. The second of these is that the strong governments and the great nations shall be responsible for the safety and the progress of the least and most backward peoples on the face of the earth. It is with the determination to see that these two great principles shall be recognized and unani- mously adopted by the whole world that the League of Nations has been created. The former principle is embodied in the combination of the powers to prevent war, and the second is developed in the doc- trine of mandates, according to which any regions of the world henceforth placed under the control of a civilized government shall be recognized as so placed in order that the rights of the weak may be held sacred and their progress in civilization may be advanced. And both these acts of transcendent importance in the history of the state are manifest products of the Christian Faith. Students of the spread of Christianity in modern times have long been aware of the powerful manner in which the process of evangelizing the world has acted upon the life and character of the mission fields. They are aware also that for many years the The Christian Faith and the State 101 great missionary boards have been confronted with many problems arising through relations to the gov- ernments of the world. These matters have not been spread broadcast in the newspapers, they have not been discussed on platforms and very little even in the pulpit ; but they are part of the records of all missionary boards in all parts of the world. If their story were related it would illustrate in a striking way the relation of the Christian Faith to the re- sponsibilities and tasks of the state. As part of the aftermath of the great war, the chief missionary boards of the world are now confronted with a situation which is not only unparalleled but full of new situations which they have to face, and most anxious practical problems which they have to solve. Around the world they are now in contact with all governments. They are engaged in negotiations of the most important kind which will affect the policy of those governments and the future history of the Christian Faith in the lands which they control. A recent conference of representatives from the whole Protestant world met in Geneva, and I take as illustrating the subject of the present lecture the following paragraph from an account of that con- ference : ® In facing the new situation missions have need to take counsel together how in the changing conditions they may secure the freedom of opportunity which is a vital interest of their work, and how they may successfully urge upon governments their reasonable claims. In doing this it is necessary for them to try to understand the standpoints of governments. They cannot, if they are to succeed, shut their eyes to the existence in the world of political and economic 9 International Review of Missions," Oct., 1920, p. 486. 102 The Christian Faith and Human Relations rivalries, and the suspicions and fears which these engender. Nor can they be indjfferent to the disintegrating effect of Christian teaching, as of Western civilization generally, on existing social fabrics, and the natural concern of govern- ments in regard to these effects. They must aim also at a sympathetic understanding of the constructive tasks of gov- ernment with a view to cooperating in these tasks as far as may be consistent with their own proper and distinctive aims. There we have set before us with the vividness of living action the depth and power of the Christian Faith, the penetrating influence of its divine prin- ciples upon the plastic nature and life of human institutions, even upon the greatest of them all, the state. Unless humanity goes mad, unless the great states deliberately cultivate moral blindness and pursue a policy which creates war and successive great wars, that will obliterate civilization, through the instruments of civilization, if on the contrary righteous relations can be maintained among the governments of the world, a universal peace may be secured and the hideous and inhuman specter of war may be banished forever from our world. But so far as we can see no condition like that can be secured, no harmony of the world maintained, except by the power of the Christian Faith. In that faith the mind of God speaks to man as nowhere else, to the depths of his soul, summoning and guiding him to the heights of his destiny. Through that faith the Creative Word by which our nature was fashioned has become the redeeming Word carrying our nature to its consummation. When the state fulfils the highest ideals of its citizens it will breathe the spirit of that faith. When that faith is utterly obeyed by the children The Christian Faith and the State 103 of God the citizens will rejoice in its light, submit to its divine authority. And then the state will be worthy of the apostolic description : '' Every sub-S ject must obey the government authorities, for no v; authority exists apart from God; the existing au- thorities have been constituted by God. The magis- trate is God's servant for your benefit. Magistrates are God's officers bent upon the maintenance of order and authority. Pay them all their respective dues " ; and over all discussion of the subject rises the august and far-shining word of our Lord, " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." IV THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND INDUSTRY By Hon. Roger W. Babson President of Babson's Statistical Organization H THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND INDUSTRY MR. PRESIDENT, members of the graduating class, and friends : Let me say what a splendid thing I think this Foundation is and what foresight Mrs. Greene and her sons showed. Mr. Greene, as most of you know, was the ruling spirit of one of the largest mill construction concerns in America, and I almost feel that this would be the one subject of the course in which he would be most interested. On the other hand, like the father of a large family of children, it would probably be the one lecture of the course which he would refuse to give himself, because industrial relations, like the bringing up of children, is a subject that most of us who have had experience in hesitate greatly to speak upon. I would not feel justified in speaking to many audi- ences today on this subject; but I feel that you are entitled to what little experience I have had along these lines. Certainly, as you go forth into the world, this will be the great problem that you will be compelled to face. I speak from experience, first, with a group of three hundred which I have at Wellesley ; second, as vice-president of a power company which supplies all the electricity to Albany, Schenectady, Troy, and Eastern New York, where we employ some two thou- sand mechanics and high-grade wage-workers; and third, in connection with experience which I have had as Chairman of the Board of Directors of 108 The Christian Faith and Human Relations the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway Com- pany, employing about two thousand motormen and conductors, and various laborers. Experience, they say, is a dear teacher, but sta- tistics would show that it supplies about ninety-five per cent, of the teaching. That especially applies to labor problems. Why is there such feeling be- tween the employer and the wage-worker? I think that can be answered very concretely as follows: The wage-worker feels that the employer is opposed to collective bargaining and the union, simply on material grounds. The wage-worker is trained to believe that unions increase wages and that in- creased wages reduce profits, and that consequently the employer is opposed to labor-unions. The em- ployer, on the other hand, is just as conscientious in believing that labor-unions derive their strength from the force which they have in collective bargain- ing, and that their employment of the strike, use of the union and collective bargaining, are simply the use of force. Both sides uphold their position for and against the union on moral, if not religious, grounds. Just as in the old days the defenders and opponents of slavery defended their position on ethical grounds, so both the employer and the wage- worker, both the defender and the opponent of the union, defend their position. What does labor want? First, labor wants a living wage, and most wage-workers want a money wage. It seems to me that there is one thing which you men, as you go out, want to understand clearly, and that is the difference between a money wage and a real wage. The real wage is the purchasing power of the week's earnings turned into groceries, Mi; - ■;-'''■ ■-^. 'T .|r"" T fc-''^ ■' * ' ' -■■ < ■, ' " , ' V, *■■■'' 'i ,,- . i HP^'-~i 1 WUr:-!. 9^M 1^^^ M 1 ^^^t^^t0 Kl^%ivi "•»ll«^-«t:K'^"' '• ~* . '^^H^^H^^ ^ V. :%' The Christian Faith and Industry 109 clothing, furniture, rent. The money wage is the amount that is in the pay-envelope. To speak very concretely, today the money wage is practically double what it was ten years ago; today the real wage is only fifteen per cent, greater than it was ten years ago. All wage-workers want more money, just as intelligent preachers want more money, and they are both justified in their position. But very few wage-workers realize the difference between real wages in terms of commodities and money wages in terms of dollars. Some say that labor wants control of industry; some of you graduates and students I have heard say that. In my experi- ence, both in connection with these personal cor- porations and during the war, when I was in Wash- ington as a helper to the Secretary of Labor, I have seen very little evidence that labor desires control of industry. Labor wants to be consulted in de- termining conditions of work, questions of ventila- tion, location of toilets, hours for lunch — yes, hours of work. Labor does not want control, and I very seriously question if labor wants representation on the board of trustees. Labor dreads responsibility, just as you and I dread the responsibility of taking out the appendix of our daughter. Labor does not want a soft snap. If you have any doubt of that, note the lethargy and indifference of the man who stands at the bench until the whistle blows twelve, when he jumps out, eats a hurried lunch, and goes out in the hot sun and plays ball until one minute of one. Labor does not object to work; none of us object to work, provided it is work in which we are interested. No, labor is not looking for a soft snap. Labor is not looking for profit-sharing, 110 The Christian Faith and Human Relations bonuses, baseball teams, bathtubs, pianos, or mov- ing-picture theaters in connection with their plants. I remember hearing, at a convention of the Amer- ican Federation of Labor, a prominent representa- tive of a great company tell of the pianos he had — one located on each floor. After he got through talking, a chap from Brockton got up (one of the labor leaders) and said, " I want to say that out in Brockton we don't have ' pi-anners ' on each floor of the factory, but we do have * pi-anners ' in each home.'' Now that is the philosophy of the wage- worker. Welfare work, profit-sharing, bonuses, and those things are useful as long as they increase the efficiency of the. worker. They are useful as long as they make money for the employer, and thus indirectly for the wage-worker; but to the extent that they are used for scenery, and to the extent that they are used in the average plant, simply as an attraction to get in labor when labor is scarce, they are harmful. But all these costs are passed on to the consumer. It makes little difference to the employer whether he has profit-sharing, or bonuses, or bathrooms, or " pi-anners," the con- sumer pays the bill. In Wellesley this last Christmas I distributed one hundred and twenty thousand dol- lars among my employees. Did this come out of my pocket? No, it came out of the pockets of my clients. The same thing is true all down through the line. Increased wages? Why does every em- ployer object to increased wages? Simply because he feels that it handicaps him in the competitive game of business. That's all. The increase does not come out of his pocket; it is simply added to the price of the goods and passed on to the consumer. The Christian Faith and Industry 111 One of the saddest things about the labor move- ment (and I beheve in labor unions and in collective bargaining) is that the wage-worker thinks his real wages are increased by the union. They are not. A strike simply brings about a forced loan. It forces the employer to advance wages before the law of supply and demand would advance them. But just as soon as the trade becomes adjusted to the advance in wages, it is passed on to the consumer. In the case of builders, that is, those who employ carpen- ters, plumbers, and masons, they are much more for- tunate than some others of us poor manufacturers, because the higher the wage the higher their com- mission. We also must remember that labor is in the adoles- cent period. The labor movement is a new move- ment, in a sense. Of course there always has been, since the days of Cain and Abel, a struggle between the man who has and the man who has not, and there always will be. During the war I was asked to speak in Washington on the labor question, and I ran into the office of the Secretary of Labor and said : " I am going to speak this afternoon to a con- vention here, on the labor problem. Have you any suggestions?" He scratched his head. He is a very careful man — always thinks through an entire sen- tence, including the period, before he utters the first word. He replied, " Why, Mr. Babson, I have only one suggestion, namely, tell them that one hundred years from today some one will be speaking on the same spot and on the same subject." Labor is in the adolescent period ; the same period industrially as you were in when you were fourteen years of age. Now you couldn't be told very much — 112 The Christian Faith and Human Relations not very much, and yet you were as serious if not more serious than you are today. It is the same with the labor movement. They are just feeling the pangs of growth. They are feehng the joys of self-expression. They are " feeling their oats," to speak technically. Now that is all in the line of nature, in the line of development, and you might as well try to tie a string around a budding apple tree as to crush labor in this movement. You might as well try to destroy a ball of mercury by hitting it with a hammer, as to try to crush labor in this move- ment. As an employer of labor I should not want to live in a country where labor was not struggling for better conditions and was not filled with this divine sense and desire for freedom, growth, and better living. Labor craves sympathy. Labor feels that it must suffer much more than the employer suffers in the struggle. Now that is a very important point — a very important point. I am pretty sure that in most instances the economics, and possibly justice, are on the side of the employer ; but here is the difficulty : the employer has a certain advantage which gives him a great responsibility. Let me illustrate : You all represent a union and I am an employer, and we get into a difficulty and you quit work. I close down the mill, and you refuse to work for me until the thing is settled. There is one thing that is con- stantly staring you in the eyes all the time, namely, that if I never open my mill again I can still run my limousine, my daughter still attend school and college, and my wife have all the luxuries of the land, by just cutting off coupons. But you, who have only a few hundred dollars in the bank, are not The Christian Faith and Industry 113 in that position, so you have this subconscious feel- ing all the time, that the cards are marked and stacked against you, and if the question becomes one of plain, sheer endurance you must eventually give in. Now that may be the law of the land, but it is not in accordance with the laws of God. Labor hungers for self-expression. Some of us, once upon a time, were in love. We found a girl who very much appealed to us. Our mothers didn't see great ability in her, our sisters didn't see much beauty in her, and our friends " joshed " us about it, and yet we were crazy about her — crazij about her. What was the reason? I will give you the opinion of a statistician as to the reason. She was the first person in the world that we felt ever understood us and appreciated us. She thought we were the real thing, and she seemed either to put into action or to put into words and personify those things that we had been hoping and craving for many years. Now this is the explanation of the influence of the labor-union leader today. The wage-worker has been going to his mill at seven in the morning, work- ing until noon, eating a cold, hurried lunch, going back to his work in the afternoon, and going home at night to find the babies asleep. And for once, here is the first man who, out of millions and mil- lions, has understood his trouble, has pleaded his cause, who has been able to get up on a soap-box and say what he has been thinking all his life. He hungers for self-expression and the labor leader has given him that self-expression. The labor leader has provided that function which he has been hun- gering for, and that accounts for the labor leader's influence today. Hence the most serious question in 114 The Christian Faith and Human Relations connection with the entire industrial problem is the character of the labor leader. You cannot eliminate labor leaders any more than you can eliminate love, but you can steer your boy to a girl who is some good. That is your problem, to steer your wage- workers — the wage-workers in your communities — to following men who are some good. Following leaders is simply in accordance with the laws of nature. It is just as reasonable for a certain few people to become leaders and the great mass to be- come followers as it is for water to run down-hill or for the laws of gravitation to work; and to buck these psychological laws is just as foolish as to buck the physical laws. The thing to do, instead of try- ing to dam the stream to run the water-wheel the wrong way, is to install the water-wheel so that the power of the stream can be used to grind corn. Hence instead of trying to crush unions and elimi- nate labor leaders, the thing to do is to get Christian labor leaders. That is the solution of the problem. Labor has an inborn desire for freedom. Labor, like the growing boy, unless very wisely and intelli- gently directed, will sow its wild oats, and it can- not be stopped. The child is just learning to walk and he does the most foolish things. He tumbles down and gets up, and tumbles down and gets up, and you are lucky if he doesn't tumble down-stairs. But is that any reason for tying his legs or locking him in the cradle? No, that is the only way he learns. It is the same with labor. Of course labor makes mistakes, the same as every child makes mis- takes learning to walk, every boy makes mistakes learning to play, and we all make mistakes through- out life. The only man who doesn't make mistakes The Christian Faith and Industry 115 is a dead man — the only man who makes no mistakes makes nothing but trouble. Now so much for the difficulties of the problem. A few words regarding the outlook for the future: Please let me say that the problem will never be solved by legislation, or agreements between wage- workers and employers, or by enforced arbitration — never — never. This plan that Governor Allen is talking about, in Kansas, is all right to get elected governor on, but it will never solve the problem of human nature. And what is that problem? That problem is — creating the right feeling; and you cannot create a proper feeling through legislation, or through votes of boards of directors, or through compulsory arbitration, or through mechanical means of any kind. By nature man likes to produce. If we went to any factory where the men were loafing on the job, and could drop back to the childhood days of those boys and girls, would we find them loafing on the job? No, we would find them out making mud-pies, all by themselves. The boy somehow or other gets hold of a knife, and with that knife, all by himself, he whittles a boat. The girl gets hold of a pair of scissors and a piece of cloth and, all by herself, starts to make a dress for her doll. By nature man likes to produce. When the boy gets a little older he makes a hut, makes a sled. He is continually trying to create things. By nature man likes to produce until he gets into a factory, and there is something about the industrial system which tends to castrate him economically and to kill that joy in production, which had been a feature of his boyhood days. Now there is your difficulty in the labor problem, and 116 The Christian Faith and Human Relations your solution of the labor problem lies in recreating that man and getting back that joy in production and that desire to produce. We must give labor more information. The aver- age employer is taught economics at school and col- lege. The average labor leader has never been given a course in economics. I wish some one would give ten thousand dollars to found a course of lectures before the Central Labor Union here in Boston. I think they would accept it and appreciate it. But the colleges and the churches, and all the other good institutions, are devoting their energy to informing the employer, when the wage-worker honestly be- lieves that water can be made to run up-hill by pass- ing a vote of the Massachusetts Legislature. He honestly believes it. And would not we believe it if we had not been told something different? A lot of things we believe now are not true, and our children will laugh at us for our belief in those things. It is just as reasonable to these fellows to believe that water can run up-hill, provided the Massachusetts Legislature votes the same and the bill is signed by the governor. The wage-worker must be told frankly by you preachers that, speaking scientifically, he is simply a factory where they put groceries in one end and take manufactured goods out of the other end. Scientifically he is a factory; in one end you put groceries, as you put meat into a meat-chopper, and you turn out clothing, houses, bridges, railroads from the other end. Hence if the cost of groceries goes up the cost of labor must go up, and in order to get the cost of groceries down the cost of labor must come down. I think all of us want the law of The Christian Faith and Industry 117 supply and demand to apply to everybody's finances except our own, but I am sure that both employers and wage-workers want to suspend the working of the law in connection with this industrial problem. We must teach both sides the fundamental truths; we must give both sides the facts. Publicity is, I think, the cure for most of our evils — international, national, social, industrial, and financial. We must have more publicity. Over in our organization at Wellesley our pay-roll is public ; anybody can go to the ofhce and find out what pay anybody else is getting. Our number of clients is published; our earnings are published; our profits are published on a bulletin-board each w^eek for our employees to see. We feel very strongly that pub- licity develops an atmosphere of confidence, which is the one solution to the problem — confidence — con- fidence. When the wage-worker has confidence in the employer, and the employer has confidence in the labor leader, a strike is impossible, and efficiency will gradually increase to the maximum. Are labor-unions inevitable? Yes. But their real function should be the function of the fire depart- ment. The most efficient fire department is the fire department which never goes to a fire. That is true. If in looking up the figures in Newton I found that the fire department was out most of the time, I should say that was a pretty poor fire chief and a very poor city government. The way to handle fires is in connection with inspection, installation of sprinkler systems, building fire-proof buildings, and the proper location of combustibles, and so on down the line. The real duty of the fire chief is to see that there are no fires in Newton; not to be going 118 The Christian Faith and Human Relations around from one house to another squirting water on property. Labor-unions have come to stay and labor leaders have come to stay. The first step is to select Christian labor leaders; the second step is to give facts publicity; the third step is for these labor- unions to use preventive work, and for employers to keep conditions such that there will not be these strikes. Possible? Entirely possible. Somebody says, " The more labor-unions, the more strikes." That may be pretty nearly true, too, but you might just as well say, " The more boards of health, the more sickness." One is as logical as the other. It is because we employers encourage the boards of health and we seek to have good men in control of the boards of health, while we push the labor-union aside and spurn the labor leader. How are men controlled ? Here is a suggestion : A child one year old is actuated ninety-nine per cent, by instinct, nothing by religion, and one per cent, by intellect. A child five years old is actuated ninety per cent, by instinct, seven per cent, by re- ligion, and three per cent, by intellect. A boy four- teen years old (when the average chap goes to work) is actuated seventy-five per cent, by instinct, twenty per cent, by religion, and five per cent, by intellect. The average man thirty years old — the average man who was enlisted and drafted into the United States Army — showed this test: Sixty per cent, instinct, thirty per cent, religion and environment, and ten per cent, intellect. In talking that over with some of the men who were handling the tests, they said, " Well, that is nothing to be excited about, Babson, you possibly couldn't show yourself more than eleven The Christian Faith and Industry 119 or twelve." What does that mean in connection with the industrial problem ? It means that all this is a problem of feelings. Ah, friends, the world is not ruled by statistics, but by feelings ; and it makes no difference what a man agrees to, or whether he is an employer or a wage-worker; unless he feels right afterward toward the other party, nothing has been accomplished. One of the saddest things I saw down in Washington was the great number of strikes that were settled technically, but with the people interested going away feeling sore. Ah, I had rather have one strike settled where both parties feel right, than have a dozen settled through compul- sory arbitration. Of course, that brings us to the difficulty that is imminent with large organizations. Why do we hear so much about the labor troubles of the United States Steel Corporation? Simply because it is the largest steel corporation, and it is inevitable. If our good friends of the Federal Council of Churches, men whom I admire and respect, had the United States Steel Corporation to run, and kept it just as large as it is today, they would have just as much labor trouble as Mr. Gary has. Bill Jones' steel plant has no trouble. Why ! Because Bill Jones can call every one of those fellows by their first names ; but when Bill dies, and the plant goes to his daugh- ter, who gets married and goes to Europe to live, then the managers here in New England forget the first names of those men, and numbers are put on them, and they are known by numbers. The plant continues to grow and make money, but that per- sonal touch becomes more and more distant. Then you take up a paper some morning and find that this 120 The Christian Faith and Human Relations company has a great labor trouble. It is due to ab- sentee ownership; the fact that the new owners do not like to live in that mill town with those people. They want to live in a cultivated community. It is as true as that two and two make four — that labor troubles are inevitable ; and we have got to get back to smaller organizations and the personal touch, and eliminate absentee ownership. Henry Ford sent me one Christmas his photograph, and under it are these words, " Eliminate absentee ownership, and the wage problem solves itself." It is awful hard to have a row with a fellow you call " Bill " every day. Just let me read something from a letter which I sent to my clients, on the labor problem : The question of closed shop or open shop is like that of high prices and low prices. We all naturally favor fair prices, neither high nor low, but what we favor has nothing to do with the price. The price of goods, wages, and every- thing else is determined by supply and demand. Furthermore, this same law determines whether we shall have open shop or closed shop. When the demand for labor exceeds the supply, then the men are in the ascendency and the closed- shop idea is naturally strengthened; but when the supply of men exceeds the demand, the employers are in the saddle and the open-shop idea spreads. Based on the study of eco- nomic history, I forecast that the question will never be com- pletely settled, but that we shall continue to fluctuate from the closed-shop idea to the open-shop idea according to the demand for and the supply of labor. As an employer I naturally favor the open shop, and it is surely more American than the closed shop. On the other hand, were I a wage- worker, I would favor the closed shop. Were labor leaders in the position of employers, they would be working for the open shop; while if we employers were in the position of labor leaders, we would be working for the closed shop. There, however, is another factor in the situation, namely. The Christian Faith and Industry 121 that the average wage-worker is going to be led by some- body. In small organizations that somebody is an employer. The workers are perfectly happy in these small concerns and no labor leader has a look in. As the organization becomes larger, however, especially when owned by scattered stock- holders, this personal touch between employer and wage- worker is lost. Then is the time when the labor leader gets in his work, as the wage-workers must go with their troubles to some one who they feel is their friend and leader. The real thing which keeps the labor leaders in their position is the inactivity of us Christians. It is the same reason that gives the Tammany politician power, namely, that he is per- sonally interested in the welfare of his constituents three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, while we reformers are interested in them for about three weeks before election. The fact that employers are now in the saddle and are able to force labor to terms, break up unions, etc., should not be looked upon as anything but a temporary position. The labor problem will not be solved in any such way. The labor problem will be solved only when the wage- workers are interested in their work and feel right toward the corpora- tions employing them. Then and only then will real labor costs drop back to where they ought to be. This can be brought about only by reestablishing the personal relation- ships between employers and wage-workers that used to exist in the old days. The employer, either through stock- holders' committees, or employment managers, or Christian foremen, should establish the personal relationship, friend- ship, and help that the labor leader has been supplying. Ultimately public welfare will limit the activities of both employers and wage-workers. The right to combine — like the right to hold private property — is only a permission granted by the community, to foster enterprise and encourage savings. It is granted on the assumption that the community is better off with such combinations. Whenever the com- munity finds it is better off without such combinations, the permission can and will be withdrawn. This would, of course, precipitate a conflict. It seems to me that you graduates, as you go out into the world, should not attempt to give specific I 122 The Christian Faith and Human Relations advice either to wage-workers or employers in con- nection with the solution of the industrial problem. It is a technical matter. Every case is different from every other case. You, however, are justified in laying down, and you should lay down, certain fun- damental, economic, religious principles. You should drive those home at every opportunity, to wage- workers, employers, and consumers, making clear that the problem will be solved only as both become imbued with the spirit of Jesus. I honestly feel that those cases in which I have been a factor have been won, not by refusing to go the second mile, but by going the second mile. I wish there were time for me to give a little per- sonal testimony. I was born in Gloucester, Mass., and was converted down there when about sixteen years of age, at a revival series of meetings in the Methodist Church, conducted by a man named Mun- hall. If any one knows him let them tell him about me. I have never seen him since, and that was twenty-five years ago. I was very much interested in the Christian work ; went into it head over heels, and became interested in the Christian Endeavor Society and the Y. M. C. A. I was very active in Christian work in Gloucester. Then I came to Bos- ton to study at one of your leading educational in- stitutions of New England — steeped in materialism. Unfortunately every month there I thought less of the church and Christianity, and more of money, statistics, economics, philosophy, and certain other subjects which, as they were taught, led me astray. I even went so far as to write asking to have my membership in the Congregational church canceled, because I thought the whole thing was " bosh." I The Christian Faith and Industry 123 graduated from that institution and went to work in connection with the statistical department of a bond house. From morning until night I was feed- ing upon the statistics of the nations of the world, all groups and classes and peoples ; and there I was reconverted by statistics. I found that the common idea, namely, that everything came from the land and labor, was false. Statistics showed me that there was more land, more natural resources, a thousand years ago than today ; that there is more land, resources, people, and labor in China than there is in our own country. I might give you scores of illustrations to show you that the fundamental truth in economics, that all comes from land and labor, is absolutely false and cannot be demonstrated at all. I found as I began to study statistics that there was a third factor, and when that third factor struck a nation or a class or a group or a community, then the land and the labor became inspired with the spirit of service, and we had some semblance of civilization. There is just as much land and labor in the heart of Africa today as there is in America ; but the heart of Africa lacks that religion, that Christianity, that inspiration that is to civilization what fertilization is to an egg, what the spring is to a watch, what love is to man. Ah, men, my final words to you are those of Towson, that great international industrial leader of our Y. M. C. A. ^ Business consists not of machinery, markets, or material; the greatest thing in business is not machinery, markets, or material, but rather men. And the greatest thing in man is not mind, or muscle, or body, but rather soul. Wages, prices, markets can be adjusted, but the soul of man which deter- 124 The Christian Faith and Human Relations mines his methods and purposes and his heart's pulses, can only be converted. And so I say that, in the last analysis, the solution of our labor problem lies in filling the hearts of the employer, the wage-worker, and the consumer with the spirit of Jesus Christ. THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT AND INTER- NATIONAL RELATIONS By Edward Caldwell Moore, D. D., Parkman Professor of Theology and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in Harvard University. THE CHRISTIAN SPIRIT AND INTER- NATIONAL RELATIONS DOUBTLESS I owe my invitation to deliver this lecture in part to the fact that I have been for years connected with the American Board of Com- missioners for Foreign Missions. This is one of the many organizations through which Christian people of our country have long sought to cultivate certain international relations. Such a society seeks to spread the knowledge of the gospel of Jesus. It endeavors to propagate the Christian spirit in the world. It seeks to bestow some of the gifts of Chris- tian civilization and to bind men together in Chris- tian hope and love. Identification with this work has led me to study other aspects of the contact of the western world with the Orient and Africa in that movement of expansion of Christendom which has been going on since the Renaissance. I have lectured in my university and written books upon these subjects. I have conceived the impulse among us which has sought to bring the faith of Jesus and the spirit of the life according to that faith to all mankind, to be but one phase of a tendency in our modern world which has for its aim to make the forces of our civilization felt over the whole earth, to make all the gains of the long lifetime of humanity available for every race. I have had some privilege of travel. I have spent nearly seven years of the last thirty-five either in Europe or the East. I have 128 The Christian Faith and Human Relations known a good many men of different nationalities in Asia or Africa, some of them rather well. The ad- ministration of a society of this sort brings one into relations with Europeans also, not merely those bearing similar responsibilities, but as well with leaders in politics and commerce, in education and reform. I have thus indicated the background of certain convictions upon my part touching this theme. I am grateful to President Horr and to the founders of the Greene lectureship for the oppor- tunity of expressing these convictions. We feel that the Christian spirit is the inner secret of our civilization. Without this our civiliza- tion would never have become what it is. In the loss of this spirit that civilization is doomed. We have seen the spread of the gospel produce a degree of civilization among men who had none. We have seen it transform in a measure the civilizations of races which had and still have different faiths from ours. We have seen certain other elements of our civilization either forced upon some unwilling na- tions or, again, eagerly appropriated by others — in both cases to their disaster. We have come to realize that this assimilation by Eastern nations of our Western standards in government and diplomacy, in military and naval administration, in trade and edu- cation, and even in some phases of social life, is go- ing forward irresistibly. If it goes on thus as a purely materialistic and secular movement it will be almost infinitely injurious. It will undermine the tradition of morals and destroy or gravely injure the ancient faiths of men and put nothing in their place. We feel that it is the highest duty of the church to see to it that the Christian spirit has its full share Christian Spirit and International Relations 129 in this world movement. Mission work viewed in this larger way ought, above all other works that I can think of, to draw the ends of the earth together. It has to do with universal needs and with satisfac- tions for those needs. It undertakes to create a level of respectful and sympathetic contact with all races, in the various aspects of their civilization, in the manifold traditions of their culture and diversities of their faiths. These faiths we view as, one and all of them, evidence of men's seeking after God, and witness of God's answer to their cry. We feel the unity of humanity and the tragedy of the suspicions and fears, the hatreds and violence, the misunder- standings and selfish interests, which prevent that unity from finding its expression. In some such terms as these, I might have de- scribed the international problem of the Christian spirit in the phase which that problem had assumed in the minds of American Christians before the war. For I assume that it is mainly of the manifestation of the Christian spirit by us Americans in our in- ternational relations that I am expected here to speak. It was then mainly the problem of our proper relation to non-Christian peoples which we had in mind when we spoke of internationalism. We had acquired a measure of understanding of the non- Christian world. That w^orld was on the whole well disposed toward America. Those peoples were con- fident of our interest in them. They believed that we cherished no merely selfish interest. We had not been entangled, as had some of the European na- tions, through their desire to appropriate Asiatic or African territory. Nor had we as yet in large or very disreputable ways been compromised in our 130 The Christian Faith and Human Relations relations with them in trade. I speak cautiously, for there have been deplorable aspects of the trade and diplomacy of every nation with the non-Christian world. The slave trade and the liquor traffic were surely iniquitous enough. We had our full share in those. The exploitation which took place under cer- tain concessions was certainly reprehensible. Yet on the whole one may say that our relations had been upon a fairly high plane. That was an advantage. It was the explanation of the fact that some of these nations in their trouble looked to us for aid and understanding, rather than to European states. We should be careful not to betray this trust nor, through absorption in our own interests and fear of the vastness of new responsibilities, unnecessarily to disappoint their hopes. We need to be on our guard lest, while we declaim against this or that wrong in the past policy of other nations in their dealing with Orientals, we ourselves be found guilty of like injus- tice and inhumanity. This question of our relation as Americans and Christians to the farthest corners of the earth and the non-Christian peoples is, however, no longer the whole, nor is it even the main, point to which we ought to speak when we now inquire concerning international relations. The war has changed all that. It is a curious thing, is it not, that in a sense our international relations had been really closer with Asia than they were with Europe? A century and a quarter ago, when we began our missions, we were on the whole rather remote in our mental and spiritual attitude toward Europe. We were dis- posed to exaggerate our independence of Europe. We were suspicious of all closer relations in that Christian Spirit and International Relations 131 quarter. We had just fought a war for indepen- dence. We had been warned by our first president against entangling alliances. We had the self-con- sciousness and self-confidence of extreme youth. We resented being patronized. We had a huge problem of our own upon which to concentrate our energies. We gave ourselves to the development of our own resources. The War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine, some of our experiences in the Civil War, enhanced this mood. Transportation was poor in those days, communication inadequate. Immigration was large only toward the end of the period of which I speak. The historian of culture is amazed to realize what a relatively isolated life we Americans led until after the middle of the nineteenth century. The result is that, at this very moment, and despite our partici- pation in the Great War, there is a portentous lack of wide and accurate knowledge of European aflfairs upon the part of large numbers of our fellow citi- zens. Their scant sympathy with Europe in the present crisis is due in considerable measure to their ignorance. We were for a long time a little people in a fabulously large territory. We were too poor to be the prey of others and too rich to wish to make others our prey. We were alienated from the lands of our own ancestors. Something like this usually happens after family quarrels. We found it easier to cultivate Japanese and Chinese and Indians than British and Germans and French. It is always easier to patronize than to be patronized. It is often pleasanter to help than to be helped. It is easier to overcome strangeness than to put an end to estrange- ment. We were in our nursery in those days of the childhood of our nation. The isolation of a nursery 132 The Christian Faith and Human Relations is a good thing for children. It is not so good for adults. The European nations had long had complex and delicate international relations among themselves, on the basis of treaties, like that of Westphalia or of Utrecht or that which ended the Seven Years' War, on the basis of the doctrine of the balance of power, in the coalitions against Napoleon and again in the time of the Crimean War, of the Triple Al- liance, and of the rise of the Entente. But we Amer- icans had stood outside of all that. The Great War was almost three years old before it was evident to us all that we could stand outside no longer. We were in a sense more remote from an international attitude of mind toward Europe than toward Asia, until four years ago. In point of governmental ideas some at least of those nations would have been hos- tile to our principles. In respect of education and almost of trade they had no great need of us. If one of us had then said anything about Christian relations he would have had in mind at the utmost comity. We should have said, " Have they not their own religious institutions?" This standing apart from the rest of Christendom, this remoteness from the problems of the Christian world, we had found it not difficult to maintain. The war has ended forever a situation in which that had been a natural and per- haps even proper attitude upon our part. The war, with the suffering which it involved, with the cruelty which it engendered, with the un- scrupulousness to which it gave scope, and the pas- sions which it let loose, with the waste which it occasioned, with the sordid or atrocious aims which it betrayed and the desperate means for the attain- Christian Spirit and International Relations 133 ment of those aims which it justified, shocked us into the inquiry, How Christian is Christendom? It caused us to review the course of all the Christian nations, including our own, in their contacts and conflicts with others and among themselves. It raised questions about the moral standard and spir- itual ideals which had prevailed. It prompted in- quiry as to the ethical foundations upon which the structure of our civilization rested. It made us aware of tendencies long prevalent within the Chris- tian nations, including our own, which, as we now look back upon them, made the war inevitable. It challenged us with the query, " What can we do to prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe ? " It made us conscious of monstrous inconsistencies with Christian principle in international relations, of the rottenness of our social structure, of the unsound- ness of our economic policies, of the selfish individ- ualism of nations in the face of evils which mutual understanding and good-will might have checked. It brought to our attention the fact that, however much of progress the Christian spirit might have made in its mastery over individual lives, there was only too little of such mastery over men in their classes and masses, in their national and interna- tional dealings. We were scandalized to learn that in some quarters, at least, the notion of a national, and still more of an international, morality and idealism was mocked at. It was calmly asserted that no such control of the conduct of nations was to be expected or desired. It is but fair to say that the anguish of the war developed among us an internationalism of a very high order, of a genuine moral and spiritual sort. 134 The Christian Faith and Human Relations No one could wish the war back. Yet few can fail to wish that we might live again in the generous sentiment, the lofty idealism, the pure altruism, in which we lived during the two years after we took our place in responsibility for the welfare of the world and were gladly paying the price. No one can say that we have not fallen off most grievously. We have disappointed others. We are profoundly dis- appointed in ourselves. Our leaders have failed us, but if we had not failed within ourselves we should have had different leadership. The lassitude which follows a war has seized upon us, although we suf- fered so little. Our own selfish concerns have bulked large exactly because our minds and hearts are not filled with generous solicitude for those who are far worse off than ourselves. We resemble those people whose trivial ailments occupy all of their attention because they have no worthier concerns to think about. The old ignorance and indifference have again possessed us. We had not sufficient intellec- tual and moral preparation for that manifestation of Christian spirit in international relations which the world sorely needs and which we once really thought that we were going to give. We must educate and discipline ourselves upon the task imposed upon us. We must let the effort cost us more than it costs any one else. For we are, of all peoples, the one which has most wherewith to pay the cost. We must do it for the sake of our own souls, for we are the ones who need most to pay that cost. In what I have said thus far I may seem to you to have begun at the remoter end of the problem of the relation of Christian Americans to the nations of the earth. I began with the non-Christian races. Christian Spirit and International Relations 135 In a way that seemed the natural thing to do as we recall the occasion which brings us together, the vantage from which I speak, and the interest of the church and of this theological school in the mis- sionary motive. Also it is true that we have thus followed the chronological order, because our inter- est in the remoter and non-Christian lands was developed earlier than was any parallel sense of our duty to Europe. Furthermore, the treatment of one of these problems is comparatively simple. That of the other is complex and baffling. On the whole, we are more nearly in a position to treat our oriental problem at the level of the ideals which belong to it. In the other, we are already finding our high ideals of the war-years hard to maintain. Finally, pressing as may be our questions as we face Asia, the task which confronts us in Europe is more pressing by far. If there is any advantage in the order I have chosen, it lies in my being able, when I shall have laid my case before you, to bring to bear, at the end of this hour together, all the urgency that is in me upon the problem of the relation of Christian Amer- ica to the Christian nations of Europe, the mother- countries of us all, from which only the Atlantic divides. For we are but the other half of Christen- dom and only another Europe oversea. Before I go on, however, I feel that we must de- vote a moment to the consideration of a third sense of the word international. We must consider an entirely new kind of internationalism which has suddenly come within our ken. It emerges in every kind of perplexing contrast with that which we have heretofore understood as internationalism. To it, quite as much as to that other, we must somehow 136 The Christian Faith and Human Relations establish relations which are worthy of Christian men. Hitherto we have understood by the interna- tional mind that which seeks to recognize and do justice to the rights of men of all nations. We un- derstood by it the mind which acknowledges the duty of the citizen of any nation to the citizens of all. We understood by it the temper on our part which, while deeply loving our own country, appre- ciates the fact that it is as natural for men of other lands to love theirs. Our own traditions and history are dear to us, but so are theirs to them. Interna- tionalism was not incompatible with a pure patriot- ism, just as my love for my own home made me no enemy of other men in their homes. It was not in- compatible with a pure patriotism but only with an exaggerated, an unworthy, and selfish provincialism. Still less did it make me an enemy of the govern- ment of my own nation. It was a spirit which, with- out forfeiting the love of home or a just pride in our own race, yet deplored the fact that the geographical distribution of races, their historical inheritances, their temperamental differences, their selfish inter- ests, had been the occasion of wars without number, with all the miseries incident to these and all the ruin of the higher aspects of civilization which they en- tailed. They are still the sources of misunderstand- ings which threaten ever again to lead to new wars. They obscure the fact of the common humanity. They postpone and prevent due appreciation of the needs and higher interest of mankind as a whole. Before the war we had cause to feel that this sentiment of internationalism was spreading more and more widely. The universal suffering and the common danger of the war, contrition for the mon- Christian Spirit and International Relations 137 strous evils of that conflict, and the resolve that such a conflict should not occur again, all made, for a moment, for the yet wider dissemination of this view. It is one of the bitter disappointments of the period since the armistice, it is a new cause for anxiety and shame, despite the discussion of treaties and leagues and covenants, despite congresses and conferences and peace literature without limit, that there has been such an ominous resurgence of old nationalisms and, as well, such a perilous injection of passionate new ones, on the basis of a vague senti- ment about self-determination, that we are put upon wondering whether the last stage of our interna- tionalism, is not to be worse than the first. And, as if of troubles this were not enough, there now emerges a clamorous demand for an international- ism of an altogether different sort. The new inter- nationalism does not seek to make us more friendly toward all men living under governments other than their own. It seeks to make men hostile to all gov- ernments whatsoever, including their own. It repu- diates nationalism, but not in the sense which I above described. It repudiates the old sense of inter- nationalism, as well, since this would seek to make all men one in mutual good-will despite their differ- ences. It seeks to make one all men of a particular class in economic society, in spite of their differences of nationality. It seeks the solidarity of all repre- sentatives of this one class in all the nations, in order that they may overthrow their respective na- tions along with all the others. It seeks their soli- darity for the purpose of making them more effec- tively hostile to men of all other economic classes wheresoever found. It is eager to throw down divi- K 138 The Christian Faith and Human Relations sions of mankind which already exist, but not be- cause it is eager to throw down divisions. It is eager to throw down the divisions of mankind which have existed, but only in order to introduce new ones which are everywhere to come into play. It is eager to unite the men of one class, as this exists in every nation, against all other classes, as these exist in every nation, but not because it deplores class dis- tinctions. It is farthest removed from desiring to do away with these. It magnifies them, entrenches them, embitters them. It exploits them as the very instrument of its victory in the war which it would declare within every nation, in place of the racial animosities which have heretofore caused wars be- tween nations. I might describe the matter graphically somewhat after this fashion. Instead of the boundaries of countries which have heretofore been only too much like great upright walls separating one people from another, we are now to have horizontal divisions be- tween class and class and running through all the peoples. These are to separate absolutely the inheri- tors of name and power and fortune, and also those who, in a society so organized, have been able to acquire name or power or fortune, from their fellows by a great gulf fixed. They are to develop the con- trarieties which are occasioned by rank or money or culture into the occasion of a universal conflict, until at last these contrarieties and all varieties are done away. The hostility to governments, as these exist, is because they, one and all, have condoned if not created these contrarieties. They have tolerated and even fostered these varieties. This is not the place to go into a discussion of the Christian Spirit and International Relations 139 principle which is here involved. The paragraph has no interest except to remind you of a new and pungent sense in which the word internationalism is being used. It has no purpose except to point out that it is not a unity of the human race which this program has in mind. It is not a recognition of the good qualities of those to whose virtues we may have been tragically blind. It is not the effort to be contrite for our prejudices against others through our absorption in ourselves. It is not an acknowl- edgment of the universal duty to do good to all, where we have done ill to many. Quite the con- trary. On its own avowed terms, it is an effort to do good, at the most, to men of one's own class in every nation and to do harm to men of every other class in every nation. It is, at the best, the effort to substitute one set of calamitous divisions for an- other. Whatever may have been the sins of classes one against another, it is difficult to see how the hope of the world lies in this contention. Whatever be the provocation offered by aristocracy and capi- talism, however just the resentment against these, there is nothing in the history of the world nor in the course of events now taking place to make us believe that the millennium, even the economic and social millennium, lies in this direction. There is every- thing in the history of the world to make us fear that, at this level, nothing will happen except that gradually a new aristocracy and a new capitalism will take the place of the old which will have been overthrown. There is not much here except the dif- ference between the " outs " and the " ins." There is not much involved for the advancement of the world, save that in every such revolution a large 140 The Christian Faith and Human Relations part of the finest fruits of civilization are lost and have then, with infinite pains and patience, to be regained. They are always regained by a different kind of man from the revolutionary. We cannot understand our own difficult time with- out appreciating how this cross current runs under and over the current of the kind of internationalism with which we have been familiar. It takes advan- tage of the international confusion to render that confusion worse confounded. If we inquire as to the relation of the Christian spirit to international- ism on this new basis, the answer is not far to seek. It may be given without fear that we are merely voicing prejudice. The Christian spirit can live no better with an internationalism of this sort than it could live with the frenzied and unscrupulous na- tionalism which brought on the war from which we have just emerged. It is only candid to add that this new internationalism has never, so far as I know, claimed to live with the Christian spirit or professed that it desired to have the Christian spirit live with it. In contrast, the arrant and ofttimes atrocious nationalisms of the old sort, of which we vainly hoped that the war had made an end, were very often defended by that which called itself the Christian spirit. If, however, any denial, of any sort, of the unity of humanity, any denial of the rights of all and the duties of all, is inconsistent with the Christian spirit then, at least we know which way we have to go. The proletarian is only doing over again, from his own new point of view, what conquering tribalism and divine-right kings and devil-take-the-hindmost capitalists have all done in their turn. He has a long score to wipe out. One Christian Spirit and International Relations 141 must sometimes think that there are extenuating circumstances in his case, even when we are most fain to call him reckless and blind. None the less, the salvation of society does not lie his way. Also, it must be conceded, we ourselves have never too well trodden the way in which we have professed to be- lieve that the salvation of the world does lie. We assert that the Christian spirit is the solution of all the international difficulties which we face. It is quite clear that we must take into the scope of our discussion the class problem, as well as the race problem, because there is not a corner of the habit- able world in which, at this very moment, these two problems are not wrestling one with another and threatening all the institutions of civilization, as we have understood civilization thus far. This brings me to my next point. I would call attention to the fact that, with ever-accelerating pace, through the last two generations before the war, the boundaries of nationality were already breaking down. A common type of life and civiliza- tion was coming to ascendency on the whole face of the earth. It was the tendency toward assimilation of an economic and industrial system heretofore identified only with Europe and America which had aroused in parts of the East a class-feeling closely akin to that which we met with in the West. We said we should begin with speaking of the non-Chris- tian nation. But are there any wholly non-Christian nations? Most certainly there are not, just as also there are none which are wholly Christian. There is not a nation in the non-Christian world in which there are not today many converts to Christianity. There are Christian churches and educational in- 142 The Christian Faith and Human Relations stitutions and hospitals which are often entirely on the responsibility of the indigenous peoples. These are taking over the whole apparatus of the Christian life from the hands of foreigners. Such organiza- tions are the fruit of the missionary endeavor of the last century. They are the seed of a new Christen- dom in Asia and Africa. Besides, there are the rem- nants of ancient Christian peoples, far older than any of our churches, older than any of our nations. Their ancestors were Christians of high culture when ours were wild-men and pagans. They have been long under the heel of the Moslem oppressor. Their Christian thought and life had stagnated. Our task, in reverence for their age-long struggle and suffering, was only to do what we could to aid them in the renewal of their own spiritual life. How have the Armenians and other Christians in the Near East stood to their faith in the years just past? Besides this conscious Christianity, there is also a still wider and more or less unconscious penetration of Christian ideas and permeation of Christian prin- ciples in the institutions and policies of all the peoples of which we speak. There has been an actual assimilation to Christian standards in much of the life and thought of peoples who still retain their old faiths or who, even if they have lost these, show no disposition to take ours. These persons are, like many among us, purely secular in mind. Yet they are much moved by ethical and humanitarian, as well as by governmental and commercial impulses derived through their contacts with Christendom. These factors also have had great part in the trans- formation which is going on throughout the world. They are partly cause and partly effect of the Christian Spirit and International Relations 143 marked tendency to conformity in the Orient to a type of life and civilization which used to obtain only in Europe and America. To both of these ele- ments in the life, say, of Japan or of China or of India, we ought to reach out. Both of them reach out to us. The iirst does so with a pathetic longing for our sympathy, with gratitude also and with a hope which we ought not to disappoint. The others often reach out to us with an eager desire, by no means for our Christianity, but rather for some of the many elements of outward greatness which Christendom possesses and by which, if these can be adopted, they expect to be able to resist the aggres- sion of Christian nations. They hope thus to pro- tect themselves against the violence of Christendom, to prevent the partitionment of their territories and the exploitation of their resources by Christian na- tions, a fate to which they are only too well aware that they are exposed. It can escape no thoughtful observer that the eagerness of the East to appro- priate many elements of the civilization developed in the West springs occasionally from a genuine admiration, but perhaps much more often from just the opposite emotion. It springs from the fear of the West, from the determination of the East to maintain itself as over against the West. It has its root not in trust, but in distrust. It is the index not at all of a mind passive and plastic to our influence. On the contrary, it springs from such a resurgence of racial and national feeling as both the Far East and the Near East have never known since the Renaissance. It is this resurgence of self-conscious and often of fierce nationalism in an East which is now armed with all the weapons of the West, which 144 The Christian Faith and Human Relations we have to note. The East is trained in all the methods of the West. It is eager to imitate the West exactly because it is determined to resist the West. It is this which constitutes part of our prob- lem as we think in the terms of international rela- tions. You have only to read the Indian newspapers of the day to note how political maxims which were never Oriental are now part and parcel of the con- tention of Indians and Egyptians against British rule. They obtained these from the British whom they now denounce as their oppressors. You have only to think how industrial and commercial meth- ods, which were never current in China or Japan, are now brought into play against Americans and Euro- peans, from whom the Chinese and Japanese learned these methods not two generations ago. The first period of the impact of Europe upon the Orient after the Renaissance was one in which the ideal was one of conquest. Then came an era in which the aim was trade. It must be said that the period of trade was scarcely less ruthless than that of conquest. For a long time, there was as good as no effort on the part of Europeans to impart the better elements of their civilization to the indigenous peoples. There was little or no appreciation of the fact that these peoples had in some cases a civiliza- tion of their own. With the end of the eighteenth century, there came a great change in the adminis- tration of European colonies, but especially in that of the colonies of Great Britain. It was a period of important changes in the life of Great Britain itself. This change was reflected in the treatment accorded the races which were beginning to be welded into the vast colonial empire of Great Britain which the Christian Spirit and International Relations 145 nineteenth century knew. No one can read the his- tory of India since Lord William Bentinck, or of Egypt under Lord Cromer, without being moved to admiration of the enlightening, liberating, elevating work which was done by men who must be counted among the best governors and greatest benefactors of peoples whom the world has seen. Yet in a sense one may say that the main result of the conferring upon these peoples of the degree of liberty and en- lightenment which they have is that they aspire to more. No other policy was worthy of Great Britain. But could this policy have been expected to have any other results than those which it has had? We cannot but question, as to some of these peoples, whether they are yet competent to assume the grave responsibilities to which nevertheless they aspire. Yet can they do otherwise than aspire to them? Is there any way of dealing with the situation which is thus conjured up except the way which the patience and generosity and self-effacement of the spirit of the gospel enjoins? Moreover, that Euro- pean prestige suffered a great shock in the Orient in consequence of the war is patent to everybody. To govern by mere prestige is no longer possible. To govern by mere force would be monstrous, even if it should be successful. Most likely it would not be successful. To govern by wisdom is difficult. It is made more difficult by the fact that abstractions about self-determination for all the small and weak peoples and other ideas of the sort were easily uttered in the excitement of the crisis of the war. They have reverberated through the world with an echo fairly deafening, from quarters which were not present even to the imagination of any responsible 146 The Christian Faith and Human Relations person at the moment when these resounding plati- tudes were given to the breeze. I use this paragraph about Britain and India or Egypt only as an illustration. The confidence in the good-will of Britain which many people of these re- gions had gained before the war has suffered since the armistice. Or at least the cries of those who proclaim their lack of confidence are more loud. It may come again or it may not. Who can say ? Who can foresee what will happen if it does not come again? If the chapter of the pacific influence which Great Britain has latterly exerted upon these na- tions is to be ended in the near future, it must, at least by every high and impartial mind, be judged to be on the whole one of the best which the world has yet written. If it is to have " finis " written under it, if Great Britain is to withdraw from the care for order in the world which she has so long borne and confine herself to care of her own inter- ests, the chapter in the world history which is to come next will certainly be looked forward to with a degree of perturbation by all who really know the aspect which these quarters of the world present. This is a new world situation. In it, the non-Chris- tian nations have been so far remodeled to the standards which have obtained in Christendom that many of the most pressing problems of civilization present almost exactly the same aspect in India or China or Japan or South Africa that they do in En- gland or Italy or France or America. They must be dealt with in exactly the same way if they are to be dealt with at all. Take the case of our own American relations to Japan. We can all remember when the common Christian Spirit and International Relations 147 sentiment in this country was a kindly patronage of Japan and a sHghtly marked self-satisfaction that it had been we who brought Japan out from her age- long isolation. It was we who introduced her to the great modern movement which she evidently finds congenial. Now, some of our papers are saying, and a part of our public is clamoring that Japan has so far emerged into the position of a world power that she is a menace to us. We may be entering upon an endless competition with her in the building of navies. We treat some of her subjects on our soil in a manner that touches the self-respect of a proud and able people. Or, looking at it from the other side, time was when the Japanese were very grateful to us Americans, very appreciative of that which we had done for them, very trustful of us, open to our influence, putting always the best interpretation upon our conduct, even when, upon the part of irre- sponsible persons, this was not all that could have been desired. Now, there are assuredly those in Japan who take up an attitude parallel to that which I have deplored among ourselves. I should be glad to believe that much of all this is misapprehension and misrepresentation. Yet we all know that we have arrived at a situation which is not simple nor easy. We have the uncomfortable sense that a little fire might start a conflagration. The situation calls for nothing so much as for those reserves and graces, those honors and honesties of which the Christian spirit is the best guaranty. What the situation de- mands is the disposition, rather let me say, the de- termination, to view all of these new complications which may ai'ise between ourselves and the Japanese in the light of the highest moral principle and the 148 The Christian Faith and Human Relations most perfect courtesy. It calls for an impartial view of the facts and for just and generous conduct on the basis of those facts. A Christian international- ism can demand of itself nothing less than this. It is our task to cultivate this spirit so widely in our own midst that the Japanese will know that this is the real mind of America. Or take again the case of our relations to China. Time was when China looked to us as her great friend among the nations. Does she now so look to us? It is possible that we do not yet know all the facts concerning the Shantung question. But many of the Chinese regard the course of our government as a betrayal of their country. This is, however, not the only matter. It is possibly not the greatest mat- ter. Time was when China looked to us with un- bounded trust when exploited and threatened by almost every nation in Christendom. They were led so to look to us by all our early history in relation to them, by Secretary Hay's policy of the " open door," by our treatment of the question of indemnity after the Boxer uprising, by many diplomatic episodes in the years which ensued. They had been so led by great enterprises for education and medical aid and famine relief, not to speak of devoted religious and moral work in their midst, by sympathy accorded them in the establishment of their republic. This latter sympathy was, to a certain extent, a question rather of the name of their new government than of any real knowledge wide-spread among our citizens of the difficulties which such a government would meet in China, or of a firm resolve on our part to help the Chinese to meet these difficulties. In her almost total inexperience with the representative Christian Spirit and International Relations 149 form of government which she adopted from the West, she has need of our assistance. In the suffer- ings incident to the present famine we are pouring out money to keep men and women and children alive. This is well. It is the least we can do. It is the kind of thing which our people is fairly certain to do. But China has need of an intellectual and moral support which goes far beyond that other. The feeling which our fathers appear to have had, that there are far worse evils than poverty or physical ills, seems largely lacking among us. This fact registers itself in our choice of the things which we are willing to do in our treatment of industrial and social problems in our own midst. It registers itself also in the things which we are willing to do, and the things which we are not willing to do, on be- half of other nations. We certainly never learned such an inversion of the order of values in life from the gospel of Christ. We do not show imagination in respect to that which we might do for others. We do not always show patience and continuance in that which we have undertaken to do. We dislike the thought of the complications into which such a re- sponsibility might easily bring us and of the long time that the completion of our duty might perhaps demand. This suggests to me one more example, the only other which I shall use, that of our relation to the Ottoman Empire. One of the wisest and best efforts which Americans have ever made in the direction of international helpfulness has been proceeding in the Ottoman Empire for a hundred years. This ef- fort has included the founding of almost a score of educational institutions, of which three have risen to 150 The Christian Faith and Human Relations the rank of real universities, one of these being for women. It has included a work of the press in the publication of translations of the Bible into a dozen languages, of great literature from a dozen lan- guages, and in the production of a literature of cur- rent discussion of every subject which censorship would permit. Of the magnitude of the work of the press centered at Constantinople and Beirut few of us have had any idea. Our effort has included more- over the work of medicine, the founding of medical schools and hospitals and dispensaries, of schools for nurses, and the actual raising up of hundreds of native doctors. It included a relation of peace and comity with all the religions of the Empire, with an endeavor to bring to these an intellectual and moral stimulus which they have, for the most part, grate- fully received. It has established centers in which, for long periods, representatives of races bitterly hostile one to another have lived together in mutual respect and regard. It has revealed to them the pos- sibility of a life of the Empire in which they might all bear a peaceful part. It has included the train- ing of representatives of not less than twenty na- tionalities to work for the enlightenment and the uplifting of their respective races, and to try con- jointly to seek the advantage of that portion of the world in which they lived. Does any one need to be told with what confidence the Armenians looked to us when their new ordeal came upon them in 1915 ? Does any one think that we have lived up to that confidence? I am not say- ing that we were bound to help them carry out, re- gardless of everything else, their nationalistic hopes. We were bound to aid them and all the other races Christian Spirit and International Relations 151 of the old Empire, after the armistice, in a way that might have prevented the dire situation in which the Armenians now are, and in which the failure of their, perhaps exaggerated, nationalistic hopes seems likely to lead to the dispersion if not even to the annihilation of the race. We could not aid Turks during the war. We were bound to help them also after the armistice, because all who know the Near Eastern situation realize that it can never be solved by merely taking sides in immemorial disputes. This is the trouble with the Near Eastern situation now. The European powers are taking sides. The in- digenous peoples are counting, each of them, upon some one of the European peoples, to help them carry out their own racial ambitions. The Turks in February, 1919, besought that the Americans would not leave them outside of that protectorate which they then fully believed that we were going to estab- lish over Christian populations in their former em- pire. They besought us that we would extend to them also the same assurance of public order, the same basis of recovery of a reasonable prosperity, as to the former subject races. It is fairly certain that we could then have done this peaceably, with the active cooperation of all the races on the spot and to the infinite relief of every nation in Europe. Because of our abstention, things have fallen back into the old hopeless rut of the murderous feuds be- tween the indigenous races and the colonial policies of the foreign powers. No one knows what the fu- ture of the Near Eastern question is to be. It is the greatest failure we have ever made. Most of our people actually never knew what was happening, else I believe that they would have made their wish felt 152 The Christian Faith and Human Relations to shoulder some portion of the burden of humanity which was thus laid to our hand. We refrained in this tragic fashion from taking in the Ottoman question the part which all our past for a hundred years would seem to have prepared us to take. That was, I suppose, in some measure be- cause we knew that this question, more perhaps than any other, would involve us in close relations to Europe. We for a moment decided against taking any further part in European or world affairs, now that the war was done. Was ever anything more naive than thus to suppose that we could take such stupendous share in finishing the war and then go home as if we had no obligation whatever to do our part in the difficulties and dangers of the peace ? It was not because we had suffered losses in men for one moment to be compared with the losses of the others. It was not because we were impoverished. We were shy of complications. We thought that we could revert to our isolation. We had not imagina- tion enough to see that things could never again be as they had been. To have stayed out of the war might have been treason to our ideals and to our bet- ter selves. As defection, however, from the Allies and from the cause of the world, this would not have been for one moment comparable with the drawing out of the peace after we had taken part in the war. Our leadership was inadequate from the side of both political parties. We may say that impartially. Yet every one knows that, had the American public known its own mind, there would have been politi- cians enough to jostle one another from the path in the effort to make themselves conspicuous in the carrying out of that mind. As a nation we did not Christian Spirit and International Relations 153 know that the period after the war was going to be, in some ways, far worse than the war itself and that in it the world would have far greater need of us. You recall that at the moment of the outbreak of the war this was viewed in this country mainly as a great catastrophe for Europeans. Before it had gone on long, almost all of us began to realize that it was a crisis for humanity, including ourselves. It was a crisis for civilization in the issue of which we were inevitably bound up. Our sympathies were touched by the invasion of Belgium, by the deporta- tions from France, by the tales, at first incredible, of the ferocity with which the war was being carried on. Despite the atrocities to which the war de- scended, barbarities on one side being met by bar- barities on the other, we came to feel that the war must be fought through in any case. Our sympa- thies drew us into it. The unrestricted submarine warfare was the occasion of our entrance. It was not the cause. Slowly the American people was making up its mind that the whole world of ideas and principles to which it belonged was at stake, that we were a part of Europe and Europe was a part of us. When the youth of our universities and of your Seminary, the sons of our bodies as well as the sons of our souls, took themselves overseas to fight for the common cause and we were left behind to do what we could to uphold them in the struggle, there did pass over this nation the baptism of a lofty internationalism. We had a sense that we belonged to the world and that a part of the highest interests of the world, its liberty and enlightenment, the stability of institutions and the possibility of mercy, was committed to us. 154 The Christian Faith and Human Relations We cannot but go back in mind, those of us who were in London and Paris in January, 1919, to the impression made by the representatives of the Allied nations as to their attitude toward us Americans. That was only two months after the armistice. We cannot easily forget the conflict of feeling within our own souls. They lifted us up in their idealization to a height concerning which no man among us could fail to feel that we did not deserve it, or to cherish poignant anxiety lest we might not be able to main- tain it. They had had times of wondering whether we would ever enter the war, but at last we had entered it. We had made our strength effective at a time when theirs had been supremely taxed. We had thrown into the balance the last needed element of weight, and it had proved sufficient. They would never have yielded, and the Central Powers, as we now know, were very near the end of their resource. Yet England and France and Italy were unspeakably grateful for the aid we had rendered in winning the war. It is not too much to say, however, that they rejoiced still more that they were to have our help in the settlement of the problems of the peace. They ascribed to us a generous readiness to aid in this regard. We on our part already sensed the begin- ning of the change which was coming over the mind of our country. Those were rather anxious days for Americans of information and judgment, despite the fact that there was so much to bring to us joy and that we spoke only of our hopes. The true ideal- ists among us believed that we were going to help to put international relations on a basis on which such a catastrophe as the war could not easily hap- pen again. No one then dreamed how deep the Christian Spirit and International Relations 155 division in our country was going to be nor how the discussion would drag on. No one foresaw how this question of our taking part in the reconstruction of the world would become a football of partisan poli- tics in a presidential year, with all the sordidness which that implies. A large part of our American public did not realize what an opportunity we had to exert a moral influence in the stabilizing of in- ternational relations after the long agony of the war. This stabilization the European nations have not even yet been able to achieve for themselves. Many among our fellow citizens had then no idea how those countries longed for our aid and moral support in the confusion and exhaustion of the time. They expected such reenforcement from this utterly un- spent power from over the sea, unprejudiced for territorial reasons, uncompromised from the point of view of trade, unmoved by historic animosities and unhampered by colonial ambitions and jealous- ies. We had really entered the war for an ideal. That was true. They thought that we would not desert them until, in some measure, that ideal was secured. Had we realized how profoundly we were needed, I do not believe that our own tribulations, which after all are relatively small, would ever have deterred us from seeking to fulfil so grand an obligation. We all know how these miserable months have dragged on and lengthened into years. We are not here to discuss politics. Recrimination is of no avail. But the question as to what we are going to do about the world's woe is with us still. And I repeat that it is not enough to subscribe to famine funds. It is hardly enough to spend all our zeal upon the recon- 156 The Christian Faith and Human Relations struction of buildings in devastated areas. If we only understood ourselves and were united among ourselves, if we were determined impartially to use all of our strength to allay evils which beset others than ourselves, there is no saying what a calm and powerful nation, standing a little apart from these struggles, yet aiming, for the love of mankind, to take up the burden of them, might still do to hold a needed balance, to maintain the honest friendship of both sides, when those in whose company we fought are beginning to drift apart, and even, in the end, to make friends out of those who for seven long years have been bitter enemies. We need not so much care how it is done. We all wish to maintain the methods which are laid down by our Constitution. That is not a matter for de- bate. But far inside of the Constitution, and far inside of all the proper aims and interests of either one of our political parties, we all know that, had it not been for the partisan and personal bitterness of the moment, a compromise might long since have been arrived at. In our hearts, we all know that such a compromise ought now to be arrived at with- out delay. Long ago in a conversation Lord Bryce said: You Americans, under an exaggerated reverence for democracy, take public opinion for a kind of fait accompli. If public opinion is against you, you think that that settles the matter. It is for you to win over public opinion to your side. It is for you to make public opinion. High public opinion always begins with minorities, with indivduals. It is in order to have a little part in making public opinion on these questions in which I am so pro- foundly concerned, that I am now speaking. It is Christian Spirit and International Relations 157 with you that I plead that you will henceforth work unceasingly to unmake a mistaken public opinion, as it prevails about you, and to put a right opinion in its place. We must help Europe, not merely and not mainly out of our pockets, but with all the trea- sures of our souls. If we do not, there is no knowing where the catastrophe in Europe will end. Indeed, under such a denial of all the nobler elements in our national and personal life, we shall have given evi- dence that the supreme moral catastrophe has already happened to us Americans. When that has once happened all other catastrophes follow of them- selves. One thing there is which hinders our clear sight in this regard. It is a thing which I find it a little difficult to describe. Yet it is happening every day before our eyes. We are a composite nation, as heterogeneous in our make-up as any nation ever was. The old English and Scottish stock which was almost pure at the beginning is now only a small part of our population. Men of every race in Europe are found upon our shores. That ought to make of us a nation with international sympathies. We be- lieve that it will do so when we are thoroughly fused into a national unity. It does not yet do so because these elements often exist only side by side. They are not amalgamated into one. We have no spiritual unity. The presence of all these racial strains in our national make-up ought to insure our under- standing of the troubles and dangers of all. It ought to insure a calm and considerate action as nearly as possible in the interest of all. As yet it does nothing of the sort. It fails of this because we are not as yet one nation. We are only fragments 158 The Christian Faith and Human Relations of many. Sometimes it would appear as if the situa- tion I describe secured nothing but the perpetuation on our soil of misunderstandings and antipathies, of feuds and animosities, which have been brought over unchanged from other soils. These feuds and ani- mosities should have no place in the minds of men and women who have truly become Americans and have embraced the representatives of all other races, of whatever origin, in a real and deep Americanism. As it is, these bitternesses reappear on our shores intensified. Fierce propaganda for some nation or fragment of a nation on the other side of the sea has for its aim, so far as possible, to array all Ameri- cans on the side of its own frantic contention. Agi- tators desire to make it appear that all Americans side with their particular party and wish the de- struction of its enemies three thousand miles away. Were we really a unified, amalgamated people, this could not possibly happen. Then the trace in the blood of every nation would have only the ennobling consequence of a universal sympathy. Then we should have a mind of our own and should know that mind. We should understand that our task is not to take sides in these old feuds at the behest of new ar- rivals from foreign shores, who only yesterday be- gan to call these their shores. Our task is to aid both parties in every such quarrel to an adjustment of their difficulties, as only a calm and strong outsider who, nevertheless, has genuine sympathy can aid. The most poignant recollections of the month immediately following the armistice have been ex- pressed in a notable article written for the New York " Evening Post " of March 2, 1921, by General Smuts, the Premier of the Union of South Africa. Christian Spirit and International Relations 159 He speaks at a level far above the disposition to lay the blame of the immeasurable catastrophe which the peace thus far has proved upon individual men. He lays it upon nations, his own nation among the rest, upon humanity as a whole. In similar high vein, Albert Pauphilet, writing in the " New Europe " of August 12, 1920, confesses the dire declension which had taken place in the spirit of his own coun- try, France, during the years 1919 and 1920. I speak that we may here together confess our own part also in this universal guilt and shame, and re- pent of our share in the world-wide misfortune and take high resolve that we will not rest until we have moved the heart of our American people to do its share in reparation of the fault. We have poured out our treasure to alleviate the miseries of sick and wounded, of widows and orphans, of the home- less and impoverished, of peoples who have wit- nessed massacres and deportations or suffered plague and famine. We have not stopped with those who had been our associates in the struggle. We have reached out to those who have been our foes as well. We could not do otherwise. Yet as I wit- ness the extravagance and self-indulgence in our own country even in the face of the high cost of living and of higher taxes, I still ask, " Could people live and spend in this fashion, if they really visual- ized one half of the misery of the world? " You will answer me that there is a measure of similar bar- baric luxury and recklessness in evidence in France and Great Britain at this moment, and one hears of it even in Germany and Austria. So much the worse for them. Surely that does not make the case better for us. Such monstrous things must be exceptional 160 The Christian Faith and Human Relations there, where people really see the awfulness of the distress. They would only show the inconceivable depravity of individuals who are guilty of such crimes against humanity. Here, these evils are less conscious and, if you please, less guilty, because many people do not really know. For that very reason, the evil is more wide-spread. The average comfortable American can form no conception of what parts of France and Italy or, again, of the Balkans and Asia Minor look like. Nothing in his past enables him even to imagine their desolation and distress. He thinks the accounts of it exag- gerated, sentimental, or even that they have their origin in propaganda. Surely some of our young Americans who are returning from the service in Poland or under the Near East Relief Committee can disabuse his mind as to that. Yet ever again I recur to the thought that it is not a still larger and never-ending stream of benefi- cence which is the thing most needed. We poured out blood in the war. We have poured out money since the armistice. But we have still one thing to give which the other nations of the world most sorely need. What is needed in most cases is that we should help the peoples again to get upon their own feet. It is with nations as it is with individuals, that which is requisite to this end is not mere material assistance. It is the putting forth in new courage and hope of their own spiritual qualities. Those who help most and best are those who pour out of their own spiritual qualities in the effort to render aid. What is demanded of us is that we put our shoulder under some portion of their moral respon- sibility, that we take up a part of the burden of Christian Spirit and International Relations 161 their anxieties, of the load laid upon them by that which they have suffered in their inner life. What is demanded is that we give ourselves. We should know this to be true if we were trying to help in- dividuals. It is not different in the help of nations to the recovery of their own best selves and the reparation of the catastrophes of their inner life. Before the war, we had the reputation in some quarters of a selfish and crude materialism. It was a reputation which we esteemed deeply unjust. We knew that it was unjust. Masses of our people might be raw and ignorant, but we were sure of their idealism. For a brief moment we proved to men of all the world that we were right and they were wrong. We had followed the highest idealism. For a moment thereafter, they idealized us too much, as perhaps before they had idealized us not enough. Yet surely we have only ourselves to blame if in these two years we have fallen far in their esteem. It is small wonder if they feel that their earlier judg- ment of us was correct and that the estimate of two years ago was a mistake. Most of all we have called down this bitter judgment on ourselves by the fact that we have in such surprising fashion stood apart from the efforts made through the union of nations to secure the conditions of a just and lasting peace. The abstention of no nation from that effort would have been so unexpected or seemed so inexplicable. We could have done in the sphere of the morale of nations so easily that which others can now do only with the greatest difficulty, or cannot do at all. It may be only excitement and a sense of disappoint- ment, with a realization of their weakness over against our terrific strength, which makes them 162 The Christian Faith and Human Relations think of us as possible aggressive enemies. We are not conscious of being enemies to any of them. Yet do you wonder that they look upon us with suspicion and with that most cruel and delusive of all mental attitudes, one which they have never before felt, the attitude of fear? We are not conscious yet of aggres- sive intentions, but out of the conscious possession of such dangerous power an aggressive intention may grow up. This is a perilous situation both from their side and ours. Do you wonder that our deter- mination to hold aloof from them breeds in them the intention to hold aloof from us? Do you wonder that our announced determination to revise all agreements which they have entered into without us looks strange to them, when they recall how they besought us, almost on their knees, to join them and have part in the making of these very arrangements ? There is scarcely a nation in the world which is not today in doubt about us, and we alone have created that doubt. The most thoughtful in our own midst must share this uneasiness. We do not yet know exactly what the steps in our own national policy toward the other nations really mean. We have moments when we think that they mean nothing coherent or consistent or intelligible. None the less, we are aware that they might be construed by others to mean almost anything. We are overwhelmingly sure that the mass of our people mean no ill. Yet we own that now and then appearances are mightily against us. There is scarcely a nation in the world which is confidently and unqualifiedly friendly to us. Yet there is scarcely a nation in the world which is not yearning for our friendship and aid in the solving Christian Spirit and International Relations 163 of the moral and spiritual problems of humanity, if we would only give them our friendship in the open- hearted way in which they once thought that we had given it. We ourselves once thought that we were giving it. Many of us are bewildered and contrite to find that we have not given it. This is a moral failure of the first magnitude. It may at any time become a catastrophe. It is not for us to sit silent in this condition. It is not for us to acquiesce in help- lessness. It is for us to make that part of our Amer- ican people which is still sound at heart hear what we have to say. It is for us to make our rulers hear what we have to say. It is for us to make the other nations hear what we have to say. It is for us to win them to believe what we believe about our na- tion's better mind, despite the tragic failure of the past and the problematical appearances of the present. This brings me, in closing, to the point in which every discussion of the religious spirit must begin and end, the point of individual duty and respon- sibility. Christianity cherishes the individual be- cause it knows that out of the heart are the issues of life. Christianity cherishes the individual be- cause Christ taught that the world can never be moved to its highest ends and finest issues save by the reaching of the hearts of individual men. If the world could have been saved by program, it would have been saved long ago. The programs of others than Jesus would have led us far on the way toward that desired result. The program of Jesus would have led us all the way, we Christians say, if only it had been supremely obeyed by many, or even re- spectably obeyed by all. It is not the failure of 164 The Christian Faith and Human Relations ideas, it is the failure of allegiance to them which distresses us. It is the obsession of our time that by change of government or by destruction of all government, by creation of wealth or new distribu- tion of wealth already created, you can insure the welfare of mankind. The utmost that you can thus bring about is a condition of relative advantage or disadvantage for the souls of men. All great states are made by great men. When these fail, states fail. All great institutions come out of the insight and purpose of individuals. And not only is the individ- ual the source of all the greatness in the world, he is also the only worthy end and aim of any other sort of greatness in the world. A democracy which, in a kind of frenzy for equality, in a prejudice against superiorities, refuses the leadership of the wise and good is doomed. A state which will have all men on a level condemns all to a low level. A class which will permit no individual in it to rise makes it im- possible for society to rise. A group which wishes no gain to the world as a whole, or even to its own self, by the aid of persons or groups which represent other aptitudes and achievements in life than its own, is capable of no serious achievement. The in- ternationalism for which we plead is no more hostile to a true nationalism and a right patriotism than is the respect for other men*s homes inimical to the love of our own. There is every reason why we should seek with joy the highest development of our own community. There is no reason why we should not attain that without being diregardful of the good of other communities. In truth, there is no possibility of our ever attaining our own highest good if we are thus disregardful. We have come a Christian Spirit and International Relations 165 long way in the recognition of the principle as be- tween individuals that " No man liveth unto him- self." The next step necessary to the welfare of the world is the recognition of the principle that no nation can live to itself. The other things of which we boast in our modern world, our facilities of transportation, our apparatus for communica- tion, our interdependence in trade, prove that to us every day. This was measurably true before the war. It is far more true since the war, because now our sufferings and the moral exigency which is everywhere forbids us to draw apart. There is a unity of life between ourselves and Europe, between ourselves and Asia or Africa, which never existed before and can never again cease to exist. We may like it or dislike it. We abetted it once when we thought only that we should gain by it. Now that it throws increased obligation upon us, we perhaps resent it and resist it and would withdraw from it if we could. It is of no avail. We must face it and embrace it. We must make it the instrument, this world unity, of the execution of new and larger purposes for humanity as a whole. We must make it the instrument, this world unity, of new and nobler realizations of ourselves. To that common end, every race must dedicate all that fortune has brought it, all that suffering has bestowed upon it, all that subtle and infinitely precious thing which a racial characteristic constitutes. To this end, every class in every nation must contribute by virtue of the very qualities which are the treasures of its past and its identical character in the present. To this, every individual must subordinate and consecrate himself with all that belongs to him as individual. 166 The Christian Faith and Human Relations It has long been taught, and now and then even been accepted, that men and women are made great when they give themselves to the best ends in life, out of the love of men, in the spirit of Christ and to the honor of God. 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