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 Beaton, David. 
 Selfhood & service 
 
SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
SELFHOOD AND 
 SERVICE 
 
 THE RELATION OF CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY 
 TO WEALTH AND SOCIAL REDEMPTION 
 
 DAVID "BEATON 
 
 ¥ 
 
 CHICAGO: NEW YORK: TORONTO 
 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 1898 
 
Copyright, 1898 
 By FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
TO THE 
 
 TRUSTEES OF OUR CHRISTIAN CHURCHES 
 
 IN WHOSE RANKS ARE SO MANY 
 
 WHO PRIVATELY AND PUBLICLY EXEMPLIFY THE LEADING 
 
 PRINCIPLE REGARDING 
 
 THE USE OF WEALTH ILLUSTRATED IN THESE PAGES 
 
FOREWORD. 
 
 It is hoped there is a message in these pages 
 interesting alike to the man of faith and the man 
 of science, more interesting where the two are 
 combined. The motive of the writing is a deep 
 sympathy with the weak, who are forced to the 
 wall in the awful industrial contest of life — the 
 defective, the dispossessed in our present social 
 chaos. The strong need no friends, they can 
 fight their own battles, but the Christian may 
 well say, "Let my tongue cleave to the roof of 
 my mouth, and let my arm wither, when the one 
 shall cease to plead the cause of the poor or the 
 other refuse to defend him." But the facts of 
 Christian history and the stern laws of life must 
 be regarded. A permanent social order can 
 come only from a constructive principle which 
 regards those facts and measures those laws. 
 This principle is set forth here, at once consist- 
 ent with the claims of personality and the work 
 of social redemption. 
 
 David Beaton. 
 
 Chicago, January, 1898. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. Social Redemption through Christianity n 
 
 II. The Christian Doctrine of Selfhood - 21 
 
 III. Selfhood the Creator of Material Wealth 30 
 
 IV. Selfhood and the Intellectual Progress of 
 
 Society 43 
 
 V. Selfhood the Agent of Social Betterment 53 
 VI. The Ministry of Wealth in Education and 
 
 Philanthropy 64 
 
 VII. Christian Selfhood Distinguished from 
 
 Worldly Conformity - - - - 74 
 VIII. Personal Service the New Ideal of Chris- 
 tianity 82 
 
 IX. Modern Lessons on Christianity and 
 
 Wealth 92 
 
 X. Simplicity of Christian Living - - 103 
 
 XI. Education and Family Training - - 114 
 
 XII. Personal Service a Privilege of Wealth 123 
 
 XIII. Personal Service a Career of Distinc- 
 
 tion 133 
 
 XIV. Business an Opportunity of Christian 
 
 Service 145 
 
 XV. Personal Administration of Accumulated 
 
 Wealth 158 
 
 XVI. The Family Inheritance - - - 167 
 
 XVII. The New Christian Civilization - - 182 
 
 XVIII. The Scope and Sanity of the New Ideal 200 
 
SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 I. 
 
 SOCIAL REDEMPTION THROUGH 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Our age is restless and critical. Christianity 
 has borne the chief brunt of this insurgent 
 spirit. Reformers have been impatient with 
 the church, and said their hardest things 
 against Christians. Many regard this criticism 
 as a sign of enmity to religion, and see in it the 
 birth of a new movement of social reform which 
 casts aside the Christian faith and the guidance 
 of the Christian church. More careful obser- 
 vation of the thought of our time will, however, 
 lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. 
 
 Why do the earnest thoughtful men and 
 women, like the majority of our workers in the 
 cause of social redemption, criticise any insti- 
 tution like the church? Just because it pro- 
 fesses to be able to cure the ills of human 
 society which they are interested in healing. 
 They do not criticise athletic associations, nor 
 literary societies because these are not called 
 
12 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 into existence for the moral and social redemp- 
 tion of society. But this is one of the main 
 purposes for which the church exists, and in 
 the accomplishment of which Christianity 
 achieves her most splendid victories. 
 
 The social reformer is impatient with the 
 methods of the church because in the depth of 
 his heart he regards her as the right arm of the 
 Lord for the social redemption of man. 
 
 Certainly the most touching, as it is also the 
 most reassuring, note of the spirit of our age, is 
 the desire, breaking out into a beseeching, on 
 the part of all social workers, that the church 
 should rouse herself from her indifference to 
 the social needs of the people, and come forth 
 to-day, as in the early days of her poverty and 
 self-denial, renewing her mighty youth in the 
 splendid self abandonment of the Apostles and 
 the early disciples, for the divine ideal of social 
 righteousness and the prosperity of the com- 
 mon people. Indeed a very large part of this 
 severe criticism has come from the best friends 
 of Christianity. To them, the weaknesses and 
 failures of the church as an instrument of social 
 redemption are the signs of a deeper degen- 
 eracy in her life, and a more fatal departure 
 from the spirit of her Founder than is to be 
 seen in the partial failure of her work in any 
 one particular direction. 
 
SOCIAL REDEMPTION. 13 
 
 This condition is regarded by them as evi- 
 dence of a change of ideal and purpose ; as a 
 fatal conformity to the world, both in spirit 
 and practice. We know that the first Chris- 
 tians won their triumphs over the heathen 
 world by the virtues born of poverty, by the 
 heroic qualities of peoples inspired by noble 
 ideals, by self-abnegation, contempt of suffer- 
 ing, and disregard of death. They counted not 
 their lives dear unto them for the love of 
 Christ. 
 
 They may have made mistakes in their 
 doctrines of political economy, but a new spirit 
 was born into the world, clear-eyed, tender- 
 hearted, yet masterful and splendid in pur- 
 pose, which changed the face of society and 
 brought liberty, purity, peace, and prosperity 
 to the enslaved and wretched of every race, 
 where the gospel was preached. In marked 
 contrast to this poverty the church is now rich, 
 beside this self-denial the modern Christian is 
 luxurious, and compared with these conquer- 
 ing virtues of self-abnegation and heroism for 
 great ideals, we have prudence and worldly 
 wisdom. And the world sees the sworn sol- 
 diers of the cross thankful if they can secure 
 their own ease and preserve their own privi- 
 leges, letting society and its wrongs cautiously 
 alone. 
 
1 4 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 Has then, the modern Christian church 
 completed the cycle of degeneracy which 
 all conquerors must tread? First, the poor but 
 strong man, hardy, vigorous, eager for con- 
 quest, inspired by loyalty or splendid race tra- 
 ditions, seeking the rich and fertile lands of 
 the south, he conquers them by virtue of the 
 physical and mental prowess created by pov- 
 erty and lofty ideals. Then the possessor, 
 luxurious, cultured, self-indulgent, wise in the 
 conservative maxims of letting things alone, 
 indifferent to high ideals, and in his turn, the 
 helpless prey, as well as the rich prize which 
 tempts the invader. 
 
 The business customs and social ideals of 
 many modern Christians give far too much 
 ground for the assertion that such a fatal cycle 
 of degeneracy has been completed by the 
 church of Christ in her nineteen hundred years 
 of history. And if this charge is really proved 
 against the church, no class of workers and 
 thinkers will more deeply lament the fact than 
 those who long for a purified and prosperous 
 social life. The patriot who hailed, in the 
 robust manliness of the first Christian's faith, 
 the promise of a new type of manhood and a 
 new order of citizenship laments it. The so- 
 cial reformer and thinker who saw, in the new 
 doctrines of a common brotherhood for all 
 
SOCIAL REDEMPTION. 15 
 
 men, the creative forces of a new society is in 
 despair. But the Christian who looked to that 
 faith and that spirit of brotherhood, not only 
 for a new manhood, a new citizenship, and 
 a new social order, but a divine energy to re- 
 generate the human soul and so re-create soci- 
 ety from the heart outward, sees the door of 
 this larger hope shut in his face. 
 
 The Christian believer has the deepest inter- 
 est in this modern controversy ; for it is vital 
 to his faith. Is the church recreant to her 
 trust? Is she false to the spirit and pur- 
 pose of her Founder? Are her ideals to-day 
 directly opposed to those of the first Chris- 
 tians? Has she failed to understand or been 
 powerless to carry out the commands of her 
 Divine Master? Is it true that the practices 
 and ideals of the great mass of His professed 
 followers are rather pagan than Christian? 
 Has the church, by this conformity, to world- 
 ly ideals of life, lost those healing and regen- 
 erating energies, which alone make her the 
 savior of men and society? 
 
 The charges, which both her enemies and 
 friends have brought against the church, are 
 almost entirely connected with her doctrine 
 and practices regarding wealth. Coming into 
 existence as a spiritual force, and at the behest 
 of a spiritual leader, Christianity soon became 
 
1 6 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 a power in temporal affairs and a producer of 
 material as well as spiritual blessings for her 
 followers. It is a notorious fact that the vast 
 preponderance of material wealth created dur- 
 ing the past fifty years is owned by the pro- 
 fessed followers of Jesus Christ. 
 
 At present the writer is building no doc- 
 trine on this industrial fact; he simply wishes 
 it to be strongly impressed upon the mind 
 of the reader. It is well for us, also, to con- 
 fine ourselves to the latter half of the pres- 
 ent century for definiteness of illustration, 
 because of the unprecedented increase in 
 wealth which has taken place during that 
 period from the scientific discoveries and me- 
 chanical improvements of the age. 
 
 It does not concern our subject to discuss 
 here whether the methods, by which this wealth 
 has been accumulated, have been wrong eco- 
 nomically or morally. It is simply laid down 
 as a fact, vitally related to the work of the 
 church in the world, that her members own 
 and control the vast and unprecedented accu- 
 mulations of modern wealth both in Europe 
 and America. Not only is wealth thus accu- 
 mulated, but it is being concentrated in these 
 latter days in vast fortunes in the hands of a 
 few individuals and families. Thomas G. Sher- 
 man estimates the wealth of America as nine- 
 
SOCIAL REDEMPTION. 17 
 
 ty-five thousand millions of dollars. His 
 figures concerning the concentration of this 
 wealth have not been seriously disputed. In 
 1889 he showed that forty-five thousand per- 
 sons owned more than half of all the wealth of 
 America. On the basis of the tax returns 182 
 families owned $43,000,000,000, 1,200,000 
 families owned $7,000,000,000, and 11,620,- 
 000 families owned $11,215,000,000 of the 
 national wealth. 
 
 These startling figures are not set down 
 here for a discussion of the economic and 
 legislative questions that arise out of them ; 
 but to place before the reader some of the facts 
 of modern social and industrial life that arouse 
 the interest of the Christian socialist, as well as 
 the alarm of the patriot. 
 
 Here then, are two circumstances closely 
 related, both in the popular mind, and in 
 the thought of educated social workers. 
 First, that the vast accumulations of wealth 
 in modern times are in the possession of 
 Christian people, and second that this wealth 
 is being steadily and even rapidly concen- 
 trated in a few families. In startling con- 
 trast to this is the continued hardship, suffer- 
 ing and perplexity of a vast mass of the peo- 
 ple. Sir Robert Peel said many years ago that 
 the condition of the laboring man was a dis- 
 
1 8 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 grace and danger to our civilization. "There 
 is too much suffering and too much perplexity 
 in his lot ; it is absolutely necessary that we 
 should render the conditions of the manual 
 laborer less hard and less precarious." Since 
 those words were spoken by the great repre- 
 sentative of the best in the old aristocracy of 
 England many revolutions in politics, econo- 
 mics, and social conditions have taken place ; 
 and the greater number of them have been di- 
 rectly aimed at improving the lot of the labor- 
 ing man. 
 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the 
 most splendid achievements of reform during 
 the past sixty years have been almost entirely 
 in the interests of the middle and working 
 classes. The material benefits resulting from 
 the discoveries of science and the improve- 
 ments in machinery have accrued almost 
 entirely to the benefit of those same classes. 
 Indeed the fame of the great men and women 
 of the same period has largely been derived 
 from measures passed in the interest of, and 
 works done for, the laboring classes. This only 
 shows how deep was the ditch out of which 
 the laborer had to be dug. It reveals his 
 former moral and social degradation, when we 
 reflect how much was required to be done to 
 make the life of the manual worker endurable 
 
SOCIAL REDEMPTION. 19 
 
 and worth living. Society could not have ex- 
 isted in the old forms for fifty years longer, 
 except for those measures of industrial reform, 
 and social amelioration. But statesmen and 
 reformers found that they had only scratched 
 the surface. Lower deeps of misery and want 
 were brought to light imperatively demanding 
 relief. 
 
 There are vast areas of population both in 
 Europe and America as degraded, oppressed, 
 and hopelessly miserable as the classes who 
 were the shame and terror of England during 
 the corn-law hunger and chartist riots. 
 
 Besides all this, the common people are being 
 rapidly educated. They know that they are poor 
 in the midst of plenty, miserable in the midst 
 of joy, and yet are in possession of political 
 power which they have been taught- to regard 
 as the doorway to prosperity. The revela- 
 tions of Booth and Riis and many others con- 
 cerning the life of the very poor in our large 
 cities, are alone grave indictments against 
 modern governments and the church. 
 
 The vices, miseries, and sorrows of the sub- 
 merged classes remain therefore a just charge 
 against modern Christianity. Simply because 
 the church of Christ exists for the purpose of 
 abolishing those evils and healing those sorrows. 
 She is accepted by the world at her own ap- 
 
20 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 praisement. For this end she was born into 
 the world. This is the source of her power 
 and her honor. She could furnish no stronger 
 evidence of her own degeneracy from the spirit 
 and purpose of her Master than resentment 
 of this criticism and refusal to hear this trum- 
 pet call to her highest duty. 
 
II. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SELFHOOD. 
 
 It should occasion no surprise that the accu- 
 mulation and use of wealth by Christians are 
 made the tests of genuine Christianity by so- 
 cial reformers, because these subjects are 
 vitally related to the particular interests which 
 they have at heart. To them this is real and 
 concrete Christianity. With them social bet- 
 terment is inseparably connected with the pos- 
 session of wealth, its absence is invariably con- 
 nected with social degradation and misery. 
 Material prosperity is, and that justly, their 
 test of social improvement. Christianity itself 
 has -taught them this much, as we shall pres- 
 ently see. 
 
 It is small wonder then that schemes of 
 social betterment take the form of appeals to 
 Christians to surrender possession, or to re- 
 strict accumulation, or distribute their capital 
 among the less fortunate members of society. 
 Jesus had not where to lay his head, Paul was 
 poor, the early Christians were poor; Chris- 
 tians to-day, if they would be like their Mas- 
 
 21 
 
22 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ter, must be poor; — such is the reasoning, open 
 or implied, in many of the plans of the Social- 
 ist for the regeneration of society. 
 
 Christians, by virtue of their wealth and cul- 
 ture, are now members of the privileged classes, 
 and use their money and influence for sel- 
 fish ends, and on the side of the world-power, 
 instead of assisting the cause of the poor and 
 for social justice and equal industrial opportu- 
 nity. Such is the arraignment of the modern 
 Christian by the social reformer. 
 
 Society demands a new sacrifice by the 
 church, as proof of her power to save. The pov- 
 erty, the grinding toil, the want of work to 
 the willing hands that make a bitter chance 
 of the poor man's lot, the inequality and 
 injustice in the distribution of the fruits of 
 his toil, and the thousand social and economic 
 evils that render the condition of the poor in- 
 tolerable in modern society, all demand of the 
 disciples of Jesus Christ healing and removal. 
 
 In those very necessities of life where the 
 victims of our present social order are weak, 
 the Christian is strong, where he is ignorant 
 the Christian is wise, where he is an outcast, 
 and dispossessed, the Christian is a son of priv- 
 ilege and heir of all the glories of our Chris- 
 tian civilization. It is thus seriously main- 
 tained that the possession of these privileges 
 
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 23 
 
 which wealth and culture bring in the course 
 of the ages have changed the spirit and pur- 
 pose of the church, and that she is no longer 
 the protector of the weak and redresser of the 
 wrongs of the oppressed. That she uses her 
 wealth mainly for the self-indulgent luxury of 
 her own members and to maintain and per- 
 petuate the privileges of a class. That, in a 
 word, there is complete conformity to the 
 world in the spirit and practice of the church 
 to-day. That there is no perceptible differ- 
 ence in politics, business, or social ambitions 
 between the Christian professor and the man 
 of the world. 
 
 So that self-interest, self-indulgence, self- 
 culture, self-glory, are the ruling instincts of 
 both alike. This is clearly demonstrated, it 
 is maintained, in the eagerness of both for 
 the accumulation of wealth and the selfishness 
 common to both in its expenditure. There is 
 only one way to cure this disease of worldly 
 conformity among Christians; and that is to 
 return to the poverty, the equality, and purity 
 of early Christianity. There is only one way 
 for the church to become again the champion 
 of the weak and dispossessed, and that is for 
 Christians to surrender their privileges in the 
 interests of industrial equality and social 
 brotherhood. 
 
24 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 Brothers, it is said, must be equal, not 
 only in nature, but in opportunity, not only in 
 honor, but in possessions. It is a practical 
 denial of brotherhood for the Christian to 
 possess and enjoy when his social brother is 
 in want and suffering. The Christian has no 
 right to superabundance when his social 
 brother is in want. 
 
 Personal property over which the Christian 
 claims the right of absolute enjoyment and 
 control is a violation of the fundamental idea 
 of Christian brotherhood. It is the source of 
 the social inequalities and injustices of the 
 present shameful condition of modern society. 
 While it obtains in the church, she is false to the 
 spirit of her Master and helpless to accomplish 
 the noble work of social redemption. Such are 
 the candid and extreme views of many who 
 love the church and believe in Jesus Christ as 
 the savior of society. 
 
 To the sympathetic Christian man, moved 
 by the spirit of Jesus, there is a marvellous 
 fascination in the thought of a condition 
 of society where all the brethren are equal in 
 honor and opportunity and possessed of a 
 common measure of prosperity. It appeals 
 alike to the poetic sentiments, and to the 
 pious aspirations of the Christian heart. 
 What could be more in accordance with the 
 
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 25 
 
 divine purpose, it would seem, than the re- 
 moval of all financial and social inequalities 
 among the social brotherhood? What more 
 favorable to a holy life than the removal of all 
 temptations of the spirit by the suppression of 
 personal ambitions and the adoption of a 
 happy equality in the material, intellectual, and 
 moral heritage of the Kingdom of God? 
 
 If, however, we may safely judge concern- 
 ing God's purpose from His action, it is man- 
 ifestly certain that equality either in gifts, 
 graces, or material possessions, never was a 
 part of his plan, in bringing in the Kingdom. 
 If we are to learn anything from Nature as 
 well as history on this point, then the one 
 fact of life, graven deep upon the rocks, 
 painted on all her blossoms, and dyed into her 
 noblest life blood, is the existence of inequal- 
 ity — inequality of faculties, of opportunity, 
 and of character. But out of this inequality 
 springs her infinite variety, marvellous richness, 
 and unfailing resource. And Revelation tells 
 the same story — nowhere common powers and 
 possessions, but everywhere inequality, vari- 
 ety, and ceaseless struggles to obtain personal 
 possessions out of which come the divinest 
 fruits of the spiritual life. 
 
 Much as the Christian idealist could wish 
 to see realized these lofty dreams of social 
 
26 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 equality and common possessions for the broth- 
 erhood, the stern realities of our mundane life 
 compel our thoughts to the more prosaic facts 
 about bread and butter. What stands in the 
 way of a common prosperity is not the un- 
 willingness of the Christian to share his wealth 
 and surrender his privileges, but the laws of 
 nature which govern the production of wealth 
 and the laws of the soul which create per- 
 sonal superiority. 
 
 The conditions which nature has exacted as 
 the price of human prosperity are stern, diffi- 
 cult, and entirely incompatible with ease, in- 
 competence, and Utopian dreams of equality. 
 All schemes, therefore, that involve restriction 
 of powers, surrender of privileges, limitations 
 of accumulated wealth, and the renunciation 
 of the heritage of education and culture on the 
 part of individual Christians, would be un- 
 natural expedients, doomed to disaster by the 
 inexorable laws of the physical and mental life 
 under which we exist. 
 
 It follows that even if it could be shown 
 that the limitation of accumulated wealth 
 and surrender of social privileges on the part 
 of Christians would bring back the pristine 
 purity and noble ideals of the early Chris- 
 tian church, the inalienable rights of Chris- 
 tian personality would still have to be con- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 27 
 
 sidered. It is no light matter, even when 
 considered in the interests of social redemp- 
 tion, to ask the Christian to surrender the 
 principle of private property. Christianity 
 appealed to him at first as to a person. His 
 individual nature, with all his varied qualities 
 of head and heart, all his heritage of race and 
 personal experiences, were involved in the fact 
 of his soul's surrender to Jesus Christ. 
 
 It was no blunder when the first converts 
 to Christianity, like Paul, laid emphatic stress 
 upon selfhood. He gave a ringing, fearless, 
 enunciation of the doctrine of individuality. 
 One soul was worth worlds. 
 
 Christ and the redeemed individual were 
 made to stand out, related to each other, but 
 in splendid isolation from all the rest of the 
 world. The doctrine was fundamental. It 
 involved all the characteristic ideas of Chris- 
 tianity concerning the personality of God and 
 of the regenerated soul, and had in it the 
 promise and potency of a regenerated society. 
 
 All remedies for the diseases of society 
 must sacredly respect this doctrine of selfhood. 
 The Christian man owes no obligation to soci- 
 ety which would violate the sacred rights of his 
 own manhood. Selfhood is the grand initia- 
 tive in morals as well as in economics. It is the 
 creator of all intellectual and spiritual, as well 
 
2S SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 as all material wealth. Christian selfhood is 
 therefore a force to be understood and con- 
 trolled for useful ends, not vilified and de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 Amiel says: "Two tendencies of our epoch 
 are materialism and socialism — each of them 
 ignoring the true value of the human person- 
 ality, and drowning it in the totality of nature 
 and society." Christianity must resist both 
 those tendencies, socialism as much as materi- 
 alism ; for the one that overwhelms personality 
 quenches the vital spark of religion. 
 
 It may be candidly admitted that Christian- 
 ity has over-emphasized the principle of self- 
 hood, and it has become largely egoism in 
 modern church life. The immense strides 
 made by the present generation in the study 
 of social conditions, make the egoism of Chris- 
 tians a glaring inconsistency, a spiritual an- 
 achronism hardly to be tolerated by earnest 
 souls. But we must not tear down the house 
 because the thatch needs mending. Before 
 we consent to the social and spiritual revolu- 
 tion implied in Christian socialism, we must 
 hear what the individual Christian has to say 
 for himself. We must ask what the doctrine of 
 individuality has done for the man and society. 
 For it may be found that the hope of society 
 
THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 29 
 
 even, lies in a redeemed, enriched individual- 
 ity; and, in the homely language of the nurs- 
 ery, our over-eager reformers may be in dan- 
 ger of killing the goose that lays the golden 
 eggs. 
 
III. 
 
 SELFHOOD, THE CREATOR OF MATERIAL 
 WEALTH. 
 
 When Christianity comes to the individual 
 soul it brings the promise of an abundant life. 
 The Christian writers had to create new words 
 to express the new ideas of their gospel of per- 
 sonal endowment. The language of paganism 
 was too poor to furnish expressions, as its re- 
 ligion and philosophy were too poor to furnish 
 ideas for the new doctrine of a redeemed and en- 
 riched personality. The believer in Christ was 
 called into life, grace, virtue, freedom, honor, 
 glory. He was made priest and king; and his 
 submission to Christ as slave in the new King- 
 dom only emphasized more strikingly his free- 
 dom from all servitude of body or mind towards 
 the former tyrants of altar or throne. The 
 pagan mind of the age was dazed with the new 
 ideas of personality. He himself had deified 
 his emperors, but this new faith now deified his 
 slaves. The common attributes of the Chris- 
 tian man gave a more exalted conception of 
 human life than the prerogative of kings. 
 30 
 
CREATOR OF MATERIAL WEALTH. 3 1 
 
 Is it any wonder that the literature of primi- 
 tive Christianity contains so many of the 
 boldest and most masterful expressions of 
 individualism? Is it any wonder that histor- 
 ical Christianity has made its mark in the 
 world mainly by means of this characteristic? 
 Nay, we may go farther, and ask, Is it any 
 wonder that its very weaknesses arise from the 
 over-emphasis of this splendid feature of its 
 life? 
 
 No one who has any knowledge of the 
 early history of the Gospel, will deny that this 
 doctrine of a redeemed, noble, rich, personal 
 life, was the re-creator of modern European 
 society. Out of that corrupt, hopeless, and 
 powerless pagan world a new life sprang, 
 armed for conquest, with a strong arm, a clear 
 brain, and a tender heart. It was seen, not 
 only in the moral purity and sweet content- 
 ment of the individual life, but in the creative 
 energies which affected trade, politics, art, 
 literature, and statesmanship. 
 
 Although Christian Selfhood took many 
 years to mould society, its effects upon 
 the individual were instant and decisive. For 
 all individuals called out of the pagan life by 
 the Gospel the results were the same as on 
 the demoniac healed by Jesus, whose friends 
 saw him sitting clothed and in his right mind. 
 
32 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 This new life, this Christian selfhood, had 
 its natural instincts, and the laws of its future 
 growth as surely implanted by its divine au- 
 thor as the original physical and mental laws 
 of nature. These instincts at once asserted 
 themselves; these laws went instantly into 
 operation. The instinct of self-preservation 
 is not more imperative on all living things than 
 the primal command of the Gospel, "Grow in 
 grace," "Give heed to thyself," "Hold fast 
 the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you 
 free." The Christian's first duty is to himself. 
 It includes his own soul's salvation, growth, 
 and enrichment; his own education, the devel- 
 opment of all his own powers of head and heart, 
 hand, eye, brain, and tongue. 
 
 Whenever the early Christian looked over 
 the record of God's dealings with the church 
 in the Old Testament, he saw that the great 
 and wise leaders set forth for his admiration 
 and imitation were men and women of such 
 large, rich, highly-endowed lives. Abraham, 
 the prince and wealthy man of his age ; David, 
 Isaiah, Daniel, Deborah, Ruth, Esther were 
 all of them either princes, poets, statesmen, or 
 people of wealth and consequence. When the 
 doings of early Christianity took form in a 
 book, the Christian of the Middle Ages saw, and 
 we of modern times see the same general fact 
 
CREATOR OF MATERIAL WEALTH. 33 
 
 only slightly modified by the circumstances of 
 early Gospel times. Paul was the first scholar 
 of his time, and not only an orator but a highly 
 endowed personality. If Peter and John were 
 fishermen, and, in contrast to the academic 
 education of Paul, were unlearned and ignor- 
 ant men, they were as intelligent as the average 
 Greek citizen who judged poems and orations, 
 and voted in the council of his nation though 
 he could not write his name. Apollos was a 
 learned and accomplished rhetorician, Luke 
 was a physician, and Lydia of Thyatira was a 
 rich purple merchant. 
 
 Christians very soon discovered that to know 
 the traditions of their faith and understand 
 the literature of their sacred books was a lib- 
 eral education in itself. And to become par- 
 takers in the high thoughts and noble works 
 of its great missionaries was to raise one's 
 self to eminence in the leadership of the 
 race. A doctrine of poverty and self-lim- 
 itation to such a faith is a gross absurdity and 
 contradiction in terms. Expansion, liberty, 
 endowment, physical, mental, and spiritual, 
 were the primal instincts of the new faith, and 
 the only legitimate outcome of its new laws of 
 life. 
 
 As its doctrines of faith and repentance 
 had purified the heart and spirit of man, so its 
 
34 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ideals of personal excellence inevitably tend- 
 ed to adorn and enrich every phase of his 
 physical and mental life. Christianity has the 
 promise of the life that now is, as well as the 
 life to come. Such a statement can have no 
 meaning unless it includes the discipline and 
 culture of all our powers of body and mind 
 and spirit, and carries with it the fruits of hon- 
 est industry and enlightened enterprise as a 
 personal possession. Poverty is no pet doc- 
 trine of Christianity. There is no recorded 
 beatitude for the pauper. Poverty restricts 
 the natural faculties and represses the aspira- 
 tions of the Christian spirit. 
 
 The social ideal of Christianity does not con- 
 template a condition of tame mediocrity. Of 
 the poor the poet has said 
 
 Chill penury repressed their noble rage 
 And froze the genial current of the soul. 
 
 That is good religion as well as good poetry. 
 The res angusta domi, the harrow of poverty, 
 has gone deep into many a soul. It sours 
 without humbling the spirit. The servile 
 vices of slavery are not more contrary to the 
 spirit of Christianity than the vices of pauper- 
 ism. 
 
 Conformity to worldly ideals, desire for the 
 larger life, its pleasures and ambitions, are 
 not by any means absent from the breast of 
 
CREATOR OF MATERIAL WEALTH. 35 
 
 the poor man. Indeed, there are some forms 
 of worldliness that are more deeply intensified 
 by poverty than by the possession of wealth. 
 The bitterest quarrels over wills occur most 
 frequently where the inheritance is small and 
 the heirs are poor. There is, on the contrary, 
 a certain contempt of what the world can give, 
 a certain lofty scorn of its pretensions, possible 
 only to the man who has always lived in afflu- 
 ence. 
 
 The error in Christian history which made 
 the ascetic and anchorite fashionable, which 
 drove half the church into monasteries and 
 convents, would be repeated in essence in 
 our own day should we restrict the possession 
 of wealth in an attempt to clarify the spirit of 
 worldliness. The outcome of the previous ef- 
 forts was greater luxury, pride, and conformity 
 than the world has ever seen. To-day the richest 
 community on earth is one whose fundamental 
 vow is poverty. We cannot control the re- 
 sistless energies of the human spirit by an 
 external rule so rude as the restriction of its 
 material possessions. 
 
 Christianity during the ages may have made 
 many mistakes in the use of those individual 
 powers, so brought into exercise, in its asser- 
 tion of social privileges and its expenditure 
 of wealth, but they cannot be corrected by 
 
36 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 schemes of socialism and confiscation, which 
 contradict and belie the essential promises and 
 hopes of the Gospel. 
 
 No page of human history is more splendidly 
 beneficent than that which records the story 
 of Christianity's redemption and enrichment 
 of individual lives; and the eye must be blind 
 indeed which fails to see that material pros- 
 perity, freedom, and culture of the individual; 
 the home, and society itself come in the train 
 of this spiritual regeneration of the individual 
 soul. 
 
 But the full force of this principle of in- 
 dividual enrichment cannot be fully felt until 
 we examine its effects upon family life. The 
 family is in reality, a part of the individual. 
 His truest, noblest individuality grows out of 
 and returns into the family. It is the true in- 
 teger and norm of society; and when the 
 Christian religion touches a man's life, its 
 deepest and most lasting benefits reach quickly 
 down into the secret springs of family life. 
 
 Personally the believer becomes intelligent, 
 industrious, and ambitious of attaining all intel- 
 lectual and social advantages which the new 
 life offers him. Physically, as well as morally, 
 he is a new creature. His environment, as 
 well as his heart, is changed. 
 
 He now becomes an important factor in the 
 
CREATOR OF MATERIAL WEALTH. 37 
 
 production of wealth ; most likely a more skilled 
 workman, certainly a more reliable and con- 
 scientious one. He is more careful of his 
 material possessions, more thrifty, while at the 
 same time he consumes, for his own proper 
 purposes, more and better articles of food and 
 clothing. 
 
 He is also an important consideration in 
 the element of supply and demand affecting the 
 markets of the world. His very ideals at once 
 tend to clothe themselves in concrete facts. 
 They have created new wants, so that the re- 
 generative forces of Christianity in one genera- 
 tion tell upon the wealth of the world and the 
 current prices of the market. 
 
 Nay, they reach further — even affecting the 
 plans and ambitions of his life. His new no- 
 tions of life are seen, not only at his table and 
 his recreations, but in his thinking and educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Yet, great as these effects are, they become 
 insignificant compared with the vital changes 
 which affect his family. In the individual 
 there may be instances in which these changes 
 are but slightly apparent. In the families of a 
 generation or two they produce a revolution. 
 
 In relation to the future career of his children 
 the Christian man is not only a new creature, 
 but a new social force. Socially he is the 
 
38 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 creator of Christian states, and of modern civi- 
 lized society. 
 
 It is much for Christianity to have been the 
 conqueror of the leading intellects of ancient 
 and modern Europe and America, but that 
 circumstance is as the small dust of the bal- 
 ance compared with the power she wields as 
 the founder of Christian homes and the direc- 
 tor of Christian education. 
 
 It is the first, as it is the grandest instinct of 
 the new-born soul of the parent to seek the 
 welfare of the child. The salvation of the 
 family and the consecration of the principle of 
 heredity are indeed, as proved by Christian his- 
 tory, as potent factors in the spread of Chris- 
 tian civilization, as the conversion of individ- 
 ual souls. They are, in the Christian temple 
 of life, the lamp whose flame is never allowed 
 to die out. They are, in Christian society, 
 not sporadic changeable influences for good, 
 but the great elemental moral forces, slow, 
 perhaps, but resistless as a glacier — primal also 
 and magnificent. 
 
 We thus see that Christianity introduces us 
 to experiences of life which reach back of in- 
 dividual opinions, and local customs, and the 
 more personal and accidental features of life, 
 and touches natural and primal springs in the 
 human soul. 
 
CREATOR OF MATERIAL WEALTH. 39 
 
 Christianity, from this point of view, is not 
 merely personal belief nor a conventional rite, 
 nor in any sense a something superadded to 
 human nature. It is an appeal to, and a 
 reinforcement of human nature. It is an 
 inspirer of natural faculties, and can play 
 its part most truly when the deep springs 
 of the human soul are opened. It may 
 be, just because of this truth, and as a con- 
 dition of its action as a natural force work- 
 ing in the sphere of natural law, that Chris- 
 tianity also is subject to the universal laws of 
 growth and decay which govern all things 
 that live. 
 
 Everything organic and inorganic has its 
 enemies. Life itself is but a cycle of growth 
 and decay out of which in turn new elements 
 of life are formed. The spiritual life of the soul 
 is no exception to this law. 
 
 Christianity indeed, is itself the creator of 
 virtues which, in their turn, produce wealth and 
 culture and social ambition dangerous to the 
 purity of the faith and the loftiest spiritual 
 ideals. The fruit of faith is virtue, and virtue 
 has a financial value. 
 
 Christianity is therefore a creator of wealth ; 
 but wealth, it is said, or at least its possession by 
 the individual Christian, is the root of all social 
 evil. Is then the spiritual life of the soul in- 
 
40 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 volved in the fatal cycle of universal nature? 
 Must it grow but to decay? 
 
 Do the forces that regenerate the individual 
 work moral decay and industrial confusion? as 
 faith produces virtue, virtue creates wealth, 
 wealth fosters worldly ideals, and so the spirit 
 of religion is poisoned by the noxious weeds 
 which Christianity itself has produced. Chris- 
 tian ideals of manhood result in new ambi- 
 tions for family advancement. This is but 
 another name for worldly conformity, and so 
 the power that ennobles society becomes the 
 power to destroy it. 
 
 How is this to be explained, not to say 
 remedied? Is this then a contradiction? Or 
 is Christianity an evil in its turn? Is it merely 
 another of the forces of nature making music 
 in the spirit to-day to end at last in a wail of 
 despair? Is all effort for betterment doomed, 
 and do our weary feet tread the cycle of 
 growth and decay, to end at last in degenera- 
 tion and perhaps death? 
 
 Instead of such disasters, we claim that 
 this feature of Christianity gives it a place 
 amid the facts of life — it is part of nature. It 
 has its feet on the firm earth of reality. It 
 denies no fact of nature and human life, other- 
 wise proved by the senses and intellect of man. 
 
 Christianity is, above all things, a sane and 
 
CREATOR OF MATERIAL GROWTH. 41 
 
 rational religion. If its head is crowned with 
 the stars its feet are on the common high- 
 ways of man. It does not propose to evade 
 the difficulties that pertain to it, as a part 
 of nature, by an appeal to its spiritual feat- 
 ures. If, as a material force, it creates wealth 
 and ambitions, which in their turn tempt the 
 soul, it is ready to show in what natural 
 ways that same wealth and ambition may also 
 minister to the soul's high aim. 
 
 This ministry is by natural means, though it 
 is claimed that in the process there is divine 
 and spiritual reinforcement of the soul. 
 
 The intelligent Christian sees, therefore, in 
 this struggle not a hopeless conflict of natural 
 forces, but a phase of soul contest towards the 
 purest and highest life. It is but the modern 
 expression of this Apostolic principle: ''There 
 is a law in my members warring against the law 
 of the spirit." 
 
 To-day it is being applied to the accumula- 
 tion and use of wealth as never before in the 
 history of the church of Christ. We have more 
 light because we have more experience. We 
 not only know better what is meant by the 
 "world" and what by the "church," but 
 we know better what money can and what 
 it cannot do. 
 
 We have nothing to gain from exaggeration 
 
42 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 and less still from mere generalities. We must 
 endeavor to see life under normal conditions. 
 We must look into the Christian man's home 
 and into his heart. We must treat him as 
 a brother, and judge him at his best. 
 
 For the very forces under which he is acting, 
 both in business and society, are gener- 
 ated and blessed by the Christian faith, and 
 are to be better understood and more wisely 
 controlled in the interests of a nobler social 
 order. 
 
IV. 
 
 SELFHOOD AND THE INTELLECTUAL 
 PROGRESS OF SOCIETY. 
 
 We have considered the doctrine of Chris- 
 tian selfhood hitherto exclusively from the 
 bearing it has upon the individual and the 
 family. We have seen that salvation includes 
 the development of individual qualities of 
 mind and heart, which are the inalienable priv- 
 ileges of the new life. The vision of such a 
 redeemed life has no horizon; eternity sweeps 
 around it, and the heritage of the past clasps 
 hands with the promise of the future in a 
 divine ministry to its measureless progress. 
 
 We have seen that this faith holds the 
 virtues and energies of the family; it claims 
 an interest in and dominion over heredity and 
 race; it regards the individual as completed 
 only in the family. The promise is to the 
 believer and his children. It lays hold upon 
 the persistent sleepless forces of education and 
 culture. It exalts to a sacred cultus the in- 
 stinct of parenthood, which longs to see the 
 child more wise, more strong, more honored 
 43 
 
44 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 than the parent. Accordingly the Christian 
 owes it to himself and the highest ends of his 
 own selfhood to use all his powers for the ad- 
 vancement of his individual and family life 
 along every avenue of moral, intellectual, and 
 social progress. 
 
 But the case of Christian selfhood does 
 not rest here ; it is vitally related to the fate 
 of society. We candidly acknowledge that 
 society has imperative claims upon the indi- 
 vidual. Our great anxiety is to discover how 
 best those claims can be met. Will it be by 
 impoverishing self and limiting personal pos- 
 sessions; by a doctrine of restriction or of en- 
 largement? The Christian might well yield 
 his fancied liberty and share his possessions 
 and surrender his privileges for an end so noble 
 as a regenerated and enriched social order. 
 But the awful doubt that the sacrifice would 
 be in vain, casts its shadow over his hopes. 
 
 In his eagerness to improve the social condi- 
 tions of the poor, the oppressed, and the dis- 
 possessed classes, the doctrine of self-sacrifice, 
 self-renunciation, and poverty is preached by 
 the reformer with painful obliviousness to the 
 facts of history. 
 
 Is it not a return to the old doctrine of ascet- 
 icism, that virtue consists in denial and self- 
 limitation. As Amiel asks, " Does duty consist 
 
INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 45 
 
 in obeying one's nature, even the best and 
 most spiritual, or in conquering it?" This 
 revival of an exploded heresy is for conquer- 
 ing nature not obeying it. 
 
 On the surface of it, there is much plausi- 
 bility in this dogma of self-repression. 
 
 It looks so pious also. But the wiser sec- 
 ond thought of modern life will show us that 
 duty to one's self, to God, and even to soci- 
 ety demands obedience to the new nature be- 
 gotten in the Christian by the Holy Spirit. 
 To ignore this doctrine of Christian selfhood 
 is really fatal to any improvement of society 
 and to the progress of civilization. 
 
 We believe the first duty of the Christian is 
 to himself. His own spirit, his own business, 
 his own family demand, by imperious injunc- 
 tions of scripture and nature, obedience to the 
 first law of all life, self-preservation, and self- 
 development. His first duty is to grow in 
 grace, in knowledge of life, in experience of 
 heart and head. He can by no process of 
 denial, limitation, or self-sacrifice do as much 
 for the Kingdom of Christ as to prove, that 
 by faith he has earned and entered on the 
 possession of a large inheritance of selfhood. 
 God's great possessions are rich, strong, full- 
 orbed souls. 
 
 His greatest glory is in the development, 
 
46 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 under the leading of His Spirit, of such souls 
 in all ages. His church has always been rich, 
 and the world always blessed in proportion as 
 such souls have appeared in all times and 
 places. Christ came to give us life — and that 
 life abundantly. The inheritance of the Chris- 
 tian is unsearchable riches. Religion is not a 
 state of either spiritual, mental, or material 
 poverty. The God who endowed such large 
 natures as Abraham, Moses, Paul, Milton, 
 Pascal, and Gladstone intended vast personal 
 enrichment of the mind and spirit for all his 
 sons and daughters. 
 
 But a restriction or surrender of the physical 
 conditions of life, out of which grow for any 
 community culture, education, and the "am- 
 ple page of knowledge rich with the spoils 
 of time," is as surely a denial to souls un- 
 born of this ample individual life as if we 
 were to close our colleges, libraries, and mus- 
 eums in obedience to the dictates of an obscur- 
 antist sect. We can not afford to neglect the 
 meaning of richly endowed and developed per- 
 sonalities. 
 
 A great man is God's greatest gift to the 
 world. Greatness is but another name for a 
 rich and varied nature ; achievement is but an- 
 other phase of personal development. The 
 imperishable treasures of civilization are the 
 
INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 47 
 
 blossoming and fruitage of great minds and 
 wills. There is a divine disregard of the fruits 
 of the mediocre life. There is a divine care 
 for the thoughts and deeds of transcendent 
 spirits. 
 
 The names which have moulded the thoughts 
 and actions of the race are numbered almost 
 on the fingers of the hands. Aristotle, Bacon, 
 Abraham, Paul, Jesus, Calvin, Angelo, Ra- 
 phael, Newton, Darwin, Shakespeare, Luther, 
 Goethe, Washington — we might easily give up 
 all the others if we are allowed to retain these. 
 Selfhood in its noblest sense was the first great 
 concern with all these minds and in all these 
 souls. Whether in the path of duty, or the 
 creation of works of the imagination, or the 
 leadership of nations, personal responsibility to 
 the ideal life — the best — is the characteristic 
 and dominant force of the great spirits who 
 have made life worth living for us plain 
 people. 
 
 It is not the creative force of a vague com- 
 munal sympathy which writes The Iliad, or 
 paints the Sistine Madonna, or rears the Par- 
 thenon. Shakespeare did not create his im- 
 mortal characters, nor did Paul write his epis- 
 tles because of a high level of the altruistic 
 spirit, and a general prevalence of good wages 
 in the nation. The artist, poet, and orator, are 
 
48 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 often self-centered, intent on large personal 
 experiences; they are not, professedly, phil- 
 anthropists. The masses and their interests, 
 the social conditions are not greatly in evi- 
 dence with them when intent upon their pro- 
 ducts of the imagination. But where would 
 the priceless heritage of beauty, exalted 
 thought, inspiration in the common round of 
 life, exist to-day, had not these spirits apart 
 poured forth the rich treasures of their indi- 
 viduality? 
 
 The modern individual is in danger of be- 
 ing lost, not only in commerce and trusts and 
 corporations, but among mission boards and 
 societies for philanthropy. Yet all the hope 
 of the salvation of the world lies in the divine 
 forces entrusted by God to the souls of great 
 and good men and women. Personality is 
 the richest and most ultimate elemental force in 
 nature, as well as in the spiritual life. With- 
 out that "everlasting aye" of the individual 
 spirit, — the experience of God in the soul we 
 call conversion, — where were the hope to-day 
 of any betterment of human society? Is there 
 any betterment possible that cannot at last be 
 traced to, and analysed into, an individual ex- 
 perience? 
 
 What was Paul, with that mighty evan- 
 gelistic energy which flowed out of his life, 
 
INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 49 
 
 but a great and overmastering individuality 
 worked upon by the new Spirit of Christ. 
 "I can do all things." ''I am crucified with 
 Christ." "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth 
 in me." Never were such sublime egoisms 
 in all history. This man was first rich, strong, 
 masterful in possession, and had command of 
 all the resources of the mind and spirit, before 
 he could pour out his treasures at the feet of 
 his Master for the regeneration of his fellows. 
 
 Every one possessing the spirit of those 
 great workers, saints, and confessors of the 
 church, feels this divine impulse for personal 
 growth and development of powers, that he 
 may have something to give to his Savior. It is 
 an instinct ; it is an impulse to all high action 
 and heroism of mastery over personal sloth and 
 ignorance. Who can dictate to the soul who 
 first learns Christ what shall be the measure of 
 its development? Who shall say whether this 
 Giotto of the Christian life shall continue to 
 tend sheep upon the mountain side, or go to 
 drink the learning of the ages at the feet of the 
 great masters? 
 
 But education means wealth, therefore to 
 limit wealth means to limit culture. Who will 
 measure the disaster to Christian truth and 
 work, if the bright spirits of those obscure 
 youths, from Luther, the miner's son, to 
 
50 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 Neesima, the Japanese outcast, had been de- 
 nied the fruits of wealth in the great universi- 
 ties of their time? 
 
 I cannot limit for myself, much less for my 
 child, the financial requirements of my age and 
 profession. Twenty-five years ago a youth 
 might fully equip himself for professional ser- 
 vice on half of what the post-graduate and 
 European course of higher instruction demand 
 to-day. It may be the best service I can ren- 
 der to the cause of the kingdom to equip fully 
 and train at vast cost of time and money such 
 a personality. 
 
 In the early days of our religious experience 
 we feel the fire of a great love and we dis- 
 count the acquisitions of the mind. We are 
 ready to deny and limit and restrain ourselves. 
 At such an hour the " self-denying ordinance " 
 of a peculiar community might appear to be no 
 loss. But as the years go by, and forces 
 which make for human enlightenment and the 
 betterment of society become better known, 
 we realize that no power goes so deep or lasts 
 so long as a great and richly endowed person- 
 ality. 
 
 This is the age of authority. Not merely a 
 truth in the abstract, but the personality of 
 him who says it. A word from Frances E. 
 Willard, Lord Kelvin, Clara Barton, or W. E. 
 
INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 51 
 
 Gladstone on their various subjects is listened 
 to by a whole world. If any great task is to 
 be undertaken it can be successfully carried out 
 only by some strong personality. This is the 
 principle always recognized in sending ambassa- 
 dors ; now all service of state or church recog- 
 nizes the same fact. 
 
 Both the Christian church and civic state 
 need to-day, as never before in this realm of 
 social activity, the service of great, strong, 
 richly-endowed personalities. But the volun- 
 tary limitation of wealth recognizes the very 
 opposite principle. Logically it means that 
 suppression of natural gifts, not the develop- 
 ment of those gifts, is the duty of the Christian 
 man. It is laying violent hands upon powers 
 not our own: for ye are not your own, "ye 
 are bought with a price." 
 
 Who can measure the extent and quality of 
 natural gifts in any youth till tested by educa- 
 tion? But no system of training, either in home 
 or in university, could be built upon a basis of 
 doing as little as possible for one's self. It would 
 prove but a "Procrustes bed" for the long- 
 limbed genius as least, and a very fiery oven 
 for burning up the aspirations of all the excep- 
 tionally gifted natures. The gifted souls, who 
 regard material conditions but as accidents 
 of life, the regal choice and buoyant ones, 
 
52 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 would see this brazen dome over their heads 
 instead of the sky. They would be forced to 
 live in a community where a narrow horizon 
 was regarded as better than the wide open 
 vault of heaven, and where more reliance was 
 placed on artificial restraints than upon the 
 free ordering of a redeemed and consecrated 
 life. 
 
V. 
 
 SELFHOOD THE AGENT OF SOCIAL 
 BETTERMENT. 
 
 ' ' The destruction of the poor is his poverty. ' ' 
 These words of the inspired wise man graph- 
 ically describe the sad condition of the sub- 
 merged classes. The real trouble with the 
 great mass which we want to help is their ma- 
 terial, intellectual, and moral poverty. They 
 are as a class weak, ignorant, defective, unfor- 
 tunate, and disinherited. 
 
 No single word can fully describe the hard, 
 cruel lot of the socially degraded inhabitants of 
 a London or a New York or a Chicago. From 
 the respectable and skillful laborer, who 
 complains that his opportunities are unequal, 
 his work uncertain, and his wages inadequate, 
 to the defective and diseased and incapable 
 sufferers from social injustice and industrial 
 evils, there are all classes and conditions of 
 people who need help and justice in the re-ar- 
 rangement of the social order. All who have 
 fallen, whether by their own vices or misfor- 
 tunes, or by the injustice of others, are equally 
 53 
 
54 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 in need. All who are born defective and im- 
 properly equipped for the battle of life; and 
 all who have gone down beneath the fierce 
 blows of an inhuman contest for their daily 
 bread go to make up the melancholy com- 
 pany. 
 
 We ought not, in justice to ourselves, to al- 
 low the anarchistic rant of professional agita- 
 tors, nor the crude economic heresies of some 
 labor leaders, to prejudice us in considering 
 the needs of the socially unfortunate and in- 
 dustrially oppressed. They exist, and what- 
 ever folly has been spoken in their cause they 
 must be helped, for they threaten the very ex- 
 istence of our civilization. 
 
 We may admit that no single institution, 
 or set of forces, no particular laws may be 
 to blame for the present deplorable condi- 
 tion of a large part of society. But surely 
 this condition itself is a fact of vital import- 
 ance to all who love Christ and honor His 
 church, and are loyal to the noble heritage 
 of liberty and right received from the fathers. 
 In the midst of the most splendid achieve- 
 ments of modern science and industry, thou- 
 sands of thousands of our fellow-countrymen 
 have no personal share in the fruits of this 
 harvest. In this age of invention thousands of 
 thousands, and many of these weak women 
 
SOCIAL BETTERMENT. 55 
 
 and helpless children, are the slaves of a hope- 
 less industrial bondage. 
 
 But the young, young children, O my brothers, 
 
 They are weeping bitterly, 
 In the playtime of the others, 
 
 In the country of the free. 
 
 When the most brilliant pageant of modern 
 history passed through the streets of a great 
 European capital ; when the rank and intellect 
 and wealth and culture of one of the mightiest 
 nations on earth, celebrated the jubilee of the 
 most magnificent reign the world has ever seen, 
 it was yet needful to spread a pauper's table, 
 and feed with the bread of charity countless 
 thousands of the citizens of that same rich 
 nation. Thus all that these submerged classes 
 had of the fruits of this splendid era of liberty, 
 wealth, and art, was a dole of charity. ' ' Blessed 
 is he that considereth the poor"; and the 
 blessing of God certainly rests upon the sweet 
 womanly heart who, amid the luxury and 
 splendor of the hour, considered London's 
 poor. 
 
 But the social wounds of the day cannot 
 be healed by charity, nor can the deep dis- 
 content, and real and fancied wrongs of the 
 oppressed and weak and outcast classes be 
 righted by private kindness and munificence. 
 We must approach these men and women as 
 
56 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 brothers and sisters of a common lot. We must 
 look into their case as fellow-citizens of a com- 
 mon country and partakers of a common hope. 
 
 One fact stands out conspicuously in the lurid 
 landscape of social degradation. It is their 
 common poverty. From circumference to 
 centre of this world of woe, they all want 
 something. It is all poverty — poverty of faith, 
 of will, of resource, of physical qualities, of 
 intellectual qualities, of moral qualities. 
 Money is the smallest part of their needs. 
 This want represents the general trouble, but 
 their real wants lie deeper. What do they 
 possess? Misfortune, injustice, sickness, and 
 all but endless toil. They are the great disin- 
 herited. 
 
 If you would lay your hand to the work of 
 help, you will find readily the truth of this 
 statement. Go among them to help in the 
 task of their betterment and you must be the 
 possessor of something. You must be a 
 scholar, or a physician, or a lawyer, or a nurse, 
 or a teacher, or a capitalist, or an artist, or at 
 least a gentleman. They do not need your 
 poverty or ignorance or incapacity : they have 
 more than they need of that. In whatever 
 department of human activity you would ren- 
 der assistance you must yourself be a rich and 
 strong personality; you, yourself, must be a 
 
SOCIAL BETTERMENT. 57 
 
 possessor of something before you can help 
 enrich them. 
 
 The vaunted doctrine of restriction and 
 surrender of self-denial and poverty would be a 
 disaster here. What these people need are 
 educated, rich, strong, self-controlled, and cul- 
 tured Christian men and women. In a word 
 they need capital, the fruits of accumulated 
 wealth. The qualities and possessions which 
 the short-sighted critic of the present order 
 objects to in the Christian are the only reme- 
 dies with which social want and sorrow can be 
 cured. 
 
 Although it has been asserted, with consid- 
 erable appearance of truth, that the Christians 
 of to-day are rich, privileged, and educated 
 out of all sympathy with the sorrows and 
 wrongs of the poor and oppressed, it certainly 
 cannot be said with any degree of truth that 
 the haunts of poverty, vice, and destitution 
 are colonies of Christians. The Christian 
 seems to possess a magic power of social eleva- 
 tion. You cannot keep him down. He is 
 master of social forces. He solves for himself 
 the social problem. Is it not a wonder that 
 the social reformer has not enquired into the 
 secret of this social buoyancy? Is it not be- 
 cause of this doctrine of a strong, rich, self- 
 hood? If this doctrine is denied, or injured 
 
5$ SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 by any false teaching concerning the right of 
 personal property, or education and enlarge- 
 ment of the individual life, will not the very 
 conditions of a regenerated society, material 
 betterment, and the progress of civilization be 
 destroyed ? 
 
 Now within the family of the socially de- 
 graded there is often found marked incapacity, 
 congenital weakness, absence of will-power, 
 and entire want of education for the real busi- 
 ness of life. Heredity which should be an 
 accession of physical energy, skill, and moral 
 resource, is too often a deadly curse of disease 
 and mental infirmity. But in a Christian 
 home these characteristics are all reversed. 
 Here Christianity has raised for herself a fort 
 in the presence of the destructive forces of life, 
 and armed and equipped every life for stern 
 battle. On the material side of life we find 
 industry, thrift, enterprise, and character. 
 The farm yields plenty, the loom sings the song 
 of abundance, the forge sends forth the fire of 
 hope, and commerce spreads her white wings 
 over the sea at the bidding of forces born and 
 fostered in those active educated Christian in- 
 tellects. 
 
 The wealth-producing forces in the bosom 
 of that Christian family are as inevitable and 
 resistless as growth and gravitation. Even in 
 
SOCIAL BETTERMENT. 59 
 
 point of comparison as wealth producers, chil- 
 dren so endowed and reared beat the world on 
 its own chosen ground. Their faith and love 
 have actually gone into the bone and tissue of 
 their bodies. They have clear heads, steady 
 nerves, powers of endurance, and economy of 
 living that carry them far ahead of all competi- 
 tors, weighted as these often are by hereditary 
 taints, loose living, and extravagant expendi- 
 ture. 
 
 But when we add to these qualities, the 
 ideals of life, the moral and spiritual discipline 
 which they have been subjected to, we then 
 can form some idea of the ceaseless upward 
 pressure into the regions of literature, art, 
 music, and fine manners, which is continually 
 acting on those communities, which are influ- 
 enced by the forces of Christianity. Their 
 own virtues will not let them stand still. 
 
 As the fruit of this industry and enter- 
 prise is reaped by the family, the scale of ex- 
 penditure inevitably increases. In dress, in 
 furniture, in service, and finally in residence 
 and equipage, the gradual rise of the family 
 fortune is manifested. Now all those virtues, 
 all those qualities of brain and heart, are pre- 
 cisely what is needed for the redemption of so- 
 ciety. 
 
 Nothing so characterized the condition of 
 
60 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 East London when the social workers first went 
 to carry the promise of a better life to it, as 
 the entire absence of beauty and pleasure. In 
 the vast aggregation of nearly two million 
 souls there was no picture gallery, no library, 
 no elevating amusements, no sweetness, no 
 song, all was a dreary mud flat of stale life 
 and endless grinding toil. 
 
 Contrasted with this gloom the Christian 
 man, in the course of an industrious and suc- 
 cessful life, fills his house with the treasures of 
 art and literature and makes it sweet with 
 music and song. Thus he gives society the 
 surest promise of a power to rescue their 
 depraved and squalid existence from the 
 wretchedness of an unbeautiful life. He adorns 
 his rooms with the choice creations of the 
 painter and sculptor, and articles of virtu fill 
 the nooks and corners, giving evidence of 
 taste and travel and delighting the eye on every 
 hand. 
 
 His children also are taught by the best 
 masters and hear the best interpretations of 
 music and dramatic art. They procure and 
 read the newest literature, fitted as they are 
 for its appreciation by their previous studies in 
 school and college. In all probability their 
 own pastor is the finest interpreter and keenest 
 critic of those works of the imagination, the 
 
SOCIAL BETTERMENT. 6 1 
 
 knowledge of which marks one as a person of 
 taste and education. It will never occur to 
 such a man and such a family that their actions 
 in these particulars are other than highly 
 proper and the inevitable destiny of the mind 
 and spirit under favorable conditions. 
 
 It is significant that the strong religious 
 community of New England, after performing 
 its own proper work as makers of society and 
 governors of the same, blossomed out as men 
 of letters and poets. Still more remarkable to 
 the Christian is the fact that the sacred books 
 of his religion are acknowledged, even by men 
 of the world, to lie at the basis of the literary 
 culture of every modern nation. But only 
 with such an educated taste and disciplined 
 mind can he perceive the place of interest 
 and power which these occupy among the im- 
 mortal products of literary genius 
 
 Amid the many forces which have compelled 
 the attention of thoughtful men to the claims 
 of Christianity, none have been so strong as 
 the example of a refined, educated Chris- 
 tian family, whose chief pleasures lie in the 
 artistic or literary taste of its members, and 
 whose home life was broadened and sweetened 
 by the exercise of those rare gifts of the im- 
 agination. Luther himself was a musician, 
 and claimed that music and song of right be- 
 
62 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 longed to God. "Why should the devil have 
 all the best music?" Many a Christian man 
 has asked the same question again and again, 
 and applied it to all art and literature. 
 
 Certainly not every Christian man who suc- 
 ceeds in life, fills his home with the treasures 
 of art, and fits his family for the apprecia- 
 tion of literature and music, does these things 
 with the purpose of service. But much of 
 the service which Christianity renders to the 
 world through the actions of Christian men is 
 unconscious service. "They builded better 
 than they knew, ' ' is true of individuals and fam- 
 ilies, as it is true of communities and epochs. 
 
 It is enough to say that the person so acting 
 feels in some manner the call to be an exam- 
 ple in all things. To furnish his children with 
 rational interests, to provide them with 
 healthy and sweet amusements, and to link 
 them by all the choicest fascinations of life to 
 home he knows, by instinct, is right; and it is 
 perhaps a recommendation to his virtue that he 
 has unwittingly furnished a genuine example 
 of what Christian forces would do for every 
 class of society if unhindered in their opera- 
 tion. 
 
 At all events, whenever the social worker 
 goes into the dreary regions of the poor, he 
 soon finds that those arts, sciences, and graces 
 
SOCIAL BETTERMENT. 63 
 
 of culture which Christian enterprise and thrift 
 have done so much to create and accumulate, 
 are urgently needed to sweeten and beautify 
 the harsh and squalid places in the life of the 
 poor. The strong, noble life of Christianity 
 is just what the weak, degraded portion of so- 
 ciety needs to-day. Selfhood, with all its 
 rich, personal possessions, all its sweet graces 
 of character and spirit, all its accumulated 
 culture, all its hereditary skill, and moral 
 strength, all its gathered treasures of art and 
 literature and music, all its wisdom of family 
 training and education, — such a selfhood is the 
 only ground of hope for the social and indus- 
 trial, as well as moral betterment of the sub- 
 merged masses of society. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF WEALTH IN EDUCATION 
 AND PHILANTHROPY. 
 
 The greatest service that Christianity can 
 render to-day in the cause of social regenera- 
 tion, lies in the gifts which men of great wealth 
 can render to public institutions of education, 
 art, science, and literature, including schools 
 of technology, and public parks, recreation 
 grounds, and centres of comfort. 
 
 Without doubt, our greatest danger lies in 
 the curse of a materialism, which makes a god 
 of "barren well-being," "the idolatry of the 
 flesh and of the ' I,' of the temporal, and of 
 Mammon." What so certain a corrective of 
 this tendency as the inculcation in the minds 
 of our sons and daughters of reverence for the 
 works of the spirit and the imagination, the 
 divine forces in nature, and the stately march 
 of mind in history? 
 
 Our American life needs more than the de- 
 velopment of its material powers in mines and 
 lumber and products of the soil and the loom: 
 it needs a native science, a native art, and a 
 6 4 
 
WEALTH IN EDUCATION. 65 
 
 native literature. If patriotism lies close to 
 true religion, we must hasten to produce our 
 own treasures of the mind and spirit before our 
 love of country has the deathless charm, the 
 holy fascination, which clings to classic lands 
 of story and song. 
 
 Before even the sacred feet of Jesus conse- 
 crated the' 'Holy Land" it was consecrated 
 to heroism by Joshua, Elijah, and the Mac- 
 cabees. Homer and Miltiades made Greece 
 grand ; the martyrs and confessors made 
 Rome holy. Our pilgrims to-day visit the 
 shrines where prophets of the new era of 
 freedom suffered and saw visions, spots made 
 classic and dear to the heart by poets, temples 
 filled with the products of the genius and toil 
 of painter and sculptor, and no class of the 
 people feels more fully the soul satisfaction of 
 these treasures of fame than the Christian pub- 
 lic. All aims of life, all expenditures of 
 money, all patronage of art, and the schools 
 which will foster and produce these things, are 
 consistent with the best in Christianity. 
 
 These works can not be forced ; they are the 
 outgrowth of a rich soil, they require time, 
 many of the best of them are produced in pov- 
 erty and privation. Still, in every country 
 where they have come to maturity, previous 
 years of toil and accumulation of wealth have 
 
66 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 elapsed; education in literature, science, and 
 art, has flourished; freedom has made some 
 progress; men of leisure have worked them- 
 selves, or men of wealth have endowed others 
 with the conditions of working without care. 
 The imperious cravings of the body have first 
 been satisfied, and the intellect and spirit un- 
 trammeled have ministered to life in those 
 unperishable interests which ennoble humanity. 
 In the creation and endowment of institutions 
 of this order, the present century has witnessed 
 an exhibition of Christian beneficence beyond 
 parallel in the history of the world.* We 
 must gather up into a shining galaxy the 
 names of the nobles and merchant princes of 
 Venice, Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, London, 
 and Edinburgh, like Lorenzo the magnificent, 
 Wolsey, Richelieu, Nassau, Heriot, and a 
 thousand others, builders of cathedrals, pat- 
 rons of art, founders of universities and 
 libraries, museums and hospitals, before we 
 can match the opulent benefactions of the pre- 
 
 *The report of gifts and bequests for public purposes 
 in the United States in sums of $5,000 or more during 
 1896, as compiled by Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia, ex- 
 ceeds $17,000,000. This includes large gifts made up by 
 the combination of smaller ones, but not the ordinary 
 denominational contributions for educational and benev- 
 olent purposes nor state and municipal appropriations 
 to public institutions. It may be called the voluntary 
 tax of the well-to-do toward the endowment of education 
 and charity. In 1895 the total amount recorded, was 
 $32,000,000. 
 
WEALTH IN EDUCATION. 67 
 
 sent era to education, missions, science, art, 
 city adornment, and the alleviation of distress. 
 These gifts are counted in one city of the 
 West alone as running into many millions 
 of dollars. There are several new and striking 
 features in this modern princely expenditure. 
 Less of it is given for the building of great 
 churches or the private glory of the benefac- 
 tor in tombs and memorial structures ; more of 
 it is in the immediate direction of civic enrich- 
 ment and for the advancement and enjoyment 
 of the people. Public parks and museums 
 and art galleries and libraries form a not in- 
 considerable part of these gifts. But it is in 
 the way of great schools of the higher educa- 
 tion — the academy, the college, and the univer- 
 sity — that the most remarkable of these bene- 
 factions are exhibited. Characteristic of the age 
 have been the princely endowments of great in- 
 stitutions of technology for the express purpose 
 of connecting the finest results of modern sci- 
 entific research and polite learning with the 
 daily life and practical needs of the working 
 classes. The old classic curriculum, still the 
 backbone of all the higher learning, has been 
 nobly sustained — indeed, in the older founda- 
 tions of the East, and in the newer of the 
 West it has secured new life and favor under 
 this revival of generosity. But the people, as 
 
6S SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 represented in the art gallery, museum, public 
 park, institutions of technology, and social set- 
 tlements, have been the chief benefactors. 
 
 Who have given this wealth? The mass of 
 this modern munificence has been Christian in 
 the strict sense of that term. In the case of 
 considerable gifts like museums and parks, the 
 object has been purely of a civic and educa- 
 tional sort ; but in the case of the great major- 
 ity of libraries, hospitals, institutes of technol- 
 ogy, academies, colleges, and universities, and 
 social work, the givers are Christians, and their 
 benefactions expressly made in the name of 
 Christianity and for Christian service through 
 these channels. 
 
 We have not mentioned here the ordinary 
 currents of Christian beneficence, such as mis- 
 sionary work at home and abroad, endow- 
 ment of theological seminaries and charitable 
 work strictly so-called; but he has a very 
 superficial knowledge of the Christian life who 
 fails to remember that a very large share of 
 Christian means is to-day being expended on 
 these and kindred claims of the church. 
 
 It is true that a very large part of this 
 money to-day, as in the past, has been contri- 
 buted by the poor. "The widow's mite," 
 the poor man "out of his poverty," have con- 
 tributed a large part to the consecrated reve- 
 
WEALTH IN EDUCATION. 69 
 
 nues which have carried forward the work of 
 Christ in all ages. But it would be folly to 
 deny that many of our church buildings, much 
 of our missionary, and especially our educa- 
 tional, work, would be impossible without the 
 large benefactions of people of means. 
 
 On the other hand, it is evident that those 
 great foundations which give a home to Art, 
 Literature, Science, and Education, mak- 
 ing original investigation possible, endowing 
 professional instruction, and dealing in a suc- 
 cessful way with the problems of our great 
 cities, have been in the past, and are now, 
 the creation of large wealth. Some Christians 
 of to-day have recognized this fact so distinctly 
 that they have dedicated great fortunes to 
 special causes like colleges and academies in 
 the West, and give on principle to institutions 
 which are certain to endure through many gen- 
 erations. 
 
 Should the grateful student desire to pay 
 for his university education at its full money 
 value it would require a small fortune to sat- 
 isfy the debt. All states and nations recog- 
 nize this fact, and have obtained endow- 
 ments either from the wealth of princes or 
 the taxes of a province. The fee is no pay- 
 ment, only an acknowledgment of gratitude, 
 on the part of the recipient, of the accumu- 
 
70 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 lated wealth and learning of the people of 
 past ages. 
 
 In all this great and wide field of service the 
 Christian finds his grandest opportunity for 
 the use of the means which great success has 
 placed at his command. Many of the most 
 conscientious give on an ascending scale and 
 on principle, as an evidence of gratitude to 
 God for material prosperity. This is not only 
 an evidence of common sense, but a clear fol- 
 lowing of the apostle's precept to "lay by as 
 the Lord has prospered us. ' ' 
 
 The great army of Christian people whom 
 the Lord has so prospered, in all ages, would 
 be much puzzled at many of the new doc- 
 trines concerning money, which are abroad 
 to-day. From the days of Joseph of Arama- 
 thea to our own, the Gurneys, the Buxtons, 
 the Baxters, the Coats, the Spicers of Great 
 Britain, and the Hardies, the Slaters, the 
 Dodges, and the Swetts of America, have 
 looked upon their wealth as consecrated, in 
 large measure, to this special form of service. 
 
 And they, with such noble princes, as John 
 of Gaunt, David of Scotland, the leaders of 
 the Commonwealth of England, and the Cov- 
 enant of Scotland, with Lady Huntington, 
 Lord Overton, and many more, would be 
 much astonished to learn that the service which 
 
WEALTH IN EDUCATION. 71 
 
 reflected glory on their age and untold benefit 
 upon generations following, was no true Chris- 
 tian service at all. If then, the Christian man 
 of to-day is to follow in such godly and noble 
 footsteps, he must attend to business and 
 regard his financial success as prosperity from 
 the Lord. 
 
 We may be prejudiced in this matter by 
 much of the glaring inconsistency of Christian 
 men in their modern business methods. We 
 may be confused by the conspicuous eagerness 
 of all classes of Christian people for material 
 prosperity. We may be amazed by the fact 
 that many Christians who are so prospered of 
 the Lord neither "lay by" nor give under im- 
 pulse ; but we are to remember that we live in 
 a country and an age when material interests 
 are the engrossing concern, and when even our 
 Christian teachers are sorely tempted to make 
 material comfort the only test of success in 
 life. 
 
 Thus arise on the one hand, within the 
 church, critics of the social order who deny to 
 Christians the right to the accumulation of such 
 wealth at all or to the cherishing of such am- 
 bitions. The Psalmist's description of the man 
 that feareth the Lord goes for nothing with 
 them. It looks like a promise from another 
 religion: "His seed shall be mighty upon 
 
72 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 earth. . . . Wealth and riches shall be in his 
 house." If they had lived in the days of Ruth, 
 they would have been ashamed of Boaz be- 
 cause he was a man of wealth. Wealth, 
 worth, and valor, or any conspicuous trait or 
 possession that gives individuality, power, 
 distinction, and constitutes a man sheik, chief, 
 patron, or benefactor, is in the estimation of 
 this class of thinkers a mark of vanity and in- 
 consistent with the spirit of Christ. These 
 regard the subject from the religious viewing- 
 point. 
 
 On the other hand, there are those who on 
 economic grounds consider the possession of 
 great wealth by one person as in itself an evi- 
 dence of the robbery of some other. Crude as 
 this theory of wealth is, it becomes a powerful 
 argument in the hands of a man of the world 
 exposing the inconsistencies of Christians. 
 
 Christians have, by their own profession, 
 renounced the world ; what right have they to 
 the possession of wealth and worldly distinc- 
 tion? Thus they argue. This tone gets into 
 conversation, this criticism becomes the vogue, 
 and it seems at first sight pious to agree with 
 it. But amid all this pretension to a superior 
 piety on the one hand, or to a one-sided polit- 
 ical economy on the other, we may safely 
 take our position on the ground of the historic 
 
WEALTH IN EDUCATION. 73 
 
 examples of the men of wealth and distinction, 
 who have been the protectors of the poor, the 
 patrons of art and science, the founders of 
 schools, and the promoters of missions in every 
 age of the church's history. 
 
VII. 
 
 CHRISTIAN SELFHOOD DISTINGUISHED FROM 
 WORLDLY CONFORMITY. 
 
 In considering the operation of Christian 
 virtues, both in the individual heart and the 
 family life and through society, in the former 
 chapters, we have dealt with actions and ideals 
 which may reasonably be regarded as the nor- 
 mal Christian course of life. 
 
 We have not considered gross acts of world- 
 liness, nor ideals that every one regards as 
 apostacy from the spirit and purpose of Christ. 
 We have done so to avoid exceptions, mon- 
 strosities, and all peculiarities of locality, age, 
 and personal idiosyncracy. We have been 
 interested in the "specimen of general value." 
 
 Some may think we have allowed too much 
 of the spirit and ways of the world to belong 
 to Christian society, and so begged the whole 
 question, or at least acknowledged that his- 
 torical Christianity had failed to stem the 
 tide of worldly conformity. The latter part of 
 this criticism, we indeed allow, has consider- 
 able force. This is the whole ground and 
 74 
 
WORLDLY CONFORMITY. 75 
 
 reason of the present writing. We have 
 sought, in leading up to this position, how- 
 ever, to show that this conformity is not the 
 result of special acts of sin done apart from 
 the normal life, or particular forms of pleasure, 
 amusements, occupations, or avocations, in 
 themselves inconsistent. Nor does it lie in 
 exalted rank, genius, or great wealth. 
 
 A paradox seems to face us here ; for every 
 observer of the progress of society sees in 
 the Christian community which accumulates 
 wealth, and rises to distinction in arts, letters, 
 and civics, a gradual conformity to ideals of 
 life and practices in personal and social con- 
 duct that must be classed as worldly. 
 
 This is a social disaster. The patriot who 
 hailed in the robust manliness of the first 
 Christian's faith, the promise of a new social 
 order is disappointed ; and the Christian thinker 
 who saw in that same shining devotion of the 
 soul to Christ the power of a new type of man- 
 hood is sad at heart, the prophet of God who 
 thought he saw the first rays of the new heaven 
 and the new earth dawning turns away and 
 weeps. No disaster is so terrible to a sympa- 
 thetic heart as the loss of hope concerning an 
 expected salvation of the people: "We hoped 
 that it was he which should redeem Israel." 
 The modern thinker and lover of men, who 
 
j6 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 has seen system after system of truth tried, 
 and expedient after expedient of reform fail, 
 sees the gradual dominance of the worldly 
 spirit over Christianity with keen disappoint- 
 ment, for it began so favorably and promised 
 so much. But experience has taught him to 
 be more cautious than former thinkers, in his 
 opinions as to the real source of the evil and 
 the remedy that will cure it. 
 
 Could we say that it is wrong for a Christian 
 man to desire personal excellence, either in 
 intelligence or character, wrong for him to 
 seek the education of his family in all graces 
 and refinements of manner, as well as in the 
 schools, and the studios; wrong for him to 
 possess property ; wrong to order his household 
 affairs beyond the bare sustenance of the 
 body, — then we could provide a cure, and one 
 not impossible of adoption. For such ideas have 
 prevailed in many instances in the past; and 
 sumptuary and socialistic schemes have given 
 temporary satisfaction and hope to many earn- 
 est souls. 
 
 It would thus be quite possible for us to 
 meet the emergency by obedience to a pre- 
 scribed form of dress, the practice and avoid- 
 ance of certain amusements and recreations, 
 and the adoption of particular rules regarding 
 the use and ownership of wealth. But we 
 
WORLD LT CONFORMITY. 77 
 
 have seen that conformity does not consist in 
 external actions; that it cannot be overcome 
 by a new rule, but by a new spirit. We have 
 seen that it grows in soil prepared by Christian 
 virtue; that it is a persistent, natural, and 
 eternal tendency in human nature; and must 
 therefore be met by forces as persistent, natu- 
 ral, and eternal, acting on that same nature. 
 
 Conformity is the crossing of the invisible 
 line which separates the Christian virtue of self- 
 improvement from the vice of self-seeking. It 
 turns the evidences of God's favor into op- 
 portunities of self-indulgence and pride. It 
 is a spirit, a tendency, a change of emphasis, 
 an ideal of life produced by gradual, subtle, 
 invisible changes in the attitude of our spirit 
 towards the world in manners, condition, and 
 opportunities of the whole life. It is another 
 instance of the universal law of all things that 
 live to lose their pristine purity, — "to vaunt 
 in their youthful sap at height decrease and 
 wear their brave state out of memory." 
 
 We have forgotten that this law applies to 
 the soul; that it moves with a resistless ele- 
 mental force over the life of nations, and that 
 it can be met, if at all, only by laws of equal 
 persistence and range. It is another illustra- 
 tion of the great spiritual truth that "the eter- 
 nal life must be eternally reconquered." 
 
78 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 History severely teaches us that all arti- 
 ficial remedies for this great evil in the hu- 
 man heart and society are worse than vain. 
 They invite reaction, they end in disaster, and 
 spread a deeper and more lasting moral ruin 
 around us. Such attempts have brought con- 
 tempt upon the strenuous souls who have seen 
 more in life than personal pleasure. They 
 have set back the hands of the clock of Chris- 
 tian progress, and given nature an opportunity 
 to revenge herself on us for our folly. 
 
 In our age the relation of natural forces to 
 virtue and social life is better known and more 
 considered by Christian people — Nature — with 
 the capital letter indeed — is baptized into the 
 Christian church. We are therefore in a posi- 
 tion to estimate the natural forces that from 
 generation to generation act upon Christian 
 people, as they act upon all others. 
 
 We remember that the very purpose of 
 grace is to change, correct, improve, or regen- 
 erate nature. But it is now recognized that 
 such operations are slow, subject still to law, 
 and will revert to old crudities and degenera- 
 tions the moment the improving impulse is 
 removed. Nay, the encouraging fact is dis- 
 covered that Nature wants to improve rather 
 than otherwise. All her myriad seeds are 
 seeking favorable soil, and ready to take ad- 
 
WORLDLT CON FORM ITT. 79 
 
 vantage of every friendly push or suggestion 
 that comes along. We know indeed that 
 every improvement in flower and animal, in 
 mind and morals, has come about in just this 
 way. The overwhelming power of little 
 things has been forced upon us at the point 
 of the bayonet of science. What worms have 
 done to plow and fertilize the soil of the whole 
 earth, the elemental changes produced by 
 forces all but invisible and creatures appar- 
 ently insignificant, are the commonplaces of 
 modern science. 
 
 The analogies of nature teach us that regen- 
 erative and purifying energies in the moral 
 world must act largely on the same princi- 
 ples. And most certainly all those forces of 
 Christianity which act principally on genera- 
 tions of people through long periods of his- 
 tory, come under the operation of the same 
 general laws as lie at the basis of continued 
 improvement in nature. Under this light the 
 conversion of the individual soul is the first 
 conscious impulse towards the higher life, 
 both for the individual and society; but it is 
 not an unrelated event apart from the spirit- 
 ual series which has been going on in Christian 
 society from the beginning. 
 
 And its reality is evidenced by the propaga- 
 tion of a new life to others. Such a force will 
 
So SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 take advantage of every aid or suggestion of 
 betterment for its individual and social im- 
 provement. It is entirely beyond our province 
 to discuss the theology of this doctrine, — as to 
 whether this impulse is supernatural and a 
 communication of divine energy. Our object 
 is simply to show that being here, as the 
 unique and magnificent contribution of Chris- 
 tianity to the regeneration of the moral life of 
 the world, its final fruits and crowning tri- 
 umphs over society, come by the operation of 
 natural law in the sphere of nature. 
 
 Its operations are not helped, but frus- 
 trated, by any and all expedients which rule it 
 out of nature, which make it exceptional, 
 local, accidental, and subject to arbitrary laws 
 of life. 
 
 Christianity is thus a part of Nature in the 
 broadest sense of that term. It is the crown 
 and glory of those inspiring mental and spirit- 
 ual forces which save men. It comes upon 
 our life with imperial commands, with gracious 
 and resistless persuasions. It leaves no part 
 untouched and suffers no rival claimant to 
 power. 
 
 If, then, it is to continue to operate on soci- 
 ety as it operates on the individual soul, and 
 if it is to act with the full force of this ele- 
 mental moral energy on the man of education 
 
WORLDLY CONFORMITT. Si 
 
 and wealth to-day, as it acted on the first 
 Christians, we must find some explanation of 
 the Christian life which recognizes and gives 
 full force to this universal principle in our re- 
 ligion. We must find an ideal of society 
 which puts in its right place this primary in- 
 stinct of the Christian to self-improvement ; 
 which makes him a powerful factor in the pro- 
 duction of wealth ; which gives him social 
 buoyancy and forces him into eminence; 
 which bestows such qualities of mind and heart 
 as make him a moulder and leader in the best 
 society; which creates even the noblest forms 
 of art and literature, and impels him to lay the 
 foundations of strong, free, great nations and, 
 in a word, confers on him this victorious ele- 
 ment of life which conquers the world on it 
 own battle-ground. 
 
VIII. 
 
 PERSONAL SERVICE THE NEW IDEAL OF 
 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 It is easy to criticise, and break down: it 
 is difficult to build up and create. We have 
 no inclination, as the habit of some is (following 
 the example of Carlyle), "to rave at everything 
 and propose nothing." 
 
 We must find a principle of life in relation 
 to the wealth of the Christian which shall 
 recognize all the facts of nature and religion 
 enumerated and illustrated in these pages. It 
 must first of all recognize the inviolability of 
 personal liberty and the personal ownership 
 of property. It must, on the other hand, be 
 able to deal with this persistent and unsleep- 
 ing tendency of human nature to deteriorate 
 and lose the pristine simplicity and love and 
 zeal of the highest. It must be an honest 
 effort to cure a real trouble in the social life of 
 Christian peoples, more dangerous in propor- 
 tion as they are more prosperous, old, and set- 
 tled. It must not cripple the Christian's ener- 
 gies nor handicap his functions as a wealth 
 82 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. S3 
 
 producer. It must not build an artificial 
 Chinese wall about his life, nor make his man- 
 ner of life peculiar, local, or unnatural. It 
 must not interfere with his political or civil 
 liberty, nor with his duty to himself in the 
 development of every power of the body or 
 the mind in the large outlook of modern Chris- 
 tian culture or service. And it may be added 
 that it ought not tend to create a special sect 
 or church out of the people who adopt it as an 
 ideal of life. 
 
 We want in fact, a novus or do secular um, 
 but not in the spirit of Separatists from the 
 old order, in the material and political sphere 
 of our life. The new order of the ages may 
 be found to be nothing very new after all: 
 indeed, to us, it comes with all the more as- 
 surance of value as something which has been 
 tried, on a limited field at least, and proved so 
 far, successful. 
 
 Experienced and practical minds have a de- 
 cided distrust of social and religious panaceas 
 which are announced as absolutely sure cures, 
 hitherto unheard-of truths. Truths which 
 the Christian church has for two millenniums 
 entirely overlooked, and are only now discov- 
 ered by the new social prophets, are on that 
 ground alone to be received with distrust and 
 applied with great caution. 
 
84 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 The remedy proposed in these pages has 
 no such peculiar claims to our attention. It 
 is not a mystery hidden in the ages, but a 
 principle of life and action which all truly spir- 
 itual souls have recognized and acted upon. 
 
 It is the use of wealth, not its limitation, 
 which alone can furnish such a principle and 
 ideal for the new order of the ages. This 
 principle has been recognized and acted upon 
 by all those individuals and families whose 
 life work and character have already been re- 
 ferred to as examples of the wise and virtuous 
 stewards of wealth. In every case where 
 Christian families are to-day exercising large 
 influence for good order, honor, purity, be- 
 nevolence, and philanthropy, this has been the 
 principle of their family life. It is simply be- 
 cause these families have been so few and ex- 
 ceptional to the great mass of our Christian 
 people that this principle has not been felt, as 
 it should have been, on a national or universal 
 scale. 
 
 We believe the time has fully come for its 
 universal acknowledgment and adoption by 
 advanced Christian thinkers and workers, as 
 the fundamental principle in their social life. 
 To this end, it must be fully set forth in all its 
 wide scope and deep reach, through every 
 form of modern thought and activity. 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 85 
 
 What hope have we, that a theory of life, 
 long known but not universally adopted, will 
 become a new force to-day? What reason have 
 we for believing that the Christian church will 
 fall in love with this ideal now, if she has not 
 done so before? There are several reasons, in 
 the trend of modern Christian thought and 
 the change of emphasis on ideals of social ob- 
 ligation, which warrant the belief that we are 
 entering upon a new era of Christian character 
 and service. There is a growing conviction 
 in the breasts of earnest Christian men that, 
 through the long years of heroism and self-sac- 
 rifice in the history of European and Ameri- 
 can Christianity, we have won only the out- 
 ward framework of liberty. We have secured 
 only the political form. The essential spirit 
 of liberty in the mastery of our own evil tend- 
 encies we have not yet won. 
 
 The very successes of the church have, as 
 time passed by, confounded her with the forces 
 of the world. And consequently new ideals 
 of life must be adopted to infuse new spirit 
 and purpose into her thought and action in 
 the future. 
 
 This is a return to first principles, but 
 the human mind, in returning to first princi- 
 ples either in art, politics, or religion, never 
 goes back with the same mental or moral 
 
S6 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 equipment with which the first disciples 
 adopted those principles. This, in reality, is 
 our ground of hope. We do not to-day advise 
 a return to first principles and to the simplicity 
 of the Gospel, ignorant of those truths con- 
 cerning human nature, history, and economics 
 which characterized the first disciples. They 
 had the future, like a trackless forest, all before 
 them. We have returned upon their footsteps 
 to find this forest a cultivated country, full of 
 cities and busy with mills and mines, and all 
 the wonders of art and literature. We have, 
 above all, the incomparable object-lessons of 
 two thousand years of the operation of Chris- 
 tian ideas upon the spiritual, artistic, political, 
 and social forces of human nature. 
 
 We do not possess, it is true, the fiery zeal 
 and the splendid enthusiasm of those first 
 disciples, who, under the expectation of an im- 
 mediate return of the Lord Jesus and a final 
 consummation of all things, were looking and 
 working for a new heaven and a new earth. 
 Our hearts are sobered by, and our minds 
 opened to, the larger and more mysterious 
 facts of life, which, under the long discipline 
 of the Holy Spirit for nigh two thousand 
 years, have been impressed upon us. 
 
 We have seen that it is apparently God's 
 purpose that even the Kingdom of Christ shall 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 87 
 
 come under the dominion of those laws of the 
 universal life which require ages and millen- 
 niums for their complete fulfillment. We 
 have discerned the reach and power of hered- 
 ity and the force of example and custom 
 handed down from generation to generation. 
 We do not readily to-day build false hopes of 
 a speedy success even in good works. We 
 rely very largely on education, or processes of 
 development and betterment, that go on from 
 one generation of the godly to another. 
 
 To return therefore, to the first principles 
 of our faith, does not mean retrogression. 
 It is not the action of the sectarian vision- 
 ary dazzled with the brightness of the past 
 but blinded to the lessons of the present. It 
 is the action of the scholar and believer, who 
 knows and loves the great ideals of the past, 
 but who brings to that past also the treasures 
 of experience and discipline of the present. 
 This is the condition of all true human prog- 
 ress, civil and religious. 
 
 We are in a state of mind to-day when 
 no lesson in church or state is being lost upon 
 us. We are impatient of idiosyncracies, of 
 half-truths, of paths that lead nowhere, of 
 grinding cycles of meaningless misery to soci- 
 ety. We love realities. We prefer to be 
 doing something rather than dreaming about 
 
88 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 doing it. If we have not the lofty visions, 
 the purifying spiritual enthusiasm of the early 
 days, we have the caution and practicality 
 come of long experience ; and we share equally 
 with them the ultimate conviction that life 
 is vain if we cannot redeem men from the 
 power of sin, and lift society into a loftier 
 plane of living, both in its material and moral 
 experiences. 
 
 However much thinking men may differ 
 as to methods in the accomplishment of the 
 great work of the Kingdom, both as regards 
 the evangelization of the unbelieving world 
 or the Christian culture of the professors of 
 faith in Christ, there is no difference in the 
 facts of history brought up to date. We 
 know what truths have been emphasized, and 
 what ideals of life have been set before men 
 during those years of Christian instruction in 
 the past ; and we know just what the results are. 
 
 No one regards the present situation as satis- 
 factory. There is the most ominous agreement 
 on this point, both by those who love the 
 church and by those who hate her. The one 
 part may say it is because the true doctrine of 
 Christianity has not been accepted and acted 
 upon by the people, and the other part may 
 say the true doctrine has not been preached, 
 but both agree that Europe and America, in 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 89 
 
 the nineteenth century of our Lord, does not 
 present that face of heavenly splendor, that 
 front of power, and that heart unspotted from 
 the world, which the Founder's character and 
 its first disciples' faith and heroism led us to 
 expect. 
 
 Another class smile cynically at this heated 
 discussion,- believing that both these disputants 
 are missing the great lessons of the past and 
 the real requirements of the present. They 
 think that all altruistic plans for social better- 
 ment are doomed to failure. But because cer- 
 tain lines of action and systems of doctrine 
 have not produced upon the world all that 
 their first sanguine promoters expected, it by 
 no means follows that those doctrines were 
 false or those methods foolish. They may 
 have been better for their own age than other 
 ideas and methods regarded with more favor 
 to-day. On the other hand, doctrines and 
 methods that saved and inspired the lives of 
 men of the past may have become powerless 
 to accomplish the same class or extent of 
 results in the present. 
 
 Most certainly the failures to produce the 
 best results on any universal scale justify the 
 reconsideration of old ideas and methods in 
 the light of all the history and experiences of 
 the Church of Christ. This thought, it will 
 
90 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 be observed, is based upon the fact that the 
 history and experience of the church comes 
 from the instruction and guidance of the Holy 
 Spirit. If this position is not granted to us 
 by all Christian thinkers, we are paralyzed in 
 our efforts for improvement. But we believe 
 none will deny it. It is an evidence of 
 the continued life and power of the church to 
 be able to adapt her methods and to better 
 understand her doctrines in the new light 
 which is continually breaking out of the Word 
 of God and the book of history. 
 
 Because of this hopeful principle of Christian 
 progress many conservative thinkers to-day 
 are looking back to the life of the Founder of 
 our faith for their guidance and inspiration. 
 They are coming again to His teachings and 
 the teaching of His apostles and first disciples 
 with new difficulties and new questions, but 
 at the same time with fresh enlightenment and 
 fresh ideals growing out of the mistakes as well 
 as the victories of the past. 
 
 Our age is one of reconstruction in church 
 and state: new methods are demanded, new 
 responsibilities are being felt, and new mean- 
 ing and forces are being added to old doc- 
 trines. There never was a time of change 
 when so many indications of success were 
 present or so many reasons for hope pressed 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 9 1 
 
 themselves upon earnest, open-eyed workers 
 and thinkers. 
 
 During the now closing century the revo- 
 lution in European politics, the appearance 
 and growth of the Western Republic, the 
 changes in modern life and thought produced 
 by steam, electricity, and the mechanical in- 
 ventions, the spread of popular education, and 
 the marked increase in the material prosperity 
 of the common people have all helped to cre- 
 ate new ideas about and impose new duties 
 upon wealth. 
 
 New social claims and physical wants have 
 arisen in places long deprived and unregard- 
 ed. New compunctions have awakened in 
 the breasts of possessors. New avenues of 
 service have been opened or at least seized for 
 the first time. New powers of appreciation of 
 the social and economic bearing of Christian 
 doctrine have been developed by the teachings 
 of the church in the minds of the general public. 
 
 The church herself is braced to a higher 
 conception of duty and to a diviner life by the 
 spread of her own principles. No one speaks 
 with contempt to-day of men of another class 
 or persuasion, and all genuine souls are eager 
 to find a solution of the problem of life which 
 will give play to the redeemed powers of man- 
 hood in a regenerated social order. 
 
IX. 
 
 MODERN LESSONS ON CHRISTIANITY AND 
 WEALTH. 
 
 It may be well to state in brief those truths 
 the church has learned about herself in her 
 relations to wealth and social life, and what 
 both Christianity and the world have also dis- 
 covered as to the social function and real value 
 of material prosperity. 
 
 We practical moderns have lost somewhat 
 of the poetry of life, but we have gained in 
 clearness and consequent sincerity. It is a 
 process often necessary before we can gain the 
 true basis of a new poetry. The church is 
 more sincere about herself to-day, she is get- 
 ting back to a love of reality and simplicity, 
 and is feeling already the breath of a divine 
 inspiration. This comes of a new sense of the 
 value of the character and teaching of her 
 divine Founder. Especially has interest deep- 
 ened by considering the practical bearing of 
 His example upon our thought and action in 
 our present earthly career. 
 
 During the first few centuries of our era 
 92 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 93 
 
 Christianity was under the sway of a one- 
 sided doctrine of separation. The crystal pur- 
 ity of her conception of personal holiness, in 
 contrast with the dark facts of the heathen life 
 out of which she was saved, created a distinct 
 separation in character. The new ideals of 
 the divine Kingdom in contrast with the cru- 
 elty and oppression of the kings and conquer- 
 ors of those unsettled times bred a sacred pas- 
 sion of hatred for tyranny disguised as govern- 
 ments of the world. Those forms of life and 
 powers of government which Christianity found 
 to be her deadly enemies she naturally thought 
 of as doomed to certain destruction. 
 
 In her teaching she gradually separated the 
 sacred from the secular. "Man was broken 
 up into parts an outer and inner." "The 
 world into earth and heaven, hell and para- 
 dise." "This was done it is true in order to 
 construct man more profoundly and truly. 
 But Christianity has not digested this powerful 
 leaven. She has not yet conquered her true 
 humanity; she is still living under the anti- 
 nomy of sin and grace, of here below and there 
 above. She has not penetrated into the whole 
 heart of Jesus." These words from one of 
 the profoundest spiritual thinkers of our age 
 show just how such a nature as Amiel's, always 
 yearning after the "totality of being," was 
 
94 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 affected by this one-sided phase of Christian 
 teaching. 
 
 Thus for ages the mighty spiritual forces 
 generated by the Gospel were used up by be- 
 lievers largely in the effort to save their own 
 souls from the city of destruction. The world 
 and its material interests had nothing for 
 them ; left to brood and dream if of a mystical 
 turn of mind, to scheme and plot for a spirit- 
 ual dominion over the government of this 
 world if of an active and ambitious genius. 
 
 At last a religious life became possible only 
 by physical separation from the world of 
 men, and the burial of the body in the liv- 
 ing tomb of cell or cave. This phase of ex- 
 aggeration might have passed away, or been 
 sloughed off for a more rational doctrine, if 
 the error had touched only the lives of nuns 
 and monks, anchorites and recluses. But it 
 affected the thinking and action of the com- 
 mon people also. They were compelled by 
 the exigencies of their labor for daily bread 
 to reconcile a doctrine which degraded the 
 physical nature with the imperious cravings 
 of that same nature supposedly implanted by 
 the Creator. They could not retire from the 
 world, they had still to work in the open field 
 of public life. 
 
 But among those common men also great 
 
CHRISTIANITT AND WEALTH. 95 
 
 spiritual forces had been awakened, espe- 
 cially at the period of the Reformation in 
 Europe. They were still under the dominion 
 of "here and there," and "outer and inner," 
 "a secular and a sacred." Individualism had 
 done its best for them under this scheme of life, 
 and perhaps also its worst. They were saved, 
 their life was in heaven ; religiously they were a 
 separate people; they sought a new country. 
 But materially, politically, and as the founders 
 of families, the creators of states and nations, 
 they were yet living on earth. They were 
 bound by its laws, statute and natural, they 
 were influenced by material interests and by 
 human ambitions perhaps more than they 
 thought. 
 
 Gradually, insidiously, but with fatal thor- 
 oughness, their religious experience, prevented 
 from becoming a universal principle of hu- 
 man action, became a mere form and fash- 
 ion of the soul, often bereft of reality, always 
 shorn of power. It was found impossible 
 to continue to attach the energies and in- 
 terests of the new-born Christian soul to a 
 domain of life limited in time, place, and sub- 
 ject. Religion, largely bereft of the tran- 
 scendent interest of present reality, was rele- 
 gated to churches, priests, and dying people. 
 The courage, ambition, talent, industrial en- 
 
96 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ergies of men, professedly Christian, were 
 given to government, business, science, art, 
 and letters. Wealth production, as the com- 
 mon measure of all forms of activity, claimed 
 its leading share of those powers, and Chris- 
 tian men manifested the qualities of their new 
 life by activities along those lines thus opened 
 up to them by the social conditions and reli- 
 gious ideas of their age. Balzac, with a certain 
 contempt for the thrifty virtues of the Hugue- 
 nots, points out that all Protestants are char- 
 acterized by this same trait. They profess 
 great unworldliness, but are the great traders 
 and manufacturers and money-getters of the 
 world. 
 
 Thus the intellectual and spiritual powers 
 of man awakened by Christianity, perverted 
 by a one-sided doctrine of life, are diverted 
 with resistless energy into channels of money- 
 making, which in turn destroy the original 
 spiritual conception of life revealed by Chris- 
 tianity. Such facts as these writ large on the 
 page of history teach us just exactly what the 
 church can do in the old way; not, we must 
 be allowed to say, with the "old Gospel," but 
 with the old way of interpreting the Gospel, 
 especially in its relation to our present life. 
 
 The method which resulted, in a few cen- 
 turies, in the conformity of the church to the 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 97 
 
 world and the conversion of the divine regen- 
 erative energies of Christianity into engines of 
 personal ambition and wealth production must 
 necessarily be defective. Some saving truth 
 has been missed, some governing corrective 
 idea has been lost sight of. The emphasis 
 upon the salvation of the individual soul, upon 
 its eternal destiny, upon the transcendent 
 importance of the spiritual, has been overdone. 
 
 The mutual and corrective truth that the 
 secular is sacred, that "the there is here," that 
 "heaven is in the heart," and "the Kingdom 
 of God within us," must be recognized by 
 the church. We know that as we cannot fly 
 with one wing, we cannot be saved by a one- 
 sided Christian faith and life. The individual 
 is the source but not the end of power, the 
 seed of a divine Kingdom is in his heart, but 
 it must be sown in the soil of the present life 
 and gather its larger nature from all influences 
 of earth and sky. The social salvation is an 
 integral part of the coming of the Kingdom. 
 Unless the individual lives to save society he 
 can not live unto the larger life of the Spirit 
 of Christ. 
 
 Nay, society will turn her forces of evil upon 
 his selfish spirituality and destroy it root and 
 branch. Christian thinkers have learned that 
 a doctrine of personal salvation unrelated to 
 
98 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 society and mundane existence is helpless to 
 redeem the world for Christ and to keep the 
 church unspotted from the world. They know 
 that to awaken in the soul of man the ideals 
 and energies which the Gospel has power to 
 do, as far as the development and culture of 
 the individual is concerned, and throw him 
 upon life without the restraint of the social 
 obligations immediately growing out of the 
 possession of these powers, is to result finally 
 in the deterioration and the corruption of the 
 church. And the hopeless, sickening sense 
 of such a cycle of victory and defeat, returning 
 upon all Christian effort, brings despair to the 
 hearts of the lovers of humanity. They are 
 convinced, therefore, that these two thousand 
 years are sufficient to have taught the universal 
 church the necessity of a new method, com- 
 prehensive of all life, and embracing the use 
 of every energy in the regenerated soul. 
 
 Side by side with this lesson, and throwing 
 much light upon it, have also arisen new ideas 
 concerning the obligations and functions of 
 wealth. We know better to-day, Christian 
 men, and men of the world also, just what 
 wealth can and can not do. Paradoxical as it 
 may seem, wealth is both exalted and abased 
 to-day in the estimation of thoughtful men. 
 Used to benefit others — wisely, as administered 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 99 
 
 by men of great experience in affairs — it has 
 all but unlimited powers of good ; used to 
 gratify appetites and personal luxury, it is as 
 the apples of Sodom, dust and ashes between 
 the teeth. Used to equip, educate, refine, 
 enlarge by travel and broader social service, it 
 is the handmaid of all noble spirits, the 
 means of cultivating the peculiar grace for 
 which princes and lords of old were counted 
 excellent and generous. Used to aggrandize 
 family greed, ambition, and trusts, it is an in- 
 strument of tyranny and ominous to the safety 
 of society. 
 
 As long as the passion of wealth getting is 
 on the man these great ideas of the age may 
 be absent or feeble, but sooner or later the 
 lessons of the common experience come home 
 to him. "Is the game worth the candle?" Is 
 all this worry, toil, and defeat of the higher 
 end of life wise, in view of the limited power 
 of money at best? These reflections come with 
 redoubled force when it is rather a question 
 of heaping up more than one can use. 
 
 The Christian man must be even more deep- 
 ly impressed with these facts touching the 
 moral value of wealth. The initial impulse 
 of an earnest, ambitious, industrious life may 
 have carried him far; he pauses to contrast 
 the ideals with which he started out, with the 
 
ioo SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ideals and purposes now governing his life. 
 He may have missed the personal culture 
 largely because he has confounded the means 
 with the end. He finds himself in possession, 
 but not capable of enjoyment. He has no 
 time and no inclination for pleasures and ser- 
 vices which he had hoped would be greatly 
 possible by means of the larger wealth. His 
 own inability to obtain the best, and the re- 
 quirements of less fortunate lives to share his 
 abundance, come with combined force upon 
 his spirit. Or even if he has carried a finely 
 balanced life all along, knows himself the 
 larger, deeper life of the spirit, has kept in 
 touch with the widening, uplifting breath of 
 the modern intellect in science, art, and litera- 
 ture, — such a man, in the new atmosphere of 
 social obligations, will best read his larger op- 
 portunities, for he knows what faith and love, 
 education and refinement can accomplish. 
 
 We are thus facing the problem of wealth 
 as no other period of Christian history has 
 been able to do. We are face to face with its 
 powers and its limitations, its obligations and 
 its rights, with an equipment of experience and 
 thought which no other time possessed. The 
 Christians are possessors of the wealth and 
 power, the science and the art, the education 
 
CHRISTIANITY AND WEALTH. 101 
 
 and freedom which it is proposed to use for 
 higher ends. This puts us in a very different 
 position from those who are discussing a sub- 
 ject of which they know nothing, and dispos- 
 ing of means which they never created. 
 
 This wealth has been made under Christian 
 forms of government and rules of social and 
 business life which have grown up in so-called 
 Christian lands. In close daily touch with the 
 industry and skill of the workman and the 
 enterprise and genius of the manager and 
 inventor have been the knowledge, the pray- 
 ers, the hopes, and impulses of Christian lives. 
 We can not say let us wait till we form a 
 Christian Society before we can tell what the 
 effect of wealth upon Christians will be. We 
 know now. We have seen its best and its 
 worst under the old ideals. We are not satis- 
 fied. It has not done as much for us as it 
 promised at starting out. It has not done as 
 much for our families and our nation as we 
 have just reason to believe it can do. We 
 are conscious of needs it has never ministered 
 to and conditions from which it has not saved 
 us nor ours. These thoughts deepen in the 
 hearts of Christian men; they are in the air; 
 the age is favorable, on account of them, to new 
 ideals of the use and power of wealth. We go 
 
102 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 back, therefore, to some first principles of our 
 Christian faith, sobered, matured, and, we 
 believe, chastened in heart and mind ; for we 
 know that on this great experiment of a spirit- 
 ual life utilizing the physical forces of wealth 
 in the creation of a new social order rests the 
 hopes of mankind. 
 
X. 
 
 SIMPLICITY IN LIVING. 
 
 Under the general subject of the "New 
 Ideal of Life" as manifested in the Christian 
 use of wealth, let us proceed to illustrate the 
 largeness and sweep of the thought. 
 
 If it controls us only at odd times, in our 
 more reflective moments, under special im- 
 pulses, wrought up feelings, and in hours of 
 worship; but is not comprehensive, active, 
 when we are oblivious of the motive of our 
 action; pulsing through life like our heart's 
 blood, it is an inadequate remedy for the evils 
 we desire to cure. 
 
 It remains then for us to show how perva- 
 sively, how universally, how simply, and how 
 naturally it will act throughout all our life. 
 
 One of the happiest and most helpful re- 
 sults of such an ideal would be in the return 
 to greater simplicity in our manner of living. 
 This is entirely different from the ascetic habit. 
 Simplicity is not exclusive of elegance, but of 
 luxury. Vulgar people spend large sums to 
 furnish their houses in imitation of the fashion- 
 103 
 
104 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 able rich, with the result described by David 
 Lyall in the house of Ann Laidlaw, " discrim- 
 inating people wondered how it was possible 
 to gather so much that was hideous and costly 
 in one place." As the expensive is not neces- 
 sarily beautiful, the simple is not necessarily 
 ugly. 
 
 An elegant simplicity is characteristic of 
 good breeding, gentle manners, and old family 
 traditions. It may, in a sort, be considered 
 the real basis of gentility. The rich parvenu 
 thinks otherwise, and makes up in lavish dis- 
 play and ostentatious luxury what he lacks 
 in family portraits and fine old silver. But 
 the real gentleman is known as much by the 
 simplicity of his habits as by the castle and the 
 crest. 
 
 This is not a mere fashion but a principle of 
 life. Its tap root is in the very deepest soil 
 of life. It concerns what a man eats, drinks, 
 wears, surrounds himself with. It is in a 
 manner the physical basis of life — the clothing 
 of his soul. It is eminently personal and often 
 presents to the youth the first battle-ground 
 between the spirit and the flesh. From the 
 standpoint of taste alone some people choose a 
 simple and unostentatious manner of life; but 
 if we are to insist upon it as a principle for the 
 guidance of Christian society we must show 
 
SIMPLICITY IN LIVING. 105 
 
 that it is other and greater than a matter of 
 taste. 
 
 What spiritual principle is involved? This 
 namely, that to the Christian wealth, on its 
 material side even, is sacred. That food, drink, 
 raiment, furniture, are all for use, not gratifi- 
 cation. That they have a sacred ministry, in- 
 timately related both to manners and to morals. 
 That waste, luxury, intemperance, display, 
 selfish excessive expenditures are as much sins 
 in the eye of God as dishonesty and lying. 
 This is what Jesus indicated when, at the 
 close of the miracle of feeding the multitude, 
 he said, "Gather up the fragments that remain 
 that nothing be lost." The material basis of 
 life, on this ground alone, is sacred, and we in- 
 dicate in this close personal action our sense of 
 responsibility for its use. We bring those 
 preeminently personal and physical functions 
 of life and social habits under the sway of a 
 principle, not of mere self-denial but of admin- 
 istration. 
 
 Assuredly those personal habits lie at the 
 basis of all morals, all gentlehood, all useful- 
 ness. I can hardly reconcile the thought of a 
 Christian man being a gross eater. Yet I have 
 known many such. Of Christian people, 
 lavish, luxurious, and even intemperate, how 
 are we to speak? It is largely because the 
 
106 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 divine grace of simplicity has not been taught ; 
 because the physical basis of spirituality has 
 not been insisted upon. "Your bodies," says 
 the Apostle, "are to be the temple of the Holy 
 Ghost," they are to be washed with pure 
 water. Revelling and riotous living were the 
 characteristics of the heathen : simplicity and 
 sobriety of manners were to be the marks of 
 Christians. Nothing said here should be con- 
 strued as finical or small criticism of the 
 minor morals and refined habits of life either 
 in food, dress, or equipage. These things 
 may be elegant and choice, and yet be per- 
 fectly consistent with this principle of simpli- 
 city. We are not arguing for a deal table, a 
 sanded floor, and unwashed waiters. 
 
 We have already insisted that any remedy 
 for conformity to the world which implies in- 
 terference with personal liberty in the ordering 
 of expenditures is as vicious as it is vain. The 
 principle of simplicity can be seen illustrated 
 alike in the homes of the great and the hum- 
 ble. One feature is common to both : a cer- 
 tain intelligence and refinement, a way of look- 
 ing at possessions as means to an end, and a 
 sense of responsibility for the uses to which 
 they put even the material things of the world. 
 The adoption of the simple aphorism, that 
 "we eat to live but do not live to eat," would 
 
SIMPLICITY IN LIVING. 107 
 
 save many of us from deep pitfalls that swal- 
 low up health and morals. Simplicity is not 
 only consistent with dainty habits of life, it 
 nourishes and cherishes them as Christian 
 graces. These are a sweet and gracious fruit 
 of Christian civilization and peculiarly treasured 
 by cultured women. Refined and dainty man- 
 ners at table have always been the marks of a 
 true lady. Chaucer, in his sweet picture of 
 the Prioresse, gives this note: 
 
 "At mete was she wel ytaughte withalle; 
 She lette no morsel from her lippes falle." 
 
 But what a gross inconsistency that, with 
 such clean sweet personal habits, women should 
 have tolerated the Sybaritic luxury, and the 
 orgies of drinking common to fashionable so- 
 ciety for five hundred years. We have noth- 
 ing to say against flowers, crystal, silver, and 
 spotless damask, pink teas, and dainty lunch- 
 eons; nothing to say against banquets of State 
 or club dinners; for this is not a plea for a 
 sumptuary law. Our claim is that a simple 
 manner of life is consistent with gentlehood 
 and refinement, that it fosters instead of de- 
 stroying them. Our contention is that excess, 
 intemperance, luxury, display, is not only vul- 
 gar but sinful ; that it is a denial of the sacred- 
 ness of personal bodily functions, and an 
 
Io8 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 adoption, at the very basis of individual con- 
 duct, of heathen ideas of life. 
 
 But can it be reasonably maintained that the 
 general habits of Christians, as far as relate to 
 the table, dress, furniture, social expenditures, 
 and amusements, are excessive, often actually 
 intemperate, and entirely quite too luxurious 
 for those making their profession? Let it be 
 distinctly understood here that by "their pro- 
 fession" is not meant a special profession of 
 self-denial, limitation, and renunciation of the 
 "good things" of this life, but simply a pro- 
 fession to regard the spiritual life as nobler 
 than the life of the flesh, and that all which 
 goes to make up gentleness, purity, strength 
 in body and soul is their sworn friend, and all 
 that renders them vulgar, selfish, and weak is 
 their sworn foe. In this sense it can be said, in 
 all charity, that our present Christian society is 
 luxurious and excessive, and regards the pos- 
 session of wealth as a means to personal grati- 
 fication rather than a power to reach a higher 
 life. 
 
 The condition of woman, it is said, is the 
 measure of any civilization, her personal habits 
 the best test of social refinement anywhere, but 
 it is true also that her social ambitions are the 
 best indications of the prevalence or absence 
 of conformity to the world. It is to satisfy 
 
SIMPLICITY IN LIVING. 109 
 
 her social ambitions that many men in business 
 and professional life, live beyond their means 
 and scatter both fortune and life in the pro- 
 cess. Woman is a creature of stronger moral 
 fiber, of purer life, of greater courage in the 
 time of sickness and disaster than man. But 
 she is more dependent on surroundings when 
 fortune smiles. Her social graces thrive best 
 in the sunshine, and she expands and rises in 
 conscious power when wealth sets her on high. 
 
 Thus the first signs of growing social am- 
 bitions appear among the female members of 
 the family. The daughters have been sent 
 to fashionable schools, they have had a little 
 fortune spent upon thern for music and other 
 accomplishments. They must now have some 
 stage worthy of their powers, natural and 
 acquired. What is wealth if it can not win 
 social recognition? What is education if it can 
 not secure fashionable friends? What is busi- 
 ness success if it does not procure a social 
 throne? For these purposes, with the attend- 
 ant expenses of house, carriage, furniture, 
 dress, clubs, and sports, the great body of 
 wealth in our Christian homes is lavished. 
 
 Under these ideals the thought of respon- 
 sibility and sacred use of wealth, even in its 
 bearing on their own life, is absent or unheeded. 
 The wealth is theirs ; what they require there- 
 
HO SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 fore to minister to their own appetites or 
 pride or ambition appears the first and ex- 
 clusive purpose of expenditure. Its use for 
 higher ends is a side issue. They do not say 
 "my duty is to be educated, refined, accom- 
 plished, useful, for the purpose of illustrating in 
 my own life the beauty and nobleness of 
 Christ ; for the purpose of making my home 
 happy and a centre of comfort and pleasure to 
 father, mother, and friend." They do not see 
 that qualities of heart and head, combined 
 with education and refinement, are not only 
 the only things worth having in themselves, 
 but are passports and creators of all the best 
 society. 
 
 The simplicity which characterizes the spir- 
 itual nature under this sense of obligation is 
 the evidence of real worth and the ground of 
 social recognition, while it breaks no fortunes 
 and shortens no lives. 
 
 The luxury and extravagance which mark 
 the carnal nature and selfish liver is the evi- 
 dence of pretense and the precursor of social 
 failure, while it often disrupts business and 
 hastens death. 
 
 The thoughtful Christian husband and wife 
 must consider the effect of an ideal like this 
 in the early years of their domestic history. 
 The children will become largely what they 
 
SIMPLICITY IN LIVING. Ill 
 
 are habituated to. They are the creatures 
 of atmosphere, habitat, and example. If 
 they find evidences of a refined and enlight- 
 ened simplicity in the home, in most cases 
 they will honor it by imitation. The tradi- 
 tions of the family for such gentlehood and 
 simplicity in conduct will become part of their 
 heritage, and the vices of a materialistic selfish 
 life will be repugnant to them. Even with 
 the utmost care in education and the most 
 consistent personal example, children will 
 sometimes show the animal traits and the most 
 selfish disposition. No more deadly poison 
 can enter the blood of a child than the selfish- 
 ness which leads him to regard the parents' 
 wealth as a fortunate chance for his own indul- 
 gence or ambition. This is that evil which has 
 its ripe fruit in the "post-obits" of fashionable 
 young roues, and the deep dishonor of wait- 
 ing for the old man's death. It is a sure sign 
 of a corrupt society, and has been rightly re- 
 garded by observers of manners like Thackeray 
 as the final dishonor of an abandoned life. 
 
 One other consideration affects the conduct 
 of the more thoughtful people to-day in the 
 manner of their living. It is the contrast pre- 
 sented by the abundant and luxurious tables 
 of the wealthy, and the hunger and destitution 
 in many homes of the poor. It is no suflfi- 
 
112 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 cient answer to say that much of this is due 
 to vice on the part of the poor themselves, 
 misfortunes or economic conditions over which 
 the rich have, as individuals, no control. Nor 
 is it material to say that much of the expendi- 
 ture of the rich in dress, table, and equipage, 
 goes to benefit trade. The truth is, that be- 
 hind economic considerations is the fact of a 
 common humanity, and when large classes of 
 people go hungry and naked, no man of fine 
 feelings will banquet to surfeit, or dress like 
 Beau Brummell. The action too strongly re- 
 sembles the parable of the rich man and Laz- 
 arus. 
 
 The Christian man, especially, will recog- 
 nize this as a matter of spiritual discretion. 
 He is forced by his better nature to find a 
 principle of action which, without involving 
 his domestic and business life in the evils of 
 communism or indiscriminate charity, will at 
 least save him from the charge of a heartless 
 disregard of the sufferings of the unfortunate. 
 He instinctively perceives that simplicity in 
 eating and dressing are the first marks of such 
 sympathy, and the people will perceive that 
 the man who can so order his life has laid hold 
 of a principle dealing with the use of wealth 
 which renders him a promoter of general well 
 being. 
 
SIMPLICITY IN LIVING. 113 
 
 In view of the newer political economy, it 
 is true that a thrift and simplicity which re- 
 sults in hoarding, and limiting of proper ex- 
 penditures for the table, clothing, and furni- 
 ture, are a great disaster both to the rich and 
 poor. But the cultured, responsible Christian 
 man who has adopted the rule of simplicity 
 will never commit this mistake. In his house 
 no domestic will ever need to complain of the 
 "long prayers and short suppers." His char- 
 acter can never be summed up in the pithy 
 proverb, "greedy as godly." He will be a 
 man to whom the simplicity of Jesus has be- 
 come real and the spiritual uses of material 
 things has been revealed — one to whom life, 
 on its physical side even, furnishes the vantage 
 ground of high character and great usefulness. 
 "Plain living and high thinking" will not 
 mean sordid ways and an excuse for avarice, 
 but a larger, purer family and personal ideal 
 of life, and opportunity for spiritual influence. 
 A knowledge of the ministry of things, a mas- 
 tery over the qualities of things, and a divine 
 purpose in the use of things, are what may be 
 hoped for from the simpler manner of life. 
 Nearer the heart of Jesus, nearer the throb- 
 bing pulse of humanity, nearer the beauty of 
 nature we get, the simpler we become in our 
 manner of living. 
 
XI. 
 
 EDUCATION AND FAMILY TRAINING. 
 
 The family (the true integer of society), the 
 power of heredity, the influence of family tra- 
 ditions, and the promise of God to bless our 
 children, should be the four-square foundation 
 on which to build Christian society to-day. 
 
 Christians commence family life with gra- 
 cious and unselfish feelings in their own hearts, 
 which they never dream of organizing into 
 principles of family education. And they are 
 surprised and disappointed when the chil- 
 dren refuse to accept the spiritual ideals of 
 life and the unselfish service of humanity 
 which warmed their own hearts when young. 
 We train our children for the professions with 
 elaborate care on lines which long experience 
 have proved perfectly adapted for the end in 
 view. We leave the ideal of life largely to 
 chance. 
 
 These two thousand years of a Christian 
 
 gospel have not yet yielded us a science of 
 
 family training and Christian education fitted 
 
 to impress our own children with the preemi- 
 
 n 4 
 
EDUCATION AND FAMILY TRAINING. 115 
 
 nent superiority of the spiritual ideal and prac- 
 tical method of life possessed by the Founder 
 of our Faith. We have not seriously thought 
 Christian education and family training with 
 such ends in view possible. 
 
 Accordingly the spiritual force which we 
 gain in one generation we lose in another. We 
 do not think it strange, even, that the child 
 of devout parents should "cast in his lot 
 with the evildoers." Mrs. Humphrey Ward, 
 in her latest delineation of English society, 
 makes the only son of a tender, spiritual, 
 devotee mother a rake and rebel against all 
 law and decency. In religion we have almost 
 altogether elected to fight the battle against 
 the world, the flesh, and the devil without the 
 aid of the hereditary principle and forgetting 
 the divine promise concerning training and 
 education. We have handed over these forces 
 to the enemy, and he has used them with cruel 
 thoroughness against our dearest interests. 
 
 Our openly avowed purpose in education 
 has been to obtain for our children a good 
 settlement in life. A "good settlement" has 
 come to mean almost exclusively a "good 
 financial settlement." Education has been 
 controlled almost entirely by this idea; train- 
 ing in the home, when given at all, has been 
 toward this object. And now we are surprised 
 
Il6 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 and chagrined that our children are more ma- 
 terialistic than we are ourselves. 
 
 The recipients of our hero-worship, whom 
 we have belauded in orations, held up as ex- 
 amples in the pulpits, mentioned with rev- 
 erence at our own tables, and praised in biog- 
 raphies are millionaires and boss politicians. 
 ''Business success," ''getting on," "making 
 money," are the characteristic phrases of our 
 nineteenth century civilization. 
 
 Our youth want to "get through" college, 
 they do not want to be educated. In some 
 cases, in our great cities, where the fever has 
 entered the blood with greatest virulence, sons 
 and daughters of wealthy Christian parents 
 have less regard for a university training than 
 the children of European peasants. Even 
 those who do go to college are consumed 
 with eagerness to get done with their studies 
 that they may go to money making. This is 
 eating our corn in the green ear — poisoning 
 the very fountain of the intellectual life at its 
 source. Even for the purpose of wealth pro- 
 duction this is suicidal, while for the ends of 
 a higher civilization and a spiritual ideal of life 
 it is altogether fatal. 
 
 Something vital is wanting here. Evidently 
 the absence of correct and systematic instruc- 
 tion by parents concerning the use of wealth. 
 
EDUCATION AND FAMILY TRAINING. 117 
 
 What is society the better for the finan- 
 cial success of this man if his wealth is to 
 be made only a vantage ground for a suc- 
 ceeding generation of grasping, materialistic 
 children? The first effect of easy circum- 
 stances in any home should be relief from 
 anxiety about the world. It should mean to 
 the children the direction of the mind and 
 heart, without distraction, to the mental and 
 spiritual equipment of life, so that when their 
 call to public duty comes the state and church 
 should get their best. 
 
 It is by the operation of this principle that 
 the artist, scientist, and literary worker is re- 
 lieved, either by private munificence or pub- 
 lic endowment, from productive toil in the 
 early period of his life, and trained to the ex- 
 ercise of his highest powers. But the youth 
 with the materialistic conception of life re- 
 nounces his advantages, "sells his birthright 
 for a mess of pottage," and the second gener- 
 ation of Christians lose all their spiritual ad- 
 vantages from the rise in life won by their 
 parents. Indeed, they have deteriorated ; for 
 the money of the first generation was tempered 
 by the warm impulses and kindly faith of the 
 parents and some restraint of a spiritual kind 
 was placed upon its use. But in the hands of 
 the second generation, which has rejected the 
 
nS SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 spiritual ideal of its fathers, and appreciates 
 only the base residue of their worldly success, 
 money becomes an engine of evil, destructive 
 of the best in the man and in society. 
 
 A clear grasp of these moral uses of wealth, 
 as related to the training and education of 
 children, would greatly help to solve this prob- 
 lem of conformity to the world in our very 
 homes. Christian parents must be led to 
 see that the power of money in certain most 
 vital directions is limited. They must be 
 taught anew the meaning of our Savior's 
 words, "a man's life consisteth not in the 
 abundance of the things which he possesseth." 
 The main purpose of wealth is to educate 
 and equip the young people for service. If 
 they are so educated and so trained that 
 all the powers of mind and heart are in normal, 
 healthy action, they are on the high road to 
 success. Success is not a return upon the old 
 road the parents have gone, and added wealth 
 is not the only end for an educated Christian 
 youth. The very possession of wealth by 
 parents should be a divine call to the children 
 for a different kind of service. They have 
 thus become, as it were, hostages to God for 
 the execution of a high treaty in the interests 
 of a more spiritual and enlightened life and 
 a larger service for the needy and unfortunate. 
 
EDUCATION AND FAMILY TRAINING. no. 
 
 Educational life at school and college must 
 be regarded with greater pleasure and inter- 
 est by the students. It is at present regarded 
 too often as a time of restraint and depri- 
 vation. This fever of materialism must be 
 got out of the blood of our youth, and the 
 calmness, repose, elevation of manner, and 
 love of study for its own sake, which belong 
 to the healthy blood of noble youth, be in- 
 jected in its place. Children must be taught 
 that under no normal conditions of life, if they 
 will only look at education from the right 
 viewing point, will they ever be so happy and 
 so honorable as when students. They must 
 be taught the secret of enjoying the present, 
 carpe diem with a new significance. 
 
 It is not because my boy may be a great 
 statesman or a successful merchant that I love 
 him, nor because my daughter may marry a 
 millionaire that I love her. I love them for 
 themselves, not for what they may achieve or 
 obtain in the future. I am in no hurry to see 
 them graduate. My money, won by honest 
 toil, is now being used for a divine purpose 
 in their education. This is, in itself, if not an 
 ultimate fact, yet quite ultimate enough to 
 mark an era in life and produce enjoyment. 
 Why should they not look at the wealth of 
 their home in the same way? 
 
120 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 When fitly educated, it is quite possible — 
 in many cases very desirable — that the boy 
 should follow his father's business or pro- 
 fessional career. It is possible, also, that a 
 prolonged university training may not be 
 necessary or desirable. This does not in any 
 way alter the ideas concerning the use of wealth 
 which such a boy ought to be taught. An 
 education fitted to his calling and genius is the 
 best for him. His business may be as much 
 a trust as the artistic gift. His professional 
 service may be as much a consecration of his 
 energies as if he went forth to minister in a 
 foreign land. 
 
 But if no such lofty ideas of responsibility 
 come to the children of wealthy homes, they 
 are in a worse condition, as far as the spir- 
 itual objects of life are concerned, than their 
 parents. Life with them has entered the 
 weary, dreary, monotony of materialism. 
 "They make money to buy land to feed hogs, 
 to make more money to buy more land to feed 
 more hogs, to make still more money," and 
 so on ad infinitum^ till existence is a burden 
 and life is shorn of its glory. 
 
 Worldly conformity has no more constant 
 stream feeding its bitter waters than the ma- 
 terialism of the children of well-to-do parents. 
 This supply is constant, partly because of the 
 
EDUCATION AND FAMILY TRAINING. 1 21 
 
 ignorance, partly because of the folly of Chris- 
 tian people. When we forget our own early 
 ideals, our faith and hope of larger service for 
 Christ and men, in the vanity of later success, 
 the children born into our homes can see the 
 present selfishness and worldly manners — they 
 ctin not perceive the original impulses. This 
 is our folly. We expect them to take up into 
 their life ideas to which we attained by sweat 
 and blood. We forget that our success has 
 rendered them susceptible to new influences 
 and- instruction ; but we do not know how to 
 teach and apply the new forces. This is our 
 ignorance. 
 
 Social Christianity was certainly intended 
 to grow stronger and purer as the sons and 
 daughters of men of faith grew up in the shel- 
 ter and culture of refined and educated homes. 
 It has failed to do so, largely because Christian 
 parents have not found in wealth its spiritual 
 ministry and have not made it a condition of 
 nobler service. As princes are educated to 
 duties of state, Christian children should be 
 educated to the service of the people. No 
 prince would consider it a privilege to make 
 money, because he has all that money can 
 bring The children of wealthy Christian 
 homes have all that money can bring. Would 
 they but recognize its responsibilities, they 
 
122 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 would add the princely dignity of service also 
 to their life. 
 
 When, therefore, they are fully prepared 
 for the work of their life, under the direction 
 of this new ideal they will enter it with a wide 
 outlook, with a real knowledge of the value of 
 money, with a spiritual purpose, and with a 
 just regard to the claims of society upon their 
 service as privileged and fortunate persons. 
 
 Such ideals and ambitions will increase their 
 productive energies, not only in business, but 
 in art, science, and literature, while it will 
 enormously increase their fitness and willing- 
 ness for all forms of philanthropic service. In 
 a generation or two this would yield us a class 
 of spendidly equipped, public spirited citizens, 
 and noble, devoted workers for the church. 
 
 The results of such training will tell also 
 upon the preeminently vital subject of per- 
 sonal service, which the conscience of the time 
 is demanding of all truly earnest souls. 
 
XII. 
 
 PERSONAL SERVICE A PRIVILEGE OF 
 WEALTH. 
 
 The note of the new philanthropy is per- 
 sonal service. Rich people have, almost en- 
 tirely, hitherto, done such work, by proxy. 
 In fashionable society "Marcella" is an oddity 
 because she went to live among the people of 
 the East End of London, and thus learn by 
 actual contact, and by personal friendship and 
 fellow-suffering, the real condition and thoughts 
 of the working-classes. 
 
 Conventional Christians whose hearts have 
 not felt the throb of the new movement can 
 not understand this "latest fad" on the part 
 of their "peculiar" acquaintances and friends. 
 It is totally unlike the ministry for the church 
 poor, where old women and sick people were 
 visited by the parson and the good ladies of 
 the parish, and were given blankets and 
 provisions. Such kindly personal service to 
 parish neighbors and fellow-members of the 
 church has always prevailed among charitable 
 and generous Christians. The idea of a 
 123 
 
124 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 brotherhood of humanity which could be 
 helped only by love and sympathy shown by 
 the rich, cultured, and strong for the weak, 
 poor, and ignorant has overgrown the church- 
 wall, and is shedding its fragrance in the great 
 field of the world. 
 
 This divine impulse to personal social ser- 
 vice lies at the heart, and surrounds, like an 
 atmosphere, the whole of the new effort to 
 help men known as "the Social Settlement 
 Movement." It came from the heart and 
 brain of a cultured student of Oxford, Arnold 
 Toynbee, and it has found its warmest sup- 
 porters among the privileged class to which 
 he belonged. 
 
 Since Toynbee Hall settlement was estab- 
 lished in 1885, Miss Lathrop, of Hull House, 
 Chicago, informs us that "about seventy-five 
 small groups of people have made their homes 
 in the most arid and crowded parts of various 
 English and American cities, to lend a hand 
 toward improving their neighborhoods and 
 toward gaining a little exact knowledge of 
 social conditions." All settlements since then 
 have been inspired and moulded by the exam- 
 ple of Toynbee Hall, which was erected to 
 perpetuate the memory of this devoted young 
 Oxfordian. "After his untimely death his 
 friends determined to build a house in East 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 1 25 
 
 London where University men might live 
 "face to face with the actual conditions of 
 crowded city life, study on the spot the evils 
 and their remedies, and, if possible, ennoble 
 the lives and improve the material conditions 
 of the people." 
 
 These social experiences have taught "all 
 scientific reformers and apostles of light that 
 the truth and beauty of goodness have to be 
 lived out among the people to be understood." 
 The social settlement to-day therefore stands 
 for a new method of social regeneration. 
 
 "It is a social, moral, and intellectual clear- 
 ing house and agency, where you can find and 
 feel the social equivalent of any doctrine, new 
 or old, of any practical or theoretical princi- 
 ple, new or old." It has been defined as "a 
 group of educated men or women (or both) 
 living among manual workers in a neighborly 
 and social spirit." "Organized work is not 
 essential but is a convenient method of getting 
 acquainted. Nothing is essential except resi- 
 dence and a spirit of brotherhood expressed 
 actively." 
 
 Dr. Caldwell has justly laid special em- 
 phasis upon the fact that "these settlements 
 have come ultimately from the Universities." 
 "It means that they are founded, not only on 
 ideas and knowledge, but upon personalities — 
 
126 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 upon the personalities of some of the finest 
 kind of men that are produced in Great 
 Britain." This element of personality has 
 always attracted the strongest class of think- 
 ers, "who are more willing to enter upon the 
 work of the education and elevation of hu- 
 manity, and thereby of themselves, than upon 
 any other kind of service." 
 
 Thus in this movement the social and 
 spiritual needs of the workers themselves have 
 always been kept in view. They entered 
 this work not in any spirit of condescension, 
 and not solely with the intention of bestowing 
 favors, but for the purpose of learning the real 
 facts about life, and keeping their own hearts 
 and minds in a healthy social balance. "They 
 were to carry with them the habits and cus- 
 toms of culture, and by settling in congested 
 districts to devote themselves to the work of 
 common self-improvement and common eleva- 
 tion." 
 
 This characteristic feature of the work 
 makes it an important contribution to the sub- 
 ject before us. It is not a mere gift, not a 
 surrender of privilege, not a denial of posses- 
 sions, but a use of gifts, privileges, and pos- 
 sessions, under the direction of a spirit of 
 brotherhood for a common benefit. It is a 
 leveling up of society to the highest altitudes 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 127 
 
 of privilege, by the insistence of individual 
 talents, tastes, and possessions. 
 
 We thus discover that the best service a 
 man can render this community among which 
 he has cast his lot, for the time being at least, 
 is to be and possess something of value. 
 Unless he is educated and refined he is of little 
 use among the unlettered and vulgar. If he 
 is a professional man — as physician, lawyer, 
 or teacher — all the better. If he is a man of 
 means and leisure, better still. "Each man 
 has much to learn and much to teach. No 
 rules limit his action as an individual." The 
 movement not only gives but demands free 
 play for all personal powers and all personal 
 possessions. It requires a rich, full life on one 
 side of the social and intellectual scale to make 
 this personal service, and to such a life it re- 
 turns a thousand-fold in largeness of experi- 
 ence, in strength of character, and in simplicity 
 of faith. 
 
 Wealthy Christian parents are under obliga- 
 tion to examine this social settlement move- 
 ment, not simply as a method of reformation 
 for the submerged classes, but as a solution of 
 the problem of self-indulgence which corrupts 
 the moral and intellectual fiber of their own 
 families. If they are seeking a principle of 
 education in their civic and social duties, if 
 
128 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 they are looking for a sane method of human 
 helpfulness, it is to be found here. 
 
 We do not say that every youth in every 
 household of wealth must necessarily perform 
 this service, but it is meant that along these 
 lines of personal service are the experiences 
 and incentives to a nobler life which is to save 
 the youth born to means and privileges from 
 sinking back into an unpatriotic and unchris- 
 tian self-indulgence. Every age has its special 
 problems and lessons; the youth who does not 
 learn the lesson of his age and accept the ser- 
 vice of his time is a degenerate. He not only 
 fails in his own proper development, but he 
 also deprives some other person or class of the 
 succor which his talents and experience were 
 intended to furnish the common good. The 
 special lesson of our time is, that, for their 
 own sakes, people of means and leisure must 
 serve in their own proper persons the im- 
 poverished and the ignorant. 
 
 Thus, then, the problems of poverty, over- 
 crowding, drink, idleness, municipal corrup- 
 tion, and practical atheism, which have be- 
 come the disgrace and menace of our modern 
 city life, have been attacked by the student 
 and the lover of humanity. It is a somewhat 
 singular fact in our modern social life that 
 practical men, so-called, have so largely kept 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 129 
 
 aloof from this work. Philanthropists, ideal- 
 ists, recluses, cultured and refined women, stu- 
 dents of social conditions — lookers-on, hitherto, 
 of the great drama of life — have seen the horrid 
 mass of pauperism increase and the breach 
 widen between rich and poor, and they have 
 at last stepped down to minister. They have 
 gone back to a direct imitation of Jesus. They 
 have reached the heart of the trouble. They 
 have manifested the divinity of unconscious 
 power, as when a child, simply because it 
 loves both parties, will effect a reconciliation 
 by taking both the disputants by the hand. 
 
 The personal service of those cultured 
 strong men and women is the link to bind rich 
 and poor together in the redeemed order of 
 society. What the poor and unfortunate want 
 is not money, but brotherhood. What the 
 ignorant, unpatriotic, selfish man needs is the 
 example of a wise, patriotic, self-sacrificing 
 life, lived in a place where he can see it is gen- 
 uine. 
 
 What our individual use of wealth had 
 largely brought about was separation, more 
 final and hopeless than Hindu caste. Our 
 scholars, statesmen, men of letters, profes- 
 sional workers, and business men, who might 
 be said to carry the wealth of civilization in 
 the shape of brains, experience, and culture, 
 
130 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 had become a separate class. They seldom 
 or never came into contact with workingmen. 
 
 Two castes have grown up in a nominal 
 democracy. They differ not only in material 
 possessions, but in ways of looking at life, in 
 habits of thought, and principles of action. 
 They need one another. The poor and igno- 
 rant citizen has a ministry for the rich and 
 educated. But the rich man often thought 
 his obligation was discharged by a dole which 
 the poor man returned with a curse. 
 
 Polite learning, also, in Universities had 
 become a recluse. Schools originally in- 
 tended for the poor became the rich man's 
 perquisite. It became luxurious, dilletante, 
 and contemptuous of the profanum vulgiis. 
 In Democratic America, and even in Demo- 
 cratic monarchies, like Great Britain, this was 
 the direst of political misfortunes. Political 
 economy, health conditions, and all those sub- 
 jects which enter into a proper understanding 
 of wages, wealth production, and national 
 wellbeing, became the exclusive possession of 
 one class. And the class which needed them 
 most, as the basis of their prosperity, were left 
 to flounder in the mire of ignorance, or be 
 led into the bogs of fanaticism by demagogic 
 1 ' will-o ' -the-wisps. 
 
 Women of leisure, education, and refine- 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 131 
 
 ment gave themselves so entirely to fashion 
 and self-indulgence amid the luxuries and ele- 
 gance of their homes, and to amusements, 
 sports, and intellectual pursuits, that the gra- 
 cious ministry of gentle womanhood was all 
 but forgotten in the homes of the needy. 
 Many of the bitterest personal sorrows and 
 social sufferings connected with wifehood and 
 motherhood can be understood and succored 
 only by a wise and loving woman. Women 
 with leisure and ability for this service were 
 engaged in balls, routs, theatres, and house- 
 parties, or indisposed on account of the social 
 strain. The personal privileges of wealth had, 
 in nominally Christian society, all but driven 
 out the sense of its personal responsibility. 
 Where the strain of the social system was 
 greatest the help was feeblest or useless. The 
 two classes, separate and frowning, faced one 
 another, as friends who have quarreled — they 
 stood apart 'Mike rocks that have been rent 
 asunder." How are these now hard, unyield- 
 ing substances to be once more fused into a 
 common nationality and common brotherhood? 
 Only by the power of love through personal 
 service. A right idea of the use of wealth in 
 our Christian families will enable us to raise 
 up a generation which will regard social service 
 as a prince regards his heritage of government. 
 
132 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 Towards this personal service the youth will 
 look with interest and enthusiasm. This will 
 be his kingdom, his privilege, his heritage, as 
 well as his patriotic and Christian obligation. 
 An Armenian princess, recently graduated M. 
 D. from Berne. She has since served in the 
 cholera hospitals of Russia, and done so much 
 good as to receive the personal thanks of the 
 Tsar. She is now practicing medicine at her 
 father's palace, where sick people for miles 
 around flock to consult her, and she is devoting 
 a large part of her fortune to erecting an hos- 
 pital to enlarge her work. 
 
 Without the possession of accumulated 
 wealth, and consequent education and equip- 
 ment, such action would be impossible. With 
 the means, and such a wise use of it, through 
 a rich, gracious personality, its power to cor- 
 rupt the spirit of the possessor is destroyed 
 and its ability to save and bless the people is 
 demonstrated. It ought to be enough to say, 
 that no condition of life can be so near an im- 
 itation of the action of Jesus and no use of 
 money so transmute the privileges of material 
 possessions into the immortal treasures of the 
 soul. 
 
XIII. 
 
 PERSONAL SERVICE A CAREER OF 
 DISTINCTION. 
 
 A prominent public man not long since de- 
 clared that the hour had come for the sons of 
 rich men in America to give themselves, after 
 proper equipment, to the public service simply 
 for the honor and opportunity of doing a 
 patriotic work. This is a most hopeful sign 
 of the times so far as municipal and national 
 progress is concerned. It has always been 
 considered the most honorable, as it has proved 
 the most glorious, phase of the history of peo- 
 ple of rank in Europe to be able to serve their 
 country. We need apprehend no danger from 
 an aristocratic, exclusive, governing class in 
 such a course of action. Our society changes 
 too often for that. Indeed, the real danger 
 from these changes is that we may get, not a 
 government by the "best," but a government 
 by the "worst." 
 
 The possession of wealth is preeminently 
 a prima facie obligation to serve the State 
 and Nation. Instead of progressing upon the 
 i33 
 
134 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 sentiments of the classic republics of the past 
 in this patriotic obligation, we are shamelessly 
 behind them. Our rich citizens are more 
 anxious that their sons should continue to 
 trade and accumulate wealth than they are to 
 see them serve the City or the State as diplo- 
 mats and statesmen. 
 
 There is only one worse sign, — the sons too 
 often agree with the fathers in this. In the 
 times when the free cities of Europe were the 
 defenders of liberty, and when Venice and 
 Genoa were in their glory, it was considered 
 an honor for a merchant to serve his native 
 town as alderman, mayor, provost, counselor, 
 or doge. Then wealth carried with it an ob- 
 ligation of patriotism. It was more honorable 
 to be a servant of the people than greatly 
 to increase the family fortune. There can be 
 little hope for our Nation till this same spirit 
 revives in the hearts of men who are born to 
 wealth and privilege. 
 
 To the enlightened Christian and patriot 
 this should be a specially attractive field of 
 action for the advancement of the Kingdom 
 of Christ. To give a son at the call of the 
 Nation for the defense of her honor in the 
 trying days of sixty-one, has always been re- 
 garded by loyal Americans as the greatest 
 proof of love of country. But the virtue of 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 135 
 
 enlightened patriotism is as much needed in 
 the time of peace as in the time of war. More 
 indeed on the part of the wealthy, for then the 
 vices of luxury and materialism are more likely 
 to fasten on their life. The Christian man 
 who so regards his wealth as an opportunity to 
 train and equip a loyal youth for the service of 
 his country has made the best possible use of 
 his fortune, and vindicated the higher ministry 
 of wealth. The youth who appropriates this 
 ideal of service and accepts this obligation, 
 arising out of his education and fortune, has 
 proved himself the best representative of the 
 men of " '76" and " '61." 
 
 There is in America to-day a noble 
 opportunity for this service also in the work of 
 education. The highly educated and richly 
 equipped sons and daughters of our families of 
 wealth are sorely needed in the poor and ill- 
 furnished colleges of the West as instructors, 
 professors, and presidents. Literature and 
 scientific work have always been a favorite 
 pursuit with men of leisure and fortune. It is 
 within our knowledge that many men whose 
 fathers are engaged in commercial pursuits 
 have turned aside from the allurements of busi- 
 ness to original scientific investigation, possible 
 only to those who can command means and 
 leisure. But the opportunity for young men 
 
136 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 and women to do a great work in the moulding 
 of the new society of the West, and at the 
 same time find congenial avenues of action, is 
 greatest in our educational institutions. 
 
 In such spheres there is opportunity for 
 personal service without many of the objec- 
 tions attaching to it among the poor and crim- 
 inal populations. That there is no remunera- 
 tion, or practically none, is the greatest honor. 
 This service to-day is rendered to the churches 
 and to society by men and women of the most 
 heroic self-sacrificing spirit, — men and women 
 who had to scrape and struggle to get an edu- 
 cation out of the hard hand of poverty. Why 
 should the sons and daughters of wealthy 
 Christian parents, privileged possessors of schol- 
 arship, artistic accomplishments, and refined 
 manners, not go forth for a few of the young, 
 strong, fresh years of their life to such work? 
 
 No interest of our American national life is 
 so vital as the higher education of the West. 
 It is poorly endowed, insufficiently manned, 
 and, beyond all things, needs the personal con- 
 tact of educated Eastern people. Where in 
 all the range of philanthropic service could 
 wealth be more fitly used than in the endow- 
 ment of a Chair to which a distinguished son 
 or daughter could give the loving, enthusiastic 
 service of a cultured mind and a Christian 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 137 
 
 heart? Is it not a wonder that the boys and 
 girls in rich homes do not see this themselves? 
 Or is it because in our selfish family feelings 
 we have wished " better things" for them? 
 
 What objection could be made to such 
 a career for the most carefully educated, shel- 
 tered, and treasured young woman? She goes 
 among people of taste and refinement. She 
 deals with students who are respectful, earn- 
 est, and devoted to their instructors. She 
 will be exposed to a thousand dangers amid 
 the ordinary amusements of society at home 
 to one in her work in such a college. She will 
 be honored, happy, useful, and fitted, if so 
 desirous, for a larger life and greater service, 
 when she chooses to return to her former 
 home. All this is true of a son also, with 
 this additional advantage, he will be more 
 likely to find a field for public service and dis- 
 tinction in the new surroundings than in the 
 elegant and enervating leisure, or business 
 humdrum of conventional society life. 
 
 We must now consider a form of service par- 
 ticularly dear to the church, and particularly 
 obligatory on the Christian families of to-day. 
 By the sacredness of our profession, as well as 
 by the genius of our religion, we stand pledged 
 to missionary work. But how has it been 
 done? Without doubt it offers one of the 
 
13S SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 brightest pages in history. It is equally true 
 that its half-hearted and inadequate support 
 to-day is becoming a reproach to the Christian 
 name. 
 
 It must get new recognition, new im- 
 pulses, new attachments to our modern social 
 forces. Its financial supporters and its actual 
 workers are divided by social and financial con- 
 siderations. The rich stay at home and give 
 of their abundance, the poor go forth to the 
 service as a profession. Some of the noblest 
 and most generous rich have so found expres- 
 sion for their sympathy and zeal. Some of 
 the most talented and consecrated poor have 
 so found the happiest career of service. 
 
 But the vast increase of wealth in our Chris- 
 tian homes during the past hundred years has 
 changed these conditions. Yet we are still re- 
 lying on the old forces. We are in possession 
 of a hereditary education, wealth, and moral 
 power, as a Christian society, which did not 
 exist when we first sent missionaries abroad, 
 and reached our Gospel hands across the Mis- 
 sissippi. We have not only faith and zeal to- 
 day, but we have cultured sons and daughters. 
 The world needs them, and they need to bring 
 the treasures of their lives into contact with 
 the ignorant and the suffering at home and 
 abroad. 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 139 
 
 The church has not yet been able to bring 
 to bear upon the children of her own homes 
 the constraint of love and the fascination of 
 interest in the cause of missions which the 
 State and education and science have used on 
 behalf of their objects. 
 
 It is the fond and patriotic ambition 
 of the son of wealthy parents in Britain to 
 serve his country in India, Africa, or China, 
 either as soldier or civil servant. When the 
 boy goes out to this service, no mother con- 
 siders it a sacrifice, no father thinks his son 
 has acted like a fool. Yet he goes to face 
 danger, often death. He has to be largely 
 supplied from the parental fortune to sustain 
 the honor of his regiment. He does not go 
 to make money. He carries with him the old 
 Norman spirit of roving conquest. He and 
 his like have won for Great Britain her Colo- 
 nial Empire. In these paths, — military, diplo- 
 matic, scientific, or adventure, — have been 
 found the glory of a great service. The spirit 
 of such men is well illustrated in General 
 Gordon, one of the noblest of them all, who 
 when he laid down his service in China proudly 
 declared "I leave China as poor as when I en- 
 tered it." 
 
 Christians of wealth and rank consider it an 
 honor and a privilege to send their sons abroad 
 
140 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 for such a purpose. To equip and endow a 
 son for this service is no sacrifice, no hardship. 
 But when it is proposed to do the same for 
 missionary service, they reverse every principle 
 of their former action. Foreign service is 
 dangerous to health; it is a great sacrifice to 
 send the young people from home. It is even 
 considered a lowering of the social status; and 
 the rich Christian father who would boast of 
 his son's appointment to a crack regiment or 
 a diplomatic mission would lament his ordina- 
 tion to a medical mission or a foreign college. 
 Many a rich Christian mother would regard a 
 daughter as hopelessly lost to society by taking 
 up Zenana work in India or medical service in 
 China; but she would be delighted to send her 
 to either country as the wife of an officer or 
 civil servant. Money would cut no figure if 
 social rank were obtained; climate would be 
 robbed of its terrors if "prospects" were bright 
 for a fashionable career. 
 
 The wealth and culture of Christians are 
 thus looked upon as means to secure social 
 distinction for their possessor. And the mis- 
 sions of the church, as the expression of mod- 
 ern Christian zeal and knowledge, are deprived 
 of the power which moves men and women in 
 all other walks of life. Our missionary work 
 still rides in an oxcart while our military and 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. 141 
 
 civil service rides in a Pullman car. The oxcart 
 has not resources enough always to procure 
 axle grease, while the Pullman car boasts a 
 perfect modern equipment, where one can 
 dine, read, shave, and sleep like a prince. 
 
 Sufficient funds for the vast scheme of mis- 
 sionary service in all its ramifications of educa- 
 tion, medical work, evangelization, and home 
 influence will never be procured until the 
 fountain of personal interest is opened. This 
 can only be done by enlisting the personal 
 service of those who can equip and sustain 
 themselves in the wise and dutiful adoption 
 of a distinguished and useful career. 
 
 Already some men and women have gone 
 forth to service at the charge of their parents. 
 The people who undertake such work need 
 have no fear of the charge of incapacity to 
 sustain themselves at home. Why should 
 it be thought strange for a parent who will 
 spend $10,000 on a son's education to endow 
 the hospital where he goes to practice his pro- 
 fession with $50,000, so that his son may per- 
 form those services for the class, and in the 
 way that Jesus did? 
 
 The adoption of this principle of action 
 would revolutionize modern missionary service. 
 It would put into the field men and women 
 exactly fitted for special work unencumbered 
 
142 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 by financial cares, unhindered by financial lim- 
 itations. Such men and women would neces- 
 sarily be of greater breadth and scholarship 
 and, if the test of Moses be applied to them, 
 of greater spirituality and earnestness. 
 
 These self-supporting workers would com- 
 mand greater respect from the people among 
 whom they labor. The great Chinese am- 
 bassador who asked questions revealed the 
 fact that a man's social status and education 
 are large considerations with the heathen. 
 They would command the attention of the 
 churches, especially of our youth. The mis- 
 sionary would be lifted from the somewhat 
 doubtful category into which he has been 
 placed by the social notions of Christians at 
 home. What would some of these mission- 
 aries like Davis and Hamlin and Lawes and 
 Chalmers not have been able to do had they 
 been backed up in their work, as business men 
 are at home, by family fortunes? Would they 
 not repeat, on a greater scale, the work of the 
 Armenian Princess already cited? But it is 
 not alone the effect of such a use of Christian 
 wealth on the extent and character of mission- 
 ary service, but the effect of it on the purity 
 and strength of Christianity at home, that con- 
 cerns us. 
 
 What other single fact in the Christian's 
 
PERSONAL SERVICE. H3 
 
 experience would so enlighten, purify, and 
 strengthen the soul as this contact with the 
 actual progress of the Kingdom through the 
 personal service of our most honored and priv- 
 ileged sons and daughters? It would draw to 
 itself the passion of parental love, of local 
 pride, of college honors, and of church attach- 
 ment. It would open up a distinguished 
 career for the heart and brains and privileges 
 of our choicest youth. And it would lift 
 Christian service at home and abroad into a 
 position of success and distinction, which 
 would fundamentally change our thoughts and 
 feelings regarding it. It would prevent the 
 calamity, fast falling upon the church, of a sep- 
 arate caste for Christian service. It would 
 permit the officers of those great societies to 
 whom we have entrusted the direction of this 
 work to be directors and advisers of the qual- 
 ity and reach of statesmen ; not as they are at 
 present, collectors and dispensers of funds in- 
 adequate to the meanest scale of operations. 
 
 Above all, it would divert the attention 
 of our disingenuous Christian youth from the 
 deadly peril of heaping up riches for personal 
 and family pride, which corrupt the soul as 
 breeding-in-and-in corrupts the blood. 
 
 That such a use of Christian wealth should 
 appear to many Utopian, reveals more clearly 
 
144 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 the vast desert of worldly conformity which 
 separates us from a life like Paul's. We do 
 not think it strange that a youth of rank and 
 wealth, the gold medalist of his year and the 
 rising hope of his party, should give up, as 
 Paul did, all these worldly honors for Christ. 
 But we do not expect it of our own day, and 
 we do not educate our children with this shin- 
 ing example before us. It may not be amiss 
 to remind ourselves that Paul's rank and 
 wealth and personal equipment are declared 
 by Professor Ramsay and the modern scholar- 
 ship to be not the least important factors in 
 the success of his marvelous career. And the 
 distinguished place which he holds in the affec- 
 tions and thoughts of the Christian world is 
 for a work more useful and a name more last- 
 ing than any he could ever have won in the 
 service of the world. 
 
XIV. 
 
 BUSINESS AN OPPORTUNITY OF CHRISTIAN 
 SERVICE. 
 
 In former chapters we have considered most 
 largely the bearing of this new ideal of wealth 
 upon the family, education, and hereditary cus- 
 toms. We must now apply it to the conduct 
 of business in the hands of a person presum- 
 ably so educated and influenced. 
 
 Here, again, there is a certain fascination 
 about schemes of profit-sharing, socialism, and 
 other short cuts to a temporary solution of the 
 social problem of wealth. But we have to 
 deal with a matter of business, — not how we 
 shall get rid of wealth to prevent spiritual in- 
 jury to its possessor and to secure natural 
 benefits to the recipient of charity, but how to 
 make accumulated wealth in Christian hands 
 perform the necessary functions of Capital and 
 promote a noble Christian character? A very 
 large proportion of Christian men must, in 
 modern society, be engaged in commercial life; 
 if they can not use the ideals of Christianity 
 and lofty citizenship in this domain of busi- 
 i45 
 
146 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ness they are cut off from the realities of re- 
 ligion. 
 
 What considerations of the higher sort, then, 
 can be adduced to influence a man who is in 
 command of wealth and who prefers to remain 
 in active business, — the man who has not the 
 statesman's ambition, nor the necessary knowl- 
 edge of art or science to permit him to take 
 an active personal part in their advancement ; 
 the man whose faculties are still at their best, 
 whose large knowledge of affairs and mastery 
 of some particular business makes him a power 
 in manufacture and commerce; the man who 
 has made money, and still can make it, whom 
 neither the church nor the world can afford to 
 lose as an active factor in wealth production? 
 Is there nothing left for such a man but to go 
 on turning everything he touches into gold, 
 yet finding no food in all these vast concerns for 
 the higher cravings of the intellect and heart? 
 
 The Christian use of wealth must deal with 
 this man's case and furnish him a method of 
 action. This is to be discovered in the true 
 functions of wealth itself and the true object 
 of all commerce. Wealth is "the available 
 thing", when it is produced the whole com- 
 munity flourishes. Commerce is an exchange 
 of commodities; trade is a transaction for 
 mutual benefits. 
 
BUSINESS AS CHRISTIAN SERVICE. 147 
 
 That there are unfortunate conditions when 
 the product is not fairly shared, and that 
 there is often plethora in one place and want 
 in another, are facts outside of our present in- 
 quiry. That trade is sometimes robbery and 
 commerce cut-throat competition is beside the 
 point for our discussion. But that a success- 
 ful business which is producing great wealth 
 for the owners and managers of the concern is 
 normally the condition of prosperity for the 
 whole community is now accepted as an axiom 
 in economics. Such a concern is a spring of 
 water: each one may not get all he wishes 
 or thinks he is entitled to, but if he gets any 
 at all, he gets it from the spring; for the 
 spring is the very condition which creates the 
 oasis in the desert. We can deal here only 
 with normal conditions of business to which 
 we can apply the laws of the spiritual life. 
 
 Capital in the hands of a man who wishes 
 to use his wealth for the higher ends of life 
 may therefore be regarded as a power for the 
 benefit of society. Not as philanthropy, but 
 as business. He proposes to use his business 
 ability for the enlargement and success of his 
 concerns; not primarily because he is going to 
 add thereby to his wealth, but because his 
 business so conducted is the material basis of 
 the prosperity of a whole community. This 
 
148 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 is no dream, but already a fixed principle in 
 the life of some business men. Nor is it with- 
 out charm for many minds of the larger cali- 
 bre. If we will call to mind the large part 
 which the inventive genius, the careful busi- 
 ness management, the mastery of commercial 
 conditions play in the production of wealth, 
 we shall see that this service is of immense 
 value to the community. These men are the 
 captains of industry, leaders in new enter- 
 prises, brain-workers who give useful direction 
 to the productive manual labor of others. 
 The annals of modern industry are crowded 
 with illustrations of this fact. Such inven- 
 tions as Whitney's cotton gin, Salt's alpaca 
 weaving, Corliss' engine, McCormick's reaper, 
 Morse and Vail's telegraphic systems, S. Gil- 
 christ Thomas' elimination of phosphorus, and 
 the Edison electric appliances advanced the 
 wealth of the world by leaps and bounds. 
 
 "Sir Lowthian Bell, who writes with the 
 highest authority, says that the annual 'get' of 
 Cleveland stone alone contained an amount of 
 phosphorus which if released would be worth 
 £250,000 ($1,250,000), but which as an ingre- 
 dient diminished the annual value by £4,000,- 
 000 ($20,000,000). "* This problem of wealth 
 was solved by S. G. Thomas, and by his in- 
 
 *" Wealth and Wages "—papers by the author. 
 
BUSINESS AS CHRISTIAN SERVICE. 1 49 
 
 vention alone $21,500,000 per year was pro- 
 duced at the outset. Similar illustrations of 
 the part played by the management of great 
 concerns abound on every hand. Thus to be 
 able to increase the efficiency of natural forces 
 by invention, to master commercial conditions, 
 to prevent waste by careful management, to 
 create wealth in a word, as a general wins 
 battles, has as great a fascination as states- 
 manship or conquest. 
 
 With the various economic plans by which 
 the wealth so created shall be best distrib- 
 uted among the people, whether by ordinary 
 wages, co-operation, or what not, it is not 
 necessary for us to deal. This will depend 
 entirely upon the local conditions of the own- 
 ers and laborers, upon character, skill, perma- 
 nence of residence, and trade customs, which 
 entirely govern such questions. It is sufficient 
 to know that even by the ordinary wage system 
 some seventy-five per cent, of all created wealth 
 goes to the manual worker; that the proportion 
 going to capital, management, and invention is 
 continually growing smaller, and that going to 
 the manual laborer continually growing larger. 
 It is only by corrupt and illegal interference 
 with the laws of trade and by personal and 
 local vice on the part of owners or workers in 
 industrial concerns that this law is hindered. 
 
150 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 But a concern conducted for such high ends 
 as in the case supposed by us will increase the 
 proportion rather than diminish it, even when 
 no extraordinary or special schemes are 
 adopted. Where, however, such a spirit pre- 
 vails in the operation of great business enter- 
 prises, all practical and just plans for the bet- 
 ter sharing of products will be welcomed and 
 fostered. This also brings its own commercial 
 reward, and such concerns as can be run on 
 lines of profit-sharing have frequently resulted 
 in greater accumulations of wealth. They 
 result also in what is of greater value to the 
 social and religious life, — in more intelligent, 
 more skilled, and more virtuous workmen. 
 
 Such a purpose in business makes the 
 desert rejoice and blossom as the rose. It 
 must be observed in estimating the value of 
 this ideal of business, that it demands for its 
 success the possession of accumulated wealth, 
 not merely in the form of capital to be used 
 in the business, but the family heritage which 
 has come in the shape of education and the 
 start in life. In the case of men who have ac- 
 cumulated wealth in their own lifetime so re- 
 garding business at a later period in their 
 career there is no real exception to the prin- 
 ciple. If it has not operated on them in the 
 
BUSINESS AS CHRISTIAN SERVICE. 151 
 
 way here supposed it will on their children, 
 whom they instruct and inspire. 
 
 Again we are to observe that it permits 
 the full normal operation of business prin- 
 ciples in the accumulation of wealth, it limits 
 nothing, it denies nothing, it interferes with 
 no right in personal property, and it demands 
 no self-denying ordinance from the man in 
 the prime of life. It is possible such a man 
 may regard his ability to conduct a successful 
 business as the only means by which he can 
 serve God and society. It is possible also he 
 detests and dreads all forms of mere charity. 
 What he wants to do for the benefit of others 
 is to furnish work: to open the mills, the 
 forges, the shipyards; to develop the natural 
 resources of the mine, the field, the forest. If 
 so he is a very close imitator of the best rulers, 
 ancient or modern. There is more statesman- 
 ship, more religion, in such an ideal of business, 
 than in half the laws and half the sermons. 
 
 The proudest boast of a prince is that 
 he is the shepherd and judge of his people. 
 The best government is that which spreads 
 prosperity and fosters manhood. All these 
 virtues are compacted in such an ideal and 
 method of business. Nor is its operation con- 
 fined to great concerns: its spirit can be 
 manifested on the humblest scale. 
 
152 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 It is not necessary for a man to put off 
 doing good in this way until he has grown 
 rich himself. It is very likely such an one 
 will never feel its constraint. Few people 
 grow generous as they grow old. The men 
 of public spirit and large philanthropy felt the 
 impulse and generously responded to it in 
 youth. So we must look to teaching our 
 youth this nobler meaning and sacred obliga- 
 tion of wealth in business. 
 
 If it should be charged against such an 
 ideal by the practical man that it is vision- 
 ary and unnatural ; that the motive which 
 impels men in business is purely selfish, — we 
 can only reply: "Granted that it is so largely; 
 yet there are some noble exceptions." The 
 end of all higher teaching is to make the ex- 
 ception the rule, to turn the minority into a 
 majority. This is the way all reforms have 
 been wrought, many of them far harder of ac- 
 complishment than this. 
 
 But the case in support of this ideal is even 
 better. There are conspicuous instances where 
 such use of wealth is the dominant principle 
 in life. The owner of one of the large for- 
 tunes in America has recently proved himself 
 the possessor of ideas of public utility as well 
 as personal ambition which furnish us an ex- 
 ample of this service on a large scale. His 
 
BUSINESS AS CHRISTIAN SERVICE. 153 
 
 estate of ninety-five thousand acres is being 
 used to show what scientific cultivation can 
 do. The Secretary of Agriculture reports 
 concerning this domain : "That he had seen the 
 most perfect system of roadways, an exhibi- 
 tion of landscape-gardening that cannot be 
 paralleled, and buildings which for dwellings, 
 stables, barns, dairies, propagating houses, 
 henneries, and other uses surpass everything 
 within his knowledge." He declared this 
 great experiment as important to the agricul- 
 tural interests of this country as the Federal 
 Department of Agriculture at Washington. 
 "This wealthy citizen employs more men than 
 I have under my charge. He is spending more 
 money every year than Congress appropriates 
 for the Agricultural Department of the Nation. 
 His men are promoted for efficiency according 
 to the most practical civil-service rules. He 
 is building up an educational institution that 
 will be of the greatest value to scientific farm- 
 ers and teachers for the instruction of others 
 in domestic architecture, agriculture, forestry, 
 viticulture, dairying, roadmaking, and other 
 useful sciences. It is one of the grandest un- 
 dertakings that individual enterprise ever at- 
 tempted; and I understand," the Secretary 
 concludes, "that it is the owner's intention to 
 leave it as a legacy to the public." 
 
154 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 It may be urged regarding the above illus- 
 tration that this is not a business concern in 
 the usual acceptance of that term, but an edu- 
 cational experiment. As such the question of 
 profit does not enter into it; and unless the 
 owner possessed large means he would be 
 unable to sustain it. 
 
 This makes the instance of the greater im- 
 portance to our particular enquiry. We want 
 to know if any normal, unrestricted, and sane 
 use of large wealth accumulated in the hands 
 of one person can be made of benefit both to 
 the possessor and the community, for we 
 are assured that the man thus using his wealth 
 is most certainly safeguarded from the deteri- 
 oration of character and the infidelity of spirit 
 called worldly conformity. In the above in- 
 stance, however, it would be exaggeration to 
 say the experiment was not conducted on 
 strict business principles, each part productive 
 and the whole a financial success. 
 
 Now as an illustration of our subject we have 
 to notice that such a work, at once of vast 
 public benefit to the immediate employees 
 and to the general community, could not be 
 undertaken nor sustained without a vast accu- 
 mulation of wealth. Nor could it be used in 
 this way under any principle of restriction, 
 deprivation, or denial of the right of personal 
 
BUSINESS AS CHRISTIAN SERVICE. 155 
 
 property. The virtue then, whatever it is, 
 both personal and communal, arises from the 
 successful accumulation of wealth in the first 
 instance. 
 
 In addition, however, it is an ideal use of 
 wealth; it includes the idea of stewardship, 
 personal ownership, and personal service; it 
 is the putting of the owner's thought, feel- 
 ing, interest, and fellowship into a business 
 concern. It is therefore altruism in business, 
 based upon the firm ground of common inter- 
 est in productive occupations. The field for 
 character, virtue, public and personal, is thus 
 occupied in such action. 
 
 The social and business inducements to 
 work in this way are natural. They are sus- 
 ceptible of appreciation, it is true, only by 
 those who have high ideals and a deep sense 
 of responsibility, but they are in the line of 
 sanity, nature, and education. They are such 
 as the more spiritual interpretation of the 
 Christian use of wealth is continually calling 
 for from all the followers of Jesus. They 
 may not be set aside either as impractical or 
 without obligation. More or less, they are of 
 deep and permanent obligation on all. And 
 it is as this principle of business action, this 
 ideal of personal service through wealth, enters 
 into all commercial and professional life, that 
 
156 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 it is saved from the taint of mere self-seeking 
 and raised to the dignity of human fellowship. 
 It would remove the canker from many a 
 manly spirit corrupting with the sordidness of 
 business; it would open new visions of the 
 possibilities of wealth, and save it from the 
 terrible indictment, made too often with truth, 
 that its possession is a curse, both to the pos- 
 sessor and the community. 
 
 Reformers are not without hope that in 
 these latter days, in a commercial community 
 where the possession of inherited wealth and 
 the native capacity for business mark men 
 out as leaders of their fellows, such men 
 will undertake the social obligations of wealth 
 and elect to serve the public in the leadership 
 of commerce, education, civic affairs, and re- 
 ligion. 
 
 Nature has no mercy on those who break 
 her laws. The forces which might bring 
 health and the divinest exhilaration if used 
 at the right time and place and for their 
 proper purpose, bring disease and bitter suffer- 
 ing when misapplied. Wealth is a force of 
 nature, the store-chamber of a thousand other 
 forces. Congested in our heart, the elements 
 which should fructify a province will destroy 
 like a pestilence. Misused for our life or our 
 family, the treasures which should reach the 
 
BUSINESS AS CHRISTIAN SERVICE. 157 
 
 homes of thousands will be millstones to sink 
 the self-seekers into the depth of the sea. 
 
 With such a business ideal and use of wealth 
 the owner enters into partnership with Na- 
 ture, secures her beneficent operation, and sees 
 her forces multiply a thousand-fold for the 
 benefit of the whole community. He makes 
 Nature the servant and promoter of moral qual- 
 ities also in the realization of a brotherhood of 
 business and the victory of his own spirit over 
 these vices of mere possession and gratification. 
 
 Christians will never really know what se- 
 crets of moral and spiritual dynamics are 
 stored up in wealth for a civilized commu- 
 nity until such ideals unloose them, as Far- 
 aday and Thomson have set free the energies 
 of Nature. Nay, they will never know the 
 productive power of accumulated wealth, the 
 real possibilities of capital, until this moral 
 energy be applied in business. The virtues 
 and affections of man as vital forces for the 
 creation of wealth and the spread of civiliza- 
 tion are more potent in business than muscle 
 or brain. These are only partly utilized as 
 yet The man who regards his business pri- 
 marily in the light of a service for God and 
 men, is revealing the secrets and setting free 
 the forces of matter and spirit for the purifica- 
 tion and enrichment of life. 
 
XV. 
 
 THE PERSONAL ADMINISTRATION OF 
 ACCUMULATED WEALTH. 
 
 In certain parts of Great Britain, endow- 
 ments of educational and other institutions are 
 called "mortifications." Death, one can see, 
 is plainly written on the face of the word. It 
 reminds us that almost all gifts from private 
 persons to the public were legacies that could 
 be realized only when the testator had passed 
 away. There are many reasons, in the nature 
 of the case, why public benefactions and even 
 private inheritances must be of this character. 
 Lear's calamity is not an impossible one to- 
 day; and there will always be cases where 
 accumulated wealth can not be wisely disposed 
 of till the death of the owner and the satisfac- 
 tion of his heirs. 
 
 But certainly in the vast majority of in- 
 stances, especially in modern times, wealth 
 which is ultimately intended for a public gift 
 can be bestowed during the life of the owner. 
 Then one of the noblest emotions of the hu- 
 man spirit can be felt by the giver. Then one 
 158 
 
ACCUMULATED WEALTH. 159 
 
 of the most unique of services can be rendered 
 by one man to his fellows — he can administer 
 upon his own estate. He can not only live 
 in his own child as a father, in his own book 
 as an author, but he can erect his own monu- 
 ment and animate his own statue. 
 
 This method of the disposal of wealth is 
 becoming common among the most intelligent 
 public benefactors of our time. Even now, 
 in the West, there are conspicuous examples 
 of men still managing their business concerns 
 for the purpose of having fresh resources to 
 administer. Some of the most munificent 
 public gifts of our times are of this character. 
 In this connection the names of Drexel, Pratt, 
 Childs, Wanamaker, Ford, Armour, Pearsons 
 are readily remembered. The practice will 
 certainly grow in favor, for it appeals to those 
 business qualities which have made their pos- 
 sessors successful. 
 
 What satisfaction is found in toiling for life 
 and accumulating wealth which the foolish or 
 vicious or incapable may dissipate or turn to 
 the confusion of the giver's memory? Why 
 bestow a benefaction that may be grossly per- 
 verted? At least for many years of the best 
 part of the giver's life the same powers which 
 went to making the fortune may be used to 
 conserve it to the high ends for which it is 
 
160 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 designed. Besides all this, the modern in- 
 stances, in which the notorious intention of 
 the testator has been frustrated by legal tech- 
 nicalities, have made men of wealth feel that 
 the best will is one executed in the testator's 
 lifetime. 
 
 The personal administration in philanthropy 
 of accumulated wealth is, therefore, one of 
 the most conspicuous ways of rendering social 
 service and at the same time saving the owner 
 from the spirit of worldliness. It singles out 
 in the most conspicuous way his personality. 
 It proposes no interference with his tastes or 
 his device in the disposal of what is entirely 
 his own. It does what Nature has already 
 done, just reminds him, that if he would 
 really possess it he must use it; that if he 
 would own its nobler qualities, he must give it 
 away. It reminds him that wealth corrupts, 
 rusts, may be stolen in possession, but is in- 
 vincible and immortal if returned to the public 
 use. 
 
 Now we are concerned with the effect of 
 such a method of beneficence on the mind 
 and heart of the possessor principally. In the 
 ordinary gift of a Christian to missions or a 
 public-spirited citizen to institutions of learn- 
 ing or city adornment we presuppose generos- 
 ity, interest in the objects benefited, and a 
 
ACCUMULATED WEALTH. 161 
 
 certain magnanimity or patriotism. Gratitude 
 to the community where the wealth has been 
 made, and local pride from birth and early 
 avocations, play also a not unimportant part 
 in large benefactions. Such motives have 
 been regarded in all ages and countries among 
 Christians as worthy of our faith and expres- 
 sive of our noblest aims in life. Under the 
 impulse of such aims men have been known to 
 live soberly, industriously, and with great self- 
 sacrifice, that in the end they might confer 
 upon the public some large and lasting me- 
 morial of their name and gratitude. 
 
 To some extent, therefore, all legacies for 
 public service ennoble wealth. The intention 
 anticipates a consecration of means to a worthy 
 purpose; but it is not the most truly indica- 
 tive of the higher uses of wealth. 
 
 These are inseparably allied to personal 
 service and administration. When, therefore, 
 the benefactor gives during his lifetime, and 
 takes a personal share in the direction of the 
 objects he is endowing, he becomes a fellow- 
 worker in the higher service. Such an admin- 
 istrator may not be an artist, yet he may see 
 with his own eyes some great masterpiece 
 which his wealth helped to create. He may 
 not be an astronomer or physicist, yet he may 
 learn the secrets of Nature which his wealth 
 
1 62 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 helped to lay bare. He may not be a 
 preacher, yet he may see the man redeemed, 
 sitting clothed and in his right mind, which 
 his wealth helped to regenerate. He may not 
 be a physician, yet he may look into the grate- 
 ful eyes of those who have got healing and 
 strength in the hospital which his wealth 
 founded. Nay, he may make the greatest of 
 all human boasts, and that too in a spirit of 
 praise rather than boastfulness. He may say 
 ''These things I not only aided with money, 
 but indeed part of these achievements I was" ; 
 thus his pars fui will have a grander meaning 
 than the statesman's or historian's. He be- 
 comes not only a munificent patron, but a 
 helper and fellow-worker in the intellectual 
 and spiritual creations of which his wealth is 
 the material basis. 
 
 Here then is a vital social and economical 
 force in action among the most intensely inter- 
 esting of all human concerns. Such men as 
 feel its charm and are inspired in their life work 
 by it, will reap its richest fruits in the devel- 
 opment of their own best powers. They will 
 see as never before the higher ministry of 
 wealth : its varied services in the mitigation of 
 human suffering, the dissipation of ignorance, 
 the spread of truth and purity, the advance- 
 ment of art, literature, and science, the eleva- 
 
ACCUMULATED WEALTH. 163 
 
 tion of the common lot, the adornment of 
 cities, and the progress of civilization in all its 
 forms. 
 
 To such men and to their families the more 
 personal uses of wealth will assume a secondary 
 significance. Do we anticipate family disaf- 
 fection as the result of such a disposition of 
 wealth beyond the direct control of the family? 
 I saw recently the daughter of a man of large 
 wealth, who had made a gift to a public insti- 
 tution, sitting in one of the classes, listening 
 with delighted face, and herself a worker in 
 the settlement which her father's money had 
 endowed. Instead of quarrels and selfishness 
 in a home where this spirit and method is 
 adopted we might expect more such sons and 
 daughters, themselves honored and interested 
 workers in the institutions which perpetuate a 
 noble parent's name. What purer pleasure, 
 what nobler ambition in life can we possibly 
 conceive than such a fellowship in interest and 
 work between the wise, strong father, whose 
 industry and genius have won the wealth, and 
 the intelligent, cultured sons and daughters 
 who are glad to share in its disposal of such 
 high ends? 
 
 When some great life story is laid bare 
 for us in a true biography, we are frequently 
 startled by the revelation of human pity and 
 
164 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 magnanimity shown by a noble merchant 
 prince in the use of his wealth for some in- 
 stitution where a dearly loved son or daughter 
 can take a personal share of the management 
 or minor service. Such experiences are the 
 nectar of the gods, nay let us rather say the 
 earnest of the spiritual fellowship of heaven, 
 where the service of congenial spirits for con- 
 genial objects is the very fruition of the soul. 
 
 We need fear no lack of interest in the 
 spread of the Gospel of Christ where such a 
 plan of life prevails. We need anticipate no 
 foolish, vain display, no waste, no luxury, no 
 indifference to the appeal of the needy and the 
 ignorant, where such a principle rules. We 
 need dread no more the ambition which de- 
 stroys the early zeal of the Christian worker, 
 no luxury which puts to shame our Christian 
 simplicity — nothing, in a word, which sows 
 the fatal seed of conformity in the rank soil of 
 unconsecrated riches. 
 
 Ruled by such ideas we would find a deeper 
 sense of personal responsibility for the im- 
 provement of all intellectual and moral quali- 
 ties making the rich man and his family more 
 fit to share in this higher service. By com- 
 ing in contact with men and women of 
 ideas and spirituality, they would respond 
 naturally to the ideal and spiritual in their 
 
ACCUMULATED WEALTH. 165 
 
 whole life. Things of the intellect and spirit 
 which the wealthy and fashionable disregard 
 would become real and familiar. The fatal 
 cycle would be broken. The forces of disin- 
 tegration would be arrested. Money which 
 breeds the maggots of ennui, enervation, and 
 disgust, when used for mere selfish indulgence, 
 begets zest, strength, and hope when put to 
 the higher service. 
 
 Such magnanimous men and such homes 
 would be the centres of new social and educa- 
 tional forces: they would occupy the places 
 which the Maecenases, the Medici, Wolseys, 
 Heriots, Harvards, and Shaftsburys have occu- 
 pied in the past, only with new and more ten- 
 der personal relationships, as befit the changed 
 spirit of the times. ''Honor to whom honor 
 is due," is one of the exhortations of Scrip- 
 ture. There would be no disposition in the 
 heart of a grateful people to withhold the meed 
 of praise to lives so consecrated to public ser- 
 vice. 
 
 The new philanthropy may expect to see a 
 new race of patrons of art, science, literature, 
 and social reform ; a new class of public bene- 
 factors for the relief of suffering, the enrich- 
 ment of public life, and the solution of the 
 civic problems of our time should this purpose 
 of personal service in the administrations of 
 
1 66 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 their wealth once possess the heart of intelli- 
 gent Christians. For the Christian man 
 charged with the bestowal of large means, it 
 is one of the surest tests of the real sincerity of 
 his spirit and one of the most splendid oppor- 
 tunities for the achievement of a great des- 
 tiny. 
 
XVI. 
 
 THE FAMILY INHERITANCE. 
 
 The strongest instinct of nature, as in the 
 case of the mother, superseding even personal 
 preservation, is the preservation of offspring. 
 This instinct has been sanctified in religion so 
 that it occupies a place next to the salvation 
 of one's own soul. It might weigh with one 
 more than one's own salvation, as it did with 
 the Apostle Paul. It has been made much of 
 here by implication, for it lies at the basis of 
 the teaching — "But if any provideth not for 
 his own, and especially his own household he 
 hath denied the faith and is worse than an 
 unbeliever." 
 
 This sentiment lies at the foundation 
 of all the laws of primogeniture and entail 
 which built up the power of feudalism in 
 Europe. It is practically the force which 
 dominates all family life to-day in Europe and 
 America. The feudal chief associated family 
 permanence, by a wise foresight, with the 
 possession of land. A family, like an idea, if 
 it is to come to anything, needs "a local hab- 
 167 
 
1 68 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 itation and a name." The European con- 
 queror early possessed himself of the land of 
 the conquered. He built his castle and his 
 manor, and took root in the soil. He became 
 a great tree, drinking sap and vigor from the 
 soil and air of the locality. 
 
 He did not disdain to increase his family 
 fortune by alliances and by commerce directly 
 or indirectly, for the noble was not unwilling 
 then, as now, to sell a title for money. If 
 blood could not make money, money could 
 buy blood. The family inheritance was a 
 vital necessity. Great names have perished 
 from the peerage because the family fortune 
 has been lost. Great names to-day are with- 
 held from the golden book because the for- 
 tunes of the owners are not considered suffi- 
 cient to sustain a peerage. When a commoner 
 is raised to the peerage in Britain he must 
 have an estate from which to derive his title. 
 A landless lord is a reproach of the bitterest 
 sort. 
 
 When men make money in trade, their 
 first step in the social ladder is the purchase 
 of land. To be John Smith of Broadacres 
 is the first indication to the public that the 
 wealthy ironmaster or brewer has social ambi- 
 tions. A territorial title is the greatest pas- 
 sion of the European to-day, as it has been 
 
THE FAMILY INHERITANCE. 169 
 
 for the last thousand years. Even the 
 farmer, at least in Scotland, is called by the 
 name of his farm. It is not "John Baxter," 
 but "Burnbrae,"— the name of the farm— 
 which marks his place in the social scale. 
 There is much sense, much Anglo-Saxon 
 tenacity in this territorial instinct. It has 
 made the European a man of the place — 
 given him locus standi among his neighbors, 
 and tenants, and retainers. His duties, his 
 sports, his honors were on his estate. His 
 great energies, his conquering forces were 
 bred and nourished close to the soil. He be- 
 came like his own oaks and elms in the parks 
 of Europe, the beautiful and dominating fea- 
 ture of the landscape. Like all great crea- 
 tures he had a place; like the eagle he bred 
 his brood in the same nest, and if he preyed 
 upon the flock he also added majesty to the 
 terrestrial scene. This attachment to place, 
 to the old nest, to the home of one's ances- 
 tors, is a mark of the strongest and finest 
 natures. 
 
 Its disappearance in American life is one 
 of the greatest defects of our age. Here 
 the city swallows up all interests. Even the 
 "old homestead" is deserted and sold for a 
 little capital to start life in the city. Children 
 born to the privilege of a grand "old home- 
 
170 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 stead," associated either with colonial or early 
 western experiences, should cherish it as the 
 most precious possession of life. No more 
 certain signs of deterioration in the East and 
 South can be found than the careless desertion 
 of the old home. 
 
 Commercial men to-day in our Ameri- 
 can cities will sell anything to turn a dollar. 
 The old cradle, the home where the children 
 were born, and where grandma died, they are 
 only chattels to be knocked down to the high- 
 est bidder. Families change their residences 
 on the merest whim. They are here to-day 
 and away to-morrow like birds of passage. 
 
 The children have no holy associations about 
 home places, they are robbed of all contact 
 with Nature, and the spirit of reverence for 
 the past dies out like a forgotten song. The 
 peasantry of Europe and the farmers of 
 America are the backbone of their respective 
 nationalities principally because they grow 
 strong with the lime and iron of the soil ; they 
 are rooted and grounded in the primal and 
 natural home places where deep intellects 
 and strong frames are reared. 
 
 The relation of these instincts and these 
 social customs to the family inheritance is 
 strong and direct. We see that a family in- 
 heritance is a natural, wise, religious provision. 
 
THE FAMILY INHERITANCE. 1 71 
 
 Men who love their family will toil and save 
 for their sake. They will seek the means of 
 protecting their weak and dependent ones from 
 the rude buffets of poverty. No greater horror 
 can come upon a wise, tender father and hus- 
 band than the thought of leaving wife and 
 daughters unprovided against his death, and 
 exposed to the pitiless shafts of poverty. A 
 writer makes one of his characters say, in a let- 
 ter to his daughter about his will, "The Lord 
 has prospered me, and there is more than 
 enough for you and your mother all your days. 
 And that thought gives me peace, for it is an 
 ill thing to see women wrestling with the 
 world." No person of fine feelings will fail 
 to see the naturalness and propriety of this 
 paternal sentiment. 
 
 In considering, therefore, the bearing of 
 the family inheritance on individualism and 
 worldly conformity, we lay it down as a fun- 
 damental principle in religion and Nature, 
 that provision for the family wellbeing and 
 perpetuation are prime considerations. Any- 
 thing that would weaken this claim of the 
 family upon the provider must be condemned 
 as pestilent and vicious. The members of a 
 family born and reared in a position of afflu- 
 ence and culture have rights arising from this 
 condition of birth and education. The parents 
 
172 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 will set the son up in business, provide the 
 daughter a dower, invest funds for his or her 
 particular needs if personal infirmity demand 
 that form of provision. 
 
 This principle of action is so strongly felt 
 that no person of wealth will adopt a child, 
 rear him or her in comfort and educate them 
 for a higher sphere, and then leave them 
 unprovided for. Such conduct would be 
 regarded as little less than criminal. The 
 instincts of nature, the common sense of men, 
 the tender love of the Christian heart may all 
 be relied upon to secure the protection of the 
 family and the proper provision for one's own 
 required by Scripture. 
 
 But the moral bearing of the family inher- 
 itance on modern Christian society has as- 
 sumed quite another phase from this. Not 
 even in the matter of worldly amusements 
 has the Christian man who is being corrupted 
 by the world, so openly adopted the princi- 
 ples of the world as in the creation of family 
 fortunes. The ambition of the vast majority of 
 Christian men seems to be to pile up vast 
 wealth to leave to children and even more dis- 
 tant heirs. Every day brings its tale of disas- 
 ter to such men. They die in harness. They 
 are spent before their time. They toil and 
 struggle to amass more and more to leave to 
 
THE FAMILT INHERITANCE. 173 
 
 some one who shall come behind. The Psalm- 
 ist gave it as a mark of the worldling, they 
 "leave the rest of their substance to their 
 babes." But now it is the Christian who 
 makes this his one aim in life. The great 
 mass of wealth accumulated in modern times 
 in Europe and America has been accumulated 
 by nominally Christian men. But more and 
 more if is bequeathed to heirs to be held in 
 perpetuation of family names and estates. 
 
 A large part of such wealth, in more recent 
 times, by some startling phases of social life, 
 is going over from America to Europe to re- 
 build the fallen fortunes of the nobility. 
 What remains at home here is affected by the 
 feudal taint. The European noble was candid 
 and open in his methods to build up great 
 houses. He invented the laws of primogeni- 
 ture, of entail, of hypothec, of game, and 
 all the other class privileges of the rich to 
 secure for the head of the house riches and 
 power. 
 
 We can not make such laws in America, 
 but we are copying social customs concerning 
 family inheritances equally as effective for the 
 destruction of democratic simplicity and equal- 
 ity. Surely a sober second thought will show 
 us how vain all this is, how destructive of all 
 the higher ideas of Christianity, and how fatal 
 
174 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 even to commercial success, in our society, 
 such a course becomes. 
 
 Perhaps we ought to dismiss those instances 
 where the parents, in utter forgetfulness of 
 their own professions of Christian faith and 
 spiritual ideals, rear their children in fashion- 
 able luxury, among idle companions, with no 
 thought of the obligations of wealth, and 
 allow them to look forward to the time when 
 all the accumulated wealth of years shall fall 
 into their hands to be used as they please. 
 But such instances are so numerous that they 
 demand the attention of the thinker and lover 
 of good society. This is the extreme case; 
 but it is symptomatic of the general practice 
 of the wealthy Christians of our age. In such 
 a case the parent allows wealth which God 
 has given him as the fruit of years of labor 
 and the product of Christian virtues to be 
 deflected from its natural course of benevo- 
 lence and perverted to the most vicious pri- 
 vate ends. What if the person so misusing 
 the wealth is one's child. What if the time 
 is many years after the parent has gone from 
 earth. Was there no obligation to see that 
 such wealth should fall into proper hands to 
 be used for noble purposes?* 
 
 * Since writing these words, a will has been made 
 public which contains a very remarkable vindication of 
 
THE FAMILT INHERITANCE. 175 
 
 But even in those cases where the members 
 of the family adopt their parents' faith and 
 spiritual ideals, have children any right to ex- 
 pect a parent to toil and scramble and ex- 
 haust every power of body and mind, merely 
 to add a few thousands more to the family for- 
 tune? Are men wise to put such a premium 
 on their own death? What object is served 
 for the social advancement, the business suc- 
 cess, or the Christian virtue of a child when 
 a parent leaves him several millions rather than 
 the simple capital of his business or the mod- 
 est legacy that remains out of what he ex- 
 pected to need for his own uses? The chil- 
 dren's rights have, supposedly, in every intel- 
 ligent Christian family been already regarded. 
 They have been well born, well educated, well 
 trained to commerce or the professions, or to 
 public service. They are companions with their 
 parents in business or social service. That 
 part of the family fortune which is invested in 
 business or the funds or other commercial con- 
 cerns, they have their share in, present and 
 
 the principle here advanced for the determination of the 
 family inheritance. This testator discards the feudal 
 principle of primogeniture in the male line, and substi- 
 tutes personal fitness on moral and intellectual grounds. 
 It is not a long step from such action to the recogni- 
 tion of the principle that, not ties of blood, but bonds of 
 the spirit constitute the rights of heirship to a Christian 
 man's wealth. 
 
176 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 prospective. But what right have they to 
 look for other, vaster, and still further accu- 
 mulations, which will require continued toil 
 and business slavery from their honored and 
 loved father? 
 
 Of course they have none. Perhaps they 
 are most eager for their father to call a halt, 
 to enter with them into the enjoyment of and 
 higher uses of what has already been secured. 
 Recently we were called to mourn the loss of 
 a business man, some fifty years of age, who 
 had within the past few years amassed in a 
 most honorable commercial career a great for- 
 tune. He was a leader in our missionary and 
 philanthropic work, not simply as a giver but as 
 a personal worker. He was a man of family in 
 the prime of life. He was a wise counselor 
 and a director of our Christian interests. But 
 he would not rest ; he would not content him- 
 self with what he had already won. He still 
 wanted more; Pelion on Ossa piled high. 
 But alas for family, for church, for public in- 
 terest, they had to lay him away in an un- 
 timely grave! 
 
 Is not the very essence of the Christian life 
 lost in such a career? Time that should be 
 spent in the home, in intellectual and spiritual 
 pursuits with the family, and a life that might 
 have been long spared to the public service are 
 
THE FAMILT INHERITANCE. 177 
 
 ruthlessly sacrificed to family greed and ambi- 
 tion. He loses his life literally by seeking to 
 save it; he gains the whole world only to 
 lose his own soul. 
 
 Aye, dreadful as the thought may be, such 
 a father can never be sure, even when he 
 looks into the eyes of those dearest to him, 
 but that some demon of covetousness, whom 
 his own worldliness has begotten, may lurk 
 behind the countenance of his child. May 
 there not arise a wish to have the "old man" 
 away that the heir may possess and enjoy. 
 The iron entered the soul of Earl Gloster 
 when he thought his . son Edgar had writ- 
 ten "If our father should sleep till I waked 
 him you should enjoy half of his revenue for- 
 ever" ; for as the father said, the ingratitude 
 was unnatural "to his father that so tenderly 
 and entirely loves him, Heaven, and Earth!" 
 Yet it is the tendency of our habits, as it 
 was, in this case, the infection of the times, 
 to breed such unnatural vices. 
 
 Such conduct is foolish even from a com- 
 mercial point of view — the expectation of 
 great riches is so often fatal to study, in- 
 dustry, and character. Society is strewn with 
 the wrecks of men who might have been great 
 and happy but for inherited wealth, or even 
 its expectation. One of the greatest author- 
 
178 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ities on modern business and on American 
 social tendencies says: "It would be well for 
 the lesson to be enforced upon the students of 
 your University that the ranks of success in 
 business and the professions are not recruited 
 from the sons of the rich, but almost entirely 
 from the field of workers."* If then a con- 
 tinued success in business or a great career in 
 the professions is the aim of a fond parent, it 
 may be laid down as a certain rule — "Do not 
 leave your boy a fortune." 
 
 There are many sociological reasons to 
 be rendered for hereditary fortunes in old 
 countries, where they invariably go with great 
 estates; for the estate has tenants, and the 
 obligations of great wealth are more readily 
 recognized in such a case. The nobleman or 
 gentleman neglectful of his social and moral 
 responsibility in his parish is considered a dis- 
 honor and a danger to his order. But in 
 America only the personal privileges belonging 
 to great inherited wealth are likely to present 
 themselves. There are no tenantry, no de- 
 pendent peasantry, no social parish obligations 
 that rest upon the "lord of the manor." 
 
 In the social life of America hereditary 
 fortunes are dissociated from all those hu- 
 manities which tend to keep them sweet and 
 * Dr. Chauncey M. Depew, in a public letter. 
 
THE FAMILY INHERITANCE. 179 
 
 pure. They are provocative of self-indulg- 
 ence, a hindrance to the natural career of the 
 American citizen, and separate him further 
 and further from the people. We must recon- 
 sider this whole subject of family inheritances 
 from every point of view, as Christians, busi- 
 ness men, and citizens of this great Republic. 
 
 Its relation to our present enquiry is very 
 plain and very important. The Christian man 
 who imperils his own spiritual interests and 
 sacrifices his own higher service to the family 
 and the State in amassing wealth for the sake 
 of leaving a family fortune, is recreant to every 
 principle of religion, false to every experience 
 of education and every duty of American 
 citizenship. Unrelated to what has been said 
 about the Christian education of the family 
 and the personal service of men of means, this 
 might appear to be a contradiction of one of 
 the main positions of our theme — the power 
 of wealth in social service, — but as the logical 
 result of the wise use of riches, the obligation 
 of personal service, and the administration of 
 wealth while the giver lives, it will be seen to 
 be a consistent outcome of the whole teaching 
 of this work. 
 
 We know that neither the happiness, the 
 honor, nor the usefulness of our children de- 
 pend upon the vastness of the family inherit- 
 
180 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ance. Every one of those interests and ambi- 
 tions which make a Christian family noble and 
 happy would be advanced a thousand-fold by 
 the just administration of the wealth during 
 the lifetime of the owner. If the unreasoning 
 instinct to leave money to a child, without re- 
 gard to character, ideals of life, and use to 
 which the wealth may be put, is to be ac- 
 cepted by Christians as a paramount obligation, 
 then the strongest passion of the worldling is 
 the dominant force in Christian society. 
 
 Did we understand the higher uses of wealth, 
 no such parental folly would be possible: 
 it would be considered a reproach for a Chris- 
 tian man to pile up a vast fortune to gratify 
 family pride, and leave it under control of 
 anti-Christian ideals of life. The Christian 
 ideal would be to use wealth as it was earned 
 in the education of the family, in their settle- 
 ment in life, in fitting and endowing them for 
 positions of honorable service, and in the ad- 
 ministration of the surplus wealth upon objects 
 which claimed the sympathies and co-opera- 
 tion of both parents and children. 
 
 The children would thus be partners both 
 in the business and benevolence of the parents. 
 They would be sharers in the comforts, the 
 honors, the privileges, and ideals of their life. 
 Their wealth would accumulate as much in 
 
THE FAMILT INHERITANCE. 1S1 
 
 moral power and usefulness as in material in- 
 crease. They would perpetuate an ideal of 
 life, a principle of service, a sort of moral dy- 
 nasty which should give permanence and 
 splendor to their name. One of the strongest 
 anti-Christian passions of the ages would be 
 met by "the expulsive power of a new affec- 
 tion." 
 
 Wealth would no longer be an end in itself, 
 but a means to the noblest of all ends. In its 
 accumulation it would take a new character 
 and gather new force, because of what it could 
 be made to do in the hands of such possessors. 
 Family ambition would not consist in a contin- 
 uous approximation to fashionable and worldly 
 examples, but would be in the perpetuation of 
 great Christian traditions. Noblesse oblige, in 
 the new order of society, would be the watch- 
 word of those who, possessing culture, and 
 faith, and wealth, used their possessions in the 
 grace of gentlehood and the dignity of service, 
 because they had learned the secret of that 
 saying "He that is greatest among you let 
 him be your servant." 
 
XVII. 
 
 THE NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 What Christians need to-day is a divine 
 passion for righteousness in the civilization of 
 their age and nation. Some are wise, digni- 
 fied, intellectual: others are earnest, spiritual, 
 and generous: while a happy third mingle 
 these gracious traits in healthy proportions. 
 But there is a conspicuous absence of fire and 
 abandon of soul in the interests of some over- 
 mastering passion or in pursuit of some fas- 
 cinating ideal. There is much sense, but little 
 poetry, in the average Christian's life. 
 
 We hear some of the demands made by 
 Jesus on the Christian heart as if they be- 
 longed to a world of dreams and He the 
 splendid dreamer. There is no predominant 
 conception of life and duty in the Christianity 
 of our day forcing all its intellectual, spiritual, 
 and material forces into an energy which will 
 carry the church to certain conquest over the 
 forces of evil in the society around her. We 
 have no dominant creative ideal concerning the 
 nature and purpose of the civilization which, 
 182 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 183 
 
 consciously or unconsciously, we are mould- 
 ing. We are comfortable, satisfied with 
 things as they arc, if we are fairly successful in 
 life. We are ''lapped in soft Lydian airs," 
 perhaps "sunk in Capuan languors." We 
 have not the strenuous note, the spirit of 
 heroes, the devotion of martyrs, the conse- 
 cration of Saints. 
 
 There is a most alarming and suggestive 
 contrast between the listless tone of the aver- 
 age Christian and the quickening enthusiasm 
 of the various secular interests of life. Sci- 
 ence carries its votaries off their feet with a 
 whirlwind of zeal for the investigation of the 
 secrets of nature. Work — eager, incessant, 
 triumphant — is the watchword of the new 
 studies ranging from the worm to the stars. 
 Literature is a teeming hive of earnest, seri- 
 ous, highly-equipped workers ; and there is 
 a spirit, a tang, a snap, a zest of life in all they 
 say and sing. Commerce also, even if fevered 
 and overstrained, is energetic and command- 
 ing, calling forth some of the most splendid ex- 
 amples of creative intellectual activity in our 
 time. It has passed into a proverb concerning 
 the artist, that he becomes a slave to the fas- 
 cinations of art. Statesmanship is but an- 
 other name for the most consuming ambitions. 
 In all these realms we detect the note of real- 
 
184 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 ity, the keen delight of the warrior, conscious 
 of a noble cause and animated by the firm con- 
 viction of a successful issue, the transport of 
 the prophet and poet under the spell of a lofty 
 vision and the inspiration of a noble ideal. 
 
 Such was the spirit of the first Christians 
 in their efforts for social redemption. To re- 
 gain this strenuous note of life, to re-possess 
 this heroic spirit, the Christian must learn 
 anew his obligation to society, his debt to the 
 spiritual claims of civilization. In doing so 
 we will run no risk of forgetting our obliga- 
 tion to the individual, for the individual claim 
 has already been met, and out of it has sprung 
 this new obligation. 
 
 We must reconstruct our Christian doctrine 
 of life in its totality under the pressure and 
 in the light of the social needs and teach- 
 ings of our own time. Besides the individual, 
 society must be regarded as the subject of 
 salvation; for though the individual soul 
 creates society, in turn society reacts upon the 
 individual. 
 
 The end of religion is a perfect civilization. 
 Sin exists in and pollutes the soul of society 
 just as truly as it exists in and pollutes the 
 individual soul. The curse of sin, thus consid- 
 ered, is its power to destroy. It limits, de- 
 prives, destroys all wealth, whether of souls 
 
NEW CHRTSTIAN CIVILIZATION. 1S5 
 
 or bodies. And because it pulls down and 
 destroys civilization and the fruits of man's 
 toil, physical and intellectual, it is thereby a 
 destroyer of souls. 
 
 The Christian thinker must come, therefore, 
 to see that an ignorant, narrow, poor, social 
 life is a degradation of our Christian manhood 
 and a destroyer of souls. This is only another 
 way of saying that intemperance, unthrift, 
 avarice, license, and injustice are rivers of 
 death, which swell the great sea of human 
 misery to the mockery and confusion of the 
 Gospel of Jesus. 
 
 The Christian requires a social ideal for 
 the work of to-day which will give him the 
 accent of conviction, the fire of a- generous 
 love, and "put life into the very ribs of 
 death:" otherwise we cannot escape the 
 charge that our Gospel is no exception to the 
 universal law of nature which reveals "the 
 world as struggling with all its force for the 
 destruction of what it has itself brought 
 forth." 
 
 Must we then accept this judgment of pes- 
 simism, and read the doom of our dearest 
 spiritual hopes in the failure of the Gospel to 
 regenerate society? Does Christianity, like all 
 world forces, "weave her own shroud and pile 
 up the stones of her own tomb"? At all 
 
1 86 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 events she will be tested by the kind of civil- 
 ization she produces; for this is the spiritual 
 atmosphere which her own children are com- 
 pelled to breathe, in which they must think 
 and work, and win their crown or meet their 
 fate. 
 
 If Christian parents should be content to 
 let their children be born in dirt and squalor, 
 be reared among the vagabonds and vicious, 
 and intermarry with the criminal and unchaste, 
 they would be denounced as apostate and un- 
 natural. Yet the Christian churches of Europe 
 and America let the souls committed to their 
 care in large sections of the community be so 
 born, reared, and married, and it does not ap- 
 pear to them unnatural or absurd. 
 
 There is apparently a wide separation be- 
 tween the rich, cultured Christian who lives 
 in the repose and refinement of his suburban 
 villa, and the thugs, criminals, and outcasts 
 who herd in the conjested districts of our great 
 cities ; but there is no real separation of fate, 
 so far as history teaches us. When the at- 
 mosphere is poisoned with the deadly small- 
 pox and diphtheria there is an equal danger to 
 the children in the castle and the children in 
 the hut. When a ship catches fire, the same 
 fate awaits the millionaire in the salon as the 
 pauper in the steerage ; captain and cabin-boy 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 1S7 
 
 are on an equal footing in the hour of common 
 danger. 
 
 The Christian church will get back from so- 
 ciety what she gives to society. By virtue of 
 our very faith in the social energy of Christi- 
 anity we are compelled to admit that with 
 what measure we mete it shall be measured 
 to us again. If, then, this civilization which 
 Christianity has done so much to create, and 
 which, in its turn, becomes the soil in which 
 Christian graces are to grow and flourish, has 
 not yet yielded us much fruit, it is simply be- 
 cause we have neglected the teachings of our 
 Lord and defied the laws of the human soul. 
 Philosophers say that Christian humanity 
 is not much better than Pagan humanity. This 
 assertion might be set aside as a prejudice, 
 and the contrary successfully maintained, but it 
 clearly proves that the condition of humanity 
 as a whole, and not separate atoms here and 
 there in favored places, is the supreme test 
 of the value of the Christian gospel. A small 
 pump will raise the level of the water in a 
 village pond, but only elemental forces ap- 
 proaching the supernatural will raise the level 
 of the ocean. Civilization is an ocean. The 
 changes in its character and spirit require the 
 operation of elemental forces approaching the 
 supernatural. We must grant either an inn- 
 
1 88 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 nite duration of time for the action of small 
 persistent forces or an infinite energy exer- 
 cised by some great force instantaneously, if 
 we hope to change great interests like society. 
 It sometimes happens that these two kinds 
 of forces are combined and act together. 
 Christianity, as the quickener of the individual 
 soul and the reformer of social life, should be 
 used so as to bring to bear all her regenerative 
 powers upon the forces of civilization. Chris- 
 tianity, as the religion of the new birth and of 
 eternal life, is an elemental moral force. Wealth, 
 as the evidence of strong personality and pro- 
 ductive energy, is an elemental material force. 
 The one is an evidence in the world of an 
 elemental spiritual power which strikes with 
 infinite energy instantaneously, and yet per- 
 sists, through generation after generation, 
 moulding, inspiring, and creating civilized life 
 after its own image: the other is an evidence 
 in the world of an elemental physical power 
 which will strike as instantaneously and with 
 infinite energy, and it, too, persists, through 
 generation after generation, to work weal or 
 woe in the Christian civilization where it has 
 been used. If these forces, the spiritual and 
 the physical in the Christian economy, are 
 divorced and rendered antagonistic by false or 
 unworthy ideals of life, they will become mu- 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 1 89 
 
 tually destructive of the higher civilization 
 which the Saints and seers of the church have 
 ever aimed to create. If they are wedded in a 
 noble ideal of life, rendered sympathetic and 
 mutually helpful, they become the parents of 
 a divinely perfect human society. 
 
 The economist says, "The odd thing about 
 wealth is the small impression the preachers 
 and moralists have ever made about it. From 
 the very earliest times its deceitfulness, its in- 
 ability to produce happiness, its fertility in 
 temptation, its want of connection with virtue, 
 have been among the commonplaces of reli- 
 gion and morality."* Thus even on economic 
 grounds the demand is made that wealth 
 shall be spent under the direction of moral 
 ideas. 
 
 True, the luxury and display of the pagan 
 world, as seen in the lives of Hadrian, Lucul- 
 lus, and Maecenas, would not be tolerated in 
 modern society. We might not attempt by 
 violent means to limit the possession of wealth, 
 but we do recognize that the fact of possession 
 is a great moral and political engine of power: 
 we recognize, in a word, that the use of wealth 
 is the real test of our civilization, and the 
 abuse of it in self-indulgence, the corruption 
 
 *E. L. Godkin in " The Expenditures of Men of 
 Wealth." 
 
190 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 of justice, or the perversion of political insti- 
 tutions is a menace to the dearest heritage of 
 our civil and religious life. 
 
 This sentiment must control the Christian, 
 at least, in the use of his wealth. Although 
 the man who acknowledges no obligation 
 to Christ and has no spiritual ideal of life, 
 may trust to the "note' of the age for the 
 extent and character of his expenditures. 
 "Sumptuous living and equipage, a coach 
 and six maids behind," is no longer the 
 "note" of the higher class in Europe as it 
 was formerly. Fashion herself has decreed 
 that the true gentleman shall have "quietness 
 of manner, of voice, of dress, of equipage, 
 and the vulgar ostentation of wealth shall be 
 left to the new rich man." 
 
 Now, whether the man of the world 
 orders his life by compulsion or willingly is a 
 matter of no ethical moment. But with the 
 Christian this is entirely different ; the ex- 
 penditure of his wealth is an integral part of 
 his character and the administration of a 
 sacred trust. He must follow a principle, 
 intelligent and moral, as the expression of the 
 ideal of his life, because his example fash- 
 ions the mode, gives the tone, and animates 
 the body politic — in a word, creates a Christian 
 civilization, by the vitality of his spiritual ideal. 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 191 
 
 Most thinkers acknowledge that Christianity 
 alone can save society from the destruction 
 which certainly awaits it under a reversion to an 
 ungenerated humanity. If the Christians of 
 our day are to take an active and intelligent 
 part in the work of salvation they must draw 
 a clear, bold line of demarcation between 
 their ideal of life and the ideal of the man of 
 the world. In general, concerning the use 
 and disposition of wealth there has been no 
 such definite line and no such spiritual ideal. 
 The Christian of to-day, in the vast majority 
 of instances, fashions his life on an ideal which 
 diverts the forces of wealth to the support of 
 unfriendly and even anti-Christian objects. 
 
 In the cycle of life, as exhibited by 
 Christian society, we see the fortunes earned 
 by the consecrated toiler of one generation 
 expended by the unconsecrated reveler of the 
 next on subjects whose very names are enough 
 to make the godly forefathers turn in their 
 graves. It is not infrequent to see the fortune 
 of a pious deacon, painfully earned by thrift, 
 industry, and temperance, wasted by his de- 
 scendants in the license and vice of Bohemia 
 and the demi-monde. There must be some- 
 thing wrong with our ideals of life when the 
 grandson of a Puritan scatters the accumula- 
 tions of piety in the support of a Parisian 
 
192 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 actress. This condition of things has become 
 possible because Christians have a divided 
 purpose in life. They devote their hearts to 
 the Lord, but their fortunes to their kindred, 
 who are very often not the Lord's at all, but 
 openly inimical to every spiritual interest sa- 
 cred to the man who made the fortune. 
 
 The claims of civilization are indefinite, 
 remote, and lack personal interest ; the claims 
 of children and relatives are definite, near and 
 personally interesting. The heir must be a 
 very great rascal or the testator a very strong- 
 minded, far-seeing man, before the fortune is 
 directed past the tie of blood and given to 
 philanthropic institutions. The fruits of years 
 of consecrated toil, the essence of this strong 
 man's personality, the energy and virtue of a 
 Christian life, expressing itself in the shape of 
 accumulated wealth, may by the mere accident 
 of fate, be lost to the cause of truth and prog- 
 ress, and fall into the hands of license and dis- 
 honor. 
 
 Thus the world for which Christ died, 
 which may be reasonably represented as the 
 world of truth, intelligence, purity, beauty, 
 justice, honor, love — in a word a spiritual civil- 
 ization — that world is not in evidence to the 
 great mass of even professedly Christian men 
 in the use and disposal of their wealth. The 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 193 
 
 passion for such a civilization has never yet 
 taken possession of their hearts and minds. 
 But surely it is not impossible for the Christian 
 to appreciate the moral splendors of a civiliza- 
 tion which, in our day, has called forth the 
 burning eloquence of poets and prophets, re- 
 minding us almost of the lofty strains of 
 Isaiah and the mystic longings of St. John — 
 a civilization, too, which has touched the 
 deepest feelings of statesmen and jurists, as 
 they trace the toilsome and bleeding path 
 along which humanity has walked to its com- 
 ing hope. 
 
 Lord Charles Russell, the Chief-Justice of 
 England, says: "Civilization is not dominion, 
 wealth, material luxury; nay, not even a great 
 literature, and education widespread — good 
 though those things be. Its true signs- are 
 thought for the poor and suffering, chivalrous 
 regard and respect for women, the frank recog- 
 nition of human brotherhood, irrespective of 
 race or color, or nation or religion, the nar- 
 rowing of the domain of mere force as a gov- 
 erning factor in the world, the love of ordered 
 freedom, the abhorrence of what is mean and 
 cruel and vile, ceaseless devotion to the 
 claims of Justice/' This definition of civiliza- 
 tion, "the finest ever framed," is based upon 
 Christian truths and pervaded by the spirit of 
 
194 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 Jesus. For such a civilization seers have 
 dreamed their dreams and prophets have 
 uttered their voices, martyrs have shed their 
 blood, Apostles have toiled and spent them- 
 selves in missionary labor, saints and lovers of 
 humanity have consecrated their lives, and we 
 men and women of to-day, with such a glori- 
 ous heritage of example behind us, must take 
 it to a warmer place in our hearts and as the 
 regnant principle in our spirits. 
 
 All noble Christian souls ever strive, after a 
 sort, towards such a civilization. But like 
 a bird with a broken wing our flight has been 
 little better than a scurrrying run. We have 
 risen to no majestic height secure of our own 
 powers. Our unconsecrated wealth was our 
 broken wing. Spiritual aims were unsupported 
 by material forces into which the life energy 
 of man, as long as he is on this earth, must 
 largely pour itself. Life, divided into hostile 
 sections, was paralyzed and a prey to destruc- 
 tion. The church, with a spirituality born of 
 heaven, "has allured to better worlds" and 
 dowered believing souls with the noblest joys 
 of life; she has strengthened and enriched 
 mind and heart so splendidly that the victories 
 of both the moral and material world have 
 rested on her banners. 
 
 How is it then that her victorious progress 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 195 
 
 is always strangely, unnaturally, illogically 
 arrested? She stops in her triumphant 
 career when she seems best fitted for further 
 conquest. Like an able general, vigorous in 
 battle but lethargic in pursuit, she has lost 
 the full fruits of her victory. The territory 
 won for Christ is constantly lost again. The 
 spiritual and intellectual vigor and enthusiasm 
 which won character, fame, and fortune seem 
 to decay and die in actual possession of the 
 fruits of the victory. Like the chiefs of some 
 great conqueror, Christians are virtuous, loyal, 
 brave, self-sacrificing in their poverty when 
 they have yet fortunes and honors to win, 
 but become cowardly, disloyal, and luxurious 
 when they have wealth and dukedoms to 
 enjoy. Among Christians, as among soldiers, 
 it is not enough to win and possess, nor even to 
 enlarge and cultivate, the personal powers in 
 life — a new ambition must possess the soul 
 thus dowered and cultivated. For the en- 
 larged life, the new powers are not alone a new 
 source of enjoyment — they are an added van- 
 tage ground and a new responsibility. They 
 carry in themselves new laws of life and bring 
 with them new powers to bless and uplift in a 
 larger sphere, or powers of evil to spread a 
 wider swath of ruin and death. 
 
 For this reason the Christian man in com- 
 
196 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 mand of resources, whether wealth, social 
 standing, experience, intelligence, or affection, 
 must open his heart to a new love, his spirit 
 to a new ambition. The glory of a spiritual 
 civilization must ravish his soul; he must' come 
 under its spell as a poet is mastered by his 
 theme, feel its fascination as the creative artist 
 yields to the grace of his ideal. This too, not 
 merely because it will add zest to his own life 
 when the world begins to pall, and active ser- 
 vice in the ordinary routine of business has no 
 more to offer, but because he is the divinely 
 appointed instrument for the accomplishment 
 of this great purpose of redemption. He is 
 false to God and to humanity who locks up 
 the treasures of education, experience, wealth, 
 in his own heart when the bleeding world is 
 calling for their saving ministry. 
 
 Moreover if the Gospel can save men, inspire 
 the soul, enlarge the mind, enrich the spirit, 
 and give life so many successes, so that a 
 Christian man is the full-orbed, normal, and 
 complete man, but when this masterpiece is 
 finished there is no field for the exercise of 
 those rich, large, gracious powers, then is the 
 Gospel but a more disastrous failure as an in- 
 strument for the sublimer end of a spiritual 
 civilization. It is a torso, not a perfected 
 statue, and the eye of humanity looks with 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 197 
 
 longing at those noble lines which prophesy 
 the glory which might have been. We trust 
 to see the dawning of a new day in the in- 
 creasing instances of men and women of the 
 most richly endowed natures and the most 
 brilliantly successful professional and com- 
 mercial careers recognizing their duty to 
 society and passionately accepting, with the 
 spirit of the old Confessors, the way of the new 
 service and the ideal of the new civilization. 
 Such an instance is that of John Ruskin: 
 "Refusing the invitations of the rich and 
 putting away the temptation to a life of 
 elegant ease and refined luxury, he gave him- 
 self to the poor. His best lectures were 
 never given where English wealth and social 
 prestige were represented, but were deliv- 
 ered to working girls' clubs and workingmen's 
 associations. If Rousseau refused the yoke 
 of law and service upon the plea of genius, 
 this man, by reason of his talents, was careful 
 to fulfil the duties not expected of medi- 
 ocrity. No man has done so much to lift 
 the veil which hides the grim realities of pov- 
 erty from the gay dreams of wealth. By his 
 life and example Ruskin has earned the right 
 to speak. as a prophet to those who stand upon 
 the threshold of the nineteenth century."* 
 * N. D. Hillis, D. D,, Sermon on John Ruskin. 
 
1 98 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 If then we can read the economic lesson of the 
 centuries that "Savage nations are always 
 poor," and if we can perceive the great spir- 
 itual truth concerning wealth, that "It is a 
 divinely ordained instrument for promoting the 
 highest Christian civilization," we shall have 
 discovered the essential truths which furnish 
 the Christian who has accumulated wealth 
 a just principle for its administration in the 
 interests of the Kingdom of Christ Jesus. In 
 this case he will perceive it to be a power spir- 
 itual of which he is possessor and a sacred 
 trust of which he is the divinely appointed 
 trustee ; and from these obligations to his own 
 soul, to his fellow-men, and to God there is no 
 discharge. If Christianity is to be saved from 
 eating out its own heart, and vindicated as the 
 supernatural regenerator of society, Christians 
 must loyally accept the principle of increasing 
 obligation with the possession of increasing 
 resources. So will society, as well as souls, 
 become the subject of its redemptive agencies. 
 
 Christianity is being tested now as never 
 before in the history of the world — not by 
 external enemies, but by lofty ideas and prin- 
 ciples of action which she herself has done 
 most to call into existence. Can she rise to 
 the demand of the hour? Can she answer 
 those calls of the Holy Spirit, which, like the 
 
NEW CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. 199 
 
 Word of God, "pierces to the dividing of both 
 soul and spirit, and is quick to discern the 
 thoughts and intents of the heart ' ' ? Are the 
 followers of Jesus in the last decade of the 
 nineteenth century able to submit their life to 
 the dominion of this lofty and heroic ideal? 
 Under it a new career of service and honor 
 awaits all strong, resourceful souls ; there will 
 be new worlds to conquer, larger plans of work, 
 deeper draughts of pleasure. Character would 
 be identified with such an administration of 
 wealth and such a use of power; nobleness 
 and social distinction would be inseparable 
 from such service ; it would be at once a test 
 of loyalty to Christ and loyalty to the Nation. 
 It would be a sure indication of that passion 
 for righteousness in the life of nations which 
 burns up the baser elements in souls and sets 
 free the pure metal of a redeemed life to enrich 
 society with the treasures of heaven. Under 
 its refining fires we should see the church of 
 Christ glow with the primal purity of the Apos- 
 tolic days; its divine breath would inspire her 
 for a new mission, its moral energy would arm 
 her for a new conquest. Disciplined by its 
 high demands she would emerge " fair as the 
 moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army 
 with banners." 
 
XVIII. 
 
 THE SCOPE AND SANITY OF THE NEW IDEAL. 
 
 The intelligent reader of these pages will 
 readily perceive that no appeal has been made 
 to passion and hardly any to mere sentiment. 
 Our aim has been to present the sanity and 
 sweet reasonableness of the doctrine that 
 wealth is a trust, and that its wise and Chris- 
 tian administration demands the exercise of 
 the noblest religious character and the rarest 
 civic spirit. Our care has been to avoid all 
 those violent class prejudices often allowed to 
 poison the mind and to keep clear of dema- 
 gogic harangues so often served up, instead of 
 argument, in the attempt to array the poor 
 against the rich. No subject is so delicate of 
 adjustment, none so difficult to understand 
 and apply safely to the complex realities of 
 life, as the relation of Christianity to wealth. 
 Yet concerning no other have so much foolish- 
 ness, violence, and crudity been spoken and 
 written. 
 
 Some social reformers can see nothing but 
 one side of the subject; they will listen to no 
 200 
 
SCOPE AND SAN ITT OF NEW IDEAL. 20 1 
 
 considerations that have weighed with men in 
 the past, and predict nothing but disaster un- 
 less the economic foundations are destroyed 
 and a new society created on principles dia- 
 metrically opposed to and essentially contra- 
 dictory of the business and social life which 
 now obtains. But a subject so vast, delicate, 
 and radical as this cannot be understood with- 
 out patient study; it can not be settled by ap- 
 peals to feeling; it must gain the reason and 
 intelligence as well as the affections and the 
 will. 
 
 The Christian man in possession of accu- 
 mulated wealth, when asked to change his ideal 
 of life for the express purpose of affecting the 
 use of his money, is bound by the strongest 
 obligations to himself and society to ascertain 
 clearly the scope and meaning of the new ideal. 
 He must assure himself that such a proposal 
 will not bring down upon his own head a greater 
 disaster than the danger he is trying to prevent ; 
 he must look into the future if he may discern 
 the fate of society as it would be affected by 
 these new social and economic principles. He 
 can thus urge, in the interests of caution, 
 the very obligations of wealth which the social 
 reformer urges in support of the economic 
 revolution. Moreover, the persons for whom 
 these considerations are especially intended 
 
202 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 are, in most instances, careful, experienced, 
 wise, perhaps even shrewd, men of business 
 who have accumulated or retained wealth, and 
 by virtue of this fact are not subjects upon 
 whom the dreams of socialists or the raving 
 of fanatics are likely to produce much effect. 
 But they are Christians, presumably open to 
 consider the reasonable moral obligations which 
 wealth entails, and susceptible to the spiritual 
 ideals of life which lie at the basis of all really 
 Christian society, and must inspire every 
 method for the higher uses of wealth. 
 
 We desire in a few sentences to show, the 
 leading human interests involved in this dis- 
 cussion, and see how they would be affected, 
 and thus, with our eyes open to the sacred 
 possibilities of life and our wills in generous 
 surrender to the new truths of the Gospel, we 
 may open our hearts to the best influences of 
 our age and manifest in our lives the noble 
 and gracious principles of the teaching and 
 practice of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 The broad issue, as stated, is between our 
 Christian selfhood and the claims of society. 
 Are they antagonistic or complementary? Is 
 the modern doctrine of the solidarity of the 
 race and the claims of society upon the be- 
 liever a denial of the hitherto accepted doctrine 
 of individualism? The question involves the 
 
SCOPE AND SANTTT OF NEW IDEAL. 203 
 
 fundamental doctrines both of religion and so- 
 ciety. On its threshold we are met by the 
 claims of personality — the individual's rights 
 to the development, exercise, enjoyment, 
 and fruits of his own powers, physical, in- 
 tellectual, and spiritual. If we deny these 
 to the Christian man we attack the doctrine of 
 personality in Christ and in God. Such a 
 denial would logically lead us to the waste 
 desolation of Buddhistic nothingness and eter- 
 nal night. The horror and despair of pantheistic 
 pessimism, that life itself is a mistake and con- 
 sciousness a curse — yawn before us in that dark 
 gulf. Against the black horror of this athe- 
 istic denial of the good of life and the glory of 
 salvation I, as a redeemed soul, enfranchised, 
 crowned with a noble selfhood in Christ, assert 
 myself. The Christian possesses a selfhood 
 which carries with its redemption every pre- 
 rogative of personality and manhood into the 
 new life of the spirit. Thus I stand in the 
 presence of the eternal realities of God, of the 
 Holy Spirit, of the Christ, and of the Human 
 Soul. Here Christianity is positive, assertive, 
 vital, and aggressive. 
 
 But these are certainly not theological ab- 
 stractions: they are historical realities or mani- 
 festations of life which bear upon the concrete 
 facts of existence ; they live, think, work, suf- 
 
204 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 fer, and triumph in this present physical life ; 
 and touch our present interest, in asserting the 
 positive possession of property. It is not 
 difficult to see, therefore, why all anarchistic 
 and atheistic systems have attacked the prin- 
 ciple of the personal possession of property. 
 The right to own property is simply the mate- 
 rial symbol of the right to exist, to know, to 
 believe, to enjoy, to love, to serve, to reign. 
 It involves not only man's right, but Christ's 
 and God's. The creator's possessions are 
 material as well as spiritual: "The cattle on a 
 thousand hills are mine," "The silver and the 
 gold are mine," is the assertion of Him who 
 also claims the allegiance of our spirits and 
 whose riches are souls. 
 
 We have maintained as a fundamental princi- 
 ple of religion, of society, and of human per- 
 sonality, that the Christian man has a right to 
 own property ; and with this right follows its 
 control, disposal, and varied administration, 
 subject only to the law of God. All schemes, 
 expedients, plans, and laws which touch this 
 right are essentially anarchistic and destructive 
 at once of Christianity and human society. 
 The only considerations that can be allowed to 
 modify this right are such as grow out of the 
 right itself. Thus, the strength of our reason- 
 ing concerning the administration of wealth 
 
SCOPE AND SANITT OF NEW IDEAL. 205 
 
 lies in the doctrine of Christian selfhood and 
 the right of personal possessions which it car- 
 ries with it. 
 
 Therefore the obligation to use wealth wisely 
 and for the higher spiritual ends of life is not 
 blackmail paid to society in order that the re- 
 mainder may be used for personal gratifica- 
 tion. Possession always involves use, and use 
 is either wise or unwise — it either blesses or 
 bans; it reaches inwardly to the possessor, 
 and outwardly to society. To regard wealth 
 as a trust, and to administer it in the interests 
 of society, is not, however, a denial of the 
 principle of possession nor a limitation of, nor 
 a concession of weakness in that principle ; it 
 is simply a perception of its higher ends and 
 uses, and an acknowledgment that it is abused 
 when used only for personal gratification, and 
 that spiritual service for one's self and society 
 are the greatest advantges of fortune. For 
 this reason the effects of such a use of wealth 
 must ever be personal. In the close and im- 
 mediate sense of promoting the culture, and 
 strength of one's own intellectual and spiritual 
 nature, as well as furnishing the stage of action 
 for enlarged service in the industrial and moral 
 life of society its benefits are personal. 
 
 Thus, and thus only, does wealth purchase 
 for its owner all that is potential in it. The 
 
206 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 socialist and unfriendly critic may point out 
 that Christianity has existed now for nearly 
 two thousand years, and not yet created such 
 an ideal use of wealth, either for the owners 
 themselves or for use in society. We 
 acknowledge and lament the fact that human 
 nature is so slow in the larger spiritual appre- 
 hensions; but Christianity is not by any means 
 alone in this peculiarity of our defective intel- 
 lectual and spiritual development. 
 
 Science was as long about the perception of 
 the Creator's thoughts in nature as religion 
 was about his thoughts in scripture and soci- 
 ety. It is but of yesterday that Newton, 
 Laplace, Faraday, Tyndale, and Thomson re- 
 vealed the secrets of Nature. Nature has 
 been before us these thousands of years an 
 open book, but we had no key to her language. 
 It is far more strange that her interpretation 
 should have been so long delayed than that 
 selfish, prejudiced, human hearts, even after 
 they have come under the teachings of the 
 Holy Spirit, should be so slow to learn those 
 difficult lessons concerning wealth, which not 
 only require a clear head, but a surrendered 
 will and a pure heart. This is indeed the fea- 
 ture of the new ideal of life which indicates its 
 true character and far-reaching influence. 
 
 It is not an intellectual proposition which 
 
SCOPE AND SANITT OF NEW IDEAL. 207 
 
 may be demonstrated by a process of reason- 
 ing, and so left secure of its own application 
 because proved. It has not only to be under- 
 stood, but accepted, submitted to, and loved. 
 It is at once an ideal which appeals to the most 
 spiritual qualities of our Christian manhood 
 and a practical plan of life which penetrates 
 and rules among the details of our material 
 existence. It reaches from the temple to the 
 kitchen, from the university to the workshop, 
 and affects our most exalted mood and most 
 sordid cares. It goes beyond the individual 
 to the family. It requires the exercise of the 
 free will, and it lays its strong hand upon 
 heredity and race. It reverses largely the 
 principle upon which modern society has built 
 up family fortunes and names, and it demands 
 strict personal service before it will yield a bet- 
 ter social life. It lays its strong hand upon 
 the man's business, and it modifies his concep- 
 tions of fame, comfort, and pleasure. 
 
 It is impossible that such an ideal could 
 have gained large credence, not to say accept- 
 ance, under the conditions which Christianity 
 has had to pass through in its checkered his- 
 tory. For many hundreds of years European 
 Christianity had to struggle for its very exist- 
 ence; and after external enemies were over- 
 come it still had to grope blindly, often amid 
 
208 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 tears and blood, after the meaning of its own 
 leading truths, so slow of apprehension and so 
 hard of acceptance are the vital ideas that de- 
 termine the destiny of races and the form of 
 civilized society. 
 
 Furthermore we are dealing with a prin- 
 ciple of human conduct which requires a com- 
 plementary knowledge of material things and 
 of human history, as well as the precepts of 
 divine revelation. The Christian church had 
 to find out, by a slow, hard experience, what 
 wealth is, how it is produced, what laws gov- 
 ern its use and possession, and what relation 
 it bears to the civil and moral life of the 
 people, before she could begin to see its bear- 
 ing upon great Christian ideals of society and 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 It is very significant, that popular liberty, 
 and indeed all human progress, has been insep- 
 arably associated with the question of taxes. 
 Nations and kings have both known that the 
 concentrated energy of a people stored up in 
 the treasury of the State largely determines 
 the matter of autocracy or freedom, of the 
 decay or permanence of governments. These 
 struggles in politics, social life, and physical 
 nature had to arrive at some quality of defin- 
 iteness, and come into contact with the ma- 
 tured thought of Christianity about itself, 
 
SCOPE AND SANITY OF NEW IDEAL. 209 
 
 before the relation of wealth and Christianity 
 could be clearly seen and strongly felt. Here 
 and there, it is true, gifted individuals were 
 enlightened on such a theme, as the sum- 
 mits of the Alps catch the rosy colors of the 
 morning long before the valleys are yellow 
 with the light of the sun. But we are treating 
 of a principle which governs nations and civil- 
 izations — a method of action which is of uni- 
 versal social application, not the rapt vision 
 vouchsafed to solitary, far-seeing souls. It is 
 not strange, therefore, that we have been so 
 long in understanding this claim of the higher 
 life, for the data from which alone we could 
 reason have but recently been gathered from 
 the facts of life around us. 
 
 Again the century which has seen the 
 greatest progress in political liberty, in scien- 
 tific research, and consequently in the accumu- 
 lation of material wealth, has also witnessed 
 the clearest recognition of this principle of ob- 
 ligation in the expenditure of wealth. In one 
 sense, the one is an accompaniment of the 
 other, but that does not alter the fact, histor- 
 ically considered, that the obligation could 
 never have been perceived in all its scope and 
 felt in all its power without those previous 
 achievements in civil life and those discoveries 
 in science, combined with new ideals in reli- 
 
210 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 gion Indeed, we are face to face with a new 
 epoch, we are entering a new era of social de- 
 velopment; not because one particular truth 
 hitherto unheard of in the church and the State- 
 is now discovered for the first time, and being 
 made the battle cry of the reformers, but be- 
 cause mutually helpful and complementary 
 truths, hitherto divorced and unfriendly, are 
 being accepted as mutually explanatory and 
 necessary parts of a great whole. 
 
 Selfhood, which is the right to possess and 
 enjoy with its corresponding obligation to 
 social service, is seen to be, both in grace and 
 nature, the only foundation of civilized society. 
 The fair blossom of family life springs from the 
 vital seed of personality. The glorious tree of 
 Christian civilization with all its precious fruits 
 of art, literature, science, education and soul 
 culture, strikes its tap-root deep in the rich 
 soil of a regenerated selfhood. 
 
 This new ideal of the Christian life is 
 not the monopoly of a class, but the heritage 
 of all men; this is no Utopian dream, but 
 the reasoned result of civil and religious truth ; 
 this needs no appeal to fanaticism for accept- 
 ance or denial, it just comes, like the dawn, 
 into the open window of every receptive soul. 
 We have advanced so far on the road of prog- 
 ress it is impossible to go back; all great 
 
SCOPE AND SAN ITT OF NEW IDEAL. 21 1 
 
 hearts who feel the people's sorrows, and all 
 noble souls who hear their Divine leader's call, 
 will advance, carrying the improved weapon 
 and keeping step to the thrilling music of the 
 new age. 
 
 How then shall we choose to live during 
 those opening years of the new century — the 
 new millennium — under the strong, clear, 
 steady light which the age has brought us con- 
 cerning the totality of our life and duty? If it 
 were a purely economic subject like the produc- 
 tion and distribution of wealth, it could be safely 
 relegated by us to experts in political economy 
 and to the general principles of honesty and 
 self-interest in commerce. But the new rela- 
 tions of Christian personality to wealth teach 
 us that the production, distribution, and use of 
 wealth is a moral and spiritual question, an 
 obligation bearing upon our most inward char- 
 acter, and reaching out to society and down- 
 ward through civilized community life for 
 countless generations. 
 
 Peace and War, Life and Death, seem 
 standing around in suspense waiting for the 
 momentous decision of the Christian church 
 as to how her members will discharge the obli- 
 gations of the new era. This problem cannot 
 be solved by artificial attempts to get rid of 
 our wealth. This would be seeking refuge in 
 
212 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 the old idea of denial and lead us back to sav- 
 agery and night. If our education, skill, and 
 virtue create wealth in all civilized communi- 
 ties, its possession is a condition of Christian 
 civilized life. We must live in the atmosphere 
 which such powers and virtues have created. 
 We might cut the gordian knot by rising out 
 of this atmosphere, as the aeronaut throws 
 over his ballast, but only to suffer asphyxia 
 or to be frozen to death. 
 
 The Christian problem of our day is harder, 
 because it carries with it the moral and spirit- 
 ual fate of individuals and society. It is 
 harder, because to use and expend is always 
 harder than to earn and gather; because it is 
 always harder to live than to die. It is harder, 
 because it is more difficult to walk in the 
 golden medium than to be a fanatic in religion, 
 or a rake and worldling. Christianity has had 
 a large complement of followers, devoted, 
 holy, intense, spiritual souls, who have de- 
 spised the world, risen victorious over its al- 
 lurements, counted life itself as nothing before 
 the prize of glory in their ecstatic vision, and 
 from thrones of power have stepped aside into 
 the cell of poverty. She has had assertive 
 natures also, — soldiers, statesmen, merchants, 
 scholars, men who have led the van of prog- 
 ress and gathered riches and power and 
 
SCOPE AND SANITY OF NEW IDEAL. 213 
 
 honor. But she has had few who have com- 
 bined these features of life — few who as work- 
 ers and fighters have seen the spiritual potency 
 of wealth and power in combination with 
 purity of heart, tenderness of spirit, and ideals 
 of brotherhood ; few who as thinkers and saints 
 have seen the material creations of the spirit 
 in combination with industry, thrift, courage, 
 hope, and a civic loyalty. 
 
 The task of Christian thinkers to-day is 
 to combine these hitherto separated ideals of 
 life. We must find a principle of action 
 which counts business as holy as worship, in- 
 deed as itself a worship in the spirit of broth- 
 erhood and help which all true business im- 
 plies. A principle of life which holds the 
 forum as sacred as the temple and the work- 
 shop as holy as the altar, which treats the 
 physical needs of men as tenderly and sacredly 
 as their spiritual weaknesses, and which draws 
 no line of demarcation between sacred and 
 secular. A principle which leads us to a gen- 
 uine imitation of Christ in making all life 
 sacred, all service a doing of ''the Father's 
 business." A principle, finally, which creates 
 no gulf of separation between a man's private 
 character and his public conduct, which will 
 make impossible the self-deception of the man 
 who, intent on private virtues, is yet recreant 
 
214 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 to public obligations; which, in a word, teaches 
 a man to see in the face of society the reflex 
 of his own character, and will use every re- 
 source of brain and heart, of spirit and means, 
 to change that image both in himself and in 
 society into the image of Jesus Christ. 
 
 That principle, applicable to every age and 
 condition of life, is that wealth (resources 
 of every kind — brains, affection, experience), 
 is a trust, and that the administration of such 
 a trust is the most sacred duty, the holiest 
 obligation of the Christian man ; that the 
 fate of the individual and the fate of society, 
 the future of children, and the success of reli- 
 gion are dependent upon the manner in which 
 this obligation is met. 
 
 This principle builds upon the past exper- 
 ience of the race like all sane, safe proposals for 
 human betterment, yet it listens to the truth 
 of the present like all true prophets of God. 
 It treasures the concentrated wisdom of teach- 
 ers, the example of heroes, and the devotion 
 of saints who have served God well in their 
 time, and makes no break in the splendid tra- 
 dition of noble lives whose names are still an 
 inspiration to the believer. But it reads their 
 story to mean that if we would follow in their 
 footsteps we must learn the new lessons, solve 
 the new problems, rise to the new duties, and 
 
SCOPE AND SANITT OF NEW IDEAL. 215 
 
 enlist for the new service to which the voice 
 of Christ plainly calls us. 
 
 This sane and balanced judgment gives it 
 life and the promise of future power, as the 
 recipient of the living spirit of God, teach- 
 ing us the truths of our own age and help- 
 ing us to quit us like men. It demands, 
 undoubtedly, a high type of Christian intelli- 
 gence and morality; but surely, after nearly 
 two thousand years of teaching and example, 
 the Christian church can furnish that to her ad- 
 herents. It demands somewhat of an acknowl- 
 edgment of failure, and even gross errors, 
 selfishness, and slowness of understanding in 
 the past, but shall Christians take refuge in 
 pride and self-sufficiency, rather than humility 
 and repentance? It summons us to a high 
 and serene consideration of the issues of hu- 
 man life, speaks to us in a language which to 
 many yet is strange, unreal, and idealistic, and 
 seems to bid us act in a world of dreams. 
 But these divine dreams may be the grandest 
 realities; for how many of those gracious 
 teachings on the slopes of Galilee, read in the 
 cold, hard, materialistic light of our worldly 
 aims, seem dreams, seen as it were by eyes of 
 another kind from ours? Yet those dreams 
 were made splendid realities by men and wo- 
 men whose great faith and great souls enabled 
 
2l6 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 them to enter into the fellowship of Christ's 
 truth and service and suffering. And out of 
 those eternal and spiritual realities of his 
 teaching, who was to the world but a dreamer 
 and defeated man, were born the moral purity, 
 intellectual vitality, social and family affection, 
 and spirit of liberty, which saved Europe from 
 corruption, despair, and anarchy. Out of 
 these things have sprung the new manhood 
 and womanhood, the love of ordered freedom, 
 and the Kingdom of God which is to-day the 
 refuge and hope of all despairing as well as 
 aspiring souls. 
 
 Therefore let not the practical man of 
 the world despise our dreams: in his heart of 
 hearts he longs for their realization; in the 
 dreary prosaic monotony of his life they are the 
 promise of color and music and grace and 
 sweetness, entering into his soul to lead him 
 up to the threshold of heaven. Let him enter 
 there through the blood of Christ, and learn 
 for himself the meaning of the dream. 
 
 We shall come under the guidance of this 
 principle, to a new dispensation of the 
 spirit which consecrates all material things, 
 as if the Divine Master said to us anew 
 " Gather up the fragments that nothing be 
 lost." Has the church not lost for the ma- 
 terial comfort of life much of the resources 
 
SCOPE AND SANITY OF NEW IDEAL. 217 
 
 which her Divine Head created by His power 
 over the physical conditions of life? Led by 
 the teaching of such a truth we shall feel 
 new tenderness and sympathy for every form 
 of human suffering and sorrow, and new 
 sacredness for every form of human life, 
 whether rich or poor. It will create an in- 
 timacy and friendship, unknown before, be- 
 tween the sordid drudgery and toil of the 
 laborer and the lofty aspirations of the seer, 
 between the cold calculations of the man 
 of business and the devout enthusiasm of the 
 saint. Nay, this shall help to rob the toil of 
 its sordidness and give it spiritual dignity; it 
 shall bring into business the holy warmth of a 
 serving son of God. This principle of life 
 shall be a new spirit moving in the common 
 ways of men, like Jesus among his contempo- 
 raries, "familiar, condescending, free," yet 
 opening our eyes to the rich and splendid 
 visions which bring the poetry of great and 
 gifted souls into common clay. 
 
 Now this divine fabric of the new social 
 order is reared on the firm foundation of 
 the physical nature around us, on the family 
 life, the home, the school, the common ways of 
 trade and art and science and music and lit- 
 erature. It demands for its realization no 
 fanatical or impossible vagary of the intellect 
 
218 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 or spirit, no violence to the elemental and 
 normal powers of the body or the soul. It 
 will come into our homes a wise, gracious 
 friend ; it will nourish our kindred with its 
 love, and adorn our life with taste and refine- 
 ment. It threatens no revolution nor destruc- 
 tion of interests which religion and nature 
 both tell us should ever be sacred. It sets no 
 bounds to progress, but rather promises, with 
 the accession of a new vital force, a renas- 
 cence of creative power in every department 
 of human activity. It has all the marks of a 
 natural, inevitable, and resistless movement of 
 the mind and spirit. 
 
 Every candid man we hopefully believe, de- 
 sires its realization, and we only regret that 
 our weakness and selfishness may hinder its 
 sway over all our life. We feel its breath 
 upon our fevered temples as the hope of im- 
 mortality came to the jaded, skeptical Roman 
 world in the days of Christ. We, too, are in 
 the exhausted period that precedes transition 
 into a stronger, nobler life. We have lost 
 many things, and others still have lost their 
 definiteness of outline, their power of carrying 
 conviction to our minds and fascination over 
 our hearts. We do not believe and love as 
 men who live near Nature and close to the 
 heart of humanity, men who honor great deeds 
 
SCOPE AND SAN ITT OF NEW IDEAL. 219 
 
 and suffer in silence, for these traits are be- 
 coming rarer among us. 
 
 Yet more in practical life the acceptance of 
 this obligation would be a new vow of obedi- 
 ence to the simple teachings of Jesus, a new 
 imitation of His example and a new inspiration 
 of His spirit. It would renew in our life the 
 simplicity of faith and the clearness of truth, 
 for we should know of the doctrine by His own 
 plan of doing His will. We should renew our 
 hopes, possess again the joy of fellowship, and 
 have the conscious dignity of walking with 
 God. In comparison with this renewal of all 
 the vital forces of the soul and all these sav- 
 ing influences on society, how mean and con- 
 temptible are the gratifications and ambitions 
 of unconsecrated wealth. 
 
 The Christian man who, in these latter 
 days, shall grow up into the stature of perfect 
 manhood in Christ Jesus is one who shall 
 consecrate all the resources of a strong, wise, 
 regenerated nature, and lay all its success, 
 material and moral, on the altar of service 
 for his fellow-men. Such an one will hear his 
 Master say " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
 the least of these my brethren, ye have done it 
 unto me." He may look into the faces of his 
 own children and lovingly say "I have done 
 the best for them," and they will rise up and 
 
220 SELFHOOD AND SERVICE. 
 
 call him blessed. He may look out upon the 
 public life, and hear "the blessing of him that 
 was ready to perish" mingle with the music of 
 the rich, strong voice of the new civilization, 
 which he has helped largely to create. Thus 
 in the possession of a Christian selfhood, which 
 is the richest form of personality, and in the 
 noble and inspiring activities of personal service, 
 which is the only social virtue, he will attain, 
 the highest crown of all redeemed souls — a 
 holy kinship with the Elder Brother. He 
 alone can truly teach him the sacredness and 
 strength of those ideals of life and bonds of 
 brotherhood which alone can sustain the 
 splendid fabric of a Christian society and usher 
 happy hearts into the Kingdom of God. 
 
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