Class 
 BooL 
 
 
 
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 CflKORIGHLT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
" nnUAT government of the people y 
 hy the people j and for the people, 
 shall not perish from the earth. ^^ 
 
 -Lincoln 
 
THE 
 APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 FIVE PATRIOTIC ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE A. GORDON 
 
 MINISTER OP THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH 
 BOSTON 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 
 BOSTON CHICAGO 
 

 Copyright, 1917, bt George A. Gordon 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Published May, 1917 
 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON 
 
 m 16 1317 
 
 ©CU4B0859 
 
PERSONAL WORD 
 
 From the early days of American history 
 the Old South Church has been a centre of wise 
 and bold patriotic feeling. In the Colonial 
 period, with others of its order, this church saw 
 clearly the importance of the State as the form 
 of political freedom. In proof of this it is perhaps 
 enough to name Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice 
 of the Supreme Court, the leading layman of 
 the Old South Church of his time, whose voice 
 against human slavery, and in behalf of uni- 
 versal freedom, was one of the first to be raised 
 in the Colony. The history of the American 
 Revolution cannot be written with Samuel 
 Adams left out of the account. Adams was the 
 leading layman of the Old South Church of 
 his generation. In the Civil War the church 
 maintained its place as one of the great centres 
 of patriotism and humanity. Perhaps the chief 
 significance of this little book, if it has any 
 significance at all, is as a witness to the apostolic 
 succession of good citizens, as a testimony to 
 the fact that what the fathers loved their chil- 
 dren and their successors revere and cherish, 
 that the fire which the earlier generations kindled 
 
RSONAL WORD 
 
 on the altar of patriotic devotion still burns in 
 full flame, and that no hand will be allowed 
 to extinguish it. 
 
 Four of the five Addresses that follow were 
 printed separately by the Old South Society, 
 for free distribution. Although the editions 
 printed were large, they are now practically 
 exhausted, and the demand continues. It has 
 seemed to those in charge of this matter that 
 the collection of these Addresses in a single 
 inexpensive volume, with the additiox* of a 
 fifth, delivered Good Friday evening, Apr'l 6, 
 1917, and here published for the first time, 
 might continue to serve thif?' cause of good citizen- 
 ship at this critical hour in our history. To 
 this appeal I have been unable to withhold 
 consent. Although spoken from the pulpit on 
 Sunday mornings, with the exception above 
 noted, I have called these utterances Addresses 
 rather than Sermons, because the text selected 
 is used more as a sacred motto for the ideas 
 presented and less as governing the entire 
 movement of thought. This distinction holds 
 less, if at all, in the second and third Addresses 
 than in the other three. The descriptive name 
 matters little, however, since it raises merely 
 a point in professional usage. 
 
 The Sunday morning on which the Address 
 on Christian and Citizen was spoken, there was 
 presented to the Old South Church the National 
 Flag, in these words of pious devotion: 
 
PERSONAL WORD 
 
 IN HONOR OF THE FIRST REGIMENT OP HEAVY 
 ARTILLERY MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEERS 1861-1865. IN 
 SACRED REMEMBRANCE OF ITS FOUR HUNDRED AND 
 EIGHTY-FOUR OFFICERS AND MEN WHO DIED FOR THEIR 
 COUNTRY IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION; AND IN GRATI- 
 TUDE TO GOD FOR THE BLESSINGS BESTOWED UPON 
 THIS NATION THROUGH THE VALOR AND SACRIFICE OF 
 SUCH AS THEY. THIS MEMORIAL FLAG IS PRESENTED 
 TO THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH. BOSTON. AN HISTORIC 
 PROPHET OF AMERICAN FREEDOM. BY A MEMBER OF 
 THIS REGIMENT AND OF THIS CHURCH. BOSTON. FEB- 
 RUARY. iai7. 
 
 The Sunday on which the Address on Ameri- 
 can Loyalty was given, the Flag of the Nation 
 was again presented to the church, in the fol- 
 lowing words: 
 
 ' THIS NATIONAL FLAG IS PRESENTED TO THE OLD 
 , SOUTH CHURCH BY SEVERAL OF ITS MEMBERS WHO 
 5ERVED THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WAR FOR THE PRES- 
 E'^VATION OF THE UNION. IN THE TWENTY-FIFTH. 
 THE FORTY-THIRD— OF W tCH THE THE FIFTEENTH 
 MINISTER OF THIS CHU^JH. JACOB MERRILL MANNING. 
 WAS CHAPLAIN — THE FORTY-FOURTH AND THE FORTY- 
 FIFTH REGIMENTS OF MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEERS. 
 IT IS PRESENTED IN HAPPY MEMORY OF THEIR COM- 
 RADES. LIVING AND DEAD; IN EVER DEEPENING LOY- 
 ALTY TO THEIR BELOVED COUNTRY; IN THE SURE 
 FAITH THAT THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH WILL CONTINUE 
 TO BE WHAT IT HAS EVER BEEN. A PROPHET OF THE 
 INTEGRITY AND FREEDOM OF THE UNITED STATES 
 OF AMERICA. 
 
 The Old South Church would be the last to 
 claim preeminence either in devotion to the 
 country, or to any other sacred possession of 
 our people; it simply desires now as of old to 
 let all whom it may concern know where it 
 stands, and with what depth of grateful feeling 
 it cherishes the august inheritance of the Ameri- 
 can Republic. 
 
 George A. Gordon. 
 
 Old South Parsonage, 
 Boston 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. American Freedom .... 
 
 11, The Foreign-Born American Citizen 
 
 III. Christian and Citizen . 
 
 IV. American Loyalty .... 
 V. The Nation and Humanity . 
 
 PAOB 
 
 3 
 17 
 33 
 53 
 71 
 
AMERICAN FREEDOM 
 
For freedom did Christ set us free : 
 stand fast therefore, and he not en- 
 tangled again in a yoke of bondage. 
 — Galatians 5:1. 
 
I 
 
 AMERICAN FREEDOM 
 
 FREEDOM and slavery are in uttermost 
 contrast in the lives of human beings. 
 The Greeks, whose tongue Paul wrote 
 and spoke with power, divided their race into 
 two classes: the class of the slave and the class 
 of the freeman. Slavery they regarded as the 
 lowest degradation; freedom as the highest 
 exaltation alike of the outward life and the in- 
 ward life. Such has been the feeling of all the 
 greater peoples through the whole of human 
 history. Slavery has meant physical, intellec- 
 tual, and spiritual misery, an afflicted existence, 
 an existence robbed of worth and joy; freedom 
 has meant physical, intellectual, and spiritual 
 worth, power, gladness, and hope. Here all 
 Americans, of whatever origin, whether native 
 or adopted, stand. 
 
 Americans were born into freedom; they in- 
 herited a world of freedom ! Their country is 
 the monumental symbol of freedom, first for 
 the white man, then for the black man and the 
 red man, and finally for all men who come here 
 and who are worthy to enter our fellowship and 
 our service of freedom, who are ready to uphold 
 the institutions and the ideals of the American 
 
4 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 Republic. The poet Burns, riding over the bat- 
 tlefield of Bannockburn, and composing the ode 
 which Carlyle said should be sung with the 
 throat of the whirlwind, sings not only for all 
 the true sons of his native country, in all their 
 generations, but also for all true Americans 
 everywhere : 
 
 " Wha will be a traitor knave? 
 Wha can fill a coward's grave? 
 Wha sae base as be a slave? — 
 Let him turn, and flee! " 
 
 The sovereign gift of Jesus to the world was 
 freedom, — freedom for the spirit that should 
 eventually cover the earth with its own forms 
 and institutions. And Paul, the greatest dis- 
 ciple of Jesus here, as elsewhere, seized his 
 Master's religion at the heart, and in the text, 
 translated accurately in Standard Bible, set 
 before the world this double gift of Christian 
 freedom: " For freedom did Christ set us free." 
 Here are the two great aspects of freedom: the 
 interior freedom of the spirit and the gradual, 
 progressive freedom both in rehgion and in 
 political life. These are the two aspects of 
 Christian freedom that I am to discuss with 
 you this morning. 
 
 I. Christian freedom begins in the mind ; it 
 is interior, it is spiritual. It is freedom from 
 the domination of wrong ideas, false notions, 
 
AMERICAN FREEDOM 5 
 
 base superstitions, evil purposes, brutal pas- 
 sions; it is emancipation from a world in the 
 mind that is false, wrong, wretched. Accord- 
 ing to Christianity there can be no freedom that 
 does not begin in the mind; and this interior 
 freedom takes two great directions: it concerns 
 the being and the character of God, his disposi- 
 tion toward mankind, his government of the 
 world. Think of the notions, false, base, horri- 
 ble, that have for ages darkened the face of the 
 Most High and made men cringe in his presence 
 and try to bribe him into doing right, to propi- 
 tiate him into good- will toward his own children ! 
 Christianity is, first of all, an emancipation 
 from this vast and wretched world of false and 
 degrading notions that have blotted out the be- 
 nignity of the Supreme Being from the sphere 
 of human vision. 
 
 This emancipation concerns not God only 
 but also man. An equal number of false, mis- 
 taken, debasing notions have grown up in regard 
 to human life; this tyranny of false and debas- 
 ing ideas and views holds men in wrong-doing, 
 drives them into courses of shame, and will not 
 let them escape. Christianity makes men free 
 in their ideas about themselves, their kind, 
 their constitution, the good for which they 
 were made, and enables them to see what is 
 essential good. Inward freedom, — that is the 
 first word in Christianity, freedom of the mind. 
 Jesus spoke no greater words in all his minis- 
 
6 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 try than these: '' Ye shall know the truth and 
 the truth shall make you free." True ideas on 
 any subject, sincerely entertained, make a true 
 mind; a true and a truth-loving mind is the 
 free mind, and it alone is free. 
 
 Jesus was persecuted by the State and finally 
 he was put to death by the State; but he founded 
 a kingdom of truth in freedom and a kingdom 
 of freedom in truth. He had perfect confidence 
 in the truth in the hands of freedom, and of 
 freedom as the child of truth. As I have said, 
 his greatest apostle, free-born, a citizen of the 
 Roman Empire as he was, perhaps because he 
 was free-born, seized upon the great central 
 gift and promise of his Master to mankind of 
 immediate interior freedom and of ultimate 
 external freedom. That double freedom was 
 Paul's gospel to the Empire. There is an epic 
 in the life of this monumental man who had so 
 long and in vain sought freedom from a world 
 of evil superstitions and false notions about 
 God and about himself. The great emancipa- 
 tion came to him when he became a disciple of 
 Jesus; then he stepped forth as a man made 
 free within and made for freedom in a free 
 world. 
 
 In this apostolic succession we must place 
 the Phrygian slave, Epictetus, who loved free- 
 dom with a mighty love and who asked this 
 great question: " Who made you a slave, Nero 
 or thyself? " Freedom began with him in the 
 
AMERICAN FREEDOM 7 
 
 mind, in the soul, and this is the story behind 
 the achievement of real freedom everywhere. 
 
 The Pilgrims, our prophets of freedom, began 
 here. Freedom was first of all a mental passion 
 with them, cherished in old England, cherished 
 in Holland, cherished in the wilderness of New 
 England; more and more they sought to be 
 free within. We think of the mistakes, the 
 blunders, the inconsistencies of the Pilgrims 
 and the Puritans; we dwell on these altogether 
 unmagnanimously and too much. Here is their 
 central bequest which made them great and 
 which makes them greater as the generations 
 run. They began with freedom in their souls; 
 that was their passion; more and more it came 
 to them; more and more it is coming to the 
 world, and the Pilgrims especially are among 
 the prophets of this greatest thing in human 
 history, — the free mind in the truth, the mind 
 made free by the truth. 
 
 II. Turn now to the other aspect of Chris- 
 tian freedom. While Christian freedom begins 
 in the mind it does not end there. It is bound 
 to flow outward in its true ideas, and more 
 and more it seeks forms and institutions accor- 
 dant with its own character. In the life of 
 each tree there resides a plan, and that plan 
 conforms to itself the tree in which the life is 
 to dwell; oak, ash, pine, maple, elm, each be- 
 comes the form, lifted into existence, grown 
 
8 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 into existence by the impulse of the interior 
 building life. In the same way the free mind 
 seeks to utter itself in forms and in institutions 
 accordant with its own character. Here we 
 touch the deepest struggle in all human his- 
 tory, — the conflict between the true mind, 
 the mind made true by true ideas, seeking to 
 express itself in institutions correspondent with 
 itself, and the darkened mind, the mind in 
 bondage, calling upon compulsion and force to 
 maintain it in the world. There is the central 
 conflict in the history of the world: the mind 
 made free by true ideas, seeking to express 
 itself in institutions and forms accordant with 
 its own character, and the mind under the 
 domination of false ideas, in part or in whole, 
 employing force to maintain itself supreme 
 against freedom and against truth; there, I 
 repeat, is the central conflict and the glory of 
 human history. 
 
 More and more for the last one hundred and 
 fifty years Providence has been throwing into 
 the hands of the people, among growing democ- 
 racies, the cause of freedom and the cause of 
 truth against autocracy, against absolutism, 
 against those whose false notions of their maj- 
 esty are supported by compulsion. The first 
 great movement was the American Revolution. 
 This was seconded by the lurid splendor and 
 magnificence of the French Revolution; there 
 modern democracy was born: there the people 
 
AMERICAN FREEDOM 9 
 
 began to live in true ideas and in freedom; 
 there and then they began to build the free 
 commonwealth. 
 
 I beg you to note this great development of 
 democracy employed, as it would seem, and as 
 I believe, by Providence to create freedom under 
 true ideas and with freedom to create institu- 
 tions for the benefit — not of certain classes but 
 of all mankind. Modern France is a democracy; 
 modern Britain is a democracy; the United 
 States of America is a democracy ! We speak 
 of the blunders of democracies, and it is well 
 that we do; we call attention to their mistakes, 
 follies, extravagancies, and that is well. But 
 fasten your eye upon the central thing, — men 
 under the domination, on the whole, of true 
 conceptions and thereby made freemen; men 
 seeking to express this truth and this freedom 
 in institutions created for the good of the whole 
 body politic. 
 
 1. Religious Freedom. Here the State touches 
 two great interests of the individual man, his re- 
 ligious life and his poHtical Hfe. We in America 
 declare the State shall not say what we shall 
 believe or what we shall worship, or how we 
 shall worship what we deem all-worthy. The 
 State must leave us to decide what we regard 
 as true, what we regard as worthy of worship; 
 it must leave us free to adopt what we regard 
 as the best method of worship. And here again 
 we are close to the Pilgrims as prophets of 
 
10 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 freedom; this is our inheritance from them, this 
 distinction between State and Church. The 
 authority of the State stops at the door of the 
 sanctuary, and a man's creed is of his own 
 thinking; a man's worship is to the being in 
 whom he beheves, and the mode of his worship 
 is according to his convenience and preference. 
 
 No man can estimate what this inheritance 
 is yet to do for the world. We are only begin- 
 ning to see what religious freedom means. 
 When men are free to believe in what they 
 regard as the truth, free to worship what they 
 hold to be the Eternal Excellence, free in all 
 their methods of worship, that will mean a 
 new world of sincerity, of insight, of character, 
 of power in religion. 
 
 2. Political Freedom. The second point at 
 which the State touches freedom concerns the 
 individual citizen. This country was founded 
 to give reasonable and just opportunity to 
 individual citizens, for the expression of what- 
 ever gifts the Almighty had implanted in them, 
 — industrial, intellectual, and spiritual. The 
 American State is the guardian, the authorita- 
 tive guardian of the utmost ordered opportu- 
 nity for all men, that they may work out the 
 gifts that are in them. The American State is 
 not a nurse, it is not a hospital, it is not a syn- 
 dicate of capitalists, it is not a union of laborers, 
 it is not a paternalism of any kind; it is a 
 majestic umpire in the free development of 
 
AMERICAN FREEDOM 11 
 
 all American talent; it is the great guarantor 
 of fair play for all individuals; and, in the 
 third place, it is the benevolent friend of the 
 defeated and the unfortunate. 
 
 This is the American conception of the State, 
 the conception of the founders, and of the second 
 founders; of those who fought that this Re- 
 public might come into being and of those who 
 fought that it might continue in being. I re- 
 peat that the American State is not a nurse, 
 it is not a hospital, it is not a syndicate of 
 money-changers, it is not a union of laborers, 
 it is not a paternalism of any kind: it is an 
 umpire in the free development of manifold 
 power, it is a guarantor of fair play in the 
 realization of the universal opportunity! 
 
 This system is not without defects. It has 
 this immortal merit, however; it has bred a 
 race fit to found, fit to maintain, fit to defend, 
 fit to perpetuate the institutions of free men! 
 To-day is a solemn day in the life of this na- 
 tion. We are on the verge of war, and our 
 population is made up largely of the kindred of 
 those who are fighting one another in the con- 
 tinent of Europe: Scot, English, Irish, Italian, 
 French, Belgian on the one side ; and of the 
 nations fighting on the other side, all but one 
 are generously represented in the American 
 Republic. I would be the last to speak a bitter 
 word or a word to hurt the sensibihties of any 
 man whose blood is derived from either of the 
 
12 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 Central Powers. But we have on our hands a 
 problem, and our question is, how shall we face 
 it as a united America? The answer is, we must 
 face it as our forefathers faced the Revolution. 
 
 3. The Lesson of the Founders. Here is the 
 great, impressive lesson for the composite 
 America of to-day. Whom did the Colonists 
 fight? Their kindred, their fathers, their 
 brothers, those who were bone of their bone 
 and flesh of their flesh. It was Englishman 
 against Englishman, Scot against Scot, and 
 Irishman against Irishman. It was a war 
 between kindred and between kinsmen who 
 twenty years before had been profound and 
 happy friends ! Kinsmen, with the same lan- 
 guage, with the same religion, with the same 
 literature, with the same traditions of freedom 
 and power and manhood, went forth to meet 
 each other in battle. There is nothing like so 
 tragic a situation in the America of to-day as 
 we confront the possibilities of the future as 
 there was when the Tea Party took place at 
 the hands of those who gathered in the Old 
 South Meetinghouse; or when Washington took 
 command of the Continental Army under the 
 old tree in Cambridge. What was their argu- 
 ment, conclusion, motive? It was that every 
 tie must be like tow in the fire when it comes 
 to the question of the existence of freedom 
 among men born for freedom ! 
 
 I commend this example to my fellow adopted 
 
AMERICAN FREEDOM 13 
 
 citizens of other blood than my own, and I know 
 if the case were reversed I should take the lesson 
 to myself. What did I mean when I took the 
 oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the 
 United States and foreswore specially and spe- 
 cifically all allegiance to the Queen of Great 
 Britain? Preparation for any emergency and 
 readiness to count freedom, American freedom, 
 first, last, and all the time above every other 
 interest. 
 
 One lesson more from the Revolution. The 
 revolutionists made a distinction clear and deep 
 between the government of Great Britain and 
 the people, between King George III and his 
 lackeys and bhnd servants and tyrants, and the 
 whole people. They knew that Chatham was 
 with them, that the greatest political genius of 
 the English race was with them, — Edmund 
 Burke; they knew or might have known that 
 the poet Burns was with them, who after the 
 war wrote a great *' Ode to Washington," who 
 after the war sacrificed all possibility of a pen- 
 sion from the Government by writing " A 
 Dream " to George III, which I beg you to read. 
 Let our Teutonic citizens, who are among the 
 most substantial and the ablest and the worthiest 
 of the adopted sons of America, — let them 
 draw the distinction which your fathers drew in 
 the day of their distress; let them draw the dis- 
 tinction between the Teutonic peoples and the 
 Teutonic government. And remember that if 
 
14 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 he were free to speak, the true Teuton would 
 say that no nation has a right to limit the just 
 freedom of the United States; subject it to 
 indignity; to murder its women and children 
 on the high seas, or to confine its industry and 
 influence within its own bounds. 
 
 We are one to-day, one in our belief in free 
 institutions, one in our sense of obligation to 
 the American Republic, and all ties even of 
 the most sacred character must be, as I have 
 said, like tow in the fire when it comes to the 
 question whether America shall be first or the 
 country of our descent or our birth. 
 
 The President of the United States has been 
 patient, patient to the utmost limit, so patient 
 that the world has been in danger of misunder- 
 standing him. Let us thank God to-day for 
 his patience, for his clearness, for his solemn 
 decision, and for his hope that war may yet 
 be averted. Let us be ready, with our faith, 
 our prayer, our manhood, and all our resources 
 to stand behind the Government that guards 
 the heritage of the American people. 
 
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN 
 CITIZEN 
 
And the chief captain answered, 
 With a great sum obtained I this 
 citizenship. 
 
 — Acts 22 : 28. 
 
II 
 
 THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN 
 CITIZEN 
 
 The Republic of the United States is in fact 
 a nation of immigrants, a nation of ahens. All 
 have made the great migration, all have come 
 hither from other parts of the earth. The only 
 difference among Americans is that some came 
 earlier while others came much later, indeed as 
 it were yesterday, to these shores. The only 
 aboriginal American is the Indian. This his- 
 toric fact should be forever born in mind. We 
 came hither first or last, across the ocean, and 
 from the ends of the earth. 
 
 There is however a ground of distinction 
 among Americans; they are rightly divided 
 into native citizens and citizens foreign born. 
 The native citizen has grown into the being of 
 the society that his alien ancestors helped to 
 form. He has in his blood an American inheri- 
 tance; his instincts have been fed with native 
 food; he is alive to nothing else as he is to the 
 American Republic. We foreign-born Ameri- 
 cans acknowledge his distinction, we rejoice 
 in his happiness, we count ourselves fortunate 
 to stand with him in the great communion of 
 free citizens. We ask him, in his turn, to read 
 
18 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 in the story of our migration the struggle of 
 his ancestors; we remind him of what we left 
 behind, what we brought with us, and at 
 what cost we gained our American citizenship. 
 
 In the words that I have chosen as my text 
 we have a foreign-born Roman citizen. Ex- 
 actly where he was born we do not know; we 
 do know that he was born outside Roman citi- 
 zenship. He was, therefore, an adopted citizen 
 of the Roman Empire and to this he refers in the 
 words that I have quoted, " With a great sum 
 obtained I this citizenship." 
 
 There are three implications in these words: 
 the cost of citizenship to this man; the privilege 
 of citizenship to him; his duty as a Roman citi- 
 zen. These three points will be a convenient 
 guide to us in our discussion of the subject of the 
 morning, The Foreign-born American Citizen. 
 
 1. First of all, then, there is the cost to this 
 man of citizenship in the Roman Empire. He 
 obtained it with a great sum; to get it made him 
 poor. 
 
 There are few among native-born American 
 citizens who understand the sacrifice made by 
 the foreign-born citizens of the heritage of child- 
 hood and boyhood in the wonder-world of early 
 life. There is the bereavement of the early mys- 
 tic, unfathomable touch of nature that comes 
 to one only through one's native land. Never 
 again to see the sun rise and set over the dear old 
 hills, with the hero's mantle Hke the bloom of 
 
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 19 
 
 the heather resting upon them, and the shadow 
 of an immemorial race, is truly a great bereave- 
 ment. Never again to see the green pastures, 
 with the flocks quietly feeding in them, under 
 the shade of the plot of trees here and there 
 mercifully provided by the humanity of previous 
 generations, nor to hear the music of the river 
 that has sung into being and out of being forty 
 generations of human lives; never again to see 
 the fields covered with corn, nor to hear the 
 reaper's song among the yellow corn; never 
 again to see the light that welcomed you when 
 you were born, that smiled on you when you 
 were baptized, that went with you to school, 
 that watched your play, that constituted the 
 beautiful, the glorious environment of your 
 early days; never again to hear the song of 
 the native birds, the skylark in the morning, the 
 mavis at nightfall, and the wild whistle of the 
 blackbird under the heat of noon from his 
 thorny den, — all this is simply an inexpressible 
 bereavement. Nature is inwoven with the 
 soul in its earliest years, its beauty, its wild- 
 ness, its soul becomes part of the soul of every 
 deep-hearted human being, and never again can 
 nature be seen as she was seen through the won- 
 der of life's morning. 
 
 It is this spell of nature over the young soul 
 that gives its exquisite pathos to Hood's world- 
 familiar melody: 
 
20 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 " I remember, I remember, 
 The house where I was born. 
 The little window where the sun 
 Came peeping in at morn; 
 He never came a wink too soon, 
 Nor brought too long a day, 
 But now, I often wish the night 
 Had borne my breath away! 
 
 " I remember, I remember. 
 The fir trees dark and high; 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 Were close against the sky: 
 It was a childish ignorance. 
 But now 'tis little joy 
 To know I'm farther off from heav'n 
 Than when I was a boy." 
 
 There it is, the mystic, divine influence of na- 
 ture through the atmosphere of the country of 
 one's birth; every immigrant to this country 
 makes that great surrender. 
 
 There is, too, the early humanity. You go 
 down^town, you who are native-born American 
 citizens, and every day you meet those whom 
 you have known from birth, your earliest play- 
 mates and schoolmates, and those who went 
 to college with you, who entered business with 
 you, who fought side by side with you through 
 the great war, who loved what you loved in 
 early life, revered what you revered, laughed 
 at what you laughed at and felt as you felt 
 
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 21 
 
 over the glory and the tenderness of existence. 
 You do not know what they have left behind 
 them who never see a face that they knew in 
 childhood, who will never meet again, till time 
 is no more, a schoolmate or an early companion, 
 who will never gather again in the old home 
 with father and mother and brothers and 
 sisters; only the most favored have had a fugi- 
 tive glance, like looking at a telegraph pole 
 from an express train, of those dear, early 
 faces. There is a whole world of bereavement 
 of early, tender, beautiful humanity on the part 
 of all who come here. And this, again you hear 
 in those two verses in *' Auld Lang Syne " : 
 
 " We twa hae run about the braes, 
 And pu'd the gowans fine, 
 But we've wander'd monie a weary foot 
 Sin' auld lang syne. 
 
 " We twa hae paidl'd in the burn 
 From morning sun till dine, 
 But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
 Sin' auld lang syne." 
 
 There is one other surrender : there is the suf- 
 fering of adjustment in a new country. The 
 first year I spent in Boston, from July, 1871, to 
 considerably more than July, 1872, I conceived 
 my condition to be as near that of the spirits in 
 hell as anything I could well imagine! To be in 
 a city where nobody knew you, where you knew 
 nobody, where so many wanted to take advan- 
 
22 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 tage of the '' greenhorn," to laugh at him if he 
 ever grew for a moment a bit sentimental, was 
 not exactly heaven. Many and many a time I 
 went down to the wharf to see the ships with 
 their white sails, written all over with invisible 
 tidings from the far, sunny islands left behind, 
 and if I had not been restrained by shame and 
 pride I should have gone home. That is the ex- 
 perience of Scandinavian, English, Scotch, Irish, 
 Teuton, Slav, Armenian, Syrian and Latin; the 
 great bereavement of nature and of early hu- 
 manity is deepened by the sorrow of readjust- 
 ment in a foreign land. '' With a great sum 
 obtained we this citizenship "; few understand 
 it, few indeed. Foreign-born American citizen- 
 ship is preceded by a vast sacrifice, and you never 
 can understand that sort of citizenship till you 
 take account of this really profound experience. 
 
 2. The next thing in the experience of the 
 chief captain was his privilege as a Roman citi- 
 zen. His station and bearing and power told of 
 that privilege. He was a military tribune in the 
 legion stationed in Jerusalem; he had risen to 
 important command and power impossible for 
 him, inaccessible to him if he had not obtained 
 citizenship. 
 
 America has been called the land of oppor- 
 tunity. Look at this fact in three directions 
 only, since time will not allow more. The com- 
 mon workman may become, by intelligence, by 
 diligence and by fidelity, the master workman. 
 
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 23 
 
 Cast your eyes over the land to-day and assemble 
 the master workmen and you will find that the 
 vast majority of them have risen from the posi- 
 tion of ordinary workmen to the chief places in 
 their trade and calling. Such a chance for ascen- 
 sion in a broad way for all competent men, in the 
 Old World, is a simple impossibility. The chance 
 does not exist there. Men rise there by talent 
 and by luck, by talent and by favoritism. But 
 here in a broad and magnificent manner they rise 
 by talent and industry, fidelity and force; here 
 as nowhere else they have a chance to work out 
 what is in them. 
 
 Consider this in the things of the intellect. 
 The Old World calls us an uneducated race. It 
 is true that we have not many great scholars; 
 the reason is that we are engaged with immediate 
 pressing problems; we apply intelligence to liv- 
 ing issues which in other lands is applied to the 
 Genitive and the Accusative and the Dative 
 cases of the Latin and Greek languages. When 
 we look backward and consider the provision 
 made for the intellect of the nation during the 
 last fifty years, we claim that there is no parallel 
 to it in any country on which the sun shines. 
 More money has gone to found colleges and 
 schools and universities for men and for women, 
 open to all talent from ocean to ocean and from 
 the Canadian border to the Gulf, than was ever 
 dedicated to education in the same length of time 
 in the history of mankind. Not only is there 
 
24 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 provision for the regulars but also for the irregu- 
 lars; all sorts of evening schools flourish in our 
 cities where the first teachers of the community 
 are available for talented and aspiring youth of 
 slender means. Men are practicing medicine and 
 law; they are in the ministry and in other pro- 
 fessions, usually called learned, who never saw 
 the inside of a college or a university, who have 
 obtained an education in what is called an irregu- 
 lar way, from and by the very men who are 
 teaching in these regular academic institutions. 
 
 Let me remind you of the abundant hospital- 
 ity, the wonderful generosity of the American 
 people toward aspiring youth. Talent which 
 would be ignored in Great Britain, promise 
 which would be sneered at in every continental 
 country in Europe, is here discovered and en- 
 couraged to develop into power. This is a phe- 
 nomenon of which we must never lose sight, the 
 chance here in the United States for a man to be 
 intellectually all that it is possible for him to be. 
 The best teachers may often be seen here wield- 
 ing the educational power of history and the arts 
 to train the youth to whom college is an impossi- 
 bility, for service requiring educated powers, in 
 his day and generation. 
 
 There is to be noted the opportunity in the 
 way of character and moral influence that comes 
 to citizens of the United States. What does that 
 mean? The chance to change and improve the 
 law of the land, the chance for a man to change 
 
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 25 
 
 and improve the government of the United 
 States, the chance to modify in the hne of hu- 
 manity the social feeUng of the United States. 
 And freedom is here the condition of all; it is the 
 breath of life; every man who complains that 
 things are not what they should be has a chance 
 by his vote to remedy the abuse and to take an- 
 other step toward the ideal. 
 
 Here again there is something new, measur- 
 ing it against the whole people. We are dupes 
 and fools when we allow ourselves to be ruled by 
 groups in this country; we are free men, with the 
 power in our hands. If we have moral ideals of 
 our own, and moral character, we can so use 
 them as to hft the character of the land in which 
 we live. 
 
 3. Finally, there was the duty of the tribune 
 as a Roman citizen. Paul was about to be bound 
 and tortured, without trial, when he appealed 
 to the chief captain, "Is it lawful for you to 
 scourge a man that is a Roman and uncon- 
 demned? " This startled the man. '' Tell me, 
 art thou a Roman? Good heavens, this will 
 never do! I am pledged to do my duty! Get 
 off those shackles and set the man free and 
 guard his life! " There was the man's sense of 
 his duty. 
 
 What is the duty of foreign-born American 
 citizens? First to learn the EngHsh language 
 and to prefer it to all other tongues on the face 
 of the earth. That tongue comes in the splendor 
 
26 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 of a June day, it breaks over life like a June sun- 
 rise, with an atmosphere, tone, beauty, and 
 power which for Americans must ever be un- 
 approachable. Let no American citizen hug his 
 foreign tongue, go into the closet with it and 
 shut out the light of the great English language 
 which carries all our ideals as Americans! The 
 very vessel of the Lord it is, in which American 
 freedom is carried, the language of Shakespeare 
 and Milton, the incomparable free man; the 
 language of Bacon and Burke and Washington 
 and Hamilton and Webster and Lincoln. This 
 tongue consecrates the immigrant who would be 
 a citizen; he never can be a citizen of the United 
 States without that, never. This is the tongue 
 that carries in a unique translation the literature 
 of Israel; the Bible is the maker of free peoples. 
 
 Next, we foreign-born American citizens must 
 read the story of the Revolution into our blood. 
 What is the significance of the Revolution for 
 the foreign-born American citizen? These men 
 were Englishmen or the sons of Englishmen; 
 they loved the British Isles better than any por- 
 tion of the earth's surface, except their own 
 Colonies; they loved them with an inexpressible 
 love. Yet when it came to a question of prin- 
 ciple they stood out and said, " We must be 
 free; the Colonies, or the United States, first ! " 
 You recall Daniel Webster's splendid eloquence 
 here: 
 
 " On this question of principle, while actual 
 
THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 27 
 
 suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag 
 against a power to which, for purposes of foreign 
 conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of 
 her glory is not to be compared, — a power which 
 has dotted over the surface of the whole globe 
 with her possessions and military posts, whose 
 morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keep- 
 ing company with the hours, circles the earth 
 with one continuous and unbroken strain of the 
 martial airs of England." 
 
 Against that power to which they were as 
 nothing, against that lovely land of their origin 
 they stood out when it was a question of their 
 own independence and their own manhood. 
 
 That applies to every foreign-born American 
 citizen today, — Saxon, Celt, Scandinavian, 
 Teuton, Slav, Latin, Syrian, bond and free. 
 Learn the lesson of the Revolution. This country 
 will have no hands upon it, from any origin, any- 
 where outside of itself. Learn the lesson of the 
 Civil War; the nation that set to work to keep its 
 integrity as a political whole, to keep its integrity 
 as a human whole, to fight, as it had done a 
 foreign dominion, an evil genius inside its own 
 border. There again is a vast lesson to all of us 
 who are foreign born. Once again we should 
 store in memory and ponder in clearest con- 
 science and intelligence the great ideas, the great 
 political ideas of America as they are exhibited 
 in Washington, in Hamilton the Nationahst and 
 in Jefferson the State Rights' patriot; and again 
 
28 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 in Webster and Calhoun, in Lincoln and the 
 Confederate, and as they issued at last in a true 
 conception of state freedom in a sisterhood of 
 states that constitutes a great nation. These 
 things should be part of the common store of 
 knowledge of the adopted citizen. They are the 
 great forces that have moved this country from 
 its earliest beginning, and that have lifted it into 
 power and renown. 
 
 America must be first; cherish your love for 
 the old country, your tenderness; — a man does 
 not need to hate his mother because he loves his 
 wife, but it is his duty to stand by his wife even 
 against his mother. What kind of a country 
 should we have if every citizen, when trouble 
 comes, should prefer in loyalty the land of his 
 birth ! What a confused mob of a country we 
 should have ! Duty overrides origin, tradition, 
 sentiment. Here and here alone is our supreme 
 and inviolable obligation. 
 
 I often think that this great country of ours is 
 ultimately to be the deepest-hearted and the 
 brightest-minded nation of the world. Hither 
 come, with sore hearts, burdened humanity and 
 quickened intelligence, the elect ; yes, the elect 
 from all nations. You look at them when they 
 land and you laugh. If you had been in Quebec 
 when I landed perhaps you would not have 
 wanted me as your minister ! The elect from all 
 nations, parts of a splendid orchestra, — violin, 
 flute, cornet, drum, trumpet, and a score of other 
 
THE FOREION'BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 29 
 
 instruments, all pouring forth their genius to 
 make the great, swelling, soul-stirring symphony 
 of this mighty nation. Thus from Scandinavia, 
 Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Armenia, 
 Greece; from England, Ireland and Scotland 
 they come; — all are here with great souls to 
 make a new and greater America. Out of this 
 composite land, this Pentecostal nation — some- 
 times it seems to me minus the Holy Ghost — 
 this nation gathered from every people under 
 heaven, rags and tatters and dirt and all, I 
 beUeve that the Eternal Spirit will evolve and 
 establish the most gifted, the most far-shining 
 and the mightiest people in the world. God 
 grant that our dream may come true ! 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 
 
Render therefore unto Caesar the 
 things that are Caesar^s, and unto 
 God the things that are God's. 
 
 — Matt. 22 :21. 
 
Ill 
 
 CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 
 
 Poetry and philosophy seemed to Plato to 
 stand in irreconcileable opposition. There was 
 a quarrel of long standing between them, and 
 there seemed to be slight hope that this differ- 
 ence should ever be done away. The philosopher 
 who is more of a poet than any other in the 
 whole historic succession of great thinkers thus 
 throws into technical and artificial contrast the 
 two highest forms of intellectual power, blended 
 as they are in the completest way, in his own 
 writings. Plato himself is the refutation of 
 his own contention; poetry creates artistic 
 forms for the same ultimate insight for which 
 philosophy provides definitions and arguments. 
 
 There is current an opinion that the state 
 and religion, the duty of a citizen and the obh- 
 gation of a Christian stand to each other as pro- 
 fane and sacred, as this world and the other, as 
 the Kingdom of man and the Kingdom of God. 
 It is indeed plain that the state may become 
 incompatible with true religion, that religion 
 may so behave as to fall outside the vital interests 
 of society. It is clear that the state may ask 
 of its citizens what as Christians they are not 
 permitted to give, that rehgion may absolve 
 
34 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 its devotees from obligations without which 
 organized society would be impossible. 
 
 This however does not meet the question in 
 its essential meaning. That question should 
 be stated thus: In the normal state is Chris- 
 tianity an alien or the supreme citizen? Is 
 Christianity blind to the need of political organ- 
 ization for the highest human well-being? In 
 my judgment he would be reducing Christianity 
 to a sad and sentimental fragment of itself 
 who should make that assertion. The prophets 
 of Israel were statesmen with the profoundest 
 insight into the moral organization of the 
 nation. Jesus is first of all the highest prophet 
 of his race, whose insights are wider and deeper 
 than all others, and capable of adjustment to 
 the moral needs of society in the modern world, 
 in a way absolutely unique. The letter of his 
 teaching may be inelastic and stiff, the spirit of 
 it never. 
 
 There is indeed a clear, inevitable risk in- 
 curred in the interpretation of the great minds 
 of the past. On a certain occasion when Robert 
 G. Ingersoll had delivered his extremely amus- 
 ing lecture upon " The Mistakes of Moses," a 
 wise hearer quietly remarked that he should 
 now like to hear Moses upon '' The Mistakes 
 of Ingersoll." Our learning, classical and Bibh- 
 cal, and indeed all our interpretations of the 
 great minds of the past, might well keep in 
 view this canon. Did Homer really exist? 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 35 
 
 If he existed, was he a supreme poet or merely 
 a skilful editor? Did a single mind give us the 
 Ihad and the Odyssey, or did these wonderful 
 epics come into being by simple popular accre- 
 tion? Were the wisest of the Greeks mistaken 
 in their belief that Homer was an historic per- 
 son and an unrivalled artist? We have heard 
 the modern classical critic upon the mistakes 
 of the Greeks; it would be extremely interesting 
 could we listen to the Greeks concerning the 
 mistakes of the modern scholar. 
 
 The case is the same with BibUcal interpreta- 
 tion. It would be illuminative could we hear 
 from an ancient contemporary authority an 
 authentic account of the origin of the lyric 
 poetry of Israel and the great epic of Job; 
 above all, could we hear Jesus on the mistakes 
 of his interpreters. I imagine that such a 
 speech would create a revolution in many 
 minds, in many lands. The thought of such 
 a speech is enough to quicken the sense of 
 responsibility as we raise the question, Was 
 Jesus a pacifist? 
 
 I. The answer to this question must depend 
 upon the definition of the term " pacifist." To 
 say that pacifism means Hving in loyalty to an 
 ideal that contemplates a remote future in which 
 war shall be no more, is to say something very 
 beautiful, but not at all decisive in this debate. 
 For this ideal that looks forward to the warless 
 future may very well sanction war as a tem- 
 
36 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 porary necessity. Jesus the sovereign idealist 
 might reasonably enough be counted as our 
 leader here. The Caledonian scorn of Rome 
 was coined in the great proverb, " Where they 
 create a desert, there they proclaim peace." 
 Conversely, the supreme idealist might proclaim 
 the pure method of peace, when the brutal 
 forces of the world made that proclamation wise. 
 
 Again, if it is said that the Kingdom of God 
 is within the soul, and that therefore physical 
 force is an alien in this Kingdom of the spirit, 
 we assent. In this case nothing is asserted 
 that any sensible person has ever denied. 
 There is always alien work for the alien force to 
 do, hke the helper to the mechanic, like the 
 beast of burden to his master. No alien force 
 can do the work of love; it may be employed 
 by love to secure an end that love alone sees, 
 like the chastisement laid upon a foolish boy 
 by a wise and noble father. 
 
 If it be further asserted that the Kingdom of 
 Christ is a community of souls within the state 
 and yet distinct from it, and that this com- 
 munity can be advanced only by spiritual 
 ideas and influences, no reasonable man will 
 object. If it is here declared that Christianity 
 means the highest ethical life of mankind, 
 and that it depends essentially for its greaten- 
 ing power in the world upon nothing beyond 
 its own sublime spirit, there will be few who will 
 care to deny the soundness of this position. 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 37 
 
 Nothing can enable men to see but light and 
 good eyes; nothing can make men just and kind 
 but true ideas and the passionate love of them. 
 We can lead the horse to the water, but we 
 cannot make the horse drink. We can drive 
 men by force into schools, colleges, and churches, 
 but we cannot make them love learning or seek 
 goodness by physical propulsion. In this sense 
 physical force is clearly an alien to the pure 
 eternal essence of the teaching of Jesus; this 
 contention I cannot find that any wise man has 
 ever disputed. 
 
 If it is further claimed that within the Chris- 
 tian community a special moral code shall be 
 acknowledged, according to which aggression is 
 condoned, offences against persons and property 
 are pardoned, brutal attacks upon Hfe and hmb 
 are patiently borne, and a self-seeking, afflictive 
 spirit is magnanimously tolerated, no one out- 
 side the charmed circle of the consenting com- 
 munity need care in any way to embarrass the 
 sublime experiment. When, however, the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount is cited as the unquestion- 
 able warrant for this experiment, it is well to 
 bear in mind that different interpretations are 
 possible. As against the old law, " An eye for 
 an eye and a tooth for a tooth," it is not hard to 
 see the general social benignity of the precept, 
 " Resist not him that is evil,'' give even the 
 criminal a generous chance, and repress in your 
 proceeding against him the spirit of revenge. 
 
38 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 So too as against the pagan code " Thou shalt 
 love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy," it is as 
 easy to see the social utility as it is to note the 
 sublime magnanimity of the command, '* Love 
 your enemies and pray for them that persecute 
 you." Jesus here calls for the cleansing of the 
 whole heart from base passions, inhuman mo- 
 tives, brutal ends. He prescribes the spirit of 
 the Most High to rule within the soul; as God 
 moves in love both by the path of kindness and 
 by the path of austerity, so must the child of 
 God who finds in God his ideal. Here is the 
 highest morality ever taught, the morality that 
 is satisfied with nothing but the pure heroism 
 of love. 
 
 When, however, we are called meekly to sub- 
 mit to the ruthless attack of the human brute 
 because Jesus said, " Whosoever smiteth thee on 
 the right cheek turn to him the other also," we 
 are reminded of the example of a pious Scot. 
 '' Your reHgion tells you," said the aggressor, 
 " when a person smites you on one cheek, as 
 I do now, to turn to him the other also." The 
 other cheek was turned to this expounder of 
 the Sermon on the Mount, and received its 
 appropriate blow. " How do you like your 
 religion now? " asked this experimenter. The 
 Scot answered, " You have got, so far, only one 
 half of my religion; here is the other half. 
 ' With what measure ye mete, it shall be mea- 
 sured unto you again,'" and with that he struck 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 39 
 
 his antagonist a solar plexus blow that put him 
 into a religious ecstasy. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's noble comment upon the 
 Greek poet Sophocles, that he saw life steadily 
 and saw it whole, is of high moment here. 
 Nothing is more needed today in the inter- 
 preter of the teaching of Jesus than the power 
 to see that teaching steadily and to see it whole. 
 If this method is not followed all sorts of con- 
 tradictions will be found in the teaching of the 
 Master. Jesus said, " I came not to destroy 
 but to fulfil "; elsewhere he said, " Heaven and 
 earth shall pass away, but my word shall not 
 pass away." Among his utterances is this: 
 " Peace I leave unto you, my peace I give unto 
 you," and again this, " Think not that I came 
 to send peace on the earth; I came not to send 
 peace but a sword." He counsels his disciples, 
 on one occasion, to go forth in absolute trust, 
 making no provision for life; on another he ad- 
 monishes the impoverished disciple to sell his 
 cloak, if need be, and buy a sword. 
 
 We are delivered from this series of grotesque 
 contradictions, which might be greatly extended, 
 when we go deeper into the mind of Jesus, when 
 we understand that he is giving counsel, not in 
 universal propositions, but with reference to 
 the occasion. Life is the one absolute value, 
 and this value lies not in life's visible continu- 
 ance, but in its integrity. Infinite values are 
 here, and the disciples of Jesus, while slow to 
 
40 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 accept the challenge of brute power, cannot 
 allow themselves and their cause to be crushed 
 out of the world by barbarian man. There is 
 no contradiction in the behavior of the peace- 
 loving men who formed Cromwell's Ironsides, 
 when before going into battle they sang: '' Let 
 God arise, let his enemies be scattered." The 
 cause of Cromwell and his army was the free- 
 dom of England from the mendacity and in- 
 tolerable tyranny of the King. There is nothing 
 unchristian, as a last resort, in the refusal to 
 allow the worst men to degrade the best. A 
 noble comprehensiveness will find all the pre- 
 cepts of Jesus harmonious with one another 
 when the troubled environment of man is seen 
 steadily, and seen whole. 
 
 Some of the ablest and best of my younger 
 brethren in the ministry differ with me here. 
 I admire their elevation of character, their 
 splendid idealism, their lofty unconcern for the 
 unpopularity of their views when the life of the 
 truth, as they see it, is at stake, their complete 
 sincerity, and their noble readiness to seal their 
 faith by heroic suffering. My objection to their 
 interpretation of the Gospel is that it is one- 
 sided, it lacks comprehensiveness; they do not 
 see the teaching of Jesus steadily, they do not 
 see it whole. They speak of Christianity as if 
 it were an alien in God's world, with no profound 
 and everlasting affinities with the mighty in- 
 stincts that burn and breathe in the human 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 41 
 
 heart, and that are the aboriginal witness of 
 God's presence with men. Christianity is thus 
 a stranger in a strange land, having no eternal 
 sympathies with the obligation of the husband 
 and father to defend his wife and children, no 
 regard for the duty of the freeman to meet 
 the aggressor against his country at the bound- 
 ary line, as the Greeks, first at Marathon, and 
 later at Thermopylae, met the invading Persian 
 hordes, no bugle blast of inspiration for the 
 lover of man, and the best that man has achieved, 
 devoting himself in Hfe and in death against the 
 ruthless brute who would trample the fairest 
 civilization into a desert waste. 
 
 If the religion of Jesus is the Eternal thing it 
 has been held to be, it must be capable of put- 
 ting itself in alliance with all that is great in 
 normal human beings, with all that is essential 
 to the material, intellectual and moral order of 
 society; it must be able to enter the entire 
 circle of our interests; otherwise it cannot en- 
 rich, exalt, and save them with an everlasting 
 salvation. Unless we see the teaching of Jesus 
 steadily, and see it whole, we shall miss its 
 supreme characteristic, its fundamental kin- 
 ship with the humanity of man, and therefore 
 its new creative might. 
 
 One further unavailing definition of the pacifist 
 remains. It is said that Jesus is the greatest 
 peacemaker in the history of man, and this is 
 true. He uncovers the ground of all peace be- 
 
42 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 tween man and man, between man and God — 
 good-will. Jesus presents in his own life the 
 highest example of peace secured, manward and 
 Godward, through good-will. He has thus laid 
 bare to the world the eternal basis of all peace, 
 all humanity. No hurricane can push this 
 planet from its path so long as it is under the 
 sway of the universlal power; nothing can cut 
 loose or expel from peace the race that is 
 grounded in fidelity to the good-will of God. 
 Among men of Christian faith there is no differ- 
 ence here. 
 
 This description of the term ^' pacifist," like all 
 the others that I have mentioned, does not meet 
 the issue. That issue is whether Jesus, under 
 all conditions and circumstances, no matter 
 what the menace might be to the life of the 
 home, the nation, and the sovereign interests 
 of our civilization, forbade, condemned, repro- 
 bated the use of physical force. Other than 
 this the term '' pacifist " has no significance per- 
 tinent to the American people in the present 
 crisis. 
 
 II. Let us suppose, for the sake of clear fore- 
 sight of the issue involved, that Jesus did 
 reprobate the use of physical force under all cir- 
 cumstances and conditions. It follows that Jesus 
 is thus set against some of the best instincts of 
 the human heart. Here is your home; here are 
 your wife, your children, and the women who 
 serve in your household. A band of brutes, in 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 43 
 
 the name of a foreign government, or in their 
 own name, attack your home that they may 
 mutilate, outrage, and destroy. You have in 
 your possession a machine gun, and you know 
 how to use it. How do you feel when you are 
 told that Jesus will not permit you to defend 
 from death and worse than death those under 
 your roof? Which is the nearer to the God 
 who made you, the prophet who is thus made 
 to disarm you in the presence of ferocious 
 brutality or the instinct that bids you fight and 
 die that others may live? The tides against 
 which no religion and no teacher can make 
 headway are the tides of the Eternal as they 
 flow in the instincts of motherhood and father- 
 hood, as they flow in the complex of instincts 
 that make the conscience of the strong in his 
 sense of obhgation to the weak who have taken 
 refuge in the shadow of his manhood. I can- 
 not forget that when a keeper in the London 
 Zoo wished to drive a lioness and her mate from 
 their cage to an outer court, and when to do this 
 he made a thrust at the lioness, her majestic 
 mate, with a fierce roar and an instantaneous 
 leap, threw himself as a terrible shield against 
 the keeper. Never was I more impressed by 
 the majesty of a primeval instinct; I felt that 
 God's moral being spoke in the self-oblivious 
 valor of the great beast; I felt that this same 
 instinct in man comes straight and swift from 
 man's Maker, that nothing can cancel its mean- 
 
44 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 ing or annul its authority. The teaching that 
 puts Jesus against these instincts would, if it 
 were true, make it impossible for me to remain 
 his disciple; because fresh from the Infinite I 
 hear voices within me that tell me that the 
 conduct I have imagined is that of a coward 
 and a sneak. 
 
 Once more this interpretation of the teaching 
 of Jesus puts him in opposition to those who 
 have defended civilization by their suffering 
 and death. Is it not a grave thing to put 
 Jesus against the two supreme patriots in our 
 history, Washington and Lincoln? Is it not 
 cruel, without evidence rising to demonstration, 
 to deny to Jesus any part in the lives of those 
 who founded the American Republic, in the 
 lives of those who bled and died that it might 
 be refounded in universal freedom? Is it not 
 shocking to exclude from the kingdom of Jesus 
 the multitudes of heroic men and suffering 
 women who have achieved for nations and 
 races the opportunity to live, to grow, and to 
 make their imperishable contribution to the 
 richness and fulness of our human world? For 
 myself I cannot believe in any such attenuated 
 Jesus, abstracted from the central conflict of 
 the world, with no part in the tragedy of hu- 
 man history, a lovely incident only in the stern 
 evolution of the kingdom of man. 
 
 III. We come, finally, to the words of the 
 Master which, in my judgment, contain a con- 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 45 
 
 elusive negative answer to the question, Was 
 Jesus a pacifist? " Render therefore unto 
 Csesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto 
 God the things that are God's." In dividing 
 the world into two great hemispheres, one for 
 Cffisar and the other for God, I do not under- 
 stand Jesus to mean that religion should have 
 nothing to do with politics, and that poKtics 
 have no part in reUgion. I understand Jesus 
 to teach that the things of religion are primarily 
 in the sphere of the spirit, that they concern a 
 man's standing, and the standing of a race be- 
 fore God. Religion deals primarily with the 
 inner, invisible side of life, as that rises into the 
 presence of the King Immortal and Invisible. 
 Again, I understand that Jesus meant to recog- 
 nize the problems of national or imperial gov- 
 ernment, in their nature, and within their own 
 sphere, as ultimate in society. 
 
 From this point of view what may we safely 
 infer concerning the functions of government as 
 approved by Jesus? There should be the enact- 
 ment of just laws; the wise and impartial inter- 
 pretation of these laws; the sure enforcement of 
 these just decisions where men refuse volun- 
 tarily to abide by them. 
 
 Enforcement of the decisions of authorized 
 and just judges; of this we may be sure that 
 Jesus would approve. The word " enforcement " 
 contains the key to the whole debate. Where 
 the members of a state are not all of them per- 
 
46 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 feet, contentions will arise; where these con- 
 tentions are settled before the proper tribunal, 
 and where the defeated person refuses to com- 
 ply with the decision, force must be applied. 
 Where men are both good and bad, law- 
 abiding and lawless; where society is ordered 
 in law and in living; where the enemies of 
 society surround it, — the vagrant, the thief, 
 the villain, the murderer, — one function of 
 government is clear. These enemies of society 
 must be restrained by force; they must be made 
 by the penalties imposed upon them a terror 
 to other candidates for war upon society. The 
 whole high order of human society rests back 
 upon the physical force whereby the righteous 
 judgment of society is made to prevail. So- 
 ciety in this world cannot exist without force. 
 The safety of life, of property, and freedom must 
 evermore, as an ultimate appeal, be guarded by 
 physical force. To make the great Master dis- 
 sent from this clear necessity of civilized society 
 would be to reduce his sublime teaching to 
 foolishness. 
 
 There are the enemies of society within its 
 bounds; there are the enemies of society be- 
 yond its bounds. In the days of the American 
 Revolution there were the Tory sympathizers 
 with British oppression; they had to be taken 
 care of, they were taken care of very well in- 
 deed. There were the British armies invading 
 the. colonies, desolating the colonies, seeking to 
 
I 
 CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 47 
 
 reduce them from freedom to vassalage. What 
 shall be done here? Shall American freemen 
 consent to this shame, submit to the invader, 
 bid the tyrant welcome, and allow him to de- 
 stroy in the colonial life whatever he chooses? 
 Not for an hour. Oppose him on the spot; if 
 he means war let it begin here. War at that 
 moment, and in that meaning of it, was essen- 
 tial to the life of American freedom. 
 
 Again, to make Jesus dissent from this clear 
 necessity of the society of freemen is to reduce 
 his divine teaching to foolishness. He recog- 
 nized the necessity of government; he recog- 
 nized, therefore, the further necessity of phy- 
 sical force to protect society against the enemies 
 within its bounds; he recognized, therefore, the 
 ultimate necessity, when all other ways and 
 means had failed, as a last woful resort, the 
 appeal to arms in a purely defensive warfare 
 against the enemies of society, and for main- 
 taining in being the sovereign achievements of 
 civilized and Christianized man. 
 
 Jesus is the highest prophet of the meaning 
 of human life. For him human life was personal 
 and social; the individual person was essential 
 to society, and society was essential to the 
 individual person. For Jesus society was an 
 organization of persons, in this time world, 
 from the moral being of the Eternal. Society 
 was a Kingdom of God; it was assailed by the 
 subtlest foes within and by the crudest foes 
 
48 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 from without. Nations were in jeopardy every 
 hour from the traitor within, and from the brutal 
 aggressor without. The nation is in duty bound 
 to conserve its highest Hfe, and with this, to con- 
 serve the highest achievements of mankind. For 
 this end it must stand on guard, it must not for- 
 get that the price of hberty is eternal vigilance. 
 It must be prepared to fight the beautiful fight, 
 to defend itself against wanton aggression, un- 
 just power, ruthless and contemptuous assault 
 upon all that it holds dear. 
 
 Jesus held that some things are worth dying 
 for. He might easily have run away and es- 
 caped death if he had been willing to save his 
 Hfe by the betrayal of his cause. His cause was 
 his life; it was the joy set before him; for it he 
 endured the cross and despised the shame. 
 What he held as truth for himself, he holds as 
 truth for his disciples. There are some things 
 worth dying for. Among these are the sanc- 
 tity of womanhood, the safety of children, the 
 security of the things essential to man's life, 
 the integrity of the State, the majesty of right- 
 eousness, the honor and freedom of the United 
 States of America. If these precious things 
 can be secured by wise delay, by moral power 
 alone, let us lift our hearts in thanksgiving to 
 the Highest; if moral power is finally set at 
 naught, let the aggressor meet the invincible 
 defender of the humanity of the nation and 
 the humanity of the world. I cannot think 
 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 49 
 
 of those whose devotion to the uttermost re- 
 ceives fitting and beautiful remembrance in 
 this memorial flag; I cannot think of the 
 generation of youth, whom they represent, who 
 went serenely to death that their country might 
 live; I cannot think of Washington and Lincoln 
 as in imagination they stand today by the 
 moving and mighty symbol of their country, 
 without the assurance of His presence and 
 approval who gave His life a ransom for the 
 world. 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 
 
For where thy treasure is there will thy 
 heart he also. 
 
 — Matt. 6 : 21. 
 
IV 
 AMERICAN LOYALTY 
 
 When we think of the many races that go to 
 make the one hundred miUion Americans of 
 today, what assurances have we of their loyalty 
 to this new country in times of international 
 crisis? Here are men from every nation under 
 heaven. Is there any outpouring upon them of 
 high power, any descent of patriotic fire, any 
 fresh consciousness of the Holy Spirit of political 
 freedom and hope, mighty enough to bind these 
 races into one vast brotherhood of loyal and 
 proud Americans? 
 
 We must confess, at the outset, to the pres- 
 ence of two serious disadvantages. The first 
 is the absence of homogeneousness. Homo- 
 geneousness is a mighty factor in national 
 unity. Where the people are of one stock, 
 where they are from center to circumference 
 kith and kin, there, in all times of crisis, national 
 feeling is wont to go with the universal move- 
 ment and strength of the tide. No part of 
 the nation has power to go the other way; it 
 is all one, and it runs to the flood as by the will 
 of the Infinite. This wonder of homogeneous 
 strength we do not possess; this initial, natural, 
 inevitable loyalty is not ours. 
 
 Nor have we Americans the instinct of loyalty 
 
54 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 to our country born of history. Whether we 
 know it or not, the voices of history sing in 
 the soul of a nation, and charm it into unity, 
 both when the song is a dirge and a paeon. 
 In the fibre of our flesh, in blood and brain 
 there are stored the subtlest memories, the 
 most potent susceptibilities. Men are largely 
 the resultant of racial experiences in the historic 
 environment in which their ancestors have 
 lived. They are born with instinctive loves for 
 nature as she appears in a particular country. 
 Even the universal features of nature, sunrise 
 and sunset, the morning and evening stars, 
 take on new beauty and splendor because they 
 shine through the dear heavens that bend above 
 the beloved land. For these peoples nature 
 is bathed and transfigured in the most moving 
 human associations; it is never beheld except 
 through the eyes of racial achievement, suffer- 
 ing, love and tears. Nature becomes a coun- 
 try whose homes are founded and whose 
 cradles are rocked upon a land of hallowed 
 graves. Loyalty here rises as by the force of 
 gravity, it is pushed upward by the unseen 
 might of immemorial generations, it calls aloud 
 in the strength of great instincts; it can be un- 
 done only by the wreck of all social order that 
 comes from the sway of the tyrant. This vast 
 assurance of unity and loyalty we possess only 
 in a minority of our people, and it would be 
 folly to underestimate our poverty here. 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 55 
 
 We must seek for assurances of the loyalty 
 of Americans, of all races, in other spheres of 
 human nature: in immediate experience of 
 good, in the strength of reason, in the magic 
 of just imagination, and in the sense of obliga- 
 tion to the future. These fountains of loyalty 
 will be found, I am persuaded, abundant and 
 perennial. 
 
 1. I name immediate experience of benefit 
 as the first universal assurance of American 
 loyalty. This does not hold for adventurers, 
 shirks or humbugs. We discount them. We 
 aflirm that for the healthy, the industrious, the 
 enterprising and the earnest of all races it is 
 good to be here. Work is surer here than else- 
 where for the man wilhng to work, wages are 
 higher, food is more abundant and of finer 
 quality, the conditions of life are more whole- 
 some, the chances to rise in the grade of one's 
 work are better; while the opportunities for 
 personal improvement by education, and the 
 sympathy of good men with aspiring youth are 
 in America simply incomparable. 
 
 When the children are made part of this 
 experience the assurance of loyalty becomes 
 much stronger. The children go to the public 
 schools; they read the history of the Revolu- 
 tion; they take pride in it as their own, and 
 sometimes they ask, as an Englishman's boy 
 did, after reading a description of the battle 
 of Bunker Hill, '* Father, be you an Enghsh- 
 
56 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 man? '' " Yes, my boy," was the reply. " Then 
 we licked you." When the poor immigrant 
 finds it possible to send his gifted boys and girls 
 to college; when he sees them treated with 
 respect; when he sees them graduate, as is 
 often the case, among the first scholars of their 
 class; when he further sees them thus equipped 
 entering life with alluring prospects of success, 
 he is, as I have found, in many instances, 
 bowed down with a sense of gratitude to the 
 country in which this experience of good is 
 possible. Thousands of humble parents, in the 
 last twenty years, have gone on Commence- 
 ment day to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, all 
 the greater colleges and universities of the 
 country, to witness the triumph of their sons 
 and daughters, to give expression to their 
 pride and joy, and to confess grateful allegiance 
 to the institutions of learning that have thus 
 taught, inspired, wrought into worth and power 
 the lives of those dearest to them. Here is a 
 shuttle flying without ceasing in the high 
 schools and colleges of the land, threaded with 
 the sense of benefit, on the loom of unrestricted 
 opportunity, weaving the robe, in royal purple 
 and gold, of American loyalty. 
 
 There is another immediate experience of good 
 that issues in loyal love for this country. Im- 
 migrants leave behind them needy kinsmen, 
 parents, sisters and others of remoter relation- 
 ship. The true-hearted, who in this new land 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 57 
 
 do not forget the old, who in founding families 
 here remember with tender and devout affec- 
 tion the home circles in which their life began, 
 are able to send generous help to those in dis- 
 tress. They are able to do this without the 
 sense of hardship; they are able to do what they 
 could not have done had they never come 
 hither. From the surplus of wages earned in 
 this richer land, they enjoy the privilege denied 
 them before, the privilege of making the exist- 
 ence of their needy kindred in the old home less 
 of a burden, more of a happiness. Picture this 
 privilege when it concerns a beloved mother. 
 Look at her in age, infirmity and want; think 
 of the good she has done, the sons and daughters 
 that she has given to the world. Imagine her 
 life of toil, anxiety, tenderness and tears; life 
 has taken at each stage all that she had to give; 
 it has taken at last her strength of body and 
 her vigor of heart. Others of her children are 
 themselves so burdened that they can hardly 
 come to her rescue. Several of them have come 
 here; they have prospered, and they are able 
 to turn the stormy afternoon of their mother's 
 life into sunshine, and the evening into peace. 
 The cottage of many an aged mother is made 
 comfortable and cheery by day, and lights are 
 made to twinkle brightly from its windows in 
 the oncoming night, because of the constant 
 and generous devotion of sons and daughters in 
 America. When the end has come, and the 
 
58 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 beloved dead is laid to rest in the ancient 
 church-yard, and the memorial stone is set in 
 dear remembrance to guard the sacred spot, 
 the sense of the privilege freely bestowed by 
 America, to utter the feelings of veneration in 
 acts of veneration, rises into a kind of religious 
 homage to this beneficent land. 
 
 When the three disciples of Jesus who were 
 selected to share the transcendent vision of 
 their Master's transfiguration were under the 
 wonder of this privilege, one of them cried out, 
 "Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us 
 build three tabernacles, one for thee, one for 
 Moses and one for Elijah." The immediate ex- 
 perience of good, rare and exalted good, good 
 that is good for the entire circle of kindred 
 lives, good that is good for the worthy who have 
 spent their strength in love and service, good 
 for age, leaning on its staff and in want, issues 
 forever in the passionate desire to build a 
 permanent grateful abode there. Our country 
 has given us these immediate experiences of 
 good; therefore we love it, with a grateful and 
 loyal devotion. 
 
 2. There is next the work of reason. Re- 
 flection upon life here, in contrast to life in the 
 old country, issues in a fresh experience of good. 
 The first feeling of the immigrant is apt to be 
 a perverse sentiment. Everything in the old 
 country stands transfigured. This is part of 
 life, and is both good and evil. 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 59 
 
 " Care and trial seem at last 
 
 Through memory's sunset air, 
 Like mountain ranges overpast, 
 In purple distance fair." 
 
 The new American has to watge a battle with 
 this perverse feeling, which is not a pure recol- 
 lection but often a pure hallucination. Every- 
 thing in the old country is at first glorified, 
 everything in the new is at first belittled, if 
 not bitterly reproached. America, it was hoped, 
 would prove itself to be paradise; instead it is 
 a land where thorns and thistles grow, where 
 men eat their bread in the sweat of their brow. 
 It thus appears as a sullen and ugly disappoint- 
 ment; the old country, glowing in the rosy 
 light of the far-away sunrise, in spite of the 
 years of trouble and sorrow, is now felt to be 
 paradise, and it has been left behind and aban- 
 doned for this ! While this perverse feeling 
 continues, this wild juggler with truth, this 
 necromancer who paints old sorrows in heavenly 
 colors, who darkens angel faces with the dye 
 of fiends, there is no hope for reasonable com- 
 parison and reconciliation. 
 
 Homesickness is a fearful malady, but it is 
 not incurable. It is a self-limiting disease, 
 and if the patient does not die, time will prove 
 the great effective physician, as in other human 
 afflictions, so in this. Homesickness resem- 
 bles a certain extreme alcoholic disturbance; 
 it fills the palatial dwelling where it is with 
 
60 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 vipers and demons; it transforms the squalid 
 hut where it is not, where it longs to be, into 
 a place of celestial freedom and peace. Intoxi- 
 cation at its worst, if the patient is isolated 
 long enough, comes at length to soberness; 
 homesickness, however long it may run riot, 
 eventually gives way to sound sense and calm 
 judgment. Then it is that a new epoch arrives 
 in the life of the American immigrant. Reason 
 emerges, calls for the plain facts, sets the old 
 and the new in fair comparison, and upon due 
 deliberation goes forward to a just conclusion. 
 
 Friends are as numerous here as in the old 
 country, employers are more just and consider- 
 ate, men are rated, in this land as nowhere 
 else, on their merit, worth is surer of recognition, 
 capacity of promotion, energy of success; be- 
 sides, there is a surrounding atmosphere of 
 sympathy with pluck, daring, devotion to one's 
 task and faith in one's ideals. Here the balance 
 of goods is clearly in favor of the new country. 
 Through a reasonable mind the immigrant is 
 winning a new love for America. 
 
 In the old world society, as a general thing, 
 is still deeply influenced by the feeling of caste. 
 There is the King, there is the royal household; 
 there is the duke, the marquis, the earl, the vis- 
 count, the baron, and the poor first rung of the 
 aristocratic ladder, the Sir somebody. It is 
 true that the feudalistic order of society has 
 received many hard knocks; it is true that a 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 61 
 
 million voices roll into all sorts of aristocratic 
 ears the great plea of Burns for essential man- 
 hood: 
 
 " A prince can make a belted knight, 
 
 A marquis, duke, and a' that : 
 But an honest man's aboon his might, 
 
 Guid faith he maunna fa' that! 
 For a' that, and a' that, 
 
 Their dignities, an' a' that, 
 The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, 
 
 Are higher rank than a' that." 
 
 Still, in the most democratic countries of Europe 
 these words are more or less of a defiant protest 
 against a dominant adverse order; while here 
 they utter with trumpet tones, and amid uni- 
 versal approval, the prevailing social sentiment. 
 The exceptions, in the person of the snob, the 
 plutocrat, and other abnormal Americans, men 
 and women, are after all purely incidental and 
 completely insignificant. The atmosphere is, 
 broadly speaking, wholly favorable to the recog- 
 nition of noble character as everywhere the 
 supreme thing in American society. Thus as 
 the American immigrant ponders this new 
 phenomenon, it commends itself to his reason; 
 the longer he considers it the surer he is that 
 here is one of the best and most hopeful things 
 in the world. 
 
 The next step is plain. Here in the dignity 
 of toil, in the doctrine that usefulness to society 
 is always a badge of honor; here in expansive 
 
62 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 social freedom, in the equality of honest man 
 with honest man; here in the public contempt 
 for idleness and wealth devoted to mere display 
 and lust; here in the aboriginal American idea 
 of the intrinsic worth of nothing but manhood 
 and womanhood, is the greatest chance on 
 earth for the free and unrestricted development 
 of the best forces in our nature, — diligence, 
 skill, conscientiousness, self-respect, in one great 
 phrase, the humanity of man. Here we are 
 not serfs, we are no man's tools; we are not 
 machines or drudges, we are citizens of the 
 United States of America. We cannot be 
 ruled without our consent. Our rulers repre- 
 sent us; they are accountable to us; our re- 
 lation to them is not that of subjects to a sov- 
 ereign, but that of a sovereign to his responsible 
 servants. 
 
 Slowly the economic, the social and the polit- 
 ical advantages here rise into the heart of the 
 American immigrant through his understanding. 
 America means for him, as he reflects upon its 
 structure, a new world. Therefore with the 
 consent of his whole mind he comes to identify 
 his existence and fate with the existence and 
 fate of the American Republic. 
 
 3. The loyalty of all true Americans is great- 
 ened by the power of a just imagination. Imag- 
 ination is the telescope of the mind; it makes 
 visible blazing realities that otherwise would 
 remain invisible. There is the size of this 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 63 
 
 country. The travel of the average American 
 can lead to no adequate notion of this reality. 
 The eye takes in but a small part of the district 
 where one lives. This continental land can be 
 seen only through the telescope of imagination. 
 When the western limit of Alaska lies in the 
 glow of sunset, the eastern limit of Maine is 
 burning in the fire of sunrise. Here is a Re- 
 public on which the sun never sets. One sees 
 imagination at work representing the enchant- 
 ing physical greatness of our country, in such 
 familiar anecdotes as these: An American in 
 England is afraid to go out after dark, lest he 
 may fall ofT the island into the sea, There is 
 not enough water in the Thames and the Severn, 
 the Tweed and the Clyde, to gargle one of the 
 mouths of the Mississippi. The United States 
 is bounded on the north by the Aurora BoreaHs, 
 on the south by the Southern Cross, on the 
 east by the Primeval Chaos, and on the west 
 by the Day of Judgment. Size is always im- 
 pressive. In the winter months, look, of a 
 clear evening, at the star Sirius, the brightest 
 splendor in the stellar universe. Read the 
 calculated dimensions and brilHancy of this 
 star made by astronomers, and with imagina- 
 tion thus informed, allow this superlative wonder 
 of the heavens to cast its spell over you. In 
 this way you will come to understand the unique 
 impressiveness of the physical magnitude of the 
 Republic. When to this we add scenery un- 
 
64 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 surpassed, economic resources unequalled, the 
 possibility of homes and food for hundreds of 
 millions of prosperous and happy human be- 
 ings, we have on the mere physical level of ex- 
 istence a nation with a unique appeal to the 
 imagination of its citizens. 
 
 Let imagination paint another picture. Think 
 what American intellect and energy have done, 
 within one hundred years, for our people and 
 for the world, in the development of the eco- 
 nomic resources of the nation. It is a miracu- 
 lous story, to be told only in the language of 
 inspired dreams: " The wilderness and the 
 solitary place shall be glad for them, and the 
 desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." 
 American inventions are in the service of the 
 civilized world. American science has an hon- 
 orable place wherever science is known, and in 
 one science at least, astronomy, America has 
 for the last thirty years led the world. In 
 applied science our country is fast becoming 
 the equal of the best; our technical schools and 
 state universities are putting scientific intelli- 
 gence in command of the economic resources 
 and needs of our people. Education has be- 
 come a passion among our youth, and the story 
 of the wealth devoted to education in the last 
 fifty years reads like a fairy tale. Religion here 
 is a reality where it is anything. The saddest 
 revelation of this war concerns Christianity. 
 In Europe among rulers and men of power it 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 65 
 
 is little more than an academic interest, a senti- 
 mental memory. Among Protestants and Cath- 
 olics alike, for the time at least, the glory is 
 departed. Nowhere is there a great prophet of 
 hope, a church with a mighty forward look, a 
 community of men swayed by moral faith in the 
 universe, and in mankind. The backward 
 look is great, the retrospect is an enchantment, 
 yesterday illumines the world with its character 
 and power; today is a day of darkness and 
 tomorrow is midnight. The hope of the Catho- 
 lic faith is here; the future of essential religion 
 is here; the forward look is here, and it is great 
 with high expectation. 
 
 All these realities do not appeal with equal 
 power to all our people; to many of our people 
 the higher among these realities make no ap- 
 peal. Yet as a grand totality, these realities 
 make our country the wonder and splendor that 
 it is in the imagination of all true citizens. 
 Magnitude, wealth, beauty, intellect, — practi- 
 cal and scientific, — religion, whether in the 
 ancient form of authority or in the freedom of 
 this modern day, and the future, promising the 
 richest realization for the highest dreams of a 
 great people; here is our country, as it lives in 
 the imagination of the millions that love it. 
 
 This Republic belongs to our people; it is 
 theirs to enjoy, to defend, to heighten in worth, 
 and to transmit to future generations. I be- 
 lieve that a new sense of ownership and obhga- 
 
66 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 tion is almost sure to come out of the present 
 crisis. America is ours to enjoy, ours to guard, 
 ours to live for, ours if need be to die for; and 
 if this shall be the mood of our people, a new 
 America shall arise fairer still and yet more 
 beloved. This is one of the reasons why I 
 favor the universal military training of all fit 
 young men. It puts the nation into the imagi- 
 nation of youth, as their nation; it lifts the 
 country before the eyes of our people as a 
 glorious banner; it calls for service and hard- 
 ship and trained manhood, and it gives in re- 
 turn a new consciousness of the worth of the 
 RepubUc. If you would love at your best, do 
 something for that which you love. Parents 
 love their children most when they have done 
 their best for them; children love their parents 
 most when they become their support and solace. 
 The fountain of love is opened to the infinite 
 depths only by unselfish service. The flag 
 of the nation presented this day to this church, 
 by members in our communion who fought in 
 the war for the preservation of the Union, in 
 sacred memory of the men of four regiments, 
 represents a love made mighty, and lasting as 
 life, by sacrificial service. Ask our youth to 
 dream dreams of the country that is theirs, to 
 train to defend it, in all times of need, as part 
 of their obhgation, and the Republic will open 
 new fountains of loyalty and enthusiastic de- 
 votion in all hearts. Our ideal of education is 
 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 67 
 
 of a nation universally trained for life and all 
 its essential interests, and thus maintaining 
 through all changes its democratic character, 
 a nation owned, loved, served and defended by 
 the sovereign people. 
 
 Can we doubt that such a nation will always 
 command, in every day of crisis, the homage 
 of its people? Can we doubt the loyalty to this 
 beneficent Republic, if worse comes to worst, of 
 any class of our citizens, English, Irish, Scottish, 
 Scandinavian, French, Italian, German? My 
 pro-German Irish friend who sells newspapers 
 at the Park Street entrance to the subway is 
 typical. His confession is this : '* I am with the 
 Germans till they attack this country; then 
 I am agin them forever.'* 
 
 For the only adequate philosophy of American 
 loyalty we come now to my text. There are 
 among human beings wise love and unwise. 
 Wise love appears with worth in the object of it, 
 and saving benefit in the subject of it. Unwise 
 love is made evident by two things, the absence 
 of worth in the object of it, the absence of sav- 
 ing benefit in the subject of it. Cordelia loves 
 worth in her father, worth in her husband; her 
 soul is saved by love. Romola, in George 
 Eliot's great novel, loves Tito; hence her sor- 
 row. Her greatest sorrow is that to save her 
 soul she must cease to love the worthless object 
 of it. 
 
 This is the truth that rises into clearness, like 
 
68 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 the world in the Ught of morning, in the great 
 words of Jesus: '' For where thy treasure is 
 there will thy heart be also." Love and trea- 
 sure go together always. Where the treasure 
 is only a fancy, a dream; where it is not a reality 
 love must eventually die. Where the treasure 
 is unimaginably great, there love goes from 
 strength to strength, till both the treasure and 
 the love find themselves eternally one in the 
 heavenly world. 
 
 Because the America that we behold and love 
 has in it worth immeasurable, and because we 
 who love America know the saving benefit 
 that our love and our service bring, we are 
 confident of our loyalty to our country in her 
 day of crisis, our increasing attachment, our 
 ever-deepening sense of gratitude, our devotion 
 to the uttermost. We shall see to it that no 
 weapon formed against her shall prosper; we 
 pledge her our best endeavor and our highest 
 prayer that in the immemorial mornings and 
 evenings of coming time, she may appear an 
 ever greater nation, fairer in the light of ap- 
 proaching and lovelier in the glow of receding 
 day; and when at last we must bid her farewell, 
 we shall leave her in the secret place of the 
 Most High, and under the shadow of the 
 Almighty. 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 
 
"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
 draw all men unto me.'' — John 12 : 32. 
 
V 
 
 THE NATION AND HUMANITY 
 
 There is a world reference to every human life. 
 Somewhere Emerson says something like this: 
 "Strike the rock with your hammer and the jar 
 is felt in Jupiter." Emerson's contention would 
 seem to be that there is a universal impact to 
 every man's life. The greater the individual 
 person, the vaster must be his impact upon the 
 whole. 
 
 The Greeks with true philosophic instinct 
 named one of their gods the " world-shaker." 
 In clearest insight, and in the noblest manner, 
 one of the greatest of New Testament writers 
 calls the Eternal God the shaker of heaven and 
 earth; here the entire universe trembles under 
 the impact of the Infinite Presence. 
 
 This fact of the world reference of every 
 human life underhes the Christian vision of 
 Jesus. He is the supreme human being; as 
 such he has a world impact of the mightiest 
 kind. This world influence is conspicuous in 
 his death. Whatever else it may have been, 
 it was a death with a meaning wide as the 
 world, and flowing into eternity, like the light 
 of the sun that brightens the whole earth and 
 goes forever onward. It was a death in the 
 interest of humanity; it was and is the su- 
 
72 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 premely availing death. It set in everlasting 
 light the spirit in man, his kinship with God, 
 his essential need, — truth, beauty, love and 
 freedom; his need of society organized in love 
 and freedom, in the pursuit of ideal ends and 
 cleansed by the tides of the Eternal. 
 
 It must be added that death was only an 
 incident in the life of Jesus, that it is only an 
 incident in the life of true man everywhere. It 
 is not to be foolishly sought, neither is it to 
 be ignobly shunned. It is to be treated as an 
 incident. The main thing is life. Death, when 
 it is impressive, gains all its impressiveness from 
 the life that has been lived; for example, the 
 death of gifted American youth fighting in 
 France for high ideals, and wearing in our 
 imagination the halo of splendid devotion. The 
 beauty of such a death is but the color hidden 
 in the sunlight that has illumined the long hours 
 of the day displayed in the splendor of sunset. 
 Death is dependent for its high character upon 
 life, and life is dependent for worth upon its 
 causes. When our cause is the well-being and 
 defence of humanity; when we love and serve 
 that cause in life, the worth it has wrought into 
 our character spreads itself upon the dark 
 clouds of death in divine fire. 
 
 The United States stands under the law here 
 indicated. No nation liveth unto itself, no na- 
 tion dieth unto itself; its universal influence 
 is simply inevitable. Whether with alliances or 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 73 
 
 without them, this RepubHc is in the thought 
 of the world. In every capital in Europe and 
 in every camp, our country is a recurrent theme 
 of interest and discussion. Our judgments and 
 our deeds as a people are reported in the lead- 
 ing journals in every civilized state, and at their 
 firesides, the families of these various nations 
 are weighing our character in the balances. 
 About this we cannot be in doubt. This nation 
 is now wielding a world influence and delivering 
 a world impact. The only question that re- 
 mains open concerns the nature of our world 
 influence, the character of our world impact. 
 
 1. We are the one nation for whom this 
 war has brought fabulous increase in wealth. 
 Are we satisfied with this as the whole story of 
 the world concern of the American Republic? 
 Is our impact to be mainly upon the treasury 
 of the nations fighting the battle of civilization? 
 Is our chief interest in the tragic conflict the 
 purpose to set free the stream of gold in Europe 
 and to make deep and sure the channel to our 
 door? Are we to lay tribute upon the necessities 
 of those whose cause we approve, whose contest 
 seems to us essential to the free life of man- 
 kind, and for every economic service rendered, 
 exact the highest attainable reward? Are we 
 to continue satisfied to reap in gold while others 
 sow in blood, to swell the bank account of our 
 citizens while others feed the grave with the 
 best and bravest of the lovers of freedom? 
 
74 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 Through the President of -the United States and 
 through the Congress of the United States, the 
 American people, from ocean to ocean, and 
 from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico 
 have answered, '' NO! " 
 
 To the believer in a moral civilization, to the 
 lover and servant of the values that constitute 
 our human world, the naked economic process 
 is an unrelieved horror. To look upon the war 
 that today darkens half the earth, that threatens 
 the humanity of the world, as simply an economic 
 opportunity, as a chance to exact the richest 
 reward for the smallest service, is nothing less 
 than covenanting with malign spirits, is nothing 
 other than playing the role of Judas Iscariot, 
 not for his stake of thirty pieces of silver, but 
 for a billion or two added to the billions already 
 made. Take for your service all that j^ou can 
 exact, turn the dire need of friendly nations 
 into a new market immensely favorable to you, 
 is doubtless the accepted maxim of the unmiti- 
 gated economic process; it must be added that 
 the unmitigated economic process is below the 
 level of the well-behaved savage. It is not true, 
 it can never be true, that the only or the chief 
 relation that the American people want to this 
 terrible menace to the humanity of man, is a 
 purely economic relation. It is not true, it can 
 never be true that our people are indignant with 
 Germany simply because she has kept our ships 
 in port, because she has broken the market that 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 75 
 
 ran so mightily in our favor. It is true, and the 
 truth is now declared to the world, that the 
 American people demand a relation to the 
 calamity that threatens the freedom and happi- 
 ness of mankind, at their own cost, and on a 
 higher level, to their own immeasurable gain, 
 in behalf of the dearest possessions of civilized 
 man. When the issue is the fate of democracy, 
 justice, humanity, when the enemy is the repu- 
 diator of all moral obligation, the wielder against 
 the men, women and children of all nations of 
 the naked sword, the untamed apostle of pitiless 
 warfare upon everything valued by decent hu- 
 man beings, the American people cry out with 
 one voice, that enemy is our enemy, that foe 
 we must fight till his reason returns to him. 
 
 2. Here we meet the creed of the mad econo- 
 mist, sell your goods in the market most favor- 
 able to you, and buy in the market the least 
 favorable to the person who sells to you; get 
 the most for what you give, and give the least 
 for the most you can get; that I take to be the 
 naked economic process. What the individual 
 would be ashamed to do to his friends, in their 
 distress, it is held that the group of individuals 
 called a state, not only may do, but must do 
 even when united with friendly powers in oppos- 
 ing the common enemy of mankind. The 
 economic process, in its utter nakedness, is held 
 by the economist of whom I am thinking to be 
 the ultimate unalterable law of human society. 
 
76 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 Other aspects of life are determined by it; it is 
 determined by none. It is worth while to exam- 
 ine this proposition that we may see how com- 
 pletely it contradicts the normal life of society. 
 The man who tries to live by bread alone, or 
 who makes the economic process sovereign over 
 life, is not even a decent animal. Your canary 
 adds to appetite a bath and a song, a friendly 
 perception that you are you, and the instinct 
 of play in response to the instinct of play in 
 you. Even here the bare economic process is 
 not enough, nor is it the source of the main 
 enjoyment. Your dog does better; he wants 
 a bone, yet he will not touch it till you tell him 
 it is his, and he will drop it when you command 
 him to drop it. He wants food, but food is not 
 enough; he wants your approval, your affec- 
 tion, your companionship. There is a genuine 
 influence exerted by the higher interests over 
 the lower, in the case of a decent dog. You 
 have watched robins when caring for their young. 
 They have a police system, and let a squirrel 
 or cat appear, and the community of robins 
 springs to arms to hurl the invader back. I 
 have seen a hen, a creature not famous for 
 courage, attack a cat till it fled, attack a dog 
 and drive him from the yard in which she was 
 feeding her young. I have seen a weasel, that 
 fierce little fighter for blood, met on his way to 
 the nest of a lapwing by a regiment of lapwings. 
 By organization of power, and by the skilful 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 77 
 
 use of their strong wings, they knocked the weasel 
 first this way and then that, till sore with blows 
 he fled in defeat. That nest belonged only to 
 one pair of birds; here was a whole community 
 moved with sympathy, and risking life for a 
 single bird family, in that community. The 
 human being for whom the economic process 
 is a naked, unmitigated fact is simply below the 
 level of a decent animal. 
 
 When we look into the economic life of society 
 we find two ultimate forces competing for the 
 control of it. The first form of social organiza- 
 tion that I describe I call normal, because it 
 ends in the vast superaddition to the economic 
 process of faith in the moral being of the uni- 
 verse, a faith that returns to change the whole 
 character of the economic process as night by 
 day. Here work is in the great heartening 
 sense of fellowship; it is brightened by the play 
 of humor; it is the parent of some of our best 
 friendships. Work has for its final motive love, 
 the love of the old home where father and mother 
 live, the love of the prospective home, the love 
 of the actual home. The mainspring of the 
 economic clock is love; break that, and your 
 economic order is a piece of dead mechanism. 
 There follows the desire of knowledge and the 
 sense of beauty; science and art are thus added 
 to the economic process. There is the faith that 
 man is hving in a moral universe, and that he is 
 accountable to that moral universe for his be- 
 
78 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 havior. Wherever that faith is sincerely held 
 it enters the whole sphere of human interests 
 as the morning sun enters our atmosphere, 
 making all things new. 
 
 What about the abnormal form of economic 
 organization? By what is it ruled? Fellow- 
 ship, humor, friendship, love; the glory of edu- 
 cation for effective living, and for a broad share 
 in the best human experience are here. Relig- 
 ion, too, is here in name, and sometimes, doubt- 
 less, in power. The whole structure, however, of 
 society is made to culminate in the lust for con- 
 quest, and the method employed is brute force. 
 For example we turn to Germany. The organi- 
 zation of German society terminates in tyranny. 
 Fellowship, humor, friendship, home, education, 
 the ideals of science, art and religion issue in one 
 abnormal combative instinct. "Deutschland iiber 
 alles" is the cry of the nation whose marvel- 
 lous social organization has issued, not in faith 
 in the moral being of man, not in faith in the 
 moral being of the universe, but in an insane 
 self-assertion, in insolence to other social or- 
 ganizations of human beings, in a mad comba- 
 tive instinct, in a wild passion to dominate the 
 world. As faith in a moral Deity brings into 
 social organization the transforming soul of the 
 Eternal humanity, so the substitution for faith 
 in the moral being of the Infinite, of the foul 
 myth of the divinity of the state, the state as 
 administered by autocrats and war-lords, intro- 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 79 
 
 duces into the blood of the people the poison of 
 enmity against all those who block their way to 
 power. The good and kind people of Germany 
 have been taught to believe that as it is enough 
 for the dog to eat of the crumbs that fall from 
 his master's table, so it is enough for all other 
 nations to be allowed to subsist and serve under 
 Prussian autocratic rule. The final super- 
 addition to the economic process determines 
 whether you are to have a society ruled by the 
 ideal of Christian humanity, or governed by 
 the ruthless might of unmoral ambition. 
 
 The mihtarist is simply the unmitigated 
 economist armed. His mind is denuded of all 
 faith in the moral being of man, of all faith in the 
 moral character of the universe. His rule is the 
 will to power, all thoughts and feelings that 
 would restrain power are to him mere fictions 
 and emotions. The German method of war is 
 the straight, logical expression of this mood. 
 The mind behind the Teutonic armies is far 
 more serious than they; that mind is one of 
 blank atheism and inhumanity, with every rag 
 of restraint and shame thrown to the winds. 
 
 It is this mind behind armies that America 
 must defy. We refuse to believe that this mon- 
 ster represents the mind of the German people, 
 that he represents the heart of the German 
 people. He has screened the truth from their 
 eyes, and made them believe as facts the foul 
 dreams of his own ambition. He has fooled 
 
80 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 them into the conviction that they were in 
 danger of annihilation at the hands of the 
 wicked nations now at war with them. He 
 has made them drunk with the insolent assump- 
 tion that they are the immeasurable superiors 
 of all other races. He has lured them on with 
 the wild illusion that the world is theirs to sub- 
 due, rule and plunder. He has made the Ger- 
 man people believe his lie; and he has shut 
 them in from the illuminating opinion of the 
 sane world beyond them. He has done this 
 with terrible strength, but he has only suc- 
 ceeded in plunging his race into a temporary 
 delusion. The German race cannot be crushed, 
 not even by its present heartless rulers. It will 
 awake some morning, as from a horrible night- 
 mare, to enter once more the ways of peaceful 
 service to mankind, again to give to the world 
 leaders in science, in ideas, in learning, in relig- 
 ious freedom, and in the deepest worship of the 
 Eternal God. Our conflict is not really with the 
 German race; it is with the monster who has 
 bewitched and debauched them, and who as his 
 unwitting instrument has made them, for the 
 hour, the enemy of mankind, and driven them 
 in the face of the moral faith of the world. 
 
 3. The United States is now at war with 
 Germany; it is therefore our Christian duty to 
 define to ourselves our reasons for this serious 
 decision. For myself I have hoped that the 
 United States might be able with honor to re- 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 81 
 
 main neutral. War is to me what it is to every 
 right-thinking man, a horror. There is to me 
 only one thing worse than war, and that is base 
 surrender to foreign military menace, of the 
 rights, fruits and possessions of civilized man. 
 I have hoped and believed that for this country 
 war might be averted. I still hope that our part 
 in the conflict may be limited to the sea, to 
 possible disturbances on our borders, to vast 
 credits to the Allies at minimum interest, and 
 to sharing otherwise our resources and power. 
 It is far from any wish of mine, except under 
 direst necessity, to see this nation plunged in 
 the war now raging on the continent of Europe. 
 If we are forced to this by the logic of events, 
 let it be known that we enter the conflict under 
 moral compulsion, for high human ends and with 
 clean hands and pure hearts. 
 
 We enter this war to avert the humihation of 
 the nation. We cannot accept national existence 
 under such terms as Germany chooses to impose 
 upon us. We cannot allow ourselves to be swept 
 from the seas by her command. We cannot 
 surrender the rights of peaceful commerce as 
 sanctioned by international law; we must not 
 submit to the dictation of the pirate; we shall 
 refuse to acquiesce when our flag is dishonored, 
 our ships sunk without warning, and our citi- 
 zens murdered. The nation that should acquiesce 
 in such indignities would thereby confess its 
 impotence or its insensibility to its own honor. 
 
82 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 This nation is neither impotent nor without a 
 high sense of honor; its rights therefore upon the 
 high seas it must defend and secure. Because 
 that means war, war has come. 
 
 We enter this conflict, I must again repeat, 
 not to make war upon the German people; our 
 enemy is the German Government. We be- 
 Heve the German Government to be the deadly 
 enemy of the German people. We believe that 
 the best thing that could happen to the people 
 of Germany would be the defeat and overthrow 
 of their government. The program of that 
 government is one of conquest; the method 
 adopted is the method of war; and the war is 
 waged with a ruthless inhumanity without a 
 parallel in the records of modern history. The 
 German Government is not to be believed be- 
 cause it is simply lying when it declares that 
 Germany is waging a war purely in defence of 
 the fatherland. The fatherland was in no danger 
 in August, 1914; Europe was quite content to 
 remain as it then was. Germany wanted con- 
 quest in Europe and beyond; she was dreaming 
 dreams of universal dominion. She saw or 
 thought she saw the arrival of the supreme mo- 
 ment. It is Germany bent upon conquest, Ger- 
 many the breaker of her plighted word, Germany 
 the apostle of war, the ravager of Belgium, the 
 ruthless destroyer of whatever stands up against 
 her march of dishonor, the wanton desecrator 
 of the monumental forms of learning, and 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 83 
 
 beauty and religion, the open and savage foe 
 of mankind, who has made herself our enemy 
 and forced America to take up arms against 
 her. 
 
 We shall endeavor not to forget the greatness 
 of the people of Germany, their strength, in- 
 dustry, thoroughness, mastery; we shall try to 
 keep in mind the varied and vast contribution 
 which they have made to the wellbeing of man- 
 kind. We shall retain our sense of friendship 
 for them, our hope for the return of more than 
 their former prosperity; our effort shall be to 
 dehver and not to crush, to open their eyes to 
 the tyranny under which they suffer; and when 
 the conflict is ended, we shall rejoice if once 
 more we may see them clothed and in their 
 right mind. 
 
 We go to war that we may help to end this 
 war, that we may help to abohsh war from the 
 circle of civilized nations. That may well be 
 the grand result of this war. Its continuance 
 till the resources of Europe are exhausted, till 
 the resources of the world are greatly reduced, 
 till the folly and the guilt of the prophet of war 
 are clearly seen, till the inhumanity of war shall 
 be expiated by the woe of the war-makers, till 
 it shall appear clear as the sun that the nation 
 or race that forgets God, that pours contempt 
 upon the teaching of Jesus, that puts might 
 above right, and interprets the life of humanity 
 solely in terms of the unmitigated animal 
 
84 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 struggle for existence, is the black prophet of 
 national and racial suicide. The Righteous 
 Ruler of the world would seem to be disposed 
 to let all the nations concerned know what 
 war means, that he may be able to recall men 
 and nations from the error of their ways, that 
 he may enlighten their eyes before they sleep 
 the sleep of death. Some such revulsion from 
 the interpretation of human life downward, 
 to which thinkers have been prone for many 
 decades, to the old interpretation of man's soul 
 and the society of men upward, I anticipate as 
 the grand issue of this tragedy. Our affinities 
 with the jungle have been made to yield the 
 guiding principle of society; our affinities with 
 the Eternal Moral Deity have been regarded 
 as nothing but pious dreams. The creed of 
 the jungle has had .free course, in the hands of 
 its chief national apostle; it stands discredited 
 because it means racial annihilation. The 
 Lord's Prayer may once more chant itself in 
 the hearts and homes of the world as the ulti- 
 mate interpretation of the universe; and the 
 only creed on which man as man can live. We 
 enter this terrible war to help to end it, and 
 thereby to help to banish war from the earth. 
 
 The highest civilization has again and again 
 been compelled to take refuge in the shadow of 
 the sword. The picture is familiar to all New 
 England people, of the Pilgrims on the way to 
 their meeting-house for the worship of God, the 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 85 
 
 men with their loaded muskets on their shoulders 
 forming a mihtary escort for their famihes. In 
 an ideal world a scene like this would be shock- 
 ing. This is, however, not an ideal world, and 
 the Pilgrims knew it. They felt that they were 
 the prophets of a new and higher social order, 
 and they knew that the bloodthirsty savage 
 was lying in wait to destroy. If the Pilgrim had 
 been a pacifist, that is a foe to war under all 
 conditions and circumstances, he would have 
 left as record only the cowardly surrender of 
 women and children to the tender mercies of 
 the destroyer, only the cruel abandonment of 
 the highest possessions and hopes of this conti- 
 nent to the dominion of the savage. 
 
 That picture of the women and children on 
 the way to the house of God, surrounded by 
 their husbands and fathers with their muskets 
 ready for action, is a parable for our country 
 today that no serious citizen should shght or 
 misread. Here are the women and the children, 
 in this land and in other lands, open to the attack 
 of the modern savage; and here are the chival- 
 rous men of today, worthy descendants, fit 
 successors of the Pilgrims, surrounding them, 
 and those whom they represent, with the de- 
 fensive power of the nation. Today as then till 
 the present calamity shall be overpast the wor- 
 ship of God must be in the shadow of the sword; 
 today as then the beauty and hope of humanity 
 are under menace; today as then the appeal is 
 
86 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 
 
 for the defence of all that makes life sacred and 
 great. 
 
 What of the cost in our young life? If we 
 could avert the loss with honor, avert it we 
 should. If we cannot avert the loss with honor, 
 the refusal to meet the cost would be treason 
 to the best. Death is finally inevitable. '* To 
 every man upon this earth death cometh soon 
 or late." Death will take care of itself; it is 
 better not to think about that. But if we are 
 compelled to think about it, we must say that 
 while there are many ways of dying there is 
 only one way of dying well. Tens of thousands 
 die in shame; tens of thousands more never did 
 a significant deed in their whole life. Their 
 death means little to anyone. The men who 
 die well are the men who think seldom and little 
 of death; they are the men who live in the 
 vision of great causes, in the love of great causes, 
 in devout devotion to great causes. Their death 
 brings to light the glory of their life, calls, as with 
 the voice of the trumpet, the minds of others 
 to their causes, marshals a new host of servants 
 and defenders of that for which they lived and 
 died. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of 
 the church; the good cause for which men live 
 and die will ever return upon the living with a 
 mightier appeal because of the sacrifices already 
 made for it. When our country calls for de- 
 fenders who shall at the same time be defenders 
 of humanity, the call must come with the accents 
 
THE NATION AND HUMANITY 87 
 
 of love and sacrifice in it of a multitude that no 
 man can number. The vision of the majestic 
 land that makes the appeal is of a land covered 
 with the glory of all who have lived and died 
 for her. 
 
 " The meanest rill, the mightiest river, 
 Rolls mingling with their fame forever." 
 
 Good Friday is sacred to the memory of him 
 who died supremely well. Another such scene 
 is not to be found in the records of our race. 
 The glory of the death of Jesus flows from his 
 vision of the Kingdom of God, his steadfast 
 interpretation of man's life in terms of eternity, 
 his ceaseless claim that man is everywhere need- 
 ful to man, his unbroken witness to the sov- 
 ereignty of the spirit, his endless protest against 
 the dominion of the brute. The death of Jesus 
 was an incident in his transcendent and victori- 
 ous life; yet as such it has become for the whole 
 higher life of man the divinely availing death. 
 Daughters of Jerusalem weep not for me; weep 
 for yourselves! His life was lived in God; it 
 was lived for the Kingdom of God in time; his 
 death has become an endless memory of supreme 
 insight and love, a memory that subdues, 
 purifies and hallows the world. 
 
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