-V l G 1 ^ C- c/ 4 */< ///y (gob anb tfjc Rations Conbocatton aobress bp $otyn £>d)olte J15ollen Presibent of Eake Jfotest College JFitist Presbpterian Cfjurcf) Eake JForesSt, Sllinots September 27 1914 * UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AUG 1 o 1915 PRESIDENT'S OFFICE \ GOD AND THE NATIONS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/godnationsOOnoll GOD AND THE NATIONS GOD AND THE NATIONS Isaiah xl:15: Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are accounted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. 17. All the nations are as nothing before him; they are accounted by him as a thing of nought, and vanity. John xv: 12: This is my commandment, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you. 13. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. 14. Ye are my friends, if ye do the things which I command you. 17. These things I command you, that ye may love one another. “God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives”— that was the calming word that rang out in the powerful voice of James A. Garfield over an excited mob in New York City, maddened and terrified by the news that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The whole world has need today of a voice of comfort to assure it that God has not abdicated, that His gov¬ ernment is righteousness and peace and must at last prevail. Not in the memory of man have there been events that made it so hard to believe that even the wrath of man can be made to praise God. Yet we cannot let go of that trust, if we are not to despair of humanity. We are still dazed by the suddenness and the overwhelming force of the horrible man-made catastrophe that is drenching Europe with tears and blood. By one of the strange ironies GOD AND THE NATIONS of destiny, it was just as delegates from all nations were moving toward Vienna for a great World’s Peace Congress to be opened by the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Berchtold, that this same Count Berchtold sent to the Servian government the per¬ emptory ultimatum which was the immediate occasion of the greatest war in the world’s history. And without warning the advocates of peace, gathering to mark and to assist the progress of the nations toward the quiet, judicial settlement of inter¬ national difficulties, found themselves tossed aside and stranded by the surge and sweep of a general mobilization. This is not an easy time for the pacifist. All the ground he has gained by unremitting toil in the sympathies and con¬ victions of men seems suddenly to be swept from beneath his feet by the tide of warlike enthusiasm. It seems as if the fight¬ ing beast in man, quelled so long by reason and by Christian feeling, had leaped to savage control, maddened by the scent of blood. For the time the militarist is in the saddle, and the nations of Europe have put their fate into the hands of their experts in destruction and slaughter. When these have done their best and their worst, it will be the turn of the statesmen to determine what can still be saved of order and civilization out of the chaos and the wreck. Why these same statesmen, who must be wise enough some day to carry through the infinitely difficult work of restoration, could not have found a way at first by which Christian brethren might solve their problems without the chaos and the wreck, that is a question to which we seek in vain for a reasonable answer. Some day, we may be sure, history will pronounce its im¬ partial verdict, fixing definitely the personal responsibility for the most destructive crime that the world has ever seen; and when that time comes, just as surely the men upon whom the guilt shall rest will be branded as supremely infamous among the miscreants of the human race. The great change in the attitude of the world toward such a figure as the first Napoleon [ 4 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS suggests the sort of final reputation that is in store for certain men who now sit in high places, no matter what may be their present success or failure. The voice of the people and the voice of God will not hold them guiltless. It would be hasty and unjust for us to attempt at this time to forestall history in the distribution of personal blame for the horrible results of this huge fratricidal struggle. But it is altogether meet that, sobered by the spectacle of the agony of our brothers across the sea—to which we can bring no present alleviation—we should in the quiet of our own security try to understand what meaning there is in this catastrophe for just and rational men. For many years the professional militarists of every clime have been ridiculing as fond and futile dreams, as impractical and perilous theories, the persistent and measurably successful efforts of the pacifists to substitute decent judicial methods in international relations for the ancient, stupid horror of war. No doubt most men would say offhand that events in Europe today vindicate the judgment of the militant party and totally discredit the benevolent propaganda of the pacifist. Superficially, there is something quite plausible and even compelling in this view. Nevertheless, it can easily be proven false. This very war of the nations, caused by the dominance of the military spirit in the councils of the nations, is itself a slashing refutation of the ruling political ideas of the militarist. We see before our eyes, in the catacylsm of a general European war, the utter collapse of three fundamental theories that have dominated, at least since the days of Bismarck, the practical politics of Europe. The first of these is the theory of “Armed Peace.” This is the favorite child of militarist politics. It is familiar to us from the incessant preachment of all worshippers of the big stick for forty years. There can be no safety but in armaments. Be so strong that no enemy shall dare attack you; thus alone shall you be safe from aggression and rest secure in the enjoy- GOD AND THE NATIONS ment of the inestimable blessings of peace. Fear is the only dependable deterrent of war; see to it that all men shall fear your power. Thus ran the argument, and beguiled by it the nations of the world have for many years been spending the best of their substance in a crazy rivalry to create each an invincible armament, in order that peace might be preserved by the threat of armed force. And now the priceless boon for which the peoples bore this crushing burden has after all been lost, engulfed in a flood of armies. So the world may see clearly what the pacifist has always said, that fear is not a deterrent, but an active and immediate cause of war. You need not take the word of a theorist for that, but read the elaborate official apologies of the very chiefs whose saving vision of “armed peace” has now turned to a grinning mockery. And in so far as these official white books make their confession that fear dictated the declaration of war, they tell the unimpeachable truth. Austrian fear of the threatening expansion of Slavic power on the south, Russian fear of Austrian aggression toward the Aegean and the Black Sea if Servia were crushed, German fear of Russian mobilization and the Pan-Slavic movement, French fear of the Prussian mailed fist, Britain’s fear of Ger¬ many’s reaching through Belgium the straits of Dover, and be¬ hind that the fear of German commercial and naval power— these were the blind forces which the arbiters of the destiny of Europe have openly confessed themselves powerless to resist. So the familiar analogy has proven accurate to the end—the Christian nations of Europe, armed to the teeth, have like so many truculent cutthroats swaggered and boasted to keep their courage up, while eyeing each other with anxious suspicion, until the first desperado who carried the dare so far as to put his hand to his pistol pocket precipitated immediate mutual slaughter. Verily, the stupid militarist theory of “armed peace” is dead at the hands of its makers. May its ghost never rise again to deceive and to coerce and to impoverish the nations. [ 6 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS The second theory that has been discredited by recent events is that of the “Balance of Power,” an extension of the doctrine of armed peace and the saving power of fear. If a single nation by heavy armaments could make itself practically immune from attack, all the more surely could a defensive combination of strongly armed powers be a guarantee of peace to these powers. Hence Bismarck’s creation of the Triple Alliance, binding Ger¬ many, Austria and Italy together to guard the peace of Europe and protect the fruits of the successful war against France out of which had emerged a united and formidable German Empire. But that was also a game at which other nations could play, indeed, must play if their peace was to be equally safeguarded. Hence the defensive alliance of France with Russia, and finally the Triple Entente binding these nations with England, to which we must add the compact recognizing a community of interest in the Far East between Britain and Japan. Here was then a “balance of power” most cunningly devised to make the very thought of war impossible, because an attack upon any one nation would inevitably involve the whole of Europe in war, and no conceivable advantage to be gained by fighting would be worth that staggering price. But alas for the wisdom of the wise and prudent! Just as the fear and suspicion engendered between the nations by the state of “armed peace” was the direct cause of hostilities, so the alliances creating the finely reciprocal “balance of power” made the conflagration leap in a day from end to end of Europe, and presently across the continents to the Yellow Sea. The third theory, strangely inconsistent with that just men¬ tioned, but nevertheless held with equal fervor by the rulers who based their politics upon the other, is the theory that a nation is an isolated unit, with a definite personality, justified in acting independently in the use of force to gain advantage or revenge or to vindicate what is called “national honor.” If the other theories are based on fear, this is based on pride, a motive [ 7 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS exactly equivalent to the peculiarly vulnerable sense of personal honor that reacted upon any injury in the duel of former days, and that still causes the feud or the vendetta in semi-civilized countries. According to this theory every nation, no matter what its obligations to and claims upon its allies, no matter how notorious a bully in its relations with weaker nations, must be the sole judge of its own cause and could not tolerate any inter¬ ference, even by its friends, in the interest of international justice and world peace. It is plain that by this theory the advantage of the carefully established balance of power, as a guarantee of peace between the nations of the world, was utterly destroyed, since, after all, the independent and arbitrary acts of any one nation could and must precipitate a war in which all the others must become fatally involved. Recent events have shown with tragic suddenness how false and ruinous this theory is,—how inevitably these supposedly individual and sovereign political units are bound up with and dependent upon one another, how even a small and relatively feeble nation running amuck can cause world-wide disaster. For many years humane and patriotic voices raised in every nation have been warning the world of the criminal folly and falsity and peril of these maxims by which the practical politics of all the great and little powers have been governed. Some indeed of the rulers of the earth have heeded the warning and made valiant efforts to stay the madness of international mili¬ tarism; but to little effect. It is the story over again of the abolition of slavery in this country. Now, as then, men are learning, at a cost of life and treasure and mutual hatreds too terrible to contemplate, a lesson that might so well have been learned in the safer and infinitely cheaper ways of peace. Nothing is more evident in the light of present events than that war is a horrible anachronism. A state of war is the direct negation of all modern institutions. War annuls repre¬ sentative government. Even in the most enlightened and demo- [ 8 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS cratic nations, the decisions upon which war hangs are in the hands of a very few men, usually of men who are the chief representatives of the military tradition; and once the battalions are marching, parliaments become mere money-voting adjuncts to a military government. War crushes labor and industry and commerce. At its first impact the exchanges of the world are closed, the delicate mechanism of the world’s financial credit is wrecked, communication and travel are at a standstill, and money, that most representative symbol of human organization, loses its value. The nations relapse into primitive conditions, and save for the monstrously effective instruments of death and destruction, the machinery of civilization, built by the cumulative effort of the ages, suddenly ceases to operate. A recent cartoon represents the pagan and barbaric peoples of the earth seated about the arena in which the spectacle of the war is going on, jeering at the “civilization” that tolerates such fratricidal strife, gloating over the Christian nations that are rending each other like wild beasts. The picture tells a true story. The children of Japhet, so long the conquerors and masters and leaders of the world, are on trial before God and their fellowmen. Our pride and our past achievements will not save us. We may forget, in our insolence of dominant power, that to God “the nations are as a drop of a bucket and as the small dust of the balance.” If we prove unfaithful and unworthy, God has resources that we know not of. Not long ago a scientist and explorer who has spent years among the primitive tribes of the great African plateau assured us earnestly of his conviction that these splendid specimens of black manhood were the race of the future, destined to carry the burden of the world’s advancement when we Caucasians in our senile decrepitude shall have witnessed the decay of our civilization. That sounds like a weirdly improbable dream to us now, but it is no stranger than the truth of past experience. Who should have fancied, in the days of Pericles, that soon the world’s capital would be in [ 9 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS Rome, or in the days of Augustus, that the somber barbarians of the Northern forests would one day be the masters of science and culture, when the glory of imperial Rome should be but a distant memory? “Be not deceived,” says a warning voice echo¬ ing divine wisdom, “God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” We know that the men who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind, no matter how soft upon their lips may be the words of Christian worship, belying the stubborn pride of their insolent hearts, mocking the Christian God. “Not everyone that sayeth unto me, ‘Lord, Lord’ ”—we hear the tone of Jesus himself—“shall enter into the Kingdom, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven.” Is our splendid Caucasion experiment a failure, like the earlier experiments of the pagan civilizations that have piled their ruins one above the other ? Or shall the white race still become really converted to the gospel of Jesus, which it so glibly professes and so recklessly ignores? That is the life and death question for our civilization. Never was there more need than now of thinking in world terms and in terms of eternity. We seem to have fallen upon a time of strangely parochial narrowness in the thoughts of men, a time when empty shibboleths again make foes of brethren; and that is all the stranger because for the first time in the his¬ tory of the world it has become one neighborhood. This paro¬ chial blindness, this unwillingness to heed the lessons of the past or to enter into others’ point of view, had much to do with the breaking out of hostilities. The rulers of the nations seem short-sighted enough to believe, and with fanatical zeal, that the imaginary lines dividing their domains have a permanent validity, a peculiar sanction. You need only turn the pages of an his¬ torical atlas to see at once how childish is this conviction, as you watch the boundaries shift and flee from century to century. A boundary has never been an accomplished fact, but always merely a fleeting mark of temporary political alignments. More [ 10 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS vital and enduring by far have been the criteria of race, religion, language, traditions, culture. And the real problem of civiliza¬ tion is, not to throw the net of one’s national boundary over an unwilling and rebellious people, but to give every race of man the fullest room for the development of its own peculiar genius, and to bind together all men of whatever name and place in the bonds of a brotherhood wherein dwell liberty and concord. It may well be that the finest contribution of our country to the civilization of the world is to be an object lesson of unity amid diversity, of peace and cooperation and mutual respect among men who here have been freed from the hatred-breeding trammels of their more parochial homes across the sea, and who have learned that not by preying upon one another, but by help¬ ing one another, they realize their own best possibilities. The old American motto “E pluribus unum” may yet, in a new sense, become the rallying cry of the nations. You may well ask now what the Christian religion has to do with all this. Much every way, or rather it has everything to do with it. Christianity has the secret of the solution for the age-long problem to which the warring nations can find no answer. For Christianity has the world-view, the eternal truth, which alone can lead men out of darkness into light. Christianity is not a racial or a national faith, it is not the possession of class or caste, it is not limited in time. Its principle cuts across the ages and through all the artificial barriers of human pride and sovereignty. Its seat is not on a throne or in a council chamber, but in the depths of the soul of man. Wherever Christian truth is implanted it must bear the same essential fruit—“the peacable fruit of righteousnessbecause it is one seed, springing up in the universal soil of the spirit, and through whatever crust of race or habit this divine plant pushes out to the sunlight, the name of its flower is love. Jesus must reign, in the councils of the nations as well as in the hearts of men, for he has shown the way of salvation GOD AND THE NATIONS for nations as for individuals, and no man has found another way. For the last time, let us fervently hope, Christian peoples are making a frenzied experiment of the other way, and already the world shudders at the result. There is no other safety— the way of fear and of pride must be forsaken and the nations must learn the meaning of the gospel they profess. There is one cure; we know that it is love alone that casts out fear, and that leaves no place for pride. Some men have said, in the terror of their hearts over the awful events of the present day, that Christian civilization seemed to be on the verge of ruin. We need have no such apprehension. In a way the reverse is true. It is precisely because the nations have failed to cultivate a Christian spirit in their relations to each other that they are now at each others’ throats. What we are now witnessing is the disastrous failure of the pagan world- politics that have remained as a perilous survival of barbarous days into the days when men in their private relations have long accepted the Christian way, at least as the ideal toward which they strive. And now it is time to ask, what after all can you and I do in this great matter that involves the welfare of the world? How pitifully impotent we seem! If we were over there in the midst of the distraction and the terror, we could only flee for our homes and be eagerly gratefuly to pay our last dollar for steerage passage back to a land of peace. And being here in safety, what can we do but wring our hands in helpless horror as the truth leaks out through censored dispatches? But if we are impotent now, in the immediate crisis, we can do much in the long run. For after awhile, when the present feverish pas¬ sion is burned out, men will begin to think again, and what men think will determine the destiny of the world. We cannot meas¬ ure today the influence that this country may have, the one great Western nation left unscarred by the cruel sufferings of war. Perhaps, as some say, the United States may through this war GOD AND THE NATIONS gain the commercial and financial leadership of the world. But it is infinitely more important that American ideals of liberty and peace shall do their missionary work than that American ships shall cover the seven seas. It is vastly and eternally im¬ portant that you and I, as American citizens in this crisis of our history, should think, not lies, but truth, not in terms of hatred and suspicion, but of faith and love. You and I must think and live in the spirit of Jesus if we are to do our part toward building up the kingdom of God on earth. Let no one say that the gospel doesn’t “work.” Nothing else does work. That which is won by the sword shall perish by the sword, be¬ cause it has in it the seed of destruction; that which is born of love shall endure forever, because it expresses the very nature of the Eternal God. It is a sad anticlimax, is it not, to descend from the awful argument in which the fate of nations is being decided, to the petty details of your life and mine, in this quiet village, in the plodding daily routine of school and college? But we forget again that God does not so judge. To him the nations are as a drop of a bucket and as the small dust of the balance, and yet not a sparrow falls without his care; to him a thousand years are but as a day, and one day as a thousand years. Christianity searches the heart; it is the principle that matters, not the acci¬ dental size of the manifestation. Jesus has little to say of monu¬ mental crimes on a national scale; but he warns us solemnly that he who hates his brother, or despitefully uses him, is in danger of the gehenna of fire. The smallest neighborhood, a single family, may have in it the same destructive hatred and fear and suspicion that is today making a hell of Europe; or it may harbor the heavenly visitant whose presence is joy un¬ speakable. What is your spirit? Is it a spirit of faction, of grasping selfishness, of lazy indifference? Or is it the spirit of cooperation, of generous rivalry in fine things, of eager inter¬ est in the promotion of the common good? Is it the spirit of [ 13 ] GOD AND THE NATIONS Jesus Christ? Then shall his joy be in you, and so your joy shall be complete. “This is my commandment/’ says our Master, “that ye love one another, even as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” The way of self-giving—that is the one way to self- realization. 12 105656703