The programme of Christianity, and other addresses

Contents

5. " First!" a Talk with Boys.

Preface

The Addresses contained in this volume have all been revised and prepared for publication by the author himself. Two of them, The Programme of Christianity and Baxter's Second Innings, are protected by the new copyright law. We call especial attention to this statement, as some of the Addresses in other editions have been published from mere newspaper reports without his revision. This is the only authorized edition of Prof. Drummond's Addresses.

THE PUBLISHERS.

New York, April, 1892.

Copyright, 1891, By HENRY DRUMMOND.

To Preach Good Tidings unto the Meek :

To Bind up the Broken-Hearted :

To Proclaim Liberty to the Captives and the Opening of the

Prison to them that are Bound : To Proclaim the Acceptable Year of the Lord, and the Day

of Vengeance of our God : To Comfort all that Mourn : To Appoint unto them that Mourn in Zion . To Give unto them —

Beauty for Ashes, The Oil of Joy for Mourning,

The Garment of Praise for the Spirit of Heaviness. 7

" WHAT does God do all day ? " once asked a little boy. One could wish that more grownup people would ask so very real a question. Unfortunately, most of us are not even boys in religious intelligence, but only very unthinking children. It no more occurs to us that God is engaged in any particular work in the world than it occurs to a little child that its father does anything except be its father. Its father may be a Cabinet Minister absorbed in the nation's work, or an inventor deep in schemes for the world's good ; but to this

IO THE PROGRAMME

master-egoist he is father, and nothing more. Childhood, whether in the physical or moral world, is the great self-centred period of life ; and a personal God who satisfies personal ends is all that for a long time many a Christian understands.

But as clearly as there comes to the growing child a knowledge of its father's part in the world, and a sense of what real life means, there must come to every Christian whose growth is true some richer sense of the meaning of Christianity and a larger view of Christ's purpose for mankind. To miss this is to miss the whole splendour and glory of Christ's religion. Next to losing the sense of a personal Christ, the worst evil that can befall a Christian is to have no sense of anything else. To grow up in complacent belief that God has no business in this great groaning

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world of human beings except to attend to a few saved souls is the negation of all religion. The first great epoch in a Christian's life, after the awe and wonder of its dawn, is when there breaks into his mind some sense that Christ has a purpose for mankind, a purpose beyond him and his needs, beyond the churches and their creeds, beyond Heaven and its saints — a purpose which embraces every man and woman born, every kindred and nation formed, which regards not their spiritual good alone, but their welfare in every part, their progress, their health, their work, their wages, their happiness in this present world.

What, then, does Christ do all day ? By what further conception shall we augment the selfish view of why Christ lived and died ?

I shall mislead no one, I hope, if I say — for I wish to put the social side of Christianity in its strongest light — that Christ did not come into the world to give men religion. He never mentioned the word religion. Religion was in the world before Christ came, and it lives to-day in a million souls who have never heard His name. What God does all day is not to sit waiting in churches for people to come and worship Him. It is true that God is in churches and in all kinds of churches, and is found by many in churches more immediately than anywhere else. It is also true that, while Christ did not give men religion, He gave a new direction to the religious aspiration bursting forth then and now and always from the whole world's heart. But it was His purpose to enlist these aspirations on behalf of some definite practical good. The religious people of those days did nothing with their religion except attend to its observances. Even the priest, after he had been to the temple, thought his work was done ; when he met the wounded man he passed by on the other side. Christ reversed all this — tried to reverse it, for He is only now beginning to succeed. The tendency of the religions of all time has been to care more for religion than for humanity ; Christ cared more for humanity than for religion — rather, His care for humanity was the chief expression of His religion. He was not indifferent to observances, but the practices of the people bulked in His thoughts before the practices of the Church. It has been pointed out as a blemish on the immortal allegory of Bunyan that the Pilgrim never did anything — anything but save his soul. The remark is scarcely fair, for the allegory is designedly the story of a soul in a single relation ; and, besides, he did do a little. But the warning may well be weighed. The Pilgrim's one thought, his work by day, his dream by night, was escape. He took little part in the world through which he passed. He was a Pilgrim travelling through it ; his business was to get through safe. Whatever this is, it is not Christianity. Christ's conception of Christianity was heavens removed from that of a man setting out from the City of Destruction to save his soul. It was rather that of a man dwelling amidst the Destructions of the City and planning escapes for the souls of others — escapes not to the other world, but to purity and peace and righteousness in this. In reality Christ never said u Save your soul." It is a mistranslation which says that. What He said was, " Save your life." And this not because the first is nothing, but only because it is so very great a thing that only the second

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can accomplish it. But the new word altruism — the translation of " love thy neighbour as thyself" — is slowly finding its way into current Christian speech. The People's Progress, not less than the Pilgrim's Progress, is daily becoming a graver concern to the Church. A popular theology with unselfishness as part at least of its root, a theology which appeals no longer to fear, but to the generous heart in man, has already dawned, and more clearly than ever men are beginning to see what Christ really came into this world to do.

What Christ came here for was to make a better world. The world in which we live is an unfinished world. It is not wise, it is not happy, it is not pure, it is not good — it is not even sanitary. Humanity is little more than raw material. Almost everything has yet to be done to it. Before the days of Geology l6 THE PROGRAMME

people thought the earth was finished. It is by no means finished. The work of Creation is going on. Before the spectroscope, men thought the universe was finished. We know now it is just beginning. And this teeming universe of men in which we live has almost all its finer colour and beauty yet to take. Christ came to complete it. The fires of its passions were not yet cool ; their heat had to be transformed into finer energies. The ideals for its future were all to shape, the forces to realize them were not yet born. The poison of its sins had met no antidote, the gloom of its doubt no light, the weight of its sorrow no rest. These the Saviour of the world, the Light of men, would do and be. This, roughly, was His scheme.

Now this was a prodigious task — to recreate the world. How was it to be done?

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God's way of making worlds is to make them make themselves. When He made the earth He made a rough ball of matter and supplied it with a multitude of tools to mould it into form — the rain-drop to carve it, the glacier to smooth it, the river to nourish it, the flower to adorn it. God works always with agents, and this is our way when we want any great thing done, and this was Christ's way when He undertook the finishing of Humanity. He had a vast, intractable mass of matter to deal with, and He required a multitude of tools. Christ's tools were men. Hence His first business in the world was to make a collection of men. In other words, He founded a Society.

THE FOUNDING OF THE SOCIETY

It is a somewhat startling thought — it will not be misunderstood — that Christ probably did not save many people while He was here. Many an evangelist, in that direction, has done much more. He never intended to finish the world single-handed, but announced from the first that others would not only take part, but do " greater things " than He. For, amazing as was the attention He was able to give to individuals, this was not the whole aim He had in view. His immediate work was to enlist men in His enterprise, to rally them into a great company or Society for the

carrying out of His plans. 1 8

The name by which this Society was known was The Kingdom of God. Christ did not coin this name ; it was an old expression, and good men had always hoped and prayed that some such Society w r ould be born in their midst. But it was never either defined or set agoing in earnest until Christ made its realization the passion of His life.

How keenly He felt regarding His task, how enthusiastically He set about it, every page of His life bears witness. All reformers have one or two great words which they use incessantly, and by mere reiteration imbed indelibly in the thought and history of their time. Christ's great word was the Kingdom of God. Of all the words of His that have come down to us this is by far the commonest. One hundred times it occurs in the Gospels. When He preached He had almost always this for a text. His sermons were explanations of the aims of His Society, of the different things it was like, of whom its membership consisted, what they were to do or to be, or not do or not be. And. even when He does not actually use the word, it is easy to see that all He said and did had reference to this. Philosophers talk about thinking in categories — the mind living, as it were, in a particular room with its own special furniture, pictures, and view-points, these giving a consistent direction and colour to all that is there thought or expressed. It was in the category of the Kingdom that Christ's thought moved. Though one time He said He came to save the lost, or at another time to give men life, or to do His Father's will, these were all -included among the objects of His Society.

No one can ever know what Christianity is till he has grasped this leading thought in the mind of Christ. Peter and Paul have many wonderful and necessary things to tell us about what Christ was and did ; but we are looking now at what Christ's own thought was. Do not think this is a mere modern theory. These are His own life-plans taken from His own lips. Do not allow any isolated text, even though it seem to sum up for you the Christian life, to keep you from trying to understand Christ's Programme as a whole. The perspective of Christ's teaching is not everything, but without it everything will be distorted and untrue. There is much good in a verse, but often much evil. To see some small soul pirouetting throughout life on a single text, and judging all the world because it cannot find a partner, is not a Christian sight. Christianity does not grudge such souls their comfort. What it grudges is that they make Christ's Kingdom uninhabitable to thoughtful minds. Be sure that whenever the religion of Christ appears small, or forbidding, or narrow, or inhuman, you are dealing not with the whole — which is a matchless moral symmetry — nor even with an arch or column — for every detail is perfect — but with some cold stone removed from its place and suggesting nothing of the glorious structure from which it came.

Tens of thousands of persons who are familiar with religious truths have not noticed yet that Christ ever founded a Society at all. The reason is partly that people have read texts instead of reading their Bible, partly that they have studied Theology instead of studying Christianity, and partly because of the noiselessness and invisibility of the Kingdom of God itself. Nothing truer was ever said of this Kingdom than that " It cometh without observation/' Its first discovery, therefore, comes to the Christian with all the force of a revelation. The sense of belonging to such a Society transforms life. It is the difference between being a solitary knight tilting single-handed, and often defeated, at whatever enemy one chances to meet on one's little acre of life, and the feel of belonging to a mighty army marching throughout all time to a certain victory. This note of universality given to even the humblest work we do, this sense of comradeship, this link with history, this thought of a definite campaign, this promise of success, is the possession of every obscurest unit in the Kingdom of God.

THE PROGRAMME OF THE SOCIETY

HUNDREDS of years before Christ's Society was formed, its Programme had been issued to the world. I cannot think of any scene in history more dramatic than when Jesus entered the church in Nazareth and read it to the people. Not that when He appropriated to Himself that venerable fragment from Isaiah He was uttering a manifesto or announcing His formal Programme. Christ never did things formally. We think of the words, as He probably thought of them, not

in their old-world historical significance, nor 24 as a full expression of His future aims, but as a summary of great moral facts now and always to be realized in the world since He appeared.

Remember as you read the words to what grim reality they refer. Recall what Christ's problem really was, what His Society was founded for. This Programme deals with a real world. Think of it as you read — not of the surface-world, but of the world as it is, as it sins and weeps, and curses and suffers, and sends up its long cry to God. Limit it if you like to the world around your door, but think of it — of the city and the hospital and the dungeon and the graveyard, of the sweating-shop and the pawnshop and the drink-shop ; think of the cold, the cruelty, the fever, the famine, the ugliness, the loneliness, the pain. And then try to keep down the lump in your throat as you take up His Programme and read —

"To Bind up the Broken-Hearted : To Proclaim Liberty to the Captives: To Comfort all that Mourn : To Give unto them — Beauty for Ashes, The Oil of Joy for Mourning, The Garment of Praise for the Spirit of Heaviness."

What an exchange — Beauty for Ashes, Joy for Mourning, Liberty for Chains ! No marvel " the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on Him " as He read ; or that they " wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of His lips/' Only one man in that congregation, only one man in the world to-day could hear these accents with dismay — the man,

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the culprit, who has said hard words of Christ.

We are all familiar with the protest, " Of course " — as if there were no other alternative to a person of culture — " Of course I am not a Christian, but I always speak respectfully of Christianity." Respectfully of Christianity ! No remark fills one's soul with such sadness. One can understand a man as he reads these words being stricken speechless ; one can see the soul within him rise to a white heat as each fresh benediction falls upon his ear and drives him, a half-mad enthusiast, to bear them to the world. But in what school has he learned of Christ who offers the Saviour of the world his respect ?

Men repudiate Christ's religion because they think it a small and limited thing, a scheme with no large human interests to commend it to this great social age. I ask you .to note that there is not one burning interest of the human race which is not represented here. What are the great words of Christianity according to this Programme ? Take as specimens these :

LIBERTY, COMFORT, BEAUTY J O Y.

These are among the greatest words of life. Give them their due extension, the significance which Christ undoubtedly saw in them and w r hich Christianity undoubtedly yields, and there is almost no great want or interest of mankind which they do not cover.

These are not only the greatest words of life but they are the best. This Programme, to those who have misread Christianity, is a series of surprises. Observe the most prominent note in it. It is gladness. Its first word is " good-tidings," its last is "joy." The saddest words of life are also there — but there as the diseases which Christianity comes to cure. No life that is occupied with such an enterprise could be other than radiant. The contribution of Christianity to the joy of living, perhaps even more to the joy of thinking, is unspeakable. The joyful life is the life of the larger mission, the disinterested life, the life of the overflow from self, the " more abundant life " which comes from following Christ. And the joy of thinking is the larger thinking, the thinking of the man who holds in his hand some Programme for Humanity. The Christian is the only man who has any Programme at all — any Programme either for the world or for himself. Goethe, Byron, Carlyle taught Humanity much, but they had no Programme for it Byron's thinking was suffering, Carlyle's de. spair. Christianity alone exults. The belief in the universe as moral, the interpretation of history as progress, the faith in good as eternal, in evil as self-consuming, in humanity as evolving — these Christian ideas have transformed the malady of thought into a bounding hope. It was no sentiment but a conviction, matured amid calamity and submitted to the tests of life, that inspired the great modern poet of optimism to proclaim :

"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the world ! I think this is the authentic sign and seal Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind And recommence at sorrow."

But that is not all. Man's greatest needs are often very homely. And it is almost as much in its fearless recognition of the commonplace woes of life, and its deliberate offerings to minor needs, that the claims of Christianity to be a religion for Humanity stand. Look, for instance, at the closing sentence of this Programme. Who would have expected to find among the special objects of Christ's solicitude the Spirit of Heaviness ? Supreme needs, many and varied, had been already dealt with on this Programme ; many applicants had been met ; the list is about to close. Suddenly the writer remembers the nameless malady of the poor — that mysterious disease which the rich share but cannot alleviate, which is too subtle for doctors, too incurable for Parliaments, too unpicturesque for philan-. thropy, too common even for sympathy. Can- Christ meet that ?

If Christianity could even deal with the world's Depression, could cure mere dull spirits, it would be the Physician of Humanity. But it can. It has the secret, a hundred secrets, for the lifting of the world's gloom. It cannot immediately remove the physiological causes of dulness — though obedience to its principles can do an infinity to prevent them, and its inspirations can do even more to lift the mind above them. But where the causes are moral or mental or social the remedy is in every Christian's hand. Think of any one at this moment whom the Spirit of Heaviness haunts. You think of a certain old woman. But you know for a fact that you can cure her. You did so, perfectly, only a week ago. A mere visit, and a little present, or the visit without any present, set her up for seven long days and seven long nights.

The machinery of the Kingdom is very simple and very silent, and the most silent parts do most, and we all believe so little in the medicines of Christ that we do not know what ripples of healing are set in motion when we simply smile on one another. Christianity wants nothing so much in the world as sunny people, and the old are hungrier for love than for bread, and the Oil of Joy is very cheap, and if you can help the poor on with a Garment of Praise it will be better for them than blankets.

Or perhaps you know some one else who is dull — not an old woman this time, but a very rich and important man. But you also know perfectly what makes him dull. It is either his riches or his importance. Christianity can cure either of these — though you may not be

the person to apply the cure — at a single hear- 3 ing. Or here is a third case, one of your own servants. It is a case of monotony. Prescribe more variety, leisure, recreation — anything to relieve the wearing strain. A fourth case — your most honoured guest : Condition — leisure, health, accomplishments, means ; Disease — Spiritual Obesity ; Treatment — talent to be put out to usury. And so on down the whole range of life's dejection and ennui.

Perhaps you tell me this is not Christianity at all ; that everybody could do that. The curious thing is that everybody does not. Goodwill to men came into the world with Christ, and wherever that is found, in Christian or heathen land, there Christ is, and there His Spirit works. And if you say that the chief end of Christianity is not the world's happiness, I agree ; it was never meant to be ; but the strange fact is that, without making it its chief end, it wholly and infallibly, and quite universally, leads to it. Hence the note of Joy, though not the highest on Christ's Programme, is a loud and ringing note, and none who serve in His Society can be long without its music. Time was when a Christian used to apologize for being happy. But the day has always been when he ought to apologize for being miserable.

Christianity, you will observe, really works. And it succeeds not only because it is divine, but because it is so very human — because it is common-sense. Why should the Garment of Praise destroy the Spirit of. Heaviness? Because an old woman cannot sing and cry at the same moment. The Society of Christ is a sane Society. Its methods are rational. The principle in the old woman's case is simply that one emotion destroys another. Christianity works, as a railway man would say, with points. It switches souls from valley lines to mountain lines, not stemming the currents of life but diverting them. In the rich man's case the principle of cure is different, but it is again principle, not necromancy. His spirit of heaviness is caused, like any other heaviness, by the earth's attraction. Take away the earth and you take away the attraction. But if Christianity can do anything it can take away the earth. By the wider extension of horizon which it gives, by the new standard of values, by the mere setting of life's small pomps and interests and admirations in the light of the Eternal, it dissipates the world with a breath. All that tends to abolish worldliness tends to abolish unrest, and hence, in the rush of modern life, one far-reaching good of all even commonplace Christian preaching, all Christian literature, all which holds the world doggedly to the idea of a God and a future life, and reminds mankind of Infinity and Eternity.

Side by side with these influences, yet taking the world at a wholly different angle, works another great Christian force. How many opponents of religion are aware that one of the specific objects of Christ's Society is Beauty ? The charge of vulgarity against Christianity is an old one. If it means that Christianity deals with the ruder elements in human nature, it is true, and that is its glory. But if it means that it has no respect for the finer qualities, the charge is baseless. For Christianity not only encourages whatsoever things are lovely, but wars against that whole theory of life which would exclude them. It prescribes aestheticism ; it proscribes asceticism. And for those who preach to Christians that in these enlightened days they must raise the masses by giving them noble sculptures and beautiful paintings and music and public parks, the answer is that these things are all already being given, and given daily, and with an increasing sense of their importance, by the Society of Christ. Take away from the world the beautiful things which have not come from Christ and you will make it poorer scarcely at all. Take away from modern cities the paintings, the monuments, the music for the people, the museums and the parks which are not the gifts of Christian men and Christian municipalities, and in ninety cases out of a hundred you will leave them unbereft of so much as a well-shaped lamp-post.

It is impossible to doubt that the Decorator of the World shall not continue to serve to His later children, and in ever finer forms, the inspirations of beautiful things. More fearlessly than he has ever done, the Christian of modern life will use the noble spiritual leverages of Art. That this world, the people's world, is a bleak and ugly world, we do not forget ; it is ever with us. But we esteem too little the mission of Beautiful Things in haunting the mind with higher thoughts and begetting the mood which leads to God. Physical beauty makes moral beauty. Loveliness does more than destroy ugliness ; it destroys matter. A mere touch of it in a room, in a street, even on a door-knocker, is a spiritual force. Ask the workingman's wife, and she will tell you there is a moral effect even in a clean table-cloth. If a barrel-organ in a slum can but drown a curse, let no Christian silence it. The mere light and colour of the wall-advertisements are a gift of God to the poor man's sombre world.

One Christmas-time a poor drunkard told me that he had gone out the night before to take his usual chance of the temptations of the street. Close to his door, at a shop window, an angel — so he said — arrested him. It was a large Christmas card, a glorious white thing with tinsel wings, and as it glittered in the gaslight it flashed into his soul a sudden thought of Heaven. It recalled the earlier heaven of his infancy, and he thought of his mother in the distant glen, and how it would please her if she got this Christmas angel from her prodigal. With money already pledged to the devil he bought the angel, and with it a new soul and future for himself. That was a real angel. For that day, as I saw its tinsel pinions shine in his squalid room, I knew what

Christ's angels were. They are all beautiful things, which daily in common homes are bearing up heavy souls to God.

But do not misunderstand me. This angel was made of pasteboard : a pasteboard angel can never save a soul. Tinsel reflects the sun, but warms nothing. Our Programme must go deeper. Beauty may arrest the drunkard, but it cannot cure him.

It is here that Christianity asserts itself with a supreme individuality. It is here that it parts company with Civilization, with Politics, with all secular schemes of Social Reform. In its diagnosis of human nature it finds that which most other systems ignore ; which, if they see, they cannot cure ; which, left undestroyed. makes every reform futile, and every inspiration vain. That thing is Sin. Christianity, of all other philanthropies, recognizes that man's devouring need is Liberty — liberty to stop sinning ; to leave the prison of his passions, and shake off the fetters of his past. To surround Captives with statues and pictures, to offer Them-that-are-Bound a higher wage or a cleaner street or a few more cubic feet of air per head, is solemn trifling. It is a cleaner soul they want ; a purer air, or any air at all, for their higher selves.