Efficient religion

Preface

The temper of the present age is utilitarian. Everybody is looking for results. The question of utility is asked shrewdly by those who seek profit, sometimes cynically by those who indulge excessively in pleasures, and of ttimes desperately by those who struggle in the meshes of stressful conditions.

If the religion of Jesus is to maintain and increase its influence with the practical men and women of this century, it must do more than to demonstrate its truth, more than to reveal its beauty, more even than to point with becoming pride to its twenty centuries of successful history ; it must show its present helpfulness.

"What is its use?" "What is it good for?" "What can it do?" These are the questions which men and women, too, are asking to-day. To suggest the answer to

PREFACE

these questions is the object of this httle book. No effort is herein made to add to the accumulating mass of evidential testimony to the helpfulness of Christ's religion. The aim here is to suggest a basis in reason for the acceptance of such testimony.

Our task is partly that of the sifter. We must seek to winnow the grain of the practically beneficial in the religion of Jesus from the chaff of those beliefs and practices which are pathetically unhelpful. But our task is also that of the moulder, and of the baker. For we are to try to shape the sifted grain into one homogeneous whole and to present it in a form that may, it is hoped, prove wholesome and nutritious to some doubting, careworn, sinful soul, hungry for the "Bread of Life."

Chapter.

I Profitable Faith .

Paoe.

. 11

Attainable Peace .

X

Achieving Power .

Chapter One

" If a brother be naked, and in lack of daily food, and one of you say unto him, *Go in peace, be ye warmed and filled ;' and yet ye give him not the things needful to the body, what doth it profit ? Can faith save him ?" — James 2 : 14-16.

When Henry Van Dyke wrote his true and compelling book, "The Gospel for an Age of Doubt," he spoke to thinkers of the intellectual appeal of the religion of Christ. But the blackest doubt is not the fruit of thought; it has its genesis in physical conditions and in moral conditions.

To-day the great multitudes of those who feel no concern for the religion of Jesus are people who never think very deeply upon any subject. They are those who are altogether unfamiliar with the written philosophies of men, some of them even unfamiliar with the deeper truths of the written revelation of God's Word. They are not so much thinkers as doers. They are not students, but actors.

The parts which most of these actors must play upon the stage of life are very limited. Their relations to the other actors on the stage they do not very clearly understand, and their relation to the Author of the play is wholly uncomprehended. Indeed, they cannot be sure that the play has any Author at all. To these who see the stage only from behind the scenes all is litter and confusion. They stumble through their minor parts when by necessity they must, but they do not know what it is all about; perhaps, indeed, the most of them never even question what it is about.

Here is the dumb, unspoken unbelief, created not by intellectual questioning, but by untoward circumstances. It is the unbelief not of the profound scholar, but of the uncomprehending child. Yet this stolid, unthinking unbelief presents the most serious of all obstacles to the advancement of true Christian faith.

When a child has reached for the toothsome sweetmeat and has found his hand restrained, he is in no mood to be convinced by argument that his father is good. When [12]

he has touched the bright thing that looked so pretty, and has been burned thereby, one cannot reasonably expect, while his body suffers, that his mind will readily comprehend the truth of love.

Just so when men in our present industrial system toil and sweat for a competence and find their hands held back, one cannot expect them, in the misery of their poverty, to believe very strongly in a God who loves them. And when other men have touched some sinful thing that seemed attractive, the immediate effect of their consequent suffering will not likely be a resplendent faith in a merciful Providence.

They do not think the unbelief. They feel it. It has become a part of their experience. They have become habituated to it. Exactly as they become accustomed to the indifference of the prosperous classes and of the moral classes, and to the stringent competition of the members of their own class, so they become accustomed to expect no help from any divine power, no help and no mercy.

This is only a partial view of the present day's practical unbelief. By the side of the many toiling, suffering, sinful people who experience an unbelief in God which they never express, we must place all those who, in prosperity, flippantly ignore God; and with both classes, if we would view the situation in its entirety, we must include the multitudes of those who are neither at the top nor at the bottom of the industrial scale, but who are necessarily busy with the affairs of the earth, and who must, or at least do, concentrate all their powers of effort in the struggle for material things. Finally, we must include in this great company of unthinking unbelievers the thousands of men and women of all classes and conditions whose lives are one continuous cry of bodily anguish, of soul loneliness, or, worse still, one unbroken stupor of sensuous indulgence.

Are all these people indifferent to Christ's religion because they have been reading Thomas Paine or Robert Ingersoll? Is it because they have discerned certain illogical conclusions in the prevailing systems of [14]

Christian thought? Have they become estranged from rehgion because of the hard fought but now dead issue between rehgion and science? None of these reasons explains their indifference". It is appaUing to think how many men and women there are in this world of God's who do not vitally believe in Him, not because they have thought themselves away from Him, but because they have never felt themselves in Him.

And the Church for centuries has been offering to these a system of thought, bidding them in the name of Saint Augustine or some other saint to believe something, instead of telling them in the name of the Master to receive something and to do something.

If Christian faith be only or principally a system of thought, it can never become efficient in the lives of these who cannot think, or do not think, or will not think. This is a proposition which seems self-evident. To present to these unthinking toilers and idlers, strugglers and sufferers, any [15]

theological view of the atonement, is to offer them stones for bread. The attempt to demonstrate to them the love of God by a process of syllogistic reasoning is like the attempt to demonstrate a problem in the differential calculus to the child who can add two and two only by the aid of his fingers, or to the man who, in the stringency of his struggle for existence, or in the debauchery of his self-indulgence has long ago forgotten all the higher mathematics which he ever learned.

Herein is suggested the cause of the partial failure of the Church of Christ to win and to hold the great majority of the brethren of Christ. The Church has been prone to make the acceptance of Christ's religion dependent upon thought. It therefore has been powerless to promote the true Christian faith in the lives both of those who in the exigencies of their material conditions cannot think, and of those who in the absorption of their pursuit of material things do not think.

There are encouraging signs, however, [16]

that the Church is beginning to rectify its mistake. One of the most encouraging of these signs is the modern interest of the Church in men. The "Men and Religion" movement of this present day, with its emphasis upon practical Christianity, must be considered as an attempt to rescue the religion of Jesus from the realm of intellectual thought, and to bring it into the realm of efficient action.

The definition of Christian faith towards which the Church of to-day most happily is tending is just this. Christian faith is simply the faith which inspired the Ufework of Christ. It is the consciousness of filial relationship with God, the consciousness, therefore, of help from God and of duty towards God.

iThis consciousness may be only experienced. There may be those who cannot express it in words, those even who may not intelligently apprehend the thing which they feel. The child does not need to apprehend clearly the idea of motherhood in order to be conscious of filial relationship with his mother. He may not know enough even to understand that the woman who succours him and who cares for him is his mother. Surely there will always be depths in her maternal love which his intellect can never fathom. But when the child goes to his mother for needed nourishment and comfort, and when a little later he goes out to obey that mother in loyalty and in true devotion, he is acting upon his faith in her. His inability to reduce the idea of motherhood to an intellectual formula in no way affects either the reality of his faith in her, or its efficiency in his own life.

We must separate the concept of Christian faith from all attempted theological definitions and intellectual systems, and we must make it something as simple and as efficient as the Uttle child's consciousness of the care of the mother who loves him and whom, therefore, he must obey. We may admit that the intellectual definitions have their value to some people, but we must see clearly that if the religion of Jesus is to be of use to the multitudes who need it most, [18]

it must be based only upon the child-like confidence in Him who nourishes and comforts and guides.

This faith, unexpressed in words, it maybe inexpressible, unformulated and unsystematized, is the faith that is profitable. It will do for the children of the Heavenly Father just what it does for the children of earthly parents, it will send them to Him who they know will nourish and strengthen. It will, therefore, first of all, cause them to grow. In His nourishing care it will bring them out of the feebleness of immaturity into the strength of manhood and womanhood. It will take away the hurt of the pain, and the sting of the disappointment. It will make their lives purposeful and useful. It will bring them into that kind of a life which Jesus sometimes called the "life abundant" and sometimes the "life eternal," the life of vitality and helpfulness, the life whose service is of value now and whose influence never ends.

We can make this faith profitable to the lives of others, too. We can bring others [19]

into this faith, to revert to our parallelism, precisely as a child is brought into the consciousness of his human parents' nourishing, strengthening, and guiding love. We can do it by ministering to men's present needs. The way is not by words, but by deeds, not so much by instructions and sermons as by sympathy and helpfulness.

This was Christ's method of bringing men into profitable faith in a Father of love. He fed the hungry. He healed the sick. He comforted the sorrowful. He forgave the sinful. By such a ministry to the existing needs of men. He revealed to them the love of God. He was not content to demonstrate God's love to those who were able and willing to think about it. He acted that love for those who needed to experience it.

The Church must insist upon Christ's method of promoting faith if it would make that faith profitable. Faith in God can be made an efficient force in the lives of the unhappy and the unsatisfied, the careless idler and the absorbed toiler, the discontented [20]

struggler for wealth and the disappointed struggler for pleasure, only in this one way, by the Christian's imitation of the method of the Master.

This man in our community, this neighbour of ours, this brother for whom Christ lived and died, is caught and held fast in the grinding wheels of our industrial machinery. He can do only a certain kind of labour, but he is by no means free to labour where he will. He is in bondage on the one hand to the organization of capital, and on the other to the organization of labour. He is, as it were, caught between the whirring wheels of the increasing needs of his family and the increasing cost of everything that his family needs. Now the labouring man is not estranged from the efficient religion of Jesus Christ. It is true that labour organizations have sometimes expressed their antagonism to the Church of Christ. But the ideal of the real religion of Jesus was very like the ideal for which these labour unions are striving, the ideal of justice, equity, freedom, and brotherly love. [21]

Christian faith can help this labouring man, the efficient faith, efficiently imparted. It is only that empty repetition of meaningless words, so sarcastically described by the author of the Epistle of James, that has failed to help him. Any man who will give his sympathetic attention to the stressful conditions under which this labouring man must live and toil, any Christian who will try to better those conditions, will help this man into that faith in God which will profit him both in this world and in the world which is to come. Help this man to what he knows he needs, and he will be helped to the satisfaction of the greater need which now he may not realize.

All about us, too, are the sinners; the brutalized, ostracized, flagrant sinners. These people are not so very unlike the rest of mankind, except that they are unclothed by social customs and unwarmed by social sympathy. It is because of the nakedness of their souls that they give license to their lower passions and appetites. The man who indulges in gross sins is probably not so bad [22]

in God's sight as the man who dehberately plans to profit from that indulgence. Yet society, and sometimes the very Church of God, has shunned the man who sins and condoned the man who has enticed him to sin.

Can faith save both of these men? Yes, the efficient faith, efficiently induced. So long as Christians are content to say to such in mere words, — "be moral," "be respectable," "believe in Christ and get converted," it will not help them to the life that is lived in God. But when Christians become ready to try to clothe their nakedness with the warmth of their sympathy and their sacrificing ministry, when they become ready to do for them and are no longer content to talk at them, then they will help them.

The faith of professing Christians having become profitable in their own lives will produce the profitable, developing, strengthening faith in the lives of others.

Chapter Two

"A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another." —John 13 ; 34.

When Jesus was teaching His disciples at Jerusalem, the government of Judea was controlled by the greed of an unscrupulous imperialism, and the religion of Judea had become the hollow form of a heartless and lifeless submission to law. By a system of unjust taxation the Roman Governor was robbing the people of their possessions, and by the pretense of religious authority the Jewish Sanhedrin was depriving them of their liberty. No wonder, then, that Christ's commandment to love one another was characterized by Him as new.

But the particular company of men to whom this strange command was spoken, though living in an age of political and of religious selfishness, had for nearly three years been in fellowship with the Man of Love. In His presence they had caught occasional glimpses of a re- [27]

ligion more spiritual than the literal legalism of their countrymen, and glimpses of a government less oppressive than that of their conquerors. They had witnessed their Master's helpful sympathy for the sick and the unfortunate; they had seen His tender forgiveness of the sinful. More significant still, they had felt His love for themselves, and the love had had its inevitable effect upon the development of their characters. It had changed the "sons of thunder" into teachable and lovable disciples. It had made the doubting Thomas the loyal friend, who was ready to die with his Master in an apparently foolish and forlorn cause. It had surcharged the heart of the impetuous Peter so that he could confidently declare himself the unfailing champion, vowing that though he should stand alone, he would yet stand boldly by his Master's side to the very death.

Yet it must be remembered that there

were some things that the love of Jesus had

not accomplished for these men. It had

made them neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It had not taken away all the self-seeking from James and John, nor all the doubt from Thomas, nor all the cowardice from Peter. The disciples were still just mortal men with varying characteristics and many human weaknesses. They were still slow of understanding and slow of heart.

We know that they were slow of understanding because, in spite of their fellowship with the Man of Love, they had as yet no conception of His religion other than some slight modification of the worship of Jehovah, through obedience to Mosaic law. We know it, too, because they had as yet imagined no government other than the temporal government of Israel's expected Messiah and Deliverer. We know they were slow of heart because they were still selfish enough to desire for themselves the first places of honour and of riches in the new government for which they hoped; because they were weak enough to sleep while Jesus sufi*ered alone in Gethsemane, and because they were craven enough to desert Him when He was taken captive in the garden. [29]

Evidently, in spite of the years of association with the love of Jesus, the commandment enjoining their own love was somewhat new even to the disciples.

Is it still a new commandment in the twentieth century? The modern republican form of government has not removed from men all opportunity for self-aggrandizement. Political parties now struggle for the supremacy which once by inheritance was enjoyed by emperors, but the party in control still uses its power for its own ends. Under the pretense of government the oppression of the poor is even now legalized, and it makes little difference whether that oppression be accomplished by unjust taxation, or by the tariff-protected, moneybought power of corporations. Who would dare to say that our present age is not producing politicians who are as thoughtless of the rights of those whom they govern as was the cruel, greedy, and cowardly Roman Pilate?

And what about the professed religion of this twentieth century? What about the [30]

slowness of comprehension and the slowness of heart of those who have behind them, not three years of association with the living Jesus, it is true, but twenty centuries of the history of the operation of God's love through Christ Jesus our Lord? Have the minds of these modern disciples completely grasped the truth that Christ's Kingdom is not the kingdom of the worldly prosperity, say of some Church? Have these no desire for the chief places of temporal power and of influence? Are not some of them still sleeping soundly while their brethren and Christ's brethren in agony sweat blood? Are all these free from the just charge of the desertion of Christ's cause when it has become unpopular, and of the denial of Christ's cause when its confession has entailed inconvenience and imagined danger? Our rehgion can no longer be considered as a mere matter of punctilious obedience to ceremonial law. We have reached the time when it has become the proper and conventional thing for religious people to express their love for God and for Christ.

But just to love God and to adore Christ for His sacrifice is not precisely the import of Christ's new commandment. He said men were to love their fellows. Must this commandment still be denominated as something new and strange? Indeed, so new is this commandment because so very imperfectly has it been obeyed that many men to-day are declaring that it cannot be obeyed. Twenty centuries of the practice of perfect obedience to that command would have brought the entire world to complete recognition of its practicability. But twenty centuries of slowness of comprehension and of slowness of heart have brought us, God save the mark, only to the place where thoughtful men are questioning the commandment's practical utility.

We must ask, then, another question. Is the commandment, which is still new, impracticable in this twentieth century of apparent selfishness? Before we hastily answer this question in the affirmative, however, we must be sure that we understand what we mean by the term "love," and we must [32]

be equally sure that we are looking in the right direction for the expected results from the practice of love.

If Christian love were only an emotion of affection, the commandment's universal application would indeed be an impossibility. Affection cannot be practiced by all men with reference to all other men. Men of antipathetic temperaments cannot have an affection for each other any more than an acid can have an affinity for an alkali. If Christ's commandment, to "love one another," means that we are to desire intimate, lover-like relations with all men, if it means that we are actually to long for the companionship of the dirty and the degraded, the diseased and the sinful, then, frankly, the command is impossible of fulfillment. Human affection is the natural product of human affinities. And affinity, a term which unfortunately is sometimes loosely used, the real affinity of human souls is something created by God. It is not something that can be commanded even by God's Son. Even Jesus Himself seems naturally [ 33 ]

and inevitably to have had warmer affection for some people than for others. He seems to have preferred the society of John to that of Judas. He loved Mary and Martha of the Uttle home in Bethany with a satisfying affection that He could not possibly have felt for the scribes and the Pharisees and for the publicans and sinners.

We are forced to conclude, then, that the love commanded by Jesus is not an emotion of affection, but only and always a principle of action. Let us make the definition complete and specific. Christian love is the principle of benevolent action. When a man has acknowledged to himself a desire to help others and has converted that desire into a motive of service, he has accepted into his life the love which is the very dynamic of the Christian religion.

We must seek the fruit of such love not in a man's feelings, but in his deeds. Though he may not naturally care to associate with the dirty and the degraded, does he try to cleanse and to elevate them? If he tries to help them he is obeying Christ's [34]

commandment of love. If he is content to leave them alone in their unfortunate conditions, he is not obeying the commandment. The test of the practice of Christian love is just as simple as this.

It must be observed, too, that there are limitations to the effect of such love upon him who really possesses it and practices it. The possession and practice of Christian love will not make one omniscient and omnipotent. It will not destroy one's individuality, nor will it mould all men according to one fasliion. The impetuosity of the Peters will still persist. The questioning minds of the Thomases will still ask, "Why?" and "How?" It may be that something of the desire for personal preferment may remain in the hearts of the sons of Zebedee.

This limitation, both of the nature and of the fruits of love, indicates that the possession of Christian love is not incompatible with the possession of a sturdy selfhood. A Christ-like interest in the betterment of one's fellows is by no means the contradiction of [35]

a natural, God-commanded interest in one's own betterment. The former interest is not the contradiction of the latter, but its supplement. To seek for one's self is the demand of a law of human life. To seek for others is the added demand of a higher law of human life. The equable adjustment of these two God-given commands is alike the problem of the indvidual's life and the problem of the industrial and pohtical life of nations.

Right here a ray of hope penetrates the dark picture of the world's selfishness. The apparent undue prevalence of self-seeking does not force us to admit that men cannot be actuated by love, nor even that they are not in some measure already actuated by love. The glaring selfishness is observable for the most part only because so many men have not learned how to adjust their clamouring love impulses to their insistent self-seeking impulses. Men are not in general indifferent to their neighbours' welfare, but by the exigencies of modern conditions they are forced to give themselves with ap- [36]

parent forgetfulness of others to the advancement of their own welfare.

How to add the command of Christ demanding love for others to the command of Nature demanding self -protection and selfadvancement, that is the problem which must be solved by those who would make the religion of Jesus of real value to the toiling, struggling, competing men of this busy twentieth century. It is a problem in addition, and not in subtraction. It is not how to make men think less of themselves, but how to make them think more of others. As the Golden Rule by implication expresses it, men are to be taught to treat others not better than they treat themselves, but as well. "Do unto others as ye would that men should do unto you." This "golden rule" commandment of Jesus is exactly synonymous with His "love" commandment. To love one another, that is, to desire to help one another, in its operation is just that treatment of others which squares with the Golden Rule.

When we thus understand the meaning [37]

and the expected results of Christian love, let us not at all be discouraged by the evidence of the selfishness and greed that surrounds us. For in spite of the apparent selfishness, in spite of much real selfishness, there was never a time before this twentieth century when men were so generally engaged in obeying this new commandment of Christ. In answer to him who declares Christian love to be impracticable, show him the hospitals and endowed schools, the public libraries and the social settlements, the houses of refuge and reform. Tell this man of the renowned philanthropists who, it is true, have become great in self-seeking industry and powerful in the selfish accummulation of wealth, but who are sharing the product of their greatness and their power with others. Tell him, too, of the multitudes of the unknown philanthropists who are also competing with their fellows for their own advancement, but who nevertheless are sharing with others the products of their smaller achievements. Remind this cynic that men are working for themselves because [38]

they must, but show him how, at the same time, they are working for others because they would. Admit that men are slow of understanding and slow of heart, mortal men all of them, of individual peculiarities and of many human frailties. But make this doubter see that the impulse of obedience to the law of love is inherent within them; and that the fruit of that love is not lacking in their lives, so long as they but try to give to a neighbour in need even the cup of cold water in the spirit of the serving Christ.

Christian love can be practiced because it is being practiced every day. It must be practiced, because it is a God-commanded law of life. It will be practiced to the benefit of all of God's children so long as God is God, for God Himself is love.

Here, enwrapped in the very nature of God, is the promise of the practical efficiency of every act of love. He who does a loving deed for his neighbour in need, accomplishes three things. He lifts himself nearer to the Father whose child he is. He brings re- [39]

lief and happiness to his brother who is also God's child. And he helps to induce in his brother's heart the consciousness of the God who cares.

**Who gives of himself with his alms feeds three, Himself, his hungering neighbour, and Me."

Chapter Three

"All things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." — Matthew 21 : 22.

A Religion without prayer is an anomaly. A prayer without a reasonable assurance of its satisfying answer is an absurdity. The religion of Jesus, to maintain and to increase its influence among men, must not only teach them how to pray ; it must give to them the assurance of the efficacy of their prayers.