Moral leadership, and other sermons

Preface

To-day brings to a close ten years of a happy ministry as Rector of St. Bartholomew's Church, and I thought I might be permitted to commemorate it by gathering together ten sermons — the same number as the years. Which to choose of the hundreds I have preached was a task I did not care to undertake. The simplest way seemed the best. The ten last sermons I have preached are here printed. With the exception of the last, all are from the stenographic notes made at the time of their delivery. They lack the literary finish that the printed page presupposes, but it may be that in this rough form they will accomplish their purpose — serve as a memorial of plain speech from a loving heart.

L. P.

St. Bartholomew's Rectory, February 1st, 1914.

Contents

PAGE

I. Maranatha 1

December 7, 1913

II

"He breathed on them, and saith unto them. Receive ye the Holy Ghost: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." — St. John 20:22-23.

It was my privilege last Sunday to speak to some of you of what is called the mystic aspect of the religion of Jesus, — the communion of the soul with God. I know that there are some of you here to whom such an appeal meant more than it could mean to your preacher, but there were no doubt some to whom it meant very little. They say: "We are not mystics, and when the religion of Jesus is placed before us as a mystical experience there is no response in mind or heart." Well, let it be so. We cannot all be poets, we cannot all be scholars, we [ 17]

cannot all be philosophers, but we can all be good men and women, and so to-day I want to speak to you of the ethical aspect of rehgion. I take my text from the Gospel of John, the 20th chapter at the 23d verse. "And he breathed on them and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost; Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained."

First, to whom were these words spoken? The Greek Church, the Roman CathoUc Church, a very large number of clergy and laity in our own Church say: "These words were spoken to the Apostles and Christ was giving to them the official power to forgive sins and to bind sins upon the human conscience. A power which they, in their turn, transmitted to their successors in office." Two things I will remark. Thomas was not present, therefore, according to this theory Thomas seems to have been excluded from the

Apostolic gift. But there is another question, the question that men and women are asking about everything to-day. Does it work.f^ Has it been found that in those countries where that theory held sway the moral life has been nobler and holier than in those countries where that theory was utterly repudiated.^

As I understand it, and as many good men and women understand it, this was not a power given to the ten Apostles alone who were present. It is said distinctly that it was given when the disciples were assembled together — disciples, men and women, the Church. It was the revelation of the moral leadership of Christ's Church that was being declared in these words of the risen Lord. The moral leadership of the Christian Church, so that the Church should be able to lift off of men the burden of sin and the Church should be able to bind the heavy burden of sin upon men's consciences un- [ 19 1 til they cried out for the rehef of the living God.

Before we come to consider what this means in our own day, in this city, in this congregation, I think we should do well to recall what it meant to the Church in the past. That I think might help to an understanding of the Church's present duty and privilege.

There are two great moments in the history of the Christian Church when the consciousness of this great power, the result of breathing in the Spirit of God, manifested itself in the life of the Church. The first was in what we call the conversion of the Roman Empire. And of course that does not mean what the later conversions of some of the Germanic tribes meant — the mere baptism and change of name of those people so that whereas heretofore they had been called Heathen or Arian, now they were called Christians or Catholics. Not at all. The [ 20 ]

conversion of the Roman Empire means the conversion of the moral ideal, and the change in the moral life of the men and women who lived in the great cities and towns and on the scattered farms of the Roman Empire.

Of course there is always the danger that besets the controversialist, to paint his opponent in too black colors, and perhaps this has been done. Therefore, I will avoid all temptation to exaggerate the state of the case morally before the disciples of Jesus Christ began to go through the great cities and the villages and tell their story of the ideal life that they had seen and touched and handled and knew — showing that they were near to God.

What sort of a life was it these people to whom they went were living .^^ Well, take from your library shelf this afternoon Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and read over that [ 21 ]

great 15th chapter. Disregard the cynicism, and overlook the fat complacency and remember that you are hearing a prejudiced witness, a man who neither understood the Christian Church nor loved it, but did love to tell the truth, and had a knowledge of that ancient time that probably has never been surpassed, perhaps never equalled. Read what that man unwillingly admits was the result of the spreading of the Christian influence over that great empire — how the lives of multitudes of men and women were changed by this thing. For, as he sneeringly remarks, the greatest advances at first were made among the vilest people, some of whom had been murderers and escaped the executioner, many of whom had been prostitutes on the streets of the great cities; some of whom were thieves, others adulterers.

Or listen to another witness, not hostile as is Gibbon, but certainly not prejudiced. [ 22 ]

Lecky, in the 3rd chapter of his great work on European Morals, says: *'The chief cause of its (Christianity's) success was the congruity of its teaching with the spiritual nature of mankind. It was because it was true to the moral sentiments of the age, because it represented faithfully the supreme type of excellence to which men were then tending, because it corresponded with their religious wants, aims, and emotions, because the whole spiritual being could then expand and expatiate under its influence, that it planted its roots so deeply in the hearts of men. One great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed."

There was no vile life in the cities of Corinth, of Ephesus, or Alexandria, or of Rome to whom the disciples who had received the Holy Spirit did not go and declare that by the grace of God every sin [ 23 1 could be forgiven, and a man could start afresh, and a woman who had been down in the mire of the city might walk with uplifted face in the glory of God. What a revelation ! What a tremendous message this was, and they believed it because it answered to the deepest longings of their spiritual nature, and thus became our spiritual ancestors. The Church forgave their sins and brought them to baptism, and said: *'This outward and visible sign of washing witnesses to an inward reality. God's Spirit will heal your poor, sick, shameful, defiled soul, and it will stand up in the new life revealed by God."

This went on in every city and in every hamlet, and wherever the messengers of the Church came. But in addition to these evident sins which all men condemn, which the philosophers condemned as well as the Apostles, but had no suggestion as to how they were to be left behind and a new Ufe begun, 1 say in addition to these [ 24 ]

there were other sins that lay heavy on the consciences of men and women who had not sunk into the degradation of which I have been speaking. For instance, it is difficult for you and me to imagine it, but it was a real difficulty to the Jew who felt the beauty and the power of the life of Jesus, and desired to become his disciple. Instantly he was beset by a difficulty that was ingrained in his religious nature — the eating of meat that had been offered to idols. It was the custom in the market to offer a certain portion of the meat that was brought in from the country to an idol, and the Jew came there to buy that meat; or the Jew went to a dinner party and he did not know but what the meat that was set before him had been contaminated by being offered to an idol. To you and me it seems an imaginary sin — it was a very real one to the Jew, and the Christian Church lifted it off his conscience and said [25]

to him: "You are a free man because you are a brother of the Son of man, and he has shown that there is nothing common or unclean. You have no reason to fear because the meat has been offered to an idol."

And then there were the sins that layon the conscience of the Heathen. They said to themselves: ''It is all very well for these people who live in cities, but for us Pagans, country people, who are ever near to Nature, it is a serious matter if we neglect the gods. The rising river will overflow the farm, the earthquake will destroy our little hamlet, the sudden burst of hail in the summer time will ruin the harvest. There are many who say that these things come because we no longer sacrifice to the old gods." And the Church went amongst those people preaching the unity of God, laying the foundation (though they little guessed it, and little cared) of all the modern sci- [26]

entific conception of this universe as a place of order which no demons can interfere with. The sin, that is, the sense of sin, lying heavy on the conscience because the idols had been neglected, with its consequent fear of the hatred of the gods, was gradually lifted by the Christian Church.

Now in addition to this remission of sins they bound sins upon people. There were many things that respectable men and women were doing, and their conscience did not trouble them at all, but the Church made their conscience trouble them, and that is the meaning of the binding of sin. Neither the Church nor any other organization can, since we have the Gospels in our hands, put arbitrary sins upon you and me, but the Church can and did in the past, and may in the future, reveal to your conscience and mine that which heretofore we have never thought of as a sin. For instance, one of the most terrible things in the social life of the [ 27 ]

latter days of the Empire was the disgust with children. They were a nuisance. They were a weariness, and the girls were simply an expense and a danger.* And therefore all over that Empire children, and above all girl babies, were exposed to the elements, to the wild beasts, to die, and apparently nobody's conscience was troubled. If the mother felt the maternal pang as the infant, that she never should see again, was drawn from her breast, nobody paid any attention to that. There was no conscience that objected till Christian men and women came and said: "But that little child belongs to God," and they baptized it. They baptized infants wherever they found them. They put the sign of the cross on them, they

* As these words were spoken, a little girl who had taken off her hat and leaned her head against her father's breast, encircled by his arm, looked up at him with a smile as much as to say: "Did you ever hear anything as silly as that?" I saw an illustration of a new life. Children had once been endured, now they are adored.

branded them as a part of Christ's flock, and slowly it came to pass that men and women said to themselves, ''This thing is a sin," and it ceased.

Another thing they did and nobody thought it was a sin — to hold slaves. Nobody thought it was a sin if the slave ran away and his master was convinced that he no longer could get any more work out of him if the master killed the slave — the way you sometimes feel about a horse that has run away — you are at liberty to kill him.

The Church did not begin a social revolution and attempt to overthrow the whole structure that was built on slavery, but they asked the master and his slave to sit down together at the Table while somebody served, and they told them that the unseen servant was J esus Christ. And from that day slowly, very slowly, the sin of slavery, the holding of the brother in bondage came to be felt to be wrong- [ 29 ]

The Church bound that upon the conscience of the world.

And the same thing took place in the gladiatorial shows. Why, when a country had been conquered and strong men had been taken captive, should they not be taken to Rome, to the Colosseum, to be devoured by wild beasts, while the elite of Rome drank the blood of the beast and the man with shrieks of delight? The Church said: "There is no such thing as Barbarian or Scythian — we are all one in Jesus Christ." And, just as once no one would have thrown a Roman citizen into the arena just because he belonged to the Eternal City, so the day came when no one would throw any man or woman to the lions because they belonged to the City of God. It was very slow, but it was very sure. They forgave sins and they bound sins — they were the moral leaders of the world.

The second great moment of which I [30]

would speak is what is known as the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Then the same thing went on. In the first place the Church, that part of it which had begun to receive the Spirit of Christ, began to forgive sins. The whole machinery of pardon had broken down. Men and women had been doing everything that the priesthood said they ought to do, and as a result they had lost their money and had gotten no peace of conscience. Conscience would not let them alone, and they began to ask themselves; *'Why is it that when I have done everything that I have been told to do I cannot find peace to my soul.'^"

And the men and women who had received the Spirit of Christ in the sixteenth century, said, the reason is this: "You haven't enough to pay God for what you have done, but God in His infinite love has paid for you. You are as foolish as the workman who week by week brings [ 31 ]

up his penny to pay the debt he can never pay, and then finds that it has been paid by him to whom it was due. The Cross of Christ," said these men, ''is the witness that the debt, whatever it is, has been paid. No one of you could pay it, no one of you need try to pay it. All you need to do is to receive God's assurance that the debt is cancelled, and that now you can live with a free conscience as His child, trying to do the will of God." That lifted the burden of sin off the consciences of multitudes, and they began life all over again.

Then, in addition to this one particular forgiving of sins (and I cannot speak of many others because of want of time), let us think of other sins the Church lifted off the consciences of men and women. First, it lifted off the sin of marriage. The Church had been saying, or rather the officials had been saying, for centuries, that marriage was a mere concession to the [ 32 ]

animal life, and that the noblest spiritual life was free from all family ties. Now came these men and women, who had received the Spirit of Christ in the sixteenth century, and said: *'The hohest life on earth is the life of a pure man and a pure woman in marriage."

They hfted off the conscience the sin of marriage, and revealed marriage as God's appointed way for the fulfilment and sanctification of human Kfe. The holy family took the place of the sexless priest.

They hfted from the conscience the sin of reading the Bible. It is true that many more Bibles were distributed before the Reformation than w^e used to think. It is true that a good many people were reading the Bible before the Reformation; but this is also true: that the officials of the Church were opposed to any reading of the Bible except under the direction of the priest. The Reformers lifted the ban and said: "Read your Bible for yourself [ 33 ]

when and where you will, and God will reveal Himself unto you plain men and women just as He revealed Himself to the men and women who wrote the book." Need I go on? I have only begun to touch the fringe of this subject, and yet here we must leave it. The Church, when it has been filled with the Spirit of Jesus Christ, has felt first of all the moral responsibihty for the conditions of the world in which it Uves; and secondly: the Church, when it has been filled with the Spirit of Jesus Christ, has had a sublime faith in the response of human nature to the revelation of the Divine Life.

I have been speaking all along of what the Church" has done. This includes various activities and many agencies. It might be by a council as at Jerusalem, or by the prince of the Apostles, Peter, or the "least of the Apostles," Paul, or by Bishops or Doctors or Preachers or EvangeUsts — but the real though unseen [ 34 ]

work of forgiveness and condemnation was the work of obscure men and women. This was true in the conversion of the Empire, and in the Reformation. The great mountain peaks hfted high above the plain are named and honored, but it is the mountain range that forms the watershed and affects the cUmate. It is the Church, the whole company of Christian people who change the world's atmosphere in any age. It is to them we must turn to-day.

Ill

"Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained."— St. John 20 : 23.

It was my privilege to speak to you last Sunday of these same words, and we thought of the way in which the Church had realized the moral leadership of the world, first in the forgiving and secondly in the binding of sins upon men's consciences in the great moment called the conversion of the Roman Empire. In the sixteenth century also we saw how godly men and women lifted off of the consciences of men and women the burden of sin which the officials of the Church had bound upon them. But time did not permit us to go on and think of the way [ 37 ]

in which those same men and women bound heavily the burden of sin upon the Church, which led to the reformation of the Roman Catholic Church itself.

To-day I want to remind you, first of all, that those two great moments do not exhaust the experience of the Church. There has never been a generation where this work has not been called for, and there never has been a generation where this work has not been done by the Church. In the first generation of Christians it was done ofl&cially by the Council of Jerusalem, which lifted a burden from conscience and laid a burden upon conscience. In the twelfth century it was done by St. Francis, the great layman, the great absolver of sin, — the man who also laid the burden of godless riches and enervating luxury so heavy upon the conscience that men and women could no longer bear it. It was done again in the eighteenth century by John Wesley, when he hfted off [ 38 ]

the burden of great and heavy sins, and laid again the burden of sins upon the consciences of others who thought themselves righteous. It has been done in the nineteenth century by the Salvation Army. There has never been a generation that has been without it.

Now this morning we want to ask ourselves, what is the need of it now? And if we followed the logical order we should consider first what are the sins that the Church ought to lift off the consciences of men, and secondly, what are the sins that the Church ought to bind upon them. But I have thought it best to leave to next Sunday the consideration of what sins we ought to try to lift, and to ask you to think with me this morning about some sins that we ought to try to bind. And as much as I dislike to do it, I intend to talk to you about a question everybody is talking and reading about, everybody is flocking to see represented upon the stage — I [ 39 ]

mean the sex relation of men and women.

Twenty years ago I said to a man whose moral judgment I greatly value: "It seems to me that the increasing divorces in this country must lead ultimately to the dissolution of society." But he said: "Not so. The difficulty to-day is not that there are too many divorces, but that there are too few." I do not think he would say that to-day, for there are some states in which there is one divorce to every twelve marriages, and other states where it is asserted (though I am not certain, and will not insist upon it) that the proportion is even greater.

Now the first difficulty in dealing with this whole matter is that the Church itself is not clear in its judgment. It is not clear officially. Individual members, you and I who are here, are not clear about it because there are so many different things that are contained in this one word, "divorce," that it is difficult to form a [ 40 ]

judgment. For instance, take this ease, and it can be duplicated, yes and more than duphcated, by experiences that some of you here this morning know. Here, we may say, is a girl who has married a man in good faith, and finds that he was physically unfit to be married, intemperate, a gambler, he does not support her, he abuses her, he calls on her to get support from her family, and at last suggests that there is some other man who would provide what is needed. Is there any good man or woman who would say that she ought to remain under those conditions? Is there father or mother who would say that the daughter ought to submit herself to the wandering lusts of such a creature.^ None. Can it be the mind of Christ that she should continue in that state I believe not. But when you ask me to go further and say that that being the case the woman is at liberty, after the court has relieved her from her [ 41 ]

legal obligation, to marry again, I find myself in conflict with the Church of which I am a minister. It says yes, I say no. But it is not my purpose to discuss that — that is another matter — I merely call your attention to it to show that there are cases where, in the judgment of all good men and women, divorces are justifiable.

We will take another case. Here, we will say, is a man who has married and soon become dissatisfied with his wife. He removes to Nevada, he sets up a fictitious residence, he complains to the judge that his wife has abandoned him, which means that she would not go out to the West with him to get a divorce. He is set free, he returns here to this community and he marries a young woman with whom, as the English servants say, he ''had been keeping company," and then all is as it should be, and nobody is to blame!

What is to be the end of this thing, my friends? For between those two extremes of justifiable divorce and fraud there are great numbers of cases which cannot be put in either category. Divorce has been made easy, and in my judgment, because it has been made easy, advantage has been taken of it. Women are notobhged now to go so far as Nevada, They can go to the State of Maine (be it said to the shame of New England) and can get a divorce from a man against whom they have not one charge to utter. They have tired of him and have seen some other man that they want to live with. Yet these people return here and expect to be received as respectable people. What is your opinion on that subject?

Now some one will say: "You will never be able to deal with this question of divorce until you have first dealt with the question of marriage. It is not di- [ 43 ]

vorce — it is marriage that is the disease." This is not a new thing, of course; the new thing about it is that while it has been uttered by irresponsible and often disreputable people, it has now been uttered by responsible people. If such things are published in the muck-raking magazines or in the yellow journals, certainly the pulpit would not be justified in calling the attention of respectable people to them; but when we have published in one of the representative magazines of this country, the Atlantic Monthly, an article by one of the leaders of the Feminist Movement, as it is called, in England, and when that article is reproduced, as I am told it has been, in such a paper as the New York Times, then it seems to me it is time for us to ask ourselves what is our judgment upon such utterances.

What is it that is said? It is said that the real trouble with modern life is that it has outgrown marriage, that marriage [ 44 ]

is simply a survival of slavery, and that there will never be peace and happiness in the family life until it is recognized that woman should not be economically dependent upon her husband. She must be set free to have her own independent income, and not be called upon to ask her husband whenever she wishes money to spend. Until that is reached, say these leaders, there can be no peace in the family. This is an economical question with which I have nothing to do, and I will not discuss it.

I pass to the second point, which is this: Marriage is a survival of slavery inasmuch as it binds the woman forever to one man, and in the nature of the case (we will not say in the large majority, but in a very large number of cases) that becomes a burden that it is impossible for a woman to bear. And what is the solution? What is the solution.^ — it is this: that instead of two people standing be- [ 45 ]

fore the altar of God and there solemnly promising to take one another "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death parts them," the woman shall now he given her true place in society y and instead of waiting for a man to come and ask her to marry him, shall choose a mate temporarily in order that he may heget by her a child, and when that function has been accomplished, the woman, being economically independent, will continue her life with the child and the man will disappear, and of course the number of mates will depend upon fancy.

* See "The Feminist Movement," Atlantic Monthly ^ December, 1913. Whoever reads that shocking article should also read Mr. E. S. Martin's ironical treatment of the same subject in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1914, and also the virile pronouncement of Professor William T. Sedgwick, professor of biology in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the New York Times, Sunday, January 18th, 1914. Not a few readers will question whether there is the intimate connection between the Feminist Movement and Women's Suffrage that Professor Sedgwick insists upon. But whatever may be the reader's opinion on that subject, the biological aspect of the Feminist Movement deserves careful consideration. I would especially