The old faith in the new day

Front matter

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm r

And all is well, tho* faith and form Be sundered in the night of fear;

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface 9

I. Our Indispensable Inheritance 11

Preface

No man can claim imperative necessity for a new book on a theme as frequently treated as that of the present volume. In this particular case the author does not so much as recall that anyone has asked him to publish his views, so that even the polite and once popular fiction of being urged by his friends is denied him. There is, however, the extenuating fact that books are by no means like living people: bad ones do not crowd their betters out of the way; so that no other volume is likely to be despoiled of its deserts by this one. The following chapters embody the conclusions which some fifteen years of active ministry, in three quite characteristic and representative cities, have brought to the author; and the substance of them having been received with gratifying response by gatherings of ministers and laymen of his own denomination, and others, he ventures to present them

10 PREFACE

somewhat more fully in this less fugitive form.

If the reader feels any irregularities of style or disconnections of spirit between the chapters, it is due to say that they have been written at such times as the author could get and not in the congenial leisure of which books are presumably the product. He has written in a downtown office amid the roar of a city’s life, on trains, in still watches of the night, and during summer days beside the sea. But whatever may be the discrepancies of achievement, his purpose has been single, namely, to provoke his brethren of the ministry to some insights into our common faith and its present-day factors, which shall lead them toward that larger certainty and usefulness the Church and the age alike demand. If what he has written shall accomplish such a result, it will be of little importance whether his specific conclusions are accepted or rejected; his purpose in their publication will have been obtained.

Kansas City, Missouri.

I

OUR INDISPENSABLE INHERITANCE

You see the great breaker that comes with its white crest rolling in upon the beach. How fine it is! It is the vanguard of the incoming tide, but wherein lies the explanation of its career? It is in the momentum of the sea behind it. It would not come, it would not rise, it would not break, it would not creep up the beach, if it were not for the roll and swell of the mighty sea behind it; and our farthest reach to-day is chiefly because of the swell of the humanity that is behind us.

If we are doing nothing noble ourselves, and if we care nothing for what serious men are doing to-day, it is impossible that any part of the past should appear great to us. Because men and women love now, they turn with eagerness to the glorious lovers in generations gone by; because men and women toil, struggle, hope, fear, rejoice and weep to-day, they wish to know of others greater than themselves who went the same wild mysterious way. Earnestness in the conduct of one’s own life is the indispensable condition of any deep and true appreciation of the past. — Gordon: Revelation and the Ideal, pp. 108, 284.

Chapter I Our Indispensable Inheritance

In certain very clearly marked respects the age in which we live is the most notable of human history. The one hundred years and more which have just passed have witnessed the most rapid and marvelous changes in society and life accomplished in any period of time. Up to the year 1800 there had been made seven great discoveries or inventions; in the century immediately following there were added thirteen more. In these one hundred years humanity passed from the stage coach to the limited express, from the sailing vessel to the Mauretania, from hand-to-hand conflicts beneath the flapping canvas of wooden frigates to the floating fortresses of our modern navies with their incredibly destructive power; from tedious letter- writing and irregular mails to intercontinental cables and marconigrams ; from the silhouette to 13 the photograph; from the letter press to the graphophone; from the pantomime to the moving picture ; from M. Lecocq to the dictograph. In this century medicine rose from guess-work diagnosis and surgical atrocities to the X-ray and anaesthesia, the whole healing science being revolutionized by the advances of the past fifty years. Within the memory of men who have not yet voted, wireless telegraphy has been developed to scientific and commercial success, the aeroplane has passed from the dream to the practical deed, and the poles of the earth have been discovered. In world-politics have occurred changes so great that they are not yet fully comprehended. J apan has become a world-power, China a republic, and the United States has colonies in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Within our own land society has made amazing advances from the political axioms of its founders. In these one hundred and fifteen years it has moved from the narrowest interpretations of representative government to the broadest popular democracy; from Negro slavery to a most inclusive theoretical equality before the law; from the seclusion and limitation of women to women’s suffrage.

“Nothing in it (the nineteenth century) was quite so picturesque as the discovery of America, or the circumnavigation of the globe, nor quite so revolutionary as the astronomy of Copernicus, and nothing so beautiful was produced as a Greek Venus or a Gothic cathedral, but it invaded more fields, it destroyed more traditions, it made more discoveries, it did more constructive work, and, in all the range from the workshop to the library, it scattered its bounties with the lavish hand of enrichment.” 1 The peril of an age so enriched and so transformed is the peril of every swiftly moving generation, namely, an impatience with what has preceded it. In 1835 Joseph Mazzini wrote: “What we have to do is to fix our eyes upon the future while we break the last links of the chain that binds us to the past. ... We have emancipated ourselves from the abuses of the past; let us now emancipate ourselves from its

1 Samuel George Smith: Democracy and the Church, p. 272.

glories.” 1 With the particular conditions and specific import which Mazzini had in mind, that may have been a fitting declaration; but the literal meaning, too widely avowed now and particularly in respect of religious ideas, leads to personal and social disaster.

There is, as we all recognize, a dangerous clinging to the past. “It were better to have no history than to have the most splendid of its years to be but a succession of iron bands.” 2 But that is not the only alternative. History is not law, it is life; life that has been fresh and vigorous and human as our own. The past is not a geographical area which we can cut away with a stroke or isolate wholesale as map-makers discriminate States or countries by printing them in different colors. The past is the undying tree, vast and mighty, with great roots that reach far down to the beginnings of things, the undying tree of which our day is but the latest bit of new branch, passing into the old even as to-

2 Fairbairn: Studies in Religion and Theology, p. 49.

IT morrow comes. And all that we hold rich and beautiful and good has its beginnings in this past, of which we ourselves are already becoming a part. “All that we possess,” wrote David Swing, “has come to us by way of a long path. There is no instantaneous liberty or wisdom or language or beauty or religion. Old philosophies, old agriculture, old domestic arts, old sciences, medicine, chemistry, astronomy, old modes of travel and commerce, old forms of government and religion have all come in gracefully or ungracefully and have said ‘Progress is king, and long live the king!’ ” 1

We stand to-day in the flush of a new and expanding civilization. The glamour of great deeds our brothers everywhere are doing shines upon our eyes. The conceit of the contemporaneous is on us. In an age of great wealth, great armies, great industries, great inventions, and great achievements in the realms of natural and applied science, we are too prone to look upon all other generations with impatience,

1 Quoted by Hillis: Investment of Influence, p. 111.

and regard their attainments with the easy tolerance of an obvious superiority. But at most the distinctive and characteristic elements of the present are the increment accumulating upon a rich and splendid inheritance from a noble past. It is that past as it is related to religion which forms the subject of the immediate chapter.

By reason of the religious ideas it has bequeathed us the past is the first effective influence in the religion of to-day. “The ancients,” said Sidney Smith, the most noted wit of the early nineteenth century, “have stolen all our ideas.”

In the pride of modern thought we are apt to forget that the fundamental conceptions of truth, the conceptions which we are wont to consider peculiarly our own, have come down to us by Professor Swing’s “way of a long path.” It has been for some recent years quite the fashion to descant about the Fatherhood of God; and some of those most concerned to maintain their position as advanced and liberal thinkers iterate their allegiance to the doctrine as if they were turning over a new leaf in the book of Revelation; but the Aryan peoples, centuries before the Christian era, had learned to look to the bending sky above them and say, “All-Father.” Our age has brought to the thought of human brotherhood a new emphasis, and government, literature, the Church, industry, philanthropy, and the home are feeling the effects. But there is not a modern stress or passion, not a modern sensitiveness to social wrong or vision of injustice; there is not a modern recognition of the inseparable connection between true religion and its expression in the life of society, which cannot be found in the pages of the Hebrew prophets. Our generation has thought that it was a discoverer, sailing like some spiritual Columbus to find a new passageway of religious and social substance and interpretation ; instead it has been simply a belated voyager landing at last on shores that braver feet had trodden centuries ago.

The popular spirit of our age is hostile to the creeds. The doctrinal confessions of the Church, torn from their places in the great movement of Christian history, are flouted by the present day. The noble affirmations of belief, so necessary for the very life of the Church and the faith in the battle days of early heresy, are complacently regarded as curios of ancient speculation, their stately language held to be a burdensome fetter, and their metaphysical discriminations regarded as archaic specimens of hair-splitting de luxe. “The day of the creeds is passed,” is the modern cry. But is it not significant that the substance of the creeds is not? Amid all the breaking of ancient forms and the rejection of ancient statements and interpretation, the great ideas the past so clearly disengaged and firmly established are the ideas with which the modern day is yet concerned.

Moreover, these ideas of the past have been the determining factors in human life. The truths of religion have been the forces of history. “The empire of Rome,” said ex-President Roosevelt in his lecture before Oxford University in 1910, “is the most stupendous fact of lay history; no empire later in time can be compared with it.” 1

1 History as Literature, p. 78.

But what was it that conquered Europe and transformed Teuton and Slav and Hun and Gaul and Goth and Saxon from their varied savagery into their better civilizations? Not the Roman empire, for all the tramp of her undefeated legions and the glisten of her undipped eagles from the Mediterranean to the German Ocean, from the vineyards of Hispania to the beaches of the Black Sea. It was Christianity that conquered Europe, the great ideas transmuted into living forces. In forest and city, on peninsula and island, the Christian gospel with its characteristic ideas went; they met Saracen and savage on the battlefield and fought the better wars of peace in hall and hut, and when the ancient Roman empire was long since dead, and the Holy Roman Empire but a fading dream, the constituent ideas of Christianity possessed the transformed field. We may reject and alter the forms in which those ideas have come down to us, but the ideas themselves remain with undiminished force and unimpoverished meaning. As one of our most recent writers on the theme has finely put it, “In the mighty past were fashioned for us great continents of faith, and voyage as men may in search of those islands of the blest about which they dream, the continents will still remain the home of their largest and richest life .” 1 We do well to remember these things.

Our age is challenging every formula and institution. It is pushing out on new areas of experience and endeavor. It is refashioning its beliefs and theories and restating its ideals. All this is but to say that it is a living age. Its impatience with the past is, in a measure, proper. We must not be fettered to dead men. We must not be imprisoned in outgrown ideas. We must not be fed upon the shells of truth from which the substance has long since withered. But while it is progress to rebel against the bondage of ancient forms, it is suicide to break with fundamental and undying truths.

The past is a formative influence upon our modern religion also by reason of the facts and experiences which it furnishes

1 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 78.

with which we interpret the facts and experiences of our own life. Whether we accept the facts in the same mood as the men of the past accepted them, whether we interpret our experiences in the way in which the men of the past interpreted their experiences, is not important for the truth here. To reject the interpretations of the past is nevertheless to use the past in making our own interpretation. And very subtly, but inevitably, the facts and experiences which the past furnishes have their part in determining our attitude toward and our use of the facts and experiences of our own life. They become the standards by or against which we work out our own beliefs and conduct.

There is the history of Israel, her relations to the peoples around her, and the stages in her own development from the patriarchal age into the most thoroughgoing and articulated theocracy the world has known, with the parallel development out of the current Semitic mythology and belief of the pure monotheism which is Israel’s first gift to humanity. There are the facts of her internal history, the building of the nation, the growth of the religious system, the clearly delineated conceptions of sacrifice, the social problems which find preservation in the pages of the prophets, the deepening and enriching of Israel’s religion and life by events of war, catastrophe, defeat, and exile which swept other nations into atheism. There are the profound expositions of national and individual experience accomplished in the psalms, the only instance in all human history and literature where the hymns of a single people have become the choicest devotional handbook of the world at large. There is the inscrutable but undeniable fact of Hebrew prophecy, especially the prophecy, not of one man or of one age, but of many men of all ages, of a Divine Saviour who should come upon the earth. Then there is the fact, so coincidental as to establish the case for miracle itself, the fact of the New Testament history, the sublime ideals and instruction, which, for all the centuries since then, have remained the supreme word for personal character and conduct and hope. In that history is the fragmentary record of a single life, which, with only this fragment recorded, has yet changed the course of all succeeding history, revolutionized the standards of national and individual behavior, and stamped its imprint on every institution which is characteristic of our modern civilization.

Coming for a moment outside of the history peculiarly recorded in the Bible, the past shows us, in secular history, engraved on monuments and inscribed in brick and block and parchment, the universal practice of sacrifice to Deity and continuing in the inherited customs of backward peoples still alive. It is a custom inseparably connected with human life as the past reveals it. But with the New Testament history the past advances a still more significant fact — that, within fifty years from Calvary, considered for the moment as simply the place of a Roman execution, the ancient Hebrew commonwealth was dead forever, its sacrificial system forever passed away; and wherever the story of Calvary, and the interpretation of it which the New Testament writings make, have gone, there also, whatever may have been the sacrificial rites and customs, they too have perished. One other fact the past, in this connection, makes very plain — that while with Calvary sacrifices for sin ceased, wherever they have thus ceased the sense of sin has grown immeasurably more real and personally poignant.

Added to its service as supplying thus the facts and experiences by which we interpret our own, the past is preeminently influential in our present religion because of the vindication it furnishes of the religious ideas it has bequeathed us. “What makes any part of history great,” writes George A. Gordon, “is the revelation it contains of the moral worth of man. To look upon that revelation,” he continues, “it is not necessary to confine attention to religious history.” 1 Here is the lengthening influence of the past upon our modern religion and religious life. It lays upon us the constraint of the increasing moral worth of man as it shows us the great adventures of

1 Witness to Immortality, p. 277.

the spirit in which, from age to age, he has participated. Every event in the unfolding of that moral worth has been a link in the chain which binds us to the centuries which have fled. What mighty deeds have gone to that unfolding! Through what emergencies of strength and sorrow, of pain and pasion, men have passed in the long career of their victorious spiritual advance! It has been said above, that the truths of religion are the forces of history. In what fierce and splendid enterprises we see these truths as we look back upon the past of which too often we are impatient! They gleam from the twilights of all classic peoples and are terribly revealed in flames and blood at the beginning of our Christian era. They shine through the murk and mist of the empire of Constantine, through the black night of the Papal Church with its unspeakable enterprises of filth and crime. They have been proven and propagated by the fires of the martyrs and the agonies of the Inquisition. They have been demonstrated in huts and discovered on thrones. They have been witnessed by the fortitude of Puritans and the fervor of Wesley ans. They have leavened commerce and liberated slaves and softened war. They look out upon to-day from the windows of schools and colleges, hospitals and halls of legislation. “We are indebted, ’’ says Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, “to the men and women who have wisely handled our yesterdays .” 1 They have wrought out the victory of the religious ideas we have acquired and in their experiences, passionate and tragic, have empowered the truths which are the very heart of the religion of to-day.

Any honest inventory of the religion of to-day must, therefore, acknowledge an immeasurable debt to the days that have gone. “The notion that the past may be ignored and forgotten is a sure recipe for spiritual smallness.” 2 And the greatness of our debt to it and the graciousness of its influence upon us are felt with singular weight when we take account of the great characters of the past with which the his-

1 Religious Use of Memory, p. 10.

2 Lyman: Theology and Human Problems, p. 109.

tory of religion and religious thinking is concerned. “The greatest needs of us all,” Henry Churchill King has said, “are the contagion of high and significant personalities, and the opportunity of sharing in their best visions.” 1 And this is true, and the influence of these high and significant personalities is powerful and beneficent, irrespective of our agreement with their particular interpretations of truth or theories of life. Interpretations and theories may have only transient value; they may be constructive and profitable for a year or a century, and then be outgrown; but the world never outgrows a great character. Dante’s theology is long since dead, but Dante is a living force to-day. We can look back with amazement and something of horror at the logical and pitiless conclusions of Calvinism, but we can regard Calvin with nothing less than abiding reverence and honor. We can do very well to-day without the particular type of mind and conception of the Scriptures which John Bunyan had, but we can never get

1 Religion as Life, p. 105.

along without John Buny an himself. “The first requisites of religion and civilization,” says George Adam Smith, “are outstanding characters.” 1 There are some significant personalities whose influence is so definitely incarnate in the work they wrought, the discoveries they made, the readjustment of ideas they compelled, that their value to the world is irrespective of their personal characters. Such a man was Charles Darwin. But there are these others, whose contributions to religious thought and life, vast and definite as they may be, are utterly dependent on their personalities. It may be at first thought difficult, or even impossible, to define in concise statements the influence these characters have brought and still bring to our latest religious life, but one has only to name their names to realize the impoverishment which would follow if they could be struck from off the record of the past. What would be the condition of religion to-day without the life and influence of Luther or Zwingli or Knox? Take away the influence of Wesley

1 Isaiah, Vol. I, p. 251.

and Whitefield, of George Fox and Bishop Rutherford; or, coming even to our later generation, take away the character and influence of Channing and Parker and Robertson, of Dale and Beecher, and how impoverished whatever religion we would have would doubtless be! The truth here has been eloquently expressed by Dr. Marineau: “The glorious persons of human history, imperishable from the traditions of every civilized people, keeping their sublime glance upon the Conscience of ages, create the unity of the faith.”

There are those who insist that we must remake our religion, reconstruct our religious ideas, revolutionize our theology. They have the attitude of men who would rebuild a house, or remold some metal figure; as if religion were some malleable substance of the mind to be handled in any fashion the vagrant will of men may work. Religion is nothing of the kind. “Religion from one point of view is as firm as the everlasting hills; from another point of view it is as pliant and flexible as water, which flows freely into every place and fills every vessel, no matter what its form may be.” 1 We need to realize the firmness as well as the pliancy. Like life itself, which, indeed, it is, religion is growth; a coordination of thought, conduct, experience, and hope, developing with the development of human interest. It can be directed here, restrained there, enriched in this fashion, protected in that; its wild growths may be cut off, its temporal or local excrescences removed, its defects remedied. But as long as it is alive for living men it cannot be arbitrarily shaped to the passing moods of any age without regard for the life and experiences of the mighty past. To revert to a former figure, these great characters of years gone by have been husbandmen ; they have pruned and protected; they have developed its neglected branches, they have fed the withering roots, they have revived its parching foliage, they have fertilized its hostile soil, they have built around it mighty barriers of devotion and apology to defend it from the storms of ignorance and the assaults of evil; while, of all the glorious

1 William Boyd Carpenter: The Witness to the Influence of Christ, p. 132.

persons of the past who keep their sublime glance upon the conscience of the ages, “serenest of the progeny of God” is He, of whom something will be said in the pages which are to follow, for whom are all things and through whom are all things, and who, for all the expanding knowledge and heightening powers of men, is yet

The fountain light of all our day,

The master light of all our seeing.

II The Modern Increment

No other century that we are able to survey was so full of such glaring contradictions and such sudden changes, as the nineteenth; the period which commenced about the eightieth year of the eighteenth century and has just closed. In it revolution and reaction followed one another in the quickest succession, and, while the masses sank deeper and deeper into Materialism, Atheism, and even Anarchism, Orthodoxy and Ecclesiasticism reached a height of development scarcely conceivable at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

During the century this division and inner confusion permeated increasingly the public life of the people: all were engaged in conflict to obtain the best for the satisfaction of life’s needs. The innermost personal life of men became chaotic, and swayed restlessly, often with sudden revolution, from the spirit of the Enlightenment to that of the Romantic Reaction; from an optimism, happy in the enjoyment of civilization, to a weariness of life so great as to make men desire death. — Weinel and Widgery : Jesus in the Nineteenth Century and After, p. 32f.

Chapter II The Modern Increment

Out of this colossal past, religion, with its everlasting firmness and its sinuous flexibility, poured into the social and intellectual ferment of the recent generation. To the multitudinous changes wrought in knowledge and experience during the past century, and particularly in recent years, it could not be indifferent. As all the events of humanity have gone to form it in the past, so all the events of humanity to-day have their bearing on its present. “For us,” wrote Brierly, “to make us spiritually, were the first beginnings of thought, the making of alphabets, the making of literatures, the struggles of patriots, the death of martyrs, the creations of genius, the rerearches of science, the whole age-long struggle of the world.” 1 It is a truth not of the past tense only. The practice as well

1 J. Brierly: Religion and To-day, p. 135.

as the beginnings of thought, the use as well as the makings of alphabets and literatures, the present as well as the past struggle of the world is making us spiritually. The age has its increment as well as its inheritance. The rapid and remarkable changes in thought, life, knowledge, and activity profoundly affect our reception and consideration of the religion which the past has bequeathed us. President Harris, of Amherst College, put the truth not too strongly when he said, a few years ago, that the Protestant Reformation itself did not work a greater change than the last quarter of a century has marked in religious thought, belief, and life. 1

Two influences may be discerned in these changes. The first is the influence of science. The application of new knowledge to machinery is visible on every side, but the scientific achievements of our age are far more extensive than mere mechanism will show. The astronomer of our generation not only weighs and measures stars so distant that light traveling 186,000 miles

1 Quoted by Henry Churchill King: Religion as Life, p. 116.

a second takes years to reach us, but he tests their chemical composition and analyzes their substance as if he held their dust within his hand. At the other extreme is the modern physicist dealing with specks of matter many times invisible to the naked eye. He analyzes one of these specks, to quote a leading scientist of the day, “into billions of molecules ; and dissects each molecule into its component atoms ; and each atom into a miniature planetary system of perhaps eighteen hundred electrons.” Then, to continue the quotation, he “measures these unthinkably minute units of matter; weighs them; tests the speed of their flight and the quantity and quality of the electric charge they bear.” 1

To go no farther into the various scientific activities, but to speak of the fundamental discovery which has most affected modern thought and life, the theory of evolution has utterly altered our outlook on the world and truth. That theory is now so widely known in its general outline and so

i Williams: Miracles of Science, p. 2.

thoroughly accepted that it needs no explanation here. Though evolutionists differ among themselves as to the way in which evolution proceeds, the fundamental theory is an axiom of modern thought. Its author, Charles Darwin, as S. Parkes Cadman, in his Brooklyn Institute lectures in 1910, said, “created a revolution which has had no equal in the intellectual history of the modern world, since the Renaissance and the Reformation.” 1 “Each age,” another suggestive thinker has written, “is confronted with new conditions, but our age is confronted with a new universe.” 2 Early in the day of this modern science it came sheerly into conflict with religion. Because the evidence religion offered for its characteristic conclusions was not of the kind and quality with which science must necessarily deal, science presumed to throw religion out of court. Because the first chapters of Genesis did not coincide verbally with the precise geological history of the globe, science would tell us that the entire