The gospel of good will as revealed in contemporary scriptures

Front matter

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Preface

This book, taking for granted the technical devices of preaching, goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to be preached and practiced : — the Gospel that Christ expects men to be great enough to make the good of all affected by their action, the object of their wills, as it is of the will of God.

The Christian is not a ^'plaster saint'' who holds "safety first" to be the supreme spiritual grace; but the man who earns and spends his money, controls his appetites and passions, chooses peace or war, and does whatever his hand finds to do, with an eye single to the greatest good of all concerned.

Sin is falling short of this high, heroic aim; and the preacher's business is to make men ashamed of it, as the low, mean thing it is.

The instant a man who has done wrong repents, God and all ChristUke men welcome him back to their favor and fellowship.

To the Christian every secular vocation is an opportunity to express Good Will : and sacrifice is the price

he gladly pays for the privilege.

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The wise Christian preacher will not as preacher become the mere partisan on one side or the other of disputed questions of political, social, and moral reform : but will commend such Good Will and condemn such evil will as there is on both sides.

Christian character and Christian virtues come not by direct cultivation, but as by-products of Good Will expressed in daily life. The Church, a superfluous superstition when considered as an appendage to an untransformed secular life, or a preparation for an undefined happiness hereafter, is a precious and sacred instrument for transforming men and institutions into sons and servants of Good Will.

As the expert interpreter of the Gospel of Good Will : as the leader in the fight against all meanness and cruelty : as the restorer of the penitent : as the infuser of spiritual meaning into secular life : as the champion of costly sacrifice: as the challenger of social injustice and the non-partisan herald of social reform: as the officer of a church that derives its sanctity and unity from the efiiciency with which it serves all forms of personal and social welfare, — the Christian minister has a mission beneficent beyond all others.

These lessons are drawn from and illustrated by texts and extracts from twentieth-century literature: not

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devotional, theological, evangelistic, or missionary books, but secular literature that is saturated with the essential Christian Spirit of Good Will.

For kind permission to quote these texts and lessons from '^ Contemporary Scriptures " I make grateful acknowledgments to the following authors and publishers :

Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, for ^' The Passing of the Third Floor Back " (page i) ; Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy and Harper and Brothers, for '^ The Servant in the House " (page 162) ; D. Apple ton and Company, for Thomas Mott Osborne's " Within Prison Walls " (page 80) ; The Houghton Mifflin Company, for John Graham Brooks' ^^An American Citizen" (page 108); J. B. Lippincott Company, for Charles Sarolea's ^' How Belgium Saved Europe" (page 135); Dodd, Mead and Company, for John Hopkins Dennison's ^' Beside the Bowery " (page 20) ; and The Macmillan Company, for John Masefield's "The Everlasting Mercy" and " The Widow in the Bye Street " (page 45) ; Jacob Riis' " The Making of an American," and ''The Battle With the Slum" (page 191) ; and Winston Churchill's "The Inside of the Cup" (page 217).

These texts and extracts are introduced to show that this Gospel of Good Will is a Gospel which is being preached effectively in the poems and plays, the biog-

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raphies and histories, the speeches and novels of the day, and should be preached in the pulpit.

In Chapters II and III, I have introduced a few passages from my book on ^^ Sin and its Forgiveness." For some things put in, and for more left out, I am indebted to the criticism of Dr. Charles T. Burnett and Dr. Chauncey W. Goodrich.

Why the Gospel of Good Will? Why not the Gospel of God ; the Gospel of Christ ; or the Gospel of the Spirit ?

Because for many of us God is a far-off, forbidding being; Christ has become sentimental and external; the Spirit has come to stand for something vague and mystical.

Readers of whom this is not true ; readers to whom God is a Father whose trusted, wise benevolence makes the doing of hard duty a dehght ; Christ an ever present companion whose friendship makes unselfish living easy ; the Spirit an inward guide whose perpetual suggestions make kindliness of attitude and act a second nature; are advised to substitute for Good Will, wherever it occurs, the one of these more obviously personal terms which means most to them.

On the other hand, to those who find these terms beset with misconceptions, and are willing to risk apparent

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temporary abandonment of them, I think I can promise that at the end of our Kttle journey they will come back to find these personal terms defined and deepened, expanded and enriched.

For Good Will is not an impersonal abstraction floating in empty air. It is the fundamental attribute of God; the essential nature of Christ; the characteristic quality of the Spirit : and whoever lives in Good Will thereby becomes a son or daughter of God, a brother or sister of Christ, a disciple and friend of the Spirit.

William Dewitt Hyde.

BowDOiN College, Brunswick, Maine, January i, 1916.

Introduction

There are two approaches to the Christian life. One is the critical investigation of the traditions in which that life is historically enshrined. The results of this investigation are at first startlingly negative, and seem to take away the foundations of Christianity. Yet followed through they reveal underneath the foundation which they remove an even firmer foundation in the eternal ideal of Good Will which the prophets partially proclaimed, law negatively declared, Christ perfectly embodied, and the early Christians enthusiastically reproduced. One finds this admirably done in such a book as William F. Bade's ^^The Old Testament ^ in the Light of To-day."

The other method is to ask, not through the critical examination of ancient tradition and ecclesiastical authority, but directly through the life and literature of the present day what are the supreme values which men are expressing and admiring in the plays and poems, the biographies and histories, the speeches and novels of this twentieth century. This method has all the pleasure and peril of plowing virgin soil on an unexplored frontier.

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It neither denies nor affirms the results as such of Biblical and historical criticism. In so far as tradition proves false and authority unfounded, so long as we are true to our present highest ideal of Good Will, we can get along just as well without as with the historical tradition. And in so far as the verified tradition and our present insight coincide, each has reason to be grateful for the confirmation of the other.

Both to those whom criticism has robbed of cherished features of the traditional Gospel and to those to whom criticism has given back the essentials of their faith, the new method brings a positive and practicable Gospel. Wisdom is justified of all her children.

We are passing through a revolution in religious thought. The old terms remain : but with new meanings and new emphasis. The old views had at least the merit of clearness. The preacher knew precisely what to preach : and the layman knew how to put the preaching into practice. The new views have not yet become equally precise. Not every preacher who holds them knows how to make them clear to his congregation : and not every one in the congregation who hears them preached is quite clear about the manner of Hfe for which they call.

As this book aims to make the new views as clearly

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preachable and as precisely practicable as the old, the natural introduction to them is a contrast, as sharp and as extreme as possible, between the old and the new views.

God used to be regarded as somewhat arbitrary : not deigning to justify his ways by the perfect standard of what human goodness at its best prompts us to say and do in our relations with our fellows : but laying down laws and penalties, drawing up plans and schemes, which seemed to have as their primary aim divine satisfaction rather than human welfare.

To-day our deeper grasp of the Spirit of Jesus, and our fuller appreciation of its great practical corollary, democracy, has taught us to measure God by at least as high a standard as that which we apply to ourselves. This makes God a Being altogether light in whom there is no darkness at all : not arbitrary will but Good Will becomes the essence of his nature : and when we seek to know His Will we ask not merely what was revealed to and believed by the harder hearts of twenty or twenty-five centuries ago, but what a Will which seeks the comprehensive best for each and all to-day expects us to be and do, in the concrete and complex situations in which we modern men are placed — situations infinitely more delicate and difl&cult than anything of which the most inspired of the ancients every dreamed.

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Eight lectures cannot cover the whole of the preacher's message. I have selected and arranged in logical order the eight commissions which seem to me most vital.

The preacher's first task is to develop in his people the habit of asking in every relationship of life, not what is profitable, not what is pleasurable, not what is respectable, not what is lawful : but what does the Will that wills the best for all : — what does Good Will in this precise situation require. To train people to ask that question every day and hour of their lives : and once or twice a week to give them guidance and inspiration toward some of the answers to it, is the preacher's most comprehensive commission. He is not merely the repeater and commentator of a message once for all delivered to the saints : but the prophet of a message that is forever as new and original as the changing situations and unfolding capacities of men.

The thing the preacher and layman ahke have to fight, then, is not sin in the old, abstract sense of defiance of an arbitrary God, disobedience of his sovereign commands, and disregard of the elaborate terms upon which he has offered us abstract salvation: but the meanness that seeks anything less than that best for all which Good Will is ever seeking; the selfishness which falls so far short of Good Will for all that it will

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take gain and pleasure for self, or self and friends, at cost of avoidable loss and pain for others and for all. To show mean and selfish persons how mean and selfish they are, and make them heartily ashamed of their greed and lust, malice and hatefulness, laziness and self-indulgence, censoriousness and hardheartedness, is the preacher's second commission.

Mean and contemptible as selfishness is, however, the selfish man is mean and contemptible no longer than he clings to his selfishness. The instant he is ashamed of it, and sorry for the injury it is to others ; wishing that instead of the mean thing he said, or did, he had risen to the noble height of Good Will for all — that instant, not by special arrangement, but in the nature of the case, because we would do it ourselves, and God is at least as good as we are at our best, the man who has been mean and selfish is forgiven, and welcomed to the favor of God and the fellowship of all who in the Christlike spirit share and serve Good Will. To assure the penitent of this free and full forgiveness of God, and to secure for him the practical, social expression of that forgiveness by all Christian men and women, is the preacher's third commission.

Good Will is not chiefly manifested for us once for all in miracle: or repeated for us in sacramental magic.

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It is manifested in the life and character of Jesus Christ far more fully than in the alleged manner of his birth or the method of his resurrection : in the conduct and spirit of the daily lives of Christian men and women, far more than in ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies : and is to be manifested most acceptably and triumphantly in the transformation of all secular vocations into expressions of friendliness and service to all whom they directly and remotely affect. To show, not in technical detail, which for the most part is beyond his powers, but in aim and principle how to make each Christian man's vocation an expression of Good Will for him, in him, and through him for the benefit and blessing of the world, is the preacher's fourth commission.

Good Will involves not merely once for all in Jesus Christ, but perpetually and universally in every disciple who shares it, the sacrifice of whatever individual preference, pleasure or profit is inconsistent with it. Up to the limit of his strength and influence, so far as is consistent with maximum efficiency in his specific station and function, every Christian man must bear his share of the suffering incidental to a finite world of natural law and human freedom : and consequent on the perversity of individuals and the corruption and imperfection of civic and social institutions. Sacrifice is the cost

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of service : each form of service has its specific price in sacrifice : and to train his people to pay the price and make the sacrifice cheerfully and bravely, yet not excessively or unreasonably, is the preacher's fifth commission.

A man who makes his life expressive of Good Will thereby becomes not merely saved and assured of an abundant entrance into a future heaven : but becomes transformed by the renewing of his mind so as to show forth here and now that perfect and acceptable Will in specific traits of character and qualities of conduct. To show what these are, and how they come, not so much through explicit cultivation but as by-products of a mind and heart devoted day by day, year after year, to Good Will, is the Christian preacher's sixth commission.

The State, the economic order, the family and the international world order are spheres, not of supernatural conflict of God and the Devil, but spheres which are the resultants of much natural selfishness and an ever increasing volume of Christian Good Will. To live in them, patient with their imperfections so far as they are for the present inevitable ; yet ever making his own contribution to them pure, and just and generous and beneficent: dwelling at the same time sorrowfully

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in the unavoidable injustices and oppressions, joyfully in the coming purity and justice and generosity and love of the world that is to be, and which all Christian men are helping to bring in, is his seventh commission.

The Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, the Church, Missions and the Ministry are not as formerly considered, supernatural institutions of mystical and magical efficacy to work moral miracles independently of the transformation and cooperation of character: but they are useful and essential and therefore holy and sacred means for the cultivation, and propagation of Good Will. To make men appreciate and reverence them, not for their traditional and fictitious, but for their present-day and instrumental value, is the eighth of the preacher's commissions.

A man who signs himself "A Student In Arms," writing from the trenches in Flanders to the Spectator of December i8, 191 5, describes so accurately the problem of the preacher, and the solution of it set forth in this book, that it may well serve as the conclusion of our introduction.

^^The soldier, and in this case the soldier means the working man, does not in the least connect the things he really believes in with Christianity. He thinks that Christianity consists in believing the Bible and setting

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up to be better than your neighbors. By believing the Bible he means believing that Jonah was swallowed by the whale. By setting up to be better than your neighbors he means not drinking, not swearing, and preferably not smoking, being close-fisted with your money, avoiding the companionship of doubtful characters, and refusing to acknowledge that such have any claim upon you.

"This is surely nothing short of tragedy. Here were men who beUeved absolutely in the Christian virtues of unselfishness, generosity, charity and humility, without ever connecting them in their minds with Christ; and at the same time what they did associate with Christianity was just on a par with the formalism and smug self-righteousness which Christ spent His whole life in trying to destroy.

"The chaplains as a rule failed to reahze this. They remonstrated with their hearers for not saying their prayers, and not coming to Communion, and not being afraid to die without making their peace with God. They did not grasp that the men really had deep-seated beliefs in goodness, and that the only reason why they did not pray and go to Communion was that they never connected the goodness in which they believed with the God in Whom the chaplains said they ought to believe. If they had connected Christianity with unselfishness

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and the rest, they would have been prepared to look to Christ as their Master and their Savior. I am certain that if the chaplain wants to be understood and to win their sympathy he must begin by showing them that Christianity is the explanation and the justification and the triumph of all that they now do really believe in. He must start by making their religion articulate in a way which they will recognize. He must make them see that his creeds and prayers and worship are the symbols of all that they admire most, and most want to be.''

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Gospel of Good Will: Christ's Expectation OF Men I

II. Falling Short of Good Will: The Meanness