The new opportunity of the church

Preface

This little book is not an attempt to prescribe any program or method of reconstruction or to define in any comprehensive way the present tasks of the Christian Church. A good deal more is called for to-day than this little volume at all considers. Good will and earnest purpose are not enough. There must be also careful and competent thinking out of the economic and social problems involved in the next forward steps in human progress. But good will and earnest purpose must be back of all such thinking and it is for good will and earnest purpose that this little book appeals. In the midst of much hesitation and questioning it is a simple word of summons and reassurance, in the faith of the motto written over the door of the old hotel in Duala, in Kamerun, *' The old falls. The times will change. And new life will blossom from the ruins."

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Some Dangers and Duties of the Present

Hour i

II The Present Business Of The Church

The Church has always the same present business. It faces new problems, new" tasks, new duties, new tests with each new generation. But it comes to each new situation with ever the same mission. Old vernaculars pass away and men speak in new language. But the Church simply translates into the new speech its enduring message. The mission and message of the Church, its first and last business is religion.

The Church is charged with this unchanging and unalterable business because human need is unaltering and unchanged. The miseries and failures of the world are all traceable, straight past everything secondary and derivative, to sin and irreligion, to wrong and ignorance. The present w^ar so far from being an exception is itself the tragic symbol of this. Dr. Wotherspoon of Edinburgh has undauntedly set this forth in one of the most notable sermons of the times entitled ^' The War and the Sin of the World."

" If we may assume any moral system for the universe or any God who judges the Earth, we may also assume a connection between these two things — the war which desolates the world and the sin of the world. Sin when it is finished brings forth death. The sin, it may be further assumed, is World Sin; not the sin of individuals and not the crime of some particular date — the war is a world war, the system which has collapsed is a world system; the process leading to the collapse must be traced in world history. It is our general method of life — our relation to that whole scheme of things which includes Heaven with Earth and God with ourselves — which has broken down, and is judged, and is condemned. The relation is false, the method is unworkable — for they have led us to this which we see, and that not by accident but logically and naturally, as (if they persisted) they were bound to lead. It has been coming for long; whoever was not blind to the signs of the times could see it coming — and now it has come, this crash of our life — of which the war itself is only a symptom, and is the beginning rather than the end."

And Dr. Wotherspoon goes fearlessly on:

" In spite of our jealousies, racial and political rivalries and divergencies, the group of peoples which share the European culture form a unity, moral and spiritual. Seen in the large, they constitute a single commonwealth. They have one economic life, one social law, one standard of conduct, and one method of thought. Their science, their philosophies, their literature, their criticism, their art, their religious and spiritual movements — even their fashions and their caprices and their sports — are international. No one of them thinks alone or has originality enough to be capable of intellectual independence or even of any profound social eccentricity. All of us have built upon the same foundations in much the same manner. If there is sin, it is sin of us all, systematic sin, sin of premiss, from which we have all reasoned to similar conclusions. Not all of us so consistently — not all of us so resolutely — not all of us so thoroughly and joyfully. Whatever credit lies in lack of logic, some of us may claim that credit. We have not all finished and crowned the sin, as one nation has done. But all have sinned, and all in one way. * The War,' writes Mr. J. H. Campbell, * is the inevitable outcome of the ideals whereby our Western civilization has been living, and shows in what it trusted, and demonstrated its lack of spiritual consciousness.*

Long ago the somber but powerful imagination of Mr. H. G. Wells had discerned this inevitable, and had warned us against * the hallucination of security,' and against the assumption of an automatic ' progress towards which men had no moral responsibility,' and he had predicted — nay, he had almost described — the present debacle, of which he discerned the seeds germinating in our practice. So, too, Mr. E. A. Burroughs finds it: * The war (he says) is the vengeance of the moral nature upon the material.' * We had grown accustomed to measure progress in material terms and either to minimize our moral ailments or to treat them with material remedies.' Mr. Burroughs will excuse none of us: — 'British individualism was in its way as much a form of animalism and atheism as German militarism or worship of expedience.' ' No part of the civilization which has perished (he says again) can plead Not Guilty to a share in the responsibility — because everywhere the new paganism was already working in greater or less degree or in one form or another.' As compared with Germany, * the rest of the nations, combatant or neutral, are white only by contrast with black, and would if contrasted with white be very gray . . . the fall of Germany is a common reproach on human nature, rather than ground of congratulation for those other mortals who are not German.' * Others, ourselves included, have deserved the cataclysm,' though only Germany could have engineered it.

*' We can, in fact, learn little from what has come upon us, unless we recognize that the sin which Germany has, in St. Paul's sense 'perfected,' is the sin of the world — a radical vice which has run through the entire social detail of our Western system; unless we recognize that the judgment which visits us is not a heterogeneous retribution — as a man might be whipped for stealing, the whipping having no relation to the theft except by sentence of the judge: we have to see that it is strictly the death which that particular sin contained: we are filled with the fruit of our own devices.

'' Nor do we learn much unless we recognize the sin, what it is — that it is the sin of a world which knows God and does not glorify Him as God — which does not like to have God in its knowledge; that it is the sin of a Christendom which confesses Christ, but will not have Him to reign (* His citizens sent after Him, saying we will not have this man to reign over us'), which has limited His authority to private occasions, and has excluded it in social and public affairs; a Christendom which has told Christ to mind His own business (which is the saving of souls), and to let society and the world alone. Germany perfected that sin ; are we clear of it? When we saw what the sin perfected is, we revolted from it, and so far have cleared ourselves; to God be the praise. But hear Mr. Burroughs again: * To approve an ideal, or even to fight for it, is nothing unless you also live by it and for it.' We have still that to do — when it is no longer necessary to fight, then to live by the truth for which we have fought."

This IS the honest diagnosis of the well nigh fatal sickness to which we awakened in part at least in the war, from which we have to escape and from which we can escape in but one way, by turning in peace as, in principle, as Mr. Root pointed out, we did turn in the war, from Paganism with its principle of the selfish will to Christianity with its counter principle of the unselfish reason. Colonel Watterson, whose sight grows clearer as the evening shadows fall, sees this among his discernings:

" Surely," said he, " the future looks black enough, yet it holds a hope, a single hope. One, and one power only, can arrest the descent and save us. That is the Christian religion.

" Democracy is but a side issue. The paramount issue underlying the issue of Democracy, is the religion of Christ, and Him crucified; the bedrock of civilization; the source and resource of all that is worth having in the world that is, that gives promise in the world to come; not as an abstraction; not as a huddle of sects and factions; but as a mighty force and principle of being. The Word of God, delivered by the gentle Nazarene upon the hillsides of Judea, sanctified by the Cross of Calvary, has survived every assault. It is now arrayed upon land and sea to meet the deadliest of all assaults, Satan turned loose for one last, final struggle. . . .

" If the world is to be saved from destruction — physical no less than spiritual destruction — it will be saved alone by the Christian religion. That eliminated leaves the earth to eternal war."

The business of the Church as it has always been, and now if possible more than it has ever been, is religion. It is religion more truly and broadly conceived than ever, more conscious of its social responsibility in the nation, alive to its mission as the instrumentality of true racial interpretation and international service but on these accounts all the more personal and the more effective in purifying and healing the individual cells of the organism of each national society and of the body of humanity. We may think as freely as we can of the modes of religious application to life but we have to realize more deeply than ever the need of its judging and restoring power.

To these ends it is the business of the Church to-day to discern clearly and to preserve the true sense of its own mission. This has been greatly confused by the w^ar, in which the Christian Church has been enlisted on both sides of a struggle, in which with all necessary qualification we believe that one side was morally right and the other morally wrong. And the Church's conception of its mission was already sufficiently blurred. There were too many among us who saw no clear distinction between the three great divine institutions, the family, the state and the Church. Confusion was not unnatural. The same man belonged to all three and could not separate his own functionings in his home, as a citizen and as

3. Christian. In a sense they can never be separated. Each of them is an institute of life and of religion, and history is the development of each in itself and of all in their interrelations. But the three institutions are there, nevertheless, and every error that men make in judging and relating them brings in its train its own judgment. The Church at least must realize this and seek to protect itself and human society from its peril. In the war, in the shaping of peace and in the new conditions of politics and industry following the war the Church needs to know that it has a mission and what its mission is. The Church is not a mere agency of government, nor a convenient channel of publicity, nor an echo of the state, nor a political judge and divider. It is a ministry of service, a fountain of moral life and duty and a witness to enduring and universal principles.

There is no room here to deal with all these functions but let us single out two elements of the Church's business and seek to make them clear. It is the business of the Church, for one thing, to supply ideals for society and for humanity and the convictions which must sustain such ideals. This is a hopeful time in w^hich to proclaim the generous and courageous ideals which men heard from Jesus on the hills of Galilee and which the first Christian missionaries carried through the Roman world. The distortions of those ideals which were seen in the French Revolution are abroad in the world again and this time they are closer to their originals. Mankind has a heart for hopes and dreams and endeavors which recall the eager days at the beginning of our national history. But a century has brought a richer and truer understanding of many things. Old vagaries and fallacies and false trust and deceptions and self deceptions are with us still, wearing new faces and speaking a subtler language. But this is only to say that the need as well as the opportunity for the Church to go about its business of proclaiming the principles of the Kingdom of God is greater than it has ever been.

And what are the fundamental ideals which the Church must express? Professor William Adams Brown has stated them with sure Christian discernment in *^ The Way Out '* to be righteousness, repentance, service and faith.

(i) Righteousness. Our Lord stated this clearly as the primary thing without which there would be no beginning and no going on except to evil and disaster. " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.*' It was the central principle of His own life and conduct. '^ It becometh us to fulfill all righteousness." It is what God is before He can be thought of as being anj^thing else. ^^ Righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne." It is the only foundation of human society, of family life, of national character, of a world order. The first thing is not honor or glory or gain or power. It is righteousness. The business of the Church is fearlessly to proclaim this and if any nation commits itself to courses of unrighteousness then the Church has its work set before it which it must do and take the consequences. The Church may be sure that in the end it will suffer less for defending righteousness than for supporting a state in wrong doing. To-day especially the message of the Church needs to be conceived as a message of moral and social and economic and political righteousness. The Lord Jesus is compassion but He is also truth. And it is refreshing to see that latitudinarian interpretations of the Gospel to which we have been accustomed in the United States have grown very distasteful during the war and that some of the most influential preachers of a lax gospel are now become the prophets of the righteous law of God and the messengers of the judgment as well as the mercy of Christ. They see^ now what Mr. Ikeda, the heroic suffering Japanese pastor, saw when in pain and poverty he spent his ebbing strength on the Japanese biography of St. Bernard. A friend suggested to him that St. Bernard w^as but little known in Japan and that a life of St. Francis would be more popular and more acceptable to the publishers. Mr. Ikeda said that he felt that, too, and had long revered St. Francis, but there was a reason. *' St. Francis," said he, '' stands for Love — selfless, gentle, self-sacrificing love, — love alone. There is great power in that, but it is not enough. There is evil in men's hearts, and that evil must be fought against and subdued. Only so can men be saved. Not St. Francis, but St. Bernard is the man who combines in himself both these principles, love and the aggressive, fighting spirit, and so I thought it would perhaps serve Christ best if I introduced St. Bernard to the Japanese Church." It is the principle of righteousness alone which has justified our participation in the war. To the nation believing this, the whole claim of righteousness between nation and nation, and class and class, and man and man, and of a righteous God, and the sin of all unrighteousness may be proclaimed with new power.

(2) Repentance. That v/ord was so instantly intertwined with righteousness by our Lord that some may dispute whether with us as with Him it does not belong in the first place. At any rate it is for unrighteousness that men need to repent. We need it. Germany and Austria and Turkey need it to be sure. But men and nations must do their own repenting. Others can not do it for them. We need to do our own. One of the most curious phenomena of the war has been the resentment which this idea has encountered in Great Britain and America. Any reminder that we had motes or beams in our own eyes, that the hands that held the chalice of freedom in the name of God must be clean, that the strength of ten belongs only to the pure heart, was denounced as the seditious talk of a pacifist, forgetting that the battle is in God's hands and that we have Him to deal with as well as the enemy. Perhaps now the word of truth may be endured. God knows how deeply it is needed. The war has led to a great moral cleansing in America but the work has only begun and with such unflinching exposure of our sins and such sincere penitence and such purpose of a new obedience as will alone avert God's judgment and receive His blessing men await the call and moral leadership of the Church. '* I do not know when this war against the German Empire will come to an end," said the Secretary of War on November 4th, '* but I know this, that the war for the salvation of young American manhood has only just begun, and that it is going to keep up." The spirit of penitence alone, not the spirit of the Pharisee, can sustain this war.

(3) Service. The participation of our country in the war was simply an act of service on the part of a whole people. We saw more and more clearly as the struggle went on that we had vital interests at stake but it was not for interests that America entered. It was to serve the righteous cause and mankind, and never before has a nation poured out such energies of service in armies, in relief, in welfare ministry. We have expressed in time of war the enthusiasm of human brotherhood, of the equal liberty of mankind. Whence came this ideal of unselfishness, of laying down our life for others, of using strength for service, of living and dying for truth and for humanity? Does any one doubt whence it came? That ideal of service at any cost, of doing duty for nothing, of counting the individual in his interest and his life as only a means of advancement for the whole human cause — this the Church must hold up in peace when it will be vastly harder for men to live by it than it was in war. (4) Faith. The world has wrecked its material interests for the sake of moral ideals and ends. Wealth and ease and comfort and all things have been conceived in their true character as means to invisible ends. The world, as will be pointed out later, has accepted the contention of the Christian faith that the supreme values are moral and unseen. How long will the acceptance last? We may be sure that the struggle is not over. It is as old as history. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw it in strangely confused form between St. Anselm and William the Red. We shall never see it in that form again. It is a struggle of far purer principle now. If we are to have a new world it must be built upon the foundation of faith, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner stone. To speak this word of faith is the present business of the Church — faith in God, in the reality and supremacy of the moral and spiritual values, interests and forces, faith in man. This last not least. We need to acquire the human faith which Paul held and to which he called men, *' faith in the Lord Jesus and unto all saints/* (Eph. 1.15.) We have reaped enough death from human tnwy and distrust.

It is the business of the Church to be the deliverer of this message of righteousness, repentance, service and faith in each nation. It is to be also an international instrumentality, the institute of humanity, as the family is the institute of the affections and the state the institute of rights. One great source of our troubles has been our racial and national isolation and selfishness. The war has been at once the fruit and the corrective of this. For the corrective we have ever>^ reason to be thankful. We have been taught that there is no such thing as comfortable separation from the rest of the world. We may disbelieve in entangling alliances but there is no escape from the entanglements. We see that our own safety depends on conditions without. We do not talk now of saving America to save the world but of saving the world in order to save America. To make American democracy safe we have had to wage a war in Europe. The Church has a work of redemption to do among these interests and ideas. It ought to conserve the good of nationalism, disciplining and inspiring the genius of each separate nation. And it ought to master its evil in the interest of humanity and reveal to each nationality its true glory which is to be found in the perfection of national character and the fulfillment of national power as the essential contribution of each people to the full life of the whole of mankind.

The Church's universal business was never clearer.

The central organizations of Islam have broken down. Mecca remains but not the Mecca of old. Some day even the long sealed city will be a mission station, w^hile already the iron bands that girt the Mohammedan peoples and the Mohammedan faith have been rent. New ties of sympathy and of confidence relate the Latin American nations to us and new realizations of moral and social need open them to the Bible, and the Living Christ. The streams of democratic influence and of moral energy springing from one great fountain, though flowing through various channels, are pouring up through the forms and institutions of government and society in Japan. The critical period in Chinese history is too analogous to the corresponding years in our own national past to leave us cold or unsympathetic toward the struggle of the contending forces of corruption and progress in China, where it can not be that God will allow the evil to prevail, and where all that is true and honest calls for Christianity as the one hope of the nation. In India the British Government is redeeming its pledges of the past and providing for a measure of self-government that will put great sections of India's affairs in the hands of the Indian people themselves, and that will reveal to India more clearly than it has yet been revealed the incompatibility of Hinduism and Islam alike with free institutions and democratic brotherhood. And the war clouds which have darkened Europe have not illuminated Africa, although they have helped Africa to realize its need of light. And in South Eastern Asia — the Philippine Islands and Siam, so alike and so different, a people awakened and a people to be awakened, want what politics and trade can give in part but yet can not give at all — a new quickening of life, a new strength of soul, a salvation which can come by Christ alone.

There may be diversity of judgment as to the method by which the Church shall function as the institute of humanity, whether, as some think, by seeking to spread an international ecclesiastical organization or, as others of us believe, by fostering in each nation its own living Christian agency, which shall supply the directing principle of the national genius. But however we may differ as to the method, the end is clear. We must replace the ideals and fears and organizations of war by the ideals and hopes and organizations of peace. Cooperation and common gain must be substituted for conflict and partisan advantage. '' Peace to find United States ready for War of Trade,'^ in the " War after the War ** — these are phrases from a newspaper account of the Fifth National Foreign Trade Convention held in Cincinnati in April, 191 8. But the Church must preach a new order of helpful association from which all shall gain, not a war of interest against interest in which both must ultimately lose. In government as in trade, the Church has an ideal and a spirit to offer to men. And the wise and true men are laying hold upon it. Viscount Grey is uttering a religious word when he lays it down as one of the foundations of the League of Nations ** that the Governments and peoples of the States willing to found It understand clearly that it will impose some limitations upon the national action of each, and may entail some inconvenient obligation. Smaller and weaker nations will have rights that must be respected and upheld by the league. Stronger nations must forego the right to make their interests prevail against the weaker by force, and all States must forego the right in any dispute to resort to force before other methods of settlement by conference, conciliation, or if need be arbitration, have been tried. This is the limitation. The obligation is that if any nation will not observe this limitation upon its national actions, if it breaks the agreement which is the basis of the league, rejects all peaceful methods of settlement and resorts to force against another nation, they must one and all use their combined force against it.*' This is only the word of order and of righteousness.

And not in commerce and government only but in race relationship, which is the hardest problem of all, the Church's principle is our only salvation. Race must be subordinated to humanity. The power of the crude results of Darwin's influence must be broken and we must reestablish Christ's. The end of humanity is not race w^arfare eliminating the weak. It is race fellowship perfecting the family life of God upon the earth. In our new and consolidated world the present business of the Church is to supply humanity with its instrumentality of self-fulfillment.

And yet how can the thing that needs to be redeemed be its own self fulfiller? This is the tragic problem of the new day. How^ can the new world that is to be hereafter be made out of the old breed of men? Saint Brice, caustically criticizing President Wilson's address before the Senate on January 24, 191 7, declared in the Paris Journal: "" The situation would appear inextricable if we did not realize how the pursuit of a fixed idea may lead astray. Wilson is haunted by the idea of inaugurating the golden age of universal brotherhood. Naturally, general disarmament is the basis of this system. The only thing lacking for the realization of this admirable conception is a new humanity. Does Wilson pretend to be able to change humanity?" Human progress does not need to wait for the total perfection of humanity. We have got rid of many evils even if humanity has not as yet been so greatly changed and we hope that we can get rid of war too with humanity as it is or as it is becoming. But Saint Brice's demand is just. Man himself is still the greatest element in his own problem. How is he to be made new? What agency but the Church knows where the power to effect the change can be found? We are back once more at the beginnings and the last word is the first. '^ Ye must be born again." What greater business could the Church have than to lead men to the one Source and Strength adequate both to generate the new life which they need and to provide that life with the forms of action through which it shall do its w^ork and bear its fruitage in the nation and throughout the world?

Ill

THE EFFECT OF THE WAR ON CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS

AND IDEALS

But has not the war produced an atmosphere in which the Church if it conceives its business in the terms just described, will be speaking without any audience? And are not the values which now appeal to men utterly diverse from all that the Church can offer? Not a bit of it. The experience of the war has clarified and confirmed our fundamental religious ideas and revealed the power of their appeal to the present day mind. It has unmistakably set in the supreme place those moral and spiritual principles which constitute the message of the Church and it has revealed the responsiveness of men to the essential ethical ideals of Christianity.

The war has not dissolved the great convictions of Christianity about God and man, about the Church and the Cross, about prayer and about Jesus Christ.