Some aspects of international Christianity

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Foreword vii

Preface ix

Foreword

The following lectures will meet a real and widespread need. They will contribute to a clearer understanding of the obligations of a true internationalism and of the strength of vital Christianity. The author, a preacher of international repute, speaks as a discriminating student of human affairs and with the moral authority of a Hebrew prophet. The conviction that the Christian religion is the only solution of the complex and baffling problems of the day, and that it has to do mightily with all the world movements is tremendously strengthened by these lectures.

The Mendenhall Lectures of DePauw University, to which this series of addresses belongs, was founded by the Rev. Marmaduke H. Mendenhall, D.D., of the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The object of the donor was " to found a perpetual lectureship on the evidences of the divine origin of Christianity and the inspiration and authority of the Holy Scriptures. The lecturers must be persons of high and wide repute, of broad and varied scholarship, who firmly adhere to the evangelical system of Christian faith. The selection of lecturers may

vii viii FOREWORD

be made from the world of Christian scholarship, without regard to denominational divisions. Each course of lectures is to be published in book form by an eminent publishing house and sold at cost to the faculty and students of the university."

Lectures previously published :

1913, The Bible and Life, Edwin Holt Hughes.

1917, Understanding the Scriptures, Francis John McConnell.

1918, Religion and War, William H. P. Faunce.

Geokge R. Grose.

President DePauw University.

Preface

While I was preparing my course of Lyman Beecher Lectures, which were delivered at Yale in the spring of this year, I received an invitation to give six lectures on the relation of Christianity to International Subjects, in DePauw University, Indiana. At first I felt that the task was beyond me. I am no expert either in politics or economics. The time at my disposal was extremely limited, and much of it was already arranged for. Yet on second thought I resolved to accept the invitation with which DePauw had honored me. There are questions of the most vital importance on which every man must form an opinion. The bearings of these questions are not confined to the regions of expert knowledge, and there is a place for the impressions of the man on the street — his general sense of moral values, his common sense view of relative importances, and the free play of his conscience upon the questions of the hour as he understands them. It is in his name and from his point of view that I have prepared these lectures.

They were delivered from fragmentary notes, and the form they took owed much to the wonderful kindness and hospitality of the

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audiences. I shall never forget the thrill of those evenings in DePauw, when the response was so immediate and so inspiring, and the most abstract discussions seemed to change to personal confidences, given and received. But when it came to writing out the book in cold blood, and without the inspiration of the friendly atmosphere of the lecture hall, the task assumed a far more formidable aspect. It had to be performed amid the confusion and distractions involved in my removal from Edinburgh to New York, and without access to many books of reference which in other circumstances I would have consulted.

Meanwhile, the political and international situation was changing from day to day, with the rapidity of a mountain torrent, and an opinion might be antiquated almost before the ink in which it was written had dried. In view of all this, I must trust to the indulgence of the reader, in the hope that he will find in the little volume at least some reminders of a very stirring time, and that the general argument and point of view may be applicable still, even when the detail of their application may have changed.

Some of the subjects of these Lectures have already been dealt with in the Lyman Beecher Lectures, though in slightly different form. Several of the present series were delivered also

PREFACE xi

at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio, and the friends who heard them there, as well as the congregation of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where they were delivered during the present winter, will permit me to associate them with those in DePauw as I thank them all for the welcome they accorded me — a welcome so cordial and so generous that it has been a permanent enrichment to my life.

John Kelman.

New York, March, 1920.

CHAPTER I Rededication

Before the war had ended there had already come upon the conscience of earnest men in every land a sense that the future life into which peace would lead us must not be identical with, or even very similar to, that to which we had been accustomed in former days. The Great War has been so searching, and has penetrated so thoroughly into every nook and corner of human interest and enterprise, that it must have wrought very serious changes in many of the aspects of life. Now that the peace has come, we find ourselves bewildered by the number of elements, expected and unexpected, which are entering into the reconstruction of society.

In Edinburgh during the spring of last year there was inaugurated in the churches a movement called the Mission of Rededication. That Mission, which created considerable interest, dealt with many different questions, not religious only, but political, social, and economic, and it has left results both in the teaching and in the practice of men. The word Rededication is striking and very provocative of thought. It at once puts us into the line of

l history, and reminds us that this is by no means the first dedication that has been attempted. Casting one's eye along the line of the past, one sees the great historical dedications of Israel in the Wilderness, Solomon's Temple, the outset of the Crusades, the Wars of the Covenanters, Plymouth Rock and the James River, the American Revolution, and the Great War. In all of these men felt that there had come upon them a new sense of life's solemn and commanding opportunities, and in each particular case they dedicated themselves to some specific task. Now, however, there is a widespread feeling that things are farther on than they were on any of these former occasions, and that there is a greater living chance, if only we may be able to avail ourselves of it, for changing things forever. The final end of war has actually seemed to be in sight, and some of us have not yet lost the vision of it, nor the faith that that vision may be realized. The new world arising out of the ashes of the old will undoubtedly have cleared itself of many hampering conditions, and there seems to be an actual prospect of realizing many of these also. When one views the League of Nations in its widest scope, which is, indeed, the only complete or understanding view to take of it, one feels overwhelmed by the stretch of its idealism, and can hardly believe that we have come to the point of attempting to arrange for and organize so mighty an affair.

Yet so it is. This generation cannot shift its responsibilities without losing altogether the solemn sense of historical unity. Our dead lie upon every battlefield, and behind them the vast company of the dead of other wars, and of all the other men and women who, in their generation, strove to realize ideals which had revealed themselves to them. There is in Edinburgh a legend of the ancient Castle, that a bugler blowing the " last post " ona wild and stormy 31st of March, centuries ago, was killed there and thrown down the rocks; and the legend tells that every 31st of March those that have ears to hear can hear the sound of a fifth bugle, whose notes linger long over the sleeping city. The dead bugler comes back to continue his challenge to living men. When we remember the dead it is well ever to remind ourselves that they without us cannot be made perfect, and that they are waiting in their silent places to"see how we shall take up their unfinished work, and what we shall make of it.

It is altogether fitting, therefore, that at such a time as this we should bring out into clear light all that is most sacred in our lives, our minds, and hearts, and dedicate it anew to high ends for future days. In doing this we are able with peculiar vividness to realize the unity of history and to see our own efforts and ideals in a higher light because of what they have meant in days gone by.

With all this in our minds we come to the great taskf of the rededication of our own lives. Again we remember that this is not the first time of dedication. We have all been dedicated before; indeed, so far as our personal religious history is concerned, we have been dedicated far too often. When we turned consciously and deliberately to God, at the first celebration of the Communion, or on the occasion of the death of friends very greatly beloved, we have all undergone several such experiences, and about each of them there has always been a sense of conscience accusing us of unfaithfulness to former dedications. Had the early dedication of our lives been complete and deep enough, we would not have had so far to travel back in order to renew our vows. It is right at such a time as this that we should very particularly consider the reasons for the failure of former dedications in so far as they have failed. We shall probably all find that there are two main reasons for those failures.

The first of these is that our dedicated things were left lying stored and inoperative. We set aside certain purposes and memories, and solemnly laid them on the altars of our spirit, and then turned back from that sacramental act to a life in which the dedicated things were to a large extent forgotten. Such dedication is conceived of too much as static rather than dynamic. It represents a judgment rather than a purpose, an emotion rather than a vital impulse. It is laid aside reverently in the region of dogma, instead of being led out into the field of living experience.

The second reason for such failure is that often our dedications are too general, and therefore meaningless. They express a real desire to be better men and women, whose spirits are more faithful to the highest things, but they do not particularize what these things are, nor examine what practical points of conduct are involved. In a word, they lack point, and in all that concerns conduct that is a fatal lack. Now the War has put point upon everything. It has forced us all back from generalities to that which is concrete and definite. Our aspirations in such former experiences were often little more than excellent copy-book sentiments to which, of course, we assented, but which never entered the region of practical conduct. Now we feel ourselves seized as it were by the throat, and as we seek another dedication an imperious voice demands of us, " What exactly do you mean? " It is necessary for us now to examine all our convictions and principles, in order that we may ascertain of them also what their exact meaning is. If our dedication is to be a mere generality to-day, we simply court a repetition of former disappointments. The solemn moment will leave us unprepared for any advance in the future, and when we come to face the pressing questions that will be on us before we know, we shall find ourselves, mentally and spiritually, " all over the place.' '

Before we state to ourselves definitely the meaning of our dedication it will be well for us to go to the root of the matter, and ask what we mean by the word " dedication " itself. It is a great word, which we are accustomed to utter with reverence. How noble it seems ! How little it often signifies ! Come, let us bring it to a point. What is the " dedicated spirit," and what does it involve?

Obviously, in the first place, it must involve limitation. In young days we all have passed through a stage in which we understood the words of Robert Browning in Pauline :

" 1 am made up of an intensest life, ... a principle of restlessness Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all."

It is not long, however, in the case of all who are dirigible in the course of life, before we learn that this radiant vision is but the figment of young enthusiasm. It is not given to mortals to enter fully into every phase of life, and we soon discover that we cannot know everything, nor feel, nor think, nor do everything either. The first requisite for a satisfactory dedication, then, is to select something which we shall know and think and feel and do. In other words, to mark out our province.

Here we touch upon the vexed question of the two rival ideals for education. The university education of older days, prescribing its fixed number of subjects identically the same for all students, has been replaced by the modern arrangement of optional courses in which each student specializes along some particular chosen lines. The danger of the new plan is that you may easily produce by it uneducated experts, people who know their own narrow business thoroughly, but who do not know it in relation to the wider world. Such uncultured specialization is a real danger which must be guarded against at the present time. But, on the other hand, we have reached a period in the world's history when mere broad culture is not sufficient to meet the demands of the day. Life is asking us all certain very definite questions, and it is incumbent upon every one who would serve his generation rightly to select for himself some limited area in which he chooses to specialize, and to which he dedicates his powers of intellect and action. This holds good in the choice of a profession, a choice which will be facing many of you very soon, if it has not confronted you already. There are all sorts of reasons which present themselves to a young man or woman in favor of or against this profession or that, and it is here that one of the great dangers in education arises. One will choose a profession because it appears to him more honorable, or more respectable socially, or more likely to provide him with quick returns in money than another. Another will take for the principle of choice the extreme opposite of this, and sensitive consciences have been often tempted to settle the big choices of life upon the principle that one should always choose the more self-denying or strenuous course. These principles of decision are equally misleading. When thinking of the dedication of a life, neither social position, nor money, nor self-denial are questions of first importance. The great question is that of efficiency as it applies to the particular nature of the person deciding. What can you do best? What does your habit of mind lead you toward doing? That will be your best contribution to the public welfare, and that should be the principle of*your choice. In a later lecture we shall revert to this.

A similar snare lies set for the feet of every earnest spirit, in the promiscuous desire of doing good. We want to help and bless our fellow men, and we have not realized that it is possible for none of us to do good to everybody. The result is often a life broken into fragments of good endeavor, and scattered over innumerable small attempts which neither link on with one another into any concerted whole, nor, indeed, achieve any completeness even along their own various lines. Again it is necessary to mark out your province, by selecting those whom life has given you as the subjects of your special service. In a word, clear up the matter of your possibilities and your limits, and then work within these limits with all your might. Find out what you stand for, and stand for that. This is the first great law of dedication.

In this there is already involved the second consideration, namely, originality. We all desire to be original, but some try to be so in very curious fashions. One of the commonest of these fashions at the present time is that of achieving originality by contradicting obvious and proved truths. I need not remind you that anyone can do that without any great display of genius or much expenditure of effort; but I would like to point out to you that a considerable amount of what passes for genius and brilliancy in current literature, upon analysis turns out to be little better than the exercise of this smart trick. Originality does not consist in differing from others, but in thinking things out for yourself. It matters little whether you agree with others or differ from them. Every truth that passes through your own personality, and goes out upon the world from you, will have something of that personality communicated to it and lingering in it. The great thing is that you should refuse the tyranny of fashion and the habit of thinking through other men's minds. " Ye are bought with a price, be not the slaves of men." The price has been bitter and costly in the lives of your comrades. At least answer it by shaking yourselves free, that you may stand independent and think for yourselves. Dedicate your life, not only to certain projects that you wish to accomplish but to that point of view which is distinctively your own, and to that set of convictions which you have found to dominate your conscience. In a word, find out what you stand for and stand for that.

Let us now ask what this means in four different departments of our life and interest :

1. Personal Religion

In this the new dedication will, on the one hand, link each of us in with the historic Christian faith, and on the other hand it will discover for us what our individual aspect of Christianity must be. These two are well embodied in that interesting word sacramentum. Familiarized to us in its English form of sacrament, it has a history of peculiar suggestiveness. In classical Latin it meant the military oath sworn by the soldier that he would be faithful to the Roman army and empire; but when it was taken over into the early Latin of the Church it assumed the new meaning of a mystery, the disclosure of hidden spiritual realities within or along with visible and tangible things of sense. In our partaking of the sacrament both these meanings are implied, and in all dedications of the spiritual life each of them is present.

On the one hand such a dedication necessarily involves the great loyalties. The faith of the fathers and the saints has a claim upon every dedicated spirit, and in our dedication we link ourselves on to that holy succession. ' ' What they believed, I believe; what they hoped, I hope : whither they are arrived, by Thy grace, I trust I shall come." In these great words of Thomas a Kempis he has handed on to us a splendid formula for the expression of the supreme loyalties involved in all Christian dedication.

Yet, on the other hand, this dedication is one's own, and a man expects to perceive hidden mysteries which no one else can see as he sees them, but whose vision is always more or less determined by his own spiritual powers as well as by his personal qualities and experience. Thus, even in the matter of belief we cannot hope to retain all the details of the creed of those fathers and saints who have gone before us. In the swift changes of thought which accompany the development of the times, and which new learning must always necessarily produce, it is necessary that the statement and interpretation of Christian truth should be elastic enough to assume the necessary changes of form. We cannot dedicate ourselves to a point of view which was possible only to those who accepted the scientific and critical conceptions of, say, the fourteenth century or the fifth. The Christianity which claims us is that upon which the light of to-day is beating; and our testimony, while it will always revere the great testimonies of the past, cannot possibly be in all details identical with any of them. As a matter of fact, there will be in a man's dedication to-day a double element. If it be as solemn and comprehending a thing as it ought to be, he will revere much that he does not literally believe ; but, at the same time, he will have discovered a central core of living beliefs which mean absolutely everything to him. I remember passing through the vestibule of a large and richly built hotel much frequented by business men. In that vestibule, among many palms and other beautiful plants, there was a collection of fine white marble statuary. The statues were reproductions for the most part of ancient Greek ones, and it was amusing to notice how these men, in a general sense prizing the beauty and the change from ordinary pursuits which the statues of that vestibule afforded them, yet passed out and in, busy upon a few vital interests of their own, not in the remotest degree connected with art of any kind. Such a vestibule is the entire creed of some men, crowded with fair but alien forms. It offers a bosky retreat for the spirit, but it has no connection with any vital interest of life. Doubtless in the creed of all men there will be such a vestibule, but the imperative thing is to discover what part of its beauty and its ideas are really vital to the life and thought of each one of us, and then to count that and that alone our living creed, to which we dedicate our lives. In some, this living core of faith still remains considerable in extent; in others it has been reduced to an extremely small number of statements. This central faith, found not now from dogma but in experience, and accepted without reserve, is at least enough for a man to live by.

2. The Church

Next to personal religion in a day of dedication there must recur to all loyal spirits the thought of that organized expression of the Christian faith represented for them by the church with which they have been connected. The present time is one which should quicken all our church loyalties, and recall us to the greater thoughts of church life which have commanded the imagination of so many generations. It is a common saying that the Church has failed, and that the War has finally published that failure to the world. I have spoken elsewhere about this measureless fallacy, and I need not repeat the repudiation of a thing so obviously untrue. The church to-day is greater than she ever was before, and she retains all those possibilities of spiritual reality and effectiveness which led the apostle of old to call her by the sublime name of the Body of Christ. That body is immortal and has the power of rising many times from the tomb. It may be buried, as it has been buried time and again, in the earth of formality and superstition and the ambitions of ecclesiastical men ; but it will always rise again in some form or other from the dead, with new powers for meeting the exigencies of a new day. Indeed, the church is like that temple of Philse which stood for many centuries on its island in the Nile, and to which pilgrims came from all quarters of the land to pray to the river god for floods and harvests. It stands there still, but it is now submerged. The raising of the waters by the great dam at Assouan has permanently and abundantly fulfilled the prayers that were offered there, and the temple has passed away in the fullness of the answer to its own prayers. So will it be with the Church of Christ. Those benefits to humanity for which the church stood long ago, in days when there was no other institution which could supply them, have been in many instances taken over by other agencies, and to that extent the church has ceased to be required. As in these instances she has been submerged in the fuller supply of her own gifts, so it may be that in the end all those spiritual blessings that she has brought to the earth will be supplied in fuller measure, and they that see the City of God will see no temple therein. But that day is still far ahead, and while man's need remains unsatisfied and his thirst unslaked, the church will ever stand upon the earth for the supply of the water of life.

While we thus disclaim the accusation that the church has failed or that it is going to fail, let us be candid in regard to those things which have suggested such a view to hostile critics. Two things especially need such attention.

(1) Denominationalism. In this respect the experience of the War has done a great deal toward rectifying erroneous impressions and undue emphasis. Some men went out to the front with very strong convictions as to the exclusive validity of their own orders, and many others brought to their new experiences extraordinarily strong prejudices in favor of their own denomination. At the front they were drawn close together, and discovered, in men belonging to different churches from their own, high spiritual gifts and an obviously valid power of ministry and call to it. They saw such men at their work and felt the reality and effectiveness of much that they had formerly thought of only to criticize. Besides that, and more potent, was the fact that they and their brethren alike were standing close to the grim realities of the battlefield, the hospitals, and the innumerable graves of the dead. The reality which they felt in this was of so very different a quality from that which they had felt in the questions that had divided them previously, as in many cases to sweep away all such prejudices, and change entirely the perspective and proportion of their views. The impression left upon the minds of many of us was that the denomination to which a man belongs is ultimately a matter of temperament rather than conviction, and that all sectarian prejudice is an instance of temperament masquerading as conviction. Man's spirit is not guided by abstract principles as a rule, but far of tener by the subtler forces of temperament, strengthened by spiritual experience.

So we came to believe that there would always be, in all time, many varieties of church life and forms of worship. There seems no reason to suppose that men will ever cease to group themselves into such classes as ritualistic and nonritualistic, or broad and narrow churchmen. And the one thing that is demanded is the widest charity in every church which will admit that there are those whom some other form of worship will suit better than that which it supplies, and will rejoice in the variety of operations of the Spirit to meet the infinitely various spiritual needs of men. Wherever it is possible we should stand not only for unity of spirit but for union of organization. Anyone can see the lamentable waste, not of money only, but of enthusiasm and effort, which is caused by the overlapping of rival churches between whose principles there is no essential difference. Thus, for the mere sake of economy, all possible unions are to be welcomed. But, on the other hand, there are matters which divide certain churches from one another which run so deep that an attempted union would only emphasize the lack of real unity. In such cases it is surely wiser that each should preserve its own individuality as a separate body of believing men. The one great demand is for the ending of the spirit of exclusiveness. Arrogance of any sort is one of the chiefest dangers in the Kingdom or the Church of Him Who told His disciples to learn of Him because He was meek and lowly of heart: and there has been no such cause of spiritual arrogance in church history as the violent contentions of one denomination against another for the exclusive possession of the truth.

It is impossible to speak too strongly about this. "Delenda est Carthago" : and exclusive arrogance is our Carthage which must be destroyed. (2) Efficiency. We must lay upon our conscience, above all else, the demand for efficiency in our church work and life. In order to produce and sustain efficiency it will be necessary continually to keep our eyes upon the appeal which the church is making to the men and women of the successive generations, in view of their present phases of thought and life. Especially in a time like this, when new conceptions are crowding in upon each other in every department of social, public, and private life, must it be necessary to keep revising the whole situation. There never can be a time when we shall be justified in taking our church methods and messages for granted, as things which have gone on edifying people from time immemorial, and shutting our eyes to the question whether these are bringing us a living grasp of the problems of the present hour. The churches tend always to lapse into the somnolent life of spiritual clubs, which may be excellent places of luxury for the elect, but which have no meaning for the live world of men and women around them. A great American preacher, contrasting the hard and upright pews when he began his ministry with the luxurious sofas on which his congregation heard his later words, told them that when he began to preach there the congregation burst forth into the eager doxology, " Praise God from whom all blessings flow," while now they expressed themselves in the pathetic notes of "Art thou weary, art thou languid?" The spiritual club must always become weary and languid, but that is an abnormal thing in Christianity. The rest which Christ promises to his followers is not a still or idle rest : it is a peace that garrisons the hearts of men girded for aggressive work. Thus it behooves us to-day to clear our decks for action.