Out of joint with the moral order

Front matter

Andrew W. Archibald, d.d.

Class

Book._

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Sour Grapes and Edged Teeth 1

II. The Melting Pot 12

Chapter I

MAN finds himself placed in a moral order. He, can agree with Daniel Webster in saying that the greatest thought which ever occupied his mind was that of his personal responsibility. But it is easy for one to endeavor to shift the burden of human accountability. He often tries to lay the blame of any delinquency upon the shoulders of others. The prophet Ezekiel represented such as saying, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." The inspired writer strongly combatted this position, which was taken by many of his contemporaries. We are to take issue with this plausible falsehood.

All error contains a grain of truth. If the fathers eat sour grapes, the children's teeth are set on edge. God Himself says that he will visit the iniquities of people upon their descendants. There is a connection between the sin of to-day and that of yesterday. There is something to the old-fashioned doctrine of Original Sin. The present age still feels the effects of the transgression of our first progenitors. The infidel plan used to be to ridicule this idea of the transmission of evil, but materialistic scepticism has become orthodox in this respect ; only it meanly charges the responsibility of our wrong-doing more directly upon our immediate ancestors, rather than upon the first parents of the human race. Or, if specially extenuating circumstances are sought, it has become the custom to enlarge upon the cumulative power of sin

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OUT OP JOINT WITH THE MORAL ORDER

through the ages. The thought is that we can not very well help ourselves, because of sinful tendencies that have been inherited, and that have grown powerful and perhaps irresistible through long centuries. Adam himself ate sour grapes in the forbidden fruit of Eden, and his children's teeth were set on edge, and the matter of course has been growing steadily worse, the evil has been developing with the lapse of years, till we are absolutely at the mercy of transmitted forces, of inherited tendencies. Hence we are not accountable beings. What is called sin is only misfortune. There is no escaping what has been fated. If we go astray, we are not particularly to blame, our fathers were, who handed down to us, as the catechism says, "by ordinary generation' ' their failings.

The Christian predestinationist can very easily become the pagan fatalist. The fault, if any there be, is charged back to its origin. The sentence of death, the claim is, might properly be pronounced upon one who had been created innocent and had fallen, but not upon those who have been, as the Psalmist expresses it, conceived in sin, and shapen in iniquity, born with a proneness to evil as natural, Job would say, as the flying upward of sparks. Men may try to rise to nobler lives, but there is all the force of adverse circumstances to drag them down. It is useless to struggle against this moral gravitation downward, this inbred principle of sin, as universal in its sway as the law of gravity, against which no single atom can successfully stand out. We are necessarily what we are made by our environment.

Now however plausible such reasoning may seem, however much we may thus endeavor to shift responsibility, God meets us with the unequivocal declaration, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. ' ' He does not let us, to the extent of relieving our-

M selves of personal guilt, attribute our edged teeth, our asperities of character, to the sour grapes, to the conscious sins, in which our progenitors may have indulged. We are individually responsible. Not that there is no moral contiguity, that the present and the past are not spiritually linked, for they are. There is a hereditability, not simply physical but extending to the whole being of man. Iniquities of the fathers are visited upon their children. Sour grapes in one generation do make edged teeth in another.

1. This is true first from the national standpoint, which the prophet had primarily in mind. The Jews in their Babylonian captivity, where they were at the time of which we are speaking, were aware that they were suffering for the sins of their fathers. Their only mistake was in supposing that there was no help, in imagining that they might as well submit to the inevitable, that they might as well go on sinning, that they had gotten to such a pass, there was no hope of a restoration to their beloved land. They were assured that the case was not so desperate, that they could again be God's own people if they would repent, if they would cease laying the whole blame upon their ancestry, whose guilt did indeed bring disaster to posterity, but posterity was not helpless, it could rise to newness of life.

We know that the Jewish captives thus inspired did recover their independence, did once more become a nation in Judea, furnishing the line of descent for the Saviour of the world. And yet they did repeatedly suffer for the folly of their ancestors. The wickedness of one generation, over and over again, was transmitted in evil effects to another. And national retribution still follows national sin. The curse of slavery, sanctioned and fostered by the founders of our American government, was handed down to their successors, whose benumbed consciences saw no way out of the unhappy dilemma in which they found themselves by reason of the transmitted evil. Had there not been prophets of exalted moral views to rouse the nation, the canker would have continued to eat into the very heart of the body politic, until there would have ensued the death and extinction of what is now a grand and free Republic. As it was, the evil was tolerated on the plea of its having been the fault of our forefathers, until, to atone for the wrong, there was required the sacrifice of thousands of precious lives.

France has had to pay the penalty of her persecution of the Huguenots. Their expatriation by the hundred thousand drained her of the very best elements of society, and, as historians admit, the bloody French Revolution became possible, because there was not moral force enough to counteract and hold in check the mob spirit of utter lawlessness. The Reign of Terror was a natural sequence. The excesses of the historic movement might have been avoided, and its benefits alone might have been the heritage of the nation. If the conserving leaven had not been lost out of the population, there would not have been the extreme reactions, from which there had to be a slow and painful recovery. God does visit national iniquity upon a people to the third and fourth generation. When the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 marched victoriously into Paris, the Rev. A. F. Beard, D. D. says that "not less than eighty of the Emperor's personal staff, high in place and power, were children of the expelled Huguenots," who had been driven forth two hundred years before. Such are what are sometimes termed the revenges of time. Such, to use a classical figure, is the slow but exceeding fine grinding of the mills of the gods. The Greek fable of an avenging divinity, of a pursuing Nemesis, is not wholly a mythological conception. Sour grapes do bring edged teeth. Wicked deeds do carry with them destroying power, extending down into the future.

And yet nations, suffering from ancestral sin, are not helpless. A people may become so loaded down with accumulated evils, that reformation, redemption, seems impossible, but there is power in the gospel to save and elevate. The highlands of Scotland were once "cold and lonely heaths," says Gibbon, "over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians." Those savages have been transformed by Christianity into the most intelligent and most religious people perhaps on the face of the globe. Nineteen centuries ago, Britain, says the same author, "was divided between thirty tribes of barbarians." What brought those natives out of a low tribal into a high civilized condition ? The religion of Jesus Christ. How about the original inhabitants of Germany? The writer already quoted, on the authority of Tacitus, says of them in the first century, "Each barbarian fixed his independent dwelling on the spot to which a plain, a wood, or a stream of fresh water, had induced him to give the preference. Neither stone, nor brick nor tiles, were employed in these slight habitations. They were indeed no more than low huts, of a circular figure, built of rough timber, thatched with straw, and pierced at the top to leave a free passage for the smoke." That is the way the Zulus and Africans of the lowest heathenism now live. "In the most inclement weather," it is added, "the hardy German was satisfied with a scanty garment made of the skin of some animal." He was like the wild, untutored Indian of our American continent when first discovered.

Such creatures were not much like the cultured Germans of the present, with their Universities of learning, the best in the world, and with their theological and Christian literature that in many respects is unsurpassed. What has caused the marvelous change? These people owe their rise out of barbarism to the new life infused into them by the gospel, with which they came in contact as they left their native forests and swept down over southern Europe and the Roman empire for plunder. In the World War they seemed to relapse into savagery with their frightfulness, but this was true only of the military leaders and not of the rank and file of citizens. The masses of the people will yet see how they were misled by the camouflage of selfish, ambitious and unprincipled rulers, whose policies indeed have already been repudiated in the changing of the very constitution of the State from the imperialistic to the democratic type.

So that while a nation may be carried low down by the weight of successive generations of sin, the ruin is not generally irretrievable. The sour grapes of the past do not so edge the teeth of the present, that responsibility ceases and hope vanishes. A fallen nation can rise again. The power of sin is great, but that of the gospel is greater. It can take, and has taken, a nation that has long declined, and can lift it and has lifted it into a noble civilization. These monuments of grace on a large scale, should ever inspire the human heart to attempt great things, while the deplorable consequences of sin as seen in history through the rolling years should impress all with the terribleness of what can thus be transmitted with cumulative force.

2. Individually the lesson is as impressive as it is nationally. We are to remember that the stream of tendencies is not resistless, that the awful tide can be stemmed, that our evil natures can be controlled. Our fathers may have sinned, but that is no reason why we should go on in the same course.

We may have teeth set on edge by their eating of sour grapes, and it may be just so much harder for us to do right, but we can do it nevertheless, divine grace assisting. The man with the palsied arm in the New Testament story was commanded to stretch it forth, and he did, receiving strength with the effort.

So it is religiously. It may be difficult for us to become or to live Christians. We may have by inheritance physical weaknesses whereby we are seriously handicapped. The acquiline nose is a facial feature, which has been transmitted through successive generations. The peculiar physiognomy of the Jew (and of the old Hittite) through long centuries has been a matter of common remark. Diseases to a certain extent are inherited. It is not strange, that the Greeks had their goddess of health, Hygeia, with her radiant complexion and with her bright and smiling face, a goddess, whose favor was well sought. Attention to the hygienic now is a religious duty, especially since an infirmity may be handed down to posterity. Mental characteristics, too, appear in the line of lineal descent. This explains the appearance of great families in history. Every nation can point to houses, which have furnished a long list of distinguished persons. The Adams family might be instanced in our own country. Oliver Wendell Holmes in writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to our own time. If," continues the Autocrat, "aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a descendant of one of the Academic Races.' ' Holmes added that Emerson had such ' ' favoring antecedents, ' ' coming from a stock which had "been long under cultivation," and thus did he account for the greatness of the philosopher of Concord. Indeed it is no longer doubted that intellectual traits are transmitted. Children of parents with poor mental equipment are not apt to make much of a mark, though of course there are here as everywhere exceptions.

But most startling of all is the fact that moral obliquities are transmitted. There is often the inheriting of temperament and disposition. A mother afflicted with kleptomania has a son who has a morbid desire for stealing. Marcus Aurelius will ever be remembered as the Roman emperor, who was a philosopher, and whose moral reflections seem almost inspired, but the impurity of his wife gave to the empire and to the world a monster in the utterly depraved Commodus. . All the details we have been giving go toward the establishment of the truth of heredity, physically, mentally and morally. Nay, the sin of some quite remote ancestor may appear in the measurably distant descendant. There is more than is sometimes thought to the proverb, which we have been discussing.

And yet never are the inherited tendencies such as to free from responsibilit}^. No one is put absolutely in the power of his inborn passions. The greatest sinner can be saved, and repeatedly the individual like the nation has risen superior to the forces of evil. God gives to every struggling soul grace sufficient ; where sin abounds, grace is much more abounding, said the chief of the apostles. Mankind are therefore inexcusable, if they continue in wrong courses. They can not plead natural inability, for God will

SOUK GRAPES AND EDGED TEETH

make them morally able. A person may have much to contend with in inherited Aveaknesses, but it is for him to overcome inherent evil. Individual responsibility can not be merged into the ancestral. One's race, or his family lineage, may not be so favorable as that of some others. He might be more disposed to a Christian life, if he belonged to a religious people like the Scotch, or if his parents had been earnest Christians; but however unfavorable his antecedents in this regard, though his blood may be tainted with evil transmitted and intensified all the way down from our primeval parents, he must suffer the penalty all the same, if he does not resolutely face about.

There is warning in the partial truth for which he is inclined to stand. Sin is cumulative, and unless steadily resisted can gain entire dominion over the soul. Inherited tendencies to evil, unless vigorously fought, will increase in strength, until frail humanity is utterly overwhelmed. The day of grace may be sinned away. Jerusalem filled up the measure of her iniquity, and was forever destroyed as a religious Capital, and the Jews as a nation, as a theocracy, became extinct, though even in this case there may be a possibility of ultimate restoration. We can never fix the limit, which however may be reached. The individual similarly can imperil his eternal welfare. God does not always strive with sin, we are divinely taught. Agassiz, said Joseph Cook, once allowed himself to be lowered hundreds of feet into the yawning crevasse of a glacier. After a while, he gave the signal to be drawn up, but there had nearly been a fatal miscalculation. ' ' In our haste, ' ' said the great naturalist himself in giving his experience, "we had forgotten the weight of the rope. We had calculated the weight of my per* son, of the basket in which I rode, and of the tackling that was around the basket; but we had forgotten the weight of the rope that sank with me into the chasm. The three men at the summit were not strong enough to draw me back. I had to remain there till one of the party went five miles — two and a half out and two and a half back — to the nearest tree to get wood enough to make a lever, and draw me up." It was a narrow escape, and a little more of the rope's weight might have, sunk him to the bottom of the ice chasm, where he might have been either frozen or crushed.

Many a man experiments with sin, he lets himself down into the chasm of cold worldliness or unbelief. He thinks he will not go too far for safety. He hopes soon to be elevated into the sunshine of a warm Christian life, but he descends lower and lower. He calculates his strength of will, as Agassiz did his own weight; he calculates the power of inherited weaknesses, of the surroundings of sinful, human nature, as the scientist took into consideration the basket and tackling, but he forgets that sin is cumulative, that the very fact of his descending gives momentum to the power of sin. The weight of the rope, of the downward tendency, is overlooked, and he goes down hopelessly to the bottom. He, presumed too much, he did not consider the momentous problem in all its bearings. The soul that sinneth shall die, and all the more because of inherited sin. That only adds to the weight which sinks to perdition.

There is one alternative when we are in such a desperate situation, when our sins, as a sacred poet has said, "like mountains round us close.' ' In exactly that exigency there is such a thing as a splendid venture of faith, quickly seizing the opportunity that has a glorious outcome. This finds illustration in a traveller who fell into the deep opening of a mountainous glacier. He was at the bottom of the chasm, whose glaring ice walls rose perpendicularly to a dizzy and bewildering height. He could see only a narrow strip of blue sky far above him, and there was no escape in that direction, up those slippery steeps. His only hope, of which he availed himself, was a roaring stream far below, which had melted from the surrounding ice pack. He could not see it in the darkness through which he slowly and painfully groped his way downward, but he heard its music, and suddenly made the plungie, unhesitatingly committing himself to its rushing waters. There was a brief sense of unutterable blackness and of a whirling, resistless force bearing him onward, and shortly he emerged into a green and flowering Swiss meadow at the foot of the towering Alps, and he was in the beautiful sunshine, with peace and calm in his heart. In the religious sphere, the important thing is to act quickly at the critical moment. Shakespeare caught the thought, when in his Julius Caesar he said impressively :

" There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat ;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures/ '

CHAPTER II The Melting Pot

IN THE preceding chapter we saw that there is a moral order to which there must be conformity both individually and nationally, if there is to be safety. We are to consider next how this applies to our own America. Isaiah says, ' ' The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation: I the Lord will hasten it in its time." This would seem to teach that religion is essential to national perpetuity, or, as it is elsewhere Scripturally expressed, "Righteousness exalteth a nation." Some emphasize the danger to America from the industrial situation, from the complications and conflicts growing out of the, threatening relations between capitalists and laborers, the whole social fabric bending to the point of breaking. Can we stand the stress and strain, to which in this regard we are being subjected?

Deserving of equally serious consideration is the influx of foreign and sometimes alien populations. We know that the greatest empire which the world has seen, the Roman, did go down before the flood of barbarians rushing with hostile intent from the north in Goths and Vandals and Huns. Jeremiah depicts the peril to Judah from a similar source, wheal he says pictorially, "What seest thou? And I said, I see a boiling caldron ; and the face thereof is from the north. Then Jehovah said unto me, Out of the north evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land." That is, enemy forces, like the hot, scalding contents of a boiling pot tipped southward, were to overspread and engulf and burn the country of God's people. There is a similar danger to our land from vast immigrations, and we can speak of a seething pot as picturing the state of things, though the, figure can be changed from its ancient to a modern adaptation. In Zangwill's well-known book and play, it is the irrepressible David, the young violinist, who says: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming." His idea was that of a fusing into one of different metals. From such an amalgamation of races he felt that there was to emerge the true American, "the coming superhuman. ' ' Even in the case of the irruption into the Roman empire of northern savages, there was a happy outcome under an overruling providence in their ultimate Christianization. With us the situation is still more hopeful, for the thousands of immigrants annually flowing in upon us are not hostile, they are merely trying to better their condition. But even then are, they not a menace to our civilization? The answer can be decidedly, No, if the true solvent is applied, namely, that of the gospel.

1. First, we will see how a similar problem has been worked out successfully in another people's history. We will note how the present English nation has been built up through the shaping influence of religion from very small beginnings and from the most diverse elements. We have here an example of the little one becoming a thousand and the small one a strong nation through the Lord's hastening. To prove this, we have only to recall England's past. Ancient writers told strange stories of an island far out to sea, beyond the pillars of Hercules, beyond our Gibraltar. It, however, had a very shadowy existence, till Julius Caesar gave it reality by landing on its shores 55 B. C. What sort of inhabitants did it contain ? They wore the customary garb of barbarians, the skins of animals, or they went practically naked like our early American Indians. Cowper said most truly :

"Time was, when clothing sumptuous or for use, Save their own painted skins, our sires had none."

"When the Roman general, Suetonius, about 60 A. D. proceeded to conquer Britain, he was astonished at the wildness of the natives, who were nothing less than crude savages. They lived in the woods and in caves. They offered up to their gods sacrifies not only of animals, but often also of human beings. Their degradation was much greater than that of the lowest Filipinos to-day. But the gospel was introduced among them, and thereupon they made, says Hume, great "advances toward arts and civil manners."

Then came, apparent disaster, when in the fifth century great hordes of German barbarians poured into the country. These, belonging in the main to two tribes, the Angles and the Saxons, overran and practically submerged the populations previously occupying the territory. These Anglo-Saxons were savages, who, becoming with others seven separate kingdoms, were continually at warfare, the historian Knight comparing them to so many * ' Choctaws and Cherokees. ' ' Of their conquest of the Britons, Gibbons says, "The practice, and even the remembrance, of Christianity were abolished." Hume says that they caused the country to revert to its "ancient barbarity." The cultivated Romans regarded them as fit only for the slave market, and raids were made upon them for this purpose. By the civilized they were regarded about as the Negroes of Africa used to be looked upon, except that, instead of black faces and kinky locks, they had fair features

[Ml and flaxen hair. When a religious father saw some of them on an auction block in Rome, and when on inquiry he was informed that they were Angles, he gave utterance to that historic pun on their name, that they could more properly be called Angels. He then and there resolved that they should be such, not only in appearance but in fact. Afterward as Pope Gregory the Great he sent Christian Missionaries to them in their distant island home. Did they need Christianizing ? They were the veriest heathen, worshipping numerous divinities in the grossest manner. Their ambition was to drink their intoxicants from the skulls of their defeated foes. It was to such that the pious Augustine and his devoted band went 597 A. D., gradually winning over King Ethelbert of Kent, who providentially had married a French princess of Christian antecedents, the celebrated Queen Bertha. He became a convert to his wife's religion, and thus one pagan tribe of our ancestors was Christianized. The other divisions of the Saxon Heptarchy were not slow to follow, and in 664 A. D. the various branches of the Anglo-Saxon Church were united, and there logically followed a political union. In the year 827 under Egbert the seven independent powers were consolidated into a nation, and the united country was called Angle-land, that is, England, and the English race began its march onward and upward. It was by Christianity that the various warring tribes were unified and compacted into a mighty people. Out of crude Britons and Anglo-Saxons, and later out of semi-civilized Danes and Normans, was developed the powerful English nation. Nor was it congenial elements that were finally harmonized. Every reader of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe will remember the intensity and bitterness of feeling, which that romance, true to history in this respect, portrayed as existing between the Norman and Saxon, between the conquering lord and the rebelling vassal, but eventually the separating lines faded away. Tennyson in his welcome to Alexandra, when she became the bride of the Prince who subsequently sat on the throne as Edward the Seventh, said proudly,

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,"

as the poet indicated the complexion, the racial composition, of the mightiest people on earth, whose drum-beat is literally heard round the globe, the sun never setting on the world-wide dominion. With such a splendid development under the moulding influence of Christianity, we ought to be filled with a great hope for our own national future.

2. Turning now to America, after this encouraging lesson from the past, here is to be enacted on a larger scale than in the old world the great unfolding drama of civil and religious freedom. Recall the small beginnings, whether at historic Lexington and Concord, where the embattled farmers, says Emerson, "fired the shot heard round the world," or whether at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. Let us picture the latter somewhat in detail, recalling how the Revolutionary heroes on that date stood behind a hastily-constructed redoubt on a spur of Bunker Hill, while the British Regulars of more than twice their number were marching in flashing armor up the steep ascent to dislodge and capture the American "rebels." Prescott and Warren were the leaders of the intrenched colonial forces, and though the red-coats drew nearer and nearer till buttons could be counted and faces recognized, not a shot was sent from behind the parapet of fence and earth and newly-mown grass. The silence was oppressive, the patience was sublime, but Prescott and Warren both were counseling, Steady now ! wait till you see the whites of their eyes, and then fire low ! When this order was given, the devouring flame leaped forth, and, says General Carrington in his "Battles of the American Revolution, ' ? "the whole front goes down. For an instant the chirp of the grasshopper and the cricket in the freshly-cut grass might almost be heard; then the groans of the suffering; then the shouts of the patient yeomen.' ' A similarly deadly volley repulsed a second attack, and a retreat followed a third onslaught only because the ammunition of the patriots became completely exhausted. Though there was a temporary and technical defeat, more than twice as many British as Americans were killed, and the first real battle for independence had been fought, and the conflict went on till freedom was gained. Warren was among the last to leave the redoubt, but at the moment of departure he fell, shot through the head, but his name is gratefully cherished by a nation to-day, and on the spot where he yielded up his life for his country, exactly fifty years afterward, June 17, 1825, was laid by Lafayette the corner-stone of Bunker Hill Monument.