Every-day religion

Preface

Eleven years ago I wrote a book called Modern Discipleship (of which a new and revised edition will be ready shortly), in which an attempt was made to set forth, quite simply, some of the meanings of Christian discipleship to-day, with special emphasis on the “ inner life.” Ever since then I have cherished the hope of writing a sequel, which should, so to say, start from the other end and deal with some of the practical implications of Christian discipleship in the field of common work-a-day life. Such a sequel is attempted in this present volume. It has naturally been impossible to cover all the ground, and I am aware of sad inadequacy in the treatment of those subjects which have been selected for inclusion; nevertheless I send the book forth in the hope that it may inspire some who read it with a fresh convic¬ tion that the only possible solution of all our diffi¬ culties, as a society and as individuals, is to be found in Jesus Christ, and with a new determination to explore personally and adventurously the way of living which He has opened up for mankind.

Some of the chapters were written in the peace of holiday time ; but most of them were penned in places, and under conditions, very far from holiday vii

PREFACE viii quiet, such as trains and station waiting-rooms, in the odd half-hours of a busy life. Perhaps such variation in the circumstances of the actual writing is not inappropriate to a book which seeks to bridge the gulf between the cloister and the market-place.

The gist of Chapter IV was given as an address at a Communicants’ Convention in preparation for the Westminster Mission (1922), and appears in the published report of the Proceedings of that Conven¬ tion. Portions of Chapters VI, XII, and XIII, recast and amplified, will be found included in a series of essays on Liberal Evangelicalism to be published shortly.

Grateful acknowledgment is made of permission to make use of copyright material from Messrs. Blackwood & Sons for the quotation from Stradivarius; Messrs. Macmillan for the poem by Mr. Blackwood; the executors of the late George Macdonald; and to Miss Evelyn Underhill.

To those friends who have helped in the writing of this book by their encouragement, counsel and prayer (two of whom have also, in their goodness, shared in the labour of proof-reading), I would tender a gratitude which cannot be adequately ex¬ pressed in words. If this book should under God contribute anything, however small, to the building of His Kingdom, they will, I know, find in that fact the recompense that they would wish.

Cambridge , October 1922.

Edward S. Woods.

4t Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see ;

And what I do in anything To do it as for Thee.

A man that looks on glass,

On it may stay his eye ;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And then the heaven espy.

All may of Thee partake ;

Nothing can be so mean,

Which with this tincture, ‘for Thy sake/ Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine ;

Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone That turneth all to gold ;

For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for less be told.”

George Herbert.

Doing it Together ....

• xi

Chapter I Introductory: Christianity A Way Of Living

" Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."— St. Matthew vii. 21.

" Whatsoever ye do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus .”—Colossians iii. 17.

"It is the glory of religion not to be set apart from life, but to permeate it powerfully."—H. G. King.

“ Christianity is the projection into the world of the lines along which Christ lived. It is a duplicating in modern life of the spirit, the method, and the aims of Jesus, a following through the world the very footprints that He left behind."— Henry Drummond.

" The long history of European Christianity, if it ever comes to be written, will be the history of a submerged and hidden move¬ ment—the tracing of the course of a pure but tenuous stream of living water which has refreshed the souls of innumerable men and women who have penetrated to its secret recesses, but has but seldom emerged into the open, to flow through the broad and dusty cities where the world's main activities are carried on."— A. E. Zimmern.

" Grant us the will to fashion as we feel.

Grant us the strength to labour as we know,

Grant us the purpose, ribb'd and edged with steel.

To strike the blow.

Knowledge we ask not—knowledge Thou hast lent.

But, Lord, the will—there lies our bitter need;

Give me to build above the deep intent The deed, the deed."

John Drinkwater.

" Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequence."—A non.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY : CHRISTIANITY A WAY OF LIVING

At a little town in Belgium, some weeks after the Armistice, I happened to be present at a gathering of officers who had come together to listen to an address by a distinguished Army Chaplain. Some seventy turned up, and the Chaplain accomplished what seemed to me the remarkable feat of holding them spellbound for more than an hour while he expounded Christianity in his own vigorous, pic¬ turesque and inimitable style. Among other things he spoke of the evolution of the Padre during the war, and the significance of that evolution. In the early days, he said, at Mons and Ypres and elsewhere, the Padre’s presence at the front had always occa¬ sioned a certain surprise; men in the combatant units could not quite make out what he was doing there, unless it were to bury the dead. Only gradually did it dawn on men’s minds that a parson’s work has to do quite as much with living as with dying.

That unthinking conception of the Padre as a sort of glorified undertaker illustrates a fact of our day which should be well pondered, the fact that religion “ has fallen into a rut of irrelevance to 3 life.” And perhaps the chief task for the Christians of our generation is to get their religion back again from life’s circumference to its centre, to experience and to demonstrate its entire relevance to all the concerns and activities of human beings. The task can never be an easy one, for just as the Churches are prone to imprison the Christ in creeds and stained-glass windows, so there is in every man who is at all religious a queer instinct to rail off a department of his life and call it religion. Within that circle are dumped all manner of things which are supposed to belong there : church-going, pious reading, meetings, missions, parsons, charities, and the general paraphernalia of organized religion. But all the while the real business of life is carried on on the other side of the fence. All the thousand details of engrossing daily work, all the personal relationships involved, all that goes on in the world around, life’s interests and pleasures and recreations, its richness and colour, its gaiety and fun and laughter, its gifts and surprises, its comedies and tragedies—these are the things which form the real stuff of human living, and for too many people they have next to nothing to do with religion. Whereas to be a Christian is to find and practise a religion which is not above or aloof from these things, but is woven in with them, and so woven with them as to determine their pattern. Jesus Christ quite clearly was, and is, concerned with life in all its fullness; 1 and any religion which is “ professional ” and aloof and unrelated to life ought

1 Cf. Col. ii. io : “ It is in Him that you reach your full life ” (Moffatt’s translation).

never to be called after His name. He came to show men a faith which should touch life at every point; His “ Incarnation ” can hardly mean less than that God Himself is concerned with everything human. Something of what is involved in this contact and this concern it will be the endeavour of the following chapters to unfold.

I

The desperate moral and material needs of our war-shattered world are sufficiently apparent, and there are plenty of people, outside the Churches as well as in them, who would be thankful enough to see what Christianity could do to assuage the wounds and rebuild the ruins. For it is generally recognized that history has not yet seen any considered attempt to apply Christianity to human affairs on any large scale. To quote once again G. K. Chesterton’s war-time dictum—for nothing more apposite on this topic has ever been said—“ Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.” That is exactly the point. And there are many signs that all sorts of people, superficially perhaps materialistic and not in the least religious, do in their heart of hearts believe that Christianity is worth trying, and that in the last resort nothing else will save the situation. For they are beginning to distinguish between symptoms and causes, and to see that, unless you can find something which is potent enough to reach and 5 eradicate innate human selfishness, to long for a new world is merely crying for the moon.

But it is not perhaps so clearly seen that if Chris¬ tianity is to be applied at all it must be applied all round. You cannot call in religion to clear up difficulties which defeat your skill, and then dispense with it in other spheres where its application might be inconvenient. To do that is to fall into the departmentalism of thought and practice which is, as we have seen, the negation of true religion. It is to be feared that such departmentalism must have nullified the effects of much fervent praying during the late war. How grotesque to beseech God to intervene for England’s victory unless you are prepared for Him to put His Hand also on England’s greed and England’s drink and England’s vice! Yet this absolute condition of any real application of Christianity to common concerns seems to escape many intelligent people. There are those, in business and in politics, who will talk in large terms about the moral solution of world problems, but who, when it comes to the point, are not at all anxious to see too close an association between Christianity and mundane affairs. Let the Churches, they say, fight drink and vice and other specially selected moral evils; but it’s “ hands off ” when it is a question of Ireland, or strikes, or foreign politics. The recent controversy in the columns of the Times 1 between the Prime Minister and the Bishop of Chelmsford and other religious leaders is full of significance.

II

It is important to emphasize, at the outset of our studies, that this conception of a Christianity which can be, and is divinely intended to be, applied to all the range of human living is a vital part of the message and the life that Jesus Christ brought to men. If one should try and sum up in a sentence what the task was which Jesus undertook, and accomplished, it might be said that He came to show men God as He is, and to teach them a new way of living. As we shall see in further detail later on, these two sides of His task are inseparably interwoven, and much of the feebleness of our Christianity springs from a failure to grasp their close connection. If in any sense you are beginning to know God as Jesus reveals Him, that knowledge is bound to express itself in life; if you wish to explore the Christian way of living, you will fail unless you also arm yourself with His spiritual secret. It is with this moral and ethical side of “ original Christianity ” that we are for the moment con¬ cerned. We cannot too often or too eagerly follow the stream back to its source and seek to ascertain from Jesus Christ Himself what He really wanted men to do and to be. And the more we steep ourselves in the story of those days when He lived among men, the more evident does it become that the way of living He challenges men to adopt is something more than the “ holiness ” of ecclesiastics, which too often has an artificial smack about it, more also than an unattractive catalogue of virtues 7 inculcated by the moralists.

The manner of life He summons men to share reveals an extraordinarily high standard, but it is never cold and rigid and non-human; indeed wherever the spirit of what He meant is truly caught by any disciple of His, there you have a life which is warmly, joyfully human, and which imports into all human concerns and human relationships a radiance, a romance, and even a gaiety, such as are not to be had from a less vital source. What this life is and all it involves can only be seen by those who are prepared to investigate for themselves the story of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth and the impression which that life made upon His contemporaries. With this purpose in view it is worth while taking a modern translation of the New Testament (such as Moffatt’s or Weymouth’s) and reading the gospels straight through, just as one would read an ordinary modern book, in order thus to get a general impression of the main features of the way of living which Jesus sets before us. Some details may be difficult to understand or to interpret, but the general outline will be clear enough. Think of the kind of things He did: the way He treated people, especially people whom other folk disregarded; think of the extraordinary fashion in which He really cared for them, not with a sort of professional charity or forced “ love,” but with real human kindliness and friendliness, from the time when He cheered the neighbours as they dropped into the carpenter’s shop to the day when, for their sakes, He refused to save Himself from the cross; and think of the temper and attitude of mind which lay behind this 8 undiscouraged service of His fellow human beings. Think of the sort of things He said, which were simply a translation into words of what He was always doing : His description in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the parables, of the best kind of human life; His shrewd insight into every human weakness and His bold appeal to all the fine stuff latent in the man that God has made—his purity, his chivalry, his fundamental humility, his capacity to do and dare anything to help a brother man or serve a worthy cause. Think of the way in which He swept away all unrealities in religion, and recall His absolute insistence on the vital importance of right conduct, and more still on the quality of spirit and motive from which right action springs.

Above all, think of the kind of picture of God He put before men, for in that conception of God the moral demand and the moral power of the Christian way of living have their roots. God , He always insists, is Life and not a religious convention . Reference was made, at the beginning of this chapter, to the curious instinct in men that makes them invent a sort of artificial stratum of life which they call religion, and then they banish God to it. Some of the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus Christ were very clever at religion-inventing, and reduced it to a fine art. If, for instance, you were a tailor and carried your needle on the Sabbath day, you broke an important religious law and displeased God. If, on the other hand, you repaired to the Temple, selected and paid for an appropriate animal and had it sacrificed, you would be doing something religiously meritorious. It came as quite a shock to them when 9

Jesus Christ—and He somehow seemed to know— asserted strongly that God, the real God, had nothing whatever to do with that kind of thing: that, in fact, religion was something altogether different from what they supposed. He was never tired of trying to explain to them that God has far more to do with children and flowers and laughter and tears and all the myriad little kindly acts that weave the texture of common human living, than with the mass of religious paraphernalia which men are so fond of concocting. God, says Jesus Christ, is really interested in and concerned with all the common stuff of our brief lives : our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows, our work and our play, and all the wondrous tangle of our relationships with one another. “ Are not two sparrows sold for a far¬ thing ?—and not one of them shall fall to the ground without your Father : but the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” 1 Now if God is like this, and if you begin to see that He is like this, then life takes on a different meaning altogether, and your reaction to life is profoundly affected. Truth is seen to be the echo of His Mind, goodness the working of His Spirit, and beauty the very texture of His garment; your work becomes your service to Him and to your fellows, and all your relationships with your fellow-men are brought within the magic circle of a great family.

Recall, finally, that this presentation of God, with its summons to such a way of living, though of necessity profoundly and directly personal, is no mere individualism; it is, on the contrary, the 1 St. Matthew x. 29.

most social gospel that has ever been preached; when, says Jesus in effect, men will have the faith and courage to embark on this way of living together , there you have “ the Kingdom of God.” What else did He mean by the Kingdom of God but a new order of society in which selfishness should be ousted by love as the ruling principle of all life ? He goes on to say, in many different ways, that the goodness to which He summons men, and therefore the Kingdom which He plans, are feasible; they are ideals indeed, but ideals that are capable of realization. To this point we shall return later.

Ill

Such, in crude and broad outline, is the way of living to which Christ invites His disciples; a way of living which, if seriously pursued by even a fair number of persons, would be quite enough to turn our world into a very different kind of place. Yet, in this as in former generations of all the professing Christians alive in the world, there would seem to be relatively few who give a quite clear-cut impres¬ sion of a life truly Christ-like. Why is this ? Partly because it always has been, and no doubt always will be, “ hard to be a Christian.” It is far, far easier to follow the line of least resistance. And all honour to the gallant few who will climb any heights to go after Jesus. But to say this does not at all exhaust the answer to our question. I suggest that there is another reason for the relative weakness of practical Christianity, and that is that most

ii

Christians do not really know, or at least do not take enough pains to find out, what it means to be a Christian in the twentieth century. We know, or think we know, in a general sort of way, but not in a particular sort of way; our Christianity fails when we reach some of the more complicated details of life, in fact just in those very things where it ought to be and might be most effective. Most of us are far from irreligious, and some of us are still church¬ goers ; but few of us are competent performers in the sphere of “ every-day religion.”

I was talking about these things recently to a friend of mine, who is foreman in a wool factory. He is honestly trying, in that factory, to do his duty as a Christian; but he is often perplexed to know exactly what that duty is. “ I really want to bring more of Christianity into my working life,” he was saying to me; “ tell me what Pve got to do and I’ll try and do it.” To such a demand as that it is difficult to find a complete and wholly satis¬ factory answer. And for this reason, that the Church in our generation has not yet thought out in its fullness the kind of national life, social life, or business life that would be in harmony with the way of living which Christ enjoins and with the idea of God which He has brought to men . 1 The Church has not as a rule failed in enthusiasm for Christianity as a body of truth ; but the exploration of Christianity as a way of living it has largely left to individual pioneering and private initiative. No

1 I use the word Church in its widest sense as denoting organized Christianity generally.

one wants to see the Church lose its hold on funda¬ mental Christian doctrine; indeed as the generations pass it becomes more and not less vital to do the work of Christianizing the common thought of God. But many of us long to see the Church set itself, as seriously, to grapple with the other task, and so avoid the failure which waits upon a one-sided emphasis and a wrong proportion . 1 Moreover, this lop-sided tendency in the Church not only prevents it doing what it might be doing for the world, but it leads it to miss the most vital meaning of its cherished creeds. It comes to think of them as shelters to hide in, whereas they are, in fact, weapons to fight with, and they lose their edge if they are never put to their proper use.

There is, nevertheless, good reason to hope that in this matter of “ applied Christianity ” our generation is going to witness some substantial progress. It is not only that, as was noticed above, there are a very large number of people who believe, if vaguely, that the world may be salvaged by trying Christianity. There are other people who hold that belief, who are resolutely determined also to find out, by hard thinking and by bold personal experi¬ ment, hozu it is going to be salvaged, and what is really meant by applying the principles of Jesus Christ to the details of modern living. And they

1 One of our greatest Christian thinkers, Prof. D. S. Cairns, says in a recent article : “ Instead of claiming the whole world extensively and intensively for Christ, the Church has left great spaces in its moral demands, and into these empty houses there have entered the seven devils of national self-interest and the greed of personal gain .”—Student Movement, June 1921.

will refuse to be discouraged either by the apathy of the multitude on the one hand or, on the other, by those who attack the Christian ethic as being, to-day, inapplicable and unworkable. It is intelli¬ gible that a man should take a frankly pagan point of view and say he prefers the world as it is, with a moderately fair chance of a good time, and without any nasty religious altruism to spoil a man’s hope of looking after himself. But it is hardly a rational proposition to assert that Christianity is all right for an individual but was never meant to apply to social, national and international affairs. That is not a distinction that can be logically sustained; and, at any rate, it is not the Christianity of Jesus Christ. He, clearly, meant to be, and must inevitably be, Master everywhere if He is Master anywhere.

IV

Everyone’s way of living is determined ultimately by his standard of values. What is life really for ? What are the things that really matter ? How can life and personality be most fully realized ? These questions are answered by “ the world ” in one way, by Jesus Christ in quite another way. It is important to see how great a gulf divides the two answers. You cannot really make a compromise between them, as the Church has sometimes tried to do, with disastrous results. You cannot serve God and mammon. The need of the world, and of the Church, to-day is for more Christians who, flinging caution and compromise to the winds, will take Christ’s standard of values and proceed reso¬ lutely to work them out in all the conditions of modern living.

Chief among the possible lines of advance are those of corporate and personal thinking, followed by corporate and personal experiment. There are already some groups of Christians, and there ought to be many more, trying by joint thinking to find out what should be involved in Christian discipleship under modern conditions. With regard to corporate experiment, think what it might mean if sufficiently strong and representative groups in specific industries or certain professions were to make fresh and bold experiments in applying Christianity to their several callings. Meantime, pending any considerable Christianization of the conditions of present-day living, it can hardly be denied that, within the framework of Society as it is, there is enormous scope for personal adventure in Christian living. Everyone of us who “ means business ” in this matter can probably think straight away of certain domains of personal living and relationships (some of which will be discussed in the chapters that follow) which have never been thoroughly and finally claimed for Christianity. As to the importance of theory and practice going hand in hand, I may be permitted to quote a story from the mission field, which will emphasize the point better than any lengthy argument. The story goes that a Korean came into the study of a missionary one day and said, “ I have been memorizing some verses in the Bibifry and thought I would come and recite them IS to you.” The missionary listened while this convert repeated in Korean, without a verbal error, the entire Sermon on the Mount. Feeling that some practical advice might be helpful, the missionary said, “ You have a marvellous memory to be able to repeat this long passage without a mistake. How¬ ever, if you simply memorize it, it will do you no good. You must practise it.” The Korean Chris¬ tian smiled as he replied, “ That’s the way I learned it.” Somewhat surprised, the missionary asked him what he meant, and he said, “ I am only a stupid farmer, and when I tried to memorize it the verses wouldn’t stick. So I hit upon this plan. I memorized one verse and then went out and prac¬ tised that verse on my neighbours until I had it; then I took the next verse and repeated the process, and the experience has been such a blessed one that I am determined to learn the entire Gospel of Matthew that way.” And he did it.

That, after all, is the only way. The only way to learn to pray is, not to read books about prayer, but to pray. The only way to become Christlike is, not to devour books on Christian ethics, but to plunge recklessly into Christ’s way of living. And if a man has the pluck to do that, he will assuredly find that the motive and the knowledge and the dynamic for such a life are increasingly available. The power to be like Christ is, by a law that never fails, invariably given to those who are willing to walk with Him in a joyful, personal companionship. This is revolutionary Christianity—for to walk with Him and live by love does mean the turning upside down of all ordinary human conventions and human 16 standards. This is creative Christianity—for it solves the insoluble problem of transforming human nature : you will never get a changed world unless you can provide changed men. This is the Chris¬ tianity after which men to-day are groping, and which has in it that which can save the world.

c

Chapter II

THE PROBLEM OF LIVING TOGETHER i. In the World

" And it shall come to pass . . . that many nations shall come and say. Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths . . . and He shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks : nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more ."—Micah iv. 1-3.

“ Christ is our peace, He who has made us a unity and destroyed the barrier which kept us apart ."—Ephesians ii. 14 (Moffatt's version).

" The future will show whether civilisation, as we know it, can be mended or must be ended. The time seems ripe for a new birth of religious and spiritual life which may remould society, as no less potent force would have the strength to do."— Dean Inge.