The expansion of religion

Front matter

CIiap,.__r____, D ipyright No.

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Preface

These Lectures do not claim to be original, eloquent, erudite, or academic. They are the record of a working clergyman's sober thinking upon a subject, profound interest in which is coterminous with the life of man. As such a record only, they are offered to the public.

E. WINCHESTER DONALD.

Trinity Rectory, Boston, Massachusetts, yanuary> i8g6.

Contents

I. Religion and Salvation . . . . i

II. The New Anthropology ... 49

III. Religion and Righteousness ... 98

II. The New Anthropology

It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to exaggerate the difference in the estimates put upon the value of a human life in our own day and in the times that are now in the custody of written history. If it be true that the " individual withers and the race is more and more," it may turn out that the value set upon the race is solely to emphasize the value of the individual. The purpose of all social organization is the protection and welfare of the individual, whatever may have been the outcome of that organization. The associated man secures what the isolated man cannot. The creation of a new unit is the beginning of richer blessings to the individuals that unite to form the new unit. The distinct endeavor of association is to produce through association what without association cannot be. It is plain enough that many associations seek the good of those alone who compose it, and not seldom by wresting from outsiders what the outsiders, being unorganized, are powerless to retain. But this is indicative, not of a faulty purpose, but of a limited one. It is good as far as it goes ; it fails because it is not comprehensive enough. It seeks the welfare of a selected or elected company, unmindful of the welfare of the mass. But the point which is always discernible is this : that association exists for the sole purpose of securing an advantage to individuals. Even the costly sacrifices which individuals make for the maintenance of their association become intelligible only as the hope is cherished that these sacrifices are eventually to be paid back, in the form of rich and substantial benefits, to the individuals. The moment associated men feel that the association is neither bringing, nor likely to bring, an advantage which is distinctly personal, the association is discredited and finally dissolved. In other words, a high value is set upon the worth of a human being. Instead of sacrificing him for the sake of organization, — State, Church, Society, Guild, or

Order, all these exist to create and secure to him the conditions under which he may have the chance to live what he conceives to be his fullest life.

One who is not a historian cannot draw from history the concrete illustrations of the gradual growth of the increasingly high estimate put upon the preciousness of a human soul in which history abounds. But one need not be a historian intelligently to read the human significance of so high-handed and heartless an expenditure of human life as the building of the Egyptian Pyramids unquestionably involved. Here are the tombs of kings, stupendous monuments, not of monarchical glory, but of the reckless waste of innumerable human lives. Deep in the sands dug the myriad slaves, ignorant of everything save the stern necessity of yielding every least bit of strength in their bodies, and every least gleam of intelligence in their minds, to the demand of the king. Up from the sands it rises, that huge bulk of stone, testimony to the greatness of a Pharaoh, indestructible evidence of the cheapness and abundance of life. The whole is the tomb of a monarch, but every stone of it the tombstone of thousands who perished that this pile might rise. In the quarries and on the roads, on the machinery and on the walls, for a score of years, toiled every day a hundred thousand men, wageless, half fed, scourged, overworked, sick, dizzy, and exhausted. The only hospital was the taskmaster's whip, which stimulated into one last agonized effort the exhausted muscles of the used-up body, the frenzied movement of the reeling brain. Death was a welcome discharge, not seldom hastened by despair. Be it that the glory of the king required the speedy completion of its symbol, be it that a too fecund people must needs be decimated without recourse to massacre, the history of the building of the Pyramids attests the carelessly slight value set upon a thinking, feeling, human being made in the image of God.

Better than statistics, more strikingly than could the graphic pages of the historian, more lucidly than any anthropology, those huge mountains of stone tell us of an age when, to reverse our Saviour's words, " a sheep was much better than a man." It is impossible for us to exaggerate the low notions of the sacredness of life which almost everywhere confront us when we open the book of history and read. Abraham felt no weight upon his conscience when he made up his mind to slay his only son. The heart of the father blenched, but the ethical aspects of the killing did not concern him. Indeed, such a test of faith as he was subjected to could not have been applied had it been probable that he would ethically revolt against human sacrifice as an idea. God had promised that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed. The sole conceivable possibility of that promise being kept lay in the preservation of Isaac's life. Isaac once dead, the promise must fail. Could Abraham kill his son, and still go on believing that God was able to keep His word ? — that, and not some scruple about the morality of human sacrifice, was the patriarch's test. And that test could be applied only in an age in which life was held cheap. Very likely we shall sometime see clearly that that misinterpretation of God s will which resulted in the butchery of Canaanitish women and children was possible only among a people to whom had not yet come the perception of the preciousness of life. The sin of Saul in saving his prisoners from massacre would not have been sin at all had he saved them from motives of clemency and not of lust and gain. The plain fact of history is that the lower the estimate put upon man, the lower we shall find the conception of the nature of God to be ; and as we trace in this lecture the progress of the idea of the exceeding great value of a human being, we shall see at every step that that idea is rooted in finer, more moral, more holy conceptions of what God is. Religion is the source of all those endeavors which, ignoring Religion, not infrequently repudiating it, are seeking the reformation of human society, not merely in the mass, but in the concrete conditions of the individual, because Religion is the source of that new value given to man which makes saving him seem worth while. The first evidence of a higher value set upon man which I shall bring, is the establishment of the hospital. Doubtless the

Romans, with quick insight into the necessity of guarding against the weakening of their armies by disease, made special provision for the care of disabled or diseased soldiers ; but only those were cared for who gave promise of recovery and return to active duty. The Greeks reckoned the wounded and the sick a total military loss, and left their disabled men to the tender mercies of nature. There was a plenty more men where the fallen came from. It was not until the fourth century, when Christianity had become a power, mainly, to be sure, in the state, yet widely also in human hearts, that the first hospital was founded. It was a signal recognition of the fact that a broken body might be, ought to be, repaired ; a new testimony to an awakened sense of the value of life, however prominently was associated with it the idea of the economic wisdom of saving life. On from the fourth century, the establishment of hospitals, especially in connection with ecclesiastical institutions, grew apace, until at the beginning of the present century they became a fixed feature of municipal and military life. But it was reserved for the last two generations to develop the hospital idea out of a natural pity for physical suffering, and of alarm at the loss of so much economically valuable life, into the magnificent conception of hospitals as ministers to man's chance to live his life at its best on the physical side of it. Public interest has been so continuously drawn to a consideration of the clever contrivances of the hospital system, to the amazing advance in surgery made possible by antiseptic treatment and by sterilization, by the ingenious devices of a newborn architecture, that we have seldom asked whence came the motive which called into being these matchless provisions for the treatment and cure of human beings.

We have taken for granted that knowledge of methods by which sickness can be turned into health, twisted limbs made straight, and poison ejected from the blood, has as a matter of course resulted in the application of that knowledge to the broken bodies of men. But the moment we reflect upon it ever so little, we see that explanation breaking down. For at the start, a pure human pity, vitalized by Christian love, cast about for means wherewith to mitigate pain. Rough and faulty those means were, but for the most part love of man called them into being. And running down from Fabiola's venture of faith, inspired by Jerome, to the Vanderbilts' munificent provision for the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, medical science has confidently counted upon the expansion of man's pitiful concern for his brother's body to supply it with the means to establish its hospitals and bring to perfection its surgical and medical appliances of cure. The Massachusetts General Hospital two hundred years ago is unthinkable, not because of the cost it implies, but because there was in the colony but a faint glimmer of the beautiful compassion for physical suffering which beats in the heart of the Commonwealth to-day. The gifts and grants which have made it a benediction are not a people's homage to the marvelous development of medical science and to its economic outcome, but a testimony to a people's deep-hearted, warm-hearted belief that no man among us should languish in unsanitary, ignorant, and poverty-limited conditions, or drag a maimed body through his painful years, if science can give him health and straightness.

You cannot touch the motive which builds our hospitals without instantly feeling that you have your finger upon the heart of a religious conviction that mans body must be saved because the man who lives in it is worth more than all else. The expansion of Religion, on that side of it which regards the human body, precedes and inexorably conditions the expansion of the hospital to meet the needs of suffering. It is this expansion of Religion also, perpetually asserting the truth which long ago was uttered in the Bible — " Know ye not that your bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost " — which has led to the separation of the generic hospital into hospitals for the sexes and for children, and finally into those reserved for specific diseases. At the end of the last century, when a stupid law in France, and an equally stupid one in England, compelled the hospital authorities to receive every patient that applied for admission, irrespective of the crowded condition of the wards and the nature of the applicants disease, the mortality was so appalling that it became a serious question whether hospitals w 7 ere a benefit or a curse. As schools for instructing medical students in the art of healing, they were an undoubted success, but the growing philanthropy recoiled from the thought of securing competent medical and surgical knowledge at so frightful a cost in human life. It revolted at the sight of four, and even six, suffering bodies crowded into a single bed in a ward which rivaled in populousness a tenement house in Mulberry Bend.

" These are our brothers and sisters," it cried, " each with a love of life, each capable of exquisite suffering and exquisite joy, each entitled to a chance with us of finding in this world the satisfaction of the nature into which they were born. The modesty of woman has rights which are being ignorantly but none the less shamefully sacrificed. The timidity of little children is daily made the occasion of an agony. The chances of life for the mother and her newborn babe are destroyed by the proximity of fever and contagion. The sacredness of human life is overlaid by considerations of economy." That was the cry of an enlightened philanthropy, of an educated political economy, if you like ; but only as it reached the ear of those who profoundly felt the essential preciousness of a human being was there so much as a chance that reform would enter the hospital, insisting that, at any pecuniary cost, men and women must be treated, not as cases, but as souls, not as organisms out of repair, but as persons, with all the rights of personality to a care and treatment which regarded a cure as the beautiful gate through which they were to go to a new life of privilege and endeavor. However great be the contributions of medical science to that development of the hospital which has revolutionized its bills of mortality, and secured a seemly decency to its provisions for sex and infancy, we shall but half account for these splendid achievements if we fail to recognize the part played by Religion in creating the motive which compelled the revolution. Without that expansion of Religion which witnesses to a profound and passionate belief in such a salvation for man as provides him with the best chances, and which includes in its conception of salvation the highest possible safety of his body, the evolution of the hospital out of something little better than a pest house into a system which has made the representative hospital the guarantee of the best treatment and the surest cure, could never have been. Out of a quickened and enlightened sense of the value of a man, which is thoroughly religious, has blossomed this splendid provision for the care and cure of his broken body. The city hospital is the utterance of the city's religious belief in mans physical salvation, just as a St. Vincents or a St. Margaret's Hospital is the expression of the Church's religious belief in that salvation, — the one as much as the other. Destroy that religious belief, let the care of the sick be handed over to the mercy of economical considerations, and while medical knowledge and surgical skill may remain, even increase, the sources of power to utilize them, to furnish them with opportunity, run thin and perhaps dry up.

I do not think we can exaggerate the part played by Religion here. You and I may have been tempted by early and inveterate ideas to look upon modern provision for physical need as an indication of the decline of religious interest and the mildly hostile rise of materialism ; but when one calmly reflects upon the origin, not of knowledge and skill, but of the powerful motive which has seized skill and knowledge as instruments for the cure of human disease, he traces back to Religion, expanded and enlightened, the streams which are flowing through humanity to form a purer river of life.

I find also that sanitary science is under larger obligations to religion than appears upon the surface. The instinct of self-preservation may safely be trusted to avail itself of every appliance known to science, provided that instinct is enough enlightened. And in the dwellings of the well-to-do, in all first-class structures, hotels, office buildings, schools and dormitories, for the use of the well-to-do, sanitary arrangements of approved and up-todate perfection are expected as a matter of course. They are vitally necessary in the mansion, and economically profitable in all income-producing buildings whose tenants are alive to the dangers of bad sanitary conditions. And so we find them wherever legitimately selfish intelligence and competitive urgency demand them. But in another direction sets the religious spirit. Insisting upon the intrinsic value of man, independent of anything he possesses and of the conditions under which he lives, Religion has been demanding that the ignorant poor shall share with the intelligent rich the benefits of sanitary science. The tenement- house question may turn out to be an economical one — for one, I think it will — but the agitation for the decent housing of the poor in both England and America has thus far been, not economical, but religious. It has never been the exclusive concern of the Church as an organized body, but when we scrutinize the nature of the motives of those who have been foremost in agitations for model tenement houses, we find them to be firmly rooted in the idea, which is distinctly religious, that man, just because he is man, with capacity to grow and to shrink, to rise and to sink, to become more spiritual and more bestial, is entitled to a material condition which secures him a chance to develop as the nature of the body he inhabits declares he ought.

Mr. Henry George, in answering the question " Is our civilization just to workingmen ? " draws a picture of the homes of the rich and the abodes of the poor which will illustrate, in a way he did not intend, the point we have in mind. " Imagine," he says, " that the first man Adam in the slumber of the night stood by your bedside in one of those great cities which are the flower, crown, and type of our civilization, and asked you to take him through it. Here you would take him through wide and well-kept streets lined with spacious mansions, replete with everything w r hich can enhance comfort and gratify taste, adorned with magnificent churches. Again, you would pass through another quarter where everything is niggard and pinched, where families are packed together tier and tier, sometimes a whole family in a single room ; w 7 here even such churches as you see are poor and mean, and only the grogshops are gorgeous. Which quarter do you think Adam would understand you to mean, if you spoke of the workingman's quarter ? " Mr. George is appealing to the public sense of justice, and his appeal is founded upon the argument that such a deplorable contrast is proof of an inequitable distribution of the proceeds of labor. But the appeal challenges instantly a reply in terms of political economy. It inaugurates a debate which is still in active progress, and meanwhile the contrast between the Back Bay and the Cove, Fifty-seventh Street and Avenue B, remains as flagrant as ever, so far as any efforts of the debaters have mitigated it.

But Religion, pushing its way through the discussion, has insisted that there is another argument which must be heard and heeded. " The human beings housed in the worst conceivable sanitary conditions are our brethren, part of the great whole, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. While you are debating, they are dying ; while you are in search of an impregnable solution of an economical question, little children are day by day drinking in the poison of a foulness of air and a degree of almost necessitated filth which, working in the blood, will put them on the threshold of manhood and womanhood handicapped for life. God never meant that man should live as these are living. The hollow-eyed, bent, gaunt, white-faced woman who emerges from the tenement house of an August morning is not the type of the woman God meant should live upon this earth. Let her be bad, fond of beer and tea and snuff — that alone is incapable of producing this distortion of womanhood. God protests in the person of every comely woman against conditions which sap the strength and mar the beauty of a woman. God is every day declaring in the wholesomeness of health, and in the pathetic repulsiveness of the disease that grows naturally out of poisoned air and reeking walls, that man was meant to be as beautiful as the leopard and the bird." You see that, after all, it is Religion speaking, Religion, which has conceived of man as so precious that it cannot tolerate the thought of his living in circumstances which, while they cannot of themselves degrade him, make his physical deterioration inevitable.

The movement in the direction of a better sanitary provision for the poor, however non-religious here and there it may appear, is at heart religious, Christian as well. If legislation is at length slowly and tentatively incorporating into the body of statute law provisions for a rigid inspection of our tenement houses, prescribing the character of the plumbing which the owner must provide, testing it when it is in place, compelling its repair when defective, that argues something more than governmental solicitude for the health of those who must do the hard work of the nation and the town. It declares, rather, that the religious conception of the value of a man has insinuated itself into public sentiment, and that the sense of public duty has uttered itself in law. When I hear that sanitary reform is the direct outcome of an enlightened science of the laws of health, and that it shows how unnecessary, after all, is the Religion which once was the creator of all humane reforms, I must still ask whence came the uncalculating force which seized upon sanitary science as an instrument, and made into fact what before was only ascertained knowledge ? Whence came the courage, the heroic, persistent, largehearted devotion which, after uncounted efforts, succeeded in permeating a public sentiment, half ignorant and half indifferent, with the acute consciousness that city tenements are an outrage upon humanity ? Not from a body of sanitary experts, as such, not out of a commercial forecast of a great new industry, not out of a threatened revolt of helpless tenants, but straight out of hearts in which lived the great conviction that man as man was too precious, too richly endowed with sensitive powers of feeling joy and pain, of rising into self-respect and sinking into animalism, to be allowed to live in conditions which daily threatened to break down the fair structure of a body that tenanted a fairer soul. Men and women, who perhaps repudiate orthodoxy of every sort, have found in their devotion to their brother's need the surest warrant for believing that deep in their hearts was a truer Religion than that illustrated in a scrupulous ritual, and in a devotion which may issue in hardness of heart. I cannot, and I will not, believe that Religion is decaying so long as vigorous warfare is waged against everything which lowers respect for the bodies which are temples of the Holy Ghost. The preachership which declares the gospel of the body is as truly religious as the preachership which proclaims the gospel of the spirit.

And to that preachership we largely owe it that the distortion, " How much is a sheep better than a man," has been restored to its original divine form, " How much is a man better than a sheep. " It is difficult, nay, it is impossible, not to break out into a fervent thanksgiving that, in our dear city, one noble-hearted, courageous, undaunted woman 1 has made physical living far less hopeless and far more hopeful for thousands who, but for her clear voice, would still be steeped in unmitigated miseries and unspeakable surroundings. It is not yet clear to us all that every effort to make life materially

yo THE EXPANSION OF RELIGION.

fairer for the unfavored many is an effort which only Religion explains and makes possible ; but it is growing clearer, and when the salvation of man is seen to be having all that is best in him at its best, organized Religion will proudly claim as its own the least of the acts which furnish man his chance to become what God intended him to be.

And this leads naturally to a consideration of that feature of modern life here in America which is still the object of praise and blame. The astonishing increase of physical exercise — whether in the form of athletics in our colleges, or sports in clubs, or drill in the gymnasium — has to many minds frequently worn the look of a logical consequence of the so-called materialism of the day. " Of course," they say, " all this was bound to come ; what else should follow the decline of spiritual Religion, the decay of a reverent belief in the powers of the world to come ? This exaltation of the body, this rich provision for its development and perfection, is rooted in that passionate devotion to things which characterizes all modern life. Beauty in art,

THE NEW ANTHROPOLOGY. Jl

luxury in living, sumptuousness in appointments, and money as a measure of worth, require a perfect body for their perfect enjoyment. The more this life crowds out the consideration of the next, the surer will be mans effort to secure the only vehicle which can carry him safely from start to finish of the journey which begins at birth and probably ends at death. To 1 Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' has been added, ' Let us exercise and develop our bodies, for without their health and vigor we perish before we die.' w But such a judgment overlooks several considerations which have to do with Religion. Religion, as we have been saying, is intent on saving all that is best in man. But it has been taught by physiology, and more recently by psychology, that while wickedness is not the outcome of a depraved body, a depraved body is the removal of many of the most valuable restraints to evil impulse, and perhaps the occasion of evil impulse itself. It certainly is provocative of restlessness on the one side, of lethargy upon the other ; and the moment a man is thoroughly restless or thoroughly lethargic, he is open to a set of temptations to which the normal man is a stranger. It is not true, historically or rationally, that wickedness is the necessary consequent of ill health, but it is true, historically and rationally, that national physical deterioration is followed by national moral deterioration, or, if not followed, is accompanied by it. The mere perception of this fact, however, and its abundant verification by both past and present, is powerless to secure a right treatment of the body for the sake of ethical or intellectual results in man and nation.

What was needed, and what is needed still, is the profound conviction that man is so rich in capacity of development, so intrinsically worthy, and so manifestly planned for a career that demands the perfection of every power, that to ignore his body is to thwart God's purpose. The moment a man cries out in deep belief, " I have no right to deny my body what, as an instrument of mind and spirit, it demands ; I have no right, in the supposed interest of that mind and spirit, to interpret * keeping it under ' as permission to let its channels become clogged or foul, its blood to run hot and thin ; I have no right to allow it to become the hotbed of disordered nerves or the pit of narcotized force/' we have a new anthropology, in which the religious significance of physical vitality has its rightful recognition. So far, then, from physical culture being a sign of decaying spirituality, it is rather the as yet unconscious, but none the less true, insistence upon the indubitable fact that ministry to the body is as truly an act of Religion as ministry to the soul The only reason our boys and young men are unable to recognize that the drill of the gymnasium is integrally one with worship in the chapel, is that they have heard the two acts spoken of as having no relation to one another, or, if not that, have never listened to a frank declaration of the fundamental equality of them as exercises — " gymnastics," to use St. Paul's striking phrase — which have in view the symmetrical development of the perfect man.

But there are not wanting signs of an increasing, and increasingly intelligent recognition^ by both educators and preachers of Religion, that in the near future the training of the child's body must keep equal pace with instruction in morals and Religion too ; not as a graceful accomplishment merely, not as a physical preparation for the hard work of manhood only, but as the necessary accompaniment of anything like a true development of the nature which looks up to God for inspiration that it may look out on the world w r ith sanity and hope. In other words, the present wide interest in physical exercise is essentially a religious one, because it rests squarely upon our profound conviction that to do adequately what we can do, to meet faithfully what membership in society involves in the way of task and duty, there must be a body which, by its vigor and strength, can keep our noblest purposes from degenerating into feeble good wishes. That is the religious basis of physical exercises. And it is characteristic of our time that it has lifted, or that it is trying to lift, the passion for the body's development clean out of the idea of it as valuable mainly for making a nation of vigorous soldiers and muscular toilers, and is setting it forth as an integral part of the ideal of the perfect man. It is corroborative of this view of it that when physical exercise secured recognition as a necessary part of education, when provision was made for it in our schools and colleges in the same way that provision had been made for instruction in chemistry and for worship in the chapel, there was at once discrimination between physical culture and competitive sports.