The gospel at work in modern life

Prefatory Note

The social influence of Christianity is being recognized to-day in a manner and to a degree that would surprise Christian workers of a generation ago. In keeping with this tendency, the Baptist Young People's Union of America has arranged its courses of study to provide for the needs of young people in the direction of this new emphasis of Christian thought. The purpose of this book is to serve as studies in the Sacred Literature Course in young people's societies. The subject has been chosen because of its practical character, and the relation of its parts to individual life.

It is a matter of gratification to the Committee to be able to offer to young people's societies the course of studies in this book, at the same time so practical, so timely, and so deeply interesting. The author, who has given much of his life to a consideration of the questions discussed and has won for himself a reputation for thoroughness and candor, has herein given some of his best thoughts in a most pleasing style.

The course has been shortened in respect to the number of lessons, so that it now consists of twelve instead of twenty or twenty-five as in former years. George T. Webb.

Table Of Contents

Chapter Page

I. The Modern Christian's Problems.. 9

II. The Gospel That Works 20

Chapter I The Modern Christianas Problems

In the large library room of the Leland Stanford, Jr., University, at Palo Alto, Cal., at almost any hour of the day, several score of students may be found conning their lessons, making notes, or browsing over some book just withdrawn from the adjacent shelves. High above them, on the western wall, is a large art-glass window, whence the light falls upon the bowed heads of the students from the benignant face of a medieval saint, Thomas a. Kempis, the reputed author of the best-known book of devotional meditations which the Christian centuries have produced. The garb and face alike proclaim the monk, and the presence there of the great ascetic's figure is sufficient reminder to those at all familiar with the words of his confession, printed under his picture in one of the galleries of the Old World : " Everywhere I sought quiet, and found it nowhere else than in solitude and amongst books."

Could the old monk himself take the place for an hour of that calm, illuminated face which, in io The Gospel at Work in Modem Life

immovable complacency, looks clown upon the Stanford students of this very modern world, after what manner would his meditations move to-day? How would he write now for the young men and young women coming and going in the reading-room below concerning his great theme, " The imitation of Christ?" Or what have all the changes that have come to pass in the four hundred and forty years since he died to do with the working of the gospel in the lives of men?

It may be granted that it was no dull age in which Thomas a Kempis lived, and that his was not an average life. 'He was contemporary with John Hus, and Jerome of Prague, and Savonarola, men of very different temper from his, borne through a far more tempestuous career. Gutenberg, to whom the invention of the art of printing is generally allowed, shared the century with a Kempis, and printed his first Bible about twenty years before a Kempis died. It was the age of the " Maid of Orleans " in France, of " The Wars of the Roses " in England, of the famous or infamous Medici family in Italy, and the closing years of a Kempis saw the fateful marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. With none of these things did a Kempis concern himself, and they might have happened upon another planet so far as the great mystic had to do with them. But whether we think of the monk, a Kempis, or of the martyr, Hus, or of the soldier-saint, Joan of Arc, or of any other of the

The Modern Christian's Problems II

remembered figures of four and more centuries ago, as looking down from that sunset window upon the youth of our time, we are thinking of men and women almost as far away from the things that interest and perplex us as we seem ourselves to the sober minded among us from actual intercourse and exchange of ideas with the hypothetical inhabitants of Mars.

We are not seeking quiet now, and few of us are seeking solitude. Our very books have become the clamorous voices of the unrest of our day. Our ideal of the saintly life has changed. We reverence the mystics, in art glass, but our own heart's saints are the men of strenuous life. We read the words of a Kempis somewhat as we look upon the window there, touched with the glory of the westering sun, with a certain sensitive enjoyment of its rich coloring and artistic lines, feeling in a way the delicate hues of his words and the fine tracery of his thought. But we turn from it all to our tasks which are lighted after all by the colder light that flows in through unadorned windows, or perchance the nearer glow of the electric light. And sometimes the " imitation of Christ " seems itself as unreal as the figures wrought in art glass yonder on the walls, and as far removed from the conditions of our ordinary life as the glowing electric bulb from the shadowy cell of the medieval monk.

It is fortunate for our faith that there is a greater distance between Jesus and a Kempis than there is between a Kempis and us. At first the distance seems to our disadvantage, for in point of time Jesus is farther away yet. But not in point of contact with our lives. Jesus was no ascetic. He lived his life emphatically among men. He was with them at the wedding feast, and dined familiarly with them at the banquet table. The plowman, the sower, and the harvester, the fisherman, and all the common round of daily toil and ordinary interests furnished him with the imagery of his speech. The common people heard him gladly because he was of their number and kept always his intimacy with their lives. He was called " a wine-bibber and a glutton " by reason of his easy and natural associations with the rich, and " a friend of publicans and sinners " by reason of his democratic associations with the poor. Jesus was preeminently a " mixer " among men. This was more than half of his offensiveness to the professionally religious of his day. It is increasingly his attractiveness to the men and women of our time who have discernment enough to pierce the thinner atmosphere of religious professionalism now.

Yet, even Jesus is far away from the modern Christian's problems if we do not guard ourselves as to what we mean by the " imitation of Christ." It is not enough that we do not mean an imitation of a Kempis rather than Christ. It is easy enough to see that the issue is not for us, How shall we live the life of Thomas a Kempis to-day? There

The Modern Christian's Problems 13

may have been much to excuse it and justify it in the age in which a Kempis lived. But neither for that age nor for any other age was it the life which Jesus lived. It was radically different in principle. The ideal of a Kempis was isolation. The ideal of Jesus was incarnation. Thomas a Kempis did not imitate Jesus. He did but imitate certain moods and tenses of the Christian life. And there is danger even in the imitation of Jesus himself if we mistake the letter of his example for the lordship of his spirit and his life. Jesus' teaching is just as vital for us in substance as it was for the men and women with whom he shared the fashions and customs of a distant day. His was the timelessness of absolute truth. It is part of his timelessness that he spoke little of the " problems " of his own generation. But his life was, nevertheless, of that generation. The very humanness with which he lived, and the fact that he spoke not according to the abstractions of mystics or philosophers, but in the terms of everyday life as he actually saw it, and shared it, compel us to go behind the letter of his saying and doing if we are to translate his truth into a like union with the life of our day. He saved the life of his age by entering into it and becoming part of it. We shall not save the life of our generation by getting away from it in the effort to realize closer fellowship with him through an impossible union with conditions which have long since passed away. His ideal for us is neither the isolation of the medieval monk, nor the imitation of the forms of his own earthly ministry, but the transfusion of his life into us and through us into the forms and customs and institutions of our day. Thomas a Kempis would make candles of us all, burning in golden candlesticks of secluded devotion before the altars of a dead Christ. Jesus would make of every one of us a " live wire " in our own generation, electric with the divine grace and goodness which were in him, carrying the might and mystery of the heavens to the humblest hamlet in the land with a glow which the palaces of the past could not command, and drawing from every river and rivulet of the rushing life of our time the power which men of old worshiped with fearful faces afar off as it flashed and thundered in the skies, that we may minister of and through that power to the enlargement and enrichment of all the life of the world.

Therefore, the foremost problem of the modern Christian is the Christian's first problem in every generation — to translate the timeless truth of Jesus, not the temporary forms of that truth, into the most convincing and commanding terms of contemporary life. And it is especially the problem of youth, because to youth especially belongs the life of to-day.

The problem has always been both one and many. It was never so manifold and complex as it is to-day. Life has always met youth and faith with the challenge of change and enlargement. But the change was never so rapid and so varied, and the enlarge-

The Modem Christian's Problems 15

ment never so trying to judgment and courage as is the case in this century in which we live. Often and again there has been need of intellectual readjustment to meet the conditions of expanding knowledge. It was even before the beginnings of Christianity that one wrote the familiar complaint, " Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." Yet, for every student the world knew then, it knows a thousand now, and we burn up more printed matter every morning in starting our fires than all the laborious copyists of that ancient day could write down from year's end to year's end. If the discoveries of a Galileo seemed to the men of the medieval world to threaten the very foundations of the faith, what of the vastly more disturbing upheavals which have broken the crust of every province of education in our time, and tumbled down great cities of painstakingly builded traditions wherein men have lived and wrought for centuries? If the world of thought was stirred to restlessness when the pioneers of research went forth a day's journey with their ox-cart conveyances into the unexplored regions beyond their Alleghanies what of conviction and conjecture now when men pass from sea to sea within a week and investigation goes with the swiftness and force of a modern express train, or challenges the lightness and celerity of the birds in their own atmosphere? Never was the problem so acute as it is to-day for those who would keep their faith and would keep also abreast of knowledge. Never was it so easy to throw old truth away by reason of the pressure of new opinion. Never did the fellowship with Jesus require such nice discrimination as it does now on the intellectual side between the changing terms in which we think of all externals from documents to doctrines and the essential changelessness of all that pertains to the inner life of truth. Yet, nowhere is the gospel more triumphantly at work in modern life than in demonstrating the difference between faith and intellectual form.

Nor was ever the problem of poverty or plenty so pressing as it is to-day. There is more in this modern world to tempt the young Christian, especially, to forsake the " mind of Christ " for mammonism than even the ages of buccaneering knew. For our necessities are more than the luxuries of our fathers, and their affluence is less than competence for us. Not only are the manifest rewards immeasurably greater for the successful now, but the area of success has enlarged quite as much as the area of education, and the common man has access to the adventures of wealth beyond even the degree of his access to the once exclusive fields of knowledge. Mammonism is not only more democratic than it was of old, hobnobbing now with all classes and conditions of men, and holding out an inviting hand to the street urchin as well as to the prince, but mammonism is more respectable and

The Modern Christian's Problems ij

much more religious. Nowhere is the problem of adjustment between a faithful following of the Christ and participation in the life of this present world more difficult to-day than it is with respect to the Christian's attitude toward wealth. We have taken the rich young ruler into the church, and are holding him up as an example of achievement and rare opportunity. Yet the gospel was never more mightily at work for the overthrow of mammonism than it is in the hearts of multitudes of Christians to-day.

The problem of pleasure, like the problem of profit, is vastly increased and intensified. The field of knowledge has not more enlarged than the field of what is popularly called fun. There is no more serious obstacle to the growth of the kingdom of God among us than the levity of the age. Religion has profited by the growth of cheerfulness. But counterfeit cheerfulness is more costly to a people than counterfeit currency. A vast amount of our humor is not humor at all, but vicious vulgarity, as witness our Sunday supplements. Recreation is the next neighbor to regeneration, as the very form of the word implies, but to confound it with dissipation is as dangerous as to mistake a reef for the entrance to a harbor. One of the largest problems of the Christian life of the day, and preeminently of the young Christian life of this generation, is the redemption of the vast new provinces which have been added within recent times to the once comparatively meager and barren domain of diversion and delight.

And how is the whole field of conscience expanded to-day ! What problems the growth of modern industrialism presents to the man who would determine his ways by the spirit of Christ. How easy is it to be individually honest, and kind, and even generous, and to be socially void of Christian conscience and as fractionally irresponsible as was the savage in his primitive individual way. What bigger problem has any age had than this of developing a co-operative Christian conscience? And let it not be thought that this problem concerns the employer more than it does the employee, the man who sells his brains for big dividends more than the man who sells his body for a " full dinner pail." This is peculiarly the problem of our time. The effective working of the gospel in almost any of us to-day is conditioned to a degree the world has never known before upon the development of a social conscience that shall be purely and profoundly Christian.

These are the larger lines of the problem of interpreting the gospel in the terms of our times. In one sense all these problems are old; they were always part of the main problem. Yet are they each of them as different from what they were yesterday as Europe is different from the Europe of Thomas a Kempis' day. And all our problems, however old in substance, are so new in emphasis that they are

The Modem Christian's Problems 19

practically new worlds to conquer for the Christ. If his gospel is to win them through us, we must be very sure that we know what his gospel is.

+ +* Quiz

i. Who was Thomas a Kempis? 2. In what respect does the monastic attitude toward life differ from the method of Jesus' ministry? 3. What is the fundamental problem of every generation with reference to Christian living? 4. How does the enlarging field of knowledge and research affect Christian living to-day? 5. What are the forces which make most for mammonism now? 6. How is the problem of pleasure affected by modern developments? 7. What do you understand by a social conscience?

I. What are the dangers of pietism? 2. Is the cheerfulness of present-day Christian living as compared with the somberness of the past wholly an advantage? 3. If you perceive points of danger and disadvantage in the present attitude, indicate what they are. 4. Do you consider the present age as on the whole more favorable to Christian living than the past? 5. If so, state what its advantages are.

Chapter II

In a quiet Christian home, not long ago, I found this bit of verse from a well-known woman writer of to-day :

" So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, When just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs."

The " sad world " was no idle phrase with that family just then, for under the modestly framed motto was an open coffin, and in the coffin lay the youngest daughter of the house, one of the fairest girls of thirteen brief summers I have ever seen. There was certainly need of the gospel of kindness in that house that day. And there was need of more.

There is need of the gospel of kindness in every home and every age. The " art of being kind " is not so common that we can afford to despise any wise emphasis upon it. Nor is it so small a part of the gospel of Jesus Christ as some suppose. Love may be the larger word, but there is something of the warmth and glow of the open fireside about that word kindness, and it does one's heart good to sit before it and take in the brightness and comfort of it.

But the word kindness will have to be exceedingly enlarged beyond all its ordinary meanings if we are going to make it cover all the height and depth and length and breadth of religion. This is putting a strain upon the word which our differences concerning " gods " and " creeds " will hardly justify. Nor would these differences disappear if we called our " gods " and " creeds " by some other name, whether that name were kindness or some more pretentious word.

Our age will not be satisfied with sectarianism for religion, but neither will it be satisfied with sentiment. There is nothing in " gods " and " creeds " except as our idea of " being's source and end" is an inspiration to godly, that is godlike, living. In the last analysis the value of a man's " god " is the " good " which follows. So also the value of a man's creed, that is of his belief, is its product in character. What he lives is his actual faith. But it is foolish to suppose that kindness cannot be counterfeited quite as easily as any other god or creed when kindness is substituted for these, and there is no reason whatever for the notion that men would all think alike as to kindness if that were suddenly made the universal religious formula. There would be as many kinds of kindness in that case as there are kinds of " gods " and " creeds " now.

The popular disparagement of " gods " and " creeds " which finds expression everywhere to-day is chiefly due to the fact that our contentions about these things so often obscure the real thing, and that is that the end of all religion is moral and not metaphysical, spiritual and not intellectual, a present salvation from " the sin that doth so easily beset us " and not a hypothetical " beatification " in some " blessed land " beyond the grave. It is better to be kind here and now, if the kindness is real and not merely superficial, than it is to hide harshness and selfishness under the borrowed plumage of empty talk about God, even though our kindness lack something of conscious inspiration through faith in him who is nevertheless the source of all the goodness and kindness that is in the world. It is better to be negative as to one's beliefs, to confess a kind of a vague agnosticism as to the beginning and end of things if one can still be positive on the side of righteousness and truthfulness and kindness between man and man than to have " the plan of the ages " at one's tongue's end, and at the same time be narrow and intolerant and void of any effective social consciousness. " God is not mocked," and as between the man who worships a shibboleth in the name of God and the man who serves righteousness and misses the definition of the divine, there is no reason to think that he will prefer the label on an empty package to the goods themselves, though the label has been obscured. The " foundation of God " which " nevertheless standeth sure " is very significantly defined in the ancient Scripture in two great affirmations, " the Lord knoweth them that are his," and " let every one that nameth the name of the Lord depart from unrighteousness." Only as our dogmatic and creedal packages are the guarantee of genuineness and uncontamination will they count for anything with God.

All this is granted with the heartiest welcome to any thoughtful and earnest protest against mere creedalism as a substitute for helpful, faithful, kindly living. By all means let us beware of " gods " and " creeds " which tend to get between us and godly character. The demand for life as against mere lip service is good. The insistence upon kindness as much nearer the heart of religion than contention over definitions is sensible and sound. " Sound doctrine " means first of all sound living, and when it means less the clamor for it is a false cry. The world's need to-day, the panacea for present problems, is not the success of this or that dogma in itself considered, nor the triumph of any mere definition of the gospel; the world's need is the gospel itself, and nothing less than this will work salvation for the men and women of our time. And whatever else the gospel may include or imply, the gospel itself is first and last and always a life, of which kindness is no inconsiderable part. Jesus came '■ that men might have life," not logic, and that " they might have it more abundantly," not that they might increase their creeds, of which the world had already a plenty even then. Certainly he did not die to save a definition; he died as he lived, to save men. Neither is there any definition by which men are always and everywhere saved. Men are saved as they live in him, and in no other way. The value of a man's creed is simply as a viaduct through which the water of life finds its way to his inmost life. It is the water that saves, not the waterway. Yet, how shall a man drink without a " cup," even the " blood " ; that is, the life of Christ? Why find fault that some waterways are of wood, and some of clay, and some of lead or iron or stone, unless they are so clogged that the water cannot flow through them at all, or unless they dangerously contaminate the water itself? Grant that the water is the all in all, and that here and there men are found strong enough to go back to its hidden sources in the hills and drink from their own hands. Still is it not true that for the vast majority of those who " labor and are heavy laden " the water must be carried to their lips in cups and vessels which other men have made and filled, and by waterways which are not always perfect in service? Even the poorest of this service is generally better than no service at all. And, unfortunately, if I may carry the figure a little farther, the tendency in modern life is to favor less of private monopoly in these waterways which serve the multitude, and to make the service both cheaper and better ; in a word, to give every man more of immediate control over his own supplies.

The fact is that what we need is not fewer " gods " and " creeds." What we need is more. We need that every man shall have his own thought about God, and that every man shall have his own individual faith toward the divine. There would be more of goodness and kindness if there were more thoughtfulness about religious things. The gospel will work best as it works most individually, as every man insists upon it for himself that he has a pure and a plenteous supply. We may not all prefer the same kind of a cup, and we may not all be supplied through the same particular pipe next to our own door. But we are all getting to the point where we feel the common need of getting the water as nearly as possible as it falls out of the same generous skies or springs in purity from the depths of the ground. And for our religion we are all getting back more and more to the mountain heights of the Scriptures and the skies under which we stand face to face with God.

Let the young Christian beware both of overmuch dependence upon creeds and of overmuch disparagement of creeds. He can neither get along with them nor without them of themselves. Their value for him is their mediation of life to him. If the divine life flows free and strong through them, they are of value to him, otherwise they are worse than vain. But let him not suppose that he can substitute for them some vague sentiment which has no sense of God and no imperative of divine origin and destiny within it. This will prove but a mirage in the desert. No gospel will work very long or very far in our own age or any other which is not first of all a gospel of God. " Well, what do you believe in ? " I asked an irate infidel, who gloried in the name, and who was raging against the idea of God. And he thundered at me with tremendous inconsistency, " What do I believe in ? I believe in love ! " Yet, long centuries ago, one said to have been that disciple who leaned on Jesus' bosom, and who learned from the Master himself the immortal and incomparable definition, gave this as the synonym of God, " God is love/' So that either the infidel was himself a hypocrite, or else he was not an infidel, since his faith was in God. A man may look up, and in fellowship with Jesus say, " Abba," that is, " Father," or he may talk learnedly of his confidence in " the integrity of the cosmic process," but if he thinks truly at all, he will hardly get away from the idea of God. No other gospel works life in men. It is no accident that the record is made concerning Moses, whose kindness to Israel was no mere personal sentiment, but an all-consuming social passion, " He endured as seeing him who is invisible." No kindness bigger than a bit of simple good nature or passing sentiment will long " endure " without spiritual vision. The gospel that works is the gospel of God.

And it is the gospel of God in a person, in " the man Christ Jesus." " You think that you do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ," I said in substance to a friend of ultra-Unitarian views, but of very beautiful and Christlike life. " Are you sure of it? Is not the God and Father in whom you believe really Jesus Christ, whom you have given another name? Are not all your thoughts of the divine actually in terms of Jesus Christ? Neither you nor any one else can be saved from false thinking and false living, except as you do really think and live in him, whether you recognize him as the source of your living and thinking or not." He could not deny the affirmation, though he was slow to allow what it implied to me.