The church and secular life

Front matter

CHURCH AND SECULAR LIFE m l^m-m-

Shelf. .M.^ CO

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Contents

PAGE

I. The Church and the Life of Men ... 1

II. The Church and Education 18

I. The Church And The Life Of Men

The Cliristiaii Churcli, using the term in its broader sense, is a vast institution consisting of individuals bound together more or less closely by a common organization, and standing for certain truths which it seeks to impress upon the minds and hearts of men for their own individual good and for the good of the race. This Church has had a strange, interesting and eventful history. It has made many mistakes, committed many sins, taught many errors. It has labored for magnificent ideals, inspired men to noble life and heroism, kept the light of God's truth shining in the earth. Like every purposeful institution it has always been and will always be on trial as to its faithfulness and as to its efficiency. Whoever and whatever aspires to lead humanity must always accept and answer the challenge of humanity to demonstrate its right to lead. That the challenge is now being pressed in such wise as to make many good people tremble for the future of the Church, and to tempt them to illjudged means for its defence.

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The challenge is not impious. Humanity has an inalienable right to demand that its professed leaders should demonstrate their divine right to lead, that divine right which comes not by the individual's accident of birth, the institution's hoary antiquity, or the doctrine's solemnly formal promulgation, but by demonstrated power, usefulness and truth. The challenge is not new. It may have taken a new form and have been pressed recently in more intelligent fashion than before, but in some shape or another the Church has always had to meet it, either as the imperious demand of inquiring minds or the yet more inexorable requirement of changing conditions. The challenge is not captious. The instinct for progress is part of the law of progress. The aspirations of the race are natural and ineradicable, though not always wise or prudent in their expression, and this very challenge of leadership is proof of their activity. A humanity constantly enlarging in extent of mental horizon and in power of apprehension and comprehension must have a progressive and enlarging leadership, its ideals must be advanced, its aspirations enlarged and its yearnings in some measure gratified.

There seems to be much significance in the following item taken from a recent issue of a religious paper: "Why do men not go to church? was asked by a Philadelphia paper, and then three pages were given to the printing of a part of the replies that were sent in. These replies were from all sorts and conditions of men, and all seemed to be united in the conviction that there was nothing furnished by the Church which the men of to-day need." Accepting attendance upon public service as a rough and ready gauge of interest in the Church and of acknowledgment of its leadership, we find that these men, representative because of their numbers and because of the diversity of their conditions, have turned away from the Church as the result of a deliberate conviction. They are not simply indifferent and self-indulgent, they are not vicious or rebellious, they are not repelled by an oppressive establishment or by a self-assertive hierarchy. These replies do not sound like the excuses which are too frequently offered in answer to inquiries of this sort. The clergyman finds it very difficult to get a reliable answer to such a question. The person asked hesitates and equivocates because of his personal regard for the questioner or because of a hesitation to affront openly a great institution in the person of its accredited representative. But this question comes from layman to layman, and the answer is not embarrassed by any of these restraints. These men say freely that they have asked the Church and themselves what this institution has to offer that they need, and the answer is little or nothing. They have asked the Church and themselves whether or not their aspirations are met and their desire for leadership satisfied, and their answer is in the negative.

It is very easy to stigmatize such a conclusion as foolishness, or to dismiss it with some remark concerning the wickedness of the unregenerate heart and its natural enmity to God, or even to take the higher ground that because men are not conscious of needs which the Church can and does meet it does not follow that they do not have such needs. All this would

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be very easy, but it would also be very hasty and 01- considered. We are not justified in assuming that all who differ with us are either foolish in mind or wicked in intent, even after we have given all due weight to the enlightening influences of religion. It is undoubtedly true that in religion, as in other spheres of life, men have many needs which they do not realize till after they have been gratified, but in order that men should progress at all they must have certain common and natural needs, and the religion which is to help and lead their progress must meet these needs which exist in all as well as the others which it itself creates, or at least reveals, in a few. If any great portion of the people feel that the Church is not meeting their needs, one of two things must be true : either the Church is an obsolete and powerless institution, or its teachings are being imperfectly presented and its work unskilfully done.

The work which the Church is doing to-day in many places and with multitudes of people ought to be proof positive to any candid mind that the first position is untenable. The fact that the Church meets the needs of so many is as strong proof of the value and usefulness of its work as the fact that it fails to meet the needs of all is of the inadequate performance of that work. There must be something wrong, and that wrong must lie, not in the nature of the Church itself, but in the way in which it is administered, and the manner in which it conceives of its mission and aims and presents them to men. If we will examine, even cursorily, some of the positions into which the Church has allowed itself to drift, we shall have no difficulty in finding some things which will go far to account for the attitude of men toward it, even if they do not justify that attitude.

The word Church has come to be used altogether too much as if it meant only the ministry. This is hardly less true of Protestantism than of Catholicism. The Church ought to be in the fullest and widest sense democratic in administration as well as in constitution. Instead it has become aristocratic or monarchical. The action of the clergy is held to be the action of the Church. The thinking of the clergy is asserted as the thinking of the Church. The universal priesthood of believers, so strenuously asserted in the New Testament, has degenerated into the priesthood of a class. The impression has been sedulously strengthened that there is no Christian ministry except the ministry of the clerical office. Men have been encouraged to forget that the first ministry instituted in the infant Church by the Apostles was the ministry of the Diaconate, a ministry of service, a ministry that had to do with the common-place things of material life. Men have lost practical hold upon the facts that every believer has a full part in the Church and in its ministries, and that everything that is done for the benefit and the service of man should be done as unto God, and when done in that spirit becomes as much his ministry as the performance of sacrifice or the offering of prayer or the preaching of sermons can be.

The Church has assumed only too often an invidious position of privilege. That there are such things as election and privilege, and that they are very real and

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important tMngs, must be admitted, not simply on tlie teacldng of Scripture, but on the obvious teaching of daily life. It is a privilege to be born in America rather than in Dahomey or Siam. It is a privilege to be born in the nineteenth century rather than in the ninth. It is a privilege to be born to comfort and refinement and Christian culture rather than to poverty and ignorance and the debasing companionships of the slums. It is a privilege to have high and noble thoughts concerning God and duty and spiritual things rather than the low outlook of selfishness and materialism. But it does not follow that some are arbitrarily chosen for the sweet things of this life and heaven hereafter, and others for bitterness here and damnation there. It does not follow that the elect have any right to take airs over the non-elect, to look condescendingly down upon them as their inferiors, or to regard them as the outcast and reprobate children of the evil one. There is nothing more hateful to God and man than ecclesiastical exclusiveness and spiritual pride. The election of God is election to heavy responsibilities, to unbounded opportunities, and to the privilege of widest service. It ought to bind men more closely together rather than separate them. It ought to weave between the hearts of men the clinging bonds of tenderest and warmest affection, rather than build between them the chilling walls of pride, aversion and positive hate. Are men likely to be conciliated by a Church which declares with one breath that God is the father of a race of brothers and in the next that " saints are his peculiar care " ?

The Church, in its common thought and teaching has fatally narrowed the meaning of its great doctrine of salvation through Christ and through him alone. The Churchj believing in the divine sonship and boundless possibilities of humanity, sees that sonship and those possibilities realized in the person of Jesus the Christ. As the salvation of man means and can mean only the realization of his highest possibilities, the Church looks to Jesus as the pattern, the inspirer, and the leader. It sees that in the nature of things men can come near to perfection only as they come near to Christ. He who is nearest to the Leader is nearest to salvation, and all approach to him, whether conscious and intentional or unconscious and unintentional, is approach to salvation. This is simple, natural and reasonable. It recognizes the merit of all effort and the value of all goodness, and at the same time recognizes that effort is more potent and goodness more valuable as they are intelligent and purposeful. It does not look askance at any aspiration, but rather tries to encourage all aspiration, to vitalize it, and to interpret it to itself. This is the true spirit and teaching of the Master, and they who harden it into a theological dogma, declare that the formal fellowship and blessing of the Church are necessary to salvation, hedge it about with mystery, and declare the uselessness and positive hatefulness of a great proportion of all human effort after higher things, because not nominally and professedly a following of Christ, commit the same mistake which was made by the Apostles who drew on themselves the merited rebuke of Jesus for forbidding the man who cast out devils in the Master's name but did not formally enroll himself among the Master's disciples. One of the worst misfortunes the Church has ever suffered at the hands of her over-zealous children has been the hardening and narrowing of the great truth of salvation by and through the splendid manhood of Christ into the shibboleth of ecclesiastical fellowship.

With this has come, almost inevitably, a sad narrowing of the meaning of faith. Faith has been confounded with holding of opinion, and belief in Christ with acceptance of certain opinions about him. By this «a load of requirement has been laid upon the seeker after higher life and after Christ which the Master and his Apostles neither used nor contemplated. The spirit of ecclesiastical dogmatism, with its rigid requirement of intellectual conformity, has stood with its flaming sword at the gate of the kingdom of heaven as the angel stood at the gate of paradise. Any man who seeks the betterment of human character and the uplifting of the human race, who works in hope and love for humanity, ought to be made to feel that our work and his work are one, and that the Church hails him as a fellow-laborer in God's cause without stopping to inquire into his intellectual opinions. St. Paul, with his disregard of the most cherished traditions and usages of Judaism, a disregard which at times seemed almost recklessly iconoclastic, must have seemed to the great body of Jerusalem Christians as far from orthodox as the Agnostic or Secularist of to-day does to the conservative Evangelical, but his faith in Christ was recognized, and his fellowship in the Church was accepted in spite of differences in

THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. y

opinion and in spite of narrow-minded protests. When men are trying to make humanity wiser and better, recognizing all the while the matchless splendor of the manhood that is in Christ, is it wise to cut ourselves off from them and them from us because they are not quite able to agree with us in opinion as to the precise relations of the human and the divine in his nature, as to the exact nature and method of that change wrought by him in the relations between the human children and the divine Father which we call the atonement, as to the integrity of the record of him, or as to the existence and character of the life beyond? When men say "I would gladly work with you but I do not see my way clear to agreement with all your doctrines," ought we not to say, "In God's name, come "? On the other hand, it is neither wise nor truly liberal for a Liberal in theology to assume an attitude of contempt and aversion for those more able to accept traditional views than himself. One in purpose, and really one in faith, we should not be divided by opinion. We should rather work together in loving forbearance, striving the while to help each other in labor, strengthen each other in courage and enlarge each other in faith.

The Church has unnecessarily and unwisely narrowed the grounds of its appeal to men. It has presented itself too much as an ark of personal safety in the deluge of divine wrath, and not enough as the salt of the earth. It has urged men to seek its embrace for the salvation of their own endangered souls rather than to seek its aid and support in the grand effort to bring an imperfect race up to the level of its possibilities. It is not easy to convince even a sinner of tlie need that the Church, its ministers, or even its Head, should interfere to save him from the wrath to come, nor have you aroused the best that is in him if you do so convince him. The better a man is the more difficult becomes the work of persuasion. It is not easy to convince a moral man, a man of upright and honorable life and walk, that he is so burdened by an inheritance of sin, or so offensive in the sight of a just and loving God, that he needs the Church, or anything that the Church can do for him, to save his soul from the awful experience of the divine wrath. Your theology may prove to logical demonstration that he has such need, but when you present your proofs he will probably laugh in your face and go his way undisturbed. But if you turn from this presentation of the case to the other, and show him the Church as the salt of the earth, your appeal is stronger. The ideal of a higher manhood will draw where fear is powerless to move. Some of the very men who turn most contemptuously to-day from the Church as having nothing that they need are deeply interested in all the problems that human advancement presents. They seek purer life, higher thought, nobler purpose, wider outlook, deeper insight, all the things which help and uplift. Show them that the Church is not a spiritual aristocracy nor a mutual admiration society, but a vast organization for bringing in just these things upon the earth, and make it so, and it will be very soon seen that they will find more for themselves in the Church than they had thought of. It is good to say, " Come with us and we will do thee good,'- but it is better to say, " Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

The Church again has allowed its ministration to be narrowed to one side of life, and that a side whose needs are not always the first to be realized. It is true that the Church has to do most directly with the inward and spiritual in humanity. It is also true that the whole of life is the manifestation of the spirit. The spiritual life of man ought to manifest itself in every possible human relation; indeed, does so manifest itself, whether we know it or not. But these multifarious relations and activities are not generally recognized as the manifestations of spiritual life. The spirit is very commonly supposed to manifest itself only in worship and in those things which have to do with worship. The Church, therefore, has come to be confounded with the public services of the sanctuary and the private devotions of the home. The very word Church brings to most minds the idea not of a great saving and regenerating force in human society, but of a certain place and certain forms and ceremonies observed there. Worship, and worship alone, is regarded as the business of the Church, and with that alone it is supposed rightfully to concern itself. To those who do not feel strictly spiritual needs, or whose spiritual life does not naturally manifest itself in formal worship, the Church appears to have no message, and the appearance is only too much the result of its own attitude. Just here lies the principal reason why women are so much more attracted to the Church than men. They are more keenly sensitive to impressions and experiences on

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the spiritual side than men, and their spiritual life manifests itself more naturally in the channels of formal worship. The Church has only too much encouraged men to feel that the things amid which they pass their lives, the so-called secular things, are outside its scope. Men feel, naturally and rightly, that these things are real and important. They do not always feel, and the Church does not properly help them to feel, that they are also proper fields for the Church's activity and proper channels for the influence of the spiritual power of Christianity upon the life of the world. The fact is that there is no part of a man's life, no sphere in his activity, no side of his complex nature which should not be touched and vitalized and ennobled by the Church. We have insisted for nineteen centuries that Christianity is a world-religion, having a message for every part of the human race. Is it not time that we began to insist in a real and practical way that it has its message for every part of man as well?

It is very largely because of these assumptions and these unnecessarily self-imposed limitations that we are brought face to face, in this splendid nineteenth century, with the astounding spectacle of an age abounding with the loftiest aspirations and the noblest ideals, turning away dissatisfied from what is, potentially at least, the best and strongest agency for the fulfilment of those aspirations and the realization of those ideals. The Church has offered the bread of life to men when they were not hungry. It has allowed it to appear that its business was the supplying of needs which men did not feel, while neglecting to insist upon its power to supply ttie needs which they did feel. It has been impatient with them because they did not desire what it thought they ought to desire, and has not always been discriminating enough to see the propriety of the things they really did desire. This unfortunate attitude, coupled with a certain dogmatism and tendency to make invidious assumption, has resulted in the indifference of many and the open opposition of some. It is not really wonderful that the leadership of the Church has been challenged or denied, and that it has been classed with feudalism and the divine right of kings as one of the obsolescent institutions of an earlier age. It is not by any means to be understood that all the error and all the short-sightedness have been on the side of the Church. There is no doubt that men have been and are hasty and blind and unjust ; but the Church is, or ought to be, the leader and teacher. It ought to be wiser and stronger and more just than can reasonably be expected of those whom it is trying to teach. Its mistakes should be unsparingly searched out and rigorously corrected, theirs noted only for kindly and loving treatment.

It is time to preach a Christianity unburdened by these assumptions and untrammelled by these limitations. Without going over the ground in detail again to show how each should be thrown off, let the point be made at once that the Church must assert itself as having to do with every part and every activity of human life. It must not allow itself to be confounded with that ministry of public worship which is only one of its means, but must insist on its universality.

It must take hold on every side of life. It must show its interest and its helpfulness in all human concerns. It must prove by its works its right to leadership in all human activities. The business of the Church is not simply to cultivate one set of powers, nor to strengthen one side of life, it is to strengthen all powers and to uplift all life. The Church has no right to recognize any distinction of things sacred in which it is supreme and things secular with which it has no business. That distinction is a device of those enemies who would rob it of both work and heritage. If man is a divine being, son of God, made in his likeness, then everything that has to do with man shares the divine contact, and everything that man does ought to be infused with the divine spirit. The pagan poet made one of his characters say, "I am human, therefore nothing human is alien to me." The Church ought to say, " Humanity is divine, therefore nothing human is alien to me."

The word Church occurs only three times in the four Gospels, and two of these are in one verse. Christ came to found a Church, and he himself said that he would found one, but he generally used a different term to describe the institution of his founding. He called it the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven. He had a great deal to say about the social relations of man to man, but very little to say about religious relations except as between man and God. He had much to say about private prayer, much about public duty, much about life and conduct, little or nothing about public worship. It is perfectly clear that what he looked forward to was not a splendid ecclesiastical institution, nor an elaborate organization for public worship, but a renewed and ennobled manhood manifesting itself in a renewed and ennobled society. It was to be a kingdom of God because it was to be a social condition where the spirit of God should govern all hearts and direct all actions. The early churches, though entirely submissive to the political powers that were and in no sense anarchistic or revolutionary, partook more of the character of communities than of what we are now in the habit of calling churches. Their business was the cultivating of life on the basis of the manhood of Christ, rather than the teaching of doctrine. Their first officers were administrative rather than religious or educational. Their funds were for charitable and merciful objects rather than for providing the means for worship. Worship was prominent and general. Worship was the foundation of all and the cement by which all was bound together. Worship was the means by which men gained and retained that spiritual life which manifested itself in higher and better and purer social relations. It was central, but not inclusive.

The present aims and ideals of the Church ought to be similar. It is the business of the Church to lead, inspire and direct all those movements which uplift humanity, which make the kingdoms of this earth the kingdom of God and his Christ. Everything human ought to interest it. Every good thing ought to feel its quickening power. Its aim is, and ought to be recognized as being, the improvement of all character and the betterment of all human relations.

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It exists only for tlie purpose of making men and women better in the most rational, as well as the most comprehensive sense of the word. Its work is to be done by showing the divine relations of all human activities, by bringing out the divine powers of human souls, and by giving these powers direction and inspiration. In this work the ministry of worship must always hold an important place, but it must be remembered what that place is. Certainly ' we cannot overestimate the importance of worship. It was only by frequent seasons of prolonged and earnest prayer that Christ kept his strength up to the level of his work. It was only by his constant worship that he kept fresh that sense of nearness to God and of refreshment from his omnipotence that carried him through from day to day. But he did these things not simply that he might keep near to God, not simply that he might keep himself refreshed, not simply that he might keep heart strong and head clear, but that he might use nearness to God, refreshment of spirit, stoutness of heart, and clearness of head for the service of his fellow-men. All these things were the bases and the supports of his labors for the betterment of human life in all its relations. We need the same things, and we need them for the same ends.

The Church has a mission wider than even its most devoted children have commonly understood, and has more to offer for the needs of men than has been commonly comprehended. For every need, for every hope, for every aspiration of humanity, it has something to offer. To every man, in every place, under every condition, it lias a message. All the activities and all the movements of our busy and complex life need its control, not as a ruler from without, but as an inspirer from within. It is the marked characteristic of Christianity that it places the motive power of all life within. " The kingdom of heaven is within you," said the Master. Eeligion in the heart rules the life without the visible interposition of law. So the Church, having the ultimate seat of its power in human hearts, should rule the world and guide all human and social activities, not by the external sway of ecclesiastical laws, but by the kingdom of God within.

II. The Church And Education

If we are to attempt to follow out tlie lines of thought indicated in the first lecture of this course and trace the relations of the Church to certain important departments of human activity, it is obvious that the discussion must take a wide range. It will be necessary that a number of large questions should be passed in review and that our attention should be directed to the real nature, bearing and scope of those questions before we can see just the relation which the Church, or Christianity, has to them and the part it is to bear in their settlement. The present question, for instance, that of the relation between the Church and education, is not the comparatively simple question as to what the Church can do in the way of founding, fostering and encouraging education. It is the very much broader question of education generally, its purposes and how those purposes may best be realized. The effort is not to discuss the question from the standpoint of a partisan, but to survey it broadly, point out its leading features, and show the relation which they bear to the general work of the Church and where and how the Church may properly labor for the final settlement of vexed questions. Matters of detail, of course, cannot be treated to any extent. No general treatment of the question can venture to say how particular problems can be worked out in particular localities. Principles may, however, be developed which will be suggestive and helpful.

Indeed, it is just in respect of its ability or inability to be helpful in these regards that the Church is on trial to-day. Our Lord and his apostles clearly taught the sufficiency of Christianity for man, and they taught its sufficiency for man here and now as well as elsewhere and hereafter. Nobody, of course, supposes that the Lord's Prayer was intended to be the only petition which men were to utter, and yet it is clear that it was intended to give men a broad and inclusive idea of the nature of the things which they were to ask of God. Its very evident intention is to guide the religious aspirations of men rather than to prescribe a set form of petition. If you will think for a moment of that prayer you will see that there is not one word in it which has bearing on any life but this present one. All the things which it contemplates are things which are to take effect here and now, and its first and central thought is that God's kingdom may come on earth as it has come in heaven. It contemplates present needs, present blessings, present righteousness. But the Church has acquiesced altogether too quietly in a limitation of its sufficiency to the hereafter and has neither claimed nor been allowed a sufficiency for the present. Contrary to the thought of its founder^ it has allowed the pressing problems of so-called secular life to be withdrawn from its purview, and its ministers have not infrequently been rebuffed as presumptuous meddlers when they have attempted to assert the Church's true position.