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THE CHRISTIAN IDEA IN THE MODERN WORLD
■■Z - 2. 4
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA
IN THE MODERN
WORLD
BY
RAYMOND CALKINS
THE PILGRIM PRESS BOSTON CHICAGO
THE NEW TORK
1 PUBLIC MBRARY
M
A87CR, L£NOX ANO TJLOEN FQUNOATION*.
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TO uSV/
ASTOR. I^fl*®^ '^^^^
Copyright 1918 By frank M. SHELDON
THE PILGRIM PRESS BOSTON
^,so
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TO
M^ Jatli^r mh Motion
FROM WHOSE LIPS I HAVE LEARNED
WHAT THE CHRISTL\N IDEA IS
AND FROM WHOSE EXAMPLE
HOW IT MAY BE LIVED
PREFACE
A large number of people, both young and old, brought up under the influence of historic Christianity, have begun seriously to question whether the Christian Idea is fitted to the actual conditions of our modern world. The distance seems to widen between the idealism of far-away Galilee and the battle-ground of life today. The Christian Idea seems to many people to be true neither to the facts of human nature nor to the facts of human Hfe. The contrast is sharpened by those who insist that Jesus' teaching of love outlaws the use of force, inculcates literal non-resistance, and insists on peace at any cost.
To vindicate the reasonableness and practicability of the Christian Idea, to show that it is the only one which does justice to all the elements of human nature, and is the only one which can be trusted to deal adequately with the prob- lems of our modern world, is the purpose of these chapters.
The material in this book was used originally in sermons and addresses by the author. It has been entirely revised for the present publication.
Cambridge^ Massachusetts, Easier, 1918,
v\\
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Issue 1
II My Brother's Keeper 15
III The Meaning of Sacrifice 27
IV The Good Fight of Faith 37
V The Meaning of Non-Resistance 49
VI Christian Discipleship 61
VII The Servant State 83
VIII A Christian Nation 97
IX The Christian Idea and the Great War . . .115
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA IN THE MODERN WORLD
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA
IN THE MODERN
JVORLD
I THE ISSUE '
The events of the past four years have thrown into sharp relief the real issue which today confronts the Christian faith. Against the dark background of these years stands clearly outlined the question which must be answered if the truth of Christianity is to be vindicated and its right to be the religion of our modern world is to be established in the mind of the a present generation. The battle-ground has shifted on which jiis being debated the question whether or not Christianity can continue to be the religion of thoughtful men. What are the questions today, the answer to which shall settle for them the larger question whether Christianity is true or not? These questions are not what they used to be. Of that we may be confident. The question, for example, whether Christianity is true or false no longer hinges on questions of (Bible authorship or composition. There was a time when 'these were the burning themes. Was the world made in six days or was it not? Can we reconcile the story of the crea- tion with the story of evolution? Did Moses write the Pentateuch? Did David write the Psalms? Is Jonah literal history? If not, then the Old Testament is false; then the Bible is false ; then Christianity is false. That was
2 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
the idea of IngersoU. It seemed to him that if he could prove that Moses and David made mistakes, then he had proved |that Christianity was a mistake. If it could be proved that the sun did not stand still at the command of Joshua, then the Bible ceased to be inspired. And if the Bible is not an "inspired book, neither is Christianity an inspired religion.
Now we have passed away beyond all that. We have discovered that these are not the questions at all that decide either the fate of the Bible or the fate of the Christian relig- ion. We understand today that the inspiration of the Bible is not involved in these questions. The Bible may be an inspired book whoever wrote it. And the inspiration of the Bible as an infallible book of religion does not depend on its being an infallible guide in astronomy, in biology, or any other science. These questions do not touch, much less settle, the truth of Christianity as a religion for thoughtful men.
Neither do the questions of the truth of the super- natural element in the New Testament involve the question of the real truth of the Christian religion. There was a time when men felt that it did. Huxley felt that it did. Gladstone felt that it did. If the miracles were disproved, Christianity was disproved. If Christ did not truly raise Lazarus, or walk on the sea, or feed the five thousand, then Christianity is false. If these went, it went. If these were not true, it was not true. So for years the supernatural element in the New Testament was the battle-ground on which the truth of Christianity was fought out. But that day also is passed. It has passed for the opponents of traditional Christianity because they hold that these questions are already obsolete; that science has dis- posed of them, — that no serious minded person may believe them any longer. But it has passed also for all
The Issue 3
thoughtful defenders of the faith, not because they admit that the miracles of the New Testament must go, but because they perceive that whether they go or not, the real core of Christianity has not been touched. They understand that the Christian religion does not rest upon a physical basis, that its innermost truth is not built on material foundations; that Jesus did not come into this world primarily to be a wonder-worker; and that the real question about Him is not whether He per- formed these miracles or not. The real test, they have discovered, is a spiritual test; the real evidence is spiritual evidence. The main question is not whether He raised a dead body two thousand years ago, but whether He can raise a dead soul today; not whether He satisfied the physical hunger of men and women then, but whether He has a message which can satisfy the soul-hunger of the world today. If He can, then the question of what He did long ago can be left to decide itself, and Christianity can be the faith of our modern world. If He cannot, then no matter what He may have done long ago, His religion is not for men today.
It is at this point then that the issue is joined. We have come at last to the root of the matter. The burning ques- tion in our day is not, Is the Bible inspired? or Did the 'miracles happen? but, Are the very ideals of Christianity true, practical and workable ideals? Has Christianity a;! spiritual message on which men can safely build their own lives and a solid foundation on which a true and stable social order can be erected? In a word, the questions about the truth of Christianity have been taken out of the study, and have been taken into the disordered, distracted life of the outside world. Can the religion of Jesus solve our personal problems, our business problems, our social
^
i
4 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
problems, our political problems? Is the faith of Jesus a faith that can be worked? Is the Gospel a Gos- pel that men can live by, a Gospel that will show the world how it ought to live, and help the world to live it? These are the real questions today; this is the real issue of our time, and on the outcome of it the future of Chris- tianity as the religion of our modern world will depend. That is what the word 'true' means today when it is applied to Christianity. True to what? If we ask a thoughtful man today whether Christianity is true or not, we find that he is not thinking of whether or not it is his- torically true or whether it can be made to agree with the teachings of science. He is thinking of something else. Is it true now? Is it true to one's own human nature? Does it square with what we know of life as it exists to- day? Will it get us where we want to go? Will it accomplish what must be done ?
And let no one deceive himself as to the seriousness of the issue. To many people it has seemed as if the issue which confronted Christianity a generation ago was the most serious that Christianity had ever faced; that if his- torical Christianity could survive the storm in which the discoveries of modern science involved it, its future for all time was assured. But that issue, serious as it was, is not to be compared in criticalness with that which is now upon us. The modern questions about Christianity go to the heart of it. Unless the modern issue can be safely And triumphantly met, Christianity may indeed continue to [be the private religion of individual souls, but it will cease to be what it thus far has been, the faith that has ordered and controlled the destinies of civilization and moulded and made the moral life of the world.
Already multitudes of people have either made up their
The Issue 5
minds or are rapidly making up their minds that the ideals of the Christian life, — letting all alone the ancient debates about the Bible and the miracles, and advancing to the real question of whether Christianity itself is true or false as a working faith — that the ideals of the Christian life are no longer practicable under the strain of modern circum- stances. They find that the family is disintegrating, that business is hopelessly demoralized, that capitalism is incon- sistent with Christianity, that national and international
/ politics are forms of piracy and plunder. In the midst of all this the Christian Church has seemed to them to stand helpless and bewildered, still feebly uttering an antiquated message — itself an external organization in which the life of the spirit is barely able to exist. When these thinkers go behind the Church to the New Testament and to the Gospels, they find there a message which, however beautiful and ideal in itself, seems to them to be absolutely out of harmony with our modern life. On what terms, they ask, is it possible to live a Christian life in our modern world? Must one not take his choice between the two? "Must one not choose between the idealism of the Gospel and the utilitarianism of modem life? Must he not frankly confess that the Christian law of conduct and the demands of commerce and political stability are radically opposed to each other, and that under the circumstances of modem civilization which one can neither escape nor for the pres- ent transform, the Christian character has become an impracticable dream ?" ^
' Some have frankly reached this conclusion. It is, they say, next to impossible to find a single man who literally and absolutely pretends to obey the teachings of Jesus. An
• actual and utter Christian would perish today just as
i F. G. Peabody, " The Christian Life in the Modern World," p. 4.
6 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
Christ did and so be a conclusive argument against Chris- tianity. The fact is, they say, that Christianity is away over our heads, — so much so as to be absolutely impossible as a program of life. Even Christians, we are told, per- 'ceive this, and so make no real effort to be Christians. Nobody, not even the most conscientious Church-goer really expects seriously to practise his religion. He pays for a pew in a Christian church, but his whole attitude of mind and actual conduct is fundamentally un-Christian. If Christianity were to become universal, we are told, and .every one were to practise it, the race would die out in a /Igeneration. Professor Peabody quotes convincingly from' ' wntemporary writers on this point.^ " 'None of us are Christians,' a distinguished EngHsh philosopher has af- firmed, 'and we all know, no matter what we say, we ought not to be. We have lived a long time now the professors of a creed which no one can consistently practise and which, if practised, would be as immoral as unreal.'^ Let us have done with pretense. Let us cease to call ourselves Christians when we do not follow Christ.' " * \\
Such then is the issue. Such is the question which pierces to the center of our Christian faith. There is the problem of Christianity in our day. Compared with it, other issues of the past may well seem trivial and secondary. But this is critical and final. "Whether con- temporary Hfe and historical Christianity are really incom- patible with each other, whether the choice must be made between the ancient faith and the modern world, that is a , fundamental question. If that choice must be made, it would be made by the great majority of thoughtful minds without hesitation, although often with much distress. It
« F. G. Peabody, op. cit. p. 6.
«F. H. Bradley, International Journal of Ethics, October, 1894.
* Garrod: " The Religion of all Good Men," pp. 154, 159 (65).
r)/"V^
The Issue 7
might be hard to Hve without the comforts and consola- tions of Christianity, but it would be impossible to live in an age that is gone. One might sigh for a beautiful past, but he must live and work in a real, even though it be an ugly, present. The Christian life must be frankly surrendered if one is forced to the conclusion that its de- mands and ideals are impracticable in a modern world." ^ ^/Therj is the problem of Christianity in our day. The I Christian apologist of the twentieth century must prove 'to the satisfaction of thoughtful men that the central, con- i:ception of Christianity is true to the fundamental facts of * ^our human nature, and that it offers men a practical work-, ing program under the conditions of modern life. /
What that central conception is, we all know. It lies at ,^- v».Mv«
the very center of the whole Christian system: the prin- ^l/^^tv
-yciple, in a word, of love, of brotherliness, of cooperation, /t^
^of service one to another: the principle which declares that u-ci.u*4
not only self-love or self-interest, but the love of one's '^
neighbor as oneself, and interest in others as well as in ^u^M^^
ourselves, is the true way of life, the true principle of con- tr*^
''duct. *T am among you as he that serveth." ^ "The, '^. V
Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to min-
/ister." ^ "If any man desire to be first, he shall be last." ^
"We are members one of another." ^ "In honor preferring
one another." ^° "Beloved, let us love one another." ^^ So
the teaching runs all through the Gospels and Epistles and
is recognized today as being the cardinal principle, the root
idea of the Christian life.
But it is precisely this idea which we find most stoutly
challenged today. It is precisely about this idea that mul-
/titudes have become skeptical. It is precisely of this idea
« F. G. Peabody, op. cit. p. 5.
» St. Luke 22 : 27. ' St. Matt. 20 : 28. s st. Mark 9 : 35. » Eph. 4 : 25.
JORom. 12 : 10. "1 John 4: 7.
t.,#^
8 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
that men are asking today, "Is it true? Do we believe it? Will it work? Is anybody today trying to practise it? If a man in truth does practise it, is he precisely the kind of man all of us would wish to be? Can the Christian Idea be brought out into the midst of our warring world and stand the test? Will it solve the problems of personal life, of business Hfe, of political life?"
Many voices have been lifted up in our day to urge that it is not true. We are told, on the one hand, that it is not ,true to our human nature. It is not human nature, as we •say, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. It is a principle that is foreign to our real selves; it contradicts the essential genius of our natures and deflects the natural current of our lives. There is, we are told, but one pure, sincere human impulse, and that is the will to live : the will to power. And the only honest morality, the only moral- ity that has no taint of insincerity and no hint of fiction or of subterfuge about it, is the one which recognizes sel^r interest as the only legitimate human impulse; which not only recognizes it, but lives by it, gives it the right of way in one's life, and does not try to graft a hypocritical kind 'of benevolent love upon it.
Now this, in popular language, has been the teaching of a philosopher, whose name has been upon everyone's lips and whose ideas have been given the widest circulation. He may be called the High Apostle of this neo-individual- ism.^2 According to Nietzsche, there are only two kinds of morality: what he calls master or ruling morality, and > what he calls slave or ruled morality. Now this master or ruling morality,, he declares, is the native, the natural, the , instinctive way in which every one lives. Happiness he j describes as the unrestrained yielding to the will to power^ '
" "Jenseits von Gut und Bose," §260.
The Issue 9
And why do we not enjoy that happiness? Because we are held back by another set of ideas that have been thrust into our consciousness, which make us believe that we have no right to that happiness : that we must restrain our- selves, and give up the will to power and sacrifice ourselves and learn to serve those who are below us, and love other people as much as we love ourselves. And where did these strange ideas come from? They did not come from within. They are not the one original impulse of the human heart; on the contrary, they are a secondary, a de- 'rived, an unnatural morality. They sprang from the lowly,
' defeated and the enslaved races who sought to save them- selves by foisting these notions upon their conquerors, by
^inoculating civilization with their slavish ideas. The first kind of morality was evolved by the ruling caste, but the second kind by the ruled : the first by the masters, but the
v^second by the slaves. According to the true morality, everything is good which proceeds from strength, power.
;< health, well-contentedness : and bad must be applied to the coward and to everything that springs from or ends in weakness. According to the second-rate and unnatural morality of the slave class, all this is shifted; and self- -interest, self -advancement, self-assertion, all that makes for power, is called bad ; and only that is called good which tries to alleviate weakness — pity and love and sympathy,
''self -abnegation and self-sacrifice. The warm heart, patience, modesty, humility: these are the highest virtues
^ because useful for the lowest classes. Now, says Nietzsche, it has come to pass that this second-rate and slave moraHty;;37 p has dominated the life of our modern world. And he sets himself to the task of transposing our meral values and 'putting master-morality where it belongs. He looks upon the enthronement of this slave morality as a desperate
lo The Christian Idea in the Modern World
attempt upon the part of the low and the base to establish themselves as powerful. This attempt, says Nietzsche, must be defeated at all costs. And with terrible emphasis he exhorts us to alter our values. "Break up," he cries, "your ideas of good and bad. Enfranchise your real self from the slavish ideas that bind it as the cords of Delilah bound Samson. Face life defiant and unafraid. Be hard. Live dangerously. Will to live in perfect freedom and perfect power. Such ideas as mercy and pity and charity are pernicious since they mean a transference of power from the strong to the weak, whose proper business it is to serve the strong. Remember that self-sacrifice and brother- liness and love are not real moral instincts at all, but merely manufactured compunctions to keep you from be- ing your true self. Remember that man is essentially selfish. Any slave would be master if he could. Any em- ployee would be in his employer's place if he were able. Any little race would be big if it knew how. Then why deny it, why make it a crime to do what every man's in- stinct prompts him to do? Why not face the facts of exis- tence whether you like them or not ?" ^^
From all this it is easy to see what Nietzsche has to say of Christianity. It has been the mission of Christianity to foist this bogus morality on our modern world. Before Christianity came, European morality was a master-moral- ity. But this was all spoiled by the slavish ideals of Christianity. Consequently Nietzsche looks upon Chris- tianity as the one great curse. "I condemn it," he says, "as the greatest of all possible corruptions. It has left nothing untouched by its depravity. It combats all good red blood, all hope of life. Christianity is the one immoral
is"Der Antichrist," |2. "Also Sprach Zarathustra" III; Jenseits von Gut und Bdse, {258.
The Issue ii
shame and blemish upon the human race. It is both un- reasonable and degrading. It is the most dangerous sys- tem of slave-morality the world has ever known. It has waged a deadly war on the highest type of man. It has ,put a ban on all that is healthy in a man." ^*
We may well call this extravagant language, and so it is. Doubtless he felt that extravagant language was needed. He was trying to uproot ideas that are two thousand years
nold. He was trying to get men to invert their moral ideas and to call good what they were accustomed to call bad and to cajl bad what they had formerly called good. Now that is quite a task. And it was to that task that this Her- culean intellect set himself. And it is useless to say that
,he has made no impression. A whole literature of the
ySuperman followed in his train. Thousands of people who never heard his name have adopted his philosophy. In-, ^1 indeed, some one has said that, ^e but had the courage to py^l '°^?into words what every" one 'really believes in his heart.'' Today the moral ideas that have come down to us in the Ten Commandments and in the Beatitudes, in the Sermon on the Mount and the Golden Rule, are under fire. To many minds the modern thought which has successfully disposed of the supernaturalism of Christianity is now disposing of its moral ideals. Whatever, it has been said, is good because the patriarchs or prophets called it good is now being besieged. The general ten- dency, it is confidently affirmed, is all toward the master- morality. It is seen in the assumption that might^makes, ■''right. It is seen in the terrible appeal to arms in our day. What is this world-war, but the practical demonstration that in spite of all we say we believe, when it comes to a
^test there is only one thing we do believe: that God is on
w" Der Antichrist," §§5, 6. Sammtliche Werke, 1895, VIII, 270; XIII, 317.
<(o
12 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
the side of the biggest battalions. It is seen in the general idea that success is the proof of value; that the man we admire after all is the man who arrives. It is seen in the tendency to worship the rising sun; in the dictum "our country right if possible, but our country right or wrong." ■• :^ It is seen in that modern jingoism which under the guise of patriotism relies on money, on ships and on guns. It is-" seen in nations armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight. It is seen in modern industrialism which is really on a war- footing, with battles, dynamite, murder, strikes, lock- / outs and boycotts for its daily story. It is seen in the; arrogance of races pretending to be superior to other races, where prejudice and hatred flame up in passion and end in outrage and murder. Ever^^vhere in our day a true Chris- tian morality — the morality of Jesus, of the Gospel, of the Sermon on the Mount is seen to be on the defensive if it is not in retreat. Everywhere existing conditions seem to be but a mockery and a travesty of the teachings, of the life, of the message, of the Gospel of Him who said: "Many that are first shall be last; and the last shall bey first." ^^ "I am among you as he that serveth." ^^
It is at such a time that certain passages in our New /^^w^ Testament stand before us with startling distinctness,^ y^ q^ "Little children, it is the last time : and as ye have heard) ct-^^^ that anti-christ shall come even now are there many anti- j -i ^^'^ christs, whereby we know that it is the last time; and this ^.v^ is that spirit of anti-christ whereof ye have heard that it ^'"' . should come, and now already is it in the world." ^^ '^ -,^i
Such is the crisis which today confronts the Christian - faith. Such is the challenge which has been issued to all who profess and call themselves Christians. Christianity
"St. Matt. 19 :30. »• St. Luke 22 : 27. " 1 John 2 : 18; 4 : 3.
The Issue 13
is engaged in a struggle today which involves its very life. But out of this struggle Christianity is destined to emerge ennobled and purified. If the history of Christianity proves anything, it proves that when it has been put to its greatest test, it has risen to its greatest heights. This present issue will but bring to Hght certain spiritual re-
'^sources within the Christian faith which have never before
♦ been reveajed.
'II
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
The stories of the Old Testament are full of teaching which bears directly upon the problems of our modern world. They have to do with spiritual interests, which are as fresh today as in the days of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. They should be carefully re-studied by all who are searching for answers to those critical questions which go to the very root of the Christian faith.
One of these stories is prepared to help us at the very threshold of our inquiry as to the reasonableness of the Christian Idea. In the story of Cain and Abel we have presented the picture of the first human relationship. It is primitive in its setting, but its teaching is of extreme interest and importance. Cain was a farmer and Abel was a sheep raiser. They were brothers and their original re- lationship was brotherly. They depended upon each other. The employment of each was necessary to the other. But Cain was angry because his brother was a better man than he, and because his brother's offerings to God were more acceptable than his. The best way to settle the matter, he thought, was to put away Abel. It was a simple idea, but Cain acted upon it. He killed Abel. Then the Lord came and asked Cain: "Where is Abel thy brother?" And he said "I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?" ^ It was, we observe, the angry retort of a guilty conscience. Cain never thought of raising the question of his relation to his
1 G€n. 4 : 9.
15
1 6 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
brother until after he had killed him. Naturally, they were brothers. Their unbrotherly relation was the result of envy, hatred, malice. If Cain had continued to be the man that he was born to be, and bound to be, they would have continued to be brothers.
There lies the significance of the Genesis story. It is the story of first relationship of man with man. And it teaches that that relationship was naturally one of brotherly interest, cooperation, sympathy. And that it unnaturally became one of suspicion, distrust, hatred and enmity.
It is well to resurrect that old story and its teaching, be- cause we live in a world where just the opposite teaching is rampant. Self-interest, we are told, is the only genuine human impulse. Benevolence, brotherhood, cooperation is all a secondary, derived and unnatural morality. Every one instinctively lives for himself. The compunctions which keep him from it are all alien to the primitive, natu- ral instincts. The Golden Rule plainly contradicts the natural impulses of the human heart. And that, we are told, is proved by the fact that "despite our poetry and our beatitudes, we actually set ourselves above the Golden Rule in our working scheme of daily life." ^ At bottom, is it not true that we are utterly un-Christian, and does not every- body know it, and does he not know that it is precisely this un-Christianity that is to be credited with his advance- ment and his 'success'? Is it not just in proportion that he is not a Christian and practically ignores his Christian ideas that he succeeds? He tries hard to live up to his code of loving his neighbor as himself and being his brother's keeper, but he cannot do it and get on. So he does not do it and he gets on. These ideas, as I have said, are in great vogue. The boldest preach them. The less
2 Henry L. Mencken, "F. Nietzsche," pp. 312, 313.
My Brothers Keeper 17
bold say them. Even the timid believe them. And every- body lives them. A labor journal recently put it all in a word when it said: "Self-love is the only practical motive in life. Altruism is essentially unscientific." That is the question. Is it unscientific in the sense that it is untrue to our human nature? Is it unscientific in the sense that it will not work in actual human relationships, but exists, when it exists at all, as a Utopian, a visionary, and an unattainable ideal? These questions involve the very life of Christianity. If they can be proved, the religion of Jesus simply ceases to exist as the religion of thought- ful men. It is here that the issue must be joined. It is here at the very bottom and center of human nature that the Christian ethics and the religion of Jesus, if at all, must have a foundation on which it can rest. If altruism is unsound, the foundation of the religion of Jesus is gone. And on almost its first page, the ;Bible renders its ver- dict. When for the first time it puts two men face to face, we are told that their natural relation was that of brothers. Their unnatural relation was that of enemies. Coopera- tion was the primitive instinctive relationship. The self- interest which destroyed that relationship was unnatural and unnecessary.
And the Bible teaching and the teaching of Jesus on this point, let us remember, stand on solid ground. One of the most remarkable agreements between^ the teaching of the Bible and the teaching of Christ on the one hand, and the findings of modem science on the other hand, lies right at this point. Whether we look to physical science or to moral science, we find their teachings to be the same : association, cooperation, combination is the normal and natural relation whether of things or of beings. We can talk, for example, about atoms and electrons and even find
1 8 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
means of counting and weighing them; but their main in- terest and importance lies in their relation to other units of matter. When we come to study them we find that they co-exist with other units acting and reacting in asso- ciation, according to the laws of their being. It is fooHsh to say that originally each acted for or by itself. There simply is no such thing. Physical science does not know about any such thing as self-existence or self-interest in the units of our material world. And it is as true of) human beings. It is as false to suppose that the original unit of society is the separate individual, as that the unit of organic life is the separate atom, or the single cell. It " is when we reach a combination of units that we have matter, — and when we reach a combination of cells that we have life, and when we reach a combination of lives that we have society. And if we care to study the stor>' of evolution according to the strictest sect of the scientists, we do not jfind that altruism has no part in it; that the consideration of the other man has nothing to do with it.^ Darwin himself never pretended that self-love, self-inter- est, the survival of the fittest alone could account for the evolution of the race. On the contrary, he declared that the evolution of human society demands cooperation as . truly as it demands natural selection. We must put powers into play, he declared, to arrest the unchecked process of purely natural selection. We civilized men do our utmost to check the process of the elimination of the weak in body and mind. We build asylums for imbeciles, the maimed, the sick, and institute poor laws, and medical men do their utmost to save the life of any one to the last moment. The great classic students of the development of human life
'For a full recent discussion of this subject, see *' Social Progress and the Darwinian Theory," by George Nasmyth.
My Brother's Keeper 19
never pretended for a moment that the unchecked perpetu- ation of the strong by self-development independent of co- operation, could account for the human race. Darwin never said that. Neither did Wallace. Huxley never said it. One of his most notable admissions was to the effect that .^altruism is as primary an instinct as egoism; indeed, that if either may be said to have appeared first, it was altruism and not egoism — the love of the other, and not the love of one's self.* And Benjamin Kidd in his two great books, Social Evolution and The Principles of our Western Civilization, seeks to prove and does prove that progress in human society demands the predominance of altruism over egoism: of regard for others over selfishness; and that in the struggle for existence that society will survive in which cooperation does prevail over self-love. The fact is that tendencies that oppose themselves to Christian morality simply cannot claim definitely the support of scientific theory. To say that altruism is essentially unsci- entific is to deny the simplest propositions on which the whole edifice of modern science is built.^ To say that generosity is a second-rate morality and that self-interest is the only original and genuine human impulse is to fly in the face of everything that our greatest modern teachers have been telling us.^ The fact is that Cain's murder of his brother Abel was the first bold and brutal assertion of self-interest as the law of human life. That doctrine was not born out of the heart of the normal man. It was born out of an abnormal heart of envy and hatred. Before Cain killed Abel the association of human beings for good and common ends was no problem at all. But ever since
* Huxley: Romanes lecture, " Evolution and Ethics," pp. 81-83, 203.
6 See also " Utilitarianism," by J. S. Mill, p. 25, and "Data of Ethics," by Herbert Spencer, p. 243.
6 See also John Fiske, " The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self -Sacrifice," and Henry Drummond, " The Asce nt of Man."
20 The Christian Idea in tJie Modern World
it has been a problem — a problem born in the heart of covetousness, and set by the hand of hate for the race to solve/
If the doctrine that self-interest is the only genuine im- pulse in life contradicts the verdict of science, let us re- member, too, that it contradicts the verdict of life itself. It is all nonsense for men to say "look into your own heart and all that you will find there is love of yourself." That simply is not true. If we look into the human heart we do find the will to live and the will to power. But we find something else also. We find the will to love. And the one is just as instinctive, as inalienable, as true a part of us as the other. We do not need scientists to help us now, all we need is our own sense. If we examine our own hearts we find all kinds of affection, of benevolences, of sympathies, of compassion, of friendship, which like tendrils seek to link our life with the lives of others. No one really wants to live for himself and by himself. A. hermit life is not a natural life. And a moral hermit is as unnatural as a physical hermit. A Robinson Crusoe on an island of moral isolation is as unhappy as the hero of the famous tale. The heart itself rises up to rebel against the claim that self-interest is our only genuine impulse. The will to love is just as genuine as the will to live. The Thou is as real as the I. If men talk of human instincts, the instinct to love our brother and our neighbor is as original and normal as the instinct to love ourselves. We watch a little child. And we find that he loves every one, trusts every one, believes instinctively that every one is his friend, cannot understand why any one should want to harm him: shares naturally anything he has with others. And when we see a Httle child acting like that and then
• See Prea. Edward Hitchcock: "Cain the first godless Political Economist."
My Brother's Keeper 21
read about self-interest, self-love being the only natural impulse in life, it all falls to the ground. The sight of all child life is enough to show that it is false. It simply is not true.
These are the two most certain facts about man: his
^individuality and his soHdarity. They exist side by side. Each is just as original, just as true, just as needed as the other. There is our individuality. There is the will to live, the will to power. We are intensely aware of this fact about our nature. No one denies it. And never were we any more aware of it than we are today. But there is this other fact which seems to involve a contradiction, yet which is just as sure. There is our solidarity. We are
oour brother's keepers. We who are many are one body. And now, no morality can be true, no religion can be true, and no movement which claims the allegiance of men can be true which does not take into account these two great facts of human existence. It must insist upon the right of any man to develop that unique personality with which God has endowed him to the full height of its possibilities. It must encourage himself to be himself, to complete him- self and to fulfill himself. And yet, at the same time it must enforce the obligation that each man owes to other men and to mankind as a whole. It must tell him that to ignore the instinct which impels him to live in brotherly association with his fellows will result as disastrously for human society and for himself as to ignore the impulse which prompts him to live out his own separate individual life.
If we come to the religion of Jesus, to the moraHty of the New Testament, what do we find? We find that it is precisely the truth and the glory of the religion of Jesus, of. the ethics of the Gospel that both of these great truths
22 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
are incorporated within it. It was the glory and remains the glory of the religion of Jesus that it brought them both to light and set them side by side and made possible for the first time in human history the union of the apparently opposed ideas of the will to live and the will to love, of the love of one's self and the love of one another. It is useless and foolish to say that the religion of Jesus does not recognize as legitimate and natural the true love and respect of one's self, or that the religion of Jesus runs counter to and tends to destroy that proper impulse of self- preservation which is one of the native instincts of the human heart. It is not necessary to labor the point ; but it is well to remember that the religion of Jesus is the religion of great personalities. If there is one thing that the re- ligion of Jesus has done, it is to produce great individuals. The Christian religion is a religion of great biographies, and that is not true of any other of the great religions. Confucianism is a great religion, yet how few truly great men has Confucianism produced. Mohammedanism is a great religion, yet one reads its history and seldom comes across a truly great character. But when we read the story of Christianity, we are perpetually reading the story of the lives of great men and women; its history is as full of them as the heaven is of stars. To say, therefore, that the religion of Jesus does not make for personality, is to con- tradict the plainest fact of Christian history. Jesus him- self is the Sun in that firmament, and revolving about Him are the stars of first magnitude in the constellation of souls. The religion of Jesus not only produces great lives, but it makes much of the individuality of humble lives. Christ showed that each man in virtue of his manhood is unique and solitary. No modem prophet preaching the sanctity of the personal life, the right of private judgment, the
My Brother's Keeper 23
dignity of the individual soul, the right to live, has ap- proached in his teaching that of the Man of Nazareth. The gospel of Christ is the gospel of the individual. His parables exalt the value of the individual; his appeal is to the conscience of the individual. Our Lord regards this individuality of man as his great glory, to lose which is to lose his all.
But now, beside this great truth of the sanctity of the indi- vidual, Jesus put the other great truth of his social obliga- tions ; to be children of the same Father is to be brothers, and cooperation, sympathy, association, love, this is as true a part of human life and human conduct as the realization of one's separate human self. And when Jesus taught this truth in season and out of season. He was not superimpos- ing upon men a second-rate notion, rather He was resur- recting out of the soul of man an impulse as native, as original, as true as that of self-interest and self-preserva- tion. He was bringing to life a native and neglected part of human nature, without the recognition and cultivation of which man could not attain his true stature, nor human society achieve its destined end. Thus it is apparent to every thoughtful mind that when Jesus, side by side with a recognition of the dignity of the individual, set up the idea of love and brotherhood, He did not erect a vague Utopian ideal that had no real foundation in human nature. What He did was rather to recognize what human nature is, and to preach that a human soul can never come into its own, nor the world become the king- dom of heaven, until both of these native, inalienable impulses of human nature are understood, recognized, cor- related and practised. In all this He is what not irreverently He has been called, the most scientific of men ; for looking beneath the surface of man's antagonism, rivalries, hatreds.
24 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
He discovers the reason for it all, and the cure for it all. The reason for it is the practice of the impulse of self- interest to the neglect of the equally native and natural impulse of cooperation and of brotherhood. The cure for it is the recognition of the legitimacy of the impulse to fraternalism, the elevation of it to the position that belongs to it, and its adoption in the practical program of a man's life. And all science, all literature, all experience, all that we know of history, of men, of affairs, comes to the sup- port of the morality of the New Testament and the religion of Jesus.
The great need of the hour, therefore, is the education of ourselves, our children, and of people generally to un- derstand and thoroughly to believe that we are as truly our brother's keeper as we are the guardian of ourselves; that it is as natural to cooperate with others as to develop our- selves; that the way to hve a normal life is to love our neighbors as well as to love ourselves. The whole spirit of our uneducated or half -educated world takes a partial view. Self-interest is declared to be the only real rule of life and the road to happiness. In the midst of such a world stands the Man of GaHlee, preaching the whole truth and the whole dignity of man.
To train men into the fullness of this truth becomes thus the real task of all education in our day. The end of all our education is not to see how much we can learn, but how much we can learn to be, how freely we can learn all that we really are. This is the greatest work in education that was ever proposed. And in it we may all have our share.
All who have to do with the home may render a funda- mental service at this point to our modern world. No one can have known the influence of a good home without
My Brothe/s Keeper 25
having learned how complete and satisfying the hfe is which is not founded on self-interest alone, but on mutual consideration and good-will. The fundamental service which a true family renders to the modern world is as a training-school in the virtues of generosity and forbear- ance. The school can cooperate. Instead of existing for the purpose of individual acquisition, our schools should be centers of social occupation. **So long as school work consists in merely learning lessons, mutual assistance, the most natural form of cooperation and association, becomes a clandestine effort to relieve one's neighbor of his proper duties. Helping becomes a school crime." ® The greatest reform in school methods today is that by which a spirit of free communication, of interchange of ideas, suggestions and results, successes and failures may become the domi- nating and pervading atmosphere of school life. Not indi- vidualism but cooperation must be the law of the Hfe of that school which truly serves our modern world.
One of the finest services that our colleges are rendering is the high teaching that a man is his brother's keeper. Let any one look searchingly at college life today and he be- comes aware that selfish competition forms a very small part of it; its main value lies far away from the mere ad- vantages of self-interest. Its chief gains are not to be won in any game of grab, rather they are to be found in having invaluable opportunities to study men of like purposes, and differing capacities from one's own, and in the leisurely association with so much that is best in American life and scholarship; in the stimulating and ennobling thought that one belongs to a vast fraternity, is a member of a great fellowship, the fellowship of men educated into the moral- ity of Jesus, beside which merely to play the game of 'get'
'See John Dewey, " Moral Principles in Education," pp. 7-27.
26 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
is a vulgar and semi-barbarous life, of which a truly edu- cated man can not be guilty. "I have visited," Dr. Rains- ford once said, "all the cities and all the states in this great land of ours, but out from them all to my mind, one build- ing stands preeminently beautiful and eloquent: it is the Memorial Hall at Harvard College." ^ It tells the story of a college generation that earnestly believed that they were their brothers' keepers. It tells the story of brave deeds following upon that belief. "They had their hour, those men of fifty years ago, and they heard their call. A golden haze of distance already hangs over that past time." It all seems very glorious, but also very simple, very easy; they could not have done other than they did. But the same spirit of the same college is making its same appeal to us today. It is telling us that we are not educated men if we are not educated into the full morality of Jesus, into the knowledge of our full dignity as children of God, and it points us into a world still full of sham and shame and greed and lust and crime, full of brutal self-interest and sheer self-love, and it tells us to play our part as they played theirs, to believe asi they believed that we are indeed the keepers of our brothers ; to make the law of love a sovereign law of our lives. That is to receive the education of our col- lege, that is to be educated into the stature of a true man, to become in a real sense a child of God.
» W. S. Rainsford, " The Reasonableness of Faith," p. HI. Harvard Baccalaureate, 1893.
' III
THE MEANING OF SACRIFICE
The religion of Jesus, as we have seen, seeks to unite the two native and instinctive impulses of our human nature. Self-love and the love of our brother; self-interest and benevolence; the will to live and the will to love; the will to possess anid the will to serve. But now it may be asked, how can these two impulses be merged? Does not the one virtually exclude the other? If one man is to go up, must not some one else go down? If you want to suc- ceed, must not some one else fail? How can you save an- other and at the same time save yourself? Here, say the critics of Christianity lies the central immorality of the religion of Jesus. It makes for the depletion and ex- haustion of the individual life. "Every time we lift some one else up, we must decrease our own store of strength. Instead of exalting oneself above the average, we are asked to lift the average up." Thus Christianity strongly opposes self-interest in the Golden Rule. There is no way of reconciling the two. One must either save him- self or save others, he cannot do both. Thus the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice seems to come into coUision with the primitive instinct of self-preservation.
Indeed, there never was a time, perhaps, when the very idea of self-sacrifice was so much debated as in the day in which we live. Why sacrifice oneself? Where lies the virtue in this denial of the personal life? What is the virtue of this turning one's back upon his own life
37
28 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
and interests and ambitions ? Cannot one do most for the world by doing the most and best for oneself? Is not the right kind of self-culture the truest kind of altruism? Some men go the full length of denying the very possi- bility of what is called self-sacrifice. It is all a pious fiction. What is called sacrifice is only a refined kind of selfishness. Does a mother sacrifice herself, as we say, to her child? It is because she would rather do so than not. Does a missionary sacrifice himself by separating himself from his home? He is happier on his lonely mission field than in the midst of his own family. It is not sacrifice for him simply because he chooses it for himself. In the last analysis self-sacrifice is impossible. There is no such thing.
Others who concede the possibiHty of sacrifice declare that where there is such a thing it is irrational : it may not be a pious fiction, but it is a pious mistake. By what means can any kind of self mutilation be called a rational or a moral act? If a man should cut off his hand one would condemn him. But why is not the mutilation of one's life, of all one's ambitions, an even more sacrilegious thing than injury to one's body? Never perhaps was the pro- test more persistently urged or its force more generally felt than in our day. Nietzsche and Shaw and Ibsen have been preaching the sanctity of the personal life in earnest,* and striking ways; and proportionately earnest has been their dissent from the whole notion of sacrifice as held up by Christ and by the Christian faith. From their point of view nothing can be more immoral than that appeal to self-sacrifice which, as we all know, lies at the heart of the Christian Evangel. "The Christian ideal," teaches Nietzsche, "is to be regarded, not only as antiquated but as repulsive to the modern mind. Social stability rests on
The Meaning of Sacrifice 29
a more virile doctrine of the survival of the fit and the victory of the strong. Christianity is a 'religion of deca-
'dence/ 'Every instinct that is beneficient and contributory to life or establishing the future, is mistrusted.' 'To live so that one does not care to live becomes the problem
, of life/ Virtue must be freed from 'moralic acid.' It is our most strenuous and instinctive piety which forbids us to continue Christians."^
Among more modern, and more conservative writers and thinkers is to be noted the same distrust of the Christian Meal because of the emphasis it lays upon the elements of sacrifice and suffering. Now, as in the days of St. Paul,
^the Cross is, to many, a stumbling-block. "It is not a suf- fering, but a militant leader, we are told, to whom men must look for their salvation. It is not by suffering that God conquers death, but by fighting. There may be suffer- ings— they do not in themselves bring victory. The symbol of the crucifix jars on our spirit. We cannot accept the Christian's crucifix and pray to a pitiful God. . . . Here was a being of extreme gentleness and delicacy and of great courage, and of the utmost tolerance and subtlest sympathy — a saint of non-resistance." ^
Similarly, the apostles of culture, of the Greek ideal of self-development, have a certain horror of the Christian
. 'adoration of suffering' which they feel to be the utter oppo- site of the normal and rational goal of ethical endeavor. The Acropolis rather than Golgotha,^ Hellenism rather than
.^Christianity, represents the true climax of the human spirit.
So runs this emphatic and impassioned protest against
the notion of sacrifice as set forth in the Christian ideal.
» Quoted in F. G. Peabody: "Jesus Christ and the Christian Character," pp. 159, 160. 2 H. G. Wells. "God the Invisible King," pp. 101. 102.
* "The Acropolis and Golgotha," ' Elizabeth Dudley,' Atlantic Monthly, September. 1916.
30 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
The way out of this apparent antinomy between the ideals of self-culture and of self-sacrifice is of course by a careful analysis of the idea of self. When we look sharply at it, we discover that we do not mean one thing by the term self, but two things, two different, contrasted and mutually exclusive things, the one of which must in the very nature of the case, be 'sacrificed' if the other is to be gained. And the whole solution of our difficulty depends upon our apprehending the difference between these two possible selves.
It is not hard to apprehend it. There are few of us, for example, who have not paused as we have passed the State House in Boston to look at that wonderful monument in front of it, commemorating one of the noblest episodes in our Great War. There we see troops, negro troops, in the act of marching; and at their head, sitting proudly in his saddle with drawn sword, their Colonel, a white man, Robert Shaw. No one can look at that monument and think of what it means without perceiving at once that when we speak of the life of Robert Shaw, we are speaking not of one thing, but of two different things. Upon the one hand we mean the individual life of that man; a mem- ber of one of Boston's first families, a graduate of Har- vard College, a young lawyer of distinction and promise. That was his life. But that was not all his life. There was another Hfe, the life of Colonel Shaw of the ist United States Infantry, colored. These words instantly suggest the other life of this selfsame man. There is the same man, but there is another life, a life of rare heroism, of singular distinction, of great nobility — a life that risked more than death; that risked ridicule and execration and failure and disgrace, in becoming the first white man in the North to become the commander of colored troops ; who gave up
The Meaning of Sacrifice 31
his commission in his own Massachusetts regiment in order to become the leader of a forlorn hope, to make fighting men out of the despised negroes. There, then, are the two contrasted lives — the life of Robert Shaw of Boston and the life of Colonel Shaw of the United States Army.
If we look at these two lives for a moment, the ever- lasting truth of a well-remembered saying of Jesus instantly emerges and becomes as clear as daylight. "Who- soever will save his life shall lose it but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it." * Let Robert Shaw, that is, have saved the life of just Robert Shaw, and he must have lost the life of Colonel Shaw; he never would have known it and he never would have lived it. But let Colonel Shaw realize and preserve his career, and it meant losing inevitably and infallibly what Robert Shaw held most dear, his standing, his reputation, his comfort, his chances of preferment and even his friend- ships. There was no other way. He had to make his choice; to save one life was to lose the other. It was not a question as to whether or not he should lose his life, the only question was which life he should save and which life he should lose.
Such, says Jesus, is the issue before us all. For the choice has to be made. It may not be quite so dramatic as in the case of Shaw, but in its essence it is the same, and in its issues and results it is the same. For there are two kinds of life which every one of us may live, and only two. There is the life that is bounded by our own imme- diate interests, desires, appetites, comforts, ambitions, the life that centers in ourselves, our homes, our busi- ness, our separate careers. Then there is another life
VSt. Luke. 9 : 24.
3'2 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
open to" every one of us, the life that centers "nm only in our homes, our own interests, oUr own ambitions, but a: life that is really linked to some great cause; that becomes the loyal instrument of some great ideal.
Between these two every one of us must make his choice. He can have one, he can have either, but he cannot have both. If he saves the life that centers in himself, he loses automatically and infallibly the larger life that lies outside and beyond himself ; if he saves that life, then he will lose the lesser life of his own convenience, comfort, pleasure. There is no other way. For this enigmatical saying of Jesus, when it is really understood is seen to be the enun- ciation of a moral law as infallible as the law of gravity or any other of the laws of nature. "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it." Thus Jesus teaches that there is no use in debating whether one will sacrifice himself or not. It is not a question of whether. It is a question of which. It is not a question, says Jesus, of whether you will sacrifice yourself or not, it is a question only of which self you will sacrifice. One can no more escape self-sacrifice than he can escape life. They go together. Every day and hour of a man's life, in every casual act, in every chance decision, in every choice of his life, sacrifice is to be found. Either he is laying down his lesser life to realize his larger life, or he is laying down, losing his larger life in order to foster and promote his lesser life. And so, runs His teach- ing, since there must be sacrifice of some kind, see to it that your sacrifice be in the interest of life; that it be a progres- sive sacrifice out of which shall spring a larger and a more abundant Hfe. Lay down your lesser life, crucify your lower instincts, mortify your baser ambitions in order that that inward divine and possible life which lies today, concealed
The Meaning of Sacrifice 33
within you may grow, develop, and prosper in ways and forms that shall never die.
It is thus that the principle of sacrifice and suffering finds its place in the teaching and example of Christ. However much that idea may have been distorted and exaggerated in later mediaeval and pietistic teaching, it is never looked upon by Christ Himself as an end in itself. There is no morbid or fanatical word or act of His to which one can point as proof that He preferred suffering as such, or set death above life. Rather the whole teaching of Jesus is the solemn enunciation of this moral law which runs through all Hfe, and of this moral decision which is an inescapable element of all human experience. "Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth, and die, it abideth by itself alone ; but if it die, it beareth much fruit." ^ Sacrifice and death are not ends in themselves, but the means to a larger and more serviceable life.
Similarly, the effort to define the life of Christ Himself exclusively in terms of denial, sacrifice and death, is fore- doomed to failure. That there is another aspect to the life of Jesus, even the casual reader of the Gospel is fully aware. Strauss and Renan and other writers from whose conclusions upon the main purpose and meaning of the life of Christ most Christians dissent, have yet rendered a valuable service in bringing to light this neglected aspect of the character of Jesus, this joyous continuous conduct of a lovely soul which may be described as the Hellenic quality in His character. A book was published some years ago entitled "The Joyous Jesus." "My purpose," the author wrote, "is to deliver the figure of Jesus from the unhis- torical shadows in which it has been laid, and to set it in the sunshine where it belongs." "I give the Chris-
»St. JoUnl2 :24.
34 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
tians," writes Zangwill, "a Christ they have forgotten, the lover of all that is simple and pure and beautiful." ^
Evidently, therefore, the attempt to define the element of sacrifice in the life of Jesus in terms of asceticism, morbid love of martyrdom, the denial of the instincts of life and happiness, falls to the ground. It simply does not do jus- tice to the facts of the life of Christ as we know them. Rather we must seek to define it, as the operation in the life of Jesus of the moral law of which I have spoken; as the choice between the lesser and the larger self. The sol- diers who crucified Jesus unwittingly uttered the truth when they said, *'He saved others. Himself He cannot save." ^ He could not, that is, save His own comfort, popularity, friends, happiness, life, and at the same time the welfare, the comfort and the salvation of men. Between the two He made His choice. The Cross is the supreme illustration of the sacrifice of the lesser life in order to win the larger life that includes the lives of other men. Precisely that is the teaching of St. Paul. Present your bodies, he says, to be a living sacrifice unto God.^ The sacrifice which we preach is not in the interest of death but of life. It is not like the mutilation of the body, but like the pruning of a plant. Thus understood, the Christian idea of sacrifice, in- stead of being wrapped in obscurity and instead of contra- dicting the native and natural and normal instincts of the human heart, completes and fulfills them.
It is thus also that we finld the idea of sacrifice actually operating in the lives of the men and women who may most truly be called Christian. The author of "The Acropolis and Golgotha" cites the case of her mother. "I have known for many years one person who unites in a normal experi-
« Quoted in F. G. Peabody, " Jesus Christ and the Christian Character," p. 48.
7 St. Mark 15:31.
8 Rom. 12 : 1.
The Meaning of Sacrifice 35
ence your grandiose abstractions of Christianity and Hellen- ism." She goes on to speak of her mother's natural endowments, her activities, love of beauty, her mental alert- ness, her enjoyment of life, — in fact of all the quahties and possessions which satisfy the Greek ideal of culture. "And yet my mother is a Christian. All of this she takes in her two hands and offers daily. Her Christianity is compounded of Love. As it streams out from her it is the creative, re- generating passion for humanity. She dies daily for us, but we live her way! No superman could impose his will more effectively than this Christian in whom power and sacri- fice are one." Sacrifice and power, that is, are not opposites. To lose one's life is to save it.
To every one there is offered the same opportunity by the ' sacrifice ' of one's lesser self to reahze a life of immeasur- able personal blessedness and of incalculable influence and power. Every kind of associated life presents the solemn alternative. No one can know the joy of family Hfe who is not capable of constant acts of what we call self- denial. A man simply cannot always enjoy his own selfish comfort, and a happy stable family life at the same time. The only way in which he can realize the one, is by being capable of forgetting and letting go the other. People seem to imagine that they can have both kinds of life at the same time, and sooner or later they find that they are mistaken. Again it is a case of either, or. There is a life to save and a life to lose. The question is, which? The joy of the life of a true home may indeed be realized. But only by the exercise of the generous instincts of self-forgetfulness and self-discipline which shall make the family life possible.
Or if we come out into the larger world outside of our own famiHes and own homes, there we see the working of this same inevitable law, of the same inexorable choice
36 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
and alternative in life. There is a life to be saved and a life to be lost. And again it is a question of which life we shall save and which life we shall lose. That is the choice which men and women are making every day of their lives. They are saving, many of them, multitudes of them, the lives bounded by social position, by material prosperity, by financial interest, and by the same act, they are losing their higher and possible lives of idealism and service. Again, some are saving the larger life of devotion and of loyalty, but at the inevitable cost and sacrifice of personal comfort, personal profit, and personal popularity. For this world of ours is not a redeemed world yet. It is still in many respects an unregenerate world. It metes out its penalties still to those who do not conform to its standards, and its prizes to those who do.
Between these two possible selves, then, each must take his choice. The great question, it has well been said, is not what shall we do with our lives, but which life shall we do with, which shall we do without. We must sacrifice the one in order to attain the other. We must lose our lesser life if we would save our higher, better selves.
Thus it is that the two ideals of self-love and of love for others coalesce in the teaching of Jesus and in the practical life of every earnest soul. The self which is preserved and fostered by our love for others is the larger and nobler self inherent in every man, but brought into being and developed into beauty and power in proportion as the prin- ciple of love for others sways and controls his life. Self- interest, that is, if we crowd into that idea of self all that it will hold, instead of being opposed to the idea of service and sacrifice, really depends upon it. We cannot truly love our best selves unless we love our brother also. The will to live includes the will to love,
THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH
One of the great difficulties that everyone encounters who endeavors seriously to understand the religion of Jesus and to make that religion consistent withj the facts of human life, is to reconcile what we may call the fighting instinct with the Christian teaching about love, forbear- ance, and good-will. I do not need to argue the reality of the fighting instinct. Everybody knows what it is, everybody knows what it means. It is there, and has alway been there, it always will be there. It is one of the aboriginal impulses of our human nature. One can read history a long way back, but one can never get behind the fighting instinct; one can predict a good many things of human nature in the future, but one cannot predict the time when the fighting impulse will be lost ; it is part and parcel of our human nature; it is born in the bone and wrought in the fibre of what we call human character. This being so, if an ideal of human conduct is set up which ignores the fighting instinct or minimizes it, or deprecates it, or fails to satisfy it, then it becomes a standard of life which every true man in his heart of heart knows to be unreal.
It is at this point that the religion of Jesus seems to col- lide with what we know of human nature, and what we know of human life. For does not the religion of Jesus substitute love for fight, acquiescence in place of resistance, passive acceptance instead of active struggle, forbearance in place of assertion? There seems to be no place in the
37
38 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
religion of Jesus for the fighting impulse. That of itself seems to prove that tHe religion of Jesus is not a religion for true men. That goes to show that the morality of Jesus will not work in our modern world. So many men talk today. They tell us that the religion of Jesus did not even work in His own day; Jesus did not survive in His day, and no one who lives like Jesus can survive in our day. He did not resist nor defend His rights, nor take a step to save Himself from destruction ; He prayed, He suffered, He loved them who despitefuUy used Him, He endured — and He died. If we live as He lived we shall die as He died. Plainly, the thing cannot be done, and ought not be done if it could be done. Is there not something within us which tells us that this is not the way for a man to live; that at the best it is a one-sided morality, that it entirely overdoes one half of us at the expense of the other half. To some it appears as if this New Testament morality were really morality become sickly and corrupt: it contradicts the normal, healthy instincts of the human mind. Nothing in it is free and normal and natural. A man in fact must be a sick man in order to be a Christian ; or to ,put it the other way, if the Christian Idea gets hold of a man it makes him sick ; he becomes anaemic, the red blood is gone out of him. All of which is to state very crudely what a good many people feel. It is only too true to say that the Christian idea of love has become so' misunderstood as to be distrusted and to stand not only for something unreal, but something which cannot but be described as untrue.
Not one of us but feels a certain force in this reasoning. "In justification of it," as Dr. Campbell has said in one of his sermons, "look clearly at the associations of the word love in our common speech, in what you call Christian or Evangelical circles. Love is always spoken of as the acme
The Good Fight of Faith 39
of all virtues, a sentiment which everyone is supposed to feel towards everyone else; or should endeavor to do so. It connotes gentleness, forbearance, humility, a desire for self-effacement; the person who absorbs into his moral system the most of this idea, is not likely to be forceful or aggressive in his dealings with his fellows, but just the opposite: modest, retiring, full of sympathy for sorrow, in a word, in whom the softer and passive virtues are called into play."^ Dr. Campbell quotes from Mr. Fielding's re- markable studies in Burmese life, in which he describes the feeling of puzzlement and contradiction with wiiich he tries to square the moral ideals which he had been taught at home with what he found in the actual world of affairs. At home he had been taught to love everybody, but later on he found that if any man had modelled himself on a truly loving char- acter, he would be set down as a fool, too weak and effem- inate for the serious business of life. But then, so far as he could see, nobody did attempt to model himself in any such fashion. He mentions the case of a doctor who was congratulated by a friend on having made a discovery that would place him in the front rank of his profession and be of the utmost benefit to medical science. "The doctor's reply that he cared nothing for his discovery except that he wanted to do good, was received in chilly silence. Every man who heard it plainly showed that he regarded it as bad form and probably untrue; and everyone knows how young men would treat one another if there were any parade of sentimentality on such a point. Let any young person in any walk of life give the impression that he wants to love everybody in the conventional religious sense and he is in for a bad half hour: he is voted weak and unmanly and is treated accordingly." The issue has been
» Christian World Pulpit, London, 1915.
40 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
sharpened by the Great War. An English paper recently published an article under the title: "Time to Retaliate." Zeppelins had blown over a sleeping town and had killed forty-five men, women and children. The writer urged that it was time to do something. And when he said that to suffer such outrages and to be quiet and loving without any show of fight or resistance had ceased to be a virtue, he made an appeal to the instinct of self-preservation and self-defence that rose right up to meet it. When, some little time back, the head-master of Eton warned the Eng- lish people that the spirit of fight would never do, and that England must cultivate a feeling of reconciliation with their foe, there was a howl of indignation against him. Everyone understands the feeling that prompted it. The question is, how to reconcile the Christian teaching of love with this fighting instinct that is plainly a part of our human nature. Can they be reconciled? Well, if they cannot be, then the Christian teaching is gone. There is one thing in the long run that people are bound to be, and that is, themselves. And if it is a question of being them- selves, or else being Christian, there is no manner of doubt as to the choice they will make. The reason why a multitude of people will not call themselves Christians today, is that they do not feel that they can both be Chris- tians and be themselves, and themselves they are bound to be.
How can we reconcile the fighting instinct with the morality of Jesus? That is our question. Let us answer it by asking another. How do we explain the fact that Jesus Himself still remains the world's ideal of perfect manhood? We waste no time by asking if He still does. There is one fact that can be called settled and solid. If anyone questions it, he has not thereby told us anything
The Good Fight of Faith 41
about Jesus: he has simply told us something about him- self. After two thousand years of history by common and universal consent men have united in crowning Him Lord of all. But now, would Jesus be thus crowned and revered as the supreme illustration of human character at its high- est and best, if He does not illustrate and satisfy in His own Person what we have called the fighting instinct? Men do not worship anyone in whom this element of human nature is absent or ignored. The kind of person to whom people give their confidence is not merely the in- offensive, the amiable, and in a purely negative or passive sense, the loving or benevolent character, but quite a different kind of nature : the strong, passionate, the self- contained, the masterful soul. If we take the heroes of any nation we find them to be men like that, men like Cromwell or Gladstone in English history, men like Wash- ington or Lincoln in American history. It is natures like these, formed on a grand scale, who win the admiration and love of men. And if men everywhere unite in putting Jesus at the head of the race, it can be only because these masterful qualities which have the fighting instinct as the root and source of them were in Him also. Love without majesty or force might have gained for Jesus affection, it would not have brought Him worship. No, nor would the affection itself have been in quality and extent, anything approaching what it is today.
No one who knows the story of Jesus' life for a moment imagines that the fighting instinct was absent. It lies open on the page. Anger, indignation, resentment, courage, rebuke, control, all the masterful virtues are not only present in Him, they are there in super-eminent degree. Now He drives the money changers from the temple with a whip of cords; now His indignation blazes out against
42 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
fraud and hypocrisy; now we read that He looked round about Him in anger; again we hear Him calHng down woes on Scribes and Pharisees. We are told that no man dared lay hands upon Him for fear of multitudes; we find Him standing up in the temple area and preaching openly truths that made His enemies gnash their teeth in rage. We find Him taking the part of the ostracized and outlawed in defiance of every convention of His time. The impact of His personality on His opponents must have been terrific. What it was upon His friends we know : it made Him the object of reverence and affection, of a whole- hearted devotion such as has never been given to a leader of men. His simple followers loved Him with such an intensity of devotion, that His death was to them the end of everything. That devotion has followed Him down through the ages. There is no name today like the name of Jesus, and the reason is that there is no name that stands for all that men love and honor, for something in- flexible, mighty, awe-inspiring, soul-enthralling as the name of Jesus does. One can account for Him in no other way. If then, we want to know how we are to reconcile the fighting instinct with the morality of Jesus in our- selves, all we have to ask is how were they united in Him ? When we look carefully into the gospel to see what it was that aroused this fighting instinct in Jesus, we make this illuminating discovery: that the source of it and the object of it all lay outside of Himself. He was never angry at any wrong done to Himself as an individual, but He was stirred to wrath such as we will never know by the moral wrongs that He saw in the world outside of Himself. Cruelty, heartlessness, hypocrisy, inhumanity, these were the things that roused His wrath. The fighting impulse was indeed there, but it took a great issue to rouse it, and'
/
The Good Fight of Faith 43
when it was roused, it was directed to a noble end. The fighting instinct is not neglected or minimized or depre- cated or ignored, but it is ennobled. Jesus does not tell a man not to fight; He tells him when to fight and what to fight for ; Jesus does not tell a man not to be angry, He tells him what to be angry about. Jesus does not tell a man he must not be indignant, but He does tell what ought to make him indignant. And when we look at the life of Jesus and then at our own lives, we find the difference to be : not that the fighting impulse is absent in His life and present in ours, but that Jesus fights for what we ignore, and that we fight for what He ignored. What makes us angry left Him unmoved. But we are unmoved by what roused Him to infinite reaches of wrath. What makes us indignant never caused Him to be ruffled in the least; but we remain unruffled by what stirred Him to the depths. What are the things that make us angry? Personal re- buff, insult, slight, or attack. From what does our anger spring? From love of ourselves, conceit, self-will, self- esteem. What makes us fight? Desire, resentment, greed, hatred, revenge. But there was no fight in Jesus that sprang from such motives and were directed to such ends. "Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him." - It took more than this to arouse the anger of Jesus; it was for more than this that Jesus fought. There was not less fight in Jesus than in us, but more fight and better and nobler.
What made Jesus angry? It was the sight of moral evil, far removed from self-love and self-interest. He saw men unkind and brutal to little children. Instantly His anger flamed up and He declared a man had better be drowned like a criminal than to hurt one of these little ones. ^ He
s St. Luke 12 : 10. » St. Matt. 18 : 6.
44 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
saw men jplaying the game of graft in the temple, and His indignation overflowed, and He drove the traitors out. * He saw the Pharisees unwilling that a man should be healed on the Sabbath, and He looked around about them with eyes which they never forgot. ^ He beheld the Scribes and Sadducees full of falsehood, hypocrisy and cunning cruelty and He uttered over them some of the most scath- ing words in all literature.*^ He let the full force of His nature go, not from selfish motives or from selfish ends, but from sheer unselfishness, from love of goodness against wrong wherever He' found it, wherever it lifted its head. Thus love and fight do not exclude each other; on the con- trary, the highest kind of love necessitates fight, only it is the highest kind of fight. "Ye that love the Lord, hate evil."" Thus Jesus does not teach us to suppress our fighting in- stinct but to love the highest that we know in order to fight for the best that there is. The true love of Christ is the magnifying of one's personality to the utmost in the service of the whole. It is the lifting of the fighting impulse from the lower levels of self-interest and putting it down in the great arena of moral issues, where it can spring from the noblest motives and be directed to the noblest ends.
The Christian teaching therefore does not seek to de- stroy the fighting impulse, on the contrary it fulfills and ennobles it. To fight from selfish motives and for petty personal ends may seem to satisfy the fighting instinct, but actually and fundamentally, it does not. " 'There was a man who did me a wrong,' an old friend once told me, and I heard it with horror, 'and I waited for twelve long years, but I waited until I had the chairs sold under him,
« St. John 2 : 14, 15. e St. Matt. 23 : 13-23.
5 St. Mark 3:5. ' Psalm 97 : 10.
The Good Fight of Faith 45
and when the chairs were sold under him, I drew a long breath and said, 'My God, but that is conquering.' " * There is not one of us who does not know how the man felt when he had done that thing. And must it not be said that he had satisfied his fighting instinct? Right or wrong, good or bad, was there not satisfaction in it? Doubtless there was; but it was not the highest satisfaction; neither was it a permanent satisfaction. For one brief, intoxicat- ing moment, without doubt he breathed the air of victory and felt the thrill of triumph, but he had not satisfied his fighting impulse. No human impulse is ever satisfied until it springs from the noblest motives, and is directed to the noblest ends. The man who had sold the chairs from under his enemy, did not know a long satisfaction. The sight of that man thereafter did not give him joy. The thought of his wife and children did not cause him happiness. His own nature had not been broadened ; it had been narrowed and embittered. He had not made the world a more liv- able place by his deed; he had made it more treacherous and tmsafe. He had not really satisfied his fighting in- stinct, he had misused and misdirected it, he had conquered only for a moment ; he had not conquered for time or for eternity.
But what a timeless and eternal victory it is when one raises the fighting impulse to the highest level, to the level of the religion of Jesus, and fights from motives that are true and noble, and for ends that are wholly great. There is infinite satisfaction. The great Christian men and women of the world are not distinguished by their lack iof the fighting impulse, but they always fight from mo- ,tives that lie away out of themselves, and they fight for ends that are eternal in themselves. They are the men
s R. J. Campbell.
46 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
and women, who, like Jesus, can never be stirred to re- sentment and indignation by mere personal rebuff or in- sult. They are lifted well above the reach of it. But they are men and women who satisfy their fighting im- pulse by loving God and truth and righteousness so utterly that they let themselves go against evil and shame where they find it; and there is simply bottomless satisfaction in that.
Christian history is full of such noble militant heroes. They were fighters, no other word can de- scribe them. But they never fought from ignoble motives and they never fought for purely personal or selfish ends. St. Bernard and Luther, and Shaftesbury and Livingstone, Wendell Phillips and Dr. Howe in their battles for truth and justice satisfied the deepest fighting instincts of the human heart. Let any one read Riis' *The Battle with the Slum." There is the record of a fight if ever there was one. But it was a good fight of faith. Abraham Lin- coln presents us with an immortal example of the true satisfaction of the fighting impulse. He was the most magnanimous and charitable of men. Impossible to get more than a smile or a joke out of Lincoln by a personal slight or injury. He could sit unperturbed at his cabinet table, amid such petty and acrimonious debates that one of its members ceased to make a record of the discussions because he did not want to preserve and perpetuate the kind of things that Lincoln had to hear and bear. But there was no fight in Lincoln there. There was nothing in all that really to start or to satisfy the moral indignation and the fighting impulse of a nature as great as his. But there was a man whom the mere sight of slavery filled with the spirit of invincible determination, and who measured his whole nature against that ancient and intrenched evil
The Good Fight of Faith 47
And who can measure the satisfaction there was in such a fight and such a victory?
We were all born to fight, but because we were also born of God, we were born to fight for what God fights. The fighting impulse is a part of us, because our God has set his face against evil. To purify and satisfy the fighting instinct is to fight from God-like motives and for God-like ends. We will never get any ultimate satisfaction from resenting injury, requiting wrong, returning evil for evil, from fighting for what we call our rights, from struggling for personal gratification ; that is indeed to use the fighting instinct, but it is also to misuse it and misdirect it. But another possibility is before us; not of fighting less, but of fighting better and fighting more. "To hate sin as the meanest, crudest thing in the world, to fight it in oneself and to fight it in the world, to save ourselves and the world from its loathsome, baleful presence, this is the work of ^Christ, this should be the crowning purpose of the Chris- tian today." ^ This is the religion of Jesus, which does not destroy, but fulfills and satisfies the fighting impulse as well as every other impulse of the human heart.
• President William De Witt Hyde. Baccalaureate Sermon at Bowdoin College.
. V THE MEANING OF NON-RESISTANCE
The question whether or not the Christian Idea out- laws the use of violence and teaches literal non-resistance has ceased to be an academic or purely theoretical question, and has become one of the most urgent problems of our time.
No word of Jesus is now more often or more seriously discussed than the little sentence in the Sermon on the Mount, "Resist not him that is evil." ^ No injunction of Jesus has been found more difficult to understand. No question has been found harder to answer than the ques- tion : "What did Jesus mean when He used those words ?" If it is answered "He meant what He said" then a disciple of Christ seems to be committed to a course of action that to what may be called the broad and general sense of mankind seems both irrational and absurd. But if He did not mean this, then the question re- mains, What did He mean? Does Jesus teach absolute non-resistance ? Is it un-Christian to use physical violence ? Does the spirit of Jesus outlaw war? Is it wrong to pre- pare ourselves to resist aggression? Is it un-Christian for a nation to manufacture munitions, raise armies and build navies? What has the Christ to say about all of this?
We limit ourselves to the New Testament. We confine ourselves to the Gospels. It is not a question of what David and Daniel said, but of what Jesus said. But even
1 St. Matt. 5 : 39.
49
50 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
if we confine ourselves to the New Testament and to the teaching of Christ we find ourselves in a maze of perplexity and in a Babel of confusion. The teaching of Jesus seems anything but clear. Of course to the literalist it is per- fectly clear. It was perfectly clear to Tolstoi. "We may bring forward," he says, "the difficulty of always obeying such a law. Many men say, as unbelievers do, that it is a foolish doctrine — that Christ was a dreamer, an idealist, who gave precepts which it is impossible to follow. But we cannot deny that Christ expresses His meaning most clearly and distinctly and His meaning is that man must not resist evil. He who freely accepts His teaching cannot resist evil." ^ And in the full application of that teaching, Tolstoi would sweep away not only armies and navies, but, states and constables and courts and judges and prisons. '
There have always been people who have felt that this is the only honest Christian position. All others are tricky and evasive. All other explanations simply try to escape the teaching of Jesus rather than to face it. People have always believed that. Literal non-resisters exist in con- siderable numbers. And they do not see how others can be called Christians in the strict sense of the term. We are told in the New Testament not to resist evil, and we do resist it. We are told to turn our other cheek, and we do not turn it. We are told if any one sues us for our coat, to give him our cloak, and we refuse. We are told not to turn away him that asketh of us, and we do turn him away. "Therefore we are not Christians. We do not practise what we profess. We are all a set of hypocrites and the Church is a sham." *
We must have respect for the literalists. At least they
> L^n Tolstoi. " What I Believe," N. Y.. 1886. p. 13.
» Charles E. JeflFewon. " Christianity and International Peace," pp. 73, 74.
The Meaning of N on-Re.nstance 51
take their Bibles seriously. That is more than can be said of the sentimentalist who sighs over the lofty and beautiful precepts of Jesus but who feels of course that they must not be taken too literally. But what is the trouble with the literalist? What is wrong with his reasoning? It is not that he uses his New Testament too well, but that he does not use it well enough. It is not a question of using or not using our Gospels to determine our conduct, but it is a question of using them in the right way. And to fasten on a single saying of Jesus, without regard to con- text, and without regard to the general character of His teaching, as a rule to be literally interpreted and strictly obeyed, is to use the teachings of Jesus as He never in- tended them to be used. It is essentially an un-Christian way of using the words of Christ. There is no folly which cannot be justified by such a mistaken use of Scripture. Moreover the literalist is not consistent. He takes one injunction literally but not another. He is a literal non- resister but he does not literally give to every beggar, or put his money into the ground instead of in a bank: and he does not literally take staff and scrip and travel from one town to another. He says one passage is to be taken literally and the other not. But if you ask him why not, he has nothing to say. Moreover, if we take the simple sentence plan of getting at the teaching of Jesus, we are involved in all kinds of confusion and perplexity. For Jesus seems to say one thing at one time and another thing at another time. Which shall we take? Which shall we leave? On this subject of non-resistance it would not be hard to find words of Christ that seem to warrant opposite views. "Resist not evil" says the pacifist. But the non- pacifist retorts, "I came not to send peace but a sword."*
* St. Matt. 10 : 34
52 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
"Turn to him the other cheek,"^ says the non-resister. "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one,"® says his opponent. "Love your enemies," ^ says the peace-at- any-price man. "Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . but the end is not yet," ^ retorts the man who be- lieves in war.
Or if one turns from the words of Jesus to His own deeds, the debate does not end. Did Jesus suffer the sol- diers to take Him? Yes, but He also made a whip of cords and drove the exchangers out of the temple. Was He not taken like a sheep for the slaughter? Yes, but did He not preach openly, and defy the Scribes and Pharisees to take Him before His time was come? Plainly there is no easy way of settling the question by taking the detached words or deeds of Jesus and setting them up as inflexible rules of conduct.
But Jesus neither expected nor desired that any such use should be made of them. H Jesus had intended His separate sayings as rigid rules for the regulation of con- duct. He would certainly have written them down. But He never did ; or He would have dictated them to His dis- ciples, but He never did ; or He would have told them care- fully to preserve them and to set them down immediately after His death. But He never did. And they never did. And when they preached and wrote, their sermons or epistles were not a long list of quotations from the teach- ing of the Master. Jesus did not come to give rigid rules for the regulation of conduct. He came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. He came to inspire us by His personality with the spirit of love and good-will and to teach us how that spirit of love and good-will may
6 St. Matt. 5 : 39 ^ st. Matt. 5 : 44
8 St. Luke 22 : 36 » St. Matt. 24 : 6
The Meaning of Non-Re sistance 53
be applied in the various relations of life. He did not come to think for us and to save us from the trouble of doing our own thinking. To treat Jesus' sayings as ethical rules is wholly to misunderstand their purpose and to trans- form the Christian religion of a spontaneous life of love and service into a religion of carefully regulated pro- prieties. He who blindly follows the sayings of Jesus does not really follow Him at all.
Therefore to take the detached saying of Jesus 'Resist not evir and to erect it into an uncompromising and rigid doctrine of absolute non-resistance is not necessarily to imitate the spirit of Christ at all. To say that Jesus pro- scribed the use of force and prohibited the use of violence is in itself to do force and violence to the teaching of Jesus. Jesus dealt with motives, with impulses. His religion had to do with the spirit. It was an affair of the heart. The whole Sermon on the Mount is a substitution of the relig- ion of the spirit for a religion of the letter. The whole argument of it is that we must get back of deeds and acts, to the motives that prompt them. The motive is the thing on which Jesus fastens His eye. And the trouble with the doctrine of the literal non-resister is that he looks at the act and not at the motive.
In a little catechism of non-resistance published by the disciples of William Lloyd Garrison, the matter is put right in these words : ^
Q. *Ts the word resistance to be taken in its widest meaning — that is that no resistance whatever is to be shown to [evil] ? A. No, it is to be taken in the strict sense of the Savior's injunction, that is, we are not to retaliate evil with evil. Evil is to be resisted by all just means but never with evil."
» Quoted by W. L. Sperry, " Non-Resistance," p. 13. The Pilgrim Press.
54 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
Of course evil is to be resisted. If one says that physical force is never permissible one is not aware of the reach of the language he is using. If, to borrow Dr. Jefferson's illustration,^^ I see a mad dog coming my way, I will use all the force I have to resist him. But also if I see a lunatic travelling in my direction, I will try to resist him also. Or again, if a drunken man comes at me with a knife, I will use violence in my efforts to beat him back. But now, if not a dog, a lunatic or a drunken man attacks me, but a wicked man who has evil in his heart and has evil intentions, if he attacks me I will also do my best to resist him. "There is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding."^^ And the love of God that is within a man's breast is not contradicted by a law of God that is written anywhere else. And if re- sistance to evil is intuitive when that evil is directed towards oneself how much more instinctive and irresist- ible it is, when it is directed toward those whom it is one's most instinctive piety to defend and to protect.
If it is so of individuals surely it is so of communities. Desperados and cut-throats must be restrained. The law must have a heavy hand that can fall at once upon any one that threatens the peace of our homes or the life and prop- erty of our citizens. And if it is so of communities it is surely so of nations. To say that a nation must never use force or violence is just as irrational as to say that an in- dividual must never resist evil by such means. For what is a nation except an aggregation of individuals? There are lunatic nations as well as lunatic individuals. There are intoxicated countries as well as intoxicated persons. A little nation can be trampled on by a big one as well as a
" C. E. Jefferson, op. cit. p. 77. "Job 32 :8.
The Meaning of Non-Resistance 55
defencedess individual can be attacked by a ruffian. Just so long as there are evil and unregenerate people or peoples in the world, just so long will resistance be used, force and violence if necessary, to put down the evil.
What then, it may be asked, becomes of the teaching of Jesus : "Resist not him that is evil," if we say that evil is to be resisted? The answer is, how are you resisting it? What is the motive behind the resistance? What is the idea which prompts you to use force and violence ? Let us return once more to the little catechism of which I have spoken. "Q. In what does the chief doctrine of non- resistance consist? A. In that it alone makes it possible to tear the evil out by the root, both out of one's own heart and out of his neighbor's heart. The doctrine forbids doing that by which evil is perpetuated and multiplied. To offend another because he offends us is to repeat an evil deed. Satan cannot be driven out by Satan. Evil cannot be con- • quered by evil." To get at the heart of Jesus' teaching about non-resistance therefore, one needs to complete it, so as to make it read : 'Resist not evil with evil. Do not seek to overcome hate with hate. Do not imagine? that you can destroy enmity by enmity. But I say unto you love your enemy and do good to them that persecute you.' In order, therefore, that resistance to evil shall be Christian, what is needed and all that is needed is that the motive behind that resistance be not the evil motive of hatred, of revenge, of resentment, of retaliation, but be a good motive which shall include the true welfare of the person who is resisted as well as the welfare of the person who resists. And to say that force and violence must never be used in resisting people is to take the position that love and force are inconsistent with each other and mutually exclude each other. But precisely the opposite of that we know to be
56 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
true. The truest love and the deepest regard for others is the very thing that often prompts us to use force and even violence in dealing with them.
It is so with parents in dealing with their children. Sometimes a boy or a girl will run wild in a home, losing all control of himself, mastered wholly by his selfish de- sires, upsetting the peace of the home and interfering with the rights of the other members of it. What is to be done with such a child at such a time? Evidently he must be suppressed. Hands must be laid on him. If necessary, he must be held by force. Physical violence may be needed to restrain him. A stubborn child was once strapped into his chair by his mother. He held himself so rigidly that it required all her strength to draw the strap tight until the little body yielded. She used every ounce of physical force she possessed in subduing her six-year-old boy. But the use of force was not evil. It did not beget evil in her, nor produce evil in the child. Behind the use of force lay love. She knew it, and he knew it. And she knew that he knew it. She was not dominated by anger, and he in turn felt no resentment. To punish a child vindictively, to resist his evil with a will that is also evil; to meet de- fiance with defiance, this is indeed to make a chasm be- tween parent and child and to invite disaster. But to resist evil with the strength that is born of love, of a love that is the enemy not of the child but of the evil in the child: that is often the only way to save the child and to save the home. And every child knows the difference: quickly he can tell whether the hand that is laid upon him is the hand of love, or the hand of hate, the touch of affection or the touch of impatience and retaliation.
If it is so of the home, it is so of the community. It would be no kindness to cut-throats and to desperados to
The Meaning of Non-Resistance 57
let them run at large. To love our enemy the thief would not consist in letting him have his evil way and enjoy his loot in peace. Love for our enemy the murderer would not lie in letting him imagine that he can kill people who get in his way, and then remain unmolested himself. Not to resist evil-doers would not show that we cared for them. A violent man in society must be treated in the same way as a stubborn child in the house. The analogy is the same. A home is a place where a few people live together who are related by blood. A community is a place where more people live together who have other relations with each other. If it is a false love which lets a selfish child have his way in the home, it is equally a false love which lets a selfish individual have his way in the community. In either case, it is to breed selfishness and to encourage evil. To love men that persecute us is not to let them have their evil way with us. And the reason is not that that would be a bad thing for us, but because that would not be a good thing for them. It would not be a good thing for their souls to let them believe that they can walk over people. People are not made to be walked over. And they must be educated to a better idea of what people are for. There- fore hands must be laid on them. They must be restricted. They must be subdued, if necessary by force. Even vio- lence may be required — a violence that shall do them bodily injury. But the motive, the idea, underlying this resistance by force, by violence, will always be not hatred, vindictive- ness and retaliation, but love in its broadest, deepest, truest sense — that aims primarily at the welfare of the person that is resisted.
And that motive is the one that will subdue our friend the criminal. Force by itself will never do it. Punishment as such will never accomplish it. If experience in dealing
58 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
with criminals has proved anything, it has proved that the policy of mere suppression gets nowhere. If a father can- not subdue his child by whipping him in anger, neither can a community subdue its enemy by punishing him in anger. Severity of punishment has nothing to do with the abolition of crime. The juvenile court has done more for Oliver Twist than the gallows ever did. Brutality does not cure the brute. Force may indeed be needed to repress him: but the use of force is not an evil if behind it are motives of true regard for the evil-doer. A strong hand may be needed to resist him: but that is not to resist him with evil if that hand is controlled by love. The new penology does not eliminate force in the treatment of crim- inals: but it does eliminate force which has behind it the motives of revenge, and vindictiveness, which is devoid of any desire for the ulterior good of the criminal himself. The application of the same principles lead us to the solution of the vexed question of the relation of nation to nation. There is no question more important. There is none that is more puzzling. As soon as we open it, we begin a debate upon which good men. Christian men, differ widely — so widely that it seems impossible to harmonize their views. Full discussion of this vexed question is re- served for another chapter.^^ yet the principles governing the solution of this problem are at least suggested in what has been said. Literal non-resistance between nation and nation, would have its counterpart in literal non-resistance between a parent and a stubborn selfish child, or be- tween a community and criminal. If we say that love and force are not opposite terms in the two cases, why shall we say that they are opposite terms in the third? If we say that the true regard for the welfare of an individual
"ScechaptcrlX.pp. 107-113.
The Meaning of N on-Resistance 59
requires that he shall be restrained by force from trampling on the rights of others, why shall we not say the same of nations? Why may we not say that truly to love another nation will be to teach it that it cannot tear up treaties, destroy defenceless people, and run amuck in the family of nations? Do not the same moral principles obtain between nations, as between individuals ? Therefore to pronounce all wars as criminal, to condemn all that take part in them, and to assert that literal non-resistance between nations is the law of Christ is as untenable as to assert the same between individuals. The questions as to how absolute non- resistance would work or what would result if one nation should offer no resistance to the aggression of another is not a part of this discussion. For all such debates are beside the mark. They do not go to the heart of our question. The issue is not between resistance and non- resistance in the field of acts, but in the area of motives. The real question is with what motive would we resist an offending nation? Shall we resist evil with evil, answer hate with hate, enmity with enmity? The distinction is not between the use of force by a nation or no use of force. The distinction is between the use of force for revenge, for retaliation, for greed, for con- quest, or its use for the welfare even of the people against whom it is used in order to suppress the evil in the nation which is being resisted. For it is as true be- tween nations as between individuals that evil cannot be resisted by evil, nor hatred conquered by hatred, nor en- mity be overcome in any other way than by love.
The root of the problem of war thus lies in the motives of the human heart. It is not force, or violence or resist- ance or any outward thing that we really need to be con- cerned about at all, but only the motives and impulses of
6o The Christian Idea in the Modern World
the human heart. And that is what we find when we turn to the New Testament. We do not discover that much is said about Hteral non-resistance or not using force, or even about abstaining from soldiering. But how much we read about getting rid of wrath and vindictiveness and strife: "Render to no man evil for evil."^^ There is the law of Christ. "Avenge not yourselves, but give place unto the wrath of God."^* Do not interpose, that is, the petty motives of personal spite and vindictiveness, but let the Divine wrath against the evil itself have its full course. "Overcome evil with good."^^ "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."^® "Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love."^^ "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and railing be put away from you with all maHce and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another."^^
This is the New Testament doctrine of non-resistance. It prohibits the resistance of evil by evil; of hatred by hatred, of enmity by enmity. It does not prohibit force but it does prohibit force which springs from evil motives and evil desires. Thus this doctrine of resistance makes greater moral demands upon us than the doctrine of literal non- resistance. It is morally much easier to abstain from the use of force altogether than to restrain oneself so as to use it indeed, if it be needed, but never from an evil motive or for an evil purpose. Literal non-resistance may indeed be an heroic and positive program. But even more heroic is the self-control which uses means of forcible resistance, yet none the less, or rather the more, overcomes the evil with the goodness, the kindness and the love that are born of God.
"Rom. 12:17. "Phil. 2:5.
xRom. 12:19. "Rom. 12:10
'»Rom. 12:21. isEph. 4:31-
VI
CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP
The task of harmonizing the Christian ideal with the life of our modern world has by no means been completed when the underlying ideas of the Christian faith have been shown to have their roots in the native soil of the human heart. There remains the task of proving that those ideas are actually workable under the practical conditions of our modern world. The word 'true,' as we have seen, means to the majority of m.en today 'true to life.' The Christian teaching about love, sacrifice, unselfishness may seem beautifully and ideally true when one interrogates the life of an individual apart from its actual location in a given kind of world, and yet seem hopelessly out of place when that same individual attempts to live his life in that world. When he looks about him and seriously contemplates living out these ideas of love and good-will which he finds to be a part of himself, he is embarrassed at the conditions that confront him. However men believe, whatever they say, to whatever faith they confess, actually are they not con- ducting their practical affairs upon the sheer principle of love of self? How then, and upon what terms, may one enter into this Hfe upon any other principle? One must have a working basis for his practical participation in af- fairs. And if affairs are actually conducted upon one principle, how can one hope to engage successfully in them if or ' guiding principle is its utter opposite ?
It .o at this point that multitudes of young men and
61
62 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
women of our time pause. Their real difficulty is not in persuading themselves that the Christian ideas are either ideally or intellectually true, but in persuading themselves that they can truly be lived and practised in the kind of a world we inhabit today. Evidence on this point could be multiplied indefinitely. Dr. Reginald J. Campbell, who has had as large an experience as perhaps any man of our time in dealing directly with young men, tells that they have assured him over and over again that what they had to do in business in order to keep their situations rendered it impossible for them to make a profession of Christianity; and that in any case, Christianity and the competitive sys- tem which forms the economic basis of modern civilization seemed to them to come in conflict at every point. "Experi- ence compels me to affirm that it is not the difficulty of squaring Christianity with the modern science that is the question, but rather the difficulty of squaring the ethical pre- cepts of the New Testament with the requirements of in- dustrial and economic practice. They cannot understand how there could be a truce between them; and hence they had to accept the facts as they are and refuse to play the hypocrite by maintaining on Sunday what their conduct be- lied all the rest of the week. I know this to be a serious problem with young men, and it is the best of them that feel it most." ^
Such, then, in a word, is the conflict which presents it- self between the Christian Idea and the conditions of modern life to the candid eye of many thoughtful people in our day. Shall we, then, conclude that however true the Christian Idea may be in some ways, it is not true to life? That though it may be a primitive and native ele- ment of our hearts, it cannot be made to work in our social
^Reginald J. Campbell: " A Spiritual Pilgrimage," pp. 142. 143,
Christian Discipleship 63
relationships? That there may be conditions in which such a principle of Hfe could be successfully practised, but that those are surely not the conditions of our present, modern world?
On the contrary, it is the precise opposite of all this which may be affirmed. Not only is it possible to practise the Christian Idea in our modern world, but our modern world, it is beginning to be perceived, cannot continue to be a tolerable place to live in unless the Christian Idea is practised. Signs are multiplying that it is to the degree that the Christian ideas of love and brotherhood are in- troduced in social relations that these relations become suited to the needs and demands of human existence. It is precisely when the Christian Idea is absent, that con- ditions are at their worst. Selfishness it has been dis- covered has been tried, and it has made a kind of hell on earth. It is time to try imselfishness and brotherhood, if our modern world is to be saved from perdition.
If, for example, we look to the smallest group of the social order, the Family, we find there a striking illustra- tion not only of the practicableness, but of the indispens- ability of the Christian Idea. Doubtless the problem of the family is the most serious of all our social problems, for the simple reason that it underlies them all. It is precisely because the integrity and coherence of the family group are the test of American civilization that modern social observers are justly filled with alarm when they discover its steady and even rapid disintegration. Domes- tic instability, it has well been said, has become in a most startling manner an epidemic social disease in American life. * In some states of the Union today, one marriage in
- F, G. Pcabody, " Jesus Christ and the Social Question," p. 12Q.
64 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
six ends in divorce. It has been computed by Professor Willcox ^ that if the present ratio of increase in population and separation should be maintained, by the end of the twentieth century, the number of separations by death would be less than the number of separations by di- vorce. The problem, as Carroll D. Wright has said, * is one which ought to engage the best minds of the country. All over the land men are asking Where lies the remedy for this pernicious social disease? It lies, some have said, in a more careful regulation of marriage. People should not be permitted to marry in such haste. More care is taken by the State in the transfer of a bit of real estate than of people entering marriage by contract. The evils of quick separa- tion can be decreased only by the prevention of the evils of quick marriage. Others tell us that separation by law must be made more difficult. There must be more delibera- tion in the courts. Secrecy and haste must be prohibited. The crime involved must be punished. The laws must be tightened. Remarriage of the guilty one must be pro- hibited. The causes for which divorces are granted must be lessened. Uniform laws must prevail so that the scan- dal of migration from one State to another in order to obtain easy divorce and quick remarriage, shall be ended. The responsibility, others have said, is with the Church. Let the Church refuse to remarry people, and they will think longer before they separate. Still others have urged the necessity of better economic conditions before we can expect any amelioration in family Hfe.
Yet all of these suggestions, however important, fail to go to the root of the matter. For the problem of the fam- ily, ultimately, is not "the result of a defective social ar-
» Willcox, " The Divorce Problem," p. 12.
* C. D. Wright, " Practical Sociology," pp. 15 Iff.
Christian Disciple ship 65
rangement, but of a defective moral creed." ^ Its solution therefore must be sought not in the sphere of legislation or of economic adjustment, but in the regulation of the impulses and affections of the human heart. It is precisely the operation of the Christian Idea in the life of the in- dividual that alone will solve the problem of family life. And if the teachings of Jesus bear frequently upon the re- lations of the home, we may believe it to be because it is within the family group that the fundamental truth of that teaching finds its best illustration, and its most natural exemplification. There is where it first begins to operate. If it cannot be made to operate there, it is vain to expect it to operate anywhere. - For the family is simply society in little. "J^^us pic- tured to himself a perfect spiritual unity of social Hfe and the germ and type of it were to be found in the family group where the self-realization of each individual was to be found in self surrender." The family, that is, is simply the most rudimentary form of life in common. But no life in common can be had short of practising the unselfish ideal. The arch-enemy of the family, and of any ^ind of associated Hfe, is the selfish will. The real foe of \. family life is the untamed Adam of the human heart, a deep-seated, obstinate and inveterate egotism, arrant and unmitigated selfishness. Family disintegration is simply a modern recrudescence of the selfishness of Cain. Ele- mentary as such a proposition is, as Dr. Peabody has re- marked, the discovery that it is true brings to many people the shock of surprise. They have thought of marriage and the life of the home as simply another way of realizing selfish desires and ambitions, and suddenly they find them- selves involved in a moral situation that demands of them
»Peabody, op. cit., pp. 171, 173.
66 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
the continued exercise of the generous instinct of self- forgetfulness, the foregoing of their own desires and wills. This they are unprepared to perform. Their idea is both to have their own selfish way and a home also, and it is a great revelation to them to discover that the thing cannot be done. It is selfishness that breaks up a home. It makes no diflference what form that selfishness may take. It may take the form of actual brutality, of purely material con- ceptions of living, or of ungenerous self-consideration or a petty disregard of others' feelings and refined cruelties of speech. The fundamental law of the family life is mutual consideration and good-will. Upon that spiritual founda- tion the family rests. Let one violate that law, and he pre- cipitates an inevitable and tragic collision of forces that must result in the wreckage of human life and happiness. In other words, it is only as the Christian Idea is recog- nized and put into practical operation that the gravest of our social problems can be solved. Nothing will counter- act this social disease and prevent its spread but the edu- cation of the individual in the moral ideas of Jesus. Not only are those ideas practicable in this most intimate and fundamental of human relationships, but they must posi- tively be practised if those relationships are themselves to be preserved and perpetuated.
If we widen the circle of human relationships, we come, after the life of the family, to that of the community. To what extent does the Christian Idea operate in this sphere of social life? Does it offer us a practical principle for the ordering of our civic duties and responsibilities? Can it be shown that community welfare, as well as family stability, depends upon the recognition and operation of the Christian Idea?
Christian Discipleship 67
We face here, as every one knows, another of the grave problems of American social life. It is commonly known as the municipal problem. Twenty years ago over twenty- seven percent of the entire population of the United States lived in four hundred towns of over 8,000 population. Ten years ago more than one-quarter of our whole population were to be found in 150 cities of 25,000 population and over. The process of municipal development is not com- pleted, but is steadily going on today. Hence the im- portance of the municipal problem. Democracy may well be said to be on trial in our American cities. If democracy fails in the city, it fails in America.
The disheartening aspects of American municipal life are so familiar that the story needs no rehearsing. Proud as Americans are in most respects, they listen without resent- ment when they are told that their cities, as a rule, are badly governed or misgoverned. Jealous as we are of American prestige and leadership, we admit without argu- ment that Europe has learned far better than we the lesson of municipal control and management. The story of in- competent municipal government, graft, waste and de- bauchery of the public interest, constitutes the most sordid chapters in the history of the American people.
How are our cities to be redeemed ? How is the munici- pal problem to be met and solved? How is our community life to be made competent and clean? Many different anwers have been given to this question. We need, we are told, a different form of city charter. We must con- centrate responsibility in the hands of a few. Ward poli- tics must be ehminated. A small central council must be chosen. A city manager must be secured. Scientific man- agement must be introduced. Modem methods must be adopted. Without doubt much progress has been made
68 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
in what may be called the science of municipal administra- tion and many cities have profited by the introduction of modern methods in the management of municipal interests. As a matter of fact, however, the ultimate solution of the municipal problem does not lie in the sphere of more expert information concerning the mechanics of city gov- ernment. As in the case of the family, if the problem be traced to its source, it will be found to have its origin in a clash of moral interests. The municipal problem, in a word, exists in acute form, because so many of the citi- zens of a community set personal and selfish interests above the welfare of the community as a whole. It is use- less to talk about clean and competent city government when citizens will not absent themselves from home or business long enough to go to the polls. It is useless to talk about clean cities when people prefer to have thieves and grafters in control of the city government rather than to lose a margin of money profit. It is useless to expect to cleanse our cities of the social evil when 'good' people will make a high rental from saloons and brothels and be heavy investors in the business of the loan sharks. Yet all these are commonplace facts to those who know the situation as it exists today. The characteristic disease from which all our cities are suffering is that the desire for money is greater than the desire for righteousness and ordinar}^ neighborliness, upon the part of a large number of so- called 'good' people. There is absolutely no operation of legislative surgery, no doctrinal or philosophical specific, no plan of municipal government that will cure this disease of the social order. It is a matter for the appHcation of the simple rules of moral hygiene. It calls for the simple operation of the Christian Idea.
Christian Discipleship 69
When Mr. Steffens ^ made his survey of conditions in some of our largest cities, he simply put in plain print what most people knew, when he declared that the most disheartening discovery which he made was that of the pathetic indiffer- ence of representative citizens to efforts for civic better- ment. Men who from any other point of view were justly looked upon as model members of society, prominent mer- chants, bankers and contractors, — all of these had their mouths stopped, their convictions of truth strangled and their influence preempted, simpty because they put their business above the interest of the community as a whole. Reform, that is, honest and clean, that had cost the red blood of sacrifice and of pure human effort, was ignored or anathematized because it threatened to lessen the volume of their trade.
This subordination of public interest to private greed still exists. So long as it continues to operate in the rank and file of the citizens of a community, there is no hope for a solution of its municipal problem. But a change, gradual yet sure, is taking place in the ethics of municipal life. The level of citizenship is being slowly but surely raised. Civic pride is a far more substantial asset of most American communities than it used to be. Confessed bood- lers no longer have a seat in municipal councils. The stay-at-home voter is made uncomfortable by the average opinion of his neighbors. Brilliant and permanent victo- ries have been won by the aroused civic conscience of many a municipality. One cannot think of New York today as under the political thumb of Boss Croker. The dissemina- tion of civic ideals calling for the devotion of the average citizen has raised the standard of community life. Cor- porations which used to defeat the public interest for pri-
' Joseph Lincoln Steffens: " The Struggle for Self-Government."
/O The Christian Idea in the Modern World
vate gain do not dare to do so today. Much of this change in sentiment is quite recent, in some cities it hardly exists, in all of them it is incomplete. Yet we may confidently pre- dict that the tide has turned ; and in the rising sentiment of the devotion of the citizen to the community ideal, the sub- ordination of private interest to public welfare, we find a new demonstration of the practicability of the Christian Idea. It is precisely to the degree to which the idea of a self-subordinating and contributing life prevails that our communities will become peaceful and prosperous.
If we enlarge once more the area of our social rela- tionships, we come to the industrial and commercial inter- ests of our time which penetrate our community life in all directions and unite us in one great nation of industrial workers. Business, finance, capital, labor, these are the words which bring before us this vast human interest which presents to the social observer so many tragic, and appar- ently insoluble problems. To what degree can the Chris- tian Idea be made to operate in this sphere of social life? Is it possible to make the Golden Rule operate in business and industry? Or must we say that here is an area of human activity in which the ideal of brotherhood and co- operation cannot be made to work ?
Much evidence can doubtless be brought together to prove the utter incompatibility of the Christian Idea with the ethics of modern industry. When we look out over this field of contemporary life, we discover that "the forces of production are maintained on a war- footing'. The modem 'captain of industry' is of the same stuff which makes great generals. He is a far-sighted determined leader of men, with his mind fixed on a single end, and with an industrial army at his command. More and more
Christian Discipleship Ji
the industrial world finds itself occupied by two armed camps. The force of the employed, combined to meet what seem to be the aggressions of their employers, and the force of the employers combined to meet what seem to be the unreasonable demands of the employed. Strikes and lock- outs are temporary raids across the enemy's frontier; or- ganization on both sides disciplines and drills the contending armies; while hanging on to the skirts of both forces, is that unorganized and shifting mass which we call the army of the unemployed." ^ There is no one so sequestered that he does not hear the reverberations of this tremendous struggle which is going on in our day, "Fifty years ago the great body of hand- workers were ignorant and un- observant; now they have eaten of the fruit of knowledge and their eyes are opened. They look about them at the prodigious productiveness of modern industry and it seems plain to them that the division of profits is unjust. They observe that in the general progress of economic pros- perity the relative gains which fall to them seem slight when compared with the enormous accumulations of super- fluous wealth which fall into the hands of the few, and they cry out with passionate indignation against a grievous wrong." ^ The spirit of the modern labor movement then, is the spirit of a moral protest. Whatever may be the right or the wrong of any single enterprise or undertaking of the labor interests of the country, one must recognize that its intensive purpose is ethical and moral.
And what is the wrong against which it has protested? Beneath all the lesser questions of hours and wages and conditions, the great underlying wrong against which the labor interests of the country have for this half century
' F. G. Peabody, " Jesus Christ and the Social Question," pp. 268, 269 » F. G. Peabody, op. cit. p. 272.
y2 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
been protesting, is that advantage has been taken of them; that they have not been treated as equals, as brothers, as partners in the great industries of the country, but as ser- vants or slaves. Their wages have been regulated not according to justice, but according to the unethical and in- human law of supply and demand. In a word, their pro- test has been that their employers have acted solely from mo- tives of self-interest. To end a situation so intolerable as that the great labor movement of our day had its origin.
It cannot be denied that the wrong against which the laboring man protested has actually existed. One cannot deny that it still exists. *'What, indeed, is the world of business," one is tempted to ask, *'but a vast battle- field of organized self-interest, a gambling-table with enor- mous stakes? How strangely it would sound if in some business centre the great words were spoken: 'Whosoever shall be first among you shall be your servant.' What a curious motto for a business of!ice would be the words: *By this shall all men know that ye are wise men of busi- ness, if ye have love one for another'^ In the opinion of many competent observers the defection from the Church of great masses of workingmen is due, more than to any- thing else, to their apparent difficulty of squaring the teach- ings of the Church with the requirements of industrial and commercial practice. The following typical instance was recently reported in the columns of ''The Christian Work." "We once had a plasterer in our church. One day he came to us, and said, 'Your sermons are beautiful, but they are like fairy language to me. You preach the New Testament doctrines, but there is no one in my building but what would laugh his head off if any one suggested practising them tomorrow. From top to bottom everything is graft.
» F. G. Peabody: " Jesus Christ and the Social Question," p. 316.
Christian Discipleship yz
You must graft to get your job and you must lie to keep it. For instance I know the plaster I'm putting on is but half plaster, is not any such thing as the contract calls for, but I'm told every morning if I don't tell the inspector (if he questions me) that it's what the contract calls for, I'm done for. The whole business is run on that basis. There is not a man in the building trades in New York from the contractor down that is not in the game, although most of them don't want to be any more than I do. But what can you do ? You can see how funny it seems to go to Church.' We remember that he used just this word juyiny and it seems quite appropriate."^*'
Shall we then conclude that we have now reached a sphere of social activity where the Christian Idea is out of place, where the effort to apply it simply produces a con- trast so grotesque that it causes one to smile?
On the contrary, earnest men are beginning to perceive that the reason that the industrial Hfe is out of joint today, is because the ideas of brotherhood, cooperation and a high honorableness have been given hitherto such scant recognition in the industrial world. Conditions, it is gener- ally admitted cannot continue as they are. The recent hu- miliations which the American people have suffered in the surrender of the government to the demands of organized labor have focused the mind of the people upon this problem as never before. What, they are asking, will deliver us from a situation so galling and intolerable? What can pre- vent the dislocation of our national life at the word of a group of labor leaders? Must we be thrown into a panic at any time by one threat of a strike that will paralyze our industrial Hfe?
10 The Christian Work, New York, April. 1917.
74 T^he Christian Idea in the Modern World
When these questions are traced to their origins, it is discovered that the situation will be permanently altered and the problem permanently solved only by the introduc- tion of a new morality into the whole industrial situation. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court can save the people from industrial anarchy, but only the people them- selves, by conducting their industrial life from a new set of motives and toward a new moral goal. In a word, the purpose of both capital and labor must be, not to seek to outdo each other in order to secure the maximum of private gain, in brutal disregard for public interest and welfare, but to cooperate with each other in that common service of the public good which alone will yield to each its equi- table and permanent prosperity. The substitution of the idea of a contributing service, for that of selfish acquisi- tion; of cooperation in the place of warfare, in a word of the Christian Idea for the anti-Christian motives of distrust and greed and hatred, alone will solve our in- dustrial problem and usher in that era of industrial peace for which the whole nation waits and groans.
This conviction, it may safely be affirmed, has taken per- manent root in the minds of the most intelligent of our leaders in finance and industry. A subtle transformation is quietly taking place in the underlying ideals of commerce and business. Public office, we have come to believe, is a public trust. We are now advancing to the conception that business big or little is a public trust also. Gradually the standards of the commercial world are being raised so that the general good is put above the private gain. The great economic problems are in a way to being settled after a fashion which will not be a reproach to our civiliza- tion. The saying that business is business, and nothing else, is heard far less often than formerly. The signs are
Christian Discipleship 75
many, and are multiplying on every hand that we are moving toward the time when all business will be looked upon less as a field for personal piracy than as a form of community service. We are arriving at a new morality in the sphere of trade which regards it not as a means of making a few men rich as soon as possible, but as a public trust requiring loyalty and fidelity to the general welfare and to the common good. Business morality today means more than that contracts should be scrupulously kept, debts honestly paid, and one's word be as good as one's bond. Morality in business today is coming more and more to mean that business should be the servant and keeper of the common good; that the best business is that which has the least baseness ; and that its object is not to get as much out of the public as it can, but to do the most for it. The real men of business today understand that they do not in any exclusive sense 'own' their business ; rather they 'owe' it. If a man should stand on the shoulders of others and pluck the ripest fruit from a tree, he cannot call it his own without reminding himself how it came to his hand. In the same way, men who 'own' commodities by manufacture or for distribution, are reminding themselves that they have come by it by using the plant created by a social partnership. And what society has put in, that society must take out.
This idea of a partnership between business and society has grown enormously in our day, so that there has been a veritable ethical transformation in the morality of trade. Twenty years ago the president of one of our universities was asked this question: "Can you tell a body of students who are going into large corporate business that success could be won with no loss of ethical ideals? Could you say that without telling them lies? Could they
y6 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
go through the organizing and financing and politics of it all, and come out with their moral idealism essentially un- impaired?" And the great educator answered: "I think that possible if the man was very strong. But, in securing contracts, in the purchasing and sale of material, in dealing with aggressive rivals or securing political favors, the strain upon men who are at the points where temptation chiefly falls is a thing to dread." " But that strain — that temptation is far less today than it was twenty years ago. Today the man of affairs who ignores ethical principles, who runs his business in defiance of a high social morality, who uses the selfish motives of private gain to the cynical neglect of the welfare of others, courts business disaster. Success in busi- ness today instead of being purchased by a contempt of ethical ideals, can be won only by the higher exercise of them.
Nowhere, however, is the new morality in business to be seen more clearly than in the changed relation between master and servant, between employer and worker. The old days are gone when capital regarded human material in the same way in v/hich it regarded raw material, to be bought and sold in the open market at the lowest possible cost. The human elements in industry have been raised to their true value, and are being appraised at their real worth. The idea of a partnership has been steadily gaining ground not only as between business and society, but as between master and workmen, between capital and labor. A new spirit is permeating the industrial life today. An actual trans- formation is taking place in the attitude of employer and employee. One reason why corporations have seemed to be soulless has been that it has not been evident even to themselves that they have been dealing with souls. A
" John Graham Brooks: " An American Citizen," pp. 8, 9.
Christian Discipleship 77
great abyss has separated the individual worker from the head of his industry. There has been no opportunity for the play of human sentiment, the operation of human con- science and the understanding of human values. Thus separated and uninterpreted to each other, employer and employee have not seen or known or understood each other. Their paths never crossed.
It is precisely the altering of this situation and the re- establishment under modern conditions of personal contact which constitute one of the most hopeful signs of the times. The heads of a great business no longer keep themselves isolated from the great body of their workers. On the contrary they want to be accessible to them. Mutual owner- ship and acquaintance is now regarded as one of the great- est assets in the efficient handling of any business. Mis- understanding, it is agreed, is due to lack of personal ac- quaintance and familiarity. This identity of interest, this re-establishment of personal human relations is prophetic of the coming day when industrial partnership shall take the place of industrial warfare.
For one thing, it is not too much to say that it is making a new man out of the employer. Instead of being a hard- faced, hard-handed financier out of whom all human inter- est and sentiment have been drawn, he has become a man once more, with all the normal joy and satisfaction in real human relationships. He has discovered not only that business may be handled in a far more scientific and there- fore interesting way, but that its human relations have a significance of which he has never dreamed of. He sees himself not on as a mere maker of things for personal profit, but as well a maker and helper and friend of men and women for society's, profit. The result has been a new joy in business, a joy which has not fallen far short
78 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
with many business men of being a kind of spiritual ex- perience.
Today a positive pride is taken by business men in the himiane way in which their business is conducted. Com- panies are vying with each other in matters of sanitation and safety, and in the contentment and good-will of their workmen. Both an intelligent self-interest and a social conscience are operating together to eliminate the wrongs of industry. Business is making the Golden Rule work just as it is making the typewriter and electric power and scientific management work.
But the new morality in business does not stop at this point. It advances to the broad conception that master and workmen are partners in one great work of production and distribution, and that thus both must have a personal interest in the conduct of industry and must share equitably in its profits. According to the old idea of business, the head of a concern was supposed to supply all the brains, and the workmen were hired to do the work. Modern methods seek to democratize industry so that there shall be a real community of interest between employer and employee. The employee, that is, is to share in the con- duct of the business as well as to share in its profits. Inter- esting experiments in this new industrial harmony abound. Industries are seeking to mobilize the interest and to secure the cooperative intelligence of their employees. It is recognized that it is possible to waste human intelligence as well as raw material and that no business can be at its best until all who are concerned in it are working to a com- mon end. And capitalists are finding that these forms of cooperation are full of dividends.
The new morality in business recognizes further that mutual interest must also mean mutual profits. The en-
Christian Discipleship 79
lightened business sentiment today is profoundly discon- tented with the old mechanical wages-system. When the day comes, as it will, when men shall have worked out tables fixing the relative value of the service each renders the world, the present-day income, wages and salary records will look as preposterous as French pre-revolutionary tax lists look today. The producing world today is hard after a fresh readjustment of values received. The senselessness, waste and injustice of fixing by the primitive method of supply and demand, barter and contract, the return which a man shall receive for real sei-vice has for years now troubled an increasing number of employers. Scores of experiments are being made as to what the labor of miners and engineers, grass-growers and shopkeepers is really worth. A national association in one of our greatest and richest industries recently made a searching analysis seeking the answer to the question : "Are all employees individually and collectively receiving all the results of their labor to which they may be properly entitled ?" In the mind of the new employer the daily wage, however scientifically ad- justed is not all that a man earns who stays by an enter- prise over a term of years. "Wages in themselves repre- sent a starting-point and technically speaking nothing more. The employer who pays mere wages has no right to ask more than wage-service. If he wants that personal interest in his industrial affairs, such as he himself gives them, he must pay for this in ways otherwise than through the weekly pay-envelope." Arid to find out what that interest is worth, and to pay for it, is recognized today by scores of employers as one of the first obligations of modem business. So fast is the new idea advancing that an indus- try conducted on the old fixed wages basis, will soon be hopelessly left behind. How adequately to fit the proper
8o The Christian Idea in the Modern World
reward to real service, is today the big question in in- dustry. And men are trying to answer it. Profit shar- ing methods have long since passed the experimental stage and have now become standardized in business. Every- where wages are being raised and adjusted not as the result of force, but as the result of a fair and honorable desire to pay labor what labor is really worth, what it really earns. Masters are seeking to render their servants what is just and equal.^^
Finally, the new morality in business is giving us a new definition of what competition means. It no longer means, or it will not much longer mean, the mere survival of the fittest in the selfish scramble for private loot. Competition is ceasing to mean in business what it means in the jungle. Competition of this sort, it has been discovered, is not the life but the death of trade. Business concerns and large corporations are no longer aspiring, if they are wise, to become powerful merely that they may crush all their rivals. The Christian Idea is penetrating the relations of great industries to each other. If cooperative ideals, it is being perceived, can supplant the old ruthlessness and selfish struggle, there will be greater industrial security and general prosperity. Thus competition for business men is coming slowly but surely to mean just what it means for physicians, for educators, for scientists : a noble effort to see which of them can render the largest service to the community as a whole. Mutual confidence is taking the place of mutual suspicion. A general partnership is taking the place of a selfish race for profits. In a public address delivered some years ago. Judge Gary of the United States Steel Corporation used these words: *Tt behooves us to make absolutely certain day by day that we recognize the
" Colossians 4 : 1
Christian Disciple ship 8i
rights of our competitors as well as of our friends, and the obligations we are under toward them. I consider it of the highest importance that every one of us should have a keen and abiding sense of the personal obligation he has to all others and to make no mistakes in trespassing upon the rights of his neighbor." Competition tempered by good- will and directed to the common good not only ceases to be a curse, but comes into perfect harmony with the teach- ing of Jesus.
This brief survey of some of the problems of our mod- ern world shows not only the broad field which is open to the operation of the Christian Idea, but shows fur- ther that the prosperity of our modern world depends directly upon the degree to which that Idea is recognized and practised. Not only, that is, is the Christian teaching suited to the instincts of the human heart, but it contains the principle upon which our social order must be estab- lished in permanence and peace.
' VII THE SERVANT STATE
That the Christian Idea can operate successfully in cer- tain areas of human interest may thus be assumed. The question remains, however, whether the Christian Idea can operate with equal success in the region of national and international life; whether it can do in the largest circle of human interest what it can perform in the smallest; whether the Christian teaching of love, brotherhood, sym- pathy and cooperation can be acclimatized in the remote and frigid zones of national ambitions, racial antipathies, and international diplomacy.
Without doubt there is the severest, as well as the broad- est, test to which the Christian Idea can be put. Thus far, in the two thousand years which have elapsed since the teaching of Christ began to operate in the sphere of social relations, no serious attempts have been made to apply it to the regulation of national and international life. And today it is not clear to the average mind how that teaching can be harmonized with national aspirations and with the com- petitive and apparently irreconcilable demands of the different races that people the earth.
And yet that Christ Himself and the early Christian teachers expected the idea of service to be applied to the State as a whole admits of no manner of question. The first recorded conflict between Christ and the Scribes and the Pharisees occurred precisely at this point. What was it that aroused the anger of that congregation at Nazareth
83
84 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
when Jesus had completed his reading and exposition of Scripture ? He had just read the passage from Isaiah begin- ning "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.^" And when He sat down and began to expound that Scripture it was, we may be sure, of the ministering life of God's people that He began to speak. You have misread our commission. He taught, you have misunderstood your mission in the world; you are looking for a Messiah who shall restore again the tribes of Israel and set up the throne of David and make you first among the nations." But such is not your mission as the people of God. It is for you to be the servants and helpers of other nations, even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister." ^ And when the congregation of Jewish patriots heard Him thus far, they would hear Him no longer and they rose up and thrust Him out ofl the synagogue.
Thus Jesus taught that His law does not change, as the size of the group to which it applies enlarges and that the law of service applies to nations as well as to men. Simi- larly the later New Testament holds up before us the ideal of a nation as fulfilling the law of Christ that ye love one another. We remember, to quote but a single^ example, the word of St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians: "Now this He ascended, what is it but that he also^ descended into the lower parts of the earth." ^ According to a profound student of the New Testament, this great truth flashed upon the apostle as he found himself at last in the great imperial city of Rome. He represents the apostle as standing in the metropolis of the world and looking at that
' »Isa. 61 : 1,2; St. Luke 4 : 18. » St. Matt. 20 : 28. » Eph. 4 : 9.
The Servant State 85
Roman world in its heights and its depths, but between its heights and its depths he saw no communion. There were men who went up the ladder and there were men who came down, but the men who went up were not the same as the men who came down. "To the eye of St. Paul there did not present itself any instance of a life which had risen to the heights voluntarily descending again to the depths in order to elevate his fellows." * Over against such an imperialism St. Paul set the imperialism of Christianity; over against the conception of a state which found its glory in possession, St. Paul set his conception of a State which •found its glory in ministration. The Christian State, ac- cording to St. Paul, finds its glory as Christ found His, not in power but in helpfulness ; its idea is not to get above other nations, but to get beneath them. Its goal is not aggrandizement but service.
Thus the Christian idea of the State is that of the State as a servant. A servant State ! How far it is from the minds of even the rank and file of Christian people ! Here, evidently, is an area in the field of modern life which has not been penetrated, much less entered and occupied by the Christian Idea. We see how it operates in the personal life. Subordination to others, consideration, service, sacrifice, this is indeed the reasonable and necessary law in the life of the individual. We see how it operates in the family life, which is impossible unless unselfishness and service is its law, and unless its members live literally by the law of Love which is the law of Christ. We are beginning to see how it operates in civic relations and how, in spite of many tragedies and brutalities, the law of consideration and good will is beginning to transform our modern industry. But when we come to the national ideal or to international re-
*,George Matheson, " The Spiritual Development of St. Paul," pp. 199, 200.
86 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
lationships then we are made aware that the Christian Idea appears to have spent its force, and that the idea of a State as a servant has not yet found its lodgment two thousand years after Christ, in the Christian consciousness. A servant State ! How foreign to the point of absurdity is the conception to the working ideals of any modern nation! How would the mottoes look suspended on the walls of the chancelleries of any so-called Christian nation : — "I am among you as he that serveth" ® "the last shall be first and the first last." ^ "The Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many." ^ A servant State ! How strange that idea sounds, amid modern political in- trigue and treachery! What idea could be further from the ideals of modern diplomacy, the whole effort of which has been to outguess, outwit, outdo every other nation? What idea could be further removed from the suspicious, hating, fearing scramble of every nation to get ahead of every other nation: to put itself at the top, and to crush every other aspirant in its path? The very conceptions, that is, of nationality and of selfishness have become iden- tified. It is not easy to stretch our imagination to the point of conceiving of a State the very object of whose existence shall not be power, outward glory, possession, wealth. By no effort of the mind can we conceive of modern rulers and statesmen and diplomats endeavoring to apply to the relations of States the word of Jesus : "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them and that they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you : but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and who- soever will be chief among you, let him be your
* St. Luke 22 : 27. « St. Matt. 20 : 16. 7 St. Matt. 20 : 28.
The Servant State 87
servant." ^ The whole poHtical history of our modern world is, as everybody knows, the utter opposite of the law of Christ. What Christ is, the nations are not; what the nations are, Christ is not. The Christian Idea simply has not begun to work in this whole sphere of the life of our modern world.
How true this is will appear if one turns from the wiles of statecraft and the underhand and selfish machinations of international diplomacy, and simply considers what may be called the general, the average conception, of the na- tional ideal. What is it? What is the idea of a nation that the word patriotism ordinarily connotes? To what idea of national greatness is it to which the popular imag- ination in so-called Christian countries responds? Suppose this ideal of a servant State were held up before any repre- sentative body of citizens : a country which does not aspire to glory and dominion, but seeks to be the willing ser- vant and helper of other nations. How strange and even ridiculous such an idea of a nation would appear. How servile, how unpatriotic, how silly, how mean! By whatever test, that is, that we apply, it is brought sharply home to our minds that the Christian Idea thus far has found scant, if any, recognition in the sphere of our na- tional ideals, or of our international relationships.
What shall we say, then? Must we admit that there is an area of our modern life in which the Christian Idea cannot and will not operate; that the idea of sacrifice and service, of good will and brotherhood does not and cannot have its place in the relation of nation to nation and of race to race?
On the contrary we may affirm with confidence that it is precisely here that the Christian Idea is to have its finest
» St. Matt. 20: 25. 26. 27.
88 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
vindication : that it is precisely at this point that it is to be shown that there is no salvation for our modern world except as the Christian Idea, which has been made the ideal of the individual life and of community life, shall be made the ideal of our international life as well. There is only one way, thoughtful men the world over see it already, by which our modern world and our modern civilization is to be saved from complete ruin and disaster: that is, by the christianizing of international politics. And inter- national politics will be christianized only when each na- tion supplants the selfish ideals of national domination by the unselfish ideal of a contributory and serviceable life; and when selfish rivalry between nations becomes rather the rivalry of service, each nation contributing its best to the common welfare and regarding itself as but one in the brotherhood of peoples and the family of nations. It is only in a word as the ideal of unselfish cooperation which alone spells peace and stability in the family life of in- dividuals becomes operative in the family Hfe of nations that we can hope for peace and stability.
The evidence that nothing short of this Christian con- ception of a State will solve our international problems is accumulating. A mass of it is now at our disposal. A demonstration of it is being given the world on a colossal scale. We are witnessing the appalling results of a pagan statecraft and an anti-Christian conception of what a na- tion is, and of what a nation's relation to other nations ought to be. Here are the nations of the world living, until now every one of them, on the theory that its great- ness and glory must be secured at the expense of every other nation. The national and international ideals of the nations have been the very opposite of the Christian idea of the State and its relation to other States. And at last
The Servant State 89
the whole world has broken out into war so terrible that it dwarfs all other catastrophes in the history of the world. The wealth of the nations is being squandered in their effort to exterminate each other. Our Civil War cost us at the most two million dollars a day, but the nations of Europe have spent sixty millions a day in the effort to bleed each other to death, and now America is adding her billions to the unbelievable total. Between five and six mil- lion men, an incredible host, have been slaughtered or maimed for Hfe and the hospitals of Europe and Asia are crowded with as many more, to care for whom is taxing the charity of a whole world. History has nothing to show to compare with the universal tragedy that has descended upon an astonished world.
What is the cause for it? How does it happen that the furies of hate and slaughter are laying to waste the most precious possessions of our modern world? Trace it back cause by cause, and step by step, and what do we find? We find that ultimately it has all come from a false and from an anti-Christian conception of the State and of the relations of States to each other. This great tragedy did not come by chance and it did not come by fate, and it did not come because nations wanted it, and it did not come primarily because any ruler wanted it. It was not the pistol shot of a Servian boy that killed an Austrian archduke, a shot that rang round the world, that started this war, nor the mobilization of Russian troops, nor the threat of a kaiser. This great tragedy was staged by forces operating through many years. Everything goes on in this universe according to law. It is as true of na- tions as men. Whatsoever a nation soweth that shall she also reap. If all Europe for centuries sowed to the wind, she was also bound in the fullness of time to reap the whirl-
Qo The Christian Idea in the Modern World
wind. The ultimate cause of this war hes in the concep- tion that the chief duty of a State is to expand in glory and in power at the expense of all other States; that the foundation of all power is in physical force; that great- ness is to be computed in terms of brute strength; that the greatness of a State is to be measured by the way in which it can outstrip other States and is prepared by armed force to defend its rights against all comers. The cause of the present world tragedy, that is, is to be found in the realm of ideas, and the ideas that have caused it are the very opposite of the Christian Idea.
First of all, we must place the idea that the state is superior to the moral law of individuals. This idolatry of the state has been boldly preached in our day. The Chris- tian law of morality "can claim no significance for the re- lation of one country to another. Christian morality is personal and social and in its nature cannot be political."® It is this false, immoral doctrine that a State is a thing-in- itself bound by no obligations that it may not break on the plea of necessity, which is the fundamental vice embodied in that foreign policy, the fruits of which we are now reaping.
But next we must place the idea that national greatness consists in domination, in the selfish and exclusive and ag- gressive pursuit of its own separate national ideas. Let me quote at this point the words of one of our clearest thinkers. "On seeking the cause of this war, things like the ultimatum of Russia, the violation of Belgian neu- trality, bulk too large in our view, and we forget, or rele- gate to a secondary place the really most vital question of all : what blame ought to be attached to all the belligerents, to those who in this immediate contest have a larger
» F. von'Bernhardi, " Germany and the Next War," p. 29.
The Servant State 91
measure of justice on their side, and those who have not? What is wrong with our civilization as a whole? What deep flaw penetrates to its core? What is the radical cause that has led to this universal strife? It is not to be found in particular acts of men or of governments, nor even in the militarism of Germany or Europe. Far behind militarism, and explaining it, is the selfish blindness of a nationalism which is unable or unwilling to take any point of view but its own or to recognize the importance of other peoples' values. We are witessing a vast struggle of the types of civilization with one another, each claiming superlative and exclusive values for itself, and therefore in- tolerant of the existence and claims of others. Each of the great stocks that are at war is fighting for its own suprem- acy on the belief that on its supremacy depends the exis- tence of that mental pattern which it cherishes above all else, above peace, above prosperity, above the millions that are sacrificed in this conflict. And yet it is so plain that no one type of civilization as yet achieved by any of the nations is perfect and exclusive. They not only can but they should exist side by side, each requiring the other to supplement its defects." ^°
These words were written in the earlier stages of the war. Without doubt they would need some modification in the light of the recent developments of what now has be- come a world war. Today we perceive more clearly the vast outlines of this great struggle which has ceased to be a mere collision between rival types of civilization and has become rather a collision between two fundamental types of morality. And yet the words of Dr. Adler remain es- sentially true, that the struggle was prepared and precipi- tated by the selfish and exclusive concepts of nationality
» Felix Adler, " The World Crisis and Its Meaning." pp. 118, 119, 22, 24.
92 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
which have underlain the whole political history of man- kind, down to our own day.
A reversal of these underlying ideas of nationality is thus the prerequisite to world peace. Instead of each nation seeking to exploit exclusively its own economic and national ideas at the expense of other nations ; instead of the sinister aggression of the stronger against the weaker, the poison which has permeated the whole system of our international relations, we need the idea of a cooperating internationalism where the ideal which animates each nation is that it may contribute its best to the common welfare and labor together with every other nation for a true world order of righteous- ness and peace.
Is it an iridescent dream? Is it a fine but a forlorn hope? Is it a beautiful but an unattainable ideal? On the con- trary, no prophecy can be made with more assurance than that the Christian Idea one day will penetrate the whole field of international life, strengthening and sweetening its relationships. Already in its course it has overthrown horrid evils, destroyed ancient and deep-rooted wrongs, and brought peace in a multitude of relationships where there was strife and ill will. The world is growing smaller year by year. The nexus of spiritual relationships that is binding nations to nation is becoming stronger and stronger. The international bonds of finance, of scholar- ship, of industry, and the passion for social justice are drawing all men together. The tragic breakdown of the anti-Christian theory of state and of interstate relations is sure to cause a rebuilding on different foundations, the beginnings of which are the practice of international brotherhood.
It is when we reach this point that our love for our own American Republic becomes most fervent and passes
The Servant State 93
into passionate prayer. For some reason, this country was planted here between sea and sea. That there was a special providence which led our forefathers across the sea has always been our deep-seated faith. That we were a chosen people we have always believed. And that we have been chosen to be the servant of God, to show the nations of the old world a better way of life, this, too, has been part of our creed. This faith, it is true, has often been obscured by "frantic boast and foolish word," and yet it has lain unspoiled in the heart of our national life. May it not be true that every service that we thus far have rendered may be but the prelude to a finer and lasting service that we may yet perform ? Does it not make every true American heart beat faster in hope and pride and ex- pectation when we think that we, as a nation, have the God-sent opportunity to set the example of a servant State, a State that does not seek to build itself up at the expense of other States, but seeks rather to use its strength to build other States up. Can we conceive of any service which America could render the world more glorious than this? It does not seem absurd and impossible that the word of Christ "I am among you as he that serveth" should be spoken of our American Republic. Rather it seems like the very ideal toward which every American patriot should press eagerly. Already there have been episodes in our national life which spell the beginning of this new day in international relationships. What has been our atti- tude toward Cuba and the far-away islands of the Pacific if it has not been that of the unselfish using of national strength in behalf of the weak? What was the meaning of our return of the Boxer indemnity to China, if it was not the determination to act for a sister nation from senti- ments of generosity and good will? Who can be too grate-
94 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
ful for that passage in one of President Wilson's messages to Congress in which, discussing our relations with our sister American republics, he used these words: "We are not hostile rivals but cooperating friends, and our growing sense of community of interest is likely to give them a new significance as factors in international affairs. It presents them as spiritual partners with ourselves standing together, because thinking together, quick with common sympathies and common ideals." And how could this national ideal have been more eloquently described than by our former secretary of state, Elihu Root, when he said, "We wish for no victories except those of peace, for no territory ex- cept our own, for no sovereignty except the sovereignty over ourselves. We deem the equal and independent rights of the smallest and weakest member of the family of the nations entitled to as much respect as those of the greatest empire, and we deem the observance of that respect the chief guarantee of the weak against the strong. We neither claim nor desire any rights, or privileges, nor powers, that we do not freely concede to every American republic. We wish to increase our prosperity, to extend our trade, to grow in wealth, in wisdom and in spirit ; but our concep- tion of the true way to accomplish this is not to pull down others and profit by their ruin, but to help our friends to a common prosperity and a common growth so that we may all become greater and stronger together." ^^
When the chief statesmen of a great nation can so explicitly and beautifully set forth the ideals of a servant State, shall we say that the day is so far off, and does it not make us tremble when we stop to think that our Amer- ica may thus be opening a new chapter in the moral history
» See Elihu Root, " Speeches in South America.*' pp. 34, 60, 62, 139, 259.
The Servant State 95
of mankind in which will be illustrated the highest triumph of the Christian Idea?
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the moral in- tention and ability of our statesmanship to act from the international point of view and for the attainment of in- ternational ends, is to be found in the moment which it has chosen for our entrance into the war. Future his- torians may well call this a turning-point in the evolution of international morality. So long, that is, as the war re- mained a war between nations; so long as the issues in- volved in the war were the supremacy of this or that national ideal or this or that type of civilization, America could not take sides without herself becoming a partisan and acting from sectional or nationalistic motives. But when the moral dimensions of the war gradually revealed themselves and when it became apparent that what the war is really to determine is the supremacy and perpetua- tion of those fundamental ideas of democracy and morality upon which the whole future prosperity of the race de- pends, then America, if she were to be true to herself as the guardian of those ideas, no longer could remain neutral. In a word, what has taken America into the war, is not this or that violation of international law ; not the in- fringement of her own rights, the sinking of her ships, the loss of American lives ; but rather the willing desire of this country to be the servant of those ideals which alone can make democracy safe. As President Wilson said : **We seek nothing for ourselves. We seek only to justify and to maintain the fundamental spiritual possessions upon which the whole fabric of our civilization and the well- being of the whole world may be said to depend." ^*
It is, perhaps, the first time in the history of the world
i» Message to Congreae, Aprii;2, 1917.
96 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
that a great nation has thus gone to war from wholly in- ternational motives and for wholly international ends. It is an event of profound and prophetic significance. It may well open a new chapter in the moral history of the world. It gives a meaning to Lowell's words, the reach of which he himself could hardly have foreseen:
" Our country hath a gospel of her own, To preach and practice before all the world, The freedom and divinity of man. The glorious claims of human brotherhood, Which, to pay nobly, as a freeman should, Gives the soul wealth that will not fly away. And the soul's fealty to none but God." ^'
15 J. R. Lxawell, L'Envoi, Student's Cambridge Edition, complete poems, p. 26.
VIII A CHRISTIAN NATION
Can the Christian Idea as appHed to the State help us to a solution of some of the vexing problems of national life? Can it tell whether the sentiment of patriotism is a help or a hindrance to the attainment of a world brother- hood? Can it tell us whether a Christian nation should arm itself? Can it tell us whether war is ever justifiable? These are the problems with which we are wrestling. What has the Christian Idea to say about these concrete problems of national life?
What has it to tell us about patriotism? Is not the love of one's own country above all other countries a real bar- rier to the realization of what has been called the interna- tional mind? Is it not a sectional interest? And to the extent to which it is cultivated is not the cooperative in- ternational ideal obscured? Must not patriotism be decried as a primitive and selfish instinct from which we must graduate in order to enter the larger life of a federated world? Again, can the ideas of patriotism and Christianity be in any sense identified? Does the love of one's country coincide, or may it coincide with our love for Christ? Or is the one a minor and the other a major loyalty? Can the flag in any true sense be placed beside the Cross? Or must the very ideas of country, nationality, patriotism dis- appear if we are to have the larger vision of the Kingdom of God? So it has appeared to many earnest minds.
Some time ago a well-known Socialist agitator in New
97
98 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
York was condemned to imprisonment for having desecrated the American flag. Before he was sentenced, he declared himself to be the most unrepentant prisoner who ever stood before the bar of that court. He declared that he was not un-American nor even in the broader sense unpatriotic, but that he believed with all his soul that these sectional em- blems kept aflame in men's breasts the national sentiments which were themselves responsible for all the horrors of war; that the attainment of the international mind is an im- possibility, so long as the banners which arouse a purely separate and exclusive passion and loyalty, are flaunted in the eyes of men.
This is not the opinion only of certain socialists. It is a view held by some devout and earnest Christians. "Our bond with our fellow-Christians," says a recent statement of the League of Reconciliation, "is everywhere closer than a national bond. We are bound first to act as loyal mem- bers of the Church." Thus, it is contended, the kingdom of Heaven will come only
" When the schemes and all the systems, Kingdoms and Republics fall; Something kindlier, higher, holier, All for each and each for all."
Thus the Christian Idea seems once more to come in con- flict with one of the most ancient and sacred instincts of the heart, the passionate love of one's own race and land. But now is it true that there is a necessary conflict be- tween our loyalty to the idea of human brotherhood and our loyalty to our own country? Between patriotism and the Christian ideal? When we look beneath the surface, we find that it is the current, accepted, conventional ideas of nationality which conflict with the Christian Idea; whereas the true idea of nationality and of patriotism not
A Christian Nation 99
only does not stand in opposition to the Christian Idea, but is in entire agreement with it.
Certain ideas of nationality are immediately outlawed by the teachings of Christ. One of them is the idolatrous, atheistic idea of the State which makes of it a kind of golden calf which the people are to kneel down and blindly worship; which places it outside of and beyond the ordi- nary categories of right and wrong; so that what other- wise would be wrong becomes right. With all of this hideous parade of a nationality which implies or permits a suspension of the moral law, the Christian Idea has nothing whatever to do. Neither does it countenance the selfish and exclusive conception of the State which while observing the punctilios of international law and etiquette is still fundamentally self-seeking and grasping in its poli- cies, motives and ambitions. This, as has been said, re- mains today the conventional idea of nationality. And it cannot be fused or harmonized with the Christian idea of brotherhood, cooperation and service. The whole diffi- culty, in a word, in reconciling the idea of patriotism with the Christian ideal, is the apparent identity of patri- otism and selfishness. It is hard to pry these two terms apart. Yet if one's love of country means only a desire for the country's material prosperity and glory, then such a patriotism as that is a hindrance to the realization of that new brotherhood of men for which the whole creation groans.
But suppose that the love of one's country means the ambition that one's country shall lead the world in service, shall be the first in helpfulness; suppose one's patriotism finds expression in the fervent desire that one's nation shall make the largest moral contribution to the life of the world? Evidently such love of one's country as that is not
est ^C?© y<^Q,
lOO The Christian Idea in the Modern World
only not in conflict with our loyalty to a world brother- hood founded on the teachings of Christ, but is a true and living outgrowth of it. We do not need to graduate from such a conception of patriotism; rather we need to cultivate it. The only way, therefore, in which the ideas of nationality and Christianity can be harmonized and fused, is by having the same law run through both : one law of brotherhood and service. Such a nation will no longer consider its goal to be its own separate supremacy, power, property rights, but will be animated by a very different and a far higher and truer desire : a desire to help, to contribute, to serve, to put forth its best not only for its own but also for the common weal. Its ideal will be that of a cooperating internationalism, wherein each na- tion will seek to give its best for the common welfare of all mankind. What in a word we need to do is to train our children, ourselves, the whole body of men that we can reach, to give the same meaning to the idea of great- ness as applied to nations, that we give to it as applied to individuals or to families. Who are the great men of our time? By common consent they are not those who are physically the strongest, nor the richest, but they are the men who have given the most and done the most for their fellowmen, for their community and their country. It was in this sense that Jacob Riis was called the first citi- zen of New York, and Jane Addams of Chicago, and Booker Washington of America. Similarly, the great families of our land are understood to be not those who have accumulated the most wealth, but those who have rendered the most service. The same categories of great- ness need to be applied to a nation as a whole. Does the idea of greatness empty itself of the moral qualities when applied to nations, that it possesses when applied to indi-
A Christian Nation loi
viduals? Evidently what we need and all that we need in order to arrive at the Christian idea of patriotism is to teach the same definition of greatness when applied to the largest unit of individuals that we use when applied to the smallest. When we grip this truth, we begin to understand how patriotism and human brotherhood can go hand in hand; how our ideas of nationality and of Christianity may meet and mingle. The love of one's own country does not need to be dismissed in order to arrive at a broader love of mankind, all that it needs is to be redeemed. The flag does not need to go, all that it needs is to be baptized. Let us renew our allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Let us continue to sing the Star Spangled Banner. But let the sentiment that animates us, the hope that inspires us, be this, that the banner of our country shall indeed float over the homes of the free and the land of the brave, over a land that is great because she serves, because the ideals that she cherishes are great, and because the purpose is great in her heart that these ideals shall be preserved for ourselves and for all the world. Of such patriotism it may be said that we want not less of it but more of it. Patriotism when properly defined is no barrier but a help to the attainment of world brotherhood and international peace.
Again, the Christian conception of the State may help us to think our way through the vexed question of arms and armament.^ This question in its essence, it may safely be affirmed, is but a concrete and acute illustration of the difficulty men find in reconciling the two ideas of love and of force. That they can be reconciled, and
iTliis discussion, it is perhaps needless to add, has no reference to the present national emergency, which calls for the application of all our resources, material as well as moral. It is a discussion rather, of the permanent ideals of a Christian nation in normal tirnes of peace.
I02 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
indeed, are reconciled in family life, in community life we have already seen. But such have been our perverted and selfish and hateful conceptions of the relation of nation to nation, that they become very difficult to reconcile, in the sphere of international relationships. Yet the whole solution of our problem rests in doing just that. If now we carefully study the statements of those who condemn, and of those who approve the preparedness propaganda, we will find that they witness for one of these ideas or for the other. Either they stand for love in international relations without the idea of force ; or else they stand exclusively for force. Those who stand for the principle of love and good- will without any show of force may be divided roughly into three groups. There are those who believe all war to be wicked and all part in it to be contrary to the Christian profession ; who hold that a nation must be ready to be sacrificed if necessary for its principles, just as Jesus was ready to be sacrificed for the principles He professed. Or again there are those who believe absolute non-resistance to be the safest policy ; that the surest way to escape attack or not to suffer from it if we are attacked, is to make no prepara- tion to resist it; or finally there are those who, in the in- terests of good-will between nations and in order to show the better way to the nations, would have our country boldly make no such preparation as would rob us of our opportunity to preach peace to the world and good-will among men. Upon the other hand there are the advocates of the idea of force. And these, too, may be divided roughly into three groups. There are those who believe in war, the professed militarists who feel that the glory of a country depends upon her ability to win wars; and there are those public men, diplomats and statesmen wh© have adopted the present international situation as
A Christian Nation 103
their standard or code of action and feel that as do the other nations, so must we do; and that it is foolish for us to pretend that we can have a policy which is different from that of other peoples ; and finally, there is the average man who, witnessing the ruthless way in which war is waged, treaties disregarded, nations destroyed, flies to arms in his imagination and wants to get ready for what may happen to him.
But now, neither of these two moods, if I may so de- scribe them, is really attempting to unite the two ideas of love and good-will on the one hand, and readiness to use force if necessary on the other hand. Yet it is only as they are united, and as the people come to see that they are united and how they are, that we shall arrive at a just judgment in this difficult and critical situation.
What then are some of the elements which a just recog- nition of each one of these ideas will exclude from the sit- uation? What element will the Christian idea of love, good- will, the absence of hatred, suspicion and fear between na- tions banish from our national mind? It will banish the spirit of commercial greed and of material prosperity from any program of preparedness. To have private capital in- terested in the sales of arms, to press the manufacturing of munitions, obscuring the higher issues that are involved is simply the mind of Mammon. It will banish the notion that material power is greater than spiritual power ; or that physical force is higher than spiritual ideas. There is vast danger that forts, fleets, guns and armies shall come to take a primary place in the minds of the people ; that a nation's rank shall be determined by the number of its battleships; its dignity determined by the number of calibre of its guns. "Vast armaments are the expression of materialism, they are the visible incarnation of appalling unbelief in spiritual
104 ^^^ Christian Idea in the Modern World
forces."^ Never did our country more need to guard itself against the belief in power as symbolized in steel or against the reliance upon brute force as the only thing that wins.
It will banish the feeling of hatred or jealousy between nations, the feeling that every nation is per se the rival or the enemy of every other nation and that the only way to deal with each other is on the battlefield. Preparedness in this selfish and pernicious sense starts with the hypothesis that nations are naturally and inevitably foes, that as one ex- pands another must contract. Thus they must distrust and suspect each other. Then they must arm against each other. Then they must begin to fear each other. At last they must come to hate each other, and hatred will wait only for the right moment to strike. That is the tragedy of a selfish and anti-Christian preparedness. Sow fear and hate and hate will reap strife and war. Preparedness in this sense means an increase in armament that no one can foresee. It means the transplantation of European mili- tarism, armament and crushing war-taxes beyond anything that our imagination can conceive. And it means the inaug- uration of an international policy, of a method of dealing nation with nation which is not only the negation of the Gospel of Christ, but robs us of the opportunity of show- ing to the nations the truer and better way. What we need in place of the pagan motto, In time of peace prepare for war, is the motto. In time of peace prepare for more peace. What we need above all else is moral preparedness, a nation ready to establish a new-world order and to se- cure such relations between nations as shall be a guarantee of perpetual peace.
A nation bent upon such a program in its relations with other nations will first set its own household in order. It
« C. E. Jeflferson, op. cit. p. 158.
A Christian Nation 105
will cast out the spirit of greed, selfishness and hatred in its own social order. It will cultivate the spirit of fraternity and good-will among its own citizens.
"If we are to profit by the lessons of this fearful blood- shed, clearly we must begin by realizing that war simply gives startling emphasis to conditions of life and action that form the norm of so-called Christian countries in times of peace. We war because we live to get ; we oppress by force of arms because we oppress by the selfishness and self-inter- est of our social and economical life ; we kill with shot and shell in war because we kill by callousness, lovelessness, treachery and self-seeking in times of peace. What advan- tageth it for a man to refuse to go abroad to fight so that he remains at home to oppress or disregard the sufferings of his brother? Where is the glory of knitting socks in the name of Christ for those who fight abroad, whilst content to be- hold our brethren at home unshod and unclothed? Or to send food to fighting armies whilst untouched by the sight, grown familiar, of hungering armies of unemployed at home?"3
It is useless to try to love our brothers across the seas whom we have not seen, unless we learn to love our brothers at home whom we do see.
But now, upon the other hand, what will, what can the idea of force mean consistent with such an idea of love? Precisely what it means in the family and in the community life. It means that if any member in the family of nations becomes unruly, ungovernable, unreasonable, it shall be restrained by suasion if may be, by force if it need be, from disturbing the peace of the world and from violating its holiest ideals. That every Christian nation should and
» " War and the Christian Ethic." P. Gavan Duffy, Inier national Journal of Ethics, January, 1917.
io6 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
must be prepared to do as truly as any Christian parent. If we are a Christian nation, we must be prepared to de- fend, either from within or without, these moral ideals which have come down to us from our fathers, which it is our duty to transmit untarnished to our children and chil- dren's children. We hold in trust the ideals of our Re- public, and it is for us to take such action — any action that shall place us in a position to fulfill that trust. The chances, as Dr. Hocking has well said, that we shall be called upon to defend our national existence are very small. But we are called upon and must be prepared to enforce peace in the world and to speak for the principles which we have professed. We must be able to speak and to be listened to when questions of international law and common hu- manity are at stake. Thus the conscience of the country demands such measure of preparedness as will fulfill our responsibilities to our neighbors, maintain the rights of treaties and contribute to the justice and peace of the world an influence commensurate with our numbers and wealth and our intelligence. In a word, the true moral preparedness of our country will consist first in the exalta- tion of spiritual ideas above those of force and in the culti- vation of good-will with nations and not in hostile prepara- tion against them. But secondly in a readiness to defend moral ideas, justice and righteousness wheresoever and by whomsoever these ideas may be attacked. Grave perils of the preparedness propaganda lie in the mood of the people which that propaganda tends to produce, the mood of jealousy, of suspicion, of fear, of hatred: and they lie in the mood that they generate in other peoples as they look across the sea and behold us keeping up our fortifica- tions, multiplying our forts, increasing our arms. All of this needs to be done with such moderation as neither to
A Christian Nation 107
inflame the mind of our own people nor to excite the sus- picion and hate of other peoples. If, instead of reckless and unnecessary material and military preparedness of such sort, we should train our youth in the service of moral ideas, and, something after the pattern of the Swiss govern- ment, should teach them that they must be prepared to be the willing servants of moral ideas and to be prepared to defend them at any cost, we should be exercising both the moderation and the wnsdom which should deliver us from losing sight of our birthright and our vision of moral leadership to international peace and good-will, and at the same time be keeping our eyes fixed on the necessity of all good servants that they be prepared to defend these ideals in which they profess to believe.
Again this Christian idea of a State helps us to answer one of the most difficult questions of all, the question, namely, of reconciling the Christian Idea with the idea of war. At first it might seem as if these two ideas were absolutely irreconcilable. "What has the gospel of the Naza- rene to do with murderous passion, bred by war? How can we speak of the Father Who makes all things to work for our good if we compromise at all with a system for which human beings are masses to be hurled at each other's throats, and which devises ingenuious machinery and pours out endless treasure for their destruction? Is it not better to endure any wrong than to implicate ourselves in such brutal and insensate slaughter. What can murder by ma- chinery have to do with the religion of the meek and lowly Jesus?''* The antithesis here appears to be so final, that some thoughtful minds have not been able to escape the conclusion that Christianity and war are opposite and
* John Oman, " The War and Its Issues," pp. 18, 19.
io8 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
mutually exclusive terms. War is always and everywhere wrong. "War is an open and utter violation of Christian- ity. If war is right, then Christianity is wrong, false, a lie. If Christianity is right, then war is wrong, false, a lie. The God revealed by Jesus, and by any great spiritual leader of the race, is no God of battles. He lifts no sword — He asks no sacrifice of blood. He is the Father of all men, Jew and Gentile, bond and free. His method of persuasion is forgiveness."^
Upon no other subject do we have to rely so utterly upon the spirit of truth rather than upon its letter. If any one takes up his Bible, for example, and looks for definite in- structions of the relation of the questions of war to re- ligion he finds himself nowhere. The Old Testament is full of war, and it is only in the perspective of a distant Messianic day that one finds even a glimpse or hint of peace. Or if we take up our New Testament to see if Jesus does not pronounce himself on this subject, we are doomed to disappointment. Jesus never once mentions the subject unless to say that there shall be wars, and rumors of wars, and all effort either to justify particular wars or to condemn them by the use of this or that detached saying of Scripture is simply to misuse the words of the Bible.
If we are to be guided into the truth at all it must be by the spirit of truth. Holding fast to our persuasion, that the nation is to be a servant nation, and that the whole purpose which animates it is to be not rivalry nor lust for dominion nor hate of others, what will this spirit have to teach us with respect to resort to arms, to the use of actual warfare?. It will certainly teach us to abhor it,
"' s John Haynes Holmes, " Sermon Preached in the Church of the Messiah," New York.
A Christian Nation 109
and to put away the notion that it is eternally necessary or right in the relations of people to each other. This idea has been boldly preached in our day but it has been preached in defiance of the law of Christ. It is outlawed by the spirit of Christ and by the true ideal of a Christian State. War will some day cease to be the method of settling international disputes. Without doubt to settle disputes as beween nations by the method of muskets and cannon will appear as barbarous to future generations as the rack and the torture chamber appear to us. Victor Hugo was a true prophet when he said that a cannon ball will one day be viewed with the same surprise and horror in our museums with which today we look at the headsman's axe or the thumb screw.
Again it is plain that all war that is for conquest, all wars that are animated by hatred of one's rival or by lust for territory are condemned by the spirit of Christ and by the ideal of a servant nation. A simple application of this principle would wipe away from the map of history almost every war that ever was waged. If this principle were actually put into operation, war would be so infrequent as to be a minor factor in the total life of the world. It would occur so seldom that the war problem would cease to exist. War would then become an occasional and exceptional episode interrupting for only the briefest in- terval the peaceful ongoing of the life of the world.
Thus our question ultimately becomes largely an aca- demic question. It asks us does the Christian Idea outlaw war as such, so that a truly Christian nation under no circumstances would ever resort to arms? So it has seemed to Tolstoi, to William Lloyd Garrison, and so it seems to many Christian people today. Yet war, in the last analysis, is the use of force by nations, and if ex-
no The Christian Idea in the Modern World
perience proves that the use of force is both salutary and indispensable as between smaller groups and that it is not inconsistent with the spirit of love, but is often dictated by the spirit of love, then resort to force cannot be condemned as between nations, and it may become the duty of the servant State. The only escape from this conclusion is by the assertion that any use of force which results in loss of life must be condemned, while force which does not go to these limits may be condoned. But is not this to exalt physical life to a pinnacle, to which neither the teaching of the Bible nor the experience of the race has ever raised it?
Admitting then that war, as the use of force between na- tions may some times be justified, under what circum- stances can we justify it? In the first place when it is waged to help a sister nation to peace, to order, and to justice. Is not Spain, for example, today a better Spain than it was before the Spanish war? Is not Spain without Cuba and the Philippines a better and a happier Spain than when she sought to throttle the aspirations of Cuba and to corrupt and degrade the Filipino? And can a war which procured freedom for these peoples and at the same time freed Spain herself from her iniquity toward them be condemned as an unjust and an unholy war? Is it not likely that more lives were saved by this war than were lost by it? Can it be urged that the seeds of hatred were sown by this war, so that the permanent friendship of these two nations was imperilled by it? On the contrary Spain and the United States were never so friendly as they are today. Empty a war, that is, of the motives of selfishness and hatred and the effects of that war are not evil, and that war does not breed hatred and revenge and produce more war.
Another instance is that of the international expedition
A Christian Nation iii
against China during the Boxer rebellion. That was war, in the sense that the force of armed men was used to sup- press disorder in a sister nation. It was used equally by the different nations the lives of whose citizens had been sacrificed by the Chinese rebels. But it was used in a different spirit and from different motives. Without doubt a hatred and distrust of Germany was planted at that time in the heart of China. But that was not because Germany used force against China, but because of the selfish motives and selfish ends which China believed Germany cherished while she used it. America also used her troops in China. But because America proved that her motives were un- selfish and that she sought only China's good, and no ma- terial gain for herself, that episode became the beginning of a firm and loyal friendship between the two Republics. In this case also war was the unselfish use of force in the interest of those against whom it was waged.
Again war will be justified if those moral ideals which the servant State is there to defend are threatened by brute power and attacked by an unreasoning and an unmoral foe. The servant State will then take up arms not for self-de- fense, so much as for the defense of those moral ideals of which she is the guardian and not for her sake alone, but for the sake of mankind as a whole. "This is not to hold life as a light possession, or war as a small evil, but it is to hold that there are worse evils than war, moral sur- renders against which we must contend even to blood, and it may be the blood of others as well as our own. No mere material good can be sufficient justification, — but justice and liberty are spiritual blessings which never have been maintained at less hazard than life. Even though we see that war is an evil to be abolished, and though we all hope for that stage in our general national life when we
112 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
shall have developed such spiritual powers of resisting evil as to make war a folly and a crime, our relation to that higher stage and order does not absolve us from our duty to the lower order in which we live, which in its own less per- fect way may still be seeking the same ends."® Nor is it a valid objection to urge that all nations believe when they go to war that they are warring for such spiritual ends and ideals. Doubtless a national conscience as well as a per- sonal conscience may be defective and warped; yet that does not mean that conscience shall not be listened to and followed. The more the ideal of a servant State is culti- vated the less likelihood will there be that the conscience of that State will cause it to err, and while such a State well knows that it is vain to say peace when there is no peace, or to set up any other standard of peace than that which will endure, it will not wage war an ell beyond that point and it will have no share in inflicting a ruin that is vin- dictive or in beating a nation to its knees or in bleeding it white. The only motive that will animate a Christian na- tion at war is the love and defense of a moral idea. Behind the arm that is reached out to defend it is the heart that is controlled and that is freed from the spirit of hate or vengeance.
Such is the war which, in the mind of the vast majority of our people, America has entered upon in our day. The great moral opportunity which is ours is that of proving that a single nation may be trusted to wage war against another, without expectation or desire for selfish or ma- terial gains. It is a vast experiment such as the world has never known before, in international morality. If it can be carried through to its high moral conclusions with- out the exhibition of any other temper than that in which
• John Oman, op. cit. pp. 35, 36.
A Christian Nation 113
it has been begun, a demonstration on a large scale will have been given to the world of the possible use of arms by a great nation in a great war from motives and for ends which, after the closest scrutiny, can bear the name of Christian. Here lies the task of every thoughtful Ameri- can; to see that that temper, and no other, is maintained and developed. The future moral history of the world is in no small measure to be determined by the issue of this vast experiment. Already there have begun to emerge some great spiritual results, which belie the assertion that no good can come out of war. The rebirth of Russia, the reapproachment in closest friendship of the most democratic countries on earth, the lyric and passionate re- union of the Anglo-Saxon races — these are spiritual possessions so great that we are not yet in a position to measure their magnitude. Add to them the spectacle of a great nation waging a great war without trace of selfish- ness or hatred solely in defence of moral ideals essential to the preservation of the race as a whole, and a new way is opened for the operation of the Christian Idea which gives us some faint glimpses of the outlines of the City of God on earth.
IX
THE CHRISTIAN IDEA AND THE GREAT WAR
The last six months have been the most eventful period in the lives of any of us. It is always difficult to realize the full significance of events when one is in the midst of them. Yet we must try to understand the full reach and meaning of what is taking place before our eyes.
Today we are raising and spending billions of dollars, equipping a huge army and navy, and raising every other branch of the military establishment to its highest point of efficiency. Our men by the hundreds of thousands have enlisted in the United States service; our troops are being transported in increasing numbers across the seas to fight on foreign soil; and those of us who remain at home are being made to realize in every way that we are in the midst of the greatest war that the world has ever known.
It is our greatest war not only in the amount of money that is being spent, or the number of men who are being put into the field, but because the issues are the greatest which our country has ever faced. In 1776 we were fighting for the independence of our country, and in 186 1 that our Union might be preserved and that all men in it might have equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But when future history is written, it will constitute the historic honor of America that in this war she heard the cry of all humanity, and entered deliberately a struggle in which she had nothing to gain for herself, in order to defend hu- man right, universal right, and in order that that justice,
lis
ii6 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
that liberty, those blessings which she herself already pos- sessed, might be preserved and perpetuated in all the world. It is this gallant entrance into the lists on behalf of humanity as a whole; it is this unselfish espousing of the cause of a whole world ; it is this dedication of her wealth, her strength, her manhood to the welfare of all mankind ; it is this willing- ness of our land to be the servant, and the suffering ser- vant, of those ideals without which this world would not be a safe or a pleasant place to live in, — which makes up the everlasting glory and honor of this war which we have now made our own. It would have been easy for America, if she had desired, to think only of her own grievances, her own rights, her own future. She did think of these things, but she thought of something more. She thought of the en- slavement of unoffending Belgium, the obliteration of the independence and liberties of smaller nations, the ruthless murder of non-combatants, who, in summer evenings and winter nights, were hurled without warning by criminal hands into the depths of the sea.' She remembered the spectacle of an arrogant militarism threatening the peace of the world, the enthronement of brute force over justice, of selfish autocracy over the rights of people as a whole, and the overthrow of those basic principles of humanity and brotherhood upon which the well-being of the whole world depends.
In defense of the wronged, in support of the weak, and as a champion of the eternal right, America has entered this war. Its issues are, to an unprecedented degree, moral and religious. We are struggling, in a word, for the vindication of the Christian Idea. We are seeking to substitute Chris- tian for anti-Christian ideas in the sphere of national and international relationships.
The Christian Idea and the Great War 117
In a remarkable article printed in the Atlantic Monthly'^ Mr. Vernon Kellogg puts his finger upon that prin- ciple, that ideal which underlies all the rest. He tells how he went to Europe a neutral, a pronounced pacifist, disbeHeving in war in general, and wholly disbelieving in the necessity or in the right of America to partici- pate in the war. And he tells how he was converted. What converted him was his personal conversations with those in the German high command. Without exception, he discovered that these great German leaders believed in, openly espoused and proclaimed their faith in, the doctrine that power, force, sheer strength is the only guarantee of national greatness, is the idea above all others to be im- planted at the center of a nation's life, and to be enshrined at the heart of a nation's policy. He points out that this has long been the preachment of the German intellectuals, and that this war has virtually become a test of the German position and claims. The idea, that is, of brotherhood, of sympathy, in a word, the mutual-aid principle, is recognized as valid only within certain limited groups. It is not to be recognized between different national groups, or race- groups. There the only creed is that of an Allmacht, of natural selection based on a violent competitive struggle, in which the fittest, that is, the strongest, will survive. Man- kind is looked upon as a congeries of different mutually irreconcilable groups. The only question is which will have the strength to dominate. In this test of strength, individ- uality counts for nothing, the interests of the state count for everything. All mercy, all compassion, all soft-hearted- ness is wrong. The test of right in this struggle is success in it.
*■ " Headauartert Nights." August, 1917.
ii8 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
And Mr. Kellogg discovered that the only kind of argu- ment which will convince the German leaders that they are wrong is the argument of force. If they arc beaten in this war, they will believe it, but not otherwise. This war must then be fought to a decision in order to defeat the German idea, and to re-establish the mutual-aid idea as between na- tion and nation.
*1 came out," concludes Mr. Kellogg, "a neutral and a hater of war, but I have come back believing that a people who practise war as a means of human advancement must be put into a position of impotence. And Germany can be put into this position only by war. She recognizes no other argument and will accept no other decision."
This then is the root-principle for which we are strug- gling, the supremacy of the mutual-aid principle in inter- national relations. This is not to claim that the Allied na- tions have always consistently stood for this principle; nor that the Central Powers have never shown any recognition of it. But it is to say that as the war has developed, this issue has become more and more sharply defined, until to- day victory for the Allies will mean the establishment of this principle between the nations of our modern world.
A second idea for which we are contending is this: that no nation has the right in peace or in war to be a law unto itself, and to disregard in its own interests the basic prin- ciples of justice, and the ordinary dictates of humanity. No nation has the right, or should be permitted, to violate treaties, overrun defenceless nations, practise barbarities, violate all humane and established usages, in order to gain military success. It was at this point, as we all know, that America broke with Germany, and took the ground that international law and common humanity must stand, and
The Christian Idea and the Great War 119
that no nation in the stress of conflict can be allowed to re- write these laws to suit herself, or to perpetrate barbarities for military ends.
It is not too much to say that America has looked upon Germany's conduct of this war with astonishment and be- wilderment. That a people which has contributed so much to the stock of this world's culture, knowledge and ideals should have acted in war like savages is something that we have found it difficult, if not impossible, to explain. Those of us who have known her, loved her, lived in her, drawn some of our greatest inspirations from her literature and her music, do not believe for a moment that this is the real German people. But since in fear, in desperation, or from other motives, the German nation for the moment, at least, is behaving like this, what are we to do? Can we witness Belgium permanently enslaved? Can we witness neutral merchant ships mercilessly sunk, and make no protest? Can we witness captured French territory horribly and in- credibly devastated and destroyed by unbridled and insen- sate ferocity? The answer is that the thing simply cannot be done. We are unwilHng to sit by and see the thing done. As Mr. Kellogg says in his last article with respect to the Belgian deportations : "They were the most vivid, shocking, convincing single happening in all our enforced observation and experience of German disregard of suflfering and human rights in Belgium. They were the final and the fully suffi- cient exhibit, prepared by the great German machine to convince absolutely any or all of us who might still have been clinging to his original, desperately maintained atti- tude of neutrality that it was high time that we were some- where else. There could be no neutrality in the face of de- portation : you are for that kind of thing, or you are against
120 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
it. We are against it, America is against it. That is the hope of the world."^
This then is the second thing we are fighting for: to re- strain by force a powerful nation that is overriding all na- tional and humane rights in her desperate efforts to win this war.
Once more, we are contending to settle the question whether or not war is essential to the program of the life of great nations. Now, of course, it is impossible to assert that Germany is the only nation to believe in and to practice war ; or that other nations are not culpable in their insistence upon great military establishments and in their resort to arms for selfish political ends. Germany may well point to her forty years of peace while Italy was fighting for Tripoli, Russia and Japan were contending for Korea, England for South Africa, and America was fighting Spain. Yet cer- tain facts are as clear as daylight. One is that the German intellectuals stood pre-eminent in their teaching that war is "the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power, it is a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with; that without it universal decadence would follow; that there is an instinct of self- preservation which leads inevitably to war and to conquest of foreign soil." Instances might be multiplied to show that this has been the common teaching of modern German publicists and the common belief of the German people. History will doubtless prove that for years Germany was preparing for just this struggle, that her political program was one which she knew would be carried to success only by force of arms ; that she was waiting only for the moment when she could force the issue with great- est chances of success. History will prove that at the criti-
1 " In von Bissing's Headquarters." J -4 Wa«<tc Monthly, October, 1917.
The Christian Idea and the Great War 121
cal moment in 1914, Germany was not only aware of the nature of Austria's ultimatum but approved it and deliber- ately chose to abide the consequences. So that the respon- sibility for the actual outbreak of hostilities falls fairly and squarely upon her shoulders. Again, no one doubts that there has existed and still exists a military oligarchy in Germany which controls the policies of the Empire and dominates the life of the people and is the inveterate foe to the peace and tranquillity of the world.
One of the great war aims of the Allies, then, is to de- stroy this oligarchy, and to lay to rest for all time this mili- tary spectre that haunts the minds and threatens the peace of the world. As Secretary Lansing has said : "There is but one way to restore peace in the world, and that is by over- throwing the physical might of German imperialism by force of arms." Similarly ex-Premier Asquith has said : "We are waging not only war for peace, but war against war. We must banish once for all from the catalogue of maxims the time-worn fallacy that if you wish for peace, you must make ready for war. For the first time in history we make an advance to the realization of an ideal to which men of action in the past . . . have been groping their way. We may not be able for a long time to dispense with coercion, military and economic, against the disloyal and the recalci- trant, but we may well hope that the positive law with its forcible restraints may gradually recede in the background and sovereign authority be recognized to rest in the com- mon sense of mankind." It is no accident that the great democracies of the world are all on one side ; that the great- est remaining autocracies of the world are on the other. The people of the world want peace and not war; and the people on the one side and a military machine on the other, are fighting to prove whether or not the conscience and will
122 The Christian Idea in the Modern World
of the people or the military ambitions of a machine shall dominate the destinies of mankind. Whether we realize it or not, we are at a turning-point in the moral history of the world. And the greatest issue of this struggle is to be whether the peaceable co-existence of states shall come to be the heritage of the world, or whether the old, discredited, mediaeval idea of jealous and warring states shall be per- petuated for untold years to come. To help mankind to this higher moral life, America has entered upon this war, and no nation ever dedicated itself to a nobler task than that. Finally, we are fighting for that new internationalism in which the right and freedom of all states, of all peoples, however weak or however small, shall be recognized and maintained. To quote once more from Mr. Asquith's defi- nition of the war-aims of. the Allies: "We are fighting," he says, "not for the restoration of the status quo, or what was once called the balance of power, but for the substitu- tion for the one and the other of an international system under which both the small states and the great can be as- sured of a stable foundation and independent development." The Allies are virtually the champions of the smaller and weaker states. They champion the cause of Armenia, of Syria, of Palestine, of the oppressed, tortured, massacred population of Asia Minor as over against the Turk; of Serbia, and the other Balkan States that have long been the prey of Austria, whose disregard of the rights of small Slavic states constitutes one of the greatest iniquities of modern European politics; of Poland, concerning which all freedom-loving nations approve the wise and generous words of President Wilson ; of Alsace and Lorraine, in so- far as the racial preferences and instincts of her population have been thwarted and suppressed by German domination ; and of Belgium, whose right to be restored to independence
The Christian Idea and the Great War 123
and indemnified for heartless destruction constitutes the determined ideal of all the allied nations. It is to this end that this strong, free people willingly devotes its strength, its wealth and its sons, in order that the smallest peoples may be liberated and assured the happiness and joy which for these blessed years has belonged to us.
Such, then, are the four great ideals for which we are struggling. If this summary be in any wise adequate and accurate, may we not see even on the terrible battlefields of our modern world, the operation of the Christian Idea? If these principles are permanently established in the heart of mankind, can it be said that they are not worth the cost, terrible as it has been? Without them, in what sense could our civilization be called Christian ?
The moral test to which such a situation puts our nation is one which cannot easily be measured. The demands made upon us transcend any that we or any other nation have known heretofore. It is a question of increasing our fight- ing force to its maximum efficiency, while at the same time keeping our national temper free from vindictiveness and hatred. No nation was ever yet subdued by force alone. It is love that ultimately conquers. It is possible to reduce to impotency the German power of aggression and at the same time to treat the German people, the German spirit, proud as ours, with such generosity and good-will, that the issues of the war shall make for toleration, recognition of mutual worth, and the rebirth of the spirit of human brotherhood. It is for this that the moral and spiritual forces of America should ceaselessly labor. Nothing can defeat the Christian aims of this war except the un-Christian spirit. A victory must be won in our own hearts, or a victory on the battle- field will spell moral defeat and future disaster. Thus far there has been in army and civil life alike a striking absence
124 T'/i^ Christian Idea- in the Modern World
of the cheaper and baser forms of war sentiment and of the feelings of animosity and blind hatred which war so often engenders. If America can rule her own spirit, and recognize that a peace to be abiding must be established in righteousness and a sense of mutual benefit and good-will, she will give to the world a demonstration of the power of the Christian Idea which will never be forgotten by the ages to come.
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