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THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
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THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES ON
PREACHING AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF RELIGION
FOR 1916
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
AS REVEALED IN CONTEMPORARY SCRIPTURES
BY
WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE
PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE
"The deirocratic -aiind att-^mpts-to apply to every moral issue its tests of justi(;e>givipg;,;servir,ie,;aniiWc<a'l solidarity."
, , — Shailer Matthews,
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916
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Copyright, 1916, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotypcd. Published March, 1916.
Notfajooti iPrega
J, S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
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H
FRANK H. DECKER
MINISTER OF CHURCH HOUSE, PROVIDENCE, R.I,
IN WHOSE HEART AND ON WHOSE LIPS THE GOSPEL
OF GOOD WILL LIFTS THOSE WHO NEED IT
MOST INTO A HAPPY FELLOWSHIP IN
CHRIST'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD
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PREFACE
This book, taking for granted the technical devices of preaching, goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to be preached and practiced : — the Gospel that Christ expects men to be great enough to make the good of all affected by their action, the object of their wills, as it is of the will of God.
The Christian is not a '' plaster saint" who holds "safety first" to be the supreme spiritual grace; but the man who earns and spends his money, controls his appetites and passions, chooses peace or war, and does whatever his hand finds to do, with an eye single to the greatest good of all concerned.
^ Sin is falling short of this high, heroic aim ; and the preacher's business is to make men ashamed of it, as the low, mean thing it is.
The instant a man who has done wrong repents, God and all Christhke men welcome him back to their favor and fellowship.
To the Christian every secular vocation is an oppor- tunity to express Good Will : and sacrifice is the price he gladly pays for the privilege.
vii
VUl PREFACE
The wise Christian preacher will not as preacher become the mere partisan on one side or the other of disputed questions of political, social, and moral reform : but will commend such Good Will and condemn such evil will as there is on both sides.
Christian character and Christian virtues come not by direct cultivation, but as by-products of Good Will expressed in daily life. The Church, a superfluous superstition when considered as an appendage to an untransformed secular life, or a preparation for an unde- fined happiness hereafter, is a precious and sacred instru- ment for transforming men and institutions into sons and servants of Good Will.
As the expert interpreter of the Gospel of Good Will : as the leader in the fight against all meanness and cruelty : as the restorer of the penitent : as the infuser of spirit- ual meaning into secular Hfe : as the champion of costly sacrifice : as the challenger of social injustice and the non-partisan herald of social reform : as the officer of a church that derives its sanctity and unity from the efficiency with which it serves all forms of personal and social welfare, — the Christian minister has a mission beneficent beyond all others.
These lessons are drawn from and illustrated by texts and extracts from twentieth-century literature: not
PREFACE IX
devotional, theological, evangeKstic, or missionary books, but secular literature that is saturated with the essen- tial Christian Spirit of Good Will.
For kind permission to quote these texts and lessons from " Contemporary Scriptures " I make grateful ac- knowledgments to the following authors and publishers :
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, for " The Passing of the Third Floor Back " (page i) ; Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy and Harper and Brothers, for " The Servant in the House " (page 162) ; D. Appleton and Company, for Thomas Mott Osborne's '' Within Prison Walls " (page 80) ; The Houghton Mifflin Company, for John Graham Brooks' ''An American Citizen" (page 108); J. B. Lippincott Company, for Charles Sarolea's '' How Belgium Saved Europe" (page 135); Dodd, Mead and Company, for John Hopkins Dennison's " Beside the Bowery " (page 20) ; and The Macmillan Company, for John Mase- field's "The Everlasting Mercy" and " The Widow in the Bye Street " (page 45) ; Jacob Riis' " The Making of an American," and "The Battle With the Slum" (page 191) ; and Winston Churchill's "The Inside of the Cup " (page 217).
These texts and extracts are introduced to show that this Gospel of Good Will is a Gospel which is being preached effectively in the poems and plays, the biog-
X PREFACE
raphies and histories, the speeches and novels of the day, and should be preached in the pulpit.
In Chapters II and III, I have introduced a few pas- sages from my book on ^' Sin and its Forgiveness." For some things put in, and for more left out, I am in- debted to the criticism of Dr. Charles T. Burnett and Dr. Chauncey W. Goodrich.
Why the Gospel of Good Will? Why not the Gospel of God ; the Gospel of Christ ; or the Gospel of the Spirit ?
Because for many of us God is a far-off, forbidding being; Christ has become sentimental and external; the Spirit has come to stand for something vague and mystical.
Readers of whom this is not true ; readers to whom God is a Father whose trusted, wise benevolence makes the doing of hard duty a deHght ; Christ an ever present companion whose friendship makes unselfish living easy ; the Spirit an inward guide whose perpetual suggestions make kindliness of attitude and act a second nature; are advised to substitute for Good Will, wherever it occurs, the one of these more obviously personal terms which means most to them.
On the other hand, to those who find these terms beset with misconceptions, and are willing to risk apparent
PREFACE XI
temporary abandonment of them, I think I can promise that at the end of our little journey they will come back to find these personal terms defined and deepened, ex- panded and enriched.
For Good Will is not an impersonal abstraction float- ing in empty air. It is the fundamental attribute of God; the essential nature of Christ; the characteristic quahty of the Spirit : and whoever lives in Good Will thereby becomes a son or daughter of God, a brother or sister of Christ, a disciple and friend of the Spirit.
William Dewitt Hyde.
BowDOiN College, Brunswick, Maine, January i, 19 16.
INTRODUCTION
There are two approaches to the Christian life. One is the critical investigation of the traditions in which that life is historically enshrined. The results of this investigation are at J&rst startlingly negative, and seem to take away the foundations of Christianity. Yet followed through they reveal underneath the founda- tion which they remove an even j&rmer foundation in the eternal ideal of Good Will which the prophets par- tially proclaimed, law negatively declared, Christ per- fectly embodied, and the early Christians enthusiasti- cally reproduced. One finds this admirably done in such a book as William F. Bade's "The Old Testament in the Light of To-day."
The other method is to ask, not through the critical examination of ancient tradition and ecclesiastical au- thority, but directly through the Hfe and literature of the present day what are the supreme values which men are expressing and admiring in the plays and poems, the biographies and histories, the speeches and novels of this twentieth century. This method has all the pleasure and peril of plowing virgin soil on an unexplored frontier.
XIV INTRODUCTION
It neither denies nor affirms the results as such of Biblical and historical criticism. In so far as tradition proves false and authority unfounded, so long as we are true to our present highest ideal of Good Will, we can get along just as well without as with the historical tradition. And in so far as the verified tradition and our present insight coincide, each has reason to be grate- ful for the confirmation of the other.
Both to those whom criticism has robbed of cherished features of the traditional Gospel and to those to whom criticism has given back the essentials of their faith, the new method brings a positive and practicable Gospel. Wisdom is justified of all her children.
We are passing through a revolution in religious thought. The old terms remain : but with new mean- ings and new emphasis. The old views had at least the merit of clearness. The preacher knew precisely what to preach : and the layman knew how to put the preaching into practice. The new views have not yet become equally precise. Not every preacher who holds them knows how to make them clear to his congrega- tion : and not every one in the congregation who hears them preached is quite clear about the manner of life for which they call.
As this book aims to make the new views as clearly
INTRODUCTION XV
preachable and as precisely practicable as the old, the natural introduction to them is a contrast, as sharp and as extreme as possible, between the old and the new views.
God used to be regarded as somewhat arbitrary : not deigning to justify his ways by the perfect standard of what human goodness at its best prompts us to say and do in our relations with our fellows : but laying down laws and penalties, drawing up plans and schemes, which seemed to have as their primary aim divine satis- faction rather than human welfare.
To-day our deeper grasp of the Spirit of Jesus, and our fuller appreciation of its great practical corollary, democracy, has taught us to measure God by at least as high a standard as that which we apply to ourselves. This makes God a Being altogether light in whom there is no darkness at all : not arbitrary will but Good Will becomes the essence of his nature : and when we seek to know His Will we ask not merely what was revealed to and believed by the harder hearts of twenty or twenty-five centuries ago, but what a Will which seeks the compre- hensive best for each and all to-day expects us to be and do, in the concrete and complex situations in which we modern men are placed — situations infinitely more delicate and difficult than anything of which the most inspired of the ancients every dreamed.
XVI INTRODUCTION
Eight lectures cannot cover the whole of the preacher's message. I have selected and arranged in logical order the eight commissions which seem to me most vital.
The preacher's first task is to develop in his people the habit of asking in every relationship of Ufe, not what is profitable, not what is pleasurable, not what is respect- able, not what is lawful : but what does the Will that wills the best for all : — what does Good Will in this precise situation require. To train people to ask that question every day and hour of their lives : and once or twice a week to give them guidance and inspiration toward some of the answers to it, is the preacher's most comprehensive commission. He is not merely the repeater and commentator of a message once for all delivered to the saints : but the prophet of a message that is forever as new and original as the changing situations and unfolding capacities of men.
The thing the preacher and layman ahke have to fight, then, is not sin in the old, abstract sense of defiance of an arbitrary God, disobedience of his sovereign com- mands, and disregard of the elaborate terms upon which he has offered us abstract salvation: but the meanness that seeks anything less than that best for all which Good Will is ever seeking; the selfishness which falls so far short of Good Will for all that it will
INTRODUCTION XVU
take gain and pleasure for self, or self and friends, at cost of avoidable loss and pain for others and for all. To show mean and selfish persons how mean and selfish they are, and make them heartily ashamed of their greed and lust, malice and hatefulness, laziness and self-indulgence, censoriousness and hardheartedness, is the preacher's second commission.
Mean and contemptible as selfishness is., however, the selfish man is mean and contemptible no longer than he clings to his selfishness. The instant he is ashamed of it, and sorry for the injury it is to others ; wishing that instead of the mean thing he said, or did, he had risen to the noble height of Good Will for all — that instant, not by special arrangement, but in the nature of the case, because we would do it ourselves, and God is at least as good as we are at our best, the man who has been mean and selfish is forgiven, and welcomed to the favor of God and the fellowship of all who in the Christ- Hke spirit share and serve Good Will. To assure the penitent of this free and full forgiveness of God, and to secure for him the practical, social expression of that forgiveness by all Christian men and women, is the preacher's third commission.
Good Will is not chiefly manifested for us once for all in miracle: or repeated for us in sacramental magic.
XVlll INTRODUCTION
It is manifested in the life and character of Jesus Christ far more fully than in the alleged manner of his birth or the method of his resurrection : in the conduct and spirit of the daily lives of Christian men and women, far more than in ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies : and is to be manifested most acceptably and trium- phantly in the transformation of all secular vocations into expressions of friendliness and service to all whom they directly and remotely affect. To show, not in technical detail, which for the most part is beyond his powers, but in aim and principle how to make each Christian man's vocation an expression of Good Will for him, in him, and through him for the benefit and blessing of the world, is the preacher's fourth commission.
Good Will involves not merely once for all in Jesus Christ, but perpetually and universally in every disciple who shares it, the sacrifice of whatever individual prefer- ence, pleasure or profit is inconsistent with it. Up to the Hmit of his strength and influence, so far as is con- sistent with maximum efficiency in his specific station and function, every Christian man must bear his share of the suffering incidental to a finite world of natural law and human freedom : and consequent on the per- versity of individuals and the corruption and imperfec- tion of civic and social institutions. Sacrifice is the cost
INTRODUCTION XIX
of service : each form of service has its specific price in sacrifice : and to train his people to pay the price and make the sacrifice cheerfully and bravely, yet not excessively or unreasonably, is the preacher's fifth commission.
A man who makes his life expressive of Good Will thereby becomes not merely saved and assured of an abundant entrance into a future heaven : but becomes transformed by the renewing of his mind so as to show forth here and now that perfect and acceptable Will in specific traits of character and qualities of conduct. To show what these are, and how they come, not so much through explicit cultivation but as by-products of a mind and heart devoted day by day, year after year, to Good Will, is the Christian preacher's sixth commission.
The State, the economic order, the family and the international world order are spheres, not of supernatural conflict of God and the Devil, but spheres which are the resultants of much natural selfishness and an ever increasing volume of Christian Good Will. To live in them, patient with their imperfections so far as they are for the present inevitable ; yet ever making his own contribution to them pure, and just and generous and beneficent: dwelling at the same time sorrowfully
XX INTRODUCTION
in the unavoidable injustices and oppressions, joyfully in the coming purity and justice and generosity and love of the world that is to be, and which all Christian men are helping to bring in, is his seventh commission.
The Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, the Church, Missions and the Ministry are not as formerly con- sidered, supernatural institutions of mystical and magi- cal efficacy to work moral miracles independently of the transformation and cooperation of character : but they are useful and essential and therefore holy and sacred means for the cultivation, and propagation of Good Will. To make men appreciate and reverence them, not for their traditional and fictitious, but for their present-day and instrumental value, is the eighth of the preacher's commissions.
A man who signs himself *'A Student In Arms," writing from the trenches in Flanders to the Spectator of December i8, 191 5, describes so accurately the prob- lem of the preacher, and the solution of it set forth in this book, that it may well serve as the conclusion of our introduction.
"The soldier, and in this case the soldier means the working man, does not in the least connect the things he really believes in with Christianity. He thinks that Christianity consists in believing the Bible and setting
INTRODUCTION XXI
up to be better than your neighbors. By believing the Bible he means believing that Jonah was swallowed by the whale. By setting up to be better than your neigh- bors he means not drinking, not swearing, and preferably not smoking, being close-fisted with your money, avoid- ing the companionship of doubtful characters, and refusing to acknowledge that such have any claim upon you.
''This is surely nothing short of tragedy. Here were men who believed absolutely in the Christian virtues of unselfishness, generosity, charity and humility, with- out ever connecting them in their minds with Christ; and at the same time what they did associate with Christianity was just on a par with the formalism and smug self-righteousness which Christ spent His whole life in trying to destroy.
"The chaplains as a rule failed to realize this. They remonstrated with their hearers for not saying their prayers, and not coming to Communion, and not being afraid to die without making their peace with God. They did not grasp that the men really had deep-seated beliefs in goodness, and that the only reason why they did not pray and go to Communion was that they never connected the goodness in which they believed with the God in Whom the chaplains said they ought to believe. If they had connected Christianity with unselfishness
XXU INTRODUCTION
and the rest, they would have been prepared to look to Christ as their Master and their Savior. I am certain that if the chaplain wants to be understood and to win their sympathy he must begin by showing them that Christianity is the explanation and the justification and the triumph of all that they now do really believe in. He must start by making their religion articulate in a way which they will recognize. He must make them see that his creeds and prayers and worship are the sym- bols of all that they admire most, and most want to be.'^
CONTENTS
I. The Gospel of Good Will: Christ's Expecta- tion OF Men I
II. Falling Short of Good Will: The Meanness
OF Sin 46
III. Restoration to Good Will: Repentance and
Forgiveness 80
IV. Good Will in Secular Vocations: Service . 108 V. The Cost of Good Will: Sacrifice . . .135
VI. By-Products of Good Will: The Christian
Virtues 162
VII. Good Will in Society: Reform . . . .191 VIII. Fellowship in Good Will: The Church . . 217
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL: CHRIST'S EXPECTA- TION OF MEN
"You have always taken it for granted, sir, in all our conver- sations, that I was a fine fellow, in sympathy with fine ideals. But that is not what surprises me : it is to find — that you are right." Jerome K. Jerome, The Passing of the Third Floor Back, p. 190.
Our lesson for to-day is from ''The Passing of the Third Floor Back"; the text is the remark of a Jew converted from cunning trickery to frank honesty. This play is the drama of conversion by expectation ; re- generation by appreciation. It portrays the influence of The Stranger, who is Christ, on as unpromising a lot of persons as ever gathered together in a boarding house. The Prologue shows us a satyr, a coward, a bully, a shrew, a hussy, a rogue, a cad, a cat, a snob, a slut, a cheat, and a passer-by, The Stranger, — Christ.
2 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
In the Epilogue we meet these same individuals again, yet with all their objectionable characteristics gone: we meet them as a generous old bachelor; two pure lovers; a devoted husband and wife; an honorable Jew ; an entertaining party ; a self-respecting maiden lady ; a generous rich aunt ; an important person ; the refined lady of the house, and The Stranger who now is the friend of them all.
How has The Stranger-friend, the Christ, wrought this wonderful transformation? By seeing and re- veaHng to each one of them his or her ideal. In the grasping lodging-house keeper he sees and reveals the generous lady she really is ; unwilling to charge him as much as he is able and willing to pay. In a powdered, painted, giggling, gushing, silly simpleton he sees and reveals a ''clever, witty, beautiful, graceful, comely woman, perhaps a little pale — there are white roses and red — with delicate features on which the sculptor Thought has chiselled his fine Hues, giving to them char- acter, distinction; her still-bright eyes unspoilt; with her fit crown of soft brown hair that time has touched with no unkindly hand."
To see how the change is wrought, however, we must give not mere extracts, but in two or three cases the whole conversation.
Christ's expectation of men 3
First, The Stranger has a friendly talk with Harry Larkcom, a low, ill-mannered, mercenary fellow who has just been trying to make an assignation with the servant girl in return for a gift of imitation emeralds.
The Stranger How well you play !
Larkcom {He swings round on his stool.) Hullo ! — you there, old cockerlor — {He encounters The Stranger's eyes. Somehow they put him out of countenance.) Think so?
The Stranger You have the touch of one who loves music.
Larkcom Here. {He rises, grins up into The Stranger's face?i What's the Httle game? Want to borrow money?
The Stranger
You see, it would be of no use. You see through me
at once.
Larkcom
(The Stranger is smiling. He turns away, ashamed of himself.) Only my bit of fun. {By way of explana- tion). My weak spot — anybody telHng me I know anything about music. Here, of course — (yVith
4 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
disgust.) Ah! All they understand here is ''Tumpty,
tumpty, turn."
The Stranger
And so you give them — what they understand.
Larkcom Oh well! somebody's got to do something to liven
things up a bit.
The Stranger
Ah ! yes. (He puts a hand on the lad^s shoulder.) Some kind, good-natured body.
Larkcom Oh well ! it comes easy — and I like doing it.
The Stranger
Yes.
Larkcom
{There is something about The Stranger that invites confidence.) My idea was to have been an entertainer.
The Stranger It was a good idea. You would have succeeded, I
am sure.
Larkcom
You see, IVe got a voice.
5
The Stranger And you have humour and a sense of fun, one reads it in your eyes.
Larkcom
(Suspicious for an instant — till he looks into The Stranger's eyes.) That's right. Why, sometimes — when I like to take the trouble — I'll have 'em all round me here laughing. Not an easy crowd to start, mind you.
The Stranger
It is your vocation. It would be wrong of you to waste your gifts.
Larkcom
Question is, would it pay ?
The Stranger I think it would. And then, that is not the only question, is it? You would be giving pleasure to so many.
Larkcom
''Giving." Here, don't you run away with the no- tion that Harry Larkcom is a philanthropist. What's it going to put into little Harry's money-box? {He slaps his pocket) That's the question little Harry always asks himself.
6 the gospel of good will
The Stranger Always ? Are you sure ?
Larkcom Ami —
The Stranger
You play them "Tumpty, tumpty, tum." Why?
Larkcom Why ! Because —
The Stranger Does it give you any pleasure — you, a musician ! Does it add anything to the "money-box"? {The lad stares.) No. You do it because you are just a good fellow. You will have them all around you, laughing. Wherever you are, Hfe shall be a little brighter; dull, tired faces shall be made to smile. You give them — so much more than money. You give them — yourself. Don't you call that being a philanthropist?
Larkcom Of course, you can put it that way.
The Stranger What other way ?
christ's expectation of men 7
Larkcom I do like seeing people jolly round about me ; hearing them whisper to one another that Harry Larkcom's the life and — Gar on ! Who are you getting at ? — you and your philanthropists ! I just like their admiration and applause. That's all I do it for.
The Stranger
Their gratitude, their appreciation. Are you not
entitled to it ?
Larkcom
You are determined —
The Stranger The thanks of those you serve : that is the true "pay" of the artist.
Larkcom Here. Am I an artist now ?
The Stranger And the artist is always a philanthropist, serving his fellow-men, not only for the sake of the money-box.
Larkcom I wonder. My old mother always would put it that way. "Harry's never so happy," she would say, "as when he's making other people happy."
8 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
Ah ! She knew you. She would have been so proud
of you.
Larkcom
Well, it would be better than the sort of jobs I'm
doing now.
The Stranger
You will forgive me. I have seen it so often. You
artists are never content doing any other work than
your own. All the rest is waste of time.
Larkcom Would you mind one day my trying over one or two little things of my own on you ?
The Stranger I should be delighted.
Larkcom Honour bright ?
The Stranger
Honour bright ! It will be pleasant — looking back
— to think that I perhaps was of help to you in the
beginning.
Larkcom
Don't say anything about it to any of the others. (The Stranger signifies understanding.) "Harry Lark- com— artist!"
christ s expectation of men 9
The Stranger (Smiling.) And philanthropist.
Larkcom And philanthropist. (Laughs.) Good night, in case I don't see you again — (holds out his hand) — partner.
The Stranger
Good night, partner.
As a result of this conversation Harry Larkcom be- comes a professional entertainer with *'Fun without Vulgarity" for his motto.
Again The Stranger has a talk with a rich, broken- down, smutty, shady old book-maker, who is trying to get a beautiful girl who loathes his very touch to marry him as a means of supporting her indigent and quarrel- some parents. The Stranger had met the girl's eyes as she was starting out for a walk with the old gambler; and as a result of The Stranger's look she had decided not to go with him. The conversation between Wright, the old gambler, and The Stranger, starts with the former's remonstrance against this silent
interference.
Wright
I want to ask you a question. (He looks around, draws The Stranger further aside.) **Heat of the
lO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
room" be damned. It was the moment she caught sight of you that she changed — suddenly discovered that she wasn't feeling well — {with a sneering laugh). What's the understanding between you two?
The Stranger You think it was I who influenced her ?
Wright I don't think anything about it. I was watching. Her eyes were fixed on yours all the time.
The Stranger
May it not have been merely her Better Self pleading
to her ?
Wright
Her Better Self ! What better can she do for herself than marry me? I'm rich. Ain't I going to be kind to her ? Ain't I going to settle money on her — money on herself, to spend as she likes? {With increasing vehemence.) Ain't I good enough for her?
The Stranger And she ? Would she have been good enough for you ?
Wright (Puzzled.) She ! Good enough for me !
christ s expectation of men ii
The Stranger Taking all your gifts — your love. Giving you noth- ing in return but the cold embraces of a shameless woman.
(A silence.)
Wright
You don't understand. The world ain't a story-book
— all Jacks and Jills and love in a cottage. The girl's got to live.
The Stranger Ay ! To live ! It is a fine thing to live ! (He turns again smiling to little Old Joey.) You shall give her Life !
Wright (Staring.) Give her Life ?
The Stranger The lad she loves. (Old Joey darts a glance at Chris- topher, where he sits all unconscious.) She shall cleave to him, cherish him. She shall be the mother of children
— children who shall crown her brows with honour !
Love ! Labour ! That is Life to a woman. You shall
give her Life !
(Again a silence.)
Wright
(Peevishly) All jolly fine. What about me? Where
do I come in ?
12 the gospel of good will
The Stranger Man, you love her ?
Wright Yes, I know I do.
The Stranger Then it is all quite simple. There is nothing else to think of but what is best — for her.
Wright Yes, there is. There's me. Ain't I got any rights?
The Stranger Ah, yes. The right to serve.
Wright Here, you're making a mistake. You're talking to me as if I were some high and mighty Knight Errant sort of a chap. It's silly of you. I ain't even a gentle- man. I'm only a common little old man. Why, I was a book-maker — that's all I was. You know, a betting man — a bit shady at that. Daresay it's all right what you say. Only (he taps his breast; his voice has risen to a plaintive whine; Self-pity has given to it pathos) — I ain't got it in me.
The Stranger Are you sure it is I who am making the mistake ?
christ's expectation of men 1 3
Wright {He makes a gesture of the hands, and, shaking his head, creeps to the easy-chair. Sits crouching with his hands stretched out to the fire.)
The Stranger You are so sure, (smiling) *'Sir Joseph!''
Wright {He turns.) How did you know that used to be my nickname ?
The Stranger You were a public character. Wherever you went, men spoke of you — of your fine lordly ways, of your wondrous kindness. Women also.
Wright Flinging your money about a bit when you've got plenty of it, that ain't the same as giving up the woman you love.
The Stranger
Forgetting Self — forgetting all things but the loving of her, and the serving of her ! Ah yes, he would be a great gentleman who could do that. You — you do not feel yourself quite equal to it ?
14 the gospel of good will
Wright {He turns a poor, troubled face towards The Stranger.) Why mightn't she come to love me — in time? I would be good to her — and kind — and — {The quiet eyes are fixed on him. The foolish words die away)
The Stranger
I think you could win her love more readily. So that she would think of you till the end always with deep wonder — teach your name to her children that they, too, might learn to love and honour it.
As the result of this conversation Wright gives up the girl, and helps on her marriage with his young rival.
The third and last of these transforming interviews that I will cite is with Jape Samuels, a tricky Jew who is trying to sell the stock of a non-existent silver mine.
Samuels Don't want to make your fortune, do you ?
The Stranger Do not all men ?
Samuels
Got thomething here thath going to make mine. I'm going to be a millionnaire. Got a thilver mine here — {he strikes the papers with his hands) — worth — I'm
CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 15
that exthited about it, I go about telling everybody I meet. {Laughs.) Of courth they don't believe me.
The Stranger Why should they not ?
Samuels Well, it ain't thenth, ith it? If a fellow hath got hold of a good thing, he keepth it to himthelf — doethn't want to let a lot of other people into it.
The Stranger It depends upon the ''fellow." There are generous fellows who like to share their fortune with their friends.
Samuels {He looks at The Stranger; grows holder) Jutht exthactly what I thay. Why not share with your palth ? Ethpethally when — ath in thith cath — thereth enough for all. {All the time he is eying The Stranger, advancing from point to point.) Would you like a thmall parthel? {He opens his papers, pushes them across the table, towards The Stranger.) You^d do good with the money. I can thee that. For a mere couple of hundred — Here, don't lithen to me. Look at the figurth for yourthelf. They'll thow you. {He seats himself the other side of the table.)
l6 the gospel of good will
The Stranger (With a gentle movement he pushes them hack across the table.) You are — is it not so ? — a Jew ?
Samuels {He starts hack as though struck. With snarling anger) Veil, what if I am? You can't help what you wath born. Ath a matter of fact, I ain't a Jew — not now. And if I wath, what differenth would that make ?
The Stranger Your word would be sufficient. (Samuels stares.)
The Stranger The word of a Jew.
(A silence.)
Samuels
What makth you thay that?
The Stranger
So many of the noblest men I have known, men I
have loved, {a faraway thought is in his eyes) have been
Jews. It is a great race — a race rich in honourable
names.
Samuels
{He is hard at work thinking) Yet to hear the way
they talk and thneer, you'd think there wath thome-
thing dithgrathful in even having been bom a Jew.
christ's expectation of men 1 7
The Stranger The Jew shall teach them their mistake.
Samuels {He glances up — fidgets in his chair.) Of courthe, I don't thay that thome among uth mayn't be a bit tricky.
The Stranger There are to be found everywhere those who are not ashamed to bring dishonour on their people.
Samuels {He rises) Jutht exthactly what I thay. Thereth good and bad everywhere. We're no worthe than anybody elthe. We can hold our own — I don't thay ath we can't. If it'th a game of who'th going to betht whom — very well, we're in it. If a thentleman cometh to uth, treath uth ath a thentleman —
The Stranger He will find that the Jew can also be a gentleman. {A moment — he touches lightly the papers.) You were going to be so kind —
Samuels {He stares at The Stranger, then at his wonderful papers, then again at The Stranger.) Yeth, I did — What do you think about it — yourthelf ?
l8 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
That your offer is most generous — that I accept it,
with all thanks.
Samuels
(He is still staring at The Stranger.) Don't you
think — you'll forgive my thaying it, but you don't
thrike me exthactly ath a bu thine th man — don't you
think it would be better to leave it over for a day or
two ? — conthult a friend ?
The Stranger What friend better than yourself ?
Samuels
(Slowly he draws hack the papers) Got mythelf to think of. Wath forgetting that. You thee, if you wath to take my word and anything by any chanthe wath to go wrong, I thould feel — {Laughs, then gravely) well, I thould feel ath though I'd been thelling the whole Jewith rathe for a couple of hundred pound th or tho. 'Tain't worth it. {He moves toward the door — turns.) Thorry. Thomething elthe, perhapth — thome other time.
In these conversations we see souls in the very process of salvation : putting off the vulgarity and vanity and trickery they had mistaken for themselves, and putting
Christ's expectation of men 19
on their better selves, which The Stranger discovers and reveals to them. As Mr. Samuels says to The Stranger in the Epilogue, ''You have always taken it for granted, sir, in all our conversations, that 1 was a fine fellow, in sympathy with fine ideals. But that is not what surprises me : it is to find — that you are right." In the same way Wright, the old gambler, finds his real self in ordering portraits of both himself and his landlady, at much more than the artist's price, of the artist lover of the young woman whom he him- self gives up : thus helping the lovers to get married. That, not the smutty, flashy gambler, proves to be the real man.
So Larkcom with his new motto, "Fun without Vul- garity," taking pleasure in giving pleasure irrespective of what is in the house, proves to be the true Harry Larkcom : instead of little Harry of the money-box.
The method of The Stranger in the play was a favorite method of Jesus. In the unstable Peter he discovers and proclaims the rock on which to build his church. In Zacchaeus, the hated publican, he discovers and reveals the scrupulously just son of Abraham. In the surprised woman of Samaria he discovers and re- veals a herald of the Messiah, a disciple of the religion of the Spirit.
20 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
This is the method to-day of those who are dealing at close quarters with sin and sinners.
In his "Beside the Bowery" Dr. John Hopkins Deni- son gives a striking instance of it in Mrs. Eliza Rock- well, ''The Lady of Good Cheer," as he calls her. She had come to call on the long-suffering, much-abused daughters of a brutal, drunken father; who not only abused them himself but in his crazed drunken condi- tion had threatened to bring home a crowd of his drunken companions to carouse all night, leaving the girls at the mercy of a roomful of intoxicated men.
The Lady of Good Cheer had brought some food for the girls, including a birthday cake in honour of the birthday of one of the girls.
''They were in the midst of a jolly Little birthday party, when they heard a heavy stumbling step on the stair. "He's coming!" cried the girls. For the Lady of Good Cheer the situation was a dangerous one. No one had come to her aid. To face alone a man who was so mad with drink that he had tried to kill his own children is hardly a pleasant task, and this man was a desperate character, who in his present mood would not hesitate a moment to strike a woman or knock her down. Yet retreat never entered her mind. If her heart beat more rapidly as she waited to see what sort
Christ's expectation of men 21
of a creature it was with which she had to deal, no one could have detected it.
In a moment the door was thrown violently open, and a huge man entered with the lurching, swinging stride of a sailor. He had been fighting, his coat was torn, a heavy blow on the cheek bone had caused a swelling that made his eyes seem narrower and more pighke than ever, and his drooping, sandy moustache had a stain of blood upon it. He was from the North of Ireland, and his origin was evident in his speech, thickened though it was by drink.
''Gi' me s' money, Jessie," he shouted, ^'gotter have s' money!"
"I haven't got none," said Jessie sullenly.
''Yes, ye have, too! don't give me no back talk! I know yer tricks!" and he advanced upon her with doubled fist.
The Lady of Good Cheer rose and stepped forward with a swift movement that brought her between the enraged man and his daughter.
''Good evening, Mr. Sanderson," she said.
He had been so absorbed in his quest for the money that he had paid no attention to her. Now he turned upon her with surprise and wrath. The veins on his forehead thickened. With that sullen scowl on his
22 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
face he was as ugly a beast as ever assumed a human shape, and many a strong man would have thought twice before pursuing the conversation.
''What're ye doin' here?" he shouted. ''Teachin' my girls to disobey their father. I'll teach you to butt in."
He gave a quick lurch toward her. His movements had the uncertain and violent suddenness of a man mad- dened by alcohol. In another moment he would have struck her down, as he had just knocked down two men who barred his way in the saloon. She faced him, tall and slender, with head erect. Her aquiline nostrils quivered a little, and her firm lips tightened slightly, but from beneath her high brow her deep, steady eyes, unflinching and calm, looked him full in the face.
''Mr. Sanderson," she said quietly, ''I know you are a gentleman, and that you would never do anything dis- courteous to a lady."
With those eyes upon him, the drunken brute faltered. His hands sunk to his side. A foolish smile, half of embarrassment, half of conceit, came over his face. ''A gentleman? Yes, sure I'm a gentleman!" he said. He gave his shoulders a sudden hunch, as if his coat were too tight for them, and expanded his chest in imitation of the person of quality he was supposed to resemble.
Christ's expectation of men 23
Then he let out a cracked and maudlin laugh, that sounded like the crow of a hoarse rooster.
The girls looked on, amazed that he had not struck down their visitor. He could hardly account for it himself. When he rushed at any one with his huge fist poised, he was accustomed to see either fear or rage in his victim's eyes, and then it was easy to strike. But in these eyes there was no trace of fear nor rage, nor yet that more maddening expression of disgust and contempt. They were challenging him on a point of honour, as if they refused to accept him at his face value. They seemed to question and probe, but not to laugh at him. There was almost a reverence in them. He felt that she had found in him something that deserved respect, and it pleased him. He paid little attention to her words, but the sympathy in her voice arrested him. She was not fault-finding, as other women were. Vague images out of the past rose before his bleared eyes: the image of a white-haired woman by the fireside, whose hands were stretched out to bless him, the vision of a fair-faced bride who long ago had trusted him and believed him true. The Lady of Good Cheer talked on of his home, and of little Nellie, and of her disappoint- ment that her birthday had been forgotten.
^'Poor little Nellie!" said Sanderson, maudlin tears
24 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
coming into his eyes. ''Shure, 'tis a shame ! It's a bad day she's had for sure ! Never mind, dearie, your dad'll give you a fine present some day! But I'm too poor now. I'm out o' work. What can a man do ? Dear ! Dear ! it's terrible !" and he gave a long sigh.
**You see we have a birthday cake, anyway," said the Lady of Good Cheer. "Isn't that nice? Sit down and join the party."
''No," said Sanderson, "I must go." A sudden fierceness came into his face, and he turned to Jessie. "Now give me that money! I've got to have it! I won't stand no foolin' !"
He lifted his huge fist again. For the moment he was out of the range of the glance by which the Lady of Good Cheer had held him.
"Mr. Sanderson!" she called.
Her voice, though quiet, was so firm and authorita- tive that Sanderson turned, expecting a tirade and pre- paring to face it with a burst of rage. But instead of a scolding he met a glance of grateful confidence that seemed to thank him for his quick understanding and prompt response. She seemed so sure that no further word could be necessary, that he gave a gasp of aston- ishment. Before he could speak she was inquiring in a tone of great sympathy how he had come to lose his
25
position as pressman, and to meet with such hard luck. There is nothing a drunken man loves more than to dilate on his misfortunes, and Sanderson, wilKng to be beguiled, sank down on the sofa.
He sprawled with his huge length over the sofa, and she began to speak seriously and sympathetically of the Hfe he had been living. She told him plainly what she thought of his behaviour, and he sat quietly and listened, although he would have knocked a man down for saying half as much. For he felt that, though she rebuked him, it was because she had found something in him she respected and trusted, and he recognized that she had a right to speak as she did. It was the same right which he had acknowledged in those who years ago had beKeved in him — the claim which faith and love always have over a man's Hfe. The battle was won long before help came, and the girls were safe that night from terrors worse than death. On her way uptown the Lady of Good Cheer ended her account of the evening by saying: ''I don't care what you say! I Hke Mr. Sanderson. There's something that's really worth while at the bottom of that man."
Rev. Frank H. Decker of Church House, Providence, is past master of the same method of the Master. He
26 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
had sent a new applicant for hospitality out with a trusty resident of Church House to bring a bundle of clothing which a friend had offered to give to the House. On the way back with the clothing the new man said to his trusty companion, ''Let's pawn these clothes, and clear out.'* The trusty reported the remark to Mr. Decker, and Mr. Decker sent for him and said: "I hear that you proposed to pawn the clothing you were sent to bring, and clear out." "No," said the man, ''I didn't say, 'Let's pawn them.' I said 'Some fellows if they had these clothes would pawn them.' " To which Mr. Decker, intent on finding the best rather than the worst in the man, replied, "There is something splendid about that lie of yours. It shows that you care for my good opinion. Now I will show you how to get it." How many of us would have had enough of the Christ Spirit to see the good concealed behind the lie ; instead of merely the evil on the surface of the pro- posal to steal?
Another applicant for Church House hospitaUty was sent to carry home some chairs that had been reseated at the House. At the end of the first block he put down the chairs on the sidewalk and said to the trusty com- panion, "I ain't going to lug these chairs. Why should I?" and went off. Later at meal- time he reappeared.
27
Mr. Decker in calling his attention to the affair, instead of blaming the man apologized to him for his own con- duct, saying, "I began too far along with you. I as- sumed that you could appreciate kindness. I see you can't. Perhaps people never have been kind to you. Now make yourself at home here in Church House, and let us show you what kindness is."
That man became one of the most devoted members of the House; willing to do the roughest, most disagree- able work, of which there is a great deal, to help the House and its head.
With these scenes from the play, and these modern instances of the application of this Christ method of appealing to the good man within the bad man, we may now see how the principle applies to preaching.
Preaching is the art of keeping constant and urgent before men Christ's expectation that in every relation of life they are to do and be what absolute Good Will requires. As examples of this Christian expectation I have taken for this first lecture benevolence, tem- perance, and preparedness for peace and war.
First; benevolence. The man who looks out for himself and his family and friends exclusively, so far as real seriousness goes, giving to causes and appeals such loose change or small checks as will silence impor-
28 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
tunity and maintain respectability, can hardly be called in this matter a Christian. He is doing what it is per- fectly easy and natural to do. There is nothing large and generous about him ; nothing supernatural ; nothing specially Christlike. Even if now and then in response to stirring appeals, or devices that subject his contribu- tions to the limelight of publicity, he gives large sums ; large even in proportion to his income; he does not thereby become much enlarged ; he does not rise to the stature or fulfil the expectation of Christ.
Christ and the Christian preacher expect every disciple to devote all he has to the service of Good Will. He expects him to put every dollar where, all things considered, in view of his talents, responsibilities, con- nections, and place and function in the social system, it will do the most good. He expects him to give all to God and his fellows; reserving for himself only what God and right-minded men see that he needs for maxi- mum efficiency in his specific station. Christ expects his disciple to care for every person in need ; every cause that is effectively promoting human welfare. To those which come closest to his connections and interests he expects him to give up to the point where giving more would do more harm to himself and his family than it would do good to the person or cause to which it was given.
CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 29
Christ, however, is reasonable : and the Christian preacher ordinarily will not expect his people to deprive themselves of the means of efficiency in their station and work, to give to others. That would be the folly of selling our oil instead of lighting our lamps. We owe ourselves and our famiHes a care for the conditions of health, happiness, and efficiency which we owe no one else; and we ought to be as generous with ourselves and our famiHes as we would wish and expect another to be in our place. That reasonable provision the rea- sonable Christ not only allows but expects his disciples in all ordinary circumstances to make. To do so is not selfishness: it is perfectly consistent with entire Good Will ; for it is what we would wish and advise another servant of Good Will to do were he in our place.
Yet even with this explanation and limitation Christ's expectation is stupendous. Even if Good Will gives back to us all that we need ; it is a hard thing to give it all in the first place. To give to the church, and charity and reform, and education and missions ; to individuals and families in distress ; to cities in devasta- tion, and countries under oppression, seems impossible to the natural man. He says '^I can't look out for all their interests. I can't hold all human and social needs as objects of my will ; I am not big enough, nor wise
3© THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
enough, nor generous enough. Christ says, "You can; you are big enough : I will stretch your will, expand your heart, so that every good claim will appeal to you as something to which you will go out in generous re- sponse : giving gladly when you can do so without sacri- ficing a more intimate and urgent claim : withholding regretfully when giving in this direction would cause more disastrous sacrifice elsewhere."
Christ expects that universal and at the same time reasonable benevolence of every disciple. That is his measure of the capacity of every human heart : he will not own as his disciple any man who is less benevo- lent. There are two premises in the benevolent appeal as in every syllogism : a major and a minor. The major premise of the Christian man is, "I desire all good : my entire resources are at the service of universal Good Will." The minor premise of a successful appeal must be, "This particular cause represents more good than any other cause to which I could devote this gift." The Christian man, the man who comes up to Christ's expectation, has assented to the major premise once for all. You don't have to argue that with him in each new case. The minor premise is always an open ques- tion on which in each case he must be specifically con- vinced. The man who is not a Christian, the man whom
31
Christ has not expanded and transformed, lacks the first premise ; so that even if you convince him of the second, you are not by any means sure that his gift will follow. It is a question of chance, emotion, publicity, vanity, whether he will say 'Yes' or 'No.' With the Christian you have merely to establish the minor premise; and the gift is sure to follow if the man is a real follower of Christ. All you have to do is to show him where the most good lies : to the most good in general he is already committed by his acceptance of Good Will as his prin- ciple of action in response to Christ's high expectation.
In the name of Christ then the preacher says to his congregation from the pulpit, and to individuals in personal appeals: ''You are big and generous enough to devote all you have to the greatest good to which it can be put. I count on you for that : you wouldn't be Christians if you were any smaller or less generous. I present this specific cause : I can't judge for you how it compares with other claims; how much you ought to give. I trust you to do that justly; and whether you give much or little, anything or nothing, I shall feel sure that Christ is well pleased with you, and you are well pleased with what you have done.
The preacher who comes to his congregation with this great Christhke expectation will get more money
32 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
than one who flatters, and wheedles, and brings pressure of unwelcome publicity, or resorts to secular devices: and he will be developing benevolence as one specific feature of the Gospel of Good Will.
Temperance may be preached on either of three planes. By temperance I mean self-control of all appetites and passions. You may try to scare men into it by showing pictures of the drunkard's stomach ; and giving detailed descriptions of venereal disease. That is the appeal to prudence ; to caution ; I had almost said, to cowardice. The man who is temperate on such grounds will be a more comfortable man physically than the man who recklessly gratifies his appetites and passions. But spiritually he is not much bigger than the man of in- temperate indulgence. Indeed from some points of view he looks smaller ; and the contempt in which the ascetic is held by the crowd of jolly good fellows with whom he refuses to run to the same excess of riot is not without its measure of justification. From the merely physical point of view appetite and passion in process of gratification is a bigger, stronger thing than appetite and passion repressed. All who have to do with young men know that this anchor alone does not hold. We throw it out with the rest for what it is worth . We doubt- less restrain a few weaklings by it. But this is not the
Christ's expectation of men 33
main reliance of a wise teacher and preacher. It is not the method of Christ.
A second approach is Httle better. We may point to the disgrace which follows unlawful indulgence. We may appeal to a man's desire to be respectable in the eyes of respectable men and women. This is the mod- ern equivalent of what St. Paul called ''the law"; the judgment of society. Yet a man may restrain appetite and passion for these reasons, and still be a very small soul. He too is a coward ; afraid of the speech of people rather than of the penalties of nature.
Jesus never condescended to that plane : and though we cast out this anchor after the other, for real holding power, if we are wise, we rely on something far stronger and higher. We appeal to a bigger and better man than the man who always asks, "What will people say about me and do to me, if I am as indulgent in these matters as I would be if I dared ? ' ' Whether in ourselves or in others we don't much respect that attitude ; and we can't hope to inspire much respect for it in our parishioners.
The Christian call for temperance is an appeal to consider the consequences of drunkenness and licentious- ness to the wives and daughters of the poor. We do not wish the home life of the drunkard's wife and chil-
34 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
dren, for women and children dear to us. But we are large enough to care for the home life of all men, women, and children ; and Christian temperance is such control as through influence and example shall tend to dis- courage the blasting of homes by drink; and make happy and decent homes for all. To that bigger, better self that wills the good of all whom our conduct even remotely affects, the preacher of Christian temperance will appeal.
The same is true of sex. I often ask a College class how many of them would wish for their mothers and sisters the life of the prostitute? The very thought of such a thing is horrible. How many wish it for the sisters and daughters of somebody else? The man who wishes something for his mother, sister, wife, daugh- ter, which he does not, to the extent of his direct and indirect influence, wish for other men's mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters is not a very large and noble sort of man. *'You are not so small and mean as that," the preacher says. ''You are chivalrous enough by prac- tice, precept and example to seek for all women their dignity, their happiness, their life; even though these women are too unfortunate, or too silly, or too perverse to cherish these things for themselves. Expect chivalry of men : expect a Good Will as generous and chivalrous
Christ's expectation of men 35
toward woman as is the Will of Christ; and men like Wright and Harry Larkcom in the play, men strongly tempted to licentiousness, will respond to the call to be in this respect their better selves.
For self-control on that generous, chivalrous Chris- tian ground is something all men in their inmost hearts respect and admire. Prudential self-control, whether of the physical or social type, the libertine with some show of reason may affect to despise. But even he knows and feels that the man who refuses for his own passing pleasure to wreck homes, ruin girls, and doom to misery and shame a whole class of wretched women : — even the libertine knows that this man of chivalrous self-control is a bigger, stronger, braver, better man than himself. Invite even him to be that man of chivalrous self-control, and to his great surprise, perhaps, he will admit in theory that you are right : and if the contact between you and him is intimate enough and constant enough : if you can get and keep Christ and this Chris- tian chivalry in close enough touch with his heart, his changed conviction will bear fruit in a changed life. To keep that positive picture of Christ and Christian chivalry clear before the eyes, warm within the heart, and compelHng behind the will, as what Christ and you expect of the men to whom you speak in public sermon
36 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
and in private interview — that is the fine Christlike art of preaching Christian temperance.
Here in the United States we have more of such tem- perance than is to be found anywhere else in the world : so much that when we tell foreigners the truth about the Christian young people in our schools and colleges, our Endeavor Societies and Christian Associations, they hardly can believe us. They have not yet learned to trust the Christian expectation which takes for granted chivalry in men and chastity in women when once its rational and noble basis is made clear. Still even here in America we have hardly developed more than one or two per cent of the power latent in this Christian appeal for a temperance that is rooted and grounded in the great- ness and nobleness of a Will that seeks the Good of all ; the injury of none.
Good Will, likewise, rather than the letter of any ancient precept, must solve in each specific case the question of peace or war. Christ does not expect of his followers either peace or war, as such. He ex- pects Good Will toward all. When that Good Will comes to be the spirit of all men and nations, peace will follow as surely as daylight follows sunrise. It is the Christian's privilege and duty to have that Good Will toward all, to develop it in others, and to the extent
CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 37
of his influence make it the policy of his nation, and through his nation to commend it in the form of in- ternational agreements, treaties, and courts of arbitra- tion to all the nations of the earth.
Unfortunately, this Good Will is still far from being the rule of all individuals and of nations. As long as some individuals and some nations are animated by self-will, and are capable of lapsing into positive ill will, so long it may become at any time the duty of Chris- tian men and Christian nations, as an expression of their Good Will toward all, to resist by force the aggressions of selfish men and selfish nations. Such resistance is not a violation, but an expression of Good Will. It is not good for the oppressed to be oppressed, nor for the oppressor to oppress them; and the Christian man and the Christian nation is doing a service to both parties when he uses force to resist any injustice to him- self, or to his nation, or to nations with which he is identified by proximity, treaty, or other bonds of obliga- tion. If it is the duty of a Christian nation to use force, it becomes also its duty to have a reasonable amount of force to use. A Christian country cannot live up to its obligations to itself, to other nations with which it is allied, and to humanity, unless it maintains a sufficient military force to enable it to resist aggression and injustice.
38 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Of course the possession of a ready military power is a temptation to its misuse. The fact that a country adopts a policy of preparedness to fight increases ten- fold the obligation to maintain a Christian sentiment which will refuse to fight so long as the ends of honor and justice can be secured by other means. The danger of militarism from preparedness is real. Power of all kinds involves serious risk. It is easier to be generous without great wealth than with it; yet the generous rich man can do much more good than the generous poor man. It is easier for an emasculated man than for a man of vigorous virility to control appetite and passion ; but no one in these days advocates that easy but dis- credited device for self-control. Precisely on the same ground, while Good Will may be easier without than with an army and navy, Good Will that maintains an army and navy, uses them strictly in the service of justice, and refrains from the injustice they give power to do, is a far greater manifestation of Good Will, and therefore a deeper and higher Christianity.
That such Good Will is not an empty dream of the cloister, but a growing reality in the minds and hearts of Christian men the world over, is illustrated by the fol- lowing statement of Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Forster, Professor of Education in Munich. I quote a German
CHRIST S EXPECTATION OF MEN 39
all the more willingly in this connection because so many sentiments of a contrary tenor have come from that country. In an address to the youth of Germany on the present war, Dr. Forster says :
" Hate disorganizes, love disciplines. Fill yourselves with deepest sympathy for all who suffer in war, whose hearts are crushed, whose bodies are broken, whose homes are burned. To indulge unbridled antipathies is not in harmony with that great discipline of soul by which alone we can win the day. England needs Ger- many, and Germany needs England. England has given us invaluable higher points of view for the treat- ment of labor questions and social work. She has taught our revolutionary spirits to moderate our party passions. Let us always remember this, and in that remembrance grasp again for the future the proffered hand. It is for that better England we are fighting when we do all we can to humble and tame thoroughly and for its own good that lower England that is now in power. The national principle has had a disastrous destructive effect on world civihzation. A nation destroys itself, annihilates the whole sum of civihzation, if these national unities do not see that a wider phase must follow — the reestabHsh- ment of true cooperation between the different races. In the union of races will the universal Christ be born in us."
40 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
An Englishman, John Oman, in his ''The War and its Issues" teaches the same lesson. "We can have no part in any gospel of hate, as if at the present time the Germans were mere fiends in human shape. We may have to recognise that they have adopted a cause for which they must suffer, but we should do so in sorrow, as a judge who must condemn, yet who would be no judge did he condemn with a light heart or in the heat of passion. Even more than towards others, we must exercise the judgment of charity towards the enemy, recognising that we are sure to hear of the evil and not the good, and allowing for the possible bias of our own hearts. And while we know it is vain to say " Peace " when there is no peace, or set up any other standard of peace except what will endure, we would not have a war pursued beyond that necessary point, and would have no share in inflicting a ruin which was merely vindictive. We will not imagine that much conquest and little conciliation can destroy Germany and save Britain. We should recognise that a peace to be abid- ing must be established in righteousness and a sense of mutual benefit and Good Will."
The same basis alike of just peace and righteous war is set forth by Felix Adler in his "The World Crisis and its Meaning." "We have dwelt too long upon the
Christ's expectation of men 41
cosmopolitan ideal of the likeness subsisting underneath the differences that distinguish men from one another. We must insist as we never yet have done on respect for the differences themselves, on the right of men and nations to be unHke ourselves, on our obligation not only to tolerate but to welcome the differences, recog- nizing their fruitful interdependence and seeking to achieve their eventual harmony. This is the new con- ception of human brotherhood without which war and the preparations for war will not cease. There must be created throughout the world, not the belief in an indi- vidualistic cosmopoHtan brotherhood such as the peace movement has hitherto advocated, but a deep sense of the worth of the different types of civilization, and the need of each to be complemented by the rest.
"Thus national humility, compatible with proper confidence in a national destiny, is the keynote of inter- national ethics. Not the pride of any people, in its poor conceit esteeming itself the torch-bearer or the model for all the rest ; but the humihty of each people, the consciousness of defect, is the fundamental condi- tion of human peace and progress. In the last analysis there must be a bond of high and pure self-interest to tie the nations together. That highest and purest self-interest is interest in the development of each
42 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
nation's own national personality, as conditioned by and accomplished through its beneficent influence in multiplying the variety and beauty of the psychic types among mankind. By patient effort, by a more pene- trating ethical teaching, and by the wit and wisdom to create institutions and instrumentalities suitable to foster the better traits, we may work for, if we shall not live to see, the time when the angelic song shall be ful- filled, of peace among men because they shall have learned to take towards one another the essential inward attitude of Good Will."
Christ's expectation is neither war on any provoca- tion, nor peace at any price ; but Good Will, expressed through peace where peace is justly possible ; expressed through war where war is inevitable. Rightly and broadly understood Christ does not forbid participation in war, or preparedness for war. To quote again John Oman on this point: "So long as religion means a greater sense of social responsibility, no man can be governed by a mere negative ruling from any quarter."
The preacher's duty about preparedness for and participation in war is not to tell his people precisely how many officers and men, battleships and sub- marines, we shall have; nor even when war shall and shall not be declared. It is to make sure that the spirit
CHRIST S EXPECTATION OF MEN 43
in which we prepare for and declare both war and peace shall be one of Good Will toward all the nations con- cerned.
Good Will requires such measure of preparedness as will defend us against aggression, fulfil our obliga- tions to our neighbors, maintain our rights in treaties, and contribute to the justice and peace of the world an influence commensurate with our numbers, our wealth, and our intelligence. Less is folly; more is crime. That the preacher of the Gospel of Good Will should proclaim; leaving to statesmen the determina- tion of precisely what is that measure of preparedness. The Christian attitude toward war is happily expressed in the epitaph proposed for Rupert Brooke and Roland Poulter : " They went to war in the cause of peace and died without hate that love might live."
Perhaps some one will ask "What rewards are given, here or hereafter, for responding to so high an expecta- tion, and living so great a life?" It is its own reward : and to look for extraneous recompense is to miss it altogether. Unless Christ, and the Christlike Spirit in our fellow-men, appeal to us as the life we supremely admire and desire, we can have no part or lot in it. Christ and his Good Will refuse to take second place as means to happiness here or heaven hereafter. Who-
44 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ever attempts to put rewards first and Christ and his expectation second, whether for himself in practice, or for others in preaching, belittles and beUes the whole Gospel of Good Will; and so, missing the Christian life, as a matter of course misses the ^'rewards" he is so eager to secure. He that loveth rewards more than Christ is not worthy of him ; and being unworthy of him is incapable of appropriating the blessings he confers.
Still, while it is impossible to get rewards by seeking to discount them as something separate from Christ and his Spirit of Good Will, certain benefits and bless- ings come with this life as by-products, which the preacher has a right to couple with his presentation of the Gospel of Good Will.
Breadth of heart, as John Galsworthy calls it, is the first and greatest. He who rises to Christ's expecta- tion becomes thereby one in sympathy and affection with all whom his Hfe touches, and all whom his sym- pathy and prayer can reach. He grows great with something of the greatness of the Father whose Good Will to all men and all nations he shares and serves.
He becomes one with Christ in an intimate and blessed fellowship of aim and endeavor, service and sacrifice; so that he is never alone or companionless : but in what- ever he undertakes feels the supporting presence, the
45
steadying purpose of the Great Master who comes across the seas and the centuries to take up his abode in the heart of every faithful follower.
He enters into a profound and tender communion with a company of men and women, larger or smaller according to the scope and range of his life, who share his purpose, and whose purpose he shares ; so that each looks upon the other as an incarnation of Christ's Spirit of Good Will; and each is loved and cherished by the others on this high and holy plane.
This communion and fellowship of the Spirit of mutual Good Will toward each other and toward all is so much deeper, sweeter, stronger, richer than ties of propinquity, passion, profit or pleasure, that those who have once found it recognize it as the pearl of great price for the sake of which all other goods like wealth, honor, leisure, amusement, so far as they may conflict with it, are eagerly given in exchange.
II
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL: THE MEANNESS
OF SIN
"The devil takes sweet shapes when he tells lies." John Masefield, The Widow in the Bye Street, p. 218.
Our text is taken from our most effective modern preacher of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, its meanness and cruelty and wantonness. If he dwells chiefly on sexual sin it is because there the apparent good offered is most alluring and intense; while the resulting evil is most cruel and heartbreaking.
This contemporary English poet, both in the rough experiences of his life, and the coarse frankness of his language, has shown himself to be like Jesus in at least one particular — his genuine friendship for publicans and sinners. Above most modem writers he has the art to turn sin inside out; and in place of the brave, gay pleasures for which it is sought, show the unspeak- able misery and woe it inevitably brings to those who have to pay its bitter penalty. As Dickens showed
46
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 47
Steerforth the seducer in the light of the grief of the Peggotty household, John Masefield shows sexual sin against the background of the betrayed woman's shame ; or the misled boy's broken-hearted mother.
For a straight lesson to the libertine there is nothing better than Masefield's lines in "The Everlasting
Mercy."
O young men, pray to be kept whole
From bringing down a weaker soul.
Your minute's joy so meet in doin'
May be the woman's door to ruin ;
The door to wandering up and down,
A painted whore at half a crown.
The bright mind fouled, the beauty gay
All eaten out and fallen away.
By drunken days and weary tramps
From pub to pub by city lamps
Till men despise the game they started,
Till health and beauty are departed.
And in a slum the reeking hag
Mumbles a crust with toothy jag,
Or gets a river's help to end
The life too wrecked for man to mend.
A more elaborate and artistic treatment of the evil woman is found in "The Widow in the Bye Street." There the cruelty of leading an irmocent boy astray is revealed in terms of the humble but happy home the wanton woman destroyed for the widowed mother.
48 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
The story is about the fall of the boy through the wiles of the evil woman : but the title is ''The Widow in the Bye Street" ; and the reader is made to see each move, not as the mere outward acts of the principal actors; but as it cuts into the flesh and eats into the heart of the poor widow-mother. That is where you must look to discover the real sinfulness of sin. Without this background of mother love and domestic joy, the folly of the boy, the sin of the woman, could not be seen as the cruel and utterly despicable things they are.
The story opens with a picture of this poor widow in her home struggling to buy bread for the son who was all her life's delight.
Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town, There lived a widow with her only son : She had no wealth nor title to renown, Nor any joyous hours, never one. She rose from ragged mattress before sun And stitched all day until her eyes were red, And had to stitch because her man was dead.
Sometimes she fell asleep, she stitched so hard,
Letting the linen fall upon the floor ;
And hungry cats would steal in from the yard.
And mangy chickens pecked about the door,
Craning their necks so ragged and so sore
To search the room for bread crumbs, or for mouse,
But they got nothing in the widow's house.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 49
Mostly she made her bread by hemming shrouds For one rich undertaker in the High Street, Who used to pray that folks might die in crowds And that their friends might pay to let them lie sweet ; And when one died the widow in the Bye Street Stitched night and day to give the worm his dole. The dead were better dressed than that poor soul.
Her little son was all her life's delight, For in his little features she could find A gHmpse of that dead husband out of sight, Where out of sight is never out of mind. And so she stitched till she was nearly blind, Or till the tallow candle end was done, To get a living for her little son.
Her love for him being such she would not rest, It was a want which ate her out and in, Another hunger in her withered breast Pressing her woman's bones against the skin. To make him plump she starved her body thin. And he, he ate the food, and never knew. He laughed and played as little children do.
When there was little sickness in the place
She took what God would send, and what God sent
Never brought any color to her face
Nor life into her footsteps when she went.
Going, she trembled always withered and bent,
For all went to her son, always the same,
He was first served whatever blessing came.
50 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Sometimes she wandered out to gather sticks, For it was bitter cold there when it snowed. And she stole hay out of the farmer's ricks For bands to wrap her feet in while she sewed, And when her feet were warm and the grate glowed She hugged her little son, her heart's desire. With "Jimmy, ain't it snug beside the fire?"
So years went on till Jimmy was a lad
And went to work as poor lads have to do,
And then the widow's loving heart was glad
To know that all the pains she had gone through,
And all the years of putting on the screw,
Down to the sharpest turn a mortal can,
Had borne their fruit, and made her child a man.
He got a job at working on the line. Tipping the earth down, trolley after truck, From daylight till the evening, wet or fine, With arms all red from wallowing in the muck, And spitting, as the trolley tipped, for luck. And singing "Binger" as he swung the pick, Because the red blood ran in him so quick.
So there was bacon then at night, for supper In Bye Street there, where he and mother stay ; And boots they had, not leaky in the upper. And room rent ready on the settling day ; And beer for poor old mother, worn and grey. And fire in frost ; and in the widow's eyes It seemed the Lord had made earth paradise.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 5 1
And there they sat of evenings after dark Singing their songs of "Binger," he and she, Her poor old cackle made the mongrels bark And ''You sing Binger, mother," carols he; "By crimes, but that's a good song, that her be :" And then they slept there in the room they shared, And all the time fate had his end prepared.
That is the background. For the story thrown on that background I must refer you to the book itself. A loose woman,
A copper coin for any man to spend
meets the boy at a country fair, leads him astray through posing as virtuous and unhappy, and appealing to his pity and his passion. He spends his money on trinkets for her :
Joy of her beauty ran in him so hot. Old trembhng mother by him was forgot.
He loses his job ; is used as a tool to bring another lover back to his mistress : finally kills the other lover and is sentenced to be hung. All the sad tale is so told that the poor pleasures of the strumpet and the boy are seen and felt in terms of the heartache and anguish of the mother, "crying herself blind" ; sorry for her own want and misery, but more sorry for the poor boy's shame
52 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
and delusion. She tells him what true love is ; and tries to show him that this is counterfeit.
"I know a woman's portion when she loves, It's hers to give, my darling, not to take ; It isn't lockets, dear, nor pairs of gloves. It isn't marriage bells nor wedding cake. It's up and cook, although the belly ache ; And bear the child, and up and work again. And count a sick man's grumble worth the pain. Will she do this, and fifty times as much?"
J. "No. I don't ask her."
M. "No. I warrant, no. She's one to get a young fool in her clutch. And you're a fool to let her trap you so. She love you ? She ? O Jimmy, let her go ; I was so happy, dear, before she came. And now I'm going to the grave in shame. I bore you, Jimmy, in this very room. For fifteen years I got you all you had, You were my little son, made in my womb, Left all to me, for God had took your dad, You were a good son, doing all I bade. Until this strumpet came from God knows where, And now you lie, and I am in despair."
Before his death the boy wakes up with disgust
At finding a beloved woman light, And all her precious beauty dirty dust, A tinsel-varnished gilded over lust.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 53
When the mother comes and takes a room to be near him in prison he asks her,
"Where did you get the money for the room? And how are you living, mother ; how'll you live?" "It's what I'd saved to put me in the tomb, I'll want no tomb but what the parish give." "Mother, I Ked to you that time, O forgive, I brought home half my wages, half I spent, And you went short that week to pay the rent.
"I went to see'r, I spent my money on her, And you who bore me paid the cost in pain. You went without to buy the clothes upon her : A hat, a locket, and a silver chain. 0 mother dear, if all might be again. Only from last October, you and me ;
0 mother dear, how different it would be.
"We were so happy in the room together, Singing at 'Binger-Bopper,' weren't us, just? And going a-hopping in the summer weather. And all the hedges covered white with dust. And blackberries, and that, and traveller's trust.
1 thought her wronged, and true, and sweet, and wise, The devil takes sweet shapes when he tells lies.
"Mother, my dear, will you forgive your son?" " God knows I do, Jim, I forgive you, dear ; You didn't know, and couldn't, what you done.
54 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
God pity all poor people suffering here, And may his mercy shine upon us clear, And may we have His Holy Word for mark, To lead us to His Kingdom through the dark."
Then at the end — the end save for the poor mother's going crazy after his execution — comes the mother's great soliloquy and prayer: one of the profoundest spiritual passages in contemporary literature.
''Red helpless little things will come to birth,
And hear the whistles going down the line,
And grow up strong and go about the earth.
And have much happier times than yours and mine ;
And some day one of them will get a sign.
And talk to folk, and put an end to sin,
And then God's blessed kingdom will begin.
" God dropped a spark down into everyone.
And if we find and fan it to a blaze
It'll spring up and glow, like — like the sun.
And light the wandering out of stony ways.
God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays,
And light of prayer is spreading heart to heart;
It'll light all where now it lights a part.
" And God who gave His mercies takes His mercies, And God who gives beginning gives the end. I dread my death ; but it's the end of curses, A rest for broken things too broke to mend.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 55
0 Captain Christ, our blessed Lord and Friend, We are two wandered sinners in the mire, Burn our dead hearts with love out of Thy fire.
" And when thy death comes, Master, let us bear it
As of Thy will, however hard to go ;
Thy cross is infinite for us to share it,
Thy help is infinite for us to know ;
And when the long tnmipets of the Judgment blow
May our poor souls be glad and meet agen.
And rest in Thee. Say 'Amen,' Jim." ''Amen."
From this widowed mother's prayer one rises with a solemn sense of the cruel cost of sin ; and pity for the poor innocent sufferer whose love compels her to pay for short-lived selfish pleasure in lifelong loving pain; bearing, as she says, her share of Christ's infinite cross.
Not every preacher can be a literary artist; but we all can use the artist's work to show that pain of inno- cent and guilty alike is ever the ugly other side of the smooth and glossy surface of sin. To do that is to make men hate it, and lead them to repent.
With the passing of the arbitrary God, laying down rules and regulations for his own delectation; doing each particular act as a special favor or disfavor to the individual immediately concerned, sin in the old sense, as a highly imprudent defiance of such a God, is pass-
56 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ing too. Indeed, if that be sin, the sinner on such terms appeals to us as rather admirable and heroic. There is enough of the old Adam in most red-blooded males between the ages of fifteen and forty to shake the fist of defiance in the face of such a God, and leave his rules and regulations to be observed by such "plas- ter saints" as regard ''safety first" as the supreme spiritual grace. The Gospel of Good Will, however, gives us an altogether different view of sin ; showing it not as a dash of bravado which evokes our admiration ; but as a taint of meanness which we pity and condemn. Bacteria and the animals seek their meat from God wherever they can find it: and if the body of an ani- mal, or the body of a man, offers the most attractive and available food, they take it without scruple or hesitation; without malice and without remorse. They seek their own good; and fail to seek the good of their victims. Yet their action, evil as it is from the point of view of their victim, is not sin. In its ethical aspect sin is the choice of a lesser in preference to a greater good; and the penalty is the loss of that greater specific good which the preferred lesser good displaces. In its religious aspect sin is the choice of some Httle specific good in preference to the greatest good of all — fellowship in Good Will with the Father,
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 57
with Christ, and with Christian men and women : and the religious penalty for sin is the loss of that fellow- ship. To fail at one point in religion is to fail altogether. Good Will is one and all-inclusive : and deliberately to fall short of it at one point is to fall short of it altogether. We cannot take part of it and leave part of it, as a superficial ethics permits us to do. Like an egg, re- ligious character and relationship is either wholly good or wholly bad. It cannot be part good and part bad. A single cherished sin shuts one completely out of real fellowship with God, and Christ, and Christian men. A person, and a relation to a person, can't be split. We are either wholly for or wholly against Good Will. That is why religion is infinitely more searching and exacting than ethics. Customs, laws, public opinion can be divided, and the man who lives by these may be part good and part bad : generous and a drunkard, genial and a libertine, truthful and a brute. Good Will claims everything or nothing. The various ethical losses and the one unescapable religious loss will become clearer as we consider specific sins.
Men fall into intemperance partly through physical craving for exhilaration ; partly through mental uneasi- ness and a desire to throw off care and anxiety ; mainly through an impulse of good fellowship and conxaviality
58 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
— a desire to share physical exhilaration and mental relaxation in congenial company. All these things are so far good : they are the premiums intemperance carries with it. If these things stood alone, and no losses were charged on the opposite page of the ledger, intemperance would be not sin but an unmixed good; and every man who didn't drink and gorge would be a sinner and a fool.
Over against these little goods gained, however, stand greater goods lost : — self-control, employment, reputation, health, livelihood for himself and' his family. These greater goods displaced measure the folly, the iniquity, the meanness of the sin of intemperance. The preacher's problem is to appreciate these little goods for which the glutton gorges, the drunkard drinks, and the drug victim takes his ''one more shot"; through such generous and fair appreciation to come into sympathetic relations with the intemperate man; and then to make him feel how insignificant they all are in comparison to the steady nerves, the strong will, the regular business, the happy family, the comfortable home he is allowing them to displace. If the intem- perate man can be made to see that, he will see that intemperance is not the brave, smart, genial, generous thing it seems under the bright lights of the club or bar-
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 59
room; but the cowardly, stupid, weak, mean thing that it is. When he sees that and is thoroughly ashamed of himself, he is in a mood to believe you when you tell him that no man who does such a mean and cruel thing can have part or lot in God's Good Will which is work- ing in the world to make it kind, happy and whole- some : no comradeship with Christ who came to make that Good Will plain and winsome : no fellowship with the great and goodly company of men and women who have Good Will as the spirit of their lives. Not until, on the basis of a hearty appreciation of the Httle good for the sake of which he drinks or overeats, or takes drugs, we have made him feel the misery and meanness of the losses he inflicts on himself and others : — not until then have we preached the whole of the sane and searching Gospel of Jesus Christ to that in- temperate man.
Licentiousness has its roots in passions implanted in man for good. Nature does not allow any generation to be more than one remove from their normal inten- sity. Keen pleasures, physical, aesthetic and social, are attached as premiums to the fulfilment of their functions. What wonder that youth seizes eagerly and recklessly on these offered goods. Unless one enters sympathetically into the force and worth of all the good
6o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
there is in sensuous pleasure, he will not be in a posi- tion to preach to young men the fearful losses that are charged up against the Ubertine. For the penalties are tremendous. By long, slow, sacrificial struggle, by fearful social ostracism inflicted on women who are either the authors or the victims of sexual sin, the race has built up the pure home; its most beneficent and beautiful institution. To the extent of his ability the libertine tears that laboriously reared structure down, and deprives some unfortunate woman, or a whole class of such women, of their birthright of love, loyalty, respect and protection in a pure and happy home. Whoever for a Httle passing pleasure can ruin human happiness ; break the hearts of grieving parents ; doom to desolation and probable disease innocent and guilty alike, is mean and contemptible. He is un- doing civilization's most costly and beneficent work. Reared himself in a pure home ; desiring it for his own sisters and daughters; he is seeking to make a mean exception in his own favor to the way he desires other men to treat them. Such conduct, however strongly urged to it by forces which Nature has found essential to the perpetuation of the race, marks a man as altogether contrary to God's Good Will; incompatible with the character of Christ; antithetic to that Spirit
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 6 1
of Good Will which binds all pure, brave men and women together in Christian fellowship.
The preacher has not preached the Gospel to good purpose unless his community as a whole, and every individual in it, has been brought to look on licentious- ness, not indeed without intelligent sympathy for the mighty forces that drive and drag men and women into it, but with such a sense of the essential meanness of any man or woman who condescends to buy per- sonal pleasure at such a fearful price in social deteriora- tion and human degradation, as shall make them treat it, whether in others or in themselves or in their chil- dren, as a loathsome, cruel, dastardly disgrace.
Gambling is another of the Devil's sweet-shaped lies. It comes disguised as a form of Good Will. We love excitement, uncertainty, risk : and a few dimes or dol- lars add these elements to what would otherwise be a dull and tame affair. When both parties can afford to lose, a little bet adds zest to the contest or game. To refuse seems churlish and timid ; to make the wager seems generous and brave.
Yet there is a fallacy in this phrase ''can afford to lose." Either the loss makes a difference or it doesn't. If it does, it involves an unsocial attitude. If it doesn't, then it is useless ; and might as well be omitted.
62 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
The tendency and example of gambling even on a small scale, for social good-fellowship, lends encourage- ment to gambling on a more serious scale; involving grievous hardship to the loser, and loss of reliance for gains on productive industry to both winner and loser. The man of Good Will, if he thinks his way through to the consequences and influences that flow from gambling, will refuse to have anything to do with it. If much is evil, as all admit, the tendency and influence of even a little cannot be good.
Speculation in its unadulterated form is gambling, and begets the gambler's anti-social attitude. The direction of capital into sound and useful channels of production is honest and honorable, an expression of the capitalist's Good Will. But that involves expert knowledge, which in turn involves keen mental labor. The shrewd investor is, whether intentionally or not, a pubHc benefactor. He puts capital at the disposal of enterprises that effectively serve real needs; and with- holds capital from those that are doomed to fail. So long as the present economic order lasts the capitalist has as important a function as the laborer.
When, however, one merely ''takes a flier"; bets on the strength of rumor, tip, or guesswork that some- thing of whose management, resources, prospects, and
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 63
processes he knows next to nothing will go up or down ; he is contributing nothing. If in the long run he gains (which is very unUkely), he is getting something out of society he doesn't deserve and hasn't earned. If in the long run he loses (as in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will), he gets precisely what he deserves. Worse, however, than the money lost is the loss of reliance on regular industry; the impatience with slow, sure earnings; the precarious financial status of his family ; the irresponsible, unsocial, and ultimately anti- social attitude toward the world, which the habit of speculation entails. We cannot rely for strenuous social service, and costly sacrifice of time and money, on any man who is intent on getting rich quick by the rise and fall of securities to the management and study of which he brings no intimate knowledge. Just in proportion as the speculative habit grows, will in- dustry, domestic security, and social service dwindle and decline.
Laziness is native to us all. Leisure, loafing, is delight- ful ; and the love of it nature has put into us abundantly as a means of self-preservation. The good-natured, care-free loafer appeals to us. As compared to the fuming, fretting busybody, who is forever on the rack of exertion, there is a good deal to be said for him ; as
64 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Stevenson has shown in his '^ Apology for Idlers." Yet on the other side of the account we find poverty; if the man have no inherited or otherwise gratuitous wealth; and even if he has, we find the shirking of services which his fellows and society need. With so much that needs to be done in the home, the school, the state, charity, reform, science, art, literature, the man or woman who retires at night with nothing use- ful accomplished is a pauper and a parasite : unworthy to be called a servant and son of Good Will ; unworthy of the name of Christian ; unworthy of the fellowship of earnest and arduous Christian men and women. Not until all the idlers, rich or poor, are heartily ashamed of themselves, and everybody in the com- munity looks on the sin of idleness as disgraceful, has the Gospel been rightly preached.
Frivolity has its roots in a hereditary love of excite- ment. Our ancestors lived on the perilous edge of life; were compelled to be alert to protect themselves against wild beasts and hostile tribes, to find game for food, and pasture for their flocks and herds. Cards and dancing, the ''movies" and the theater, the trolley and the automobile, place artificial excitement and un- necessary motion within the reach of us all. And many there be, especially of women, who go in at these
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 65
open doors of opportunity for frivolous dissipation. There is good in it all. It is better to be excited than to be depressed; it is better to be on the move than to sit stil] and mope. But when there is so much suffer- ing to be relieved; so much knowledge to be acquired and diffused; so much wrong to be righted; so much sympathy needed; it is a burning shame that at the end of the day, the week, the month, the season, any man or any woman should have to show as good ac- compKshed only so many luncheons and dinners eaten; so many cards shuffled; so many miles travelled; so many plays or pictures seen; so many dances and parties attended. As incidental diversions; as dessert after the roast beef of usefulness and the salad of help- fulness, these amusements have their important place. It is a great mistake to overlook the good they each and all contain, or to condemn or prohibit specific amuse- ments. But to give up to them the whole or any con- siderable proportion of one's life, is to withdraw from the ranks of the useful and serviceable ; to fall short of Good Will; to lose touch with Christ; and to miss altogether the fellowship in service which binds true Christians together in the spirit of active Good Will. The Gospel has not been preached as it should be until every one within hearing has been made thoroughly and
66 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
heartily ashamed of indulging for themselves or tolerat- ing for their children a life of meaningless excitement, with its inevitable cost and counterpart of strength and steadiness undeveloped, duties undone, services shirked, and opportunities thrown away.
Unkindness saves a great deal of effort. It is easier to snap and snarl; to upbraid and find fault; to be cross and hateful ; than to take the trouble to appreciate the feelings of others and control speech and conduct with a view to causing as little pain and as much pleas- ure as a just consideration of mutual claims permits. Wherever a sad heart can be made happy or a wrong will set right, there is an open door into Good Will: and whoever, from unimaginative laziness and hard- heartedness refuses to enter it, or turns his back upon it, shuts himself out from that kindliness which is the heart of God, the soul of Christ, and the Spirit in which all true Christians live and love.
Jealousy, envy, fill a little soul full of its own im- portance. If it could have this premium of being puffed up, and pay no corresponding penalty, then these qualities would be virtues; petty virtues to be sure, but not the pitiful sins they are. The penalty is inevitable : a soul full of self has no room for eager interest in other things and generous devotion to other
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 67
persons ; no chance to share the Good Will which ranks others at least on an equality with ourselves. So long as we are shut in with our own envy and jealousy, we are automatically and hermetically excluded from the Christian fellowship.
Censoriousness, likewise, is a cheap and easy device for securing the sense of self -exaltation. To call another man stingy, unless it be in sorrow and with a view to his reformation, impHes that I am generous by contrast. To point out with glee the impurity of another gives me a false sense of the purity of my own contrasted heart. When I denounce the hypocrite, except in pity and desire for his conversion, I cannot help drawing, and hoping others will draw, the inference that I by contrast am sincere. But to pay for these specious emotional gains, I lose the sympathy I ought to feel for others, as well as the modest sense of my own short- comings. In judging others I condemn myself as guilty of having a soul just big enough to take in the evil, but not big enough to take in the good, in other men and women. Into such a soul the great-hearted Father, the compassionate Christ, the Spirit of Good Will by no possibility can come and take up their abode.
Conceit and pride are closely akin to censoriousness. They swell out one's vanity ; and give the semblance of
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greatness to the soul that harbors them. But the proud heart is so hollow ; the conceited soul is so empty ; that it is a fearful price one has to pay for indulging in these expensive spiritual sedatives. Not to the proud and conceited ; but to the meek and the poor in spirit is assured the blessedness of Christian fellowship.
Cowardice is good so far as it saves one's skin ; but it becomes detestable when it costs the repudiation of one's convictions ; the failure to stand up for unpopular reforms; the refusal to risk hfe for country. The shame that is heaped upon the coward is the measure of the worth of the interests he allows to go unprotected and unserved in order to save and protect himself. Obviously no coward can share Good Will with the Christ who suffered crucifixion rather than fail to bear witness to the truth the Father gave him to see and serve.
Treachery is even worse than cowardice ; for cowardice is merely saving oneself from general risks and dangers. Treachery is the betrayal of some special cause with which we are intimately identified ; the benefits and fellowship of which we have enjoyed ; and for the loyal support of which we have given some explicit or tacit pledge. To betray such a cause, or the person who represents it, as Judas did Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, is almost the lowest depth of meanness into which
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sin can bring a man. To be sure even here some good is sought and gained : the thirty silver pieces have their normal purchasing power even in the hands of the traitor : but all that they can buy is so insignificant in comparison with the honor lost by treachery, that their value in comparison is negUgible ; and treachery stands out as almost wholly and inexcusably mean. No traitor can have a place in the Kingdom of which the Father's Good Will is the rule; Christ's sacrifice the supreme inspiration ; and the spirit of loyalty and mutual devo- tion the very breath of life.
The good the traitor seeks ; his office, or position, or bribe money, however insignificant and contemptible, is at least substantial. The hypocrite gets nothing but the favorable opinion of those whom he deceives ; and even that favorable opinion is given not to what he is, but to what he pretends to be. The hypocrite parts company with all reaHty.
Hypocrites are of two kinds : those who pretend to be better than they are; who were the more common in New Testament times ; and those who pretend to be worse than they are; who are the more common, especially among young people, at the present day. Whatever the form, the essence of hypocrisy is the same — an entire absence of genuineness — the posing as
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something one is not. Obviously Good Will, as it lives in the Father, as it flashes out in Christ's scorn of the Scribes and Pharisees, as it dwells in the hearts of all genuine Christian men and women, is infinitely removed from the posing of the hypocrite. Meanness, smallness, the selHng of the birthright for a mess of pottage, — which is the essence of all sin, — can go no farther down than this ; that one ceases really to be himself and be- comes merely an impression — false at that — imposed on the minds of others.
Lying, too, has the double aspect common to all sin. In its meaner forms it is a device for shirking responsi- bility, escaping criticism, defrauding customer or credi- tor, and springs from the innocent instinct of social self-preservation. In its higher forms, as used by cul- tivated people, it is a generous desire to be more enter- taining than a plain statement of the case will warrant ; to deck out a situation in colors contributed by the narrator's "happy artistry." Many of the most charm- ing women in the world, some of the world's most famous men, especially those of the mihtary and sports- man types, are half -unconsciously addicted to lying as the most natural way of making themselves and their experiences interesting.
On the other hand, lying of all kinds tends to break
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 7 1
down confidence between man and man ; and, by crying *'wolf" when there is no wolf, to invite disaster when the real wolf appears. The Har refuses to dwell in the same world of mutual understanding with his fellows ; he shuts them out of his little life, and in so doing shuts himself out of theirs. People learn to distrust him, and in distrusting him to distrust human nature. Lying is intellectual highway robbery; and its penalty is mental soHtary confinement.
Stealing has the same two aspects that are the com- mon marks of sin. A man wants something which belongs to another. He wants it very badly. He is poor, and the man who has it is so rich that he would never miss it. Or the chance to steal is so general and indirect that the man from whom he steals will not even know that anything has been taken from him. This is the case in the more prevalent forms of stealing to-day ; the steaHng that is carried on by respectable citizens and honored church members in every branch of industry, commerce, and poHtics. I want to support my family a little better, or give my son a more expen- sive education, or maintain my daughter in a wealthy social, circle. I cannot do these things if I confine my- self to producing goods or rendering services which I offer to the world at their current market value. But I
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can do these things very easily if I organize a corpora- tion and take, as unfortunately the laws of certain states allow me to take, a large block of the stock for com- paratively worthless property or insignificant services. I can do these things if, as director of a railroad, I use my power as the representative of the stockholders and the trustee of the public to get portions of the road built by a construction company in which I have an interest; and then, as a member of the construction company, sell to the railroad in which I am a director the constructed road at several thousand dollars a mile more than its construction cost. I can do these things for my wife and children if, holding a majority of stock in a corporation, I sell it to parties who will use the controlHng interest thus acquired, to make the stock of the minority stockholders comparatively worthless. I can do these things if, as owner of a controlling interest, I use the power it gives me to vote exorbitant salaries to myself and my friends, or to withhold dividends and pile up a surplus until the poorer stockholders are com- pelled to sell for less than it would be worth if the busi- ness were fairly managed.
I can do these things if I buy things which I am un- able to pay for ; if I use my political influence and posi- tion to secure franchises, favors, exemptions, which will
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 73
allow me to make profit out of the public loss. These and countless similar forms of stealing all have at their core the innocent and laudable desire to make money, gain power, secure position for myself, my family, and my friends. All that is praiseworthy. The presence of this ambition is an indication of many personal, domestic, and social virtues. We cannot withhold a certain admiration and affection from thieves of this type, whom we meet in business, in society, at the club, and even at church.
On the other hand, when we realize how ruthlessly they strip the hard-working man of the savings of a Hf etime ; how they impoverish the widow and orphan ; how every honest workingman in the community has to work harder and live poorer to make up for his share of the general loss that corresponds to their dishonest gains, we despise the methods by which these men have gained their wealth.
Murder is a widely prevalent form of sin to-day. In saying this, I do not refer to the rapidly increasing number of cases of violence and bloodshed. Alarming as that is, it is but an insignificant fraction of the total murder that goes on in our modern Christian civiliza- tion. As Professor Ross has pointed out in his ''Sin and Society/' the modern assassin "wears immaculate
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linen, carries a silk hat and a lighted cigar, sins with a calm countenance and a serene soul, leagues or months from the evil he causes. Upon his gentlemanly presence the eventual blood and tears do not intrude themselves. This is why good, kindly men let the wheels of com- merce and of industry redden and redden, rather than pare or lose their dividends. This is why our railroads yearly injure one employee in twenty-six, and we look in vain for that promised ' day of the Lord ' that ' will make a man more precious than fine gold.' Our iniquity is wireless, and we know not whose withers are wrung by it. The purveyor of spurious life-preservers need not be a Cain. The owner of rotten tenement houses, whose 'puir enables him to ignore the orders of the health department, foredooms babies, it is true, but for all that he is no Herod. The mob lynches the red- handed slayer, when it ought to keep a gallows Haman- high for the venal mine-inspector, the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a fire- trap theatre."
The murderers we meet in every walk of life to-day, members of every club or church we join, present in evening dress at almost every dinner or party, like the thieves previously considered, are simply the men who want big dividends with which to maintain their famihes in luxury, and do not inquire too curiously how many
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 75
human lives they needlessly shorten to increase those di\'idends, or how many human heads they cut off with their coupons.
Statistics of a year's accidents to workingmen in Allegheny County, in which Pittsburg is located, pub- lished in the Nation of March i8, 1909, show that 526 men were killed in that county by industrial acci- dents in the twelve months from July i, 1906, to June 30, 1907. In addition 2000 were seriously injured, of whom 500 were so crippled as to be discharged from the hospitals permanent wrecks. While the speed and pressure of the work render a large number of these acci- dents unavoidable, in a group of cases investigated 35 per cent were attributable to the employers' negligence ; in other words, the employers preferred to commit that amount of murder rather than pay the slight cost of life-saving precautions and devices.
In Bangor, Maine, a family moved into a tenement which had previously been occupied by a patient sick with tuberculosis. The landlord neither informed the incoming tenant of the fact, nor had the house disin- fected. The child of the family died of tuberculosis in consequence. When asked why he did not have the house disinfected, the landlord excused himself on the ground that he could not afford the ten dollars, more or
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less, which it would cost. Murder for ten dollars is a depth of depravity to which most bandits would scorn to condescend.
The rookery landlord and the jerry-builder, the adul- terator and the maker and vendor of deleterious patent medicines, the quack doctor and charlatan "healer," the purveyor of polluted water and infected milk, the man who fails to fence dangerous machinery and provide safety couplers for his cars, the owners of unsanitary tenements and fire-trap theatres, the men who over- work children, and employ women on conditions fatal to either health or character, — these murderers, num- bered by hundreds, and whose victims are counted by tens of thousands, are the ones who do the wholesale human slaughter of to-day. There are a hundred times as many men guilty of murder through commercial com- plicity in the United States to-day as there were five hundred years ago, when the bow and arrow and the tomahawk were the weapons employed. In so far as preventable disease and calamity exist in our communi- ties, we all are sharers in responsibihty for the murders their permitted continuance entails.
What shall we do about it? What has Good Will to say ? We must call it by its plain hard name of murder every chance we get. We must make the men who are
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guilty feel themselves to be the murderers they are. We must make their practices so odious, that every decent man will be ashamed to have a hand in them.
The great demand of the hour is ethical insight ; to point out in precise terms the meanness and cruelty and misery-producing power of specific sins. If the pro- moter of dishonest business schemes could see the priva- tion in country homes, where the hard earnings of years of toil are swept away by the floods of water with which he has diluted the stock they purchased in good faith ; if the licentious man could see the years of agony and degradation, released at last by squaKd and ignominious death, which the victims of his passing pleasure must drag out in consequence of what he and men hke him have made of them; if the inconsiderate husband, the merciless employer, the gHb scandalmonger, the corrupt legislator, the reckless speculator, could be made to see just what their conduct means in want and woe and lingering pain and premature death to their innocent and helpless victims, they would speedily repent and mend their ways.
Sin in all its forms ; the sinner in all his disguises ; is foolish, mean, contemptible ; utterly and irreconcilably opposed to and estranged from Good Will, Christ, and the Spirit in Christian men. To make that fact so
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plain that the wayfaring man cannot fail to see it, and feel it, and take it to heart, is the second task of the preacher : second only to the first task of making men see and beheve in Christ's great expectation of entire Good Will. Good Will is the primary fact; for until that is seen and felt you cannot make men see and feel by contrast the meanness and disgrace of falling short of it. The best you can do is to conjure up some fright- ful image of punishment in the hereafter. That fright- fulness in God we no longer fear; any more than we respect it in men who adopt it as a mihtary policy. God is Hght and in him is no darkness at all. His Will is altogether, always, and toward everybody good. Christ revealed that goodness; Christian men and women reproduce it ; and the really dreadful penalty of sin, in addition to the specific goods forfeited by it, is the unworthiness of fellowship with God, with Christ, and with Christian men which cherished sin entails. To make that fearful loss, that dreadful penalty felt as the supreme wretchedness it is ; and so drive men to escape from it in penitence, confession, and conversion, is the second task of the preacher. Not the cheap and discredited terror of problematical vengeful torment in the hereafter ; but the loss of fellowship with God and Christ and all who have the Spirit of Good Will — this
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 79
is the weapon of the true Christian minister against the ever present hydra-headed monster sin. To wield that weapon effectively is doubtless much harder than to brandish the old red battle-axe of an arbitrary danma- tion ; and requires of the minister more Christlike gifts of mind and heart. Already we see rising among us a ministry that shall be able to make men loath, hate and repent of sin because they see and feel the meanness and hideousness of it as contrasted with Good Will to others and to all which Christ and Christian men reveal, and which it is their supreme privilege to serve and share.
Ill
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL: REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS
'*I have put myself on trial in the court of conscience and a verdict has been rendered of ' guilty ' — guilty of having lived for many years of my life indijfferent to and ignorant of what was going on behind these walls. I want to see for myself exactly what your life is like, not as viewed from the outside looking in, but from the inside looking out. For somehow, deep down, I have the feeling that after I have really lived among you, marched in your lines, shared your food, gone to the same cells at night, and in the morning looked out at the pieces of God's sunlight through the same iron bars — that then, and not until then, can I feel the knowledge which will break down the barriers between my soul and the souls of my brothers." Thomas Mott Osborne. Within Prison Walls, pp. i6 and i8.
My text is taken from the speech to the inmates of the New York State Prison at Auburn by the chairman of the Commission on Prison Reform appointed by the Governor, who was about to serve a week's imprison- ment with them. At the conclusion of the speech from which the text is taken the inmates asked about him
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RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 8 1
the question that was asked about Jesus, "What manner of man is this?"
Another speech made by Mr. Osborne September 25, 191 5, in reply to the critics of his administration as Warden of Sing Sing, will serve as our morning lesson. Whatever we may think about this or that method he has employed, we can't fail to detect in this speech the true Christian ring of a costly Good Will for the prisoners.
"In all earnestness I say to you that Sing Sing could stand my death, but Sing Sing could not stand my re- moval. I love my home and children as you do. They are far away while I am at work down there in Sing Sing. I'm doing my bit. Can you afford to let me go home? (Loud shouts of "No.") It's more impor- tant to you and to the State than to me. I can afford to go home to those I love and end my days in the spot I love. But the State cannot afford to let me go — yet.
"I don't expect to stay there long; I don't expect to live long. A man can't stand it — can't stand the responsibility of control over the destinies of so many of his fellow-men, for I'm Czar of Sing Sing. I feel the strain and I want to go home. But I won't go home until I find a man to take my place and to carry on the work
G
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I have tried to start. I am proud of it, but the real credit belongs to the boys behind the bars, for no one can save them ; they must save themselves.
"Men who are sent to Sing Sing are no longer trying to escape the reputation of having been in Sing Sing. They advertise the fact. A young man the other day advertised for a job, and in the advertisement said he had just come from Sing Sing. It's my job to find out how Sing Sing can be turned from a curse into a bless- ing, and I pray your help.
"Now, I have been pictured as a sentimentaHst. That is not true. I am no worshipper of sentiment, but I am a devotee of common sense. I have no sym- pathy with crime, nor have I any sympathy with the criminal. But I have a fellow-feeling. I repeat, I have no sympathy with the criminal, and no soft-hearted man has any business dealing with crime or criminals.
"I have, as I see it, just two duties to the State. One is to keep my charges in Sing Sing, and the other is to see that they become capable and desirous of leading useful lives when they get out. Under the old system no wonder they came out brutes. Now, do you want these men, who are leaving Sing Sing at the rate of fifteen hundred a year, to go out vindictive, ready to get their revenge for the hell they have been through; or
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do you want them to go out feeling that the scale has been balanced; that they have paid and are square with the world and not ashamed of having paid ? There is no choice. A man who feels right with the world is a better citizen than the man who wants to get even. Life and property are safer.
"You have all heard a lot about escapes from Sing Sing. I'll tell you the truth. Since December there have been three escapes. That's less than there ever was before in that time. Why, people talk about escapes from Sing Sing as if it were a new invention. They have always been escaping from Sing Sing.
"Let me correct another impression. There is no traffic in 'dope' at Sing Sing. There are plenty of ways to get it; there always were plenty of ways to get it in Sing Sing. Why don't they use it. Because they know it is best not to ; they know that the Mutual Welfare League will lose its privileges if the members use drugs. It is no religious or moral motive back of it ; it is selfishness. But it works. The whole system of responsibihty works because it is human nature to rise to responsibility.
"I am asked, Where is the punishment? I reply, I am not a behever in mere punishment that has no end in view. BrutaHty never made a better man. Punish-
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ment ? When you send a man to prison, when you take his Hberty away, you have already inflicted the most terrible punishment you can inflict. It isn't the ma- terial discomforts that make a prison. I have suffered more physical discomforts in camp than I have in Auburn prison. Do they want to get rid of me and have a return to the old brutality? To keep a man in a cell and make him take drugs to forget — that is not only brutahty, that is blasphemy. When you take away the right of speech, God's most precious gift, you make a man a brute.
*'But, men and women, here is an experiment of immense importance to the whole civilized world — it is a determination of the question. Can democracy deal with the prison problem ? It is not so much a problem of having men safe in prison ; it is a problem of keeping them safe after they get out."
Here we have the stuff Christian forgiveness is made of — sacrifi.ce of ease, comfort, home, and shortening of life : no sympathy with crime or the criminal as such : fellow-feeling for the man who has been a criminal: a desire and a plan for his restoration to employment and the Good Will of the Christian community: firm pro- tection of society with no brutaHty in the treatment of the wrong-doer: the transformation of the prisoners
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from vindictive foes of society, to its disciplined and well-disposed servants.
Mr. Osborne has been persecuted and maligned as Jesus was, and every reformer has been and will be. But what is reviling, persecution and false accusation, compared to having a convict say of one, as a convict in Sing Sing said to Mr. Shuster, as reported in the Independent for July 19, 191 5.
''I tell you Tom Osborne has the right idea, and he's carrying it out wonderfully. He is making the State prison what it ought to be — a place not for the sup- pression of all that is human in us, but a place for the making of good citizens to go back to society. Under the old system, if you weren't a criminal before you entered Sing Sing, they made one of you before you went out. Now it's just reversed. If there is any- thing wrong with you when you come in, they take it out of you before you leave. And they do it, not by brute force, but by fair play and common sense."
After making all necessary deduction for this con- vict's optimism, the mere fact that he expresses himself in this cordial way shows that he at least, if not every convict, is responding to Christian treatment with genuine appreciation and heart-felt gratitude.
To condemn sin is easy. It comes natural to the
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censoriousness of our hard unregenerate hearts. To condemn sin with a sympathetic appreciation of the genuine goods for the sake of which men are drawn into it, is less easy and more rare. Yet, as we have seen, this is what every preacher who would be a power for good in a community must do. A still harder task, however, awaits preacher and layman alike. Having condemned the sin ; we must invite the sinner to repent- ance with full assurance of the forgiveness of his sins by God, by Christ, and by ourselves and our fellows, so far as we are sharers with Christ in the Father's Good Will. Repentance begins in a man as soon as he sees, feels and confesses how large the goods lost are in compari- son to the little goods his sin has gained. The prodigal son thinks first of the food in the father's house ; later of the father and his forgiveness. Yet repentance is not complete and permanent until the penitent has some sense of Good Will toward him, either in his fellow-man, or Christ, or the Father, and some assurance of being taken back into a fellowship in which he is looked on not with condemnation for the sin he has committed, but with favor in view of his repudiation of it. It is only as it is thrown onto the background of Good Will that sin is felt as not merely the loss of this or that specific good and therefore folly ; but as the failure to
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come up to the best in personal worth and relationship, and therefore needing repentance. Repentance and ofifered forgiveness must go hand in hand. A man can be sorry he is in a scrape, and wish he were well out of it : a man can confess that he is a fool and lament the greater goods he has lost : but he can't repent until he beheves and feels Good Will welcoming him, mean and contemptible as he has been, into its noble fellowship and service.
Christianity is the good news that no sin is too heinous to be forgiven provided the one who has committed it repents. For proof it points first to Christ praying for his murderers, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." He appealed to his Father's Good Will, knowing that it could not wdthhold forgiveness from any penitent. He exemplified it in his own atti- tude. "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her : how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" What is more to the point, Christ expects his followers to be so filled with the Spirit of Good Will that until seventy times seven they will for- give repented sin and restore to favor and friendly intercourse the repentant siimer.
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Hence our willingness to forgive serves a double pur- pose. It is the proof of God's forgiveness of our short- comings : for Good Will in God cannot be less and lower than Good Will in ourselves. It is at the same time the best evidence of our fellowship with the Father and with Christ: for forgiveness is the hardest task Good Will has to face; and if we are equal to that until seventy times seven : if, in other words, willingness to forgive unto the uttermost is our per- manent attitude, then we share Good Will in its most vital and exacting expression. It thus becomes the preacher's privilege to assure every man who has done wrong of complete forgiveness; by the Father and Christ as the witness of the Father : and also by all true Christians who share the Father's Good Will and have the Christhke Spirit. A man who would not for- give the worst wrong, even if done directly against himself, or against those dear to him, when satisfied that the wrong-doer was truly penitent, would be out of Good Will; no son of the Father; no brother of Christ; no sharer of the Christian Spirit. A Christ who did not so forgive would be no savior of the world ; no witness to Good Will. A God who would not forgive at the first sign of genuine penitence would be no God of Good Will, but a Devil; meriting not the worship
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and praise but the scorn and contempt of Christlike men. Forgiveness of the repentant wrong-doer is so essential an attribute of God, so fundamental a quality of the Christlike Spirit, that God could not be God; Christ could not be Christ ; the Christian could not be a Christian \vithout it.
Are we Christians then? Can we rise to this high calling ? In my brief pastorate I found that the hardest task I had to undertake was not to convert sinners, which is comparatively easy if you are dealing with the grosser t>^es of sin, but to induce the Christian people of the Church to welcome into vital fellowship and cordial social recognition the reformed drunkard and the repentant woman who had gone astray. Unless the preacher succeeds in developing the forgiving spirit in his people: not the forgiving spirit in general in church on Sunday; but the forgiving spirit toward in- dividual offenders who have directly or indirectly injured individuals; the Christian Church is only a heathen body in a Christian dress; and preaching is only a parrot-like repetition of platitudes. The vital Christian preacher toward each repented sin, then, has a double task : to assure the offender that God forgives him and to bring himself and his fellow-Christians into the forgiving spirit toward him.
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The preaching of Christianity, then, with reference to drunkenness and the drunkard, should be that any man who has been guilty of this sin; and who has come to see and feel how contrary it is to Good Will ; who is sincerely sorry for the cruel wrong it has done; and who puts it from him in sorrow and loath- ing; is as welcome a child of the Father as the tem- perate man who never went astray; is a brother of Jesus Christ; and entitled to as kindly and courteous a reception by Christian people as the holiest saint. Can you then greet with cordial Christian friendliness the man who has led your son into dissipation and dis- grace? Suffering as you do the sorrow and shame his sin has brought to you and those dear to you, can you still forgive him when he repents? If you can, God's Good Will is in you; Christ is with you; of such as you are the Kingdom of Heaven. If you can't you have yet to learn the first rudiments of Christian living.
Can you forgive the man who has led your sister or daughter astray; filling her Hfe with bitterness and shame, and your heart and home with sorrow and humiliation? Can you restore to your friendship a man or woman who has bought their selfish sensual pleasure at such a tremendous cost of pain and misery to you and yours, on evidence that he too shares the
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 9 1
pain and misery he has caused, and loathes himself for having done it ? If you can, you are in Good Will. If you couldn't or wouldn't, you are not a Christian, not in Good Will toward that repentant offender; but a heathen breathing out evil against one who, however evil he has been, is now repentant of evil and seeking good : and therefore is in his actual present attitude and intent a nobler man, a purer woman, than you with your hard and unforgiving heart toward him on account of his repented past.
Toward the lazy, shiftless, inefficient, incompetent employee ; who is sorry for the waste and loss and in- jury his incompetence has caused ; can you be apprecia- tive, friendly, cordial, kindly? I don't ask, Can you take him back and retain him in your employ? Some- times that is right, and sometimes it is not. Forgive- ness does not always involve restoration to previous status. A railroad superintendent cannot rightly take back a careless switchman, however penitent; for he owes more to the thousands of passengers than to the single switchman. A theological seminary president carmot rightly retain a listless professor, however sorry he may be for his shortcomings ; for it owes more to its hundreds of students, and the tens of thousands in their future congregations than it does to that one uninspir-
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ing teacher and his dependent family. But the super- intendent of the railroad, the president of the Seminary can, and if a Christian must, feel a personal kindliness for the man he is compelled by official duty to discharge. Whether he retain him if he can ; whether he discharge him if he must, the employer if he will himself remain son, brother, sharer in Good Will, must retain or discharge him, if he is truly sorry for his inefficiency, with something of the same sorrow and suffering which the repentant employee feels. Vicarious suffering; the innocent for the guilty; was not enacted once for all some nineteen centuries ago. It is the law of Christian living in every vital relation of life, Hke that of em- ployer and employee, yesterday, to-day and forever.
Toward the frivolous young man or woman, if he or she comes to a sense of his or her wicked worthlessness, and is sorry for it and ashamed of it ; we may have to be officially hard : if, for instance, we happen to be school principals or college presidents with intellectual standards to maintain : but if we are Christians, if we live in Good Will, we are bound to have kind hearts, good wishes and a forbearing spirit ; and as far as our personal feelings toward them go, give them as cordial an appreciation and as sympathetic a treatment as we have for their more diligent brothers and sisters who
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through the whole trying eleven hours bear the burden and heat of scholastic requirement.
A man has slandered us : injured our standing with persons for whom we care : and subjected us to dis- trust, criticism, defeat and injury. Later, too late to undo the harm, he comes to us and says he is sorry. Can we feel toward him the kindliness one child of God should feel for another? If we are sharers with Christ and our fellow-Christians in Good Will we can. And if we can't then while we may be no worse than our slan- derer was when he slandered us : we are harder, meaner, more unkind and cruel than he is now. He is now in Good Will ; and we are by our own fault out of it. He is in the Heaven of God's favor; Christ's grace; the Christian fellowship. We are in the hell of hard, un- forgiving hate.
A dishonest promoter, with glowing prospectus, forged testimonials, false hopes of large dividends secures the hard earnings and savings of a lifetime: Kves luxu- riously on the salary he votes to himself or the profits he unjustly appropriates : and when the crash comes leaves us penniless in old age. Hundreds of such tragedies are happening every day. Ordinarily the swindler of this type is too remote, too impersonal, for his victims to know personally. But suppose we
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do know him; and know that he is truly sorry; not merely for the prison sentence he receives, but for the privation he has caused us. We probably should not feel called upon to invest any further savings in his enterprises. But if we are Christians we should will him no more harm than the protection of society against similar swindlers requires him to suffer. And as soon as that object is accompHshed, if convinced of his penitence attested by works meet for repentance, we should favor his release on parole, or even his complete pardon. Otherwise in the sight of God, measured by our participation in Good Will, we are and shall be, if not worse than he was, worse than he is and means to he.
An avaricious employer coins money out of the life- blood of our boy or girl ; and by compelling him or her to overwork in unsanitary surroundings, causes disease and premature death. Just for a few more dollars he murders our dear one. For, if not ours by birth, if we are in Good Will all boys and girls are ours by the adoption of sympathy. And tens of thousands of them are being slain every year by the avarice of greedy employers and murderous conditions of employment. When he sees and confesses the murder he has committed, repents, and abandons his miserly and
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 95
murderous habits of employment, can we forgive him, and count him among those whom common devotion to Good Will makes friends ? If not, we are not Chris- tians. If we can, we have learned the lesson and re- produced the meaning of the cross of Christ.
Some one has been inconsiderate, haughty, exclusive, supercilious to us, or to those we love ; causing bitter pain and grief. If he repents, can we overcome our resentment, and wish for him full measure of the happi- ness he has cruelly refused to give to us and ours ? The answer to that question will show whether in our social relations we are Christians, or mere heathen still.
Another has been jealous of our standing, our talents, our wealth, and tried his best to pull us down. After- ward, seeing the injury he has done, he is sorry, and tries to make amends. Can we give him our favor, our influence, our support as heartily as if he had always rejoiced in our good fortune ? We can if we have Good Will, as Christ has it ; as hosts of our fellow Christians have it.
Another has worried the life out of us by perpetual nagging, fault-finding, complaining and uncalled-for criticism. Seeing how weary and disheartened he has made us, he repents, and begins to try to see some good amid the obvious bad in us. Can we welcome him
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back to our friendship ? That will show whether Good Will is really in us, or our profession of Christianity is an empty form.
A man has annoyed us by his intolerable conceit, until we can hardly endure the sight of him. He comes to see how silly and petty it all is, and is heartily ashamed of himself. Are we as ready with our welcome to the new man as we were with our abomination of the old? We shall be, if we are Christians ; and share with Christ and all true Christians God's Good Will.
A coward betrays us; a traitor gives away a cause for which we have labored long and hard. When they see the injury they have done they feel Hke Judas ready to go hang themselves. Are we wilHng, so far as justice to our cause permits, to take them back into our friend- ship and favor? If Christ be in us, if we are with him in Good Will, we shall ; if not, we shall not.
Finally if a hypocrite, whom we have detested as utterly hollow-hearted and unreal, confesses and re- nounces the loathsome sin, can we give him another chance? This is perhaps the hardest test of all: for we can't help suspecting that his repentance is only one more pose ; and we don't hke the idea of being fooled by him. If we do give him our confidence, our fellows will smile and call us ''easy." Yet that is a risk Good
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 97
Will calls US to run whenever not mere words but works meet for repentance are in evidence. It is better that we should be deceived in an honest attempt to forgive one who was and still is a hypocrite, than that we should refuse forgiveness to one who merely has been a hypo- crite ; is sorry for it ; and is resolved henceforth to be a sincere man.
The forgiveness of sin is not something done once for all in ancient history, or eternal in the heavens ; but it is something we all are called upon to do every day, and the spirit of which we need to have with us and in us all the time. To keep that spirit alive in himself and his people; to pronounce unchristian every man and every act whereby forgiveness and its appropri- ate expression are withheld, is one of the preacher's hardest tasks; and one which if successfully accom- plished is the clearest evidence of a successful and faithful ministry. For the man or community that has the forgiving spirit is in Good Will. While one who fails to forgive in this personal costly way is out of it altogether.
The question will arise in the minds of those famil- iar with traditional views. What has the Cross of Christ to do with the forgiveness of sin? If God were a jealous, arbitrary being ; a stickler for his own offended
98 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
dignity and the majesty of his law, we can see how the death of an innocent victim might be necessary to buy him off : just as believers in a personal devil (who by the way is not so very different from such a God) thought a ransom to him necessary. Undoubtedly in St. Paul's attempts by Rabbinical reasoning to explain Christ's death in terms of the Hebrew sacrificial system there are passages which lend themselves to such inter- pretation. If that is the way you think and feel about God, and Christ's sacrifice, undoubtedly you can sup- port it by ''proof texts" from the Bible. On the other hand, if you think of God as the Fatherly Good Will to all his children : most tender to those who have gone farthest astray ; and most eager to welcome the prodi- gal's return (a view for which there are far more ''proof texts"), the idea that such Good Will to men needed any ransom or appeasement of wrath is monstrous and absurd. All forgiveness, as we have seen, involves sacrifice of merely individual feeHngs, and power to rise above them to a point of view high and large enough to include the offender's welfare. If Jesus had not been equal to that; if he had not stood ready to pay the full measure of such devotion to the real welfare of an evil and hostile world, he would not have revealed God's Good Will : he would have fallen below what the best
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 99
Christian men and women have attained. In that deep and real sense Christ bore the burden of the world's iniquity : the chastisement of our peace was upon him : and with his stripes we are healed. He did in a typical historic situation, on a large world scale, what every one of his followers is repeatedly called upon to do : — he rose above his individual pleasure and preference to a universal devotion to the good of all whom his action could affect : and he paid with his Hfe the cost of such devotion. If Good Will were not thus self-sacrificing, self-transcending; if Christ had not revealed it in agony and blood; if countless Christian men and women did not share this sacrificial attitude and bear their portion of this cross, sin would be unforgiven and unforgivable; the sinner who had fallen would be irrevocably doomed ; and his restoration to divine and human favor would be impossible. In that sense Christ had to suffer for our salvation : but in the same way every Christian has to suffer for the for- giveness and restoration of those who wrong him and those dear to him, and in wronging them wrong the world. Christ's cross is not unique but typical : Cal- vary is not local but cosmic : sacrifice is not temporal but eternal. The lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. Only he who dies to self can live to God's
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Good Will, and restore wrong-doers to their forfeited place in that Good Will.
As the basis of forgiveness, sacrifice is necessary : not in an external, forensic, or merchandising sense ; but in the intimate, personal sense of including others, however undeserving they may have been, in the Good Will which one shares toward them with God. So under- stood, the preacher may and should freely use the suffer- ings of Christ as the strongest appeal to Christians to be forgiving ; and to wrong-doers to believe that God's Good Will forgives them the instant they repent.
For Christ's sacrifice is so clear and compelling : so individual and so universal: so enshrined in Hterature and art, emotion and conception; that it reveals the forgiving Good Will of God a thousandfold more effectively than the fragmentary, scattered sacrifices of his followers ; obscured as these are by famiharity, im- perfection, and entanglement with sordid details.
The preacher then will preach Christ and him crucified as the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. But it will be a cross borne in the heart of the Father as well as the Son : a cross of which each faithful and forgiving follower bears his part.
Good Will, conditioned by the structure of the uni- verse and the freedom of man, seeks for each and all
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL lOI
the greatest good these conditions permit. When a man does wrong, Good Will resists the wrong action in the interest of those who are wronged by it ; and also in the interest of the wrong-doer. For it is good for the transgressor to find his way made hard. When he turns from it and repents, Good Will instantly accepts him as potentially its servant. To go on identifying the wrong- doer with the wrong he has repudiated would be not only brutal but stupid. It is not merely contrary to Good Will; it is contradictory to the facts. The re- pentant wrong-doer is right : and if God did not recog- nize it he would be unreasonable : if recognizing it he did not forgive he would be unrighteous. Forgiveness is not a special favor, exceptional, gratuitous. When a wrong-doer has repented it is the only decent thing to do. A man who would not forgive another man who repented the wrong he had done him would be an inhuman brute. A God who would not forgive a man who repented the wrong he had done, would be a devil. Christ has re- vealed the reasonableness and righteousness of forgive- ness so clearly and beautifully that whoever falls below it ceases to be divine and human ; and becomes brutal and fiendish.
The fact that so much of our theology presents a God who is reluctant to forgive, and forgives only by special
I02 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
arrangement, shows how far we are from having incor- porated into it the disposition and insight of Jesus. As Jesus taught us, the fact that *'we ourselves forgive every one that is indebted to us" (Luke xi. 4), is sure proof that a God who is not inferior to us cannot do less than forgive us our sins. Refusal or hesitation to do so is unmistakable evidence of the uneliminated brutality of the God or man who fails to forgive.
Forgiveness is the most distinctive note Christ brought to the world ; and explains why he was so insistent on repentance. For until the wrong-doer repents it is neither rational nor righteous to forgive him. To for- give the unrepentant, or, in Mr. Osborne's words, to sym- pathize with the criminal as criminal, is to enter into compHcity with his wrong-doing. Only on the basis of stern condemnation for the deliberate and unrepentant wrong-doer is forgiveness consistent with moral and spiritual integrity. Cherished and unrepented sin, as we saw, shuts the sinner entirely out of fellowship with Good Will. That truth must be firmly held and un- compromisingly proclaimed. Then with equal confi- dence the complementary truth must be added : that not by special arrangement, or forensic dickering, but as the essential expression of the intrinsic nature of Good Will, each and every sin is forgiven, the worst wrong-
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 103
doer is restored to the favor of God, of Christ, and of all Christian men, the instant he sincerely repents the wrong that he has done. As sure as sin shuts out the sinner ; so sure sincere penitence brings forgiveness and the welcome to the Father's house of the returning prod- igal. We are all prodigals: sacrificing over and over again, until seventy times seven, the greater and the greatest to the little and the less; but as often as we repent, even unto seventy times seven, we are assured of the forgiveness and fellowship of God, of Christ, and all men who have the Christian Spirit. This is the best part of the good news the preacher of the Gospel of Good Will is commissioned to preach.
He has, however, more to do than merely to preach it. He must bring himself and his people to practice it. Forgiveness is kindness toward a person who has been doing something which we abhor. It is personal Good Will shining through intense disapproval. It is close and friendly contact with a person whose act and atti- tude we shrink from and antagonize. It is not natural, and therefore rare. When it occurs it is supernatural and indicates the presence in the heart of him who for- gives, of something superhuman, divine. That some- thing is Good Will in its most costly, sacrificial form.
Who is the agent of forgiveness? In the deepest
I04 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
sense, of course, God, and God alone, can forgive sins. That, however, is only another way of saying what was said above, that forgiveness is an act of supernatural, divine love. For God is Good Will ; and whatever can be done only in Good Will, is done in God and through God.
In another sense, equally profound, Christ is the one through whom all sins are forgiven. For Christ is the historic representative, accepted as such by an ever in- creasing proportion of the race, of that self-sacrificing, outgoing love which holds dear and sacred every human soul, however depraved. Since Christ means that, and without that forgiveness is impossible, we rightly regard him as the Forgiver and Saviour of all who have sinned. There is no other door into the sheepfold. Other foun- dation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
All this, however, may be accepted either in a dry, dead, traditional sense, or in a fresh, vital, world-con- quering sense. Of late the church, for the most part, has accepted it in the dry, dead, unfruitful sense. The church that takes it in this sense is doomed. The preachers that preach it are offering their diminishing congregations a gospel of mere words.
The agents of God's forgiveness are individual Chris-
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 105
tian men and women. The real church is the com- pany of those who have God's forgiving love in their hearts, and bestow it on their fellow men. Wherever one such soul forgives and loves another, however un- worthy that other be, there the kingdom of God comes and spreads. Whoever forgives others has the indis- pensable experience within him by which to interpret the reported and transmitted forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ. To those who lack that experience in themselves, or lack some human friend to act as its interpreter to them, forgiveness, however eloquently reported in book or sermon, remains a sealed message, an untranslated and untranslatable cipher. Forgive- ness is a personal relation, and requires for its full and adequate expression two parties, both human, sharing together the condemnation of whatever has been wrong in either; bearing toward each other mutual respect, and mutual affection. Until God's forgiveness is thus incarnated, until Christ's forgiveness is thus repro- duced in the specific situation where it is needed, toward the particular individual who has done the wrong, it remains something up in the clouds, back in ancient history. It is not a vital, flesh-and-blood reality, doing its redeeming, transforming work in the midst of breath- ing, erring, repenting men and women, in the homes,
I06 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
and factories, and farms, and stores, and offices, and prisons of the actual modern world.
If we are to help save the world, we must not merely report forgiveness as a fact in eternity, or as an event in past time. We must not merely symbolize Christ's sacrificial love upon the altar, or announce it from the pulpit : we must act it out ; we must be the agents of it. For though it is true that one may learn of Christ's forgiveness from sermon or Bible, even then it is experi- ence of forgiveness by a human father, mother, teacher, or friend, which gives the hearer or reader the power to interpret in real terms the reported or recorded for- giveness of Christ.
Real forgiveness, genuine salvation, requires that some one who has the love of Christ for men in his heart shall come close to the individual who has done wrong, touch him at the sensitive point of his particular wrong- doing with mingled kindness for him and condemnation for his sin, and win him to share with the one who loves him, and with God, their common condemnation of the wrong which he has done. Whoever makes such loving forgiveness the principle and spirit of his life, thereby enters and abides in the kingdom of God, and the body of Christ. Wherever one such soul forgives and loves another who has done wrong, there the kingdom of God
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL IO7
comes, there the church of Christ extends and spreads. All who have that experience, have the experience wherewith to assure themselves that the reported for- giveness of God in Jesus Christ includes and applies to them; and to all whom, with the insight of love, they lovingly forgive.
IV
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE
"All business should be done so that the advantage is distrib- uted. Business success should mean much more than the enrich- ment of an individual. It should mean that the community is enriched." William H. Baldwin, Jr., in An American Citizen by John Graham Brooks, pp. 282-283.
These are the words of a brilliantly successful rail- road president. Our lesson will be a series of brief selections from his biography, showing the attitude towards business this successful railroad president main- tained. Before describing this attitude as an ideal for all vocations it is well for us to recognize that in one man at least, in the most intricate and delicate of all vocations, that of railroading, this attitude, here in the United States in the twentieth century, has been a fact, and a successful fact.
"There was never a moment when, in the deeper, wider currents of his mind, he was not moved by impulses greater than the acquisition of wealth : never a moment
108
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 109
when this was not a secondary and subordinate object of his energies."
*'He early learned that interests between the manage- ment and the laborer are one and the same only as both sides try to make them the same. This harmony does not come of itself, nor is it to be taken for granted. All the truth it holds has to be created by honorable pur- pose and Good Will."
"He came to think of the railroad as having one final justification, — namely, the development of business in the communities through which it passed. It was there to make life easier to the farmer. It was there to cheapen products to the consumer. It was there to assist in the distribution of congested city populations."
''His whole idea of the railroad was to develop it in the interest of everybody along the route. Its pros- perity was to be the common prosperity. Baldwin not only held that as a theory, but he acted upon it practi- cally."
''With stubborn valor he took the position that all business necessary to he done, can be done without base- ness. It can be done without low trickeries and with- out organizing injury against one's fellow men."
"Among his best and surest gifts was that rare power of putting himself so vividly in the place of another, as
no THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
to enlarge and humanize his observation. He was always helped by asking, 'What should I think and do, if I were actually in that man's place? ' "
"Our transportation system is our largest machine and also our most important. It is so important that the motive in its management should be elevated and broadened. It should be first a social motive and not a personal one. He insisted that the propaganda for teaching this social motive to the people could not begin an hour too soon."
" In the spirit of fair play, he asks the simplest ques- tion: If these bilHons of capital have to be organized in order to protect themselves against disrupting rival- ries, do not the laborers working for these organizations have the same need of combination ? Do they not need it for the same reason ? Is capital exposed to cut- throat competition in any greater degree than labor is exposed to it? How can capital have the face to ask for com- bination, in order to free itself from a murderous compe- tition, when labor suffers every bit as much from the same cause? An encouraged immigration of unskilled foreigners subjects the common workman in this country to the most relentless pressure, and yet he is to be de- prived of the very instruments of self-protection which capital claims and is strong enough to get."
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 1 1
" I need, as an employer, an organization among my employees, because they know their needs better than I can know them, and they are therefore the safeguard upon which I must depend in order to prevent me from doing them an injustice."
"The function performed by railroads has become too important to the body pohtic to permit of any solu- tion of these serious labor and wage questions, except by intelHgent consideration on the part of the representa- tives both of the management and of the employees."
"Collective bargaining and voluntary arbitration are possible only when the employer recognizes the right of the employed to have a voice in the fixing of wages and conditions of employment. The recognition of committees of employees is absolutely essential and is judged to be inevitable."
"His religion of Good Will is a religion which required in his case Uttle ritual or institutional expression. He lives it quite as much on Monday as on Sunday. He lives it in his office and on the train. He lives it in the turmoil of a strike and in the treatment of his subordi- nates. He fives it with the negro, for whom he asked justice as he asked it for the trade-union. It is this refigion which gave him the pity and tolerance for the prostitute even while enforcing the law against her."
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''His assertion that the private dividends should not be first, but strictly subordinated to the common wel- fare, is an unflinching ethical proposal. There is no better definition of social morality than conscious sub- mission of our action to the good of the community. To make the common weal the controlling test of cor- porate action would moralize business as it would moral- ize politics. It would revolutionize our wealth-making more profoundly than most sociaUst schemes now in vogue. This principle of using corporate power first for public ends, was not with Baldwin a mood of phrase- making. It had to him a clear-cut meaning on which he was willing to act."
''Baldwin did not vapor about ideals or force them upon unwilling ears. There never was in him a taint of the 'holier-than-thou' attitude, yet he was an idealist in its strict and proper sense — a mind moved by ideas. What haunts him and even drives him is a moral im- agery of something better. The propelling idea in his case is moral because it consciously includes the good of other people. If the mental picture is that of his rail- road, he conceives of it in relation to pubHc welfare. The railroad must be more and more efficient in a ser- vice that includes everybody. He does not think of it merely as a machine out of which a few private pockets
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II3
are to be filled. Its one justification is that it helps toward a development in which all men share."
''It was never for a moment his purpose to make all the money he could possibly acquire. With moral deliberation, he set limits to his own acquisition. He would make money, but he would make it with condi- tions. He would neither be a parasite nor a gambler. Upon principle, he would grow rich more slowly if there were any question of straight and honorable methods. In a case of proposed railroad extension, he was asked, as an official, to take advantage of plans then secret and buy certain properties. He considered it, but re- fused. 'I could have made a pot of money out of that,' he said, 'but I should have sold too much of myself.' "
With this twentieth-century, American fact as text and lesson, we may now apply this "religion of Good Will" to other representative vocations.
To transform into expressions of itself all secular vocations is the practical aim of Good Will ; and there- fore the objective at which the preacher by words and the layman by works must aim. We must see in sharp, clear contrast the difference between the man who is and who is not enlisted in the service of Good Will, as that difference comes out in the secular vocations.
Stated in general terms that difference is that the seK-
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ish man does not consider, and the servant of Good Will does consider, the consequences of his action to all who are affected by it precisely as if he bore those conse- quences in his own person. Let us then run through a representative Kst of vocations, putting the natural man who serves his own will first, and the Christian man who serves Good Will second in each case. That will show what the preacher has to preach, and the layman has to practice, to make the world the Kingdom of Good Will and of Christ as its historic champion.
The natural man, as worker, thinks first of his pay ; and secondly of doing his work well enough to hold his job and continue to draw his pay. The man who has heard and obeyed the call of Good Will thinks first of his work and the substantial benefits it will confer on the consumer of its product ; does it heartily with his eye on the good it is doing ; and takes his pay gratefully as more or less of an equivalent given him in return for the service he has rendered. The natural man therefore does his work slavishly and grudgingly: the disciple of Good Will does it freely and gladly ; giving full measure, whether the measure of pay is quite full or not.
The natural man, as player of any game plays to win, by fair means or foul. The man of Good Will in every
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 1 5
game virtually offers the prayer, "Fair play; and may the best man win." He would rather be beaten fairly than win unfairly: and when the better man wins will be as glad for him, and as appreciative of his skill and prowess, as though those superior quahties had been his own. The boy who can do his best and still be glad to find in another a better than his best, has gone a long way on the Christian road : and the preacher who can enter his young people on that arduous race is doing his part as coach of their spiritual athletics. Pluck, training, courage, perseverance, and also courtesy, honor, chivalry, magnanimity, must mark the spiritual athlete who will win the prize of Christlike character offered by Good Will.
The natural employer of labor, the employer who recognizes no will but the will of his own interest, will pay as little wages, and provide as inexpensive condi- tions of Hfe and labor as possible ; and let his relations to his employees end then and there. It is the preach- er's duty to make every such employer chronically un- comfortable. He will make the cold-blooded, hard- hearted grinder of the faces of his employees realize that not to make his relationship to his employees an expression of Good Will, is to be himself out of that Will altogether. Bits of it he may pick up in his home,
Il6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
his club, his associations with other employers. But in the full comprehensive fellowship of Good Will no employer of labor can be, who fails to make the welfare of his employees the constant object of his will.
On the contrary the employer who is himself in the employ of Good Will aims to make his employees participants in the financial profit; the social spirit; the good name and good order, which binds employer and employees together in mutual loyalty and devotion. Precisely how this is to be done or how far it should be carried, through profit-sharing, arbitration, welfare work, social centers, athletic teams, the preacher may not be enough of an accountant, a business man, or a sociologist, to point out in detail. Unless he is an expert he will do best to leave these details to the em- ployer to work out in his own way. His business is to make sure that the employer, if he thinks of him- self as a Christian, shall as an essential part of that thought think of his employees as partners, brothers, helpers, friends, whose interests are included in the interest he takes in his business as a whole.
The Christian employee, in proportion to the number in his class, is rarer than the Christian employer. The natural man as employee does as little as he can : feels no responsibility for use of time, care of tools and plant,
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II7
economy of materials, or soundness of product. He regards his employer as his natural enemy; and too often values his union chiefly as a means of fighting him.
The Christian employee, the employee who lives in Good Will, makes his employer's interest his own; whether this interest is reciprocated or not ; even if the employer be a big and perhaps corruptly managed impersonal corporation. He will give it his best work, his best thought, his best care ; whatever he gets in return. If he joins a union and fights for and by col- lective bargaining, as he has a perfect right to, he will be careful to do no injury beyond what may be neces- sary to make his employer realize his rights and treat him as a fellow-man. With malice toward none, with charity for all employers, the Christian employee will do his best work as long as he works at all ; and when he strikes it will be under the stern necessity of a last resort in the interest of justice ; not as a welcome chance to show his animosity.
This Gospel of Good Will, when preached to work- ing-men and their unions, will not always be a welcome one. But the preacher must be as plain with the em- ployee as with the employer ; hold up as high and hard a service of Good Will before the one class as before the
Il8 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
other. The Christian solution of the labor problem is not as simple, as easy, as congenial to the heart of the selfish man as many of the panaceas offered appear to be. But if once generally applied it can be guar- anteed to work : and not only solve the problem, but make heroes of those who do their part in its solution.
The selfish man as merchant aims to make as much as he can out of his customers and still retain their trade against competitors. If cheap goods- will bring larger profits and more frequent sales than substantial goods, cheap goods he will sell. If worthless or deleterious goods, Hke most patent medicines, 3deld the largest margin of profit, and develop a habit which it requires repeated purchasing to satisfy, those he will advertise and urge his customers to buy. The customer in every transaction is regarded, not as a man to be served to the best of the merchant's ability for a fair return ; but as a profit-producer to be exploited. ''Let the buyer look out for himself, it is no business of mine to look out for him," is the heartless motto. It is the preacher's duty to show that merchant that he is nothing more nor less than a legalized pirate, preying on the neces- sities of his fellow-men. The preacher very likely does not know enough about merchandising to tell the merchant just how much profit he should charge
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS I SERVICE II9
when virtual monopoly gives him the chance to charge what he pleases. But if he is fit to be a preacher, he does know what the spirit and attitude of a merchant toward his customer ought to be ; and he will not allow that merchant to be comfortable in his own mind, or well esteemed by others, unless the goods he sells, the prices he charges, are determined not alone by the pres- ence or absence of effective competition; but by a genuine desire to serve the customer by giving him at a price fairly representing the value of his skill, his risk, his capital, his labor, the commodity that customer desires. That is what it means to preach Good Will to a merchant. On no lower terms has the preacher the right to assure the merchant that he is filHng his place and performing his function as Good Will requires. The professional man takes as his province some line of service, Law, Medicine, Religion, which involves for its thorough comprehension a prolonged training, and a developed insight which the laity as a rule cannot attain. They consequently are entirely at his mercy; absolutely dependent on his skill, integrity and honor for the soundness and worth of what he gives them in professional service and advice. Hence the professional man must be one of two things : either a free and con- scious servant of Good Will as it applies to the cases
I20 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
with which he professionally deals ; or else a downright charlatan, palming off under the protection of his pro- fessional authority not merely worthless but positively deleterious substances or services. The temptation to be a charlatan is at times very strong. It is cheap : it is profitable : and in individual cases it appears easy to escape detection. The lawyer, physician or minister who has not felt at some time or other the tempta- tion to substitute the cheap guess for the costly certainty, the easy evasion for the expensive solution of a hard problem, is probably rare. Good Will in the Christian professional man involves bringing to bear on each specific case the fruits of the world's best science and skill as it applies to that case: the resolute re- fusal to offer anything less than the best one is capable of acquiring and using. The Christian professional man is thus the representative of Good Will in some specific sphere not easily accessible to the layman : and he is bound to make the interest of patient, client or parishioner his own; yes more than his own: he is bound to place it above personal profit, convenience, reputation, or in critical cases his own health and life. As the professed representative of a single difficult phase of Good Will, he must see that that Will is done, whatever the cost to himself. The Gospel is not fully
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and faithfully preached until every professional man in the community is taught to measure himself by the high standard of doing disinterestedly and devotedly all that Good Will requires of the man who represents it in one of its more arduous and technical forms.
The scientist likewise is tempted to accept hearsay and tradition for first-hand truth. The former is easy, cheap and respectable: the latter is hard, expensive and often at first unpopular. Formerly this duty of truthfulness on the part of the scientist was not ade- quately recognized; and the easy repetition of tradi- tion, the cheap adoption of respectable error, was thought to savor of orthodoxy. Our generation has learned the lesson that Good Will is at the same time, especially for the man who assumes to be an expert, the will to truth ; though there are sections of the world, and branches of the church, where Good Will is still confounded with the will to He ; if the lie only be in the interest of ecclesiastical tradition. Against all that the preacher must set his face: he must put truth, however unpopular, however unsettling, however ap- parently dangerous, above orthodoxy, above safety, above immediate comfortableness. For Good Will cannot permanently be promoted by falsehood; and all the immediate good that temporarily seems to be
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gained by pious fraud has to be paid for when ultimately the truth comes out, as it surely will. The blame for the disillusion and doubt the truth brings attaches not to the men who bring the truth, but to the men who clung so long to error — and taught others to cUng to it.
The preacher must rid himself of behefs which he holds at second hand ; and profess to believe only the things which he sees with clearness and holds in sin- cerity. Any make-believe in his own thinking will betray itself in a tone of unconscious insincerity when he attempts to influence others. It would be easy to name whole ecclesiastical communions whose clerical utterances on certain subjects carry to the candid no conviction whatever; simply because we feel sure that they have never dared to be frankly candid and sincere with themselves. On the contrary the preacher who is the conscious servant of Good Will, becomes so fearless in his rejection of falsehood, so single-minded toward the truth, so transparently honest in his distinction between what he is sure of, and what he is uncertain about, that all who hear him catch the holy contagion of transparent truthfulness.
Special pleading or elaborate argument in the pulpit seldom convinces anybody : but the confident assertion of a man who is transparently sincere with himself,
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 23
carries weight with all who see and feel his sincerity. Historical and metaphysical matters may be doubtful : but there are plenty of moral and spiritual truths to which the sincere preacher can bear convincing testi- mony. The preacher who lives in Good Will will never be tempted to the impossible task of trying to convince his people of something of which he himself is doubtful. On the other hand mere truthfulness is only one special section of the total sweep of Good Will. It would be easy to name one or two denominations which have so prided themselves on their intellectual sincerity that they have lost the perspective of other phases of Good Will, hke charity, modesty, sympathy. Truth- fulness for the scientist is vital : and if he fails in that point, he fails totally. But for the ordinary man, truth- fulness is merely one of a hundred ways in which Good Will seeks and finds expression.
The teacher's temptation is not so much to falsehood ; as to indifference; to the half doing of his work; to thinking that because he has "got off" something in the presence of the learner, therefore the learner has learned : whereas the getting off of truth is only the easy end of teaching: the real test being whether the truth is brought home to the minds of the pupils, and there appropriated and sympathetically shared. To
124 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
shirk this harder task is the great temptation of the teacher; one into which a teacher without conscious Good Will is pretty sure to fall.
The teacher then must be taught to see teaching as an opportunity to put truth so clearly, convincingly, pictorially, appreciatively, sympathetically that the pupils will assimilate and organize it into the structure of their minds, and embrace it with the affection of their hearts. The preacher must know and feel, and make teachers know and feel, the infinite difference between a teacher who teaches a lesson and is done with it when it is off his mind, and a teacher who lives imagi- natively and sympathetically in the minds of his pupils ; and prepares, presents, reviews and examines with a view to the effective assimilation and organization of truth in the minds of the pupils. Only the latter teachers enter and abide through their vocation in Good Will. Educational officials, like presidents, principals and superintendents, if they know their business, will refuse to have on their staff of teachers any men or women who are not Christians in the sense of being the sympathetic servants of their pupils.
Wealth, the product of past and the control over future labor, can either be a curse or a blessing to its possessor and to the world. Gained unscrupulously;
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 25
held greedily ; invested recklessly ; wielded mercilessly ; spent ostentatiously; given away promiscuously; it has untold power to harden, and hurt, and degrade. To do these things is natural and the line of least resistance for the capitaHst. If he does these things it is the preacher's duty to denounce him as the enemy of Good Will. On the other hand gained, invested, saved, spent, given in such ways and such proportions as Good Will demands, capital becomes a mighty benefit and the capitalist a mighty benefactor.
The preacher may not be enough of an economist and financier to tell the capitaHst in detail precisely how to avoid the curse and win the blessing that the posses- sion and use of capital involves. But he must be an expert in the right attitude of the capitaHst toward it. He must help his wealthy men to offer their wealth conscientiously, wisely, disinterestedly to the service of Good Will. He must help them to make sure that the proportion of their wealth they invest in productive in- dustry win do more good so invested, than it would if invested in other forms of production; or if given, or spent on himself and his family. The rich man must be sure that the amount of money spent on himself and his family will do more good so spent than it would if invested or given. He must be sure that the money he gives
126 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
tends to do more good so given than it would if given in other directions, or invested, or spent. This is a hard task ; and with or without help in detail from the preacher the rich man is pretty sure to make a great many mis- takes. But it is the rich man's duty to make this effort ; and the preacher's duty to keep him aware that only through such a devotion of every cent he has to the most effective service of Good Will can he win the blessing and escape the curse of riches. It is the preacher's task to point out this very narrow way to every rich man in his congregation ; and to assure him that while to unregen- erated human nature such a disinterested distribution of one's resources is impossible, it is, at least in intent and aim, not only possible but imperative for all who have Good Will. Giving is hard to the man whose will is merely the resultant of his natural desires. Why should he give "away" — away from himself — what he so laboriously has won? And if he does give, there is sure to be some self-centred motive behind it; "to be seen of men" ; or to get rid of annoying importunity. Good Will once made the object of the individual will identifies the giver with the person or cause he seeks to help. If being seen to give will incite others to give too, he will let the light of his giving shine : not for his own individual glory, but that Good Will may be
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 27
glorified and better accomplished through other generous hearts. But if no such good is to come from publicity, the giver who gives in Good Will will prefer not to let his left hand know what his right hand doeth. He will be so intent on Good Will ; so identified with its aims, that personal mention in connection with it would be unwelcome, because distracting attention from the gift and its aim to the giver and his merits — a very minor consideration in the mind of any man who has Good Will at heart.
There is hardly a better test of one's progress in Good Will than this — whether one wishes to be known in the matter other than as such knowledge strengthens Good Will in others : or whether one regards his gift, and the good it may do, as a means to his own popularity and reputation. How far short of giving from Good Will most of us fall may be seen in the difference in size between an anonymous gift to the contribution box, and the public subscription we would make to the same cause.
Shall the Christian fight? He prefers peace. He will not fight for aggression or gain. Yet rather than let tyranny oppress the weak, arrogance break down civ- iHzation, lust ravish the defenceless, greed exploit the poor, hypocrisy block the way to Heaven, the man who
128 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
is animated by Good Will will fight with the army and navy, with the police and the courts; and on the un- civilized frontier with his revolver and his own right arm. Yet he will do it without malice; with sorrow that he has to; with forgiveness at the first sign of penitence; with outstretched hands of helpfulness the instant the vanquished surrender. As long as the motive of the fighting is not the enemy's harm as such ; but the repression of the injustice he is seeking to com- mit ; fighting is not merely consistent with, it becomes expressive of Good Will, which is the essence of Chris- tianity. Incidental injury to our enemy, if it is merely incidental to doing good or repressing evil, because it is not made the prime object at which the will aims, does not vitiate the will. Whoever inflicts injury sincerely regretting the necessity of doing so, because Good Will requires it, becomes therein the true Christian soldier. The writer who writes whatever comes into his head, regardless of its effect on the reader, is unchristian. He wields the mighty power of the pen to the wanton injury of multitudes of readers. Some incidental injury to the immature and the unprepared, if accepted as a regretted necessity, as a means to greater goods on the whole, is, like injury inflicted regretfully in war, consistent with and expressive of Good Will and there-
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 29
fore Christian. But harm intentionally done for fame or gain, in indifference or self-conceit, marks a writer as anti-Christian — the enemy of Good Will.
The artist in sculpture, painting or drama is subject to the same test as the writer. Harm done incidentally with reluctance as an unavoidable means to a greater desirable benefit on the whole is not only permissible but laudable. Great art, like nature, is bound to harm some who are not prepared to receive it worthily. But no artist can positively will that harm, or fail to deplore it, without coming under the condemnation of Good Will, and forfeiting the fellowship of those who share and serve it. Beauty is a large element in that good which is the end and aim of Good Will : but unless the good in the beauty of an artistic creation is clearly greater to those who behold it worthily than the harm to those who behold it unworthily, the work of art and the artist who creates and exhibits it is an enemy of Good Will. For while good and beauty to a great extent coincide, good is the more inclusive term; and therefore ulti- mately beauty must be weighed in terms of good. A work of art which has as its foreseen and deliberately accepted chief result the stimulation of lust, however beautiful, is an unchristian product; and excludes the artist who creates it from the fellowship of Good
130 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Will. If this be Puritanism it is a Puritanism that is as old and noble as Plato and Aristotle and Jesus. Beauty is a precious thing; but offending beauty is condemned by all who have Good Will.
Taxpaying is a rather searching test of the extent to which one has become identified with Good W^ill. The man who is living in his own will as supreme will hate his taxes ; dodge them ; make private deals with the assessors. Between him and the public wel- fare which his taxes are to support and serve there is a great gulf fixed, deep and wide as the gulf be- tween hell and heaven — indeed, profoundly appre- hended it is that very gulf, — and the natural will, unless it gets across on some such shaky bridge as regard for reputation, or fear of fine and imprisonment, cannot cross it.
Good Will spans that gulf — or rather for it the gulf does not exist : the interests of the public and the inter- ests of the man who has been born again into Good Will become identical; and the bearing of his fair share of the public burdens is to such a man a positive delight. He takes just as much satisfaction in the payment of his full taxes as he does in buying beef steak for his family or a suit of clothes for himself. He is big enough to make the taxes, and the services they perform.
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 131
just as much objects of his will, as the clothes on his back or the food on his table.
The ofi&ce-holder whose will is the resultant of his own personal interests will be inefficient, corrupt and corrupt- ing. It takes a will as large and generous as Good Will to make a man in office treat that office as a trust to be executed as faithfully, as disinterestedly, as devotedly as he would attend to his private affairs. Good Will in office as the Will to make the interests of the state or country one's own will be a frequent theme with the true preacher.
Even the reformer, if he be not in his reform as a service to Good Will, finds himself caring more for his own prominence than for the success of his cause. When the men who are satisfied with, and are profiting by, the abuses he attacks, turn upon him and revile him and persecute him, he will weaken, compromise, "let up." One who would carry through to a successful issue any great reform must be patient, persistent, brave, magnanimous, good-natured, disinterested; and these qualities come and stay with a man only in so far as he makes Good Will his principle of action. The preacher may not always be able to say in detail what reforms are wise and timely and what are visionary and impracticable : but he ought to be an authoritative
132 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
expert on the motives on which every reformer should prosecute his reforms; and the interpreter of Good Will as it applies to the reformer's personal attitude and temper.
These are by no means all the specific vocations and relations in which a man stands ; but they are enough to make clear the vital and eternal difference between a man who lives his Kfe and does his work from himself, by himself, and for himself, and the man who, wherever he touches the world, and his fellows, tries to make his conduct expressive of Good Will.
To keep that contrast clear before the minds, warm within the hearts, of his people is ever the preacher's mighty duty, and the layman's stupendous task. In that contrast as it works out in detail, the richness and variety of which has been only suggested, are to be found the stuff for scores of sermons. No preacher who thinks out in detail that eternal difference will ever lack for vital themes on which to preach.
If we summarize even the few specimen vocations we have considered the result will make the fundamental issue clear, and show the Gospel of Good Will in some- thing of its splendid transforming and transfiguring power.
Who then in his vocation is the Christian? He is
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS I SERVICE 1 33
Whoever as worker puts the thought of the enjo>'ment of the consumer alongside the thought of his pay :
Whoever as player wants the best man to wdn :
Whoever as employer ranks the wages and health of his workmen on a level wath profits and dividends :
Whoever as employee keeps his employer's interest as clearly in mind as his own, and as warmly at heart as his union's :
Whoever as merchant by good wares at fair prices brings producer and consumer together :
Whoever as professional man rates the character, health, prosperity, of parishioners, patients, clients above popularity, station or fee :
Whoever as scientist prizes truth above fame or gain :
Whoever as teacher enjoys the mental growth of his students more than the spread of his own reputation :
Whoever as o\sTier treats his wealth as a Hability to be invested, spent and given in such proportions as on the whole will do most good :
Whoever as giver helps the recipients to become in turn also givers :
Whoever as fighter maintains good will toward his enemies on all points save the few on which he believes them to be wrong :
Whoever as writer makes his readers love good and hate evil :
134" THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Whoever as artist sets things as they are in the fair light of things as they should be :
Whoever as taxpayer takes positive pleasure in bearing his full, fair share of community burdens :
Whoever as citizen votes to his private injury when private and public advantage conflict :
Whoever as office-holder rates efficiency and service above honors and emoluments:
Whoever as reformer wins the hate of men who know him for the sake of men whom he never will know :
Whoever as man, wherever he touches the world, makes his fellow-men and himself equal objects of Good Will.
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE
"She will have left an inspiring example to posterity. She has lost everything, but she has saved her own soul, and she has saved the liberties of Europe." Charles Sarolea, How Belgium Saved Europe, p. 194.
The lesson from which the text is taken is too long and detailed to quote at length. I will summarize the substance of it : giving in the author's own words only the conclusion.
Of sacrifice on a large and conspicuous scale there is no more shining modern example than the action of Belgium at the outbreak of the great war, as it is set forth by Sarolea in his *'How Belgium Saved Europe." Territorially the smallest nation of Europe ; half Flem- ish, half Walloon ; half plain, half mountain ; half agricultural, half manufacturing; half CathoHc, half agnostic; neutral and protected in its neutraHty by treaty; this nation so recently ruled by the execrable Leopold II, this little peace-loving nation, was given
13s
136 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
the twelve hours of night between seven in the evening and seven in the morning to make the most momentous decision in all her history. On the one side was the promise, if the word of a treaty-breaking, consciously wrong-doing nation can be called a promise, of the integrity of the Belgian kingdom, prompt evacuation of her territory and indemnification for damage. On this side was physical Hfe, material comfort and unin- terrupted prosperity. On the other side was the horror of an unequal war; the devastation of her country by a policy of studied and systematic frightfulness ; death for thousands of her sons ; poverty, starvation, or exile for millions of her citizens. Yet rather than sacrifice nationaUty to the risk of absorption by an aggressive, hateful and domineering autocracy; rather than sacri- fice treaty rights and the civiHzation that rests upon them to the ambitions of treaty-breaking militarism, Belgium, single-handed and unsupported through those terrible days of August, 19 14, cheerfully, unitedly, patriotically, religiously sacrificed the material to the spiritual ; the individual to the social ; the national to the international ; and gave her little but essential contribution to the cause of humanity and liberty, democracy and essential Christianity, in the hour of its greatest danger. Belgium has suffered the loss of
THE COST OF GOOD WILLI SACRIFICE 137
all things — all save her soul. But, in consequence of her sacrifice, there is still hope for the cause of national liberty and international honor ; there is still hope for a peace too strong in the aUiance of federated nations for any one nation however autocratic and militaristic and perverse to break ; and there is the certainty that Httle Belgium has risen to rank with Palestine and Greece among the nations whose heroism has helped to save the world, advance the cause of civilization, and reveal anew the Godlike capacities of our common human nature.
Now that the tremendous sacrifice in blood and treas- ure, in the comforts of home and the shrines of art and religion has been made, we can all see that through this sacrifice Belgium has won a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory than could have come through a thousand years of ease-loving self-indulgence. As Mr. Sarolea says : —
''In order to understand the dogged resistance of the Belgians we must appeal to the deepest instincts of man, to the elemental impulses of Hberty, and perhaps still more must we appeal to the higher motives of out- raged justice, to the moral consciousness of right and wrong. Until we take in the fact that from the begin- ning the struggle was lifted to a higher plane, we shall
138 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
fail to understand the true significance of the war. From the beginning the war was to the Belgian people much more than a national war: it became a Holy- War. And the expression 'Holy' War must be under- stood not as a mere literary phrase, but in its literal and exact definition. The Belgian war was a crusade of Civilization against Barbarism, of eternal right against brute force."
*'So true is this that in order adequately and clearly to realize the Belgian attitude, we are compelled to illustrate our meaning by adducing one of the most mysterious conceptions of our Christian religion, the notion of vicarious suffering. In theological language, Belgium suffered vicariously for the sake of Europe. She bore the brunt of the struggle. She was left over to the tender mercies of the invaders. She allowed herself to become a battlefield in order that France might be free from becoming a shambles. She had to have her beautiful capital violated in order that the French capitol might remain inviolate. She had to submit to vandaHsm in order that humanity elsewhere might be vindicated. Belgium will have lost every- thing. The material damage, the destruction of thou- sands of cities and villages, the total collapse of industry and trade are incalculable. The damage to the monu-
THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE 1 39
ments, sacred to art and religion, is not only incalcu- lable but irreparable. The sufferings inflicted upon millions of people baffle imagination, but the moral and spiritual gain is equally inestimable. Belgium will have proved to all the world her determination and her right to exist as a free nation. She will have earned the sympathy and admiration of the whole world. She will have left an inspiring example to posterity. She has lost everything, but she has saved her own soul ; and she has saved the liberties of Europe."
If newspaper correspondents and secular writers rise to the heights of such a spiritual interpretation of current events, the Christian preacher cannot afford to preach sacrifice as merely an exceptional ancient transaction : he must measure the life of men and na- tions to-day by the same high standard, and proclaim an ever deepening and widening sacrifice.
The principle of sacrifice is as fundamental and uni- versal as the laws of arithmetic. It is inherent in the very nature of choice: which cannot take one of two or more alternatives without sacrificing the others. We have already seen that sin is the sacrifice of the greater to the lesser good ; and that service involves the sacrifice of the lesser to the greater good. In every specific form of service there is latent or explicit the
I40 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
sacrifice of some minor competing goods. Under the names of temperance — the cutting off of competing pleasure, and courage — the taking on of incidental pain, the Greeks taught the same lesson. Without sacrifice it is impossible to choose : impossible to take a single step in moral and spiritual living.
Yet fundamental and universal as sacrifice is in the spiritual Hfe, it should never be presented as an end in itself, nor carried beyond the limits set by Good Will. For Good Will cares for us no less than for those we serve ; and sacrifice beyond the point reasonable and efficient service requires is sour and silly asceticism. Hence preaching and practice should always emphasize, not the lesser good foregone, but the greater good achieved. Still sacrifice is so essential to the service of Good Will, and so likely to be either underdone or overdone, that its universal necessity and its reasonable limits will be the frequent theme of the preacher. And we shall get a concrete and vital, as distinct from abstract and theoret- ical insight into the laws and the limits of sacrifice if at the outset we follow, even at the risk of partial repeti- tion, some of the same relations as in the previous chapter on service : drawing out in each case the sacrifice that is latent in the service ; and showing how the efficiency of the service sets a limit to the extent of the sacrifice.
THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE 141
The worker who does his work with an eye to the consumer's benefit, will have to sacrifice in labor the difference between the amount required to make a poor article that will barely "get by," and a standard article that is sound, durable, and serviceable. That difference measures the portion of the Cross of Christ he has to bear.
On the other hand, to do one's work so nicely that one loses on every contract, cannot afford to buy tools, cannot pay his bills, as is the case with the over-con- scientious carpenter who planes both side of plank for a plank walk, or the housewife who keeps house so immaculately that she has no time or strength left to entertain, is to defeat in large measure the very ends at which reasonable sacrifice aims. To give all the work Good Will requires in its consideration of the benefits of our work to customer and consumer, and to stop working precisely when that point is reached, is the fine art of the Christian worker's sacrifice in con- nection with his work.
The player who plays fair sacrifices a good many games he might win by unfair means. That is his part of the Cross of Christ. Yet it is a mistake to go as far as one eminent university president did in dis- countenancing curved pitching on the ground that it
142 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
was intended to deceive the batter. Strategy with its incidental deception is an essential part of such games as baseball and football : and to cut that out would defeat the whole object and enjoyment of the game. When the theater, dancing, cards, billiards in any particular community have become so misused that their predominant effect on those who participate in them is degrading and demoralizing, it may then and there be part of the sacrifice Good Will requires to give them up. But wherever they can be reclaimed to their legitimate uses of recreation and wholesome social inter- course, then their reclamation rather than their renuncia- tion is the more acceptable sacrifice to Good Will. The use and enjoyment of these amusements up to the point where they predominantly injure others or ourselves, is a much finer and harder Christian art than either their excessive indulgence or their total repudiation.
The Christian employer of labor must sacrifice what- ever part of his profits and his time is necessary to make his relations with his employees brotherly and sym- pathetic; the conditions of their work sanitary; and their remuneration just. No employer can enjoy Good Will on less sacrificial terms.
At the same time he is not called upon ordinarily to give his employees so much that he bankrupts his busi-
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 43
ness; fails to provide for lean years, depreciation, and fluctuations in demand. He is not called ordinarily to be so extremely sacrificial that he ceases to be an employer and becomes an employee. To remain an employer and still be a Christian ; at least until there is a radical revolution in our methods of production and distribution, is the fine art which Good Will requires of the Christian employer. The preacher as a rule does not know enough about manufacturing and merchan- dising to draw that fine fine where reasonable sacrifice ends and suicidal bankruptcy begins : but he should know enough about the sacrificial principle and its limitations to help the Christian employer to draw that fine for himself and his business as Good Will directs.
The Christian employee as his part of the cross of Christ must give up sabotage, soldiering, maHngering ; all malice and uncharitableness toward his employer. He must regard his employer as a brother whose inter- ests are as precious to him as his own. Good Will, however, does not call upon him to take whatever wages and submit to whatever conditions his employer, whether individual or corporation, may seek to impose upon him. Good Will includes the workingman's rights as well as his duties ; and warrants him in insisting on the
144 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
right to unite; the right to collective bargaining; the right to compensation for accident ; and the right to decent conditions of labor. It is better for society and better for the employer in the long run, as well as better for the workingman that he should have these rights : and the preacher of Good Will is bound to stand by him and encourage him in all reasonable and unmalicious ways in which he seeks to secure and maintain his rights. Needless oppression ; needlessly low wages ; needless unsanitary conditions of labor are no part of the cross Good Will imposes on the workingman. It asks no workingman to be content with his wages unless those wages represent under prevailing conditions his fair share of the combined product of labor, capital, risk, and skill of superintendence. And it does not require him to be content with prevaihng conditions, if he is — not sentimentally desirous — but reasonably sure of a practicable better economic order which would give fairer distribution without vastly lessened production. All the workingman is called upon to sacrifice is his laziness, his selfishness, his malice, his hostility, his recklessness and irresponsibility. Whatever Good Will for him, for his employer, and for society per- mits, he is at liberty to pursue with all his might. Only what Good Will forbids toward society, toward
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 145
his employer, toward himself, is he as a Christian employee called on to forego.
The Christian merchant's share in the cross of Christ is the sacrifice of all profits over and above his fair reward for bringing commodities to the customer at the time and place, of the quahty and quantity desired. Such re- ward must include interest on capital, risk, loss on unsold goods and bad bills, skill, taste, and many other things besides the money and labor cost of keeping and selhng the articles sold. But extra profits on inferior goods : extra profits on misrepresentation; extra profits on taking unfair advantage of monopoly or the customer's ignorance ; extra profits secured in any way which in- volves treating the customer in a way he would not be willing to be treated if he knew all the facts : extra profits in short due to any act or attitude inconsistent with Good Will toward both merchant and customer, the merchant must forego who would Hve as a Christian in the fellowship of Good Will. The banker, the land- lord, the promoter, all who exchange one valuable thing or certificate of value for another come under this search- ing requirement of the Christian merchant. To sell for more than, all things justly and broadly considered, the buyer would wilHngly pay ; in other words for more than Good Will would have him pay ; is to cease to be
L
146 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
a Christian. But that requirement, severe and search- ing as it is, leaves ample room for large returns for large and valuable service in the difficult spheres of exchange and distribution. Even on these terms a Christian merchant may make a great deal of money. Good Will gives him his just dues.
Judged by Christian standards, in the hght of Good Will, there is not the sharp difference between the pro- fessional man and the ordinary laborer or business man which is usually drawn. Like every worker and trader the lawyer, physician or preacher is bound by Good Will to give for a fair and reasonable fee or salary his best services. The only difference is as we have seen that the professional man, by virtue of his long and costly technical training, is an expert, while his clients, patients and parishioners are not : and consequently they cannot judge as readily as the buyer of ordinary goods and services whether or not they are getting the best that skill and dihgence can give them, on terms which, count- ing cost, preparation and quaHty of service, are fair and reasonable. For that they are mainly dependent on the honor of the professional man. In that sense, and in that only, the professions are more honorable — re- quire and deserve on the average a higher type of honor — than other vocations. All workers, laborers, mer-
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 147
chants, manufacturers, professional men, to be Chris- tians, must charge for their services what Good Will for all concerned allows. But since those concerned have not as adequate abihty to check up the quality of the services and the reasonableness of the charges of the professional man, as they have in the case of non-pro- fessional workers, the professional man therefore stands to that extent in a Httle more intimate responsibility to Good Will. If he is not a Christian^ Good Will fails more completely of being done, and with less oppor- tunity for redress, than if non-professional men in their vocations are disobedient. The professional man, how- ever, is himself an object as well as a subject of Good Will, and reasonable provision for his own comfort, and the dignity of his profession, is part of his Christian service.
The scientist has his specific cross. Formerly astro- nomical, geological, biological truth ; to-day economic, political, social truth, is frequently unpopular ; clashing with ancient prejudices, vested interests, the mental inertia of the aged and the well-to-do. There are places where the speaking of the truth would deprive a man of his professor's chair, his pulpit, his poHtical office, his reputation, his HveHhood. The man who holds any of these things above truth has no part or lot in Good Will.
148 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
When a scholar's views clash with tradition, preju- dice, or profit, the sacrifice of everything inconsistent with the truth as he sees it, even if it be his reputation, his position, his living, must be made cheerfully and bravely as the price of continued fellowship with Good Will, with Christ, and with all sincere Christian men. The scholar, however, is not under obligation to carry a chip on his shoulder, and provoke popular animosity by defiant proclamation in aggressive form of every new view he comes to hold.
The teacher, the educational administrator, has a heavy cross to bear. Many schools, many so-called Christian colleges even, are honeycombed with shirk- ing, superficiality, compromise, unreality, inefficiency, favoritism, slipshod ways of instruction, finance and management. Good Will requires every teacher, super- intendent, principal, president so to carry its intellectual and moral standards; the genuine training of the stu- dents ; and the service to the community through them, on mind and heart, that whatever loss of popularity, loss of numbers, loss of athletic prominence those stand- ards and that training for service require will be cheer- fully borne as the price of being Christian. Most teachers in schools and many teachers in colleges have an amount and conditions of work put upon them which
THE COST OF GOOD WILL*. SACRIFICE 149
are inconsistent with giving their individual pupils all that they really need. But whoever as teacher accepts as his or her ideal anything less than the best for those pupils his time, training, strength and execu- tive ability enables him to give, becomes thereby un- christian. Judged by what Good Will requires adminis- trator and teacher to do for their pupils, and for society through them. Christian schools and colleges are still as rare as the sacrifices required to make them truly Christian are costly. At the same time the Christian teacher is not called upon to kill himself by overwork ; still less by worry. Good Will includes the teacher's welfare.
The cross of the rich Christian, as Jesus pointed out, is a pecuKarly heavy one. To make his money service- able to Good Will involves so much weighing of the worth of one investment against another ; of one bene- faction against another; of one expenditure against another; and of each investment against all benefac- tions and expenditures; of each benefaction against all investments and expenditures ; and of each expendi- ture against all investments and benefactions, that those of us who have little wealth may well breathe a sigh of relief. For not until the amounts and proportions of all these uses of property are — not infallibly, for that
150 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
is impossible — but conscientiously determined as Good Will for all concerned directs, can the rich man fully enter or remain in the Kingdom of Good Will. Investments that depend for profits on hard or dishonest dealings, benefactions prompted by rehef from importunity or desire for popularity, expenditures on self and family that do not represent in happiness and efficiency more value not only to them but to the world than would any practicable alternative, shut the door of the King- dom of Good Will in the rich man's face. Having more than others, he is called to sacrifice more : for apart from sacrifice no man can see God, or know Christ, or have fellowship with men and women who are really Christian.
At the same time the rich Christian is not ordinarily called upon to give away all his goods. That would be a much easier and a much more useless and mischiev- ous act in most cases, than to use them in proportionate service. Good Will includes the rich man's usefulness and happiness ; and reasonable care for that is part of his Christian task.
Whoever gives and is known to give assumes a seri- ous sacrifice of which the money given is often the least serious part. Multitudes of beggars, agents, repre- sentatives of benevolent causes swoop down upon him ;
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 151
and if he will give according to Good Will, he must sift these claims, dividing the unworthy from the worthy, making a scale of those which through merit, propin- quity or affinity with his own intelHgent interest, should take precedence. He will have to say *'no" oftener than '^yes." He will get more criticism than gratitude ; yet he must take it all good-naturedly and continue to give. For complaint, ingratitude, misunderstanding, is the price every giver has to pay for giving not where it is easiest and most popular; but where his judgment, interest and location make it possible to do most good and least harm.
Promiscuous, indiscriminate giving almost always does far more harm than good. The benefactor himself, as well as his beneficiaries, is dear to Good Will and is justified in protecting himself against perpetual impor- tunity, and the damage that giving without careful investigation into need, character and efficiency is almost sure to do. A Httle given discriminatingly and wisely is much more acceptable than much given promis- cuously and foolishly. The preacher, at the same time that he trains his wealthy and poor alike to give as an inescapable part of their sacrifice to Good Will, must do all in his power to protect them from irresponsible agents, lazy loafers, organizations that beg money and
152 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
maintain officers for obsolete or fantastic ends, and institutions that seek endowment in order to grow bigger rather than to be content with doing better the modest task to which their present funds are ad- equate.
The sacrifice of the Christian soldier, in addition to those which are inherent in the profession, and which every soldier must make, is the repression of all mahce toward those whom he fights. Good Will permits no *'Song of hate"; but requires that the hands be out- stretched in helpfulness to the enemy the instant he surrenders. As long as evil men and nations bring on unjust wars, good men and nations must stand ready to fight in self-defence and in defence of humanity and civiHzation : and while Good Will sets limits to hate and mahce it sets none to the energy and efficiency with which unavoidable war while it lasts shall be prosecuted. A man or nation, however, that fights where arbitration is a practicable substitute for war, fails utterly of the sacrificial spirit which is essential to fellowship in Good Will.
The writer and the artist are called to sacrifice the easy gain and cheap fame which can be had by any writer or artist of mediocre abihty who will play on the preju- dice or inflame the passions of bhnd and brutal men.
THE COST OF GOOD WILL*. SACRIFICE 1 53
Fame and gain come to the true artist and author; but there are stages in their careers when they must take less of these for the sake of more beauty, truth, purity and love. Apart from such sacrifice, actual at some time, potential at all times, no poet, painter, sculptor, can be spiritually great.
This however is not to say that harm to some may not be part, and a legitimate and inevitable part, of strong, brave handling of unpleasant facts. If the creative God in his Good Will permits incidental evil, as we well know he does, the creative artist and author cannot expect to escape the same conditions and the same necessity. Evil that is not chosen for its own sake, but accepted as the condition of greater good on the whole is no more culpable in the human artist than in the divine. This limitation on the sacrifice of artist and author leaves him all the freedom in his art a great artist needs and a good artist wants.
Sacrifice is an element in all personal relations. The deeper the relation, the higher the sacrifice. A friend is a second self : he doubles our joys and multiplies our interests. But his problems at the same time become our problems : his burdens our burdens : his disabilities our disabilities : his failings our failings : to be shared in sympathy, and removed by helpfulness. Friendship
154 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
that seeks only gain is not friendship, but selfishness posing in friendship's attire. The preacher must hold his people up to this sacrificial side of their friendships and affections.
The lover who lives and loves in Good Will must sacrifice all gratifications of passion that are inconsistent with the orderly and decent life of family and society; that would rob woman of her self-respect and social standing, and children of their birthright of physical health in a pure and happy home. In youth, and in the bachelorhood prolonged by the necessity of getting an economic footing before a family can be supported, this sacrifice, where the opportunities for indulgence are wide open and importunate ; where strain of work is intense ; and hours of leisure are either empty or filled with recre- ations that are suggestive and stimulative of passion, this sacrifice often seems a very heavy one to pay, day after day, year after year, through the period when physical vigor is at its maximum. Good Will however requires it : on no easier terms can Christian fellowship, and the complete self-respect that goes with it, be had. All honor to the splendid fellows, more numerous in America to-day than anywhere else in the world, or ever before, who have the strength and self-control to pay that heavy price ! They are God's chosen ones who
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 55
bear the brunt of civilization's battle with our unelimi- nated brutaUty.
In our admiration and our sympathy we must never forget or let them forget, that love in all its expressions is intrinsically good, not evil : and we must work by hospitality, social centers, wholesome and happy oppor- tunities for intimacy between young men and young women to make Hfe before marriage as normal as possible, and early marriage the privilege of as many as possible. It is not love or passion, or the natural attraction of the sexes for each other that we are called upon to sacrifice ; but its cruel perversions. To pure love that blesses all it touches there is no Hmit set by God's Good Will or man's just laws.
When friendship and love pass into marriage and found the family, the joy and gladness of life reach their highest point. Well-married husbands and wives come closest to heaven. But with the gladness come sorrows : with the joy, and as its counterpart, come the greatest sacrifices one is ever called on to make : harder in some respects even than the sacrifice of the soldier when he enlists for war. For when two persons rightly marry, each gives up not only exclusive ownership in the income of his property: but himself as a self-sufficient inde- pendent being. Henceforth, his property, however the
156 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
legal title may run, is common property : his inter- ests are predominantly common interests : his Ufe is a common life : what is good for both is the aim of each. Expenditures of time, money, strength : indulgences in amusements and recreation: risks in enterprise and investment which before were pardonable or even praise- worthy, now in competition with common interests and responsibilities become undesirable and even cul- pable. The glory of the new conjunct life condemns pretty much all that is exclusive in the old individualistic life. Both the man and the woman have become not merely new creatures; but one new creature in whom neither retains the old self.
The ideal of this relation is to have all things in com- mon : talking over expenditures, undertakings, pleas- ures, duties, until the will of both is expressed in every act and interest of each. The next best thing, often the best practicable, is that the mutual interest shall be acknowledged once for all in general terms: and then by allowances of money : free disposal of time : liberty in forming circles of acquaintance : opportunity for all kinds of social life : each shall trust the other, and be trusted in turn, to work out the details of such indi- vidual self-expression as shall enrich the common Hfe: and to renounce such ambitions, whether of clubs, or
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 57
dissipations, or speculations, as are merely divisive and tangential : taking one out of the family life in a way or to an extent inconsistent with enriched and enriching return.
The preacher should make his people appreciate, expect and prepare for this strain of readjustment as an inevitable part of the blessedness of married life. And in individual cases that seek or will accept his pastoral counsel he should help them and hold them to this inevitable sacrifice as the noble and costly side of the relation which he expects them to be too strong and brave to shirk in selfish querulousness, or evade in cow- ardly divorce.
Our greatest, if not our deepest blessings, come through our country: its institutions, its laws, its Hberties, its protection of person and property. Here again sacrifices commensurate with these great boons are required of every person who worthily receives them. Cheerful payment of one's full fair share of taxes; generous devotion of time and strength to the formation and promulgation of sound policies; faithful work at the primaries and the polls ; readiness at personal cost to seek and hold office oneself ; help to put the right men into office and to keep the wrong men out, are the least a man of Good Will should do as a citizen.
158 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Finally as the crown and consummation of this practi- cal devotion, day after day, year after year, in times of peace, comes the duty and privilege and glory of giving his life, or the life of husband or son, to the service of his country in just and righteous war. The man of Good Will however must rise higher than nationahsm in his patriotism. President Wilson at the close of his message in December, 191 5, called attention to the new era on which we have entered. It is the era in which we have had the greatness of world-concerns thrust upon our attention. We cannot think world-thoughts worthily without being prepared for whatever sacri- fice our world-responsibiHties may call. Not in readi- ness for aggression or insolent interference in the affairs of other nations: but in sympathy for all who are in disorder and oppression, we must be strong enough to render our reasonable and proportionate service; by peace wherever peaceful arbitration is possible : by war wherever righteous war is unavoidable. The nation that lives up to the Gospel of Good Will must accept the perpetual sacrifice which world-wide responsi- bility involves. On no easier or cheaper terms can any nation rise from nominal to vital Christianity. The more we prepare for war in this spirit, the more zeal- ous shall we be to avoid war, and wherever possible to
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 159
establish justice through arbitration and treaty. Here as everywhere sacrifice is not made for itself. The fearful sacrifice of war is one to be prepared for at all times : but actually to be made only when every device of patience, remonstrance, arbitration, and negotiation has proved unavaihng. To have military power is a national necessity : to use it save as a last desperate resort is a national disgrace. The Gospel of Good Will requires the Nation to bring reasonable military preparedness to the altar: but it bids the nation search earnestly in the thicket for the tangled ram of such conciliation as will save the actual sacrifice of its sons on the red altar of war. Every Christian nation must stand ready to do what Belgium did in 1914. But we hope and pray that the spread of the Gospel of Good Will may render the actual offering of so costly a sacrifice never again a national necessity. Sacrifice in every case is the obverse of service : the price we have to pay in private loss for personal or social gain. That price must be paid in each case up to the Hmit where more sacrifice would involve less effective service ; and less efficiency of the servant for future service. All the wealth and popularity that can be maintained without compromise of principle it is the Christian's duty to secure and maintain. For Good
l6o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Will includes him along with his country, his constitu- ents, his cause : and justifies him in taking for himself such remuneration and support as is not inconsistent with the best good of others and of all.
The supreme sacrifice is that of Jesus Christ: and it was made, Kke our sacrifices, in loyalty to his vocation and his personal relationships. He felt called to preach the Gospel of Good Will in a community and an age where formaHsm, legalism, Pharisaism were on the throne. To preach effectively this Gospel under these conditions was to bring down on his head the hatred, jealousy and spite of those who were wedded to and profiting by these false gospels. By keeping quiet, or by confining his ministry to remote rural regions, he could have escaped the enmity of the rulers at the nation's capital. Such a policy of self-protection, how- ever, would have made him false to his calHng ; unfaithful to the unshepherded sheep on whose superstitions the formalistic wolves were all too prone to prey. He refused to save himself by sacrificing the truth, and sacrificing his fellow-men who were entitled to hear the truth from his lips, and see it in his life. In fidelity to his vocation as the Son of Man, the typical repre- sentative of humanity, the Savior of the world, he pro- claimed his truth boldly, aggressively, persistently;
THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE l6l
and sacrificed his life to do it. So long as he could teach it more effectively by Kving than by dying, he post- poned his trip to Jerusalem ; and escaped out of the midst of his enemies. But when open attack at the cost of his Hfe was the most effective witness against error and for truth, he did not flinch from drinking the full cup of torture, ignominy, and death. True to his vocation as revealer and teacher of the highest spiritual truth, he laid down his life. For the full enjoyment of that Gospel, and its diffused spirit and multiplied fruits throughout the world, we are indebted to him and to his sacrifice. The preacher is abundantly justified in making that sacrifice the central theme in his preach- ing, provided he preaches it not merely as a sacrifice made once for all to appease an estranged God; but a sacrifice we must all repeat in faithful and heroic devo- tion to our daily tasks and social relationships.
VI
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL: THE CHRISTIAN VIRTUES
"My religion is very simple. I love God and all my brothers." Charles Rann Kennedy, The Servant in the House, p. 22.
These words of our text are spoken by Manson, who represents Christ. He comes into the Vicar's household in the disguise of a servant, and in the regular course of his service, and the conversations incidental to it, separates in that household the sheep from the goats. The text contains his separating principle. If Good Will for all your brothers is your aim you go to his right hand. If honors and emoluments, promotions and preferments for yourself are your aim, then even though those honors and emoluments happen to be ecclesiasti- cal, your place is on the left, and your destination the outer darkness.
There is in the play only one hopelessly lost soul — only one that even Christ can't save. He is James Ponsonby Makeshyfte, D.D., the Most Reverend the
162
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 63
Lord Bishop of Lancashire. And why can't Christ save him? Why does he turn him out of the house? Because his real motto is: ''Give as Httle, and grab as much as we can" ; because there are spheres of human Good which he despises; because he is unwilling to sit at the table with a working-man ; because he fails to include in his idea of good the welfare of the work- ing-man ; because his will is no bigger than his personal interests, and the dignities and emoluments of his eccle- siastical office. A man can't be as little as that, and share in the fellowship of Manson, Christ. For Christ's fellowship is not primarily an affair of learned lore, stained-glass windows, and ecclesiastical millinery: all of which the Bishop has in abundance : it is genuine love of God and all his brothers, which the Bishop utterly lacks.
The Vicar, the Reverend William Smythe, is half lost, half saved : and in the end is saved so as by fire. He has climbed to ecclesiastical preferment by taking unfair advantage of his poor brother whom he drove to a Hfe of dissipation : and by listening to the false and foolish advice of his ambitious wife, who loves him more than she loves God, and is more anxious to see him win a great reputation as scholar and preacher and churchman than to see him doing the greatest good to
1 64 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
his people. There is this sign of genuineness about him, however, that he heartily despises the Bishop, and can't endure to have the old hypocrite around poisoning the air of his house. Under Hanson's influence he becomes sincerely sorry for the wrong he has done his dissolute brother, Robert Smith, a humble scavenger. In the end he shakes off the selfishly ambitious influence of his too fond wife, joins his humble brother in doing the disagreeable and dirty work of cleaning out the church drain, because that happens to be what the people really need to have done. His repudiation of his wife's bale- ful influence is the turning point. She cares nothing for his real usefulness, everything for his preferment, as comes out in their conversation.
Auntie
{Now thoroughly afraid.) What do you mean by the
truth, William?
Vicar
I mean this : What is the building of this church to
you? Are you so mightily interested in architecture,
in clerical usefulness, in the furtherance of God's work ?
Auntie I am interested in your work, William. Do you take me for an atheist?
by-products of good will 165
Vicar No : far worse — for an idolater !
Auntie
William —
Vicar
What else but idolatry is this precious husband-wor- ship you have set up in your heart — you and all the women of your kind ? You barter away your own souls in the service of it : you build up your idols in the fashion of your own respectable desires : you struggle silently amongst yourselves, one against another, to push your own god foremost in the miserable httle pantheon of prigs and hypocrites you have created !
Auntie (Roused.) It is for your own good we do it !
Vicar Our own good ! What have you made of me ? You have plucked me down from whatever native godhead I had by gift of heaven, and hewed and hacked me into the semblance of your own idolatrous imagination ! By God, it shall go on no longer ! If you have made me less than a man, at least I will prove myself to be a priest !
Auntie Do you call it a priest's work to —
1 66 the gospel of good will
Vicar It is my work to deliver you and me from the bondage of lies ! Can't you see, woman, that God and Mammon are about us, fighting for our souls?
Auntie
{Determinedly.) Listen to me, William, listen to
me —
Vicar
I have listened to you too long !
Auntie You would always take my counsel before —
Vicar All that is done with ! I am resolved to be a free man from this hour — free of lies, free of love if needs be, free even of you, free of everything that clogs and hin- ders me in the work I have to do ! I will do my own
deed, not yours !
Auntie
{With deadly quietness.) If I were not certain of one
thing, I could never forgive you for those cruel words:
William, this is some madness of sin that has seized you :
it is the temptation of the devil !
Vicar It is the call of God !
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 67
Yet even the ambitious wife is saved after much protestation. When the Vicar finally joins his humble brother, takes off his coat and sets about the dirty and dangerous work of cleaning out the drain, she is brought to give him her blessing, "God's might go with you, William! Accept him, Christ!" and she is last seen taking with one hand her husband's hand, and with her other hand the hand of his humble and formerly wronged and despised scavenger brother, so that the three form a kind of cross.
The real church Manson or Christ is building, the church Robert, the drain-digger, belongs to, the church to which he and Manson win his Vicar brother and his ambitious wife, ''ain't psalms, and 'ymns and old maids' tea parties, mind you"; it is "no dead pile of stones and unmeaning timber; no aggregation of Gothic arches and stained-glass windows."
"When you enter it you hear a sound as of some mighty poem chanted. Listen long enough, and you will learn that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of the nameless music of men's souls — that is, if you have ears. If you have eyes, you will presently see the church itself — a looming mystery of many shapes and shadows, leaping sheer from floor to dome; the work of no ordinary builder !
1 68 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
" The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of he- roes : the sweet human fiesh of men and women is moulded about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable : the faces of Httle children laugh out from every cornerstone: the terrible spans and arches of it are the joined hands of comrades; and up in the heights and spaces there are inscribed the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world. It is yet building — building and built upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep dark- ness: sometimes in blinding light: now beneath the burden of unutterable anguish : now to the tune of a great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of thunder. Sometimes in the silence of the night-time one may hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades at work up in the dome — the comrades that have climbed ahead."
Robert Smith, the dissipated scavenger brother, understands and is drawn to that church. "I think I begin to understand you, comride, especially that bit abaht the 'ammerins an' the harches. S'pose there's drain 'ands wanted in that there church o' yours?" He goes in to dig the drains. With all his bad record he has two redeeming traits. He is tender to his long- lost, new-found daughter, and he works — works for the good he can do. "I work — and work well ; that's
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 69
more than some of 'em can say — and I don't get much money for it either." When reminded by the Vicar of the stench and horror and darkness of his drain dig- ging, he replies, ''What's it matter, if the comrides up above 'av' Hght an' joy an' a breath of 'olesome air to sing by? 'Igh in the dome, the 'ammerins of the comrides as 'av' climbed aloft ! " And when the Vicar in deepest penitence says, ''I call myself nothing: I am nothing — less than nothing in all this living world," Robert, proud of the place in the service of the whole his humble vocation gives him, exclaims, ''But I call myself summat — I'm the Drain-Man, that's what I am." His place and function of service, his humble share in doing God's Good Will, makes him brother of Manson, the Servant in the House — Christ.
That is a Gospel every right-minded man in the world accepts as soon as he clearly sees it. Of course it is hard to give a twenty-minute sermon the clearness and force of a well-acted two- and- a-half -hours play. But if we take the same theme ; show the greatness and glory of Good Will however humbly done; we shall get something of that response which this great play wherever presented has evoked. Good Will, whether in a play or sermon, is the only thing big enough to make a thoughtful man give all his little self possesses in happy
170 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
whole-hearted exchange. All the Christian virtues flow out of this love for God and all one's brothers: this devotion to their real good regardless of the honors and emoluments one's service to them may involve.
Christian character, and all its constituent virtues, are by-products of Hving in Good Will. To aim at character directly; to cultivate the Christian virtues like Benjamin FrankHn, giving one day to patience, another to chastity, another to generosity, is to miss altogether the Christian point of view, and become a conceited prig. If we trust and serve Good Will, all these graces will come trooping after us. But if sought directly they fly beyond our reach.
The most characteristic Christian virtue is modesty; or as the New Testament calls it meekness, humility, poverty of spirit, not being puffed up. One who sees how vast is Good Will; what splendid achievements it is making ; and how much remains to be done ; will come to see how small and how imperfect is his little contribution to the great whole. A young Christian, like a novice at any work or sport, may be filled with self-importance, and say and do things to show off his newly acquired accomplishments. But it is the sure mark of the novice — this self-centered, self-conscious air of importance and superiority. He who has come
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 171
to admire Good Will in Christ and his fellow- Christians, and has learned to measure himself by that perfect standard, will understand how far his best achieve- ments fall short of it; and will be modest as a matter of course ; as the inevitable corollary of the plain fact of his manifold shortcomings. Whoever like the Bishop in the play is proud and puffed up, has failed to see Good Will and his own true place far below its high require- ments. To cultivate modesty directly is impossible : for the more we think we have of it, the less modest we are. But Good Will, by its contrast with our imperfect wills, induces modesty. The preacher will teach his people to measure themselves and each other by that searching standard.
Purity of heart is likewise directly unattainable. The more we dwell on it, the more we are conscious by contrasts of the lusts over which purity is the victory. Dwelling on it even for the purpose of preaching it to others is spiritually ultra-hazardous. The more we think about purity the less pure we become. As Pascal says, ''Few persons think of modesty modestly, or of chastity chastely." On the contrary, if we live in Good Will for all men and women, out of that thought will flow a reverent and tender regard for all that concerns their welfare : most tender and most reverent in refer-
172 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ence to those sacred instincts and functions on which the perpetuation of the race through the union of the sexes is so beautifully based. The Christian preacher will seek purity for his people, not by exhortation to it, but by deepening their reverence for Good Will in its provision for love as the fountain of life.
Gentleness is a sickly, sentimental affair when culti- vated for its own sake ; and marks the mollycoddle and the sissy. Hard, coarse, rough brutality is more manly. But the gentleness that comes of keeping before one's eyes and in one's heart Good Will is strong and firm. It refuses to hurt another's feelings, not from fear or weakness, but because that other person is a child of the Father, a brother or sister of Christ, an actual or potential agent of Good Will. To harm another by word or deed is to hurt what is dear to oneself — a stupid contradiction. From one in whom Good Will dwells, no harsh act, no cross look, no cruel word will come: because such acts and looks and words contradict the Good Will which is one's inmost principle of life. To be sure we have lapses here more than elsewhere; for our looks and tones and acts reflect too often not what we permanently mean to be ; but what we lapse into in unguarded moments. Yet if these be promptly fol- lowed by repentance and the request for forgiveness,
'BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 73
they cannot destroy the gentleness which is what every disciple of Good Will seeks to express. The preacher, then, will preach not gentleness directly ; but the devo- tion to Good Will out of which gentleness inevitably flows.
Charitableness Hkewise, when cultivated directly, is an easy-going, indifferent, almost effeminate quality. But when it comes as the result of living in Good Will for others, it is at once keenly critical and kindly merci- ful toward their faults and failings. The Christian sees in his brother's failing a defeat of Good Will for him : and he cannot help being sorry, and hoping for better things next time. He cannot rejoice in another's iniq- uity ; both he and his brother are included in the Good Will which it is his precious privilege to serve. Good Will therefore is the seed of which charitableness is the fruit.
Cheerfulness, or as the New Testament calls it, hope, is another Christian grace which the preacher cannot profitably exhort his people to cultivate, but which will surely follow wherever Good Will is preached persua- sively. Accident, sickness, poverty, loneliness, unpopu- larity, failure, sin, bereavement, death — one or more of these evils confront us most of the time : no one can escape them altogether. Earthquake, tornado, vol-
174 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
cano, conflagration, flood, insect pests, war, unemploy- ment, over-production, imperfect distribution, robbery, theft, failure of employers or debtors, breakdown of character of those in whom our lives are bound up, events wholly or largely beyond our foresight and con- trol, bring upon us suffering and loss. If we are merely children of nature, desiring the good things these mis- fortunes take away, then we shall be at the mercy of these accidents, bereft and comfortless.
The Christian preacher, however, offers the sufferer a chance to serve and share Good Will. Here in human history, in human hearts, in human homes, in Christ and the spirit of Christian men and women, in ourselves so far as we are Christian, we see, and taste, and touch and handle a Good Will which would not willingly sub- ject those whom it loves to suffering. This is the best thing we know in the world. Therefore we believe it is the purpose for which the world was made. We know that we cannot shield those we love from all these incidental and accidental evils. We do not know or believe that God could do it in a world like this, where finite forces follow their own unvarying laws, and finite wills follow their own always imperfect and often per- verse devices. Good Will is not omnipotent in the sense that it can produce any specific result it pleases,
, BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 75
regardless of the conditions of life in a rational and law- abiding world. Prayer which rests on and fosters that delusion is perverse ; fatal to true worship and rational comfort. If getting what we happen to want out of an arbitrarily omnipotent God is the kind of comfort his people crave, then the frank and honest thing for the preacher to say is that there is no such comfort to be had ; and the persons who are weak and foolish enough to ask for it, would not be worthy of it, even if it were to be had. No : God's Good Will is conditioned by the rational laws of its own uniform and beneficent opera- tion. It can achieve supernatural results; but they are supernatural in the sense of being above what the merely natural heart of man could accomplish ; not in being above what law will permit.
Good Will is still at work in the world and at war with evil, even when evil strikes us most severely. It is blessing others, even when in some few particular re- spects the general order it permits hurts us : and we can rejoice in its blessing of others ; help it on ; and so share its outgoing to others ; be its agents ; have it in our hearts. And if we are fruitful, and keep on having Good Will toward others ; in due time others who have Good Will, will recognize a kindred spirit in us and welcome us as brothers and sisters in its fellowship and
176 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
service. Giving it to others ; receiving it from others in return; we shall live more and more in it; and thus become more and more sure of it. Whatever accident or evil man may take away, this experience of being both object and subject of Good Will remains, and grows. We can be for Good Will at all times : and we can be assured that Good Will at all times is for us: and if that be for us, and we for it; nothing that happens can be effectively against us, or separate us from our fellowship with God, with Christ and with our fellow- Christians. We can join hands in cleaning out the drains, like the saved souls in the play : and in doing it we can be as happy as Robert Smith.
To be sure this fellowship in Good Will cannot readily be extemporized in time of trouble. Those who are not ready when the invitation comes cannot go in to the feast. Those who desired only things, and lose those things they desired, lose all ; and naturally are comfort- less. But those who, with the things they had, also had Good Will as the spirit of their Hves; doing its service, sharing with others its fellowship, have some- thing so much better than things, while they have things, that the best part of their life remains when the things they had are by accident or misfortune taken away. To purchase this pearl of great price they are willing to
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 77
part with all their other possessions. No misfortunes can leave him bereft who keeps Good Will in his own heart; and shares with and receives from others this same precious treasure.
Sickness may take away certain powers and forms through which one has expressed and enjoyed Good Will : but it cannot rob one who really has Good Will in his own heart, and rejoices to recognize it in the hearts of his fellows, of this his most valued possession. Indeed sickness often brings out within one a devotion to and appreciation of Good Will which health, and the absorption in routine health permitted, had failed to develop. Health can express Good Will in most ways so much more effectively than sickness, either acute or chronic, that one who has it in his heart will take every reasonable precaution to be well and keep well. Yet when sickness comes, whether from exposure, or overstrain, or contagion, or one's own folly, he will find in more patient cheerfulness; in increased gratitude ; in deepened tenderness, ways in which he may in part make up, and sometimes more than make up, for the forms of serving Good Will which the sickness has rendered temporarily or permanently impossible.
The rest, trust, peace, and patience which Good Will imparts to the heart in which it dwells, does much
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to hasten recovery and avert disease. A man or woman who regards himself or herself as the son or daughter, agent and embodiment of Good Will in the world, with some of its specific work to do and love to manifest, will be so regular in exercise, temperate in diet, restful in sleep, moderate in work, that he or she will not have a twentieth part of the ailments that overtake the man or woman who is bent on self-indulgence, or per- sonal ambition, or social preferment, or mere business success. Christianity of this sort, altogether apart from any special theories about the nature of disease or the unreahty of matter, is the greatest health-giver and life-preserver in the world. Good Will is a Gospel which, if faithfully preached and practiced, for the most part keeps its adherents well and strong ; and yet when sickness does overtake them makes them patient and cheerful to bear it.
The Christian preacher must also show his people how to be contented in whatever state they are. Pov- erty has its consolations for one who is in Good Will. The Christian, to be sure, can express more Good Will with ample furniture of fortune than without it. He can keep workmen steadily and remuneratively employed : educate his children : support good causes and reforms : help the poor: provide for the old age of himself and
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 79
his family so much better with money than without it, that for the sake of these ends, all of which are precious in the sight of Good Will, he will earn and save and invest all that he can consistently with the claims that come upon him from day to day. Yet just because he seeks and holds his wealth not for itself ; and not for himself considered as a selfish individual ; but for Good Will, and for himself as its agent, the best part of his wealth — the end it serves — will remain with him, even if he fails to secure the wealth ; or if, after securing it, he loses it. Good Will, though in some ways it can be better served by the rich, in other ways can be effectively served by the poor. Sympathy, affection, appreciation are often better gifts and better services than those money can buy ; and these the poor are often able to give more generously and naturally than the rich. The preacher will teach his people that if they really live in and for Good Will, riches or poverty, though not as the Stoics would say indifferent, is yet a minor matter. Wealth honestly gained and justly and gener- ously used is preferable, and on the whole more service- able; but poverty is also endurable, even welcome, as developing sympathies and charities which wealth too often stifles and stunts.
Finally the Christian who lives in Good Will develops
l8o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
an efficiency, an economy, a serviceableness which, not always but frequently; not universally but generally, makes him friends ; finds him employment ; brings him recognition, help, support ; and tends to take away his poverty. All these things Good Will tends to add unto the man or woman who cheerfully, diligently, faith- fully, generously gives to its service what he has, be that little or much. Robert in the play gets his daughter, his brother, and even his formerly supercilious sister-in- law in return for the humble service he renders.
The man who is trying to do right in a world that is going wrong is often like Elijah afi&icted with a sense of loneliness. It is the preacher's privilege to show him that he is serving, not an unrealized ideal, but God's slowly coming, surely conquering Good Will, which generations before him have served ; which millions of his contemporaries are serving, and which generations after him will serve ; and that he has a great and grow- ing companionship with Christ and an innumerable company of fellow- Christians. Nor will the minister permit this companionship in Good Will to remain per- manently one-sided. He will make sure that this man is recognized, appreciated, befriended, loved, by some other sons and daughters of Good Will, and welcomed into the intimacy of a friendship founded on this common bond.
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL l8l
The man who lives in and works for Good Will at times gets criticised, makes himself unpopular: and is persecuted for righteousness' sake. All manner of evil is said against him falsely ; because there are sure to be persons with whose interests his service of Good Will fails to coincide. All the ultra-conservatives in politics and religion ; all the thoughtless and reckless radicals ; all the grafters; all the selfishly sensitive; all the sillily sentimental ; all the hypocrites ; all the Scribes and Pharisees ; all the Bishop Makeshyftes, at one time or another are bound to be against the man who disin- terestedly and conscientiously makes Good Will his principle of conduct. Woe to him if these people speak well of him ; for it is a sure sign that Good Will is feebly apprehended and timidly performed. To be alone and to be reviled is hard. But to be sure that one is saying and doing what Good Will, and all its honest and en- lightened sons, desire one to say and do, is not to be alone; but to have the support and approval of the best company on earth and in heaven. Living in such high and wide fellowship, one can stand the criticism and condemnation of those who are out of it ; or only im- perfectly and unintelligently in it. Here again, usually but not always, in the long run the man who consist- ently does the Good Will soon or late comes to have
1 82 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
his integrity recognized; comes to be loved by those who share with him the same high service; and even to be respected by the very men whom he disinterestedly opposes ; and who from self-interest continue to oppose and maltreat him. It is the preacher's richest privilege to give the man who is persecuted for righteousness' sake the assurance and the experience of this divine and human support.
Failure is much harder to bear than criticism. To work long and hard ; to do one's best ; and then from one's own miscalculation, or defect, or blunder; or from the ingratitude, greed or treachery of others to fail of the result at which one aims, is very hard to bear. If that is the whole story it is almost unendurable. Yet to the man who lives in Good Will that is not the whole story. He may fail to secure the specific object at which he aimed; but the preacher stands before him and by his side to assure him that he cannot fail to be in Good Will, unless by his own fault he falls out of it. The effort he puts forth counts as just so much added strength to the cause of Good Will in the world. The training acquired in this defeat ; the influence exerted ; the protest registered ; will all be helpful in the renewal of the same general campaign at other points and at later dates. No effort put forth in the service of Good
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 83
Will can ever be lost. As the location of the ball on the gridiron at any given time, and the final score, are the resultants of all the efforts put forth on both sides ; on the side of the losers as well as on the side of the winners ; so the preacher will tell men Good Will is stronger, and its triumph sooner, in consequence of every ounce of energy, every unit of resolution, every atom of intelli- gence any defeated man has put forth in its behalf. Many battles may be lost ; many soldiers may be slain ; many captains may be vanquished : but the campaign, the cause. Good Will goes marching on: and every faithful fighter in its behalf; every honest worker in its service, has his share in the conquest he helps to achieve. Even his partial and temporary failure con- tributes its part to hasten the eternal and total triumph. And here too whoever keeps on fighting and working in Good Will draws soon or late to his side supporters and comrades with whose aid he makes his defeats progressively less, and his victories increasingly fre- quent.
Every man has defects and handicaps, makes blun- ders, says and does foolish things of which he is heartily ashamed. Yet if one is heartily devoted to Good Will, and sure of his place in its favor, even his acute mistakes and chronic failings cannot cast him down. Here or
1 84 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
there, again and again, he may be a discredit to himself and to the Good Will he seeks to serve. But the preacher is there by his side to tell him that Good Will is so magnanimous ; its service is so varied ; that no man is so awkward and clumsy, so stupid or ill- trained, so inefficient and incompetent, but that on many sides and in many ways outwardly, and altogether in his heart inwardly, he can be its useful, honorable servant and well-beloved son. The preacher will tell him that if a man makes up his mind and sets his heart to count oneness with Good Will the supreme thing for which he cares ; the one thing on which he stakes his happiness : he will find that no physical disabilities; no mental weaknesses ; no social disqualifications ; no spiritual dulness, can separate him from what he most desires. The only disqualification that can exclude the humblest from the wedding feast is the deliberate neglect to put on the wedding garment that is freely offered to all invited guests — the garment of Good Will.
In addition to our own sins and the sorrow and shame they bring, we have to bear the effects of the sins of others : the sins of a dishonest partner ; the sins of an unfaithful or drunken husband ; the sins of a dissolute son or a wayward daughter ; the sins of competitors who make honest dealing almost financially suicidal;
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 185
the sins of slanderers that destroy our good name ; the sins of employers who break down our health ; the sins of rulers that misrepresent us and plunge us into extrav- agance, or debt, or war.
If we are mere children of nature, craving the good things of which the sins of others deprive us, we shall be soured, embittered, dejected, comfortless. But the preacher is ordained to assure us that if we beUeve in Good Will, working for the good of us and of others; if we enter eagerly, generously, bravely into its service, we shall have its fellowship and cheer ; and that is so much deeper and stronger and sweeter than anything any wrong-doer can take from us that we shall be opti- mists even in an environment in which to all outward appearance everything makes for pessimism.
The wives of drunken and brutal husbands ; the hus- bands of insincere and ostentatious wives ; the employees of heartless corporations and the employers of shiftless help ; merchants who are crushed by cruel competition ; investors who are fleeced by unscrupulous manipulators ; friends who are alienated by mischief-makers; lovers who are separated by worldly parents or gossiping mis- chief-makers : — all who suffer unjustly from the wrong- doing of others are welcome to enter through the open door of disinterested devotion the blessed fellowship
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of Good Will, and of all its sincere, simple, straight- forward disciples. Here is comfort free for all; which Good Will alone can give; and which no other man's evil will can ever take away. Whoever wishes to Hve in Good Will can have what he wishes for the asking. ''Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receive th; and he that seeketh findeth ; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Under- stood not of a future, far-off heaven; but of a present and intimate fellowship in Good Will, this and a host of kindred Scripture invitations become self-evident on the lips of the preacher who has the insight and tact to utter them at the right time and in the right way to the afficted persons who need to hear them.
Faith in immortality, grounded in faith in Good Will, is a distinctively Christian grace. Bereavement is the severest of the sufferings to which we are subjected, and for this the preacher must provide a comfort which is at once genuine and noble. Union based on mutual sharing of Good Will is the highest, hoHest, sweetest thing we know here on earth : and the more we ap- preciate it ; the more we live by it, in it, and for it, the surer we grow that it is the end for which the world exists and for which we were born ; and that the sepa-
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 187
ration of death cannot utterly defeat and destroy it. Proof in the sense of physical evidence of physical sur- vival, so tliat the physical order would be incomplete and contradictory without it, there is none. But we have moral and spiritual evidence of immortaUty in the sense that our highest and hoHest affections ; our deepest and tenderest aspirations ; our bravest and noblest sacri- fices would be put to permanent confusion and futility if what we hold so precious and strive so hard to be worthy of were withheld. In that case we should be better, kinder, braver, than the world of which we are a part. Good Will as reflected in human hearts would be left un- related to a kindred Good Will at the heart of things ; a mere temporary sport of chance coming from and going to an order inferior to itself, yet triumphing over it. This the greatest spirits of our race, those who have most fully entered into and worked for Good Will, stead- fastly refuse to believe. Expectation of eternal service and fellowship in Good Will gives him who has it such a dignity and worth ; such a strength and calm, that the experience of it in ourselves, or the appreciation of it in others, goes far to prove it ''too fair to turn out false." Most persons who, like Jesus and Paul, have suffered much and advanced far in this enlarging and uplifting fellowship simply cannot believe in, any more
l88 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
than they can will, the extinction of a life and love so precious. This assurance of faith, attested by the vast majority of the faithful, it is the preacher's honest privi- lege to offer for the comfort of all who mourn the loss through death of those whom the fellowship of Good Will had ennobled and endeared.
Our own certain death, if we are living in this faith, gives us no anxiety and no alarm. There as here, for- ever as now, we serenely trust Good Will to make a heaven which it will be our privilege to serve and share. For a heaven not upbuilt by the free and harmonious effort of many sons and servants of Good Will would be no heaven : and with no such work to do and cause to serve, neither Good Will, nor our wills a sharers of it, would have worth or meaning. For, as the ideaHsts teU us, to be or to exist at all means to fulfil purpose; and a purpose that makes the present Hfe noble, and requires eternity for its fulfilment, is the pledge and prophecy of a blessed immortality.
In addition to the idealistic evidence that immor- tality in Good Will is the only satisfactory fulfilment of the world-purpose, there is the pragmatic evidence that whoever hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as Good Will is pure. One cannot cherish the anticipation of an eternal life of perfect Good Will, and
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 189
at the same time cherish malice and pride and cruelty and greed and sloth.
This faith makes judgment automatic and inexorable. In the clear transparency of the spiritual world those who have Good Will are forever welcome to its fellow- ship : those who have the lurking grudge, the mean jealousy, the hollow insincerity, are automatically shut out.
Pictorial representations of this automatic judg- ment by Good Will, are found at the end of Plato's " Gorgias," and in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment. Phillips Brooks' sermon on "The Law of Liberty" also states it beautifully and convincingly.
"By this law we shall be judged. How simple and subhme it makes the judgment day ! We stand before the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch the closed Hps of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce our fate ; heaven or hell. The Hps do not open. The Judge just lifts His hand and raises from each soul before Him every law of constraint whose pressure has been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic na- ture of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's law of liberty becomes supreme. And each soul, with-
I go THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
out one word of condemnation or approval, by its own inner tendency, seeks its own place. They turn and separate, father from child, brother from brother, wife from husband, each with the old habitual restrictions lifted off, turns to its own ; one by an inner power to the right hand, another by a like power to the left; these up to heaven, and these down to hell. Do we need more? It needs no word, no smile, no frown. The freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated nature dictates its own destiny."
A partial foretaste of this final judgment those who live in Good Will achieve here and now, in the spiritual discernment with which they joyfully recognize and are recognized by a kindred Good Will in those of their fellows who have it : and perceive and pity the absence of it, and consequently the impossibility of spiritual fellowship, in those who have it not.
VII
GOOD W^LL IN SOCIETY: REFORM
"We all love power — to be on the winning side. You cannot help being there when you are fighting the slum, for it is the cause of justice and right. How then can you lose? And what matters it how you fare, your cause is bound to \\in. Every defeat in such a fight is a step towards victory, taken in the right spirit. In the end you will come out ahead. With a mother who prays, a wife who fills the house with song, and the laughter of happy children about me, all my dreams come true or coming true, why should I not be content ? In fact I know no better equipment for making them come true : faith in God to make all things possible that are right: faith in man to get them done: fun enough in between to keep them from spoiling or running off the track into useless crankery. An extra good sprinkling of that!" Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American, pp. 424-425 : 431-432.
With these passages from the " Making of an Ameri- can " for our text, we will go to the same happy warrior's ''The Battle with the Slum" for our lesson.
''The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it her enemy. It was a losing fight until conscience joined forces with fear and self-interest against
191
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it. When common sense and the golden rule obtain among men as a rule of practice, it will be over.
^' The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, pohtical freedom, brought on an acute attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too many of us had supposed that, built as our common- wealth was on universal suffrage, it would be proof against the complaints that harassed older states ; but in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that. Having solemnly resolved that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we shut our eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was as if a man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to bed with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula was all right, but merely repeating it worked no cure. When, after a hundred years, we opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the working- woman in our cities ; upon ' knee pants ' at forty cents a dozen for the making ; upon the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city life, ten per cent each year for the trench, truly the Lost Tenth of the slum. Our country had grown great and rich ; through our ports was poured food for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets mul-
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 1 93
titudes huddled in ignorance and want. The foreign oppressor had been vanquished, the fetters stricken from the black man at home ; but his white brother, in his bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a dis- tinct note of menace. PoUtical freedom we had won ; but the problem of helpless poverty, grown vast with the added offscourings of the Old World, mocked us, unsolved. Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently its stamp upon the government of our cities, and it became the scandal and the peril of our poHtical system.
''Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle has got to be fought, and fought out. For it is one thing or the other ; either we wipe out the slum, or it wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It cannot be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and surrender means the end of government by the people. We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue.
"In the battle with the slums we win or we perish. There is no middle way. We shall win, for we are not letting things be the way our fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to be won in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep on o
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fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits upon the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the brotherhood. As a man does in deaHng with his brother so it is the way of God that his children shall reap."
The slum is simply society's diseased tissue at its most inflamed point. What Mr. Riis says of it is true of the whole long list of poHtical, economic, social, and moral and international reforms.
Society is imperfect. It is never a complete expres- sion of Good Will. It is the resultant of Good Will on the one side, and of resisting matter and hard himian hearts on the other. There are usually two sides to a social question ; and some truth on each side. There are two ways of taking each side : one that is right and one that is wrong. Ordinarily it is not the preacher's business to tell his people which side of a debatable social question they shall take : but to show them how to take whichever side they join in the right and not in the wrong way.
For instance the preacher ought not to tell his people whether to vote the Republican or the Democratic ticket. If he attempts to do so he will antagonize good people in his congregation who honestly differ from him : and to that extent forfeit and deserve to forfeit his influence
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 1 95
over them for more important issues. He ought to draw a sharp Hne, not between Republicans and Democrats ; but between Christian RepubHcans and heathen RepubH- cans ; between Christian Democrats and heathen Demo- crats.
Who then is a Christian RepubHcan? and who is a heathen RepubHcan? Who is a Christian Democrat, and who is a heathen Democrat ?
A Christian Republican is a man who believes that Good Will calls for a strong centraKzed government, in which the power of the whole is made effective for the benefit of each part : in which the profit of the individual and the prejudice of the locality is sacrificed to the inter- est of all and the judgment of the nation. He is willing to pay a higher tariff to keep in employment working- men in whom he has no direct interest ; he is glad to pay a bigger tax to have forests conserved, deserts irrigated, rivers and harbors dredged, hundreds of miles from his home ; to have scientific researches prosecuted ; explora- tions made ; foreign policies maintained, and the mihtary and naval power requisite for their support developed. The Christian Republican desires the nation to do all the Good Will it can ; even at the expense of his pri- vate, local interests as a consumer of a particular com- modity ; as a dweller in this or that town or state ; as a
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member of this or that profession or vocation. To make Republicans Christian Republicans — Republicans who desire the nation to express all the Good Will it can, at whatever cost of taxation ; at whatever risk of corruption centrahzed power inevitably invites : beheving the benefi- cence on the whole outweighs the corruption ; and the good of the whole is greater than the cost to its constit- uent parts : — that is the preacher's duty to his Re- publican parishioners.
On the other hand, if there is in his congregation a Re- pubHcan who, just because he happens to be a manufac- turer of woollen or tin goods, does not care how much more his fellow-citizens have to pay for their coats and dinner pails, so long as that increase comes to him and his locahty and his business in extra profits ; who is a Repubhcan for the sake of Republican office or Republi- can graft ; it is the business of the preacher to make him ashamed of himself : to show him that as such a Repub- hcan he can have no part or lot in Good Will for his country ; and brand him as the parasite and traitor that he is.
The Christian preacher likewise will try to make his Democratic parishioners Christian Democrats : Demo- crats, that is, who stand for the principle that the locahty, the special interest, the individual should be let alone as
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM I97
much as possible ; that the individual can make a better use of his money and manage his local affairs better than a central government can manage them for him; and that a sturdy independence is better for all concerned, and therefore for the nation as a whole, than a nursed, coddled and fostered prosperity provided and controlled by governmental agency.
Bad Democrats, on the other hand : Democrats who care not how the working-man must reduce his standard of Kving, or even go hungry, if only they buy their goods cheap ; Democrats who are indifferent to the destruction of our forests, the obstruction of river and harbor traffic, the decline of efficiency in army and navy, so long as taxes are low : Democrats who are in politics for their pockets rather than their principles : — these the preacher will rebuke in the same searching and merciless way as he does their RepubHcan counterparts, as traitors to their country and enemies of Good Will.
If this is the attitude of the preacher toward the two great parties, what shall it be toward parties that spring up in support of moral issues, Hke the Progressives and the Prohibitionists? Precisely the same. There are Christian Progressives and unchristian Progressives ; Christian Prohibitionists and unchristian Prohibition- ists. The Christian Progressive sees the political ma-
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chines of both old parties grinding and crushing the people they were created to serve; captured and cor- rupted by powerful vested interests : and he stands for the restoration of power to the people ; and the recapture in their interest of both governmental and party machin- ery. The Progressive with this programme is a Christian : and the preacher will honor and encourage him as a man who stands for important aspects of Good Will which in the strife of the regular parties, and by corrupt alhance among the leaders of both of them, had come to be neg- lected.
The unchristian Progressives, the disgruntled ofhce- seekers who hope for personal advancement in a new party, the unpractical visionaries, the temperamental agitators, who fasten themselves upon every new move- ment, the preacher will condemn as useless and mis- chievous disturbers of the peace.
The Christian Prohibitionist likewise; the man who sees clearly and feels deeply the misery and degradation and corruption the sale of liquor carries in its train; and who beheves that for the moment the pushing of the fight against this evil is more important than the support of the great domestic and foreign policies for which the regular parties stand : — the Christian Prohibitionist should be honored and upheld. The unchristian Prohi-
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bitionist ; the man who sees only one issue at a time, and sees that red and reckless ; the denunciatory Pro- hibitionist, the ascetic Prohibitionist, the self-exalting Prohibitionist, the Christian minister, with such gentle- ness and humor as he can command, will criticise and expose.
The Christian preacher, whatever he may do as citizen outside the pulpit, will not, as preacher, be a partisan of any party : he will not preach RepubHcan, or Democratic, or Progressive, or Prohibitionist doctrine. He will be a partisan of Good Will in all these parties, and the foe to whatever in any of them opposes it. He will hold the Gospel of Good Will so precious, that he will not risk his influence for that by antagonizing in the pulpit honest beliefs of his people on minor matters of detail.
Before we can see the preacher's duty toward industrial problems and parties we must call to mind the present stage of industrial development.
As long as life was simple, as long as every man was half farmer, half jack-at-all- trades, as long as business con- sisted chiefly in the exchange of goods and services be- tween individuals who were approximately equal, if not in wealth, at least in opportunity, individual justice, justice between man and man, was all the justice needed. Now that many essential services, like transportation,
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light, water, communication, have become monopolies; and most of the rest through concentration of capital and mutual understandings have acquired many of the attributes of virtual monopoly, the individual in buying these commodities and services, and in selling his own services and products, is no longer on an approximate equality with the public service corporation or even the private corporation ; but largely at its mercy. But the mercy of a corporation is proverbially lacking. A cor- poration, left to itself, becomes a mere machine for de- claring dividends ; with both mercy and justice, to say the least, not in the focus, but at best on the dim pe- riphery of its attention.
Since the corporation ordinarily cannot be made dis- interestedly and directly expressive of Good Will, it be- comes necessary for some commission, or board of con- trol, to be placed over it to compel it to conform not merely to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of Good Will. Such commissions or boards have as their function the enforcement of the rights of patrons and employees ; the prevention of violation of the spirit as well as the letter of the law ; and the definition of the terms and ap- plications of the law when they are uncertain or in dis- pute.
The object of these laws and commissions is to lift the
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 20I
plane of competition where there is competition ; and to restrain the power of monopoly where there is monopoly. Protection against the exploitation of child labor : re- striction of the hours and the conditions of the labor of women and children : provision for working-men's compensation in case of accident, so that the cost of such accidents shall not fall on the poor working-man or his family, but shall be distributed among the consumers of the product as part of its just price : working-men's insurance at moderate rates, with state protection and support, instead of the exorbitant terms and tricky poli- cies which uncontrolled private companies have imposed : — these are some of the more urgent reforms Good Will has been demanding and will continue to demand in the immediate future.
Welfare work ; rest rooms ; provision for luncheon at moderate cost; recreation and social opportunities for employees are other forms Good Will takes when it enters the heart of a powerful individual or corporation and controls its attitude toward employees. Recognition of labor unions ; readiness to deal with them ; a grateful sense of whatever help they can give their employees toward just wages and wholesome hours and conditions of work is another sign that Good Will toward the em- ployees is present in the heart of the employer.
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When possible on an open, fair and honest basis, profit- sharing is the crowning consummation of Good Will under the competitive system of production and distri- bution. When capitalist, entrepreneur and working- man, each and all have a share proportioned to their contribution to the profits of their joint enterprise ; then we have as much Good Will in industry as present condi- tions permit, and the immediate future promises as prac- tically possible.
When Good Will in business has achieved public con- trol of the plane of competition, arbitration, welfare work, profit-sharing, working-men's participation in manage- ment, there will doubtless develop the need of further safeguards and firmer cooperation; and these may in- volve steps still further in the direction of socialism. When they prove their beneficence and practicaHty Good Will in men and society will adopt them. But for the present and the immediate future those who have this Good Will must be careful not to let go the values of independence, initiative, and resourcefulness in the competitive system, before they are sure of greater gains from socialistic experiments.
Individualism aims to give each man all the liberty consistent with the like liberty for everybody else. But there are two fatal indictments against uncontrolled
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individualism under modern conditions. First : liberty is not an end but a means ; and when set up as an end amounts only to an empty abstraction : good as a war- cry in times of revolution against tyranny, but entirely incapable of producing a satisfactory mode of life. We need freedom not from tyranny only but in participation in a common good ; and of this freedom in a common good individualism gives the mere form without the sub- stance.
Second : the Hberty individualism offers, however it might work out between equals, when applied to parties grossly unequal inevitably results in the enslavement of the weaker by the stronger. The Hberty offered by individu- alism turns out to be no Hberty at all : for to the weaker party it presents the alternative : — ''Accept the terms offered by the stronger, or starve on terms satisfactory to yourself" : — which is practically no alternative at all.
SociaHsm is weak in just the opposite way. Individ- uaHsm provides goods and services ; but at cruel cost to the exploited laborers. SociaHsm promises to take excellent care of the laborer ; so good care in fact that the individuaHstic motive to enterprise and thrift would be greatly in danger of becoming relaxed. But where are the goods and services coming from if the nerve of individual responsibiHty is cut ?
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The post-office is cited as an example of collectivist efficiency. Yet the efficiency of the post-office comes through men trained under the regime of competition. As long as the momentum of individuaUstic initiative lasted, sociaUsm would work ; but that would not be for long. SociaHsm in its more extreme form is conceivable only as the first stage in a process of economic degrada- tion ; the brief stage namely during which the momentum acquired under individuahsm would last. IndividuaHsm gives us magnificently efficient and economical produc- tion with grossly unjust and unequal distribution. So- ciaHsm offers us just and generous distribution, with enormously decreased and deteriorated products to dis- tribute. One offers the empty heart and the full hands ; the other the full heart and the empty hands.
The preacher's duty is the same toward economic policies as toward poHtics. He must see and approve the good in individualism ; and see and condemn the evil in individuahsm. He must see and approve the good in sociaHsm; and see and condemn the evil in sociaHsm. As preacher he can rarely venture to say at what precise moment and to what precise extent free contract shall end and government control begin ; government control end and government ownership begin. As preacher his task is to make free contract considerate ; knowing
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 205
that considerate contract leads logically and emotionally to profit-sharing, welfare work or government control : to make government control impartial as between cap- itaHst, consumer and employee ; knowing that the logic of control of services, rates and wages drives inexorably in the direction of government ownership.
On the other hand, if ever, and so far as, government, ownership, or a control amounting to virtual ownership, is reached, it will become the urgent duty of the Chris- tian preacher to preach with all his might the old in- dividuaHstic virtues of economy, industry, dihgence, initiative, enterprise : for when once the competitive motives to these individualistic virtues are withdrawn disinterested Christian benevolence will be the only safe- guard against laziness, shiftlessness, stupidity, corrup- tion, reaction, and retrogression. Under the individual- istic regime, the phases of Good Will most needing to be preached are the sociaHstic virtues : under the socialistic regime the virtues most needing to be preached would be the individualistic virtues. But the Christian preacher should never become either the mere individ- ualist or the mere socialist. His business is to help in- dividuaKsts to be Christian individualists, and in so doing he will carry them a long way toward socialism. His business is likewise to help socialists to be Christian
206 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
socialists, and if he does that effectively he will hold them to the homely individual virtues which too many socialists sadly lack, and by lacking seriously discredit their cause.
Thus the Christian preacher's vocation is to serve both economic parties ; and is equally important which- ever of the two happens to be uppermost. At the same time since he preaches not what men like but what they need ; and men always need most the qualities, not of the order under which they are living and which are en- forced by that order, but the quaHties of the order under which they are not living and but for the preacher would be unenforced, the preacher's message on these subjects in neither case can be altogether popular.
The wise minister will not preach directly for or against woman's suffrage. He will scorn to withhold from woman anything that would add to her dignity and power which she reasonably and earnestly desires. At the same time he will so magnify her contributions as wife, mother, comrade, friend, hostess and teacher, that her possible service as voter will be seen to be a very minor fraction of her total service to society.
If in politics and labor problems the preacher must see and serve Good Will on both sides of controverted questions, in the family may he not take sides, and lay
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down the law for society to follow? Many preachers so assume ; and many laymen acquiesce. But here again his highest usefulness Hes not in hot partisanship nor cold neutrality ; but in helpful service to the needs of both parties.
Divorce is of course the burning issue respecting the family. The Christian preacher as the exponent of Good Will holds up as the ideal for every normal man and woman indissoluble monogamous marriage. Mankind's prolonged experiment in living has proved that for the normal individual in a normal society such marriage is happiest, holiest and best for all concerned. The whole trend and tendency of the Christian minister's teaching and preaching will make for such permanent and fruitful union. He will include the promise of such a union in the marriage ceremony. He will counsel patience and forbearance when married men and women seek his advice in times of strain. He will train young men and women to regard marriage as a lifelong obligation to be fulfilled at cost of serious sacrifice. He will refuse to remarry persons who in selfishness and petulance, restlessness or infatuation, have been divorced. For the sake of the priceless blessings Hfelong devotion brings to husband and wife, to parents and children, to family and society, he will urge men and women to pay the
208 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
high price that devotion frequently costs when the other party is poor, or sick, or irritable, or unreasonable. On no lower or easier terms can Good Will for the family be proclaimed.
Yet when the pearls of a pure affection are persistently trampled under the feet of swinish greed, lust, and hate- fulness; when through no fault of the innocent party life for him or her is made intolerable with no prospect of benefit or blessing to the guilty one ; then the Chris- tian minister will recognize what most Christian states already allow — the right of the innocent party to divorce and remarriage. The true marriage is so much more blessed than any other mode of Hfe that it does not need to be bolstered up by the enforced continuity of marriages which are perverted into loathsome sensuality, hideous hate, intolerable wretchedness. The Christian preacher should have so much sympathy for the unhappy vic- tims of bad marriages, and so much respect for the blessedness of good marriages, that he will recognize and approve the desire to escape the bondage and degrada- tion of such an unchristian union. He will not in a spirit of formal literahsm ask whether the guilty party has committed the one specific sin which Jesus happened to mention as a legitimate ground of divorce. He will ask in a broad, sympathetic, common-sense spirit whether
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 209
Good Will for the individuals concerned and for society calls them to continue to pay this heavy price or not. If in his best judgment it does not, he will sanction divorce; admit the innocent divorced person to the fullest Christian fellowship; and even perform the marriage ceremony where there is the promise and pros- pect of a new and happy lifelong marriage. To do less than that would be to miss the spirit of Good Will, through being a stickler for the precise letter in which its general conditions were declared by Jesus and em- bodied in the Holy Scriptures — an attitude which is unworthy of the free and friendly preacher of Good WiU.
If politics, economics and the family are to be treated by the preacher indirectly through principles rather than directly in detail, surely distinctly moral problems like the brothel, the saloon, and the gambling den are spheres in which the preacher may advocate specific social programmes. Not on questions where there is honest and earnest difference of opinion between men of equal Good Will ; at least not unless he gives full and generous acknowledgment to the earnest and honest Good Will of his opponents. Even here he will be most effective as preacher, whatever he may do in his capacity as an individual citizen, if he confines his preaching for p
2IO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
the most part to principles ; and leaves to the mayor, the police, good government clubs and the voters the specific measures in which his principles shall be em- bodied.
Concerning the social evil it is his province to make men see and feel and reverence the beauty and beneficence of Nature's provision for the reproduction and im- provement of the human race through the selection of the best in each of two individuals brought together by the mighty attraction of sex. The holiness of pure love he will teach them to revere as God's choicest gift. On the background of such a reverence he will throw the beastliness of the lust that would pollute and pervert it in selfish and irresponsible sensuality; so that every man who hears his message will be ashamed to treat any woman with anything less than chivalry. On this back- ground he will throw the odiousness and cruelty of the greed that destroys and sells the bodies and souls of women for the gratification of the lusts of brutal men. The preacher will make the whole sordid and loathsome traffic to appear the cruel, monstrous, degrading contra- diction of Good Will it is. Having created and kept alive that sentiment his work as preacher is done : and if that is faithfully, fearlessly and effectively done, the proper legislative, executive, and police measures will
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follow in proportion to the political, business and social influence his congregation has in the community; and the minister will be more not less a power, than if as preacher he were to attempt to say whether this or that specific regulation shall be adopted. The Christian ministry always has been and always will be the most potent foe of this unspeakable iniquity : and in the future as in the past the preacher's main contribution will be sentiment aroused by principles, rather than legislation applied or misapplied in details.
The same is true of intemperance. The horror and beastliness of it ; the cruelty to wife and children ; the injury to society and posterity will be a frequent theme with the preacher whose people are subject to that temp- tation. He will unsparingly denounce the meanness and infamy of men who make a sordid living- by catering to the vices of the weak, and impoverishing their wretched families. If this is temperately, faithfully and fearlessly done, poHtical action in restriction of the liquor traffic will follow : and follow all the more surely and effectively than it would were the preacher to attempt to tell his people to vote to put prohibition into the state or national constitution before there is sentiment to enforce it in the villages and cities of which the state and nation are composed. As a citizen the preacher may make
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stump speeches if he please; but the pulpit is not the place, nor the hour of Sabbath worship the time, to ad- vocate state-wide statutes, or amendments to the con- stitution of the country. Important as those things are, the preacher has larger and less divisive issues : issues, too, on which he is or ought to be more of an expert than he usually can be in constitutional amendments, statutes and police regulations.
The same principle governs the minister's attitude toward international affairs. He will instil into the minds of his people the horror, the futility, the waste, the wickedness of all war that is honorably avoidable. He will point out the infinitely superior economy and efficiency of arbitration where that is practicable. He will labor to build up a sentiment which will unite the nations in a league of peace.
Yet he will recognize that, to say nothing of barbarous tribes, even nominally Christian nations are not yet actually Christian in their policies toward other nations.
Whenever self-defence against wanton and arrogant aggression demands it, whenever weak nations for which we have by treaty or proximity special national obli- gations need our protection against outward attack or protracted internal strife, wherever the maintenance of the laws and rights of nations against their unscrupulous
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 213
and deliberate disregard requires it, then rightfully and firmly he will call upon his nation, as he would an individual in similar situation, to take up arms ; not in malice, not for aggrandizement or glory, but as a costly sacrifice essential to the doing by the nation of its part in the service of Good Will.
Peace-making and peace-loving as every minister of Christ must be, he will advocate such sufficient pre- paredness for war at all times as will reduce to a min- imum the necessity for actual war; and make the nation's voice effective in behalf of international justice. Bitterly as he opposes mihtarism he will advocate so much military strength in his own na- tion as is necessary to protect both his own nation and the world from domination by those nations in which it is enthroned.
On all these matters, and a host of others, child labor, the juvenile court, prison reform, charity administra- tion, rural betterment, civil service reform, arbitration of industrial disputes, the minister may not be unin- telligent or indift'erent: neither can he wisely be dic- tatorial in detail. To create and sustain sound convic- tions and Hvely sentiment is his mighty province, a province so mighty that he makes a fearful mistake when he forfeits his authority and influence within it to con-
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tend over the debatable details of their application. Not of course that details and appHcations are unim- portant; or that principles and sentiment amount to anything unless they are appHed in detail. But in the intricate and delicate team-work of society, principles and sentiments are the Christian minister's specific assignment : while application in detail through legis- lation and administration are not. Let the minister stick to his assignment ; and urge the other social agencies to be faithful to theirs : and through the united efforts of clergy and laity, preacher and citizens, Good Will is sure to be done more effectively than if ministers seek to legislate and enforce ; while the citizens are left hazy about spiritual principles, and spiritless in moral sentiment.
This team-work view of the minister's relation to social problems is at present far less popular than the indi- vidual-star view, which measures the minister by what he can accomplish directly, and set down to his individual credit. But the sacrifice of individual credit for speedy and showy specific results is the price one has to pay everywhere for the greater ultimate efficiency of team- work.
To this principle there are of course exceptions in times of acute crises; when the minister happens to
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 21 5
be at the same time an expert in politics, or economics, or social reform ; or when no layman or group of laymen can be induced to take the lead in application of Christian principles to crying social needs and wrongs. Then the minister may be forgiven if he temporarily leaves the ministry of the word to serve tables ; if he neglects the cultivation of sound convictions and earnest sentiments in others to become himself on his own account a leader in a Republican, or Democratic, or Progressive, or Prohibition campaign ; or to take sides in a lockout or strike ; or to close this or that specific saloon.
Of course all that has been said about the minister as minister in the pulpit, and in his pastoral relations, does not interfere with the minister's doing his part as a citizen side by side with his fellow-citizens of his own and other parishes in direct political, economic, moral and social reform.
Mr. Riis was offered repeatedly political offices in which to carry on his fight against the slum. But he invariably declined with the remark that he could do most by sticking to his last as a reporter.
Unless he be an exceptional man in exceptional circum- stances the preacher will do best to follow his example. Direct activity in specific measures of reform is not a bur- den to be laid on the shoulders of every preacher : and it
2l6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
is grossly unfair to judge the ministry by such an expecta- tion. If he is fitted to be a preacher at all his chief efl&ciency will come through the convictions and senti- ments he imparts and quickens in the men and women to whom he ministers.
VIII
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH
"The new Church Universal, then, would be the militant, aggressive body of the reborn, whose mission it was to send out into the life of the nation transformed men and women who would labor unremittingly for the Kingdom of God. The supreme func- tion of the church was to inspire — to inspire individuals to will- ing service for the cause, the Cause of Democracy, the fellowship of mankind." Winston Churchill, The Inside of the Cup, p. 366.
The book from v^hich our final text and lesson is taken strikes simultaneously two notes: service of the fellowship of mankind, and intellectual honesty. The former is our theme. A generation ago the latter was the burning issue. It is important still. Good Will has no affinity with falsehood. Yet that is not the burning question to-day. A man, as the result of early training and environment, may hold views about such matters as the virgin birth which critical, scientific his- tory finds it impossible to accept : and at the same time be a devoted and accepted servant of Good Will, a man the latchet of whose shoes the critical, scientific his-
217
2l8 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
torian is not worthy to unloose. And on the contrary a man may be scientifically correct in his views about these matters, and still be at the farthest remove from that Good Will in which vital Christianity consists.
Our lesson from this book is in two parts : the first, negative and specific, showing precisely what the true Church and its members cannot be — selfish plunderers of their fellows under respectable disguise : the second positive but abstract, showing the attitude toward Hfe the Church and its members must take : and that for this attitude there can be no dogmatic, traditional, or rituaHstic substitute.
The first part, the description of what the church can- not be and cannot tolerate in its members without its own stultification is put into the mouth of a working- man, Garvin, who has lost his fortune, and is in danger of losing his child, as the result of the dishonest deaHngs of the prominent churchman, Eldon Parr.
*' ' Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess you wouldn't have to walk more than two blocks to find another in this neighborhood. You think Eldon Parr's a big, noble man, don't you? You're proud to run his church, ain't you? You wouldn't beHeve there was a time when I thought he was a big man, when I was kind of proud to live in the same city with him. She'll tell
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 219
you how I used to come home from the store and talk about him after supper, and hope that the kid there would grow up into a financier like Eldon Parr. The boys at the store talked about him : he sort of laid hold on our imaginations with the library he gave, and Elm- wood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your church in the newspapers — and sometimes, Mary and me and the boy, in the baby carriage, on Sunday after- noons we used to walk around by his house, just to look at it. You couldn't have got me to believe that Eldon Parr would put his name to anything that wasn't straight. '' ' Then ConsoHdated Tractions came along, with Parr's name behind it. Everybody was talking about it, and how it was payin' eight per cent, from the start, and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance it was. Before the kid came, as soon as I married her, we began to save up for him. We didn't go to the the- aters or nothing. Well, I put it all, five thousand dol- lars, into ConsoHdated. She'll tell you how we sat up half the night after we got the first dividend talking about how we'd send the kid to college, and after we went to bed we couldn't sleep. It wasn't more than a year after that we began to hear things — and we couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and the stock tumbled. Even then I wouldn't believe it of
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him, that he'd take poor people's money that way when he had more than he knew what to do with. I made up my mind if I went down to see him and told him about it, he'd make it right. I asked the boss for an hour ofif, and headed for the Parr building — I've been there as much as fifty times since — but he don't bother with small fry. The clerks laugh when they see me coming. I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be around they'd filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn't long before we had to move out of our Httle home in Alder Street. We've been movin' ever since,' he cried, and tears of weakness were in his eyes, ' until we've come to this, and we'll have to get out of here in another week. God knows where we'll go then.
^* ' Then I found out how he done it — from a lawyer. The lawyer laughed at me, too. Say, do you wonder I ain't got much use for your church people ? Parr got a corporation lawyer named Langmaid — he's another one of your milHonaire crooks — to fix it up and get around the law and keep him out of jail. And then they had to settle with Tom Beatty for something like three hun- dred thousand. You know who Beatty is — he owns this city — his saloon's around here on Elm Street. All the crooks had to be squared. Say,' he demanded aggressively, 'are Parr and Langmaid any better than
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Beatty, or any of the hold-up men Beatty covers? There's a street- walker over there in those flats that's got a million times more chance to get to heaven — if there is any — than those financiers, as they call 'em- selves ! I ain't much on high finance, but I've got some respect for a second story man now — he takes some risks I I'll tell you what they did, they bought up the short car lines that didn't pay and sold 'em to themselves for fifty times as much as they were worth; and they got controlling interests in the big lines and leased 'em to themselves with dividends guaranteed as high as eighteen per cent. They capitalized the ConsoHdated for more milUons than a Httle man like me can think of, and we handed 'em our money because we thought they were honest. We thought the men who listed the stock on the Exchange were honest. And when the crash came, they'd got away with the swag, like any common housebreakers. There were dummy directors, and a dummy president. Eldon Parr didn't have a share — sold out everything when she went over two hundred, but you bet he kept his stock in the leased lines, which guarantee more than they earn. He cleaned up five milHon, they say. . . . My money — the money that might give that boy fresh air, and good doctors. . . Say, you believe in hell, don't you? You tell Eldon
222 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Parr to keep his charity, — he can't send any of it here. And you'd better go back to that church of his and pray to keep his soul out of hell.'"
As I have said the second part is more abstract. It isn't so easy to draw worthily the individual saint as it is the individual sinner : for the sinner is small, with sharp outlines and clear-cut angles ; while the man who lives in Good Will is large, S)nnmetrical, well rounded, and therefore a difficult subject for a striking portrait. Even in abstract description, however, the true church and churchman tower above the mean manipulator of securities, the donor of parks, playgrounds, Hbraries and settlement houses with money wrung from the plunder of the poor. I cite his long attempt to describe the true church, as a vague feeling after rather than a definite finding of the church as the fellowship of Good Will.
"He began by referring to the hope with which he had come to St. John's and the gradual reaHzation that the church was a failure — a dismal failure when compared to the high ideal of her Master. By her fruits she should be known and judged. From the first he had contem- plated, with a heavy heart, the sin and misery at their very gates. Not three blocks distant children were learn- ing vice in the streets, httle boys of seven and eight,
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 223
underfed and anaemic, were driven out before dawn to sell newspapers, little girls thrust forth to haunt the saloons and beg, while their own children were warmed and fed. While their own daughters were guarded, young women in Dalton Street were forced to sell them- selves into a life which meant slow torture, inevitable early death. Hopeless husbands and wives were cast up like driftwood by the cruel, resistless flood of modern civiHzation — the very civilization which yielded their wealth and luxury ; the civiHzation which professed the Spirit of Christ, and yet was pitiless.
" He confessed to them that for a long time he had been blind to the truth, had taken the inherited, unchristian view that the disease which caused vice and poverty might not be cured, though its ulcers might be alleviated. He had not, indeed, clearly perceived and recognized the disease. He had regarded Dalton Street in a very special sense as a reproach to St. John's, but now he saw that all such neighborhoods were in reahty a reproach to the city, to the state, to the nation. True Christianity and Democracy were identical, and the congregation of St. John's, as professed Christians and citizens, were doubly responsible, inasmuch as they not only made no protest or attempt to change a government which permitted the Dalton Streets to exist, but inasmuch
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also as, — directly or indirectly, — they derived a profit from conditions which were an abomination to God. It would be but an idle mockery for them to go and build a settlement house, if they did not first reform their lives.
" When he, their rector, had gone to Dal ton Street to invite the poor and wretched into God's Church, he was met by the scornful question : * Are the Christians of the churches any better than we? Christians own the grim tenements in which we live, the saloons and brothels by which we are surrounded, which devour our chil- dren. Christians own the establishments which pay us starvation wages ; profit by politics, and take toll from our very vice ; evade the laws and reap milHons, while we are sent to jail. Is their God a God who will Hft us out of our misery and distress? Are their churches for the poor? Are not the very pews in which they sit as closed to us as their houses ? '
" One inevitable conclusion of such a revelation was that he had not preached to them the vital element of Chris- tianity. And the very fact that his presentation of re- ligion had left many indifferent or dissatisfied was proof positive that he had dwelt upon non-essentials, laid emphasis upon the mistaken interpretations of past ages. There were those within the Church who were
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 225
content with this, who — like the Pharisees of old — welcomed a religion which did not interfere with their complacency, with their pursuit of pleasure and wealth, with their special privileges ; welcomed a church which didn't raise her voice against the manner of their Hves — against the order, the Golden Calf which they had set up, which did not accuse them of deliberately retarding the coming of the Kingdom of God.
''Ah, that religion was not religion, for religion was a spiritual, not a material affair. In that religion, vainly designed by man as a compromise between God and Manamon, there was none of the divine discontent of the true religion of the Spirit, no need of the rebirth of the soul. And those who held it might well demand, with Nicodemus and the rulers of the earth, 'How can these things be?'
" Truth might no longer be identified with Tradition, and the day was past when coimcils and synods might determine it for all mankind. The era of forced ac- ceptance of philosophical doctrines and dogmas was past, and that of freedom, of spiritual rebirth, of vicari- ous suffering, of willing sacrifice and service for a Cause was upon them. That cause was Democracy. Christ was uniquely the Son of God because he had hved and suffered and died in order to reveal to the world the mean-
Q
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ing of this life and of the hereafter — the meaning not only for the individual, but for society as well. Noth- ing might be added to or subtracted from that message
— it was complete.
" True faith was simply trusting — trusting that Christ gave to the world the revelation of God's plan. And the Savior himself had pointed out the proof : ' If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak for myself.' Christ had repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had demanded material evidence : true faith spurned it, just as true friendship, true love between man and man, true trust scorned a written bond. To paraphrase St. James' words, faith without trust is dead — because faith without trust is impossible. God is a Spirit, only to be recognized in the Spirit, and every one of the Savior's utterances were — not of the flesh, of the man
— but of the Spirit within him. 'He that hath seen me hath seen the Father ' ; and ' Why callest thou me good ? none is good save one, that is God ' ; the Spirit, the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate in the human Jesus.
" To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blind- ness, and then, and then only, we might behold the Spirit shining in the soul of Christ.
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'' The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine message which would convince and transform and elec- trify those who heard it to action — a presentation of the message in terms which the age could grasp.
*' No man might venture to predict the details of the future organization of the united Church, although St. Paul himself had sketched it in broad outHne : every worker, lay and clerical, labouring according to his gift, teachers, executives, ministers, visitors, mission- aries, healers of sick and despondent souls. But the supreme function of the Church was to inspire — to inspire individuals to wilHng service for the cause, the cause of Democracy, the fellowship of mankind. If she failed to inspire, the Church would wither and perish. And therefore she must revive again the race of in- spirers, prophets, modern Apostles to whom this gift was given, going on their rounds, awaking cities and arousing whole country-sides.
" But whence — it might be demanded by the cynical — were the prophets to come ? Prophets could not be produced by training and education ; prophets must be born. Reborn, — that was the word. Let the Church have faith. Once her Cause were perceived, once her whole energy were directed towards its fulfilment, the prophets would arise, out of the East and out of the
2 28 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
West, to stir mankind to higher effort, to denounce fearlessly the shortcomings and evils of the age. They had not failed in past ages; when the world had fallen into hopelessness, indifference and darkness. And they would not fail now.
" The meaning of life, then, was service, and by life our Lord did not mean mere human existence, which is only a part of Hfe. The Kingdom of heaven is a state, and may begin here. And that which we saw around us was only one expression of that eternal hfe — a medium to work through, towards God. All was service, both here and hereafter, and he that had not discovered that the joy of service was the only happiness worth living for could have no conception of the Kingdom. To those who knew, there was no happiness like being able to say, 'I have found my place in God's plan, / am of use J Such was salvation."
The essential contrast between the church of Eldon Parr and the new Church Universal, as here set forth, is the contrast between a church composed of plunderers of the weak and poor, and a church devoted to the ser- vice of the Good Will which includes and cares for the humblest and most defenceless of our brothers and sisters.
In preceding chapters we have said nothing about the Church, the Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, pubHc
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worship, prayer, missions, or the ministry as a con- secrated order. Without any of these aids Good Will may be done, the Kingdom may come, through the obedience of individuals and their informal cooperation with each other. Not until we recognize this fact can we appreciate the real mission and true value of these agencies. They have no magical virtue or mysterious eflScacy in and of themselves ; and the claim that they have brings them into deserved disrepute. Apart from them all a man may live in and by and for Good Will ; and if he does he is a Christian. To deny him that title, and to insist on something more as essential is to miss the whole point of the Gospel of Good Will. Who- ever doeth that Will is brother and sister and mother of Christ; though he never enter a church, or open a Bible, or say a verbal prayer, or partake of the sacra- ments, or do or refrain from doing a single thing on Sunday which he would not do or refrain from doing on the other days of the week.
Still, while not essential as ends, all these things are precious means of keeping alive in one's own heart, and enkindhng in the hearts of others, the love and service of Good Will. There is no other important interest or enthusiasm that attempts to dispense with organized association. Athletics, business, literature, history, art,
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science, banking, engineering, manufacture, agriculture, education, labor, all have their clubs, associations, con- ferences, conventions, organized locally, nationally and many of them internationally. For the same reason men and women who enjoy Good Will desire to share it with each other ; profit by each other^s experience and insight; provide for its communication to their chil- dren, and its extension to those outside its fold. Worth- less, positively mischievous, spiritually deadly, when set up as an end in itself, the church as a means of fellow- ship in Good Will is so natural, so useful, so necessary, that practically all who have that Will at heart, and see the church as the provision for its expression and prop- agation; unless prevented by some false attitude on its part, or some misunderstanding on their own part; will desire to share and support its worship and its work. One of the preacher's most important tasks is to protect the church from the misconceptions which have arisen about it. When a convert asked Billy Sunday *'Do I have to join the church?" he repHed, ''No, you don't have to take a steamer to go to Europe. The swimming is good." Neither the steamer nor the church is helped by attributing to it a magical value of its own : its value as an instrument to ends greater than itself is in each case ample justification. Joining the church is
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 23 1
the normal and usual corollary of accepting Good Will as the support and guide of Hfe. But to preach the church as the main proposition, is to obscure the great spiritual issues which it is its function to proclaim. To increase men's faith and obedience and trust in Good Will should be the preacher's single aim; and if that aim be genuine and effective, additions to membership in the visible organization which represents it will follow as warmth follows sunshine. But to aim at member- ship directly for its own sake, is like attempting to warm a room by breathing on the bulb of the thermometer.
Christian unity consists in community of Good Will : the sense of oneness of aim that binds together all who are striving for the common good. It tends toward church unity : yet is not dependent on it, and need not be postponed until church unity is reahzed.
In so far as racial, cultural, or temperamental differ- ences call for different social, intellectual, and devotional expression Good Will welcomes and supports diversity in polity, doctrine and worship. In so far as economy and efficiency demand centralization, as they certainly do in rural regions. Good Will calls for church union, or at least church federation.
So long as denominational differences last, the member of a denominational church, if he is full of Good Will,
232 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
will have the feeling toward his denomination that a soldier has toward his particular company : — some- thing a little more intimate than his feeling for the army, yet entirely subordinate to that. He will expect the soldiers of other companies to be as loyal to their companies as he is to his : when the good of the service requires it he will readily transfer his membership to another company, and welcome men from other com- panies to his own : cherishing as the deepest bond of imity loyalty to the army as a whole of which the several companies are merely constituent parts. Good Will is inclusive, not divisive ; and in due time will develop the outward unity all its children so eagerly desire.
The Bible is not infallible; not everything in it is scientific, historical, or even final moral truth. Good Will came into the world before the Bible ; made the history the Bible records ; lived the Hfe the Bible por- trays ; and is as much bigger, stronger, richer than the Bible as facts are bigger than records ; as deeds are stronger than words ; as life is richer than letters.
The moment we see this, however, we begin to see how marvellous a help the Bible is to all who seek to live in Good Will. Once we get a vital, first-hand impulse to Good Will from a Hving person or group of persons, who are doing it; then the example, the teaching, the
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 233
spirit of those who lived this life long ago, comes with an inspiration, an encouragement, an illumination which throws floods of light on the path Good Will now calls us to follow. The Bible is more helpful than the precepts and illustrations of modern doers of Good Will, because of the greater freshness and simpKcity of characters and situations ; because of the more thorough winnowing of essentials from non-essentials wrought by time and art. In these writings, not preserved by miracle from the incidental errors and limitations of the times in which they were composed, but cherished with reverent affec- tion by three score generations of men, there is such a clearness of issue between Good Will and the evil forces that are opposed to it, that we get a sharpness of out- Hne, a naivete, which no later literature has been able to approach. The same spirit animates these writings that animates the words and deeds, the songs and speeches, the letters and discourses of Christian men to-day : but in them this spirit shines through a far more transparent medium, and is obstructed by less irrelevant detail. Furthermore the Bible contains the original records of the words and deeds, the life and death, of the great Master of Good Will, and the acts and writings of those who caught their inspiration from him at first hand.
234 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
A man can be a Christian without reading the Bible : he can be a much better one by reading it : and, other things being equal, the more he reads and reflects upon it the better Christian he will be. It is, and will remain forever, the supreme Hterature of Good Will. The unique supremacy of the Bible is best maintained by a frank and thorough criticism which abandons all false defences ; admits all sorts of human blemishes ; and in spite of them all; yes, on account of them all, sees there a transparent revelation of the glory of Good Will; which we more sophisticated moderns seem powerless to achieve. Put the Bible on its in- trinsic merits; and it will fare better and rank higher than it ever has under the claims of a miraculous in- fallibility. A preacher who does not know his Bible as a mathematician knows his multiplication table; and who does not use its examples, its precepts, its phrases, as constantly, will miss his best material for illustration and inspiration.
The Sabbath likewise is a dreary end ; a most useful and helpful means. It is the great opportunity to re- member, reenforce and express Good Will. The Sab- bath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as Jesus emphatically declares.
Ordinarily there are better things than work or
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 235
play for Sunday. Rest, change, simple social inter- course, neighborly helpfulness, reading, reflection, wor- ship, prayer, are better for the individual and for society than a continuation of the labors and sports of the week days; and therefore Good Will invites to these Sabbath occupations all who seek its fullest fellowship in highest consecration. Not that work and play on that day are intrinsically and universally bad; or that the clerk or bookkeeper kept at his desk all the week should not have his game of golf or tennis on Sun- day afternoon : but that friendliness and rest, meditation and worship are ordinarily better : — that is the general ground on which Good Will claims that these better things shall have first place in our plans for Sabbath observance. Because a worshipful Sunday is helpful to that individual and social well-being which is the ob- ject of Good Will ; and a secular Sunday is injurious to individual and social well-being ; therefore the highest type of Christian will aim as a rule to put worship into his Sunday plans and keep distraction out.
Friendship has its hand clasp : affection its kiss : all sorts of clubs, associations and fraternities have their initiations and banquets. In all these cases the things done are not essential; nor possessed of mysterious efficacy. They are outward and visible symbols of an
236 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
inner loyalty and devotion. Yet few friends refuse to shake hands; few lovers dispense with the kiss; few fraternities or orders omit all rites and ceremonies.
The sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper bear a similar relation to fellowship in Good Will. Of themselves they are nothing; but taken in faith; in other words, regarded as seals, symbols and signs of our fellowship with Christ in Good Will, our gratitude and our devotion to him, they give a pubHc confession, a social recognition, to this fellowship which make it at once more intimate and more objective. One can be a Christian without them; as a friend can be a friend without ever shaking hands ; or as a lover can be a lover without ever kissing his beloved. But one can be a more assured ; a more influential ; a more sociable ; a more substantial Christian by accepting and utiHzing the symbols which reach across the seas and the cen- turies and link us to Christ, and to all who have received these symbols from him, or his appointed representa- tives.
Public worship is not essential to that Good Will in which Christianity consists. One can be a Christian without it. Yet if one is in earnest about Good Will ; he will desire from time to time to call it consciously to mind ; reconsecrate himself to its service ; and share his
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 237
enthusiasm for it with Hke-minded men and women. That is precisely the opportunity which pubHc worship affords. The congregation and each individual is hfted into an attitude and atmosphere in which Good Will is held as the supreme object of reverence and service ; the supreme guide to aspiration and conduct. One who habitually enters into this attitude and atmosphere will develop Good Will and express it toward others, far more effectively, systematically and persistently than one who depends on its fortuitous occurrence to his individ- ual mind and heart. As the years, the decades, the generations pass, the man and the family that unites in pubHc worship will become very different from the man and the family that do not reenforce the chance promptings of the heart by this systematic means. One can be so much better a Christian with than without such aid ; that he who deliberately neglects it, choosing as he does less rather than more of the power of Good Will over his life, finds the little Christianity that he has fast slipping away from him ; and spiritual bank- ruptcy staring him in the face.
Even verbal prayer likewise is not of the essence of Christianity. As Jesus repeatedly tells us, a man who does Good Will without ever consciously saying ''Lord, Lord," is better far than the man who is explicitly
238 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
prayerful but disobedient. To the men of silent obedience admission to the Kingdom may come as a great sur- prise to themselves ; and a great shock to their orthodox critics; but we have Jesus' word and our own insight that it surely comes. Yet a man is very foolish who does not pray. As Arthur Balfour once said at the conclusion of a long and rather inconsequential dis- cussion on prayer, ''But to be at his best a man must pray." Prayer is a device for keeping our thoughts, our aims, our words, our acts, consciously under the guidance and control of Good Will. It is about as necessary to the best Christian living as contact with the wire is to an electric car. The car may move in the desired direction without such a contact; but its movement under such chance propulsion will be fitful, costly, insignificant, unreliable. A Christian conceiv- ably might serve Good Will without praying; but his service would be intermittent and spasmodic. Who- ever is deeply in earnest about Good Will, will be eager to keep it clear before his mind, warm in his heart, com- pelling behind his will ; and prayer is the approved de- vice for doing these things.
Prayer is not a blank check on omnipotence, by pre- senting which, properly endorsed, anybody can secure anything he happens to want, and is willing to
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 239
ask for in that form. Petition is a proper part of prayer — even petition for specific things ; just as petition is a perfectly proper part of the intercourse between friends; but it is not the principal part. A friend whose chief relation to us consisted in asking for this or that special favor or specific object, would not be one whose disinterested devotion we should rate very high ; or even one whose friendship we should care to keep. Precisely so, if we have not risen above making prayer primarily a means to gaining this or that specific favor ; we are not on very honorable terms with God and his Good Will. God is not mocked : and if we get Httle from such prayer, we get all we deserve. Prayer is primarily communion, fellowship; mind with mind; heart to heart ; will with will. Incidentally it doubtless has other effects : but its chief effect is the filling the mind and heart and will of him who prays so full of Good Will, that by his resulting action Good Will is done, as apart from the prayer it would not be done. Not my will but Good Will is what in true prayer we most desire. It seeks the positive presence and power of Good Will in us, doing through us and for us, what we alone, or trusting to chance influence, could not or would not do.
Undertaken in pride of race, or pride of opinion, or
240 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
pride of superior virtue, missions are an injury aKke to missionary and convert: but undertaken in the desire to give the best we have in moral motive, in spiritual comfort, in medical skill, in industrial arts, in intellectual interest and power, missions are so essential and con- summate an expression of Good Will, that no preacher who fails to preach them, and to train his people to support them, appreciates what Good Will requires of those who would share in its world-wide application. If that Will is good for me, it is good for my. neighbor : if it is good for my section of the city, it is good for every section of the city : if it is good for my old and settled community, it is good for the frontier town : if it is good for my country and my race, it is good for every country under heaven, and for all the races of the earth. Granted that Good Will begins at home, and is mainly expressed in secular vocations and domestic and local services : yet if my will stops anywhere short of the ends of the earth it is not Good Will which I am seeking and serving. To carry Good Will where there is most ill will, where the actual situation is most painful, is to come closest to it, to share it most, and serve it best. The Gospel of Good Will requires more sacrifice than the doctrine of the eternal damnation of the heathen ever did. The depth and extent of missionary contribution and
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 24 1
devotion, not as a thing apart from secular and home ser- vice or as a substitute for it; but as its crown and con- summation, will ever be one of the best tests of Good Will. The minister is no more essential to Good Will than are Church, Bible, Sacrament and Sabbath. There is no miraculously imparted grace of which the priesthood is the custodian and distributer. The minister is the guardian, exponent and teacher of that life in and for Good Will which is common to minister and layman. The minister is related to Good Will in precisely the same way as the butcher is related to meat, or the carpenter to houses, or the shoemaker to shoes. The butcher eats meat, the carpenter lives in a house, the shoe- maker wears shoes the same as do other men. But in addition the butcher provides meat, the carpenter houses, the shoemaker shoes for other men. They are simply the specialized agents, set apart to provide these commodities. Precisely so the minister Hves in, and by, and for Good Will the same as other Christian men. But in addition to doing that Will for himself, he shows his fellows how to see it, and do it, and enjoy it. He judges himself and all men by the standard of that Will : points out its appHcations : exhorts to the sacrifices it requires : imparts to all who live in it the hope and comfort it contains.
242 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Just because the function in which he speciaHzes is so precious and vital, the insight requisite is so keen, and the character required to present and represent it worthily is so high, the ministry is a highly honorable profession : but its honor rests on no mysterious superi- ority. It rests simply and solidly on the worth to the individual and to society of knowing, loving and serving Good Will.
The minister is simply the man who is set apart by society to keep vivid the vision, and active the service, by others as well as by himself, of Good Will. If he does that work well he is entitled to such salary as will give him the tools, the freedom, and the connections required for doing his best ; and to the honor that is due to an impor- tant social service cheerfully and effectively rendered.
But he will keep closest to his Master, and come clos- est to men the less he thinks of the honor, and the pro- fessional standing he shares with the lawyer and the physician ; and the more he thinks of the social service rendered, and the spirit of service he shares with the Christian butcher, the Christian carpenter and the Christian shoemaker. The minister hke his Master should think of himself chiefly as one who serves.
Other vocations offer larger remuneration, higher honors, more conspicuous careers : but none offers more
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 243
close companionship with God, or more vital relations with one's fellow-men ; none renders more valuable ser- vice for the ennobling of individuals, the upbuilding of institutions, the healing of the nations, and the redemp- tion of the world.
This Gospel of Good Will carries with it momentous implications. If this is true, many other things supposed to be true and important are false or trivial. Good Will is not called upon to go out of its way to tear down these trivial falsehoods. It patiently waits to see them fall down as soon as the sufficiency of the Gospel of Good Will is estabKshed. Is then this Gospel of Good Will true and sufficient?
The tests are pragmatic. Does it make men Chris- tians? Does it make earth heaven? These tests we may now apply.
A man, in response to Christ's expectation, acquires and maintains the habit of spending his money, control- ling his appetites and passions, choosing peace or strife, and making every other decision with an eye single to the greatest good of all who are affected ; as the Father who loves all his children will.
Every thought or deed or word that falls below that generous aim he scorns as meanness unworthy of him, and repents as sin.
244 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
All men who fall into meanness or sin, the instant they are ashamed and sorry he forgives; and therein finds assurance that God and Christian men likewise forgive his own sins, and restore him to their favor.
He chooses and fulfils his vocation with a justice and generosity which make the interest of client, customer, consumer as precious to him as his own.
He pays whatever price of sacrifice such disinterested devotion to universal good in a world still largely evil may require; accepting that cost as his portion of the cross of Christ.
He thinks little about his own character, his own vir- tues, his own salvation even : but trusts the Good Will he has toward others to enlarge and enrich his soul into the stature and likeness of Christ.
Where good and evil are mixed, with some of each on both sides of disputed questions, he appreciates the good and opposes the evil in both ; giving his influence to the one where, all things considered, he finds most good and least evil.
He joins and supports the church, cherishes its lit- erature, its sacraments, its times and seasons, its wor- ship, its missions, its ministry, not slavishly or super- stitiously, but freely and gladly as the appointed agencies for keeping alive and handing on the Gospel of Good Will.
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 245
A man who believes and lives this Gospel, whatever else he may believe or not believe, do or refrain from doing, is a Christian.
Wherever and to whatever extent this Gospel is preached and practised, no matter what the racial, intellectual, social, economic or political status, there and to that extent earth becomes a household of heaven.
These fruits the Gospel of Good Will, when clearly preached and faithfully practised, brings forth : and on thia power to make men Christian, and earth heaven, it rests its claim to be the true Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
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