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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
BOOKS BY PROF. WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN
Published by Charles Scbibneb's Sons
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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE ?
LECTUEES DELIVERED IN JAPAN BY
WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN, Ph.D., D.D.
UNION SEMINARY LECTURER ON CHRISTIANITY IN THE FAR EAST
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1916
Tffm
COPTKIGHT, 1916, BT
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published November, 1916
©O.A446687
TO THE MEMORY
OP
GEORGE WILLIAM KNOX
MY COLLEAGUE FOR MANY YEARS
MY PREDECESSOR IN THIS LECTURESHIP
MY TRUSTED AND DEAR FRIEND
PREFACE
On the 25th of April, 1912, there died in the Severance Hospital at Seoul a man who was bound to Japan by many ties. For fourteen years a missionary in Tokyo, George William Knox continued after his return to the United States to take a lively interest in things Japanese. Through his books and articles he inter- preted the spirit of the Japanese people to his fellow countrymen in America, and during the Russo-Japanese War he was one of the most effective advocates of the Japanese cause. It was always his hope to revisit the country where his young manhood had been spent, and to share with his friends there, young and old, the insights of his maturer years. This opportunity came to him in 1910, through his appointment as Union Semi-
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PREFACE
nary lecturer on Christianity in the Far East, but his hope was not destined to be realized. An attack of pneumonia, contracted while he was in China, pros- trated him just as he was on the point of leaving Korea for Japan. From this illness he never recovered, and the lec- tures which all who knew his fitness to deal with questions of comparative reli- gion had so eagerly anticipated were never delivered.
Twice before in the person of its be- loved president, Dr. Charles Cuthbert Hall, Union Seminary had sent one of its faculty to the Far East to witness to its faith in the supreme importance of the cause of Christian missions. Dr. Knox hoped that the custom might be- come an established one. He repeatedly expressed the wish that others of his colleagues might follow the precedent set by Dr. Hall and himself. My own appointment as lecturer on Christianity
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PREFACE
was the result of this suggestion. It seems appropriate, therefore, that this little book, which owes its inspiration to Dr. Knox's example, should be in- scribed to his memory.
The substance of the chapters that follow was delivered in the form of lec- tures in Kyoto, Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo, in response to an invitation from the Federation of the Japanese Churches, and from the Continuation Committee of Japan, a rbody representing all the organized Christian agencies in that coun- try. At Kyoto the lectures were given under the auspices of the Doshisha; at Kobe, of the Kwansei Gakuin; at Tokyo, in the Ginza Church, under the auspices of a committee representing the different theological schools of that city. Two of the lectures were repeated at Osaka before an audience which included rep- resentatives both of the missionary body and of the native church.
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The subject chosen needs no justifica- tion. In this time of world crisis when existing customs are everywhere being challenged, and the very existence of civilized society seems threatened by the world war, it is essential that we who are Christians should raise anew the ques- tion as to the nature and grounds of our faith, and should ask ourselves whether the enterprise in which we are engaged is a practicable one, worthy of the allegiance of sensible men. Espe- cially is this inquiry appropriate in such a country as Japan, where Christianity is a missionary religion, facing older faiths which also claim universality. Here the grounds on which Christians base their belief in the validity of their own re- ligion have peculiar interest, not only to the Christian, but to the non-Christian. In considering these grounds, therefore, in the wider connection in which the war has placed them, we are making a [x]
PREFACE
direct contribution to the cause of mis- sionary apologetic.
But in truth the issue here raised transcends all local or national limita- tions. The question whether Christi- anity is a practicable religion is not simply a missionary question; it is a human question. Indeed we may say without exaggeration that it is the human question, the question upon our answer to which our hope for the future of man- kind depends. Is force to be the ulti- mate word in human affairs, or is there something higher and more compelling — the love which bears and believes all things and which, if our Christian faith be justified, shall never fail? If these pages can do anything to strengthen this faith where it has been weakened, or re- vive it where it has died, they will have justified their purpose.
A part of the matter incorporated in the present volume has already appeared
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in print. Since the war broke out I have had opportunity repeatedly to dis- cuss the moral issues which it has raised in lectures, addresses, and articles. So far as this material was available for my present purpose I have not hesitated to make use of it. A part of the first chap- ter appeared in the Hibbert Journal for January, 1916, under the title, "Is Chris- tianity Practicable?" The substance of the second was delivered as the Drew Lecture at Hackney College, in London, in October, 1914.1 A part of the third appeared in Present Day Papers.2 A few paragraphs have also been used from a sermon on "The Allies of Faith,"3 and an address on "Worldwide Peace."4 I
1 Published in the Christian World Pulpit for October 28, 1914, and the Methodist Quarterly for January, 1915.
2 "Christianity on Trial," September, 1915; also published as a tract by the Church Peace Union.
3 Oxford, 1914.
4 " Worldwide Peace; What It Is, Why We WTant It, and What We Can Do to Bring It About," published in the Christian Work, April, 17, 24, 1915.
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wish here to express my indebtedness to the journals in which these extracts first appeared for permission to reprint them here.
It remains to acknowledge my indebt- edness to the friends who have helped me in the preparation of these lectures. First of all to the Board of Directors of the Union Theological Seminary, to whose action I owe my appointment as Union Seminary lecturer; secondly, to the Federation of Churches and the Con- tinuation Committee, whose invitation encouraged me to accept the appoint- ment, and especially to President Ibuka, of Tokyo, and Dr. Dearing of Yoko- hama, who arranged my programme in Japan, and the latter of whom read the lectures in manuscript; most of all to the many friends in Japan, both among the missionaries and the native Chris- tians, whose sympathetic interest in the lectures during their delivery, and whose
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request for their preservation in more permanent form have encouraged me to give them to the public. To Professor Kashiwai, my interpreter in Tokyo, and a former student in the Union Theologi- cal Seminary, I owe a special debt of gratitude for his accurate and pains- taking translation of the lectures into Japanese; and to Dr. Wainwright of the Christian Literature Society, which has undertaken the publication of the lec- tures in Japan, my thanks are due for seeing the manuscript through the press.
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CONTENTS
I. The World Crisis as Challenge and
as Opportunity 1
The Challenge of the War to Christian Faith — The Issue Defined. Is Christianity So- cially Practicable ? — Attempts to Evade the Issue — The Principles by Which It Is to Be Met.
II. The Christian Interpretation of His- tory 48
The World Crisis in the Light of the Christian Philosophy of History — History as God's Training-School of Character — History as God's Education for Brotherhood — History as the Meeting-Place of God and Man.
EI. The Christian Programme for Human- ity 97
The Christian Ideal for Society — The Alterna- tives to Christianity — The Practicability of the Christian Programme — The Resources Available for the Christian Cause.
IV. The Duty for To-Morrow .... 141
Where to Begin — The Christian's Duty to His Neighborhood — The Christian's Duty to His Country — The Christian's Attitude Toward War.
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CONTENTS
PAGB
V. What the Church Can Do .... 191
The Opportunity of the Church — The Witness of the Church to Human Brotherhood — Missions as an Invitation to Spiritual Ad- venture— The Living God as the Guarantee of Final Success.
Index 239
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CHAPTER I
THE WORLD CRISIS AS CHALLENGE AND AS OPPORTUNITY
Two friends were recently conversing about the war. "I do not see how I can go on living," said one. "It seems as if I had lost God out of my world." "Strange," answered the other, "it seems to me as if I had just found Him." The conversation is typical. Amid all the questions which the war has brought to the surface — questions eco- nomic, political, racial — the moral ques- tion has claimed the centre of attention. Appalling as has been the loss of human lives, colossal as has been the destruc- tion of capital, men have been conscious of a danger even greater for the life of [l]
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the spirit. What will the war mean for the higher life of man? Are we on the eve of a permanent relapse into bar- barism, or are we witnessing the birth throes of a new and higher social order? To every thoughtful man this ques- tion is of interest, but to the Christian it comes home with peculiar closeness. For Christianity in all its forms believes in a moral government of God in which all nations and races are included, and judges all experience, social and indi- vidual alike, in its bearing upon this supreme issue. It is not strange then that in every country of Christendom, those which are at war and those which are participants only by their sympathy, men are asking themselves what bearing the events we are witnessing will have upon the religion to which they own allegiance. How far has the Christian claim been confirmed, how far disproved, by the war? Of the two judgments [2]
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quoted at the beginning of this chapter, tested by the Christian standard, which has most evidence on its side ?
In the pages that follow I propose to raise, and so far as I can, to answer this question. I wish to ask what lessons we may learn from the present crisis as to the nature and validity of Christian faith, and what contribution Christians can make to the tasks of spiritual re- construction which must be undertaken after the war is over?
One of the most striking features of the last two years has been their revela- tion of the failure of the churches to ex- ercise any controlling influence upon the national policy of the so-called Christian nations. In an age when unity was the dominant note of Christian preaching; when the barriers that divided the de- nominations, in sympathy if not in ac- tion, were everywhere being overpassed; when the Christian consciousness of [3]
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world responsibility and world oppor- tunity had voiced itself in such gather- ings as the Edinburgh Conference, and such calls as that of the Conference on Faith and Order; when in every coun- try of Christendom the older individu- alistic conception of Christianity was giving place to one more conscious of its social responsibility, and more sen- sitive to the appeals of universal need, we might have expected that when the issue of war or peace had to be faced, the Christian conscience would have been alert enough, and the protests of the churches sufficiently powerful and effective to have called a halt in time. Whatever may have been true of other ages and of men of other faiths, in this age at least, and among nations calling themselves Christian, war on such a scale should have been impossible.
But as a matter of fact this expectation has been disappointed. Not only were [4]
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the churches powerless to prevent the war, but they made no serious attempt to do so. And now that the war has come, and the nations on either side are committed to the contest, the Chris- tians within each are found heart and soul in support of their respective govern- ments, not only in the physical struggle in which they are engaged, but what is more significant, in their interpretation of the moral issues at stake. With all recognition of the unselfishness of pur- pose that has animated Christians as individuals, it must yet be confessed that with reference to international re- lations the Christian sentiment of the world has failed to make itself felt in this supreme crisis in any unified and effective way. Individual Christians have said and done many noble and un- selfish things. The church as a whole has shown no consciousness of indepen- dent responsibility. It has committed 15]
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itself to no definite constructive pro- gramme.
In this, to be sure, Christians do not stand alone. What is true of the church is true of every one of the idealistic agencies in whose activity we were wont to take pride. When put to the su- preme test, science and art, literature and law have proved as impotent as re- ligion. The Palace of The Hague is de- serted. Where two years ago we found business men investing their capital with equal impartiality in Russia and Austria, Germany and England, to-day we see the nations organizing their economic resources on lines determined by the present conflict, and what is more men- acing, promising themselves the perpetu- ation of this divisive policy after the war is over. Socialism, the one political creed already definitely committed to an international programme, has seen its organization disrupted by the strain of [6]
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opposing patriotisms, and its members, with a heavy heart, abandoning their dream of the world war against capital- istic oppression for the more pressing, if repugnant, task of killing their brother Socialists who, like themselves but in opposing ranks, have obeyed their coun- try's summons to arm in her defense. Even science, the most objective and un- impassioned of all human interests, has caught the prevailing contagion, and, abandoning all pretense of impartiality, committed itself in the persons of its most distinguished representatives to a propaganda of partisanship.
What we seem to see therefore is the bankruptcy of internationalism in all its forms. But of all these failures, signal and discouraging as they are, none is more surprising, and none more dis- heartening, than that of the Christian church. For no other organization rep- resents in a more unqualified way the
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higher interests of mankind, and none is more definitely committed to the ideal of brotherhood, of which war is the ex- plicit denial. It becomes incumbent, therefore, upon us who call ourselves Christians, to inquire into the reason for this failure; to discover whether it is irremediable, and if not to learn what we can do to make its recurrence in the future impossible.
The question thus raised is not an academic one. It is not one which has to do simply with our private satisfac- tion and reassurance in faith, important as these may be. It is forced upon us by the social situation. For we are not simply thinkers, but actors. When peace comes, whether it be sooner or later, and the work of reconstruction has to be faced, we shall have to do our part in determining the policies to be adopted, and the methods to be followed in realiz- ing them. And what we do will be de-
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termined by what we believe. Shall we yield to the prevailing scepticism, and abandon our hope of the realization of the Christian ideal of brotherhood on earth? Shall we seek compensation for Chris- tianity's failure here in the millenarian's dream of a triumph of righteousness in some other world than ours, or in the mystic peace which follows the abandon- ment of all earthly ideals for the higher bliss of communion with the ineffable God? Or, is the fault not in our ideal, but in ourselves, a fault which may be remedied if we do our part, and which in fact it is our most pressing duty, as it is our supreme privilege, to remedy?
It is difficult to exaggerate the im- portance of this question. When the initial shock of the war was over and men awoke from the numbness of their first surprise to face the problem of ad- justment to the new and strange world in which they found themselves, the [9]
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first effect was a certain exhilaration of spirit. The very magnitude of the crisis had in it something inspiring, almost en- nobling. Small concerns were forgotten, petty interests no longer attracted. Men were solemnized, uplifted, carried out of themselves by the enthusiasm of a great loyalty. Religious men especially were quick to respond to the ideal elements in the situation. In their country's appeal to sacrifice and devotion Christians found a natural outlet for the instinct of con- secration which had been bred in them by their religion. They did not doubt that in serving the nation's cause they were at the same time promoting God's kingdom on the earth.
But as time went on this early enthu- siasm gave place to a different mood. As the magnitude of the struggle has become more apparent, and its cost not only in human life but in faith and hope and love, it has become less easy [io]
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to maintain the optimism which char- acterized the early days of the war. Face to face with the grim reality of modern warfare, with its ruthless bru- tality and shameless cynicism, the ideals of peace which we associate with Chris- tianity seem unreal and remote. What had at first been regarded as unthinka- ble has come to be taken as a matter of course; and even those Christians who still cherish the ideal of world brother- hood and peace despair of finding any sphere in which it can be made prac- tically operative for generations to come. Such a situation is full of danger, for a faith which cannot find appropriate ex- pression in action is held by a precarious tenure. From every point of view, there- fore, the inquiry which is here proposed becomes of commanding importance.
What then is the issue which the war has raised for Christian faith? It is in [HI
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briefest statement whether Christianity is a practicable religion for society as well as for the individuals who compose it?
There are two different angles from which the question as to the practica- bility of the Christian religion may be approached. It may be approached from the point of view of the individual, or it may be approached from the point of view of man's social relations. We may ask how far Christianity is a practicable religion for the individual man and woman; whether it offers a reasonable creed, a satisfying object of worship, a worthy ideal of conduct, and motives adequate to insure its realization; or we may ask whether Christianity is so- cially practicable, a religion which in such a world as this, with its complex relationships, economic, social, and po- litical, we may reasonably expect to become the accepted standard for the common faith and life of man.
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It makes a great difference in which of these two senses we understand our question. From the point of view of the individual, few would be found to deny the practicability of Christianity, for the evidence to the contrary is accessible on every hand. There are men and women all the world over who believe in the Christian God, accept the Chris- tian standard, and realize that standard in their own personal conduct to a re- markable degree. They are unselfish, trustful, brotherly, forgiving, hopeful, pure. They face calamity with courage, sin with repentance, opportunity with consecration, and persecution with self- control. They may be mistaken in their belief, and their hope may be destined to disappointment, but no one can deny that, so far as their personal experience is concerned, Christianity has proved and is still proving itself not only a practica- ble, but a satisfying and ennobling religion.
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For men of this type the war has in- troduced no essentially new element into their religious experience. It has im- mensely deepened and intensified it. It has provided a new challenge for faith, a new opportunity for service, but it has not made it appreciably harder to be- lieve in God. Indeed, for many it has become far easier, for the very shattering of earthly ideals and the new revelation of the transitoriness of material posses- sions has served to set in clearer per- spective the unseen reality, and removed, as it were, a veil which seemed to hang between them and God. For many it has meant a readjustment of standards and a reinforcement of the tendency present in every religion which, like Christianity, makes much of personality, to postpone the consummation from this life to another. Where so many of the young and the strong have been cut off in the flower of their youth, it cannot but
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be that thought should turn to the life after death for the solution of the prob- lems that baffle us here. But this, too, is not a new faith, only the re-emphasis in a new setting of what has been pres- ent in Christianity from the first.
But with the other phase of the ques- tion it is different. When we ask whether Christianity is socially practicable, we ask whether the standards which have been accepted and in a measure realized by selected individuals here and there, are valid for the race as a whole; whether nations and the rival classes within each nation, whose dealings one with another are now conducted on purely selfish principles, may be expected to abandon their present rivalry in favor of the more generous and inclusive meth- ods advocated by Christ.
For such a question the war is of mo- mentous significance. For war in the boldness of its affirmation of the su-
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premacy of self-interest as between so- cial groups is, in its essence, the denial of Christianity. If war, and what war means, is a permanent social necessity, then Christianity in the sense in which we are interested in it here is socially impracticable, and our question must be answered in the negative.
There are many thoughtful people who believe that this is the case. Regretfully but none the less explicitly, and with full consciousness of the significance of their action, they have abandoned any hope that the principles and ideals which in- spire the life of the best Christians can ever be made dominant in the life of society as a whole. They look upon the interpretation of Christianity which has been so much in evidence in the last gen- eration as a spirit of brotherhood and tolerance which was gradually to leaven society as a whole — which, indeed, was actually leavening it so rapidly and so
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successfully as to make war in any such sense, and on any such scale as it had been known in the past, morally impos- sible— they look, I repeat, upon such a conception as this, a conception made familiar to us by the theology of the last thirty years, as a delusion, beau- tiful, if you will, as any dream of an ideal social state is beautiful, but wholly unrelated to the matter-of-fact world in which we live, and full of danger, as all unreality is dangerous which blinds men's eyes to the perils of the existing situation, and leaves them unprepared to meet it. And it cannot be denied that there is much to be said in support of this view. Tested by each one of its cardinal prin- ciples, Christianity seems hopelessly to have broken down. Whatever else one may or may not include in Christianity, this at least it has meant to those who have accepted it in the past; the father- hood of God, the brotherhood of man, [H]
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redemption through Christ, the leader- ship of the church. And yet how un- real and far away seems each of these when measured by the grim realities of the present ! How can one speak of the fatherhood of God in any universal and all-embracing sense in the light of the terrible calamities which have fallen upon so many innocent sufferers all over the round world! How can one believe in the goodness of God when one contem- plates this unexampled harvest of agony, of bitterness, and of death? How the whole dilemma that in every age has haunted the imagination of man, the di- lemma: either God would not, and then He is not good, or He could not, and then He is not in control — how this dilemma has been intensified until it seems as if it could not be evaded. For the individual here and there, the man of strong faith and heroic courage, it may be possible now as in the past to
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fight one's way through the storms of doubt up into the clear skies of faith, but for the world at large, surely if what we see is to be the measure of the future, it is vain to talk of the fatherhood of God with any expectation of being be- lieved.
The case is still more disheartening when we pass to the second great article of the Christian faith, the brotherhood of man. For what we seem to see to-day is a colossal denial on the part of that portion of the human race which has been longest under the influence of Christ, and which alone definitely calls itself Christian, of this central and cardinal conviction. Whatever else Christianity may or may not be, it is an international religion. It began as a protest against the doctrine which identified the King- dom of God with any single nation. It broke the barrier between Greek and Jew, and proclaimed the coming of a [ 19 ]
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new social order which should include both. But now we see the revival in the most brutal form of the very barriers which it was the mission of Christ to break down. The outstanding factor in the situation is the factor of race; the final unit, it is declared over and over again, must be the nation. The Chris- tian claim to reach beyond the individual life and prescribe laws for the state is explicitly repudiated, not simply by poli- ticians and by statesmen, but by Chris- tian theologians who tell us that Chris- tianity has to do purely with the life of the individual, that the unselfishness which it prescribes and the sacrifices which it inculcates are valid only for private persons within the limits of the present life. As for the state itself, that, we are told, is the ultimate unit, know- ing no law but that of its own existence, and recognizing no authority, human or divine, which has the right to ask of it
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the self-abnegation which is the supreme law of the individual Christian.
Nor is it otherwise with the third great Christian tenet, that of redemp- tion through Christ. Characteristic of Christianity as an individual experience is the consciousness of the forgiveness of sins, humility in the presence of the holy God, penitence because of the mem- ory of past wrong-doing, sympathy with others who are involved in the same legacy of sin and are heirs to the same blessing of redemption. The willingness to forgive as one has been forgiven, to bear and to forbear, to think no evil, to trust where one cannot see — all these qualities so characteristic of the finest Christian experience — where shall we look for them to-day in this world of sus- picion, enmity, and hate? How can we believe in the social practicability of the Christian religion when we find each of the warring nations repudiating all
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blame from itself and attributing all re- sponsibility for this world tragedy to its opponents? What concord is there be- tween the spirit of Christ and the pride and self-satisfaction that are the domi- nant notes of the age in which we live ?
And if it be said that these are but local and transitory symptoms, the evi- dence of a world-spirit which for the moment has slipped its leash and run wild without control; that within or- ganized Christianity at least we may count on a protest against these unchris- tian tendencies and the reaffirmation in the face of a challenging world of the great ideals and principles of which we have been speaking — we face this further and most discouraging fact of the all but complete abnegation of leadership on the part of the Christian church. In every country that is now at war we find the forces of organized religion mobil- ized with army and navy in defense of
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the particular contention of the state in question. The consciousness of world citizenship so characteristic of the church of Christ in its great days is for the moment eclipsed, and one wonders whether it will ever be possible to revive it.
It may be said — it will no doubt be said — that in principle there is nothing new in what we see. In one form or another the problem of evil has always been with us. But there is something in the size of the present crisis that stag- gers the imagination, something which forces home the issue even upon those comfortable and sheltered lives which have hitherto managed to elude it; while for those who are already hostile to Chris- tianity it seems as if here at last a weapon had been thrust into their hands to drive home their case with a logic which could not be resisted.
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There are some Christians indeed who try to evade the difficulty by denying the relevancy of Christianity to the pres- ent life, or at least to those phases of human life which concern the relations of men in society. According to their view Christianity is purely a religion of individual salvation. It is concerned with the soul of man, not with his body, and with this life simply as a preparation for that which is to come. To those who hold such a view there is nothing surprising in the present situation. It involves no failure of Christianity, for the simple reason that Christianity has never proposed to be a religion for this world. Not transformation, they insist, but escape, is the Christian message; not leadership but protest the true func- tion of the church.
There are two forms which this other- worldly Christianity may take. One is premillenarianism. This abandons the
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present world to the power of evil. It expects no improvement in society until the great cataclysm at the end of the age when Christ is to return in person to establish his kingdom. In the mean- time it confines the duty of the church to preaching repentance to individuals, and warning them to be ready to wel- come their Lord when he comes.
It is easy to understand how this view arose. During the first decades of Christianity no one anticipated the long duration of human history. The disciples believed that Christ would come again within the lifetime of men then living in order to establish his kingdom upon earth and to realize the social ideals of justice, brotherhood, and love. And when this expectation was disap- pointed and men faced the prospect of a period of waiting indefinitely long, the old habits of thought still persisted and the social consummation unattain-
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able, or at least unrealized here, was awaited in the undiscovered country that lay beyond death. In the mean- time the energies of Christians found sufficient outlet in the preparation of the individual for the life after death, and the winning of new candidates for the citizenship of the future kingdom.
So there grew up a conception of Chris- tianity which, while it still cherished the social ideal, and phrased its faith in terms of social fellowship, was yet in principle largely self-centred and indi- vidualistic.
I would speak with the greatest re- spect of those who hold the premillena- rian view. In an age which is tempted to compromise for the sake of immediate success they have held aloft the ideal of personal purity and of unswerving loyalty. To the sorrowful spirit they have offered comfort; to the sinful, hope, and to those who despair of any outcome of
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life here adequate to the demand of the Christian ideal, they promise in another world a new sphere of activity, and a better guarantee of success.
But for many Christians, and these not the least sincere, such a restriction of the sphere of Christianity presents difficulties. They believe with all their might in the gospel of individual salva- tion, but they believe, too, that Christ has a message for society as well which cannot be neglected with impunity. They remember how much of the Bible is concerned with questions of social righteousness, and feel that such a situa- tion as faces us in Europe to-day would, if accepted as permanent and normal, be in effect a denial of the gospel. To hold fast the Christian ideal for society, while at the same time denying that it is capable of realization in the present world seems to involve one in a funda- mental contradiction which, if clearly [27]
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perceived, must paralyze the will. It gives us an ideal which we can do noth- ing to realize, and in the midst of events which are shaking the world to its foun- dations, assigns us the position of irre- sponsible spectators.
The other form of other-worldly Chris- tianity is mysticism. This is even more radically antisocial.1 It regards our re- lation to our fellow men in any possible world as of only temporary and transi- tory significance. To the mystic God is the only true reality, and God can brook no rival in the allegiance of the soul. From the vain quest of social betterment with its divided allegiance, from the false
1 It is hardly necessary to say that I use mysticism in this connection in a technical sense to denote a type of religion which concentrates attention upon the relation between the individual soul and God, and re- gards all other factors as irrelevant if not positively disturbing. The term is often used in a wider sense, as a synonym of vital as distinct from traditional re- ligion, and those are called mystics who unite with ethical devotion to their fellow men a vivid sense of the presence and fellowship of God. It is with mysticism in the former sense only that we are concerned here.
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hope of human progress with its inevita- ble disappointment, he would recall us to the inner world where alone God is to be found.
When I was in England during the early months of the war I remember hearing a distinguished writer, herself a mystic, give a lecture on mysticism and the war. She denied that there was any- thing in the present situation which could disturb the calm of the mystic's life with God, for the simple reason that this life was lived on a level where all such questions as were involved in the present struggle in Europe were irrel- evant. All the passion and agony, the struggle and rivalry which fill the days and nights of the contestants at the front belong to the region of mundane interest, from which it is the function of religion to free the soul. In the un- troubled peace which God gives to his saints they have no place.
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It is not my purpose here to consider the relation of mysticism to Christianity or to debate the question how far the Christian religion may rightly be called mystical. It will be sufficient to say that, to the extent to which the mystic's definition of Christianity is accepted as correct, it loses the marks which dis- tinguish it from the contemplative re- ligions of the East, and the teaching of Jesus is emptied of its natural and hitherto all but universally accepted meaning. When Jesus spoke of God as a Father, he used words borrowed from the most familiar of social relationships, and committed his disciples to an ideal incapable of description in terms of purely individualistic and self-centred religion.
There are two reasons why it is difficult to be satisfied either with the premille- narian or the mystic creed. The first is psychological, growing out of the per-
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sonal religious experience; the second, historical, based upon observation of the experience of others.
The first reason why we find it hard to be satisfied with a purely individual- istic religion is that we know that we ourselves are more than individuals. The more we try to be our own best selves, the more earnest we make with the Chris- tian ideal of personal consecration and self-sacrifice, the more, in short, we try to do the things that individualistic Christianity requires of us, the more in- evitably we find ourselves led beyond the sphere of individual interest to the common aspirations, ideals, and endeav- ors which make up the life of men in society.
The second reason is historical. As we retrace the story of mankind in the past and ask ourselves who are the heroes whom we most admire, and the benefactors in whose achievements we
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take the most pride, we find they are those who have given themselves with the most complete devotion to the ser- vice of their fellows, and to whose sacri- fices, however fruitless at the time they may have seemed, we can trace some for- ward step in the upward march of hu- manity. Unless we are to renounce all hope of human progress and, like the Eastern sage of whom Kipling writes in "Kim," reduce history to a series of cycles in which generation after genera- tion retraces with unseeing eye the path- way already traversed by its predeces- sors, we must believe that God has some purpose in the movements of nations as well as of individuals, some satisfying goal to which, by however arduous and painful a path, he is leading the peoples. Such, at least, is the conviction which has inspired the present inquiry. I am writing for those who, with me, believe that Christianity has a social message,
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and that Christians have a responsibility to their neighborhood, and to the state, as well as to their own souls before God. To all who hold this faith the war is at once a challenge and an opportunity: a challenge to justify their faith against attack, an opportunity to learn lessons which may prevent similar failures in the future.
It is so in every great crisis. It is at once test and teacher. We learn by what we experience, and no contact with opposing forces, whether in the world of thought or of action, leaves us just where we were before. The his- tory of the Christian religion is not sim- ply the story of the reaffirmation from age to age of a changeless deposit of faith; it is the record of a growing in- sight into the significance of principles whose full meaning can be only gradu- ally apprehended in the light of advanc- ing experience.
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So it must be in the present crisis. It will not be enough for us to maintain our faith undaunted. We must grasp it more firmly and understand its consequences more completely than we did before.
In the chapters that follow I propose to take up both aspects of this inquiry. We shall consider, in the first place, how we are to meet the challenge of the war, and what answer our faith can give to the reasons which are urged against it. In the second place, we shall ask our- selves what we can learn from the ex- perience through which we are passing, as to our duty for the future.
But before we take up this more de- tailed study there are certain prelim- inary questions which must detain us for a moment. These have to do with the principles by which the practica- bility of any ideal must be judged.
What then are the principles by which
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we must test the claim of any social philosophy to offer us a practicable mode of life? I will mention four: (1) In estimating its success or failure it must be judged by its own claim, and not by some standard imported from without.
(2) Where it is a question of a process we must take account of the entire period of the development and not merely of a cross-section artificially selected.
(3) In the case of a far-reaching social phenomenon like Christianity, which touches life on all sides and is in process of constant reaction with its environ- ment, we must not identify the religion whose practicability is in question with the ecclesiastical organization which at best imperfectly expresses it. (4) Fi- nally, in disproving any conclusion it is not enough to point out its difficulties. We must face the alternatives, and show that they involve no difficulty as great or even greater.
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When we apply these principles to our estimate of the present situation we shall be led to temper the severity of our judg- ment. Christianity, whether as a pro- gramme for the individual or for society, has never promised itself an easy vic- tory. It has been a militant religion, recognizing evil as a present fact of far- reaching ramifications and insidious power. The ideal which it holds forth is not of a gradual unfolding, taking place automatically and inevitably as the flower swells and ripens under the sun, but a conquest over enemies who need to be subdued by an effort of the will, and whose resistance, even when suc- cessfully overcome, will leave its scars behind. As pictured in the New Testa- ment, Christianity is a religion of tri- umph indeed, but a triumph of those who have come through great tribulation, martyrs and heroes as well as saints.
This is so even in the life of the in-
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dividual. The great characters which Christianity has formed have been formed through struggle, and there have been times in the life of each when they were tempted to despair of success. What should we have said of Augustine if his "Confessions" had ended before his con- version, or of Luther before the great experience which revolutionized his life? When we say that Christianity is a prac- ticable religion for the individual we mean that, in spite of personal failure and sin, the motives which Christianity commands and the inspiration which it supplies have proved sufficient in the case of a multitude of men and women to overcome the opposing forces of pride, self-will, and envy, and to produce char- acters rounded, harmonious, and com- plete.
How much more necessary is it to avoid hasty judgments when we con- sider the social practicability of the
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Christian religion! For here we have to do with a process which instead of being complete in a few score years is to be measured by millenniums. To say that Christianity is socially prac- ticable is not to say that it is possible to-day or to-morrow, or even in the next generation to realize the Christian ideal in society — but that the realization of this ideal ought to be the aim toward which social effort should be directed, and by the success or failure of which social progress should be measured. No doubt a long process of education will be necessary. No doubt while the edu- cation is incomplete and men who have accepted the Christian standard face those who either know it not, or who as yet reject it, compromises will be inevi- table as they are inevitable to-day in the life of the individual who as yet im- perfectly apprehends or at least imper- fectly realizes the Christian ideal. But
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just as little as the fact of such com- promises makes us despair of the prac- ticability of Christianity for the indi- vidual or leads us to abandon the Chris- tian test of character in favor of one less rigorous and exacting, ought the pres- ence of these social compromises and failures to lead us to abandon our faith in the social practicability of Christian- ity, provided only we can be assured that the direction of social progress is toward rather than away from the Christian ideal. It is not the fact that we have hitherto failed to realize the Christian social ideal that should discourage us, but the abandonment of the attempt, and still more the theoretical justifica- tion of this abandonment on the part of those who in their private life still call themselves Christians.
Once more, no attempt to measure the resources at the command of Christian- ity in its world campaign can be ade-
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quate which ignores the Christianity out- side the organized church. As little as the spirit of any people can be measured by the state of its contemporary institu- tions, as little as the moral resources of a city or a state can be estimated by the utterances of the politicians who at the moment may be in control of the offices, can the spirit of Christianity find ade- quate expression in the deliverances of its official leaders, or its aspirations be limited to the programme which at the moment may command the assent of ecclesiastical authority. Organizations are proverbially conservative. They are the precipitate of the moral victories of the past. Permanence is their ideal rather than progress — the thing that has been rather than the thing that is to be. It is not, therefore, by the official utterances of a religion, valuable and precious as these may be in their conser- vation of the spiritual inheritance of the
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past, that we are to estimate the lines of its future development. Rather must we gain our clew to this in the strivings and hopes of the forward-looking, whether within the organization or without — the men and women who feel within them the spirit of the new age and voice the ideals which will find expression in the institutions of the future. The signifi- cant thing for the estimate of present- day Christianity is not the fact that the official leadership of the church has for the moment broken down; that in each of the warring nations the ecclesiastical authorities have taken their cue from the utterances of their respective gov- ernments, and with little or no criticism accepted the official point of view as their own — but that in every nation earnest spirits have found this attitude spiritually unsatisfying, and are trying in their own way to express a more cath- olic and comprehensive ideal.
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Once more, it is not enough to reject any conclusion on account of its difficul- ties. We must consider the alternative. There are difficulties no doubt in assum- ing the social practicability of the Chris- tian religion, but are there no difficulties in assuming the contrary? What those difficulties may be has been brought home to the consciousness of mankind with a vividness unexampled in history by the events of the past two years. This war with all its horrors is the direct result of the fact that the men in con- trol of the policy of the leading Eu- ropean nations, whatever their personal attitude toward Christianity as a private faith may have been, have deliberately accepted the thesis of its social imprac- ticability and have been sustained in this attitude by the public sentiment of their respective countries. When the war is over and the questions of reconstruction are to be faced, this question will have to
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be answered by those responsible for the terms of peace; whether the philosophy which underlies the diplomacy of the past two generations is still to control, or whether from the mere point of view of human prudence and reason, if from no higher ground, it may not prove wise to try a different method? If the former alternative shall prevail, we know what to expect. After a breathing space, longer or shorter, there will be a renewal of what we have been experiencing in Europe on a scale as much more portentous and ter- rible than what we now see, as the forces which in the meantime modern science shall have evoked will be vaster and more appalling. Nor is this all. With the rapid education of the great peoples of the remoter East, it is already certain that in a time longer or shorter, but distinctly measurable, these unnumbered millions of men, hitherto largely aloof or qui- escent so far as the Western world is
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IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
concerned, will be drawn into the vor- tex, and increase by their new reserves of power the terror of the impending cataclysm. As the world grows smaller and the distant draws near, the refuges which in the past have sheltered neutral and peace-loving nations from the storms of war will grow fewer and at last dis- appear altogether, and the extent and duration of the contests that will suc- ceed one another from generation to generation in dreadful and monotonous succession be measured only by the re- sources of humanity as a whole.
Such then is the alternative which we face if Christianity be not socially prac- ticable. And the question fairly arises whether it is not as reasonable to sup- pose that the influences which within individual communities and states have gradually substituted the methods of co-operation and of law for those of armed force, may not find advocates
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ingenious enough to apply them to the new situation when once the magni- tude of its issues has been faced.
More is at stake than appears on the surface. It is one thing to postpone the coming of the Kingdom of God, to realize that in a process so complex and many-sided, involving so many differ- ent generations and races, requiring for its completion an education so pains- taking and long-continued, generations and ages may have to pass before the consummation which is desired is reached; it is one thing — while the process is incomplete — to regard each struggle for a better social order, each new experience of tragedy following the failure of the old as one more step in the forward march, one more object- lesson in God's great training-school of brotherhood — and quite another to see in the entire attempt to realize the ideal of brotherhood among men a gigantic
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self-delusion destined from the start to inevitable failure, and to be content for oneself with a purely individualistic and self-centred faith.
I do not say that life will not be pos- sible with such an outlook. I do not say that religion in some form will not sur- vive. We know that religion has an in- exhaustible vitality, and manifests itself in the most forbidding environment and the most unexpected forms, but I do say that for the thoughtful man more will be involved in such an issue than the fail- ure of Christianity as a social scheme. Even for the individual it is hard to see how Christianity can any longer appear a practicable religion if by Christianity we mean the religion which accepts the principles of Jesus as its standard of faith and life. The man who believes in the fatherhood of God and the brother- hood of man may indeed postpone the coming of the social consummation. He
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may push it into a remote future or shift it to another world. But there is one thing which he cannot do without the surrender of his most vital faith, and that is, abandon it altogether. Deceive our- selves as we may, try to hide it from ourselves as we will, the individual and the social gospel belong together, and one cannot permanently survive the ship- wreck of the other.
It is in the light of such considera- tions that we have to approach our problem and measure the arguments which make for or against the social practicability of the Christian religion.
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CHAPTER II
THE CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
In the last chapter we considered the issue which the war has raised for Chris- tian faith. It is, in a word, that of the social practicability of the Christian re- ligion. Is the religion that we profess valid for nations as well as for individ- uals— a religion which we can teach in our schools, practise in our business, and apply in all the complex relations of our national and international life ? We con- sidered the attempts which have been made to evade the issue by those whose conception of Christianity is purely individualistic and other-worldly, and found them unconvincing. Finally, we laid down certain general principles by
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which the practicability of any mode of life must be tested. We have now to consider more in detail the consequences which follow from these principles for the subject of our present inquiry.
There are three different tests which we may apply to the claim of Chris- tianity to offer a practicable social pro- gramme. We may test it first by its diagnosis of the existing situation; secondly, by the remedy it offers, and thirdly, by the resources at its com- mand.
And first of the diagnosis. If the Christian claim be justified, how shall we account for the present situation? The Christian answer is entirely simple and definite. It is because as a matter of fact the principles of Christianity have never been applied.
I do not mean this simply in the sense in which it is true of our individual fail- ures that our accomplishment falls be-
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low our endeavors. I mean that in in- ternational affairs no serious attempt has been made to apply Christian principles at all. Even in countries which call themselves Christian the energies of Christians have, as a rule, been confined to dealing with individual lives, and the larger problems which concern nations and states have, with few rare exceptions, been dealt with either on principles of temporary expediency or of deliberate selfishness.
In saying this we are saying only what is generally admitted. Whatever may have been their private faith as individ- uals, the statesmen who are responsible for the diplomacy of the various Euro- pean countries have taken it for granted that self-interest must be the supreme law of nations. They have made it their primary aim to secure advantage for their own people at the expense of their rivals, and it was the clash which inevitably
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resulted from this policy of organized national selfishness which precipitated the war.
This does not .mean that there has been no difference in the standards of the different European countries; that idealistic motives have had no part to play in determining national policy, or in dictating the limits beyond which a particular state was unwilling to go; but it does mean that when we take the his- tory of Europe in the large, and trace the events of the last two years to their remoter causes, we are led to a concep- tion of the relation of states radically inconsistent with the Christian ideal. When in times of peace nations treat neighboring nations as enemies in dis- guise, and organize their resources, dip- lomatic, economic, and military, with a view to possible conflict, it takes little intelligence to predict the results. And this, without a single exception, has been
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the state of the leading European nations for a generation at least.
I know no more pathetic utterance in all recent history than that sentence of Sir Edward Grey in the English White Book, in which, pleading against hope for one more day's delay before the issue is joined, he promises, if the hoped-for respite is secured, to do his best to trans- form the system of rival alliances which had brought the world to the verge of war, into a real concert of Europe.1 It is as if he had said: "In the past we have tried to preserve the world's peace by the appeal to fear; but now that it has become clear that this method has failed, has not the time come for a dif- ferent experiment? Since international
1 "And I will say this: If the peace of Europe can be preserved and the present crisis safely passed, my own endeavor will be to promote some arrangement to which Germany could be a party, by which she could be assured that no aggressive or hostile policy would be pursued against her or her allies, by France, Russia, and ourselves jointly or separately." (British White Paper, No. 101.)
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rivalry has brought us to the brink of the precipice, why not try international co- operation? I for one am ready for it and pledge myself, if the rest of you will join me, to do what I can to make it a success."
Alas, it was too late. You cannot turn back the wheels of history as you can the hands of a clock. And all the efforts of the diplomats who in the fate- ful ten days that preceded the outbreak of war worked with a good faith that there is no reason to question, to stay the impending catastrophe, were neu- tralized by forces to the strengthening of which they themselves and the peo- ples they represented had for years, sometimes consciously, more often un- consciously, been contributing.
It is with these underlying causes that Christianity is primarily concerned — the rivalries, the suspicions, the fear, the greed, the pride, of which wars are made.
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Unlike much contemporary pacifism which attacks war directly as the evil of evils, Christianity sees in it a symptom of something deeper and more evil still, namely, the radical selfishness of the human heart. War is not an indepen- dent fact which can be isolated from its antecedents. It is a part of the process of discipline through which by ways painful, but none the less salutary, God is teaching the nations their essential unity, and training them for higher things.
Two elements then enter into the Christian interpretation of war: first, the sin which has caused it; secondly, the divine purpose which is being fulfilled through it. It is only as we put the present crisis in this larger context that we reach what is distinctive in the Chris- tian view.
It was the prophets of Israel who first clearly perceived this connection. From
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the first the religion of the Hebrews had been a social religion, in the sense that the unit with which it dealt was the nation, rather than the individuals who composed it; but it had been a local religion. Its vision was bounded by Canaan, and the great world that lay- beyond was all but unknown. The prophets commanded a broader horizon. They first measured the extent and the completeness of Jehovah's control. Not Israel only was subject to his will, but the great world-powers — Egypt, Assyria, Persia, with whose fortune that of Israel was inextricably involved. All the move- ments of contemporary history — the march of contending armies, the rise of dynasties and the fall of cities — took place by His decree and for the execu- tion of His purpose. The Assyrian was the rod of His anger,1 the razor with which He was to shave head and beard.2
1 Isaiah 10 : 5. 2 Isaiah 7 : 20.
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Egypt was His servant.1 Philistia and Syria executors of His will.2 Far from the misfortunes of Israel proving that God had abandoned them, they were rather warnings which He had sent them for their good, stages which they must pass on their journey to salvation. The great thing was to understand their meaning, and to learn the lessons which they were designed to teach.
Christianity inherited Israel's faith in an all-encompassing Providence. It gave this faith new significance through its new revelation of God's character and of his redemptive purpose made known through Jesus Christ. It shifted the emphasis from the outward drama of the army and the camp to the inward struggle of the soul. It spiritualized and univer- salized the social ideal; and through the resurrection faith opened vistas of com- fort and hope beyond the grave, denied
1 Isaiah 19 : 19-25. 2 Isaiah 9 : 11, 12.
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the earlier stages of Israel's history. But it never wavered in its faith in God as Lord of all; of this life as well as of the life to come; of evil as well as of good; of nations as well as of the individuals who compose them.
This confidence was the result of no shallow optimism. When all goes smoothly it is easy to speak and to think comfortably. Some of us have learned this to our cost. We had under- estimated the forces which resist prog- ress. We had supposed that the great prize for which we had been contending was to be quickly won; that war on a great scale belonged to the past, and that our more enlightened age, in spite of its underlying selfishness and cruelty, could somehow slip easily into the King- dom of God. We have had a rude awakening, and we are tempted to go to the opposite extreme and to wonder whether, after all, Bernhardi and the
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prophets of force are not right, and our ideal of a social order at once just and free is not an idle dream.
Our predecessors in the faith were under no such illusion. If they believed in peace it was not because they were un- acquainted with war. There is no fact which confronts us to-day, however ap- palling and terrible, which they had not looked in the face. If they believed in God's control of history, it was not be- cause they underestimated the forces of evil, but because they had confidence that God was able to overrule evil for good.
How the Old Testament lives again in the light of contemporary events ! What a grim commentary upon Isaiah and Jeremiah are the events which are even now transpiring in Poland and France. The "country desolate," the "cities burned with fire," the land de- voured by strangers, "the daughter of
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Zion left as a booth in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city."1 Then, as now, "the hills did tremble, and their carcasses were as refuse in the midst of the streets."2 Then, as now, could be heard "the uproar of many peoples that roar like the roaring of the seas; and the rushing of nations, that rush like the rushing of mighty waters." 3 Then, as now, the swift advance, spreading ter- ror with its impression of resistless power.
These are but examples taken at ran- dom. How many times they could be multiplied if we were to follow human history through all the tragedy of its checkered fortunes, and recall again the sights and scenes which have been wit- nessed by Christian men who have yet kept a firm faith in the loving Father
1 Isaiah 1 : 7, 8. 2 Isaiah 5 : 25.
3 Isaiah 17 : 12.
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who holds all in the hollow of His hand, and without whose will not even a spar- row falleth.
It is worth while to recall these famil- iar facts, because they will help us to keep our sense of balance and propor- tion. We speak of our experience as un- paralleled in human history, and there is a sense in which this is true. But the statement needs qualification. The pres- ent crisis is unparalleled in magnitude, but not in quality. Hunger is hunger, and pain pain, and death death the world over; in Palestine as in Belgium, in Rome as in Austria and France. And the anguish of hope deferred, the shattering of ideals, the bitterness of the "I would, but ye would not," were as poignant to the patriarchs and saints of the first Christian century as they can be to us to-day. There is nothing, I repeat, that any man or woman or child is experiencing to-day which has
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not been experienced by others over and over and over again. There is no chal- lenge to faith in what we see which has not been met by faith in the past and vanquished.
What, then, is this faith that rises triumphant over every obstacle? What does the Christian see as he contem- plates the mysteries of God's providence in history? He sees three things. In the first place he sees God at work for a moral purpose. In the second place he sees God at work for a social purpose. In the third place he sees God at work for a religious purpose. Let us try, taking the Bible as our guide, to under- stand what this triple vision means for our faith.
When we say that God is in history for a moral purpose, we mean that His chief concern is the making and training of character. Not happiness, but dis-
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cipline is His primary interest, and hap- piness, when it comes, is only the seal that the discipline is complete.
This does not mean, of course, that Christianity is an ascetic religion; that it has no place and no regard for the simpler pleasures and interests of com- mon life. The reverse is true. The fig- ures which Jesus uses to describe His kingdom are the familiar figures of the peasant life on the soil — the fisherman with his nets, the sower with his seed, the father with his children, the friend with his friend, the host with his guests. The ideal state, when it comes, will be one of prosperity and peace. The lan- guage of the prophets about the holy city surrounded by fertile fields and in- habited by prosperous and contented people recurs in the Christian's descrip- tion of the new Jerusalem. But these things are incidental to the main pur- pose, which is the establishment of jus-
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tice and brotherhood among men. When Messiah comes it will be to judge the world with righteousness and vindicate the moral government of God.
This explains the Christian's attitude toward suffering. It is God's means of training character. Far from its being a sign of His forgetfulness, the proof of His weakness or of His indifference, it is through suffering that God teaches His most important lessons and opens the way for the impartation of His choicest blessings.
Here, too, the work of the prophets was epoch-making. In a world full of anguish and strife, to a people tempted to believe that God had utterly forsaken them, they bring their assurance of a loving purpose, using evil as an instru- ment of good. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth," is Jeho- vah's message to Israel through Amos, "therefore I will visit upon you all your
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iniquities."1 Love is not afraid to in- flict suffering, when the loved one is in mortal danger. Where there is sloth and self-indulgence and unbrotherliness, there must be suffering if there is to be salvation.
This does not mean that all suffering is due to sin. We shall see presently that much suffering has a very different explanation. But it means that while sin continues, suffering must continue; and that where we find evidence on a national scale, and over long periods of time of social misery and social degra- dation, we may be sure that there is at root a moral cause.
The first lesson, then, that comes to us as Christians, as we contemplate the sufferings of the present, is that of the need of self-examination and penitence. These great evils have not come upon mankind without a cause, and it is our
1 Amos 3 : 2. [ 64 ]
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duty, so far as we can, to understand this cause, that we may do our part to remove it.
One of the encouraging features of the present situation is that it has put the moral issue again in the centre of attention. We had been told that man- kind had outgrown the sense of sin, but to-day we see it revived in the most un- expected quarters. It is the subject of the diplomatic correspondence. It gives its tragic interest to the official papers, white, yellow, and gray. The theme of them all is moral responsibility. What is the contention of each of the parties in this gigantic controversy if not that they are fighting to uphold the elemental principles of justice and morality against men who have banded themselves to- gether for purposes of selfishness and greed? It is not we who are guilty, so runs the official apologetic of all the na- tions. But that there has been guilt
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on a scale the most colossal in history all are agreed. What is this but a confes- sion that the sense of sin is still alive in men, and that the old questions of guilt and punishment are still living questions. But the Bible not only points out to us the inevitable connection between sin and suffering, it shows us also what is the root of all our misery. This sin is unbrotherliness. It is the self-centred life, regarding only its own interests and indifferent to the needs and sufferings of others, which in every age has been the spring of social jealousy and social un- rest. What the Assyrians planned to do to Israel as a whole, individual Israel- ites, relying on their superior advantages of birth, or place, or wealth, had done in effect to their less fortunate fellow countrymen. They had treated them as the raw material of their own pleasure and gain. They had ignored their rights as human beings — common children of
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a common father — to a life that was full and free. The national misery which involved their own fortunes with those whom they had despised and oppressed was the natural and inevitable conse- quence of the national sin.
We stand too near the great crisis of our time to attempt any judicial appor- tionment of guilt or blame. That will be undertaken in due course, and before the bar of history each will be obliged to answer for the things done and left undone. But back of the question of immediate responsibility — the question of who touched the spark which caused the great explosion — there is the deeper question of the underlying conditions which made the explosion inevitable when the spark was applied. Here there can be no easy shifting of responsibility. Each of us has his share to bear in the common burden of sin. Whatever dur- ing all the years that have gone has sown
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envy and distrust between individuals and nations; wherever the weak have been oppressed and the longing for free- dom has been stifled; wherever men have thought basely of their fellows, attribut- ing to them conduct and desires which they would despise in themselves; wher- ever brute force has been magnified as the supreme reality, and the power of love has been belittled or denied; wherever, in short, individuals and na- tions calling themselves Christian have denied by their conduct the religion they profess, there they have been lay- ing the train which was some day des- tined to explode in bitterness and hate. As certainly as day follows night, so cer- tainly suffering follows sin. It is futile to cry, Peace, Peace, when there is no peace. It is idle to expect peace where the causes which produce war remain unremoved.
There is nothing, therefore, in what
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we see to dismay or to discourage us; nothing that we could not have pre- dicted if we had read our Bibles aright. What we see, so far from being a dis- proof of God's moral government of men, is the most august demonstration the world has yet seen of the inexorable- ness of the moral law and the inevitable- ness of the penalties which follow its violation. Once again God is teaching us by the most terrible of all examples that the one sure guarantee of peace is justice between nations and brotherhood among men.
And this brings us to the second article in the Christian philosophy of history — that God's purpose in history is a social purpose. It is not simply the training of the individual as an individual, but the establishment of the Kingdom which is his supreme concern, and this intro- duces complications into the situation.
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It explains the strange phenomenon, so baffling to faith, of the suffering of the innocent with the guilty.
From the beginning this has been the crux of the problem of suffering. It was not hard to understand suffering where there was sin. The mystery was rather on the other side, that so often the wicked seemed to escape their just punishment. But that the righteous should suffer while the wicked went scot-free, this seemed a challenge of God's moral gov- ernment so staggering that for long — even in the face of the most convincing evidence — men refused to believe in the fact. We see this in the attitude of Job's friends — when they insist, in spite of Job's denial, that where there is so much suffering there must have been corresponding sin. We see it in the protest of Jeremiah and Ezekiel when they repudiate the old proverb: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the
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children's teeth are set on edge." * And yet it remains true that the innocent do suffer with, and for, the guilty, and that the iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. What does it mean? There are two things which it might mean. One is that the ultimate reality is force, and that the Christian faith in the loving Father, who cares for each one of His human children, is without foun- dation in fact. The other is that the individual is not the final unit; that be- cause God's plan is social, a family, and not simply a collection of unrelated sons and daughters, His method of training must be more complex than would be the case if He were dealing with isolated individuals. It is the latter which is the Christian view. God's method is a method of redemptive love, and redemp- tive love saves by vicarious suffering.
1 Jer. 31 : 29, 30; Ezek. 18 : 2, 3. [71]
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Of all the revolutions in human valua- tion I know of none more revolutionary than this. It is the supreme example of Nietzsche's Umwerthung alter Werthe. We glean some estimate of it in the awed surprise with which the great prophet of the Exile records the story of his own discovery as he follows the experience of the suffering servant. "He was de- spised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as One from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed." l The righteous suffer for the wicked that the wicked
1 Isaiah 53 : 3-5. [72]'
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may be saved. This is the Christian solution of the problem of problems, the suffering of the innocent with, and for, the guilty. It is God's method of re- demption, the method of vicarious suffer- ing, the method which finds its supreme example and seal in the cross that was set up on Calvary.
It is not easy to exaggerate the im- portance of the cross for Christianity. It dominates our theology. It sets the tone of our religious feeling. It gives the key to our theodicy. Where other religions have shrunk from pain as the supreme evil, or turned aside from it as the supreme mystery, Christianity looks it full in the face and finds in it the price of salvation. "Him who knew no sin, God made to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."1
But it is a question whether even yet
1U Cor. 5 : 21. [73 ]
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we have learned the full meaning of the cross. Its very wonder has shrouded it in an artificial mystery. It has been isolated from all other human experi- ences as an event wholly sui generis. It has been explained as God's method of dealing with the sin of the individual — your sin and mine — the way in which the burden of the guilty soul has been shifted to the shoulders of the guiltless Christ.
But the cross has another and an even deeper meaning — a meaning not individ- ual merely, but social. It is the supreme revelation of a law that is valid every- where and always, the law of the soli- darity of all mankind in the moral life. It is not simply that Christ was willing to suffer for my sin. It is that, being what He was, He could not but suffer for it. When He became man it was not merely as an isolated individual, but as a member of the human family. He became involved in all the fortunes of
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the race, subject to that mysterious law of which we have spoken, that binds us all up together in one common bundle of life, so that not one of us can live for himself alone, but each is involved, for good or for evil, in the fortunes of all the rest.
How much this consciousness of hu- man solidarity has been reinforced by the events of the past two years! We are learning in a terrible text-book the truth of the old words that God has "made of one every nation of men." We have seen the war reaching beyond the nations immediately engaged, and laying its ruth- less and destroying hands upon peace- loving and inoffensive people. There is not an island so remote but feels the electric shock. There is not a man or woman so humble but on their shoulders some new burden will be laid as a direct result of this war. The time has gone by when any nation can say to other
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nations: " It is no concern of yours what I do to my neighbor." For good or for evil (for evil certainly if not for good) we are members one of another. We have been told it before, we know it now.
But there is another side to this mat- ter of human solidarity which it is just as important for us to understand, and that is its function as an agent of salva- tion. We have learned that there is a divine law which involves us all alike in the consequences of past sin. We have yet to learn that the same law may be made equally effective in the trans- mission of good.
And yet this, too, is the lesson of the cross. There is a contagion of good as well as of evil. As the sin of mankind brought suffering to the innocent Christ, necessarily, and as part of God's law, so the courageous acceptance of that suffer- ing by Christ brought salvation to sin-
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ful mankind, with an equal necessity, and as part of a law equally divine. In redemption, as in suffering, Christ is the type of humanity at its best. What was true of Him on the supreme scale, and in exceptional degree, may be true on a lesser scale, but no less truly in the case of every man or woman who follows Him in His path of loving sacrifice, and has learned from the heart to pray His prayer after Him, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Paul filling up on his part "that which is lack- ing of the afflictions of Christ . . . for His body's sake, which is the Church," 1 Latimer bidding the faltering Ridley "Be of good comfort, and play the man," since "we shall light such a candle by God's grace in England as, I trust, shall never be put out," are but the most con- spicuous examples of the great company of every name and age who, having fol-
1 Col. 1 : 24. [77]
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lowed Christ in His sufferings, have shared with Him also the triumph of sacrificial love.
It is in this spirit that the Christian must contemplate the terrible events through which we are passing. As they are the supreme proof of the solidarity of mankind in suffering, so they offer the supreme promise of the solidarity of mankind in salvation. If the suffer- ings which this great war lays upon the innocent breed only feelings of bitterness and hatred; if they are met with the resolve to return the same in kind with interest to the oppressor when the bal- ance of power inclines to the other side; if the answer (the final answer, I mean) to a desolated France be a ravaged Ger- many, then this war will prove but one more chapter — the most terrible to date — in the long story of bitterness and hatred of which history is full. But if the sufferers can learn from Christ His
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lesson of forgiveness; if they can see in their experience, as He saw in His, the price of salvation not for themselves only, but for those who have done them wrong; if their experience of the evils of war make them but the more resolute and the more courageous in their pur- suit of a just and lasting peace, then the outcome of the great struggle may be a new era of mutual understanding, and the blood of the martyrs prove once again the seed of a new and a better Church.
Much has been said of the compen- sation which is to be given to Belgium when the war is over. What compensa- tion can be given to a country which has suffered what she has suffered and is suffering? Will you give her money? Will money bind up her broken hearts, turn gray hairs brown, and recall her sons and daughters from the grave? Will you renew the guarantee of her in-
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dependence ? What treaty that the hand of man can write can rid her of the haunting sense of insecurity which is the legacy of human faithlessness where faith was due? There is one gift which could be given, and one only, which would de- serve the name of compensation, and that is the knowledge that through her suffering, appealing to mankind as no national suffering has done since the days when Israel's tragedy lent the Prophet his figure of the Christ to come, there had been born in every country in Chris- tendom such a sense of the futility and wickedness of war, such shame at the profanation of the Christian name by deeds essentially anti-Christian, such a searching of heart as to the causes of this pitiable relapse to barbarism and penitence for whatever in the life of each had made it possible; above all, such determination that such a tragedy should never happen again, as should mark the
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end of this whole dark chapter of human history and usher in a new era of con- fidence, brotherhood, and peace.
Is it to be so? That depends upon the power which is really strongest in history, whether the God in whom we believe — the God of righteousness and wisdom and love — is really in con- trol.
And this brings us to the third article in the Christian philosophy of history, the most significant and momentous of all, and that is that God is in history for a religious purpose, a purpose, that is to say, which involves the training of man for fellowship with God, and man's consciousness of God's solidarity with him in all his experiences.
Here, too, we have to do with an in- sight slowly won, and often inadequately grasped. At first men thought of God as outside of the drama of history — the
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spectator, the playwright; if acting at all, only occasionally, at set times and for specific purposes, but not himself in- volved in His inner life in the fortunes of the human actors He set in motion. This was, on the whole, the dominant Greek conception, and it recurs again and again in Christian history. God is the onlooker, sympathetic indeed, and well disposed, whose great calm we may hope to share in the good time coming when this life is over, and the other which lies beyond has begun.
But the prevailing Christian concep- tion is very different. It is not merely, as we have seen, that God is in history, immanent as well as transcendent, actor as well as spectator; but that He is in- volved in His inmost life in the fortunes of the human participants. He not only acts, He cares. When Israel sins, the burden falls not on man only, but on God. He is like the husband whose wife
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has committed adultery; * the father whose children have rebelled against him.2 If he punishes, it is not because he is indifferent or angry, but because he earnestly desires their moral good. There is no suffering of theirs in which he does not share. "In all their afflic- tion He was afflicted; ... in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them and carried them all the days of old." 3
It is only in the light of this truth that we grasp the full meaning of the cross. I have spoken of it in its human significance as a revelation of the law of vicarious sacrifice which is valid for man as well as God. But this is only one side, and not the deepest, of its mean- ing. It is the revelation of the heart of God. It shows God involved with us, in our deepest tragedy, fellow sympa-
^Hosea 1, 2. 2Deut. 32 : 6, 20.
3 Isaiah 63 : 9.
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thizer with us in our sorrow, fellow sufferer with us in our sin. It is the assurance that the pain which we suffer is not wantonly sent. It is the supreme pledge that the ultimate outcome will be good.
Here, and here alone, do we find the complete Christian theodicy, our ground for faith in the essential goodness of the world. We win this faith, not by ignor- ing evil, or by belittling it, but by trans- figuring it with the glory of the Divine sympathy and the serenity of the Divine purpose. It is a great thing to feel that our suffering may have a part to play in promoting human progress; it is an even greater to realize that through it we may gain an insight into the heart of God.
Here, too, with much that is baffling and discouraging, the war has brought us unexpected reinforcement of faith. Where the mind sees only difficulty, the heart has its own logic, and in the pres-
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ence of a need too great for human help, God finds his opportunity of self-revela- tion.
Illustrations of this fact have been coming to us from every army in the field. Wherever we turn we hear of the spirit of prayer in the trenches. The Russians kneel before their priests to re- ceive their blessing before they advance to battle. The French priests are on the firing-line, ready at any moment to celebrate a mass or to read a prayer for the dying. From the English lines come stories of religious revival. From Ger- many we hear of filled churches, and of the revival of the spirit of prayer. Let- ters from the front breathe an unwonted seriousness. To many a man who sel- dom named the name of Christ, he has become a familiar friend.
"Involuntarily," writes a Berlin teacher serving in the trenches in Poland, "thoughts turn from this world to the
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regions beyond. Spontaneously one feels one's way back to God, and realizes the great blessing of the church. Sometimes when we were compelled to he still on the firing-line under a most intense shower of bullets many hands were folded and many lips moved in silent prayer, while others told their rosaries. Afterward one can see the expression of joyful peace on all faces."
The same experience is put more naively by an English Tommy in the lines entitled, "Christ in Flanders."
"We had forgotten you, or very nearly. You did not seem to touch us very nearly. Of course we thought about you now and
then, Especially in any time of trouble. We knew that you were good in time of
trouble, But we are very ordinary men.
"And there were always other things to think of,
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There's lots of things a man has got to
think of; His work, his home, his pleasure, and his
wife; And so we only thought of you on Sunday, Sometimes perhaps not even on a Sunday, Because there's always lots to fill one's life.
"Now we remember, over here in Flanders.
It isn't strange to think of you in Flanders.
This hideous warfare seems to make things clear.
We never thought about you much in Eng- land.
But now that we are far away from Eng- land,
We have no doubts; we know that you are here."
No doubt there is another side to the picture. To many the war has been only benumbing and brutalizing, accen- tuating tendencies to evil already pres- ent, but till now held in check. But for the more thoughtful and earnest it has acted as a call to religion, reviving the consciousness of the God in whom till
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then they had scarcely realized they be- lieved.
There is a truth here of which we need to be constantly reminded. In times of prosperity, when life is easy, and plea- sure the chief preoccupation, it is easy to forget God. The factors in our en- vironment which we can see and handle and measure seem entirely adequate to account for the results we experience, and the arguments of the sceptic who finds God a needless hypothesis win a ready assent. But when trouble comes and the familiar props fail us, we find to our surprise that there is something in us of which we had not taken account. The conclusions to which our logic seemed forcing us become suddenly intolerable. We awake to the consciousness of the Great Companion, and we look up and take courage.
We who are religious teachers have been slow to learn this lesson. We have
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thought that we could prove God by reason to men who had not yet discov- ered His presence in experience. We have constructed syllogisms and balanced probabilities, and met the arguments of our opponents with counter-arguments, and we have been surprised that the con- viction which we hoped to produce did not follow.
But this is because we have been pro- ceeding in the wrong way. We have argued where we should have assumed. It is not our place to prove to men without God that God exists, but to point out to men already in contact with God through nature, through history, through their own personal life, the mean- ing of their experience.
This does not mean that reason can do nothing to help faith, but only that it must be used in the right way. The true function of a religious philosophy is not proof but interpretation. It is its
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task to point out the experiences of the soul, out of which, as a matter of fact and not of theory, faith in God grows, and the needs of the heart to which faith in Christ answers.
How many they are! There is the need of guidance as we face the mystery of life and realize how many questions there are which we cannot answer. There is the need of comfort as we meet life's disappointments and failures. There is the need of forgiveness as we realize with shame our own personal shortcom- ings and sins. There is the need of in- spiration as the monotony of life's rou- tine dulls our sensibility and renders us unresponsive to new appeals for service and for heroism. There is the need of companionship as one by one the old friends drop away and there are no new ones to fill the accustomed places. Above all, there is the need of hope as we face such an impasse as seems to confront the
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world to-day, and we are tempted to despair of any guidance wise enough to find a way out.
These elemental needs and experiences of the soul are the real ground of our faith in God. It is our privilege to in- terpret their significance to those who have not yet discovered it, and so to di- rect the latent energies of the soul into their appropriate channel.
This was Jesus' way. He did not try to prove to men that God existed. He took that for granted. But He talked to them about their Father, His care of them, His plans for them, their duty to Him, and He urged them to put His teaching to the proof, and to see if it did not come true.
This too was Paul's method. He never talked to men as if they were without experience of God. He came to them as bringing a fuller message about the God they knew already in part, and wor-
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shipped imperfectly. He spoke out of experience to experience, and his appeal was always to a more perfect experience.
This has been the method of the great evangelists of every age. They have preached God as the most real and the most familiar of facts, and trusted the conscience of their hearers to answer with an Amen. And now the war has come to prove that they were right — that in the very quarters where God seemed most forgotten, His Spirit has been at work all the time, and it needed only the occasion to reveal His presence.
It is this discovery of God's present companionship in trial and danger, which is our deepest ground for faith in immor- tality. Immortality, as the Christian conceives it, is more than a substitute for joys denied here, a compensation for suffering and limitations otherwise insup- portable. It is the completion of a fel- lowship begun here; the consummation
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in all its richness and fullness, of a Di- vine companionship which has already made life supremely satisfying. It is not because life means little to us that we desire to live by and by, but because Christ has filled life so full of undreamed- of possibilities; has made personality so much bigger and better a thing than we had dared to hope it could be.
Nowhere is this consciousness of life's inherent value more vivid than in the case of the young. When one reads the casualty lists that are published week by week, and realizes how many of those who have fallen are only boys at the very threshold of their lives; when one sees the portraits of the bright young faces which fill page after page of the illus- trated papers, so full of hope and en- thusiasm and the joy of life, one feels that if there be any reason in the world, there must somewhere be a place where these unused powers shall find employ -
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ment, and these unsatisfied desires satis- faction.
And it is not simply the number of these young lives that forces upon us the question of another life. It is their quality. It is the new revelation which this war has brought of the inherent dignity of human nature, of man's ca- pacity for courage and sacrifice and loy- alty. Surely a being as great as man is showing himself to be is made for some end that endures beyond the span of this life. Surely the God who has fashioned such finely tempered instruments will not suffer them to rust unused.
It is in this faith, and with this in- sight that we must face the crisis which has come upon us. There are many pressing duties which the hour has brought, duties of action, duties of de- cision, duties of endurance. But, press- ing and important as these duties may be, there is a duty still more pressing [94 ]
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and still more important; and that is to bear our part in the inner contest which is to decide whether the ultimate outcome of all our struggle shall be a victory for faith or for unbelief. Is force to be supreme in the world, or is there something stronger still — the love that bears and forbears, that "suffereth long and is kind," that "taketh not account of evil," that "rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth"?1 Is Christ to be the ultimate conqueror or the Superman of Nietzsche ? This is the question of questions, and the scene of its ultimate decision is the heart of man.
This, then, is the call that comes to us who call ourselves Christians, in this hour that tests men's souls. It is a call to inner clarity and freedom that, as we study the working of God's provi- dence in history, we may do so by the
1 1 Cor. 13 : 4, 5, 9.
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light that shines from His Divine Spirit in our own hearts. It is a call to con- fidence and courage, that through our experience of God's present working in the soul of man we may win assurance of that larger life to which He is leading us in the better country that is still be- yond our sight. Above all, it is a call to fellowship in service that, as men of faith and brotherly love, enlisted under Christ for the struggle against the inner passions that are more deadly than any outward foe, we may make our contribu- tion to the history that is to be.
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CHAPTER III
THE CHRISTIAN PROGRAMME FOR HUMANITY
From diagnosis we turn to remedy; from the explanation of the causes of the war to the method by which it is proposed to neutralize them. Here too the Christian proposal is entirely simple and definite. It is a change of spirit.
Suppose peace were to be declared to- morrow. What good would it do if there were no change in the attitude of the nations which are fighting? If the fear and suspicion and mistrust and hatred that are so much in evidence to-day were still to persist; if the mad race of arma- ments by land and by sea were to go on unchecked; if each man and woman
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and child in each of the countries osten- sibly at peace knew that the respite from slaughter, whether longer or shorter, was to be used by each in devising means for being deadlier and more dangerous still when the breathing space should be over and the battle be on again — would such peace as this be worth while ? Could we in good conscience pray for it?
Ah, no, it is something different that we have in mind. We want a peace that will be lasting and permanent because it springs from confidence and good-will. Such a peace as exists between the differ- ent States of this country, once rivals in arms; between the provinces of Ger- many, once independent and hostile states; between Canada and the United States, where for a hundred years along a frontier three thousand miles long no rifle has been discharged, and the foot- step of no watching patrol resounds. We want a peace that frees men not
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simply from the experience but from the nightmare fear of war, which releases energies that would otherwise be diverted to preparation against the inevitable catastrophe and turns them to the pur- suit of righteousness and the realizing of spiritual ideals.
For this more is necessary than the cessation of fighting. There must be a change in the spirit of the fighters. An armistice is not peace, whether it last for a week or for a generation. We want more than the silencing of cannon and the disbanding of armies. We want a change of mental attitude toward this whole matter of peace and war so funda- mental and revolutionary as to require a complete reconstruction of the prin- ciples upon which the relations between nations have hitherto rested. War, as we have seen, is, after all, only a symp- tom, and no remedy which deals with symptoms alone can effect a complete
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cure. War is the result of a mental atti- tude of suspicion, rivalry, and distrust which has in turn been engendered by centuries of social wrong. A peace that involved the continuance of these senti- ments and the perpetuation of these wrongs would be as unstable as it would be unsatisfying. The true remedy lies deeper in the removal of the causes of enmity, and this is possible only through the practice in national and international as well as in individual relations of the Christian principles of co-operation, sym- pathy, and service.
Jesus had a name for the society which is characterized by this spirit. He called it the Kingdom of God. By the King- dom of God we mean the new social order in which the principles of Christ shall dominate all the relations of life; a so- ciety in which trust shall replace fear, love take the place of strife, co-operation of selfish competition; in which helpful-
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ness shall be the test of greatness, and the supreme reward, the consciousness of having deserved well of one's kind.
Three points need emphasis in con- nection with this definition of the King- dom. In the first place, its extent; in the second place, its nature; in the third place, the means of its realization.
In the first place, its extent. It is a universal kingdom, taking in all races and all ages, including the living and the dead. In contrast to all tribal and national religions, Christianity is inter- national. Its unit is humanity ; its stand- ard for nations as well as for individ- uals the family; its sanction the loving will of the Father-God. War is the ne- gation of all these. Its ideal is that of the conqueror, its unit the nation armed; its standard enlightened self-interest; its sanction force. War, therefore, not sim- ply in its consequences but in its ideals, is the uncompromising foe of all in which
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as Christians we believe and for which we ought to strive.
This does not mean that Christianity ignores national distinctions any more than that it ignores individual distinc- tions of capacity and of function. On the contrary, as we shall see presently, it gives them new dignity and impor- tance. But it is true that it refuses to regard them as ultimate. They exist not for their own sake, but as part of a larger unity to which they contribute each their quota, as the individuals who compose them add each his part to the fulness of the national life.
In the prophecy of Isaiah there is a famous passage1 which pictures the future of the nations in the form of an interna- tional brotherhood. It looks forward to the time when Egypt and Assyria, the former oppressors of Israel, shall be con- verted to the true religion and worship
1 Isaiah 19, 16-25. [ 102 ]
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the true God. Led by their own par- ticular paths of discipline and of failure, chastened by suffering, redeemed from sin, they, like Israel, shall enter upon a new era of national prosperity and right- eousness. The old enmities will be for- gotten, the old hatreds outgrown. For rivalry will be substituted sympathy, and for warfare co-operation. "In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria; and the Egyptians shall wor- ship with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts has blessed them, saying: Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of mine hands, and Israel mine inheritance."
To understand the significance of this prophecy we must translate it into mod- ern phrase. For Israel read Belgium;
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for Egypt, Germany; for Assyria, Eng- land, and we shall be better able to ap- preciate the prophet's meaning. Let us suppose that Belgium had suffered at the hands of England also what she has suffered at the hands of Germany; and the prophet, himself a Belgian, survey- ing the misery of his country, for so many generations the battleground of contending armies, asks himself what is to be the outcome of this national tragedy, and finds his answer in a new and bet- ter future for which it is a preparation. "In that day there shall be a highway out of Germany into England, and the English shall come to Germany, and the Germans to England, and the Germans shall worship with the English. In that day Belgium shall be the third with Ger- many and England, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that Jehovah of hosts has blessed them saying: Blessed be Germany, my people, and England [ 104 ]
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the work of mine hands, and Belgium mine inheritance."
It is the Christian picture of the ideal society, a society in which brotherhood shall be as real between nations as it is to-day between the best individuals.
This suggests a second characteristic of the Christian society. It is a spiritual society. That is to say, a society in which the ties between its members are personal and moral, love rather than law, loyalty rather than compulsion, the free assent of all to a common ideal rather than any external device to secure uni- formity, whether of action or belief. It is a society of brothers freely working to- gether for common ends.
This does not mean that Christianity is indifferent to the accepted forms of social organization, but only that it re- gards these as means rather than as ends. Like the nation it has its institutions, and has embodied its beliefs in creeds,
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and its worship in sacrament and ritual. But these exhaust its life as little as the life of the nation is exhausted by its con- stitution and laws. Behind the church that we see, with its organization and ritual, there is a greater and a more majestic structure — the society of re- deemed personalities who own allegiance to Jesus Christ, and live for the ends which he approves.
We have been slow to recognize this fact. In religion as on all sides of our life, that which is visible and tangible tends to crowd out the unseen and the spiritual. The forms that were devised as aids to faith become our masters. The institution usurps the place of the men and women whose life it was de- signed to nourish, and ecclesiastical con- formity is made the test of spiritual life. Only in times of crisis, like the present, when the real issues at stake stand out in all their clarity above the mists of the
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conventional and the customary, do we realize the true significance of the Chris- tian ideal as a society of persons freely co-operating for a common end.
And this leads us to consider in the third place the means by which the ends of the Kingdom are secured. They cor- respond to its nature as a spiritual so- ciety, realizing its life through the inter- play of personalities. Between persons, external constraint can effect nothing de- cisive. The only effective way to in- fluence a spiritual being is through his ideals.
This does not mean, of course, that external means have no place in the Christian scheme of things. Like all other human beings, the Christian is housed in the body and must face the physical and economic problems which life in the body brings with it. Like them he must use science, physical, edu- cational, social, to subdue the forces
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which oppose him and harness nature to his tasks. Like them he may be obliged at times to use force to resist force, and gain security for the peaceful develop- ment he requires. But this thing is cer- tain, that force as such can never of it- self secure the ends he seeks. It can at most remove obstacles. It cannot build the Kingdom of God. For this there is but one way open to Christians, the trust and love that beget answering trust and love in others.
Like all our greater problems, then, this of Christianizing society proves to be psychological. It is a question of controlling the motives which determine the will. Selfishness must be replaced by sympathy, suspicion by confidence, the rivalry of class or race by the con- sciousness of kind. Only when this has been done; only as men come to feel their kinship with one another, and re- solve to live together as kindred should,
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can we hope to deal successfully with those other problems, economic, indus- trial, political, upon the solution of which the possibility of an efficient and health- ful social life depends.
Such then is the Christian programme, universal in scope, spiritual in nature, a society of brothers bound to one another by common ideals, common aspirations, and common experience. Is it possible to realize such a society in fact?
There are two quarters in which the Christian solution of the social problem is challenged. It is challenged by ma- terialism, and it is challenged by nation- alism. The first questions the means which it proposes to employ to secure its end; the second rejects the end.
The quarrel of materialism with Chris- tianity has to do with its reliance on spiritual forces. For faith it would sub- stitute science, for the spirit of brother- [ 109 ]
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hood improved economic conditions. Let us better man's material welfare, it tells us, and his moral status will take care of itself.
In the past Christian theologians have dealt with materialism chiefly as a phil- osophical theory. They have met its arguments with their counter-arguments, and in ways made familiar by the theistic text-books have tried to establish the reasonableness of the religious interpre- tation of the world.
I do not propose here to retraverse this familiar ground, but there is another and a more convincing method by which we may test the claim of materialism to give us a satisfying philosophy of life, and that is by its fruits. For the last two generations the apostles of material civilization have had things all their own way. They have commanded the ser- vices of the ablest men of their day. They have gained the mastery of re- [no]
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sources undreamed of by their ancestors. They have heaped up wealth on a scale that to the men of even a hundred years ago would have surpassed the wildest dreams of avarice; with the result that to-day we see all Europe banded together to destroy the very wealth which it has been laboring so long to produce.
There is nothing in this at which to be surprised. It is only what we might have expected beforehand, had we been wise enough to learn the lessons of our own past. Power alone can give us no guarantee of social betterment, and sci- ence is power pure and simple, as potent for evil as for good. Give power to a good man and he will use it beneficently. Give it to a selfish man and it will en- large his ability to enslave his fellow men. Science untamed by love has proved it- self the great destroyer, blotting out in a single day what it has cost the labor of a generation to produce. It is not sci- [iii]
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ence that must save men, but faith, faith in some beneficent purpose run- ning through life, in some wise and lov- ing Power on whom we all depend.
For we cannot escape faith if we would. The choice is not between sci- ence and faith, but between two rival faiths, each using science for its own purpose. Of course we need science to help us in our constructive work. Of course it is our duty to conserve our material resources and better our eco- nomic condition. But the point is that we have power enough now and knowl- edge enough to make the world over, if only our ideals were right and our mo- tives pure. It is our ideals that must be changed. If we are to effect any per- manent improvement, it is here that we must begin.
So stated, the Christian plan seems not so unreasonable after all. For faith in self, or class, or race, or nation, it [ 112]
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offers faith in Christ as the inclusive figure in whom each alike finds its true place and rightful consummation. It would deliver us from a narrow allegiance to one that is world-wide, and for a method that knows no final arbitrament but the sword, would substitute the divine method of forgiveness, of trust, and of service.
Nationalism goes still further in its denial. Where materialism questions the means, it rejects the end. For humanity it would substitute the nation as the final goal of effort. Peaceably it may be, but if not, by war it proposes to advance the national interest and safeguard the national welfare.
You will notice that I have spoken of nationalism and not of patriotism. Na- tionalism is exclusive in its spirit, exalt- ing the nation at the expense of its rivals and indifferent to their rights and wel- fare. Patriotism is love of one's coun-
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try for its higher spiritual aspects, and is consistent with cosmopolitanism, in the largest sense. Nationalism says, "My country right or wrong," and stops there. Patriotism adds, "Right that she may be kept right, wrong that she may be made right." To the nationalist, the nation is ultimate; to the patriot, she is the dear- est member of the family of nations.
Nationalism in this narrow sense is essentially antichristian. It seeks na- tional aggrandizement, or at least, na- tional advantage in complete indifference to the welfare and the rights of others. It has no comprehensive world policy. It sees nothing ahead but the continuance of the present condition of organized savagery we call militarism. Its high- est hope is that its own nation may by some supreme effort prove itself master at last of all its rivals. For this it is willing to sacrifice everything, even if need be, Christianity itself. [ H4 ]
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In times of peace those who hold this brutal philosophy hesitate to show them- selves in their true colors, but when war comes they throw off the mask. War gives the advocates of national selfish- ness their chance. The altruistic influ- ences against which they have to con- tend under normal conditions are for the moment removed, and they are free to organize the nation's life after their own ideals. Let them but keep control long enough and they will do irreparable damage. In spite of all that we may say or do, they and not the idealists who are dying by thousands at their bidding, will organize the new world which is even now in the making.
For the dangerous thing about nation- alism, and the point at which its unchris- tian character most clearly appears, is not the fact that it insists that a nation must be ready to defend itself if it should be attacked, but that it makes the possi-
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bility of war the controlling factor in the determination of national policy in time of peace.
I was reading recently an article by Mr. Jane, a distinguished English naval expert, on the naval policy of the United States. In this article he expressed his belief that the plans now under con- sideration by the American Government would prove inadequate, and that it would become necessary very largely to increase the number of our ships and men. His reason for the opinion was that while the plans now proposed were ade- quate to repel an attack upon a single ocean, they were not sufficient to meet a simultaneous attack on two. Suppose Germany and Japan should unite to at- tack the United States, what then ? " We can, if we like, consider such a future alliance as quite improbable. But navies are not built to face probabilities, but possibilities."1
1 Boston Evening Transcript, July 8, 1916. [ 116]
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Could there be a clearer reductio ad absurdum of militarism ? Where in every other sphere of life we are expected to make probability the guide of action, here and here alone we are to be gov- erned by possibilities. If the Christian programme be impracticable what shall we say of the alternative which these practical men offer us? It is the per- petuation to the end of time of the law of the jungle, a ceaseless struggle for existence in which the weaker go to the wall, in which might makes right, in which necessity knows no law. Surely a philosophy which offers us no outlook more attractive than this cannot hope permanently to satisfy the human heart.
And as a matter of fact it does not satisfy it. It does not satisfy even the men who profess to hold it. When face to face with the issue, the most uncom- promising imperialist shrinks from the consequences of his own logic. He does not accept the jungle as his picture of
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the ideal state. He believes, at least he tells us that he believes, in culture, in civilization, in humanity, in the world state, and all the other beautiful ideals of the spirit. He, too, wishes to organize the world for ideal ends, only he does not think it practicable to do it in the Christian way.
One of the most remarkable of all the features of the present war is that it is being fought by men who profess to be fighting because of their love of peace. These are not mercenaries who are fight- ing, soldiers by profession, who follow arms because they love war, but civilians — lawyers and merchants, farmers and professors and clerks — men who have left home and family at the call of duty, as they believe, in order to preserve the institutions of civilized society which alone make life worth living.
The spirit of the soldiers is reflected in the language of the governments, [lis]
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As we have already seen, no one of them is willing to take the responsibility of having begun the war. Each declares that it is its opponent who must bear the blame for this crime against humanity. Each insists that it is fighting a defensive war, and that its sole object is a just and lasting peace.
On April 5, 1916, the German Chan- cellor delivered a speech in the Reichstag, in which he outlined Germany's plans for the future. Speaking of the condi- tions to be faced after the war, he used these words: "The Europe which will arise from this crisis, which is the most severe in the history of all time, will be a new Europe in many respects. The blood which has been shed will never be repaid, and the wealth which has been destroyed can be replaced but slowly. Europe must be for all nations that in- habit it a continent of peaceful labor. The peace which ends this war must be
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a lasting peace, and must not bear the germ of new wars, but that of a peaceful arrangement of all European questions."1
Similar sentiments have been expressed by all the governments at war. I was in England during the days that imme- diately preceded the declaration of war, and I can testify out of my own experi- ence to the strength and extent of the desire for peace, and to the shrinking on all sides from the thought of a European war. There was a sense of horror in the prospect as of men conscious, like the heroes of the old Greek tragedies, that they were being driven against their will into committing some appalling crime.
What an unconscious testimony we have here to the extent of Christ's in- fluence! So far as ideals at least are concerned the enlightened public opinion of mankind has been converted already.
1 London Times, weekly edition, April 14, 1916, p. 871.
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Imagine Julius Caesar apologizing for go- ing to war, and justifying the conquests of the Roman legions on the ground of their benefit to the conquered. Imagine Napoleon doing so. So much at least Christ has accomplished as to make the conscience of civilization uneasy at the thought of war, and to make universal brotherhood seem desirable, if it could be attained.
This conclusion then follows with an irresistible logic: Either the time will come when the nations will realize the folly of the present system of interna- tional anarchy, and seriously attempt to apply Christian principles to interna- tional affairs, or we must resign our- selves to a future of anarchy from which the stoutest imagination may well shrink back appalled. The appeal to self-in- terest has been tried and failed; the ap- peal to fear has been tried and failed. [121 ]
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One method only remains to be tried, the method of co-operation, of trust, of service.
But is the Christian method practica- ble? Is the issue a living issue? Must we not confess — shrink from it as we will — that there is no alternative open, things being as they are, and man being what he is, but an endless succession of struggle and failure and hate, such as has filled the history of mankind in the past ?
Certainly, if the present be the measure of the future, there is no alternative. If there be no springs of power in hu- man nature as yet untapped; if there be no reserves of divine reinforcement on which we have not yet drawn, then indeed we must confess that the case is hopeless.
But that is not the way we act in other realms of human experience. The one distinguishing and original thing about [ 122 ]
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man is the fact that he has never been willing to make the past his measure of the future. In man alone among the living creatures that populate the globe we find the creative and prophetic in- stinct. Man lives by faith and grasps the thing that is to be while yet it seems impossible. All that we hold most pre- cious in human life, in science, in art, in the state, we owe to this indomitable hopefulness. There was a time when every man's hand was against his neigh- bor, and in all the ranges of forest and plain that were open to human habita- tion there was no oasis where a man could take refuge and feel sure that he was safe. But we have created states and na- tions, and within these at least have sub- stituted law for the sword, and confidence for suspicion. There was a time when the seas were barriers that separated men of one land from another by an im- passable gulf. There was a time when [ 123 ]
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it seemed as impossible that a man should raise himself above the earth into the air as that he should pull down a moun- tain by his own unaided strength. But now the seas have become highways for commerce which bind all the world into one, and we fly above the mountains with a swiftness and security that grow more astonishing with every passing day. The impossible of yesterday has become the possible of to-day. And all because men have refused to accept this funda- mental heresy of unbelief, that because we have failed in the past we must still fail in the future.
So it is in this matter of our Christian faith. If the ideal which we hold is really a desirable ideal, and if the only obstacle in the way of its realization is in the human spirit, then we must set about changing that spirit and we must believe that it can be done.
Are we told that it is impossible? It [ 124 ]
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is being done before our eyes. It is being done in the interests of the very- policy which is proposed as a rival to Christianity. Men are systematically training their fellow men to regard the citizens of other nations with suspicion and distrust, and they are succeeding in their attempt. Do not let us deceive ourselves into believing that the spirit that now reigns over so wide a part of the human race is normal or natural to man. It is itself the result of a process of education, in part deliberate, in part unconscious, through which men have been taught to associate all good with their own country and to look upon the countries to which at the time they hap- pen to be opposed in policy, as danger- ous and unprincipled rivals whom it is the highest duty of the patriot to oppose and if need be to crush.
Most ominous of all the revelations which the war has brought has been its [125 ]
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disclosure of the extent to which the organs of public opinion have been used to influence national sentiment against peace and for war. Partly this has been done through the press, partly through the schools. University professors have lent themselves to the propaganda, pub- licists have preached the gospel of na- tional aggrandizement and national glory. Children have been taught from infancy to look upon the citizens of other coun- tries as possible enemies, and upon mili- tary service as the highest form of pa- triotism. In part no doubt those who have taken the lead in this movement have been animated by motives with which we must sympathize. It is one of the tragic by-products of militarism that it creates the dangers against which it warns. When all Europe is an armed camp, it were folly for the patriot to be blind to the dangers to his own country. One can only honor a soldier like the
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late Lord Roberts, who — in face of the danger which he regarded as imminent — consecrated his last years to a campaign in favor of universal military service for England. But behind such sincere and unselfish characters, advocates of pre- paredness in the interest of peace, as chivalrous to their opponents as they are loyal to their own, we discern other and more dangerous figures, philosophers like Treitschke and Cramb, who cele- brate war for the moral discipline it brings, and others even more sinister, to whom war or at least the fear of war means personal profit and enhanced pres- tige; manufacturers to whom it brings increased dividends, capitalists to whom it opens new markets, journalists who see in it the material of a new sensation. It is these men and the influences which they set in motion which constitute the real danger against which we need to be on our guard, the most formidable
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obstacle to the creation of that saner public sentiment without which perma- nent peace is impossible.
What is true of Europe is no less true of the United States and of Japan. The most serious danger to the future good relations between the two countries is not any real incompatibility of inter- ests, but the jingo spirit. There are men to-day on both sides of the Pacific who for reasons in part sincere, in part selfish, are systematically working to stir up ill feeling and suspicion between two neigh- bors who for every reason of history, of sentiment, and of interest ought to be friends. They attribute to each designs against the welfare and prosperity of the other. They repeat in exaggerated form every utterance on either side of the ocean which is calculated to wound sensibility and inflame passion. They speak of war between the two countries as not only possible but likely, and urge
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each to arm to be ready for the impend- ing conflict. So through the very reit- eration of possibilities which as yet have no existence beyond their own brain, they do their best to make them actual.
It is such a spirit as this, a spirit of suspicion and distrust, systematically cul- tivated through a long period of time which is responsible for the present war, as it has been responsible for most of the wars of the past. It is this which has changed the war from a war of govern- ments into one of peoples, and made it the tragic and heart-breaking thing it is. It is this spirit which we must somehow exorcise if we are to secure the perma- nent peace for which we long.
In England there are factories where crippled soldiers are put to work to make ammunition to supply the armies in the field. In one of these factories a re- porter recently found two men, one with a deformed limb, the other who had lost [ 129 ]
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an eye. They fell into conversation. "It seems a shame to make things as makes cripples," said the former sorrow- fully. "Sometimes when I think that one of my shells might twist a German's leg off same's mine, I feel a bit sorry. When that happens, I 'ave to 'ave a read at a newspaper about poisoned gases."
"I don't mind admitting," said the one with the sightless eye, "that I pray occasionally that none of my shells will ever blow a German's eye out. Under- stand I'm no less a Britisher, only human. I know what it is to lose an eye, and I can imagine what it would be to lose two."
That is how the normal civilized man thinks and feels before his mind has been inflamed by suspicion and hate.
Now, what has been done in the name of national rivalry and ambition can be done, and must be done, in the interest
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of international brotherhood and peace. We must educate men for humanity. It may take time. It may take patience. We may not live to see it. Our children may not live to see it. But in the end it will be done.
What then are the resources at our command in this campaign of educa- tion? That is our final question. Do not let us underestimate them because they are thus far disorganized and un- vocal. All over the world there are men and women in increasing numbers who have seen the vision that we have seen, of a world which is really Christian, a world in which love shall be the law of life, confidence the inspiration of prog- ress, and forgiveness based upon the con- sciousness of common failure open the door from the dead past to a new and more splendid future. They are found in the trenches and in the hospitals, among
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the men who have seen with their own eyes the hatefulness of war and learned, as they could have learned at no less a cost, how rare and blessed a thing is peace. They are found in a million homes among those women who are waking to a new consciousness not only of the social privileges but also of the social responsibilities of motherhood; women like those whose indomitable optimism makes itself heard across the trenches in such utterances as the Christ- mas letter of the English women to the women of Germany and Austria, and the answer that came back from them.1 They are found in the ranks of labor among men like those German Socialists of Munich who in the early months of the war drew up a peace programme so fair to their opponents that their fellow
1 These letters, with others of similar import, have been reprinted by the Woman's Peace Party, in a tract entitled "A Group of Letters from Women of the Warring Nations." Chicago.
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Socialists in England could accept it as it stood as their own.1 Above all, they are found among those Christians of ev- ery name and of every land who have grown ashamed of a religion that shelters itself under the great name of Christ and is content to accept his promise of indi- vidual salvation while it turns a deaf ear to his call to go out into all the world and preach his gospel, not only to every creature but in every relationship of life.
But we have other allies still, allies of which as yet we have taken too little account because they belong in part to that unseen world that is still waiting to be born. There is that better man in men who sleeps in every human breast, waiting for the voice that can arouse
1 For the full text of these proposals cf. the Labour Leader for February 4, 1915. They are grouped un- der three headings, as follows: 1. Peace on terms that will heal fresh wounds. 2. Peace on terms that will heal old wounds. 3. Peace on terms that will give lasting security.
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him from his slumbers and summon him to that real world for which he was made, and in which alone he is at home, the man who is lover reverent of women, father tender of children, friend respon- sive to sympathy, patriot loyal to coun- try, worshipper destined for God. This undiscovered man, citizen of Christ's Kingdom that is to be, is waiting to be found and roused and organized for the greatest of all enterprises and the most splendid of all campaigns.
He is waiting to be found, did I say? Nay, he is here already. Of all the mar- vels of this marvellous time none has been more wonderful than its revelation of the unsuspected moral reserves of humanity. The virtues that we had thought the prerogative of the few, cour- age, consecration, self-sacrifice, faith, are found to be the common heritage. We had heard that the days of heroism had passed forever, that men were engrossed [ 134 ]
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in money-getting and money-spending, blind to spiritual reality and deaf to the appeal of the ideal, and we have wit- nessed a rebirth of idealism on a scale more stupendous than any that history records. We have seen the nations give of their best and dearest without a mur- mur— mothers their sons, wives their husbands, young men their lives, parents their homes. We have seen an entire people offer its country on the altar of freedom, and with the sight there has come to us a new realization of the moral greatness of humanity, and a new reali- zation of its immortal destiny. We know now what we had often been told but had scarcely dared to believe, that of all the powers that inspire action and com- mand human loyalty there is none com- parable in the range of its influence to an ideal.
And if it be said that this is just the tragedy and despair of the situation,
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that idealism has proved so lamentably false a guide, that the causes that have called forth loyalty and evoked sacrifice have been narrow and selfish causes, the ideals of nationalism and of mili- tarism, the answer is that this is true only in appearance. It is because these causes have stolen the garments of Chris- tianity and masquerade as the servants of world-wide brotherhood and peace that they have gained the whole-hearted allegiance of the peoples. Nothing is more striking in the whole situation, nothing more full of hope for the future, than the fact that the old glorification of war for war's sake has been so largely discredited. Each nation, as we have seen, claims to be fighting in self-defense; each nation declares itself to be the ser- vant of international brotherhood and peace, not simply to justify its claim against its opponents, but because on no other ground could it retain the alle-
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giance of its own citizens. The Christian virus has penetrated too far; the Chris- tian ideal has struck its roots too deep to make the ethics of war permanently satisfying to any modern people.
This then is the great gift which the war has brought us: this new revelation of the unsuspected moral reserves of hu- manity. Once more we have been re- minded of that oldest of the truths of religion that man is not simply flesh and blood, but spirit. When we appeal to the ideal in him we are dealing with something that is really there; a force more potent for good or evil than the electricity that lights our streets and draws our engines, or the dynamite by which we blast our way through the solid rock.
It is in the light of such facts as these that we must approach our great task of educating men for humanity. When we contrast what we are saying and do-
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ing as we go about our quiet tasks of peace, with what our brothers are doing and bearing at the front, how little and futile it often seems. Do not let us be deceived. It is with the moulders of ideals that the fate of the future rests. When as parents, through the familiar discipline of the home, we train our chil- dren in common action for an end be- yond self; when as teachers, we enlarge the range of our pupils' vision, and ac- quaint them with the good in other ages and in other races than their own ; above all, when as Christians we unite with our fellow Christians of every land in wor- ship of the God of all the earth and con- secrate our lives to the tasks of his King- dom, we are doing the most important and the most practical thing in the world: we are generating the forces that will inspire the armies of the future.
Among the French soldiers at the front there are some poor fellows who have no [ 138]
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friends or relations to write to them. To these a distinguished Frenchman has addressed a letter which has been pub- lished in the daily press. "What are you righting for?" he asks, "you who have neither wife nor child nor home to defend; for whom no mother prays and no father waits? I will tell you. You are fighting for the future. The others are fighting for the past and for the present. You are fighting for the French children who are just born, for those who will be born, that they may be free."
Ah, yes, it is this love of the future that is our hope — the future that we may never share, but in which we yet believe. We have seen it imperfectly, narrowly, from angles which bring us into conflict with the vision of our neigh- bor; but we have seen it, and some day we shall see it more clearly still. The little loves will give place to the greater; the false patriotisms will be replaced by [ 139]
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the true, and in the service of humanity, as a whole, all lesser aims and tasks will find their rightful and satisfying place.
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CHAPTER IV THE DUTY FOR TO-MORROW
We have considered the challenge which the present world crisis presents to Christian faith, and the principles by which it is to be met. We have studied the Christian programme for humanity. We have seen that Christianity pro- poses to substitute for the present sys- tem of organized selfishness a new social order, universal and spiritual, a society in which helpfulness shall be the prin- ciple of action, and the consciousness of brotherhood the bond of union, and we have seen no reason to doubt that it can be realized in fact, if all who believe in this ideal co-operate to bring it about. It remains to ask what our part is in this common task, and how it can best be [ 141 ]
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performed. What can we modern Chris- tians do to realize our own ideal? In a task so vast and many-sided where shall we begin ?
We must begin where Christ began, with the individual. There is no substi- tute for Christian character, and Chris- tian character cannot be manufactured by wholesale. It must be a new creation in each individual, consciously facing the ideal of Christ, and consciously making it his own by a free act of choice. Unless we have men and women who believe in the Christian ideal for society enough to live for it, and if need be to die for it, society will never be Christian in fact.
There is no substitute, I repeat, for individual conversion. Public opinion, that most potent of all forces in our mod- ern world, is what it is because of the opinion of the men and women who compose the public. If you would change it you must change them. And the
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change must begin, as all changes begin, in persons, in the contact of some indi- vidual with a new ideal, and the surren- der of his will to its appeal. If we are to have an army, we must have officers; if we are to have followers, we must have leaders, and leadership is an affair of the individual.
Trace back any great social move- ment you please, and you come at last to some individual man or woman. To speak of modern nursing means to think of Florence Nightingale. To mention United Italy means to think of Mazzini and Garibaldi and Cavour. What were Protestantism without Luther, or monas- ticism without Francis of Assisi and Ig- natius Loyola? What is Christianity itself but the impact upon the spiritual life of mankind of that supreme person- ality whom we call Jesus ?
But it is just as true that if you are to have an army you must have soldiers. [ 143 ]
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No general can win a battle alone, and so again we are brought back to the neces- sity of personal work for men. It is not enough for one man and another to ac- cept the Christian principle, and work for the Christian end. We must make these principles common property, and for that we need missionary propaganda on a scale more comprehensive and effec- tive than any the world has yet seen. The work that the churches are doing in their evangelistic campaigns is work that needs to be done and must be done if the Christian cause is to succeed.
One of the most surprising features of the present situation has been the ex- traordinary unanimity of sentiment in the different countries at war. There was at first a disposition to regard the war as having been forced upon the differ- ent peoples by their leaders, and each nation flattered itself that it was fighting not only for its own safety, but to liber- [ 144 ]
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ate the enslaved in other lands. But we see to-day that this is in a true sense a war of peoples. Only profound con- viction as to the justice of their cause could move the nations to the gigantic sacrifices which the war has laid upon them, and convictions do not spring up in a night. They are the fruits of a process of education carefully planned and long continued. It is because day by day, year by year, generation after generation, men have been preaching to Germans and Englishmen and Russians and Frenchmen the greatness of their nation's destiny and the duty of individ- ual loyalty, that the sentiment has been created which made each government confident of the nation's support when the crisis came.
If Christianity is ever to make itself
felt as a world power on a scale as vast
and with results as amazing, it will be
because of a period of preparation as
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painstaking, as intelligent and as long continued. For a Christian society you must have real Christians, and millions of them, and these are not made in a day or in a year.
But individual conversions alone, how- ever many may be the individuals con- verted, will carry us but a little way. We must apply the consequences of our Christian convictions to society. And that means that we must organize.
At no point is the revolution in our habits of thought, which has been brought about by modern science, more far- reaching than in our conception of the nature of human society. Time was when we thought of society as a collec- tion of individual units, each complete in itself. To-day we know that person- ality is itself a social creation. We real- ize, as it has never been possible to real- ize it before, the extraordinary variety [ 146 ]
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and intimacy of the ties that unite in- dividuals one with another, not only in their economic but in their intellectual and moral life. We see that in order to influence an individual effectively it is not enough to appeal to him directly. We must attack his environment and change the forces which enter into the making of his personality.
And with this new insight modern sci- ence has given us new power. It has marvellously increased our resources; it has multiplied in ways that stagger the imagination the wires that reach from one man to another, and created the machinery that for the first time has made it possible to mobilize all the re- sources of the nations and make millions of men act with the precision and effec- tiveness of one.
This is something new under the sun. Here is a new power put into the hands of man which he has never had before,
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a power which may be used for good or for evil, for co-operation or for war. The leaders of the church, trained in the habits of the older individualism, concerned primarily with the forces of the inner life, have been slower to dis- cover the existence of this power than men who have been trained in another philosophy and are working for other ends. This is the true significance of what we see to-day. We are witnessing the mobilization of humanity for common action on a scale and with an effective- ness never possible before. It is true that the purpose of this mobilization is destruction, and its inspiration distrust, suspicion, and fear. But the same forces which have been utilized by statesmen and diplomats to serve their narrow ends are available for nobler uses if only we can gain access to the springs of action and win the nations to loyalty to a higher and more inclusive ideal.
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Thank God, we are beginning to learn this lesson. Even before the war came there were many Christians who realized the inadequacy of the older individual- istic methods, and were working for closer and more effective co-operation be- tween the churches. These efforts have already begun to bear fruit in federa- tions, councils, and continuation com- mittees. We are mapping out the field to be occupied, cataloguing the resources at our disposal, laying plans, not simply for the present but for the longer future. And this is a great step forward.
For one thing we are beginning to deal with the social questions which lie at our own door, questions like the drink problem, the problem of prostitution, the industrial problem in its various phases. We see that these are matters which concern us as Christians, for which we cannot avoid responsibility even if we would. We are no longer content to
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preach or to listen to the gospel on Sunday while our lives during the week give the lie to what we say or hear. We feel that in Christian sentiment we pos- sess a power which might be used to make the world over if only it could be properly unified and directed.
This movement toward a social ap- plication of the gospel is world-wide. Wherever you go you will find that Christians are aroused to the social need and are beginning to turn their convic- tions into action.
When I was in Osaka1 in April, 1916, I found the whole city aroused over the proposal to establish a vice quarter in the neighborhood of some of the more important schools. Public meetings were called in protest, and the better senti- ment of the community organized so as to make the protest effective.
1 A great industrial centre on the Inland Sea, which has been called the Pittsburgh of Japan.
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It was the same in China. In Hang- chow there are but eight hundred Chris- tians, but when the government proposed to set apart a quarter for public vice in the outskirts of the city they conducted a campaign so effective that the plan had to be abandoned, and I was shown with pride the deserted buildings that were the convincing demonstration of the power of Christian sentiment when organized for the common good.
This is as it should be. In the social application of the gospel the place to begin is in my relations to my neigh- bor across the street. Unless we can make our neighborhood Christian we cannot have a Christian city. Unless we can Christianize our city, we cannot hope to have a Christian country. Un- less we can Christianize our country we must abandon the hope of Christianizing the world.
This opens up a wide field at which
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we can only glance. How much it means to make a Christian community those of us who have tried to attack even a single phase of the social problem in a practical way know only too well. Whether it be the drink problem or the vice problem, or the problem of sanitation, or the prob- lem of unemployment, we find that we are dealing with influences which reach beyond the immediate environment and causes that had their origin generations before we were born. To deal with one effectively we must attack the others also, and before we realize it we find that our attempt to clean up our own back yard commits us to a programme of social reconstruction on the most com- prehensive scale.
This is the real root of our present difficulty. If we want to understand the causes of the present international crisis we must seek our answer at home and not abroad. It is because our own
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social system is so largely selfish and un- christian that it is so difficult to persuade men to believe that altruism is feasible on a large scale. The man who in his domestic relations acts on the principle that business is business, is not likely to be a believer in the efficacy of love as a solution of international difficul- ties.
While these pages were being written there was in progress in one of the largest cities of the United States a labor dis- pute which involved many thousands of persons. The industry which was af- fected was one in which the rate of wages was comparatively low, and the time of employment irregular. After years of contention and bitterness both employers and workers had agreed upon a plan of operation which provided a regular method for dealing with questions in dispute. Representatives of both parties met to consider the matter in contro-
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versy, and when they were unable to agree the subject was referred to a committee of arbitration for final de- cision. Under this agreement the in- dustry had been operating peacefully for a number of years. But a few months ago when the committee of arbitration decided a case adversely to the conten- tion of the employers, they refused to accept the decision, repudiated their agreement, and in order to enforce com- pliance with their will declared a lockout in the dull season of the year, relying upon hunger to bring the workers to their terms.
As to the rights and wrongs of the im- mediate matter in dispute the present writer is not competent to speak. But from the published utterances of both sides to the dispute, one principle clearly emerges which bears directly upon the subject of our present interest. The workers contended for some independent [ 154 ]
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tribunal to which disputes should be re- ferred for final adjudication. The em- ployers refused to concede this. They claimed the right to manage their own business to suit themselves without in- terference or dictation from outside. If the workers did not like their action they had their remedy at hand; let them strike. In other words, the employers denied the existence of any paramount social obligation. They were individual- ists out and out, and they accepted with- out flinching the consequence of individ- ualism, which is war. What difference, one may well ask, is there in principle between the attitude of these employers and their sympathizers and that of the philosophers and statesmen whose un- willingness to recognize any higher sov- ereignty than the individual state makes war the final arbiter in disputes be- tween nations? If there is not con- science enough in society to deal with
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the lesser evil, what hope is there of our being able to master the greater ?
But, thank God, there is another side to the matter. If every failure to live out Christ's principles at home makes it more difficult to live them out abroad, the converse also is true. Every success at home makes success abroad seem easier and more credible. The man who has tried arbitration in his business and found that it succeeds will be the first to be- lieve in the possibility of its application to international affairs. The community which has found it possible to run a city for the benefit of all, and not simply the private gain of the few, will not easily despair of the world.
Twenty-two years ago New York City was in the grip of a corrupt political organization known as Tammany Hall. Things had reached such a pass that decent men were ashamed of the city, and yet the power of the organization
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was so great that it seemed hopeless to try to break it.
At this juncture it occurred to some public-spirited citizens to attack the problem piecemeal. They founded good- government clubs in the different quar- ters of the city, and began to organize their neighbors in each district for the study of local conditions. In the new interest thus aroused, and the new ac- quaintances formed, they soon found that they possessed an instrument of no small political power. And it was these good-government clubs, co-operating in a city-wide campaign, which in 1894 suc- ceeded finally in defeating Tammany Hall and installing a reform government in power.
It is an example which may well en- courage us in our plans for our future activity as Christians. When we con- template the magnitude of the task be- fore us we are appalled by its difficulty
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and its complexity. Who are we, we ask, to think of Christianizing the world ? But we do not have to do it all at once. Our responsibility is only for that part of the task which lies in our immediate environment, and is within the compass of our strength. But we have this added encouragement in our labor, that what- ever success we may gain in our par- ticular field, will be so much to the general good. Any triumph of the Chris- tian principle anywhere is so much new reason for faith in its applicability every- where.
These principles may help us to think our way through some of the practical problems which face us in the immediate future. They have their bearing, for example, upon the question of national loyalty. As Christians we cannot ad- mit the nationalist's contention that the nation is the final unit, and that no hu- [ 158]
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manitarian considerations should be al- lowed to stand in the way of the national interest. Are we therefore obliged to conclude that the nation has no rightful claim upon our allegiance, and that in the alleged interest of human brother- hood we must discard patriotism alto- gether ?
To do this would be as unreasonable as to conclude that because the law of Christ condemns selfishness in the indi- vidual, and bids us keep ever in mind our relations to the larger unity we call the Kingdom of God, the individual has no independent value for God, and the Christian is under no obligation to de- velop his own personality? Individual- ism, whether in nations or in persons, is the perversion of a good. It is self-de- velopment run to seed. But self-devel- opment has its place in the catalogue of Christian virtues. It is the way we make ourselves strong for service. [ 159]
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We have learned this in the case of the individual. We know that in our per- sonal life we are not shut up to the choice between selfishness and suicide. There is a third alternative open to the Christian, and that is self-development for social service. The more I have, the better I am, the stronger I become, the more I have to give. The same law holds good in the life of the state. Patriotism is God's way of training individuals for com- mon action for unselfish ends. With- out national self -development there can be no effective international service.
But it is easier to admit this in theory than to follow out its implications in practice. What does it mean for one nation to serve another? In what spe- cific ways can this Christian duty be ful- filled?
There are some who interpret service in terms of charity. The rich nation ought to share its wealth with the na-
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tions that are poorer; the more advanced with the more backward; the nation that has escaped the ravages of war with those that have experienced its devas- tating effects.
This view of Christian duty has re- cently been put before the American people in the form of a definite proposal. Let Congress at the end of the war ap- propriate five hundred million dollars to be used for the relief of the sufferers in the different countries at war, and for the reconstruction of the cities which have been destroyed. Is it conceivable, we are asked, that such a proposal would not be gratefully received? Could we imagine any action which could give more convincing evidence of the Chris- tian spirit or prove a more effective agent in promoting good- will between nations?
With the spirit which inspires this proposal one can have only sympathy. There is a place for charity in the Chris-
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tian catalogue of virtues, and where suf- fering has been colossal the scale of char- ity should be correspondingly great. But charity alone is not enough. It has not proved enough in the relations between individuals. We have no reason to sup- pose that it will prove enough in the re- lations between nations.
There was a time not so long ago when individual duty was conceived in terms of charity. Almsgiving was the Chris- tian duty par excellence. The rich man gave of his superabundance to the poor man, and the man of moderate means to the man who had less, and when he had done this he conceived that he had done all that he needed to do.
But we are coming to see that this is a wholly inadequate conception of Chris- tian ethics. It is not alms that man needs but justice; not the alleviation of poverty but its removal. What we ask of the rich man now is not that he
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should be kind to his dependents, but that he should co-operate with them in bringing about a social order in which they shall no longer be dependent. More precious than gold, more to be desired than comfort, is personal self-respect, and personal self-respect is difficult to the man whose very existence is depen- dent upon the bounty of another. As has been well said: "He who controls the sources of a man's subsistence, in effect controls his will."
What is true of individuals is true also of nations. What one nation asks of another is not charity but justice. It is recognition of its rightful place in the family of the nations and the granting, not as a matter of condescension but as a right, of the conditions which are neces- sary to enable it to fill that place with self-respect. If we wish really to justify our claim to be a Christian nation, we cannot stop with the offer of charity,
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however proper that may be; we must be willing to co-operate with other na- tions in bringing about such changes in the social order as shall make the op- pression of the weak by the strong for- ever impossible.
This would involve a change of policy so radical that it is doubtful if as yet many even among Christians have ven- tured seriously to contemplate it. It would mean the abandonment once for all of the maxim that the policy of any country can be determined solely by the welfare of its own citizens. It would mean the application of the Christian principle of trusteeship to natural re- sources not simply on the national scale now contemplated by our advocates of conservation, but in our international re- lations. It would mean the rewriting of our tariffs and immigration acts from the point of view not simply of national advantage but of world need. It would
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mean, in a word, doing for the world at large what no single country has yet succeeded in doing for its own people, namely, making them act and feel as if they were really one.
I say feel as well as act, for in this matter of social justice feeling counts for quite as much as action. Why is it that within the family co-operation is possible between strong and weak on a basis of mutual self-respect? It is because they feel their common unity. Why is it that to-day Canada and Australia and New Zealand are sending the best of their sons to die for England when they were free to hold aloof if they would? It is because they feel their oneness with the mother country. Why is it that England herself is co-operating with Russia and France, her ancient enemies, spending men and money in support of peoples whom a generation ago she re- garded with distrust and fear? Again [ 165 ]
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it is because she has come to feel that in the interests which count for most they are really one. If we are ever to change our present policy of national selfishness for one of brotherly co-operation with other nations it will be because we have first come to feel toward those nations as brothers.
This does not mean that in our national policy there will be no place for tariffs or immigration acts; but it means that the theory on which they are based will be altered. Where peoples represent dif- ferent types of civilization, as in the case of America and Japan, unrestricted immi- gration may prove an evil for both. But if so the restriction will be based upon grounds of mutual advantage and car- ried out in a way to conserve the self- respect of both parties. So it may prove for the advantage of all the world that those countries which in the upward march of civilization have attained a
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higher standard of living should protect themselves by tariffs against the com- petition which would drag them down without uplifting their competitors. But here again, if this be the case, the con- straining motive for the Christian nation will be the advancement of the whole rather than the advantage of a part.
The same principles apply to the treat- ment of dependent peoples. It is ab- surd to treat savage races as though they were on an equality with those which have been trained for centuries in the school of civilization. Such races are children, and must be treated as such; but they are children who will grow up, and the nation which aspires to be really Christian will not forget this fact. It will teach them the things they need to know in order to walk alone. It will not allow unscrupulous exploiters to appropriate the natural resources which are necessary for their development even
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if the exploitation bring temporary ad- vantage to itself. It will so act that when the child grows up he will not find him- self robbed of his patrimony.
Such a change of policy would have far-reaching consequences. It would not only benefit the countries immediately concerned; it would contribute power- fully to peace among the nations; it would remove one of the chief causes which have produced war in the past, and hasten the time when the conscious- ness of unity which now obtains between certain groups of nations shall be ex- tended to humanity as a whole.
Will you think me bold if I venture upon a single concrete illustration? I have just come from China, that great country across the Yellow Sea which is now passing through such a momentous period in its national history, and every- where I found men asking what was to be Japan's attitude toward its neighbor
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in this crisis of its history. It is not my purpose to speak of what has happened in the past, still less to give counsel as to what Japan should do in the immediate future. But I may without impropriety be permitted as a moral teacher to point out the alternative possibilities which the situation holds in solution, and to call attention to their bearing upon the larger world situation of which we have been speaking. One is to follow the policy of exploitation which, with a few hon- orable exceptions, has been character- istic of European diplomacy in the cen- turies which have passed; to secure such immediate advantages as may be gained from China's distress, peaceably if pos- sible, but if need be by force, regardless of the susceptibility of the nation in question, and in complete indifference to what may be for its national advan- tage in the longer future. It is the policy of the robbers to whom Jesus referred
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in the parable of the good Samaritan, who finding a traveller upon the Jericho road set upon him in his weakness, robbed him of his possessions, and departed leav- ing him half-dead.
This is one of the things that Japan might do in China, and if she did it she would do only what European nations, calling themselves Christian, have done before. But she would miss her great opportunity, and surrender the leader- ship of civilization to some other nation more far-sighted and more courageous than herself.
The other possibility is that of friendly co-operation and brotherhood, a policy which should frankly recognize the right of the Chinese to the same national self-development of which Japan offers so conspicuous an example, and which should seek to co-operate in every pos- sible way with the men in China (and there are such men, not a few) who are seeking in a spirit of patriotism a solution
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for their national ills. It is, in a word, the policy of the good Samaritan who seeing a man wounded, bound up his wounds and put him in an inn; but mark this well, as soon as he was well enough to stand, left him free to take his own way without dictation and hindrance. Which policy, think you, will in the long run prove most to Japan's interest, the policy of exploitation or the policy of friendship? Which will bind China closest to Japan and prove the source of greatest strength in years to come? Unless all past experience is deceptive, friendship pays best in the long run. You may hold a man down when he is weak, but when he is strong he will do the same to you; but help a man up when he is down, and when you are in need you will find him your helper. In our personal relations we have found this true; we have yet to prove it true in the relations of nations.
I have taken an illustration from Jap-
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anese contemporary history because I am speaking to Japanese; but I might have applied the principle to my own country with equal appropriateness and with equal force. I might have spoken of the possibilities which face the Ameri- can people in dealing with their neigh- bor to the south. Into the perplexing questions raised by the present Mexican situation this is not the place to go. But distinct from the question of the specific things to be done and still more important is the question of the spirit which should inspire the action. What shall determine the duty of the United States to Mexico, the advantage of our own nation or the welfare of Mexico? When we have secured the safety of our own borders and protection for our own citizens we shall have taken only the first step in our duty as a Christian na- tion. The question will still remain how we can best help Mexico to realize her [ 172 ]
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own destiny among the nations, to right the wrongs under which so many of her own people now suffer, to develop her undeveloped resources, to educate her uneducated masses, and so to enter upon the path of national independence and self-respect which shall fit her to enter on equal terms into the family of the nations.
For the cultivation of such a spirit it is our duty as Christians to work. It will not prove an easy task. Repentance is never easy, whether in a nation or in an individual, and repentance we must have before improvement is possible. When it comes to questions of national policy no nation can afford to say to another: "I am holier than thou."
I do not mean to say that there are no differences in degrees of guilt. I do not mean that in such a world crisis as we face to-day there are no immediate moral issues between which we must
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choose. But I do say that when we take the long look (and I conceive that to be a Christian means to take the long look and not the short one, to see the things of time in the light of the eternal) — I say when we take the long look and follow back the present situation to its remoter causes, we are led to a story of selfish exploitation and conscienceless cruelty in which every one of the nations, without exception, is to a greater or less degree involved. There is not one who can say: "I am blameless." To all alike the call comes to national repentance and national reformation. Whether we be Japanese, or English, or Russian, or French, or German, or American, each of us faces the same choice between two alternatives — the policy of national self- ishness and the policy of national ser- vice. For each the choice will have far- reaching consequences, not only for its own life but for the life of the world.
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Another vexed question upon which our discussion sheds light is pacifism. Here, too, we seem to find ourselves be- tween the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand is militarism with its demand for armaments; on the other is pacifism with its denunciation of war. One tells us that war is a permanent human neces- sity; the other that it is the sin of sins.
At first sight, indeed, the pacifist posi- tion seems peculiarly appealing. It pre- sents us a plain question of duty, a sim- ple choice between right and wrong. If God, as we know, is love, asks the pacifist, how can it be right to fight ? Above all, how can it be right to kill? Christ, he tells us, came to save life, not to destroy, and the true Christian will follow him in his uncompromising hostility to war in every form. Let others do what they will, he will not fight. Better suffer evil than do it. Better be killed than kill. And what is true of the individual, he
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insists, is true of the state. Better to perish as a nation than to survive at the cost of the violation of the law of love.
But further analysis shows that the problem is not so simple. If love and non-resistance were synonyms pacifists would be in the right, but it is not clear that this is true. To refrain from fight- ing when others than myself are con- cerned may be the part of selfishness rather than of courage. Had Belgium not resisted Germany, it might have been better for Belgium, but what would have been the consequences for France ? This is a situation in which the logic of paci- fism affords no clear guidance.
The difficulty of the pacifist position becomes still more apparent when we consider the case of dependent or sub- ject peoples. What shall we say of a nation whose rulers deliberately adopt a policy of extermination, as Turkey did
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at the time of the Bulgarian massacres, and is doing to-day with the Armenians ? What shall we say when Mohammedan slave-traders decimate Africa and leave the marks of their ruthless progress in tracks of blood from sea to sea? Have civilized nations no responsibility in such a case as this? May force not be used to prevent such outrages or render their repetition in the future impossible?
And what of those cases where a great principle is at stake, such as was involved in our own war of independence, or in the struggle for a united Italy? Shall we condemn Washington and Mazzini as unchristian because when peaceable means had been tried in vain they turned to the sword as the last resort? Shall we say that Lincoln was no Christian when he answered the gun fired on Sum- ter with his call for volunteers? To do this would be to unwrite some of the noblest pages of human history and rob [ 177 ]
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our children of examples by which our own lives have been inspired.
No doubt war in itself settles nothing finally. It can at most clear the way for the spiritual influences to which the future belongs, but that it has sometimes done this seems plain, and that the same re- sult could have been achieved in any other way under the conditions which then existed is yet to be proved.
The problem here is of a piece with the larger problem which meets us when- ever we try to apply an absolute ideal to a progressive society. Progress means gradual change from the less to the more perfect, a change in which each particular step is to be judged in its bearing upon all the others. In most phases of the social problem we recognize this and act accordingly. We see that in organized society compromise of some sort is in- evitable, and adopt that course of action which, on the whole, seems to lead us [178]
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most surely and most directly to the de- sired end. Pacifists accept the princi- ple of compromise in other aspects of the social life, but in this one particular they make an exception. To war, and to war alone, they apply the absolute standard. They act themselves and ex- pect others to act as if the Kingdom of God, for which they like other lovers of their kind are working, were realized in fact.
I would speak with the greatest re- spect of those who take this position. Among their ranks are some of the bravest and some of the most unselfish of men. The taunt that the pacifist is a weakling or a coward springs either from ignorance or from motives less worthy. Courage is no less courage when it braves public opinion than when it faces bullets. And the world is better to-day, and the outlook for the future more hopeful because in every country [ 179]
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there is a little group which in the name of Christ has refused to compromise with conscience even though refusal mean per- sonal misunderstanding and social ostra- cism.
Nevertheless the fact remains that for most Christians the arguments of the pacifist have not proved convincing. To them the war has come as a clear call of duty, and in giving their lives to the service of their country they have found the satisfaction and peace which are the natural results of willing sacrifice to a cause beyond self. To discredit such a sacrifice or belittle the motive which in- spired it is to act unintelligently. Rather should we welcome this spirit wherever it is found, and see in it a foretaste of the greater loyalty which is some day to unite all the peoples in the service of the Kingdom of God.
But if we cannot see our way clear to accept the pacifist position, it does not
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mean that we are committed to milita- rism. Here again there is a third alterna- tive possible. A nation may arm in the interests of peace. Strong enough itself to repel invasion, it may show such fair- ness in its international relations and such trust in the willingness of other na- tions to meet it on the plane of justice and reason that the suspicion and fear which lead to war may be repelled, and the new era of internationalism with its accompaniments in disarmament and world organization may be ushered in.
The difficulty has been that in the past military preparedness has been accompa- nied by no correspondingly strong move- ment for the peaceful adjustment of dis- putes between nations. To arm for peace while you maintain unimpaired the causes which produce wars is to involve yourself in a contradiction in terms. There are more ways than one
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to wage war, and tariffs and immigration acts may be as fruitful a cause of mis- understanding between nations as Krupp guns and submarines. Unite the two and the result is inevitable. National armament in the hands of nationalistic diplomacy can have but one issue. It spells war and only war.
If then we are to rescue civilization from the impasse into which it has been brought by the present system of inter- national relations we must put a new meaning into the concept of prepared- ness. We must challenge the right of the militarist to claim this great word for his own. Those who argue for national service are quite in the right, but is there no way to serve but to fight? Surely he serves his country who removes the causes which threaten her peace as truly as he who fights for her when the threat has become a reality. The teacher who interprets to his countrymen the higher
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aspirations of men of other lands, the economist who exposes the fallacy of the policy of national exclusion, the lawyer who devises the machinery for the peace- ful settlement of international disputes, the minister who reminds men of their common relation to a common father; these, too, as well as the soldier and the sailor, are national servants, preparing their country to meet the dangers to which without their help it would be ex- posed. The difficulty has been that we have thus far left their work so largely to their own initiative. We have organized our armies and our navies and equipped them with all the resources of modern science. We have left our professors and our publicists and our economists and our moralists to deal with their greater responsibilities in isolation. We have perpetuated in this most important of all the aspects of national service the methods of guerilla warfare. Is it any
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wonder that under the strain of the world crisis it should break down ?
What is the explanation of so stupid a policy? It is the lack of an adequate ideal. In our feeling, whatever may be true of our theory, we have not yet outgrown the feudal age. The glamour of the age of chivalry is with us still, and we bring up our children to think of war as the true school of heroism and soldiers as the ideal patriots. Professor James is right. We need a moral equiv- alent of war. We need to show that there is a cause as splendid as any for which the heroes of old have fought, demanding virtues as exacting and mak- ing appeals to sacrifice as complete as any that are being made to-day in the mountains of the Tyrol or the battle- fields of France. Such a cause Jesus gives us in his gospel. He summons us to a new crusade for the Kingdom of God. It is our part as Christians to give
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form and definiteness to this ideal, to make it live before the imagination of men; above all, to show its bearing upon our own duty as a nation, and the part we can take in helping to translate it into fact.
Not less preparedness then but more should be the national motto — prepared- ness for the tasks that meet us every day in the year, preparedness not sim- ply or chiefly for the war that may some day be possible, but for the peace that is inevitable. When once the imagina- tion of men has been captured by this conception there are no limits to what we may hope to achieve.
Am I giving a counsel of perfection, a dream out of place in this world of hard fact, the world of Bernhardi and Treitschke and Nietzsche? If so it is a dream that has been dreamed by others who cannot be accused of being senti- mentalists. Nietzsche to-day is every- [185 ]
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where lauded as the man without illusions, the prophet of the will to conquer, the preacher of the glory of strength for strength's sake. To Nietzsche then let us go. This is what he has to say of the present philosophy of preparedness:
"Perhaps a memorable day will come when a nation renowned in wars and victories, distinguished by the highest development of military order and intel- ligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice to these objects, will voluntarily exclaim, 'We will break our swords,' and will destroy its whole mili- tary system, lock, stock, and barrel. Making ourselves defenseless (after hav- ing been the most strongly defended) from a loftiness of sentiment — that is the means toward genuine peace, which must always rest upon a pacific disposi- tion. The so-called armed peace that prevails at present in all countries is a sign of a bellicose disposition, of a dis- [ 186]
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position that trusts neither itself nor its neighbor, and, partly from hate, partly from fear, refuses to lay down its weap- ons. Better to perish than to hate and fear, and twice as far better to perish than to make oneself hated and feared. This must some day become the supreme maxim of every political community." l It was Germany's failure to see this which explains why she has lost the sym- pathy of so many of the thoughtful men in the neutral nations. More than for what she has done they blame her for what she has failed to do. She was the country to which educated men the world over had been accustomed to turn for intellectual leadership. She had car- ried the ideal of national unity further than any other nation. She had organ- ized her resources for the tasks of peace
1 "Human, all-too-human," Eng. tr., vol. II, p. 337. I owe the quotation to Dr. Gladden, "The Forks of the Road," pp. 83, 84.
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with an intelligence and effectiveness un- approached by any other people. Of all the nations therefore she seemed the best fitted to realize the ideal of Nietzsche of the nation strong enough to fight who yet dared to take risks for peace.
She did not do it; that is her national sin. It is no excuse to say that in this she was only following an example which had been set by other nations in the past. Even if this were true, it would not exonerate her. The nation which is to lead humanity in its upward march cannot be content to be no worse than others. It must be actively and aggres- sively better. When Germany put aside the dream of an international peace, based on confidence and justice, and staked her all upon the appeal to the sword she lost her opportunity of in- ternational leadership.
And what is true of Germany will prove true of every other nation which [188]
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follows in her footsteps. It will prove true of England if England listens to the counsels of her own imperialists. It will prove true of the United States if we al- low ourselves to be swept from our moor- ing by those who in matters of national policy would bid us take counsel of our fears. What will it profit to conquer the armies of the enemy in the field if the philosophy which armed them re- mains unsubdued ? Unless this war bring changes, not simply in the outward rela- tions, but in the spirit of men, its vast sacrifices and unexampled heroism will have been spent in vain.
Is there not here a great opportunity for the Japanese people? What the world needs to-day, I repeat, is interna- tional leadership — the example of a great nation, wise enough to read the signs of the times and daring enough to follow what they see. Before you, as before every civilized people, there open two
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possibilities, and between them you must choose. There is on the one hand the policy of imperialistic nationalism, with its corollary in militarism, and on the other the policy of international co-opera- tion and brotherhood with preparedness indeed, but preparedness which is directed to the single end of promoting good feel- ing between the nations and so removing the preventable causes of war. The first promises the more immediate success. The second looks to the longer future. Which part will you take? You have done great things in the past. Are you strong enough and brave enough to at- tempt still greater? You have proved yourselves masters of the art of war. Will you be able to show an equal mas- tery of the greater and the more difficult, and may I add, the more heroic art of peace ?
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But after all what one nation can do alone even with the best will in the world is limited. Between nations as between individuals, there must be co- operation on a large scale if large results are to be obtained. It is one of the en- couraging features of the present situa- tion that this is being so generally recog- nized. From widely different quarters we find the conviction expressed that the present condition of international anarchy must no longer be permitted to continue, but that the common interest of the different nations in a peace based upon justice must find expression in some international organization represen- tative enough to command confidence, and strong enough to enforce respect.
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But it is one thing to see what ought to be done, and quite another to devise means for doing it. Here it must be confessed that the outlook is not encour- aging. Individuals have been won to the ideal of a League of the Nations. Societies have been formed to educate public sentiment in favor of concerted action in matters affecting the peace of the world. But there exists to-day no organized body able to bring to the cause of internationalism a support as effec- tive and resources as great as nationalism can command within each of the coun- tries which it is proposed to unite.
Did I say that there was no organiza- tion? I spoke too hastily. Yes, there is one, if only we realized its potentiali- ties and were prepared to use them for the great ends at stake. This organiza- tion is the Christian church. In the church we have a body whose member- ship includes all classes and all races,
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which is committed by its very constitu- tion to faith in the unity of mankind, and which has its representatives in ev- ery quarter of the globe. In the church, therefore, we have an agency of unri- valled power for realizing the Christian social ideal.
But as yet this great instrument has never been effectively used. The church of Christ, great as have been its services to humanity, has never yet fairly faced its responsibility for social reconstruc- tion. It has confined itself largely to the work of saving individuals and in this limited sphere has not been able to agree as to the method in which this was to be done. So we see the lamentable spec- tacle of a divided Christendom, impotent to realize the unity in which it professes to believe.
We have already considered the rea- sons which explain this failure. Some of these reasons are historical, growing [ 193 ]
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out of the intellectual environment, and for which Christians are only in part responsible; our ignorance of the laws of social life, for example, the pressing importance of meeting the primary needs of the individual soul. But the point is that we face a new situation to-day, and can no longer plead ignorance. We know to-day the power of social organization, and the greatness of social need. We hear the call to united action from men who, for lack of our union, are perishing.
Here is our supreme opportunity as Christians — to make the church in fact what in theory it professes to be, the representative and spokesman of the spiritual unity of mankind.
It will not do to say that it is too late; that the church has had its chance and failed. That is no more true of the church than of every other international organization. Socialism, too, has failed, and international law. Arbitration has [ 194 ]
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failed, and The Hague court — failed, that is to say, for the time being. But that does not mean that the failure need be permanent. The direction of a mov- ing body is determined by the relative strength of the different forces which play upon it; and because at any par- ticular time the forces which favor prog- ress have not yet acquired momentum enough to overcome the forces which oppose it, it does not follow that they have no momentum, or that they may not at some future time gain the mastery. It is not the situation at the present moment which will prove finally decisive for the future organization of society, but the rate at which each of its com- ponent elements is increasing or dimin- ishing, and that is a matter in which our own activity may play a determining part.
What contribution, then, has the church to make to the work of social [ 195 ]
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reconstruction? In the equation of so- cial progress what particular increment of power may it fairly be expected to contribute ?
Three things at least the church can do, which need to be done. In the first place, it can remind us of the degree of unity which we have already attained. In the second place, it can furnish us a training-school for common action in the service of mankind. In the third place, it can foster that attitude of expectant faith without which great undertakings are impossible.
In the first place the church can re- mind us of the degree of unity to which we have already attained. This is a service of the highest importance. There are men and women in every country to-day who feel their oneness in purpose and sympathy with their fellow Chris- tians with whom for the time being,
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through no fault of their own, they are at strife, and who desire nothing better than to co-operate with them in resist- ing the campaign of bitterness and hate which threatens the future of all they hold most dear. But they lack the means to make their will effective in action.
Just before the war broke out there was held at Constance in Germany a conference of Christian ministers to dis- cuss international peace. Among those present were Englishmen and Americans, Dutchmen and Swedes, Frenchmen and Germans. They met under the shadow of the impending crisis, and men who were there have told me that they will never forget the solemnity and the ten- derness of their communion together dur- ing the few brief hours before they were obliged to separate.
There are Christians, I repeat, in every country with such an international con- sciousness, but their witness is ineffec- [ 197]
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tive because it does not reach those for whom it is most needed. The channels of expression which were open to them in peace are closed in war. When Dr. Lahusen of Berlin preaches a sermon on the necessity of forgiving our enemies, of which more than fifty thousand copies are sold in Germany,1 no echo finds its way across the sea to England. The papers are too full of Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate." When Dr. Temple and other English Christians unite in the publi- cation of "Papers for War Time," 2 in which the nobler aspects of Christianity find expression, or bow in prayer for the brothers across the sea, from whom for the time the fortunes of war have sepa- rated them, word of it finds its way to Germany only through some chance let- ter of an American friend, and that months afterward. Yet it is through such contacts alone that the unity of
1 Berlin, 1915. 2 Oxford, 1914.
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the Christian consciousness can be main- tained. One of the most pressing duties before the church is to devise some method by which this difficulty can be overcome, and freedom of communica- tion secured between the different bodies of Christians in time of war.
Let us suppose that when the German Christians published their open letter at the beginning of the war, in which they passionately protested their country's innocence of any aggressive intention, and put the blame for what had hap- pened upon their opponents, their fellow Christians in England, instead of enter- ing into the issues immediately in con- troversy, should have addressed them in some such fashion as this: "We un- derstand and respect the spirit of patri- otism which impels you to spring to the defense of your country in her hour of crisis; we feel a like impulse and acknowledge a similar duty. What you
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believe about Germany we believe about England, and if this were the proper time and place we could argue our coun- try's cause with a conviction no less sin- cere than yours, and with arguments which we believe to be better founded. But this has been done by others, and to their statement we are content to refer you. We who are servants of Christ have other interests to guard and owe a higher allegiance. While this great issue is being fought out, and until the verdict of history on the immediate points in controversy shall be finally rendered, it is our duty to guard the spiritual in- terests of mankind; to maintain unbroken the continuity of the Christian conscious- ness; to resist the attempts of men of ill will on both sides to add to our just causes of quarrel the bitterness of un- just suspicion and malicious falsehood; to serve as the organ through which the spirit of faith and hope and love, which
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we are sure is present with you as we know it is with us, may find effective ex- pression in action.
"Will you not join us in the attempt to fulfil this duty effectively? Let us appoint representatives of the Christian bodies on both sides of the contest. Let us request from our governments the privilege of free communication between the two. Let us refer to them each story of cruelty and oppression on either side for impartial investigation, and so far as possible for correction or redress. Above all, let these representatives see to it that every utterance of the Christian spirit, every instance of generous deed or unselfish thought in each country at war is brought to the notice of the citi- zens of the others. Do not let us leave to neutrals in time of war the duty of medi- ating between Christians. Let us claim our right as fellow members of the body of Christ to direct access to one another." [ 201 ]
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Such an appeal, whether successful or not, would have had a moral value diffi- cult to overestimate. Its tones would have echoed around the world. It would have set a standard for the church of the future.
But what the churches as a whole are not yet ready to do, groups of Christians are already doing. There are agencies actively at work to-day in which the internationalism implicit in Christianity finds clear and self-conscious expression. One such agency is the Peace Movement; another is the Student Movement. Most far-reaching in its effect is the Foreign Missionary enterprise. It is one of the grounds of encouragement in the present situation that the bonds which united the workers in these different causes, while strained, have not been broken by the war. Interchanges of sentiment have taken place between their leaders. Pray- ers have been offered for the comrades in [ 202 ]
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the countries at war. Even now plans are being actively discussed for the re- sumption of the common task as soon as the war is over.1
It is difficult to exaggerate the impor- tance of this service. We have spoken repeatedly of selfishness as a cause of war. But after all this is only part of the explanation and not the most serious. Nations fight not only because of what they suffer, or of what they covet, but be- cause of what they fear. Russia had not attacked Germany, but Germany tells us that she is fighting because Russia was going to attack her by and by. France
1 A brief account of conferences conducted by Pro- fessor Battin, on behalf of the League of International Friendship, with representative Christians in the differ- ent countries at war, appeared in the Christian Work for August 5, 1916. Of unusual interest was the ex- perience of Dr. Mott, who visited Europe in the in- terests of the Student Movement in 1914, and again in 1916. Many individual instances of international good feeling have been collected in Good-Will, the or- gan of the English Friends. Cf. also the files of Die Eiche, the organ of the German Peace Movement.
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had not invaded Belgium, but Germany insists that she invaded Belgium because she knew that France was going to do so by and by. And so it goes in a circle that knows no end. Selfishness breeds suspicion, and suspicion fear. The un- derlying cause of war is not merely men's memory of the wrongs which they have experienced in the past. It is the dogma which makes the past the mea- sure of the future, and refuses to believe in the possibility of any change for the better in the relations between nations. It is the denial not simply in fact but in theory of the cardinal Christian prin- ciple of the brotherhood of man.
Now the only way to meet such an issue successfully is to bring evidence to the contrary. We must call attention to the numbers of men and women in all countries who do in fact love justice and follow mercy, and who, if they were but convinced of the existence of similar sen-
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timents in the citizens of other countries, would be glad to co-operate with them in a policy of international friendliness. We must resist at all hazards the temp- tation to attribute all virtue to oneself, and all vice to one's opponents, and re- alize that in spite of all outward differ- ences, in its deepest longings and desires the human race is fundamentally one.
Who is in a better position to furnish this evidence than the Christian church? To Christians human brotherhood is not an unproved thing. It is a fact that has been demonstrated over and over again by evidence of the most convincing char- acter. For generations the church has been putting to the proof its faith in the power of the gospel to transcend differ- ences of race and of class, and it has found it justified.
On June 7, 1916, there was held in Constantinople the commencement exer- cises of a women's college. The gradu-
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ating class numbered seventeen in all: three were Turks, seven were Bulgarians, three were Greeks, five were Armenians, and one a Jewess. For years the peo- ples to whom these graduates belonged had been enemies, and more than once had engaged in deadly and internecine strife. The Greeks had fought with the Bulgarians, and the Bulgarians with the Turks, and for the Armenians the very word Turk was a synonym for all that was most inhuman and damnable. Yet here in the very storm centre of the world's strife, with war raging all about them, and no one knowing what a day might bring forth, they met on common ground as members of the sisterhood of educated women.
This is what Christianity is doing to- day, and what it proposes to do. It is facing the race prejudice which is so formidable an obstacle to peace among the nations, and proving that it is not [ 206 ]
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insuperable. It is furnishing a solid basis in experience for our faith in the brotherhood of man.
When the war broke out fear was ex- pressed of the adverse influence which the European strife might exert upon Christian missions. If even to us at home the war has proved a challenge to faith, should we not expect it to prove a blow still more severe to those less mature Christians whose acquaintance with Christianity was so much more recent ?
This fear has not been justified by the event. The war has shaken faith indeed, but not in Christianity. It has shaken faith in the profession of the Western nations to be Christian nations. To those of us who have been brought up from childhood in Europe or America, the identification of Western civilization with Christianity may be a natural thing. To the Christians of China and Japan, [ 207 ]
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to whom Christianity has come in its native guise of unselfish service and sac- rificial love, no such confusion is pos- sible. They see clearly that it is not Christianity which has failed, but a civili- zation which falsely calls itself Christian. More powerful than any apologetic of the schools is the demonstration of the break- down of a purely material civilization.
Against this lurid background the beauty of the Christian spirit shines with a purer radiance. Where strife is fiercest we see love reaching across the barriers which war has raised. The incident of the English and German soldiers who left the trenches to fraternize together on Christmas Day has its parallel in many others less well known. From the letter of a young English officer in Bel- gium I quote these words:
The other night four German snipers were shot on our wire. The next night our men went out and brought one in who was near
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and get-at-able, and buried him. They did it with just the same reverence and sadness as they do to our own dear fellows. I went to look at the grave the next morning, and one of the most uncouth-looking men in my company had placed a cross at the head of the grave, and had written on it:
"Here lies a German We don't know his name; He died bravely fighting For his Fatherland."
And under that, "Gott Mitt uns" (sic), that being the highest effort of all the men at German.
A French soldier, wounded in a recent attack on the German trenches, related the following incident: "Near me," he says, "lay two soldiers, mortally wounded; one, a Bavarian, young and fair-haired, with a gaping wound in his stomach, and the other a young Frenchman, hit in the side and head. Both were in mortal pain, and growing paler and paler. I saw a feeble move-
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ment on the part of the Frenchman; he painfully slipped his hand under his coat for something hidden away under his breast. He drew out a little silver crucifix, which he pressed to his lips. Feebly, but clearly, he began: 'Hail, Mary, full of grace.' The Bavarian opened his blue eyes, which were al- ready glazing with approaching death, turned his head toward the Frenchman, and with a look, not of hate but almost of love, finished in a murmur the prayer, 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of death.' The eyes of the two men met, and they understood. They were two companions in like misfortune, desiring to die believ- ing according to their faith. The French- man held out his crucifix to the other, who kissed it, and taking him by the hand said: 'Having served our countries, let us go to God reconciled.' "*
1 Christian Work, July 22, 1916. [ 210 ]
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Such stories could be multiplied a thou- sandfold. Underneath the strife and pas- sion we detect a great hunger for some- thing different, a longing too deep for words for some new and better form of life, waiting only for the appropriate oc- casion to crystallize into action.
It is for the church to give voice to this longing, to assemble the evidence from all races of mankind which witnesses to the gain already made in the struggle for spiritual ideals and holds out promise of ultimate victory.
This does not mean that we are to idealize humanity or shut our eyes to the ignorance and weakness which play so large a role in human affairs. It does not mean that we are to condone wrong- doing, or fail to protest against it when- ever we see it. On the contrary, as we have seen, the effect of Christianity should be to intensify the conscious- ness of sin and to sharpen the judg- [211 ]
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ment passed upon selfishness and cruelty, whether in ourselves or others. But it does mean that the judgment which we pass must be Christian judgment. We must judge others as we should wish to be judged ourselves if we had done the things which we condemn in them. We remember that we ourselves have done wrong and repented, and we hope that our sin has been forgiven. We dare not deny to others what we claim for our- selves. We must believe, however hard at the time it may be to do so, that in its heart of hearts each people of man- kind wants to do what is right when it sees what right is, and that in each the forces of good-will will in the end prove stronger than the forces for evil. In spite of all discouragement and temporary failure we must hold fast to our faith that the splendid qualities which have gone into the building of each of the na- tions at strife have not exhausted them-
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selves in this immediate task, but have their part to play in the building of that larger citizenship which we call the King- dom of God.
When the returning pilgrims from the Peace Conference at Constance met the German officers who had been commis- sioned by the Kaiser to conduct them to the frontier, the officers could not re- strain their laughter when they learned the business that had brought the trav- ellers to Germany. But he laughs best who laughs last. Man is not simply German or English or Belgian, but human, born of woman, child of God, brother of Jesus Christ, and war may teach this lesson no less than peace. It is teaching it to-day. In many a hos- pital, on many a battle-field, the love of kind overleaps the boundaries of race, and the ministry of Christ makes akin those who but now were locked in the death-struggle. Some day this loving [ 213 ]
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service will bear its fruit, and the "con- flict of ideals" be resolved in the " har- mony of sacrifice."
But after all what can be done by the church in time of war is limited at best. The true concern of Christianity as we have seen is with the causes which pro- duce war, and these can be dealt with successfully only in time of peace. It is not enough to recognize the ties which already unite men. We must increase their number and strengthen their hold- ing power, and this can only be done by providing some common object definite enough to arouse interest and appealing enough to command loyalty.
Here again the church holds a stra- tegic position, for in work for the up- building of the Kingdom of God it possesses such a unifying object. The church is not simply a body of wor- shippers conscious of a common relation
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to God. It is a missionary society com- mitted to a world programme. It exists to make the world over after the ideal which Christ has revealed. It is a train- ing-school for common action in the ser- vice of humanity.
It is difficult to exaggerate the im- portance of this contribution. One of the saddest of all the effects of the war is the division which it has caused among Christians. We have already called at- tention to this. Men who claim to wor- ship the same God are righting on op- posite sides, and each prays to the same Deity for victory over the other.
In part, no doubt, this is due to honest misunderstanding. Men do not know the real spirit of their opponents, and because of this misconception are led astray.
But this is true only in part. When one studies the utterances which the war has called forth, one is led to the conclu-
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sion, reluctantly to be sure, but still in- evitably, that there is a real difference in the God worshipped. Under the name of Christ many so-called Christians are really worshipping a very different Deity.
During the early months of the war I read an article by a distinguished the- ologian on the ethics of war. In this article he laid down the principle that war was God's way of re-establishing the balance between the real power of a nation at a particular time, and its po- litical power; and since this was true, it was manifestly the duty of the con- queror in any war to keep all he could get, since only under such conditions could God's purpose be accomplished.
This article happened to be written by a German, but the philosophy which it inculcates is not confined to any coun- try. It has its advocates in all. When men deny that the principles of Christ are valid for nations, when they turn to
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force as the final arbiter in international disputes, they are really taking refuge in a pre-Christian religion. They are wor- shipping Thor or Odin under the name of Christ.
We have already dealt with the prob- lem which this fact raises for faith. It is a part of the larger problem of social progress. History, as we have seen, does not move in a straight line. It has its eddies and its backwaters, its failures and its retrogressions. God has been training man for Christianity through a long historic process, leading him up step by step from the beast to the man, from the old man in Adam to the new man in Christ, and the traces of the earlier stages still survive.
We can follow the steps of this educa- tion in the Bible. Before Christ came there were generations when men thought of God in terms of power rather than of love. Jehovah was the God of hosts,
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the Lord of the armies of Israel. He called upon Joshua to exterminate the inhabitants of Ai and rebuked Saul for saving Agag alive. Only gradually was the lesson learned that God desires re- pentance rather than vengeance, and that he saves by sacrificial love.
It is not strange then that men to-day should grasp at the less advanced pas- sages in the Old Testament as an excuse for their own selfishness or lack of faith, and invoke Christ to bless the very thing that he came to destroy. The thing has occurred again and again in history. We meet it in Puritanism with its exalta- tion of Old Testament ethics to the level of the New. We meet it in the Inquisi- tion with its attempt to substitute force for persuasion in dealing with questions of personal conviction. We meet it in the claim of the militant Popes to an absolute and unquestioning obedience. Imperialism is not simply a philosophy;
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it is a religion, and one of the oldest. And imperialism is not less imperialism when it borrows Christian garments and masquerades under the name of Christ.
How shall we meet this situation? What influence can we command power- ful enough to exorcise this evil spirit? There is only one influence strong enough, and that is the Spirit of Christ. The only weapon with which to fight an ideal is a higher ideal; the only way to con- quer a loyalty is by a stronger loyalty.
Our supreme need, then, is of a virile gospel. It is not enough to promise comfort; not enough to preach salvation. War's appeal is to the strong. Its com- pensation is spiritual — glory or honor, or the consciousness of duty done, or the thanks of a grateful country. If we are to win men from such a service we must offer similar rewards, greater glory, truer honor, a higher duty, the gratitude of mankind. Safety first may be a good [ 219 ]
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motto for a railroad or a savings-bank; it will not do for a country, still less for a church. The religion that is to con- quer the world must be a fighting re- ligion. It must write on its banner New Wars for Old.
Such a motto foreign missions offer the church. Missions are religion's invi- tation to the spirit of adventure. They show us Christianity in its fighting mood, the church organized for conquest. In missions we see the effort to realize the unity of mankind by the free sharing of each with all of the highest blessings of the spirit. We see love going out into all the world to heal and to serve. But we see more than this. We see love appealing to the free spirit to become its own true self; to break the bonds of ignorance and sloth and indifference and unbelief with which it has too long been shackled, and to join the ranks of the healers and the sharers.
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This definition puts foreign missions in their true perspective. They are not an isolated thing, a task to which a man may give himself for its own sake, without reference to or regard for other human interests. They are a part — the most important and significant part — of that modern social movement which is so characteristic a feature of our age. They are the way the Christian spirit responds to the Master's summons to refashion the social order after the pattern which he has set. In them human brother- hood translates itself from faith into fact.
In a recent address upon the American spirit1 Mr. Lane, the Secretary of the Interior, thus interprets the peace-loving spirit of the American people: "The spirit of America is against war not be- cause we have grown cowardly and fear death, nor because we have grown flabby and love softness; no, not even because
1 The Survey, July 15, 1916. [ 221 ]
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we have become conscious converts to the Prince of Peace. But we in America have something larger to do. We are discovering our country. Every tree is a challenge to us, and every pool of water and every foot of soil. The moun- tains are our enemies. We must pierce them and make them serve. The wilful rivers we must curb ; and out of the seas and the air renew the life of the earth itself. We have no time for war. We are doing something so much more im- portant. We are at work. That is the greatest of all adventures."
It is a true interpretation of the la- tent idealism in the American character. Business to the American is not simply making money; it is conquering diffi- culties; it is measuring one's strength against obstacles; it is making some- thing where there was nothing before; it is refashioning the world after the pat- tern of an ideal.
[ 222 ]
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But there are ideals and ideals. If it is a big thing to subdue nature, it is a bigger to conquer spirit. If it be a man's work to transform the physical universe, it is no less a man's work to make over society. But it is this and nothing less for which foreign missions stand.
There was a time, as we have seen, when the missionary enterprise exhausted itself in its appeal to the individual: To win a convert here and there from other religions; to organize them into little groups; to draw hard and fast the lines which separated the Christian community from its heathen environment — this was the missionary's work.
But these days have long passed. Foreign missions have entered upon a new phase. The appeal to the individual is no less important than it was before, but we see the individual in a new set- ting. He is a member of a community that we wish to transform. He is the [ 223 ]
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citizen of a nation that we wish to win. It is not Chinese simply that we are trying to Christianize, but China; not Indians, but India; not Japanese, but Japan; not Americans, but America. To men with such an aim there is nothing foreign. Everything human has interest for us since everything human bears di- rectly upon our task. Education, indus- try, commerce, statesmanship, whatever concerns the relation of man to man, or of state to state, comes within the pur- view of the missionary, is relevant to the task to which he has set his hand. The great missionaries have not been simply preachers; they have been statesmen and diplomats. Martin gave China its in- ternational law; Washburn was the lead- ing authority on the Turkish question, the trusted friend and counsellor of the diplomats of Europe; DeForest inter- preted to the citizens of other countries the better spirit of Japan.
[ 224 ]
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Is not this a man's work? Consider the obstacles to be overcome. There is selfishness, that oldest and most primi- tive of human impulses, the impulse to take all one can get and to keep all one has got. We must make this our servant by releasing that larger self which is latent in every man. We must make men see that what Christ wishes is not slaves but co-workers, and that the task which we offer men in the upbuilding of his Kingdom is one in which each man's tru- est self will find its deepest satisfaction.
There is habit, the inertia of the mind which is content with things as they are, and resists any attempt at improvement. If China appeals to the business man as a field for profitable investment because of the vastness of its undeveloped re- sources, how much more to the Chris- tian ! What human resources there are here waiting to be turned to profitable uses ! What kindliness, docility, patience, [ 225 ]
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fortitude, loyalty, if only we could liber- ate their possessors from the ignorance which now fetters them and open to them the larger opportunities in which we ourselves have found our freedom.
There is prejudice, the natural disposi- tion in each country to think its own civilization the best and to look with suspicion upon influences coming from without. What infinite tact is necessary to deal with such an attitude, what clear discrimination between the things which are transient and temporary and the things which are eternal !
There is a form of missionary activity more common in the past than to-day, which awakens just resentment. When one comes to another country with an assumption of superiority, and tries to impose upon men of an alien civilization customs and ideals with which their own history affords no point of contact, it is not strange that resistance should be en-
[ 226 ]
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
countered. It is one of the salutary by- products of the war that it will make it easier for us to resist this temptation in the future. We realize to-day what we ought to have known before, that there is no such thing yet as a Christian nation. There are nations which have enjoyed the benefits of the gospel longer than others, nations which have been longer under the tutelage of Christ and in which more individuals have benefited by his instruction; but there is no single nation which is not still missionary ter- ritory, not one in which the task which the foreign missionary faces in India or in Siam, is not equally faced by the Chris- tian minister at home. The distinction between home and foreign is a purely arbitrary distinction. It is a matter of the atlas and of the missionary report. There is but one kind of missions, and that is Christian missions. There is but one field, and that is the world. [ 227 ]
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It is only when we interpret the mis- sionary enterprise in this large way that we can measure its far-reaching signifi- cance. It is not the concern of one nation only but of all the nations. It is not the concern of the church only, but of all who love their kind. The day of small enterprises has passed never to return. Only organization can meet organization; only by working together for the cause of humanity in time of peace can we forge the bonds of sympathy and of confidence that will keep us one when the strain of war comes.
In this inspiring task of co-operation and reconstruction, you of the Japanese church may have an honorable part to play. It is in your power to assist in this reorganization of the Christian forces by giving an example within your own country of an effective and undivided Christianity. We who inherit the tradi- tions of the Western world are hampered in our attempts to come together by many [ 228 ]
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
obstacles to which you are strangers. Here on this new soil where Christianity- is still comparatively young, it should be possible for you to unite all Chris- tians in the consciousness of a common opportunity and a common responsibility, and give your fellow Christians who are still divided the example of a united na- tional church.
And here again we must begin at home. If Christians cannot come together in Tokyo to express their common brother- hood in Christ, how can we expect them to do so in Japan as a whole? If they cannot do so in Japan how can they do so in the world? The task of Christian co-operation, important enough surely from the point of view of the local com- munity, acquires a commanding impor- tance when contemplated from the point of view of the world.
And so we come back to the place at which we began, the responsibility which [ 229 ]
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rests upon us as individuals to create the spiritual atmosphere which will make possible these great results. Unless we are the men we ought to be we shall never have the church we need, or the world for which we long.
How shall we meet this responsibility ? Whence shall we gain the reinforcement of power we need? There is but one source which is adequate to the demand, and that is God.
I have spoken of the resources at our disposal for the great tasks which lie ahead; the capacity which the war has revealed in human nature for heroic loy- alty and self -forgetting sacrifice; the longing for some better world order than the present system of rivalry and strife; but after all the most important fact in the case still remains to be catalogued, and that is the living God Himself. We are not obliged to work out the world's salvation alone. If that were the case [ 230 ]
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
we might well despair. God, who has created in us these capacities, and put into our hearts these longings, is Himself actively at work in the world to accom- plish His plan.
Greatest of all Christianity's contri- butions to social progress is faith in the living God. There is nothing in the ideal of human brotherhood as such in which Christians can claim exclusive proprietorship. It is shared by all who believe in internationalism in any form. Whoever is restive under the present con- dition of organized selfishness, miscalled civilization; whoever recognizes a true community of interest with men in other countries who share with him the as- pirations of a higher and more generous life; whoever refuses to accept the ideals of nationalism and of imperialism as the final word for humanity and in spite of present discouragements still hopes for the reorganization of society along lines [ 231 ]
IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
expressive of the common interest, what- ever form that reorganization may take; whoever, in short, regards mankind as greater than any of its parts and con- secrates his life to its service, faces in principle the same issue which confronts Christians to-day.
It is one of the compensations of the present situation that it has shown us how many such people there are. Chris- tians of all nations honor the courage of that minority of Socialists who have dared to plead the cause of humanity under the most imperialistic of all the warring governments, and they in turn when they wish to drive home their pro- test in the most convincing way borrow language from the religion which they had formerly repudiated. We had not thought of Vorwdrts as a Christian or- gan, but these are the words which it addressed to the German Government in the momentous days when peace and
[ 232 ]
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
war still hung in the balance: "Let us understand, then, that we are not merely Germans, French, or Russians, but that we are all men, that all the peoples are of the same blood, and that they have no right to kill one another, but that they ought to love and help one another. Such is Christianity, humane conduct. Man does not belong to one nation only: he belongs to humanity."1
But while in its main lines the issue is the same for all, it comes home to Chris- tians with peculiar force because of their religious interpretation of life. To us regard for other men is not simply a mat- ter of human instinct, still less of prac- tical expediency, but of religious faith. Human brotherhood is the corollary of divine sonship, and the task of organiz- ing the world according to the principles
1 This editorial, which was suppressed by the Ger- man Government, was privately circulated and is re- printed in The Survey of August 21, 1915.
[ 233 ]
IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
of mutual helpfulness and unselfish ser- vice follows necessarily from the initial act of redemptive love, on which the in- dividual bases his hope of personal sal- vation.
It is here, I repeat, in this faith in the Father God that we reach the su- preme contribution of Christianity to the cause of social reconstruction. We are all facing a common task, but we differ in our estimate of the resources at our disposal. Where some see only the human factors in the case, our faith dis- cerns God at work, and on His inexhaus- tible stores of wisdom and power we base our hope of final victory.
For it is faith, after all, on which all turns, faith in the power of spirit to lift itself above the flesh, of light to dispel darkness, of love to conquer selfishness, of the future to emancipate itself from the shackles of the past. Where such faith exists all things are possible. With- [ 234 ]
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
out it the will falters and effort flags. Where there is no vision the people perish. Our primary business as Christians then must be to keep alive the God con- sciousness in man. We have seen how this consciousness revives in time of crisis, but why need we wait for crisis to discover God? God is as near and as accessible in peace as in war if we have only eyes to see Him. It is for the church to furnish this vision. Greatest of all its tasks and most weighty of its responsibilities is its function as a school of faith. It must keep ever before our eyes the struggle for righteousness in which we are always engaged. It must remind us of the summons to service that is forever sounding in our ears. It must retell to the rising generations the story of the triumphs which have already been won by those who have put their trust in God and dared to take risks in His service. In a word, it must foster that
[ 235 ]
IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
attitude of expectancy which shall make no enterprise seem too daring, no under- taking too great.
For whom should this attitude be easier than for us modern Christians? We are not facing unfamiliar problems like those pioneers of faith who had to venture out into the dark with no ex- perience to guide them. We are the latest in a long line of experimenters who have put Christ's promises to the proof and found their faith justified by the event. As we look back over the course of history we see days that looked to those who lived through them as dark as these through which we are passing now, but we see also the light of the new day that dawned after the clouds had rolled away. We remember Calvary with its dark shadow, but we remember Easter, too, and we thank God and take courage.
I have come recently from Panama,
[ 236 ]
WHAT THE CHURCH CAN DO
where it was my privilege to study the great Canal which represents, I suppose, the supreme limit of man's achievement in the struggle against nature. One's thought goes back to those early days when the French engineers began their work. We wonder at the faith which made them believe then that their plan was possible in the face of all the doubters who declared that it was impossible. But we do not fully learn the lesson of their faith until we realize that with the data then at their command the doubters were right. If there were no resources available but those De Lesseps possessed when he began to dig, the task was im- possible. And yet the canal has been dug. Why? Because there were un- discovered resources still uncatalogued. In his arsenal of nature God holds in re- serve new powers which are only gradu- ally released, as science discovers one by one the keys which unlock the closed
[ 237 ]
IS CHRISTIANITY PRACTICABLE?
doors. And it is these new powers, an- ticipated by faith before science can gain access to them, to which the future be- longs.
It is so in our task of spiritual recon- struction. In religion as in science the present can never be the measure of the future. If we were shut up to the re- sources which we now possess we should fail. But God has other workers still to enlist, and new powers still to release, and these in time — if we but do our part — will make accomplishment certain, and usher in the new social order for which the world still waits.
[ 238 ]
INDEX
Absolute ideal, 178.
Adam, 217.
Africa, 177.
Agag, 218.
Ai, 218.
Almsgiving, 162.
America, 166, 207, 221, 224.
American character, idealism
of, 222. Amos, 63. Apologetic, 208. Arbitration, 154, 156. 194.
application of, in labor dis- putes, 154. Armenians, 177. Assyria, 55, 102, 103. Assyrians, 66. Augustine, 37.
Confessions of, 37. Australia, 165. Austria, 6, 60, 132.
Battin, Professor, 203. Belgium, 60, 103, 104, 176, 204, 208. compensation to, 79, 80. Bernhardi, 57, 185. Bible, 27, 61, 66, 69, 217. Boston Evening Transcript,
116. Brotherhood of man, 19, 45, 46, 81, 204, 205. contribution of Christian- ity to, 206. Bulgarian massacres, 177.
Calvary, 73, 236.
Canaan, 55.
Canada, 98, 165.
Cavour, 143.
Chancellor of Germany,
119. Charity, 160, 161, 162. China, 151, 168, 207, 224. Japanese attitude toward, 168-170. Christ, 21, 25, 74, 76, 77, 106, 113, 142, 175, 213, 219, 227. second coming of, 25. incarnation of, 74. cross, typical character of,
77. Spirit of, 219. Christ in Flanders, 86. Christian faith, 3. conscience, 4. attitude toward war, 5. religion, a record of growth,
33. claim, tests of, 49. ideal, 51. method, practicability of,
122. unity, 229. Christian Work, 203, 210. Christianity, individualistic conception of, 4. practicability of, two senses of the question, 12; from the point of view
[ 239 ]
INDEX
of the individual, 13; of society 11-22, 38. principles which deter- mine, 34-47. attempts to evade issue, 24-29. premillenarian at- tempt, 24 sq. mystic attempt, 28 sq. social interpretation of, 16,
42. chief tenets of, 17, 18. internationalism of, 19. organized, 22. as a religion of individual
salvation, 24, 32. a militant religion, 36. place of struggle in, 37. influence of, upon charac- ter, 37. outside the church, 40. spirit of, 40. not to be measured by its institutions, 40. alternatives to, 42, 44. not an ascetic religion, 62. Christmas, 208. Christmas letter of English
women, 132. Church, failure of, 3. lack of definite construc- tive programme, 5, 7, 40, 41, 77. abnegation of leadership of,
by, 22, 41. as an institution, 106. what it can do, 191 sq. international character of,
192. opportunity of, 193.
failure of, in the past, 193. reasons for this, 193, 194. function of, as a reminder of unity already attained, 196 sq. a missionary society, 214,
215. function of, to foster faith in God, 235. Compromise, place of, in re- ligion, 38, 39, 178. acceptance of, by pacifists, 179. Concert of Europe, 52. Conference of faith and or- der, 4. Congress, 161. Constance, 197, 213.
Peace Conference at, 197. Constantinople, 205. Conversion, 142. Cramb, 127.
Crisis, magnitude of present, 23. significance of, as test and teacher, 33. Cross, 73. importance of, for Christi- anity, 73. isolation of, from other hu- man experience, 74. social meaning of, 74. divine significance of, 83. the revelation of God's heart, 83.
DeForest, 224. De Lesseps, 237. Dependent peoples, 167.
[ 240 ]
INDEX
Diagnosis, Christian, of pres- ent situation, 49 sq.
Diplomacy, 43, 50. philosophy of present, 43.
Duty for to-morrow, 141 sq.
East, peoples of, 43. Easter, 236.
Edinburgh Conference, 4. Education, 145.
for humanity, 37, 131.
use of, in the interests of war, 125, 126. Egypt, 55, 56, 102, 103. Eiche, Die, 203. Employers, 155. England, 6, 29, 104, 120, 129,
165, 189. English White Book, 52. Environment, 147. Europe, 29, 207.
history of, 51. European countries 50, 51,
52. Evangelists, great, method of,
92. Exploitation, 168, 169, 174. Ezekiel, 70.
Faith, its nature and validity, 3. reinforcement of, wrought
by the war, 84. in God revived in time of
trouble, 88. in God based upon experi- ence rather than logic,
function of, 112, 123.
Fatherhood of God, 18, 19,
234. Feeling, function of, in so- ciety, 165. Florence Nightingale, 143. Foreign missionary ente--
prise, 202. Foreign missions, 220. true significance of, 221. social significance of, 223. contrast between older and newer ideals, 223, 224. obstacles to, 225 sq. Forgiveness of sins, 21, 79. France, 52, 58, 60, 78, 165,
176, 184, 203, 204. Francis of Assisi, 143. French priests, 85. Friends, English, 203.
Garibaldi, 143. German chancellor, 119. German peace movement,
203. Germany, 6, 52, 78, 85, 98, 104, 116, 132, 176, 187, 197, 198, 203, 204. national sin of, 188. Gladden, 187.
God, moral government of, 2, 63, 69. Kingdom of, 10, 19, 45, 57. mystic view of, 28. fatherhood of, 30, 46, 59. Lord of all, 57. control of history, 58. purpose in history, 61 sq.
69, 81. solidarity with man, 81. immanent, 82.
[241 ]
INDEX
transcendent, 82.
faith in, revived in time of
trouble, 88, 231. faith in, based upon experi- ence rather than logic, 89, 90. differences in conception of,
216. the ultimate source of power, 230. God consciousness, 235. Good government clubs, 157. Good-will, 203. Greek, 19. Grey, Lord, 52. Guilt, 173.
Hague Court, 195. Hangchow, 151. Hebrews, religion of, 55. History, God's training- school, 45. Christian interpretation of, 48-96. Human brotherhood, 221, 233.
Ideal, power of, 137.
lack of an adequate, 184. Idealism, 136. Ideals of peace, 11. Ignatius Loyola, 143. Immigration acts, 164, 166. Immortality, 56, 92.
experimental basis for our faith in, 93.
reinforced by the war, 93. Imperialism, 218, 219.
English, 189.
India, 224.
Individual, significance of, 142.
Individualism, 148. inadequacy of, 149.
Individualistic agencies, 6.
Individualistic religion, argu- ments against, 31.
Inland Sea, 150.
Inquisition, 218.
International brotherhood, 136.
Internationalism, 181. bankruptcy of, 7.
Isaiah, 58, 102.
Israel, 55t 63, 66, 80, 82, 102, 103.
Issue raised by the war, 11.
Italy, 143, 177.
James, Professor, 184.
Jane, Mr., 116.
Japan, 116, 128, 150, 166,
168, 207, 224, 229. Japanese church, function of,
228. Japanese people, alternative
before, 189, 190. Jehovah, 55, 63, 217. Jeremiah, 58, 70. Jerusalem, the new, 62. Jesus, 30, 46, 100, 143. Jesus' method, 91. Jesus Christ, 56, 62, 95.
Kingdom of, 62. Job, 70. Joshua, 218. Julius Csesar, 121. Justice, 163, 165.
( 242 ]
INDEX
Kaiser, 213. Kim, 32.
Kingdom of God, 69, 100, 134, 159, 179, 180, 184, 213, 214, 225. extent of, 101. nature of, 105. means of its realization, 107. Kipling, 32. Krupp, 182.
Labour Leader, 133.
Lahusen, Dr., 198.
Lane, Mr., 221.
Latimer, 77.
League of International
Friendship, 203. League of Nations, 192. Letter of German Christians,
199. Life after death, 26. Lincoln, 177. Lissauer, 198. Luther, 37, 143.
Martin, 224. Martyrs, 79. Mary, 210. Materialism, 109.
as a philosophic theory, 110.
as a mode of life, 110. Mazzini, 143, 177. Messiah, 63. Method of God, redemptive
love, 71. Mexico, 172.
duty of United States to, 172, 173. Militarism, 114, 117, 181.
Military service, universal,
127. Missions, Christian, 215; ef- fect of war upon, 207. unity of, 227. Mohammedan slave-traders,
177. Monasticism, 143. Moral government of God, 2.
challenge of God's, 70. Moral reserves of humanity,
137. Mott, Dr., 203. Munich, 132. Mysticism, 9.
anti-social character of, 28. meaning of, 28. relation of to Christianity, 30.
Napoleon, 121. Nation, Christian view of its claim upon the citizen's allegiance, 159. National selfishness a cause of
war, 51. Nationalism, 109, 113.
its rejection of Christian
end, 113. anti-Christian character of, 114, 115. Neutral nations, 44. New Testament, 36. New York City, 156. New Zealand, 165. Nietzsche, 72,95, 185, 186, 188.
Odin, 217. Official papers, 65. Old Testament, 58, 218.
[ 243 ]
INDEX
Optimism, 11, 57. Organization, need of an in- ternational, 191. Osaka, 150.
Pacifism, 175.
contemporary, 54.
arguments for, 175.
difficulties in, 176.
limitations of, 180. Pacifists, courage of, 179. Palace of The Hague, 6. Palestine, 60. Panama, 236.
" Papers for War Time," 198. Patriotism, 160.
distinguished from nation- alism, 113, 114. Paul, 77.
Paul's method, 91. Peace, permanent, its nature, 98.
evidences of love of, 118. Peace movement, 202. Persia, 55.
Philosophy of history, 69. Philistia, 56. Pittsburgh, 150. Plan of God, social nature of,
71. Poland, 58, 85. Popes, militant, 218. Practicability of Christianity, rejection of, by many thoughtful people, 16. Prayer, spirit of, in the
trenches, 85. Premillenarianism, 9, 24.
explanation of, 25, 26.
reason for rejecting, 27.
Preparedness, 181.
need of a new concept of, 182.
need of Christian, 185. Programme, rivals of the Christian, 109 sq.
the Christian, for human- ity, 97-140. Progress, 178. Prophet of the Exile, 72. Prophets of Israel, 54, 63. Protestantism, 143. Providence, 56, 61. Public opinion, 142. Puritanism, 218. Purpose, the divine, 84.
Race, 20.
Reason, function of, in pro- ducing faith, 89.
Reconstruction, 8.
Redemption through Christ, 21.
Reichstag, 119.
Religion, inexhaustible vital- ity of, 46.
Repentance, 173.
Resources available for the Christian cause, 131.
Responsibility, question of ultimate, 67.
Ridley, 77.
Roberts, Lord, 127.
Rome, 60.
Russia, 6, 52, 165, 203.
Russians, 85.
Salvation, 56, 219. Samaritan, 171. Saul, 218.
[ 244 ]
INDEX
Savage races, 167. Science, 147. failure to remain objective,
7. Christian attitude toward,
107. limitations of, 111. Self-development, 159. Self-interest the governing principle of diplomacy, 50. Self-sacrifice, 135. Sin, 211.
Christian attitude to, 212. forgiveness of, 212. revival of consciousness of,
65. nature of, in unbrotherli-
ness, 66. national, 66. Social gospel, 47. Social ideal, 26, 56. Social message of Christian- ity, 32. Social question, Christian in- terest in, 147. Social service, 160. Social system, unchristian character of the present, 153. Social validity of Christian- ity, importance of ques- tion, 8. Socialism, 194. failure of, 6. Socialists, 232. German, 132. English, 133. Society, modern conception of, 146.
Solidarity, human, 75.
in sin, 76.
in salvation, 76, 78. Spirit of God, 92, 96. State, non-Christian charac- ter of, 20.
ultimate unity of, 20.
Christian view of duty to, 33. Student movement, 202, 203. Suffering, Christian attitude toward, 63.
not inconsistent with love, 64.
meaning of, 71.
not all due to sin, 64.
of the innocent, 70, 71, 73.
mystery of, 70. Sumter, 177. Superman, 95. Survey, The, 221, 233, Syria, 56.
Tammany Hall, 156, 157. Tariffs, 164, 166. Temple, Dr., 198. Theodicy, 73.
the complete Christian, 84. Theology, 17. Thor, 217. Times, London, 120. Tokyo, 229. Treitschke, 127, 185. Turkey, 176. Tyrol, 184.
Unbrotherliness, 66.
United States, 98, 116, 128, 189.
naval policy of, 116. Unity, 3.
[ 245 ]
INDEX
Value of human life, 94. Vicarious suffering, 71. Vorwarts, 232.
War, challenge of, to Chris- tian faith, 1-12, 33, 34.
the denial of brotherhood, 8.
first effect of, 9.
attitude of religious men toward, 10.
effect of, on faith in God, 14.
effect of, on belief in immor- tality, 14, 15.
the affirmation of the su- premacy of self-inter- est, 15.
the denial of Christianity, 16.
remoter causes of, 51.
God's method of discipline, 54.
Christian interpretation of,
54. underlying causes of, 53. brutalizing effect of, 87. a symptom, 99. true remedy for, 100. of peoples, 145. unable to settle anything
finally, 178. appeal of, to the strong, 219. Washburn, 224. Washington, 177. Western civilization not
Christian, 207. White Book, English, 52. Women's Peace Party, 132. World citizenship, absence of consciousness of, 23.
Yellow Sea, 168.
Zion, 59.
[ 246 ]
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