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THE GOSPEL OF
GOOD WILL
WILLIAM DEWITT HYDE
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V.
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES ON
PREACHING AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF RELIGION
FOR 1916
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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TORONTO
THE
GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
AS REVEALED IN CONTEMPORARY
SCRIPTURES
BY
WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE
PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE
"The deirocratic -aiind att-^mpts-to apply to every moral issue its
tests of justi(;e>givipg;,;servir,ie,;aniiWc<a'l solidarity."
, , — Shailer Matthews,
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
All rights reserved
TO ■■■' ■ »
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219m8A.
TILDi-N
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PUBUC LIBRARY
TtLOf.N FOUNDAT/ONI
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Copyright, 1916,
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotypcd. Published March, 1916.
Notfajooti iPrega
J, S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
aso
H
FRANK H. DECKER
MINISTER OF CHURCH HOUSE, PROVIDENCE, R.I,
IN WHOSE HEART AND ON WHOSE LIPS THE GOSPEL
OF GOOD WILL LIFTS THOSE WHO NEED IT
MOST INTO A HAPPY FELLOWSHIP IN
CHRIST'S EXPERIENCE OF GOD
to
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PREFACE
This book, taking for granted the technical devices
of preaching, goes straight to the heart of the Gospel to
be preached and practiced : — the Gospel that Christ
expects men to be great enough to make the good of all
affected by their action, the object of their wills, as it
is of the will of God.
The Christian is not a '' plaster saint" who holds
"safety first" to be the supreme spiritual grace; but
the man who earns and spends his money, controls his
appetites and passions, chooses peace or war, and does
whatever his hand finds to do, with an eye single to the
greatest good of all concerned.
^ Sin is falling short of this high, heroic aim ; and the
preacher's business is to make men ashamed of it, as
the low, mean thing it is.
The instant a man who has done wrong repents,
God and all Christhke men welcome him back to their
favor and fellowship.
To the Christian every secular vocation is an oppor-
tunity to express Good Will : and sacrifice is the price
he gladly pays for the privilege.
vii
VUl PREFACE
The wise Christian preacher will not as preacher
become the mere partisan on one side or the other of
disputed questions of political, social, and moral reform :
but will commend such Good Will and condemn such
evil will as there is on both sides.
Christian character and Christian virtues come not
by direct cultivation, but as by-products of Good Will
expressed in daily life. The Church, a superfluous
superstition when considered as an appendage to an
untransformed secular life, or a preparation for an unde-
fined happiness hereafter, is a precious and sacred instru-
ment for transforming men and institutions into sons
and servants of Good Will.
As the expert interpreter of the Gospel of Good Will :
as the leader in the fight against all meanness and cruelty :
as the restorer of the penitent : as the infuser of spirit-
ual meaning into secular Hfe : as the champion of costly
sacrifice : as the challenger of social injustice and the
non-partisan herald of social reform : as the officer of
a church that derives its sanctity and unity from the
efficiency with which it serves all forms of personal and
social welfare, — the Christian minister has a mission
beneficent beyond all others.
These lessons are drawn from and illustrated by texts
and extracts from twentieth-century literature: not
PREFACE IX
devotional, theological, evangeKstic, or missionary books,
but secular literature that is saturated with the essen-
tial Christian Spirit of Good Will.
For kind permission to quote these texts and lessons
from " Contemporary Scriptures " I make grateful ac-
knowledgments to the following authors and publishers :
Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, for " The Passing of the Third
Floor Back " (page i) ; Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy and
Harper and Brothers, for " The Servant in the House "
(page 162) ; D. Appleton and Company, for Thomas
Mott Osborne's '' Within Prison Walls " (page 80) ; The
Houghton Mifflin Company, for John Graham Brooks'
''An American Citizen" (page 108); J. B. Lippincott
Company, for Charles Sarolea's '' How Belgium Saved
Europe" (page 135); Dodd, Mead and Company, for
John Hopkins Dennison's " Beside the Bowery " (page
20) ; and The Macmillan Company, for John Mase-
field's "The Everlasting Mercy" and " The Widow in
the Bye Street " (page 45) ; Jacob Riis' " The Making
of an American," and "The Battle With the Slum"
(page 191) ; and Winston Churchill's "The Inside of
the Cup " (page 217).
These texts and extracts are introduced to show that
this Gospel of Good Will is a Gospel which is being
preached effectively in the poems and plays, the biog-
X PREFACE
raphies and histories, the speeches and novels of the
day, and should be preached in the pulpit.
In Chapters II and III, I have introduced a few pas-
sages from my book on ^' Sin and its Forgiveness."
For some things put in, and for more left out, I am in-
debted to the criticism of Dr. Charles T. Burnett and
Dr. Chauncey W. Goodrich.
Why the Gospel of Good Will? Why not the Gospel
of God ; the Gospel of Christ ; or the Gospel of the
Spirit ?
Because for many of us God is a far-off, forbidding
being; Christ has become sentimental and external;
the Spirit has come to stand for something vague and
mystical.
Readers of whom this is not true ; readers to whom
God is a Father whose trusted, wise benevolence makes
the doing of hard duty a deHght ; Christ an ever present
companion whose friendship makes unselfish living easy ;
the Spirit an inward guide whose perpetual suggestions
make kindliness of attitude and act a second nature;
are advised to substitute for Good Will, wherever it
occurs, the one of these more obviously personal terms
which means most to them.
On the other hand, to those who find these terms beset
with misconceptions, and are willing to risk apparent
PREFACE XI
temporary abandonment of them, I think I can promise
that at the end of our little journey they will come back
to find these personal terms defined and deepened, ex-
panded and enriched.
For Good Will is not an impersonal abstraction float-
ing in empty air. It is the fundamental attribute of
God; the essential nature of Christ; the characteristic
quahty of the Spirit : and whoever lives in Good Will
thereby becomes a son or daughter of God, a brother or
sister of Christ, a disciple and friend of the Spirit.
William Dewitt Hyde.
BowDOiN College, Brunswick, Maine,
January i, 19 16.
INTRODUCTION
There are two approaches to the Christian life. One
is the critical investigation of the traditions in which
that life is historically enshrined. The results of this
investigation are at J&rst startlingly negative, and seem
to take away the foundations of Christianity. Yet
followed through they reveal underneath the founda-
tion which they remove an even j&rmer foundation in
the eternal ideal of Good Will which the prophets par-
tially proclaimed, law negatively declared, Christ per-
fectly embodied, and the early Christians enthusiasti-
cally reproduced. One finds this admirably done in
such a book as William F. Bade's "The Old Testament
in the Light of To-day."
The other method is to ask, not through the critical
examination of ancient tradition and ecclesiastical au-
thority, but directly through the Hfe and literature of
the present day what are the supreme values which men
are expressing and admiring in the plays and poems,
the biographies and histories, the speeches and novels
of this twentieth century. This method has all the
pleasure and peril of plowing virgin soil on an unexplored
frontier.
XIV INTRODUCTION
It neither denies nor affirms the results as such of
Biblical and historical criticism. In so far as tradition
proves false and authority unfounded, so long as we are
true to our present highest ideal of Good Will, we can
get along just as well without as with the historical
tradition. And in so far as the verified tradition and
our present insight coincide, each has reason to be grate-
ful for the confirmation of the other.
Both to those whom criticism has robbed of cherished
features of the traditional Gospel and to those to
whom criticism has given back the essentials of their
faith, the new method brings a positive and practicable
Gospel. Wisdom is justified of all her children.
We are passing through a revolution in religious
thought. The old terms remain : but with new mean-
ings and new emphasis. The old views had at least
the merit of clearness. The preacher knew precisely
what to preach : and the layman knew how to put the
preaching into practice. The new views have not yet
become equally precise. Not every preacher who holds
them knows how to make them clear to his congrega-
tion : and not every one in the congregation who hears
them preached is quite clear about the manner of life
for which they call.
As this book aims to make the new views as clearly
INTRODUCTION XV
preachable and as precisely practicable as the old, the
natural introduction to them is a contrast, as sharp and
as extreme as possible, between the old and the new views.
God used to be regarded as somewhat arbitrary : not
deigning to justify his ways by the perfect standard
of what human goodness at its best prompts us to say
and do in our relations with our fellows : but laying down
laws and penalties, drawing up plans and schemes,
which seemed to have as their primary aim divine satis-
faction rather than human welfare.
To-day our deeper grasp of the Spirit of Jesus, and our
fuller appreciation of its great practical corollary,
democracy, has taught us to measure God by at least
as high a standard as that which we apply to ourselves.
This makes God a Being altogether light in whom there
is no darkness at all : not arbitrary will but Good Will
becomes the essence of his nature : and when we seek
to know His Will we ask not merely what was revealed to
and believed by the harder hearts of twenty or twenty-five
centuries ago, but what a Will which seeks the compre-
hensive best for each and all to-day expects us to be and
do, in the concrete and complex situations in which we
modern men are placed — situations infinitely more
delicate and difficult than anything of which the most
inspired of the ancients every dreamed.
XVI INTRODUCTION
Eight lectures cannot cover the whole of the preacher's
message. I have selected and arranged in logical order
the eight commissions which seem to me most vital.
The preacher's first task is to develop in his people
the habit of asking in every relationship of Ufe, not what
is profitable, not what is pleasurable, not what is respect-
able, not what is lawful : but what does the Will that
wills the best for all : — what does Good Will in this
precise situation require. To train people to ask that
question every day and hour of their lives : and once or
twice a week to give them guidance and inspiration
toward some of the answers to it, is the preacher's most
comprehensive commission. He is not merely the
repeater and commentator of a message once for all
delivered to the saints : but the prophet of a message
that is forever as new and original as the changing
situations and unfolding capacities of men.
The thing the preacher and layman ahke have to fight,
then, is not sin in the old, abstract sense of defiance of
an arbitrary God, disobedience of his sovereign com-
mands, and disregard of the elaborate terms upon
which he has offered us abstract salvation: but the
meanness that seeks anything less than that best for
all which Good Will is ever seeking; the selfishness
which falls so far short of Good Will for all that it will
INTRODUCTION XVU
take gain and pleasure for self, or self and friends, at
cost of avoidable loss and pain for others and for all.
To show mean and selfish persons how mean and selfish
they are, and make them heartily ashamed of their
greed and lust, malice and hatefulness, laziness and
self-indulgence, censoriousness and hardheartedness, is
the preacher's second commission.
Mean and contemptible as selfishness is., however,
the selfish man is mean and contemptible no longer than
he clings to his selfishness. The instant he is ashamed
of it, and sorry for the injury it is to others ; wishing
that instead of the mean thing he said, or did, he had
risen to the noble height of Good Will for all — that
instant, not by special arrangement, but in the nature of
the case, because we would do it ourselves, and God is
at least as good as we are at our best, the man who has
been mean and selfish is forgiven, and welcomed to the
favor of God and the fellowship of all who in the Christ-
Hke spirit share and serve Good Will. To assure the
penitent of this free and full forgiveness of God, and
to secure for him the practical, social expression of that
forgiveness by all Christian men and women, is the
preacher's third commission.
Good Will is not chiefly manifested for us once for all
in miracle: or repeated for us in sacramental magic.
XVlll INTRODUCTION
It is manifested in the life and character of Jesus Christ
far more fully than in the alleged manner of his birth
or the method of his resurrection : in the conduct and
spirit of the daily lives of Christian men and women,
far more than in ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies :
and is to be manifested most acceptably and trium-
phantly in the transformation of all secular vocations into
expressions of friendliness and service to all whom they
directly and remotely affect. To show, not in technical
detail, which for the most part is beyond his powers,
but in aim and principle how to make each Christian
man's vocation an expression of Good Will for him, in
him, and through him for the benefit and blessing of
the world, is the preacher's fourth commission.
Good Will involves not merely once for all in Jesus
Christ, but perpetually and universally in every disciple
who shares it, the sacrifice of whatever individual prefer-
ence, pleasure or profit is inconsistent with it. Up to
the Hmit of his strength and influence, so far as is con-
sistent with maximum efficiency in his specific station
and function, every Christian man must bear his share
of the suffering incidental to a finite world of natural
law and human freedom : and consequent on the per-
versity of individuals and the corruption and imperfec-
tion of civic and social institutions. Sacrifice is the cost
INTRODUCTION XIX
of service : each form of service has its specific price in
sacrifice : and to train his people to pay the price and
make the sacrifice cheerfully and bravely, yet not
excessively or unreasonably, is the preacher's fifth
commission.
A man who makes his life expressive of Good Will
thereby becomes not merely saved and assured of an
abundant entrance into a future heaven : but becomes
transformed by the renewing of his mind so as to show
forth here and now that perfect and acceptable Will
in specific traits of character and qualities of conduct.
To show what these are, and how they come, not so
much through explicit cultivation but as by-products
of a mind and heart devoted day by day, year after
year, to Good Will, is the Christian preacher's sixth
commission.
The State, the economic order, the family and the
international world order are spheres, not of supernatural
conflict of God and the Devil, but spheres which are
the resultants of much natural selfishness and an ever
increasing volume of Christian Good Will. To live
in them, patient with their imperfections so far as they
are for the present inevitable ; yet ever making his own
contribution to them pure, and just and generous and
beneficent: dwelling at the same time sorrowfully
XX INTRODUCTION
in the unavoidable injustices and oppressions, joyfully
in the coming purity and justice and generosity and
love of the world that is to be, and which all Christian
men are helping to bring in, is his seventh commission.
The Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, the Church,
Missions and the Ministry are not as formerly con-
sidered, supernatural institutions of mystical and magi-
cal efficacy to work moral miracles independently of
the transformation and cooperation of character : but
they are useful and essential and therefore holy and
sacred means for the cultivation, and propagation of
Good Will. To make men appreciate and reverence
them, not for their traditional and fictitious, but for
their present-day and instrumental value, is the eighth
of the preacher's commissions.
A man who signs himself *'A Student In Arms,"
writing from the trenches in Flanders to the Spectator
of December i8, 191 5, describes so accurately the prob-
lem of the preacher, and the solution of it set forth in
this book, that it may well serve as the conclusion of our
introduction.
"The soldier, and in this case the soldier means
the working man, does not in the least connect the things
he really believes in with Christianity. He thinks that
Christianity consists in believing the Bible and setting
INTRODUCTION XXI
up to be better than your neighbors. By believing the
Bible he means believing that Jonah was swallowed by
the whale. By setting up to be better than your neigh-
bors he means not drinking, not swearing, and preferably
not smoking, being close-fisted with your money, avoid-
ing the companionship of doubtful characters, and refusing
to acknowledge that such have any claim upon you.
''This is surely nothing short of tragedy. Here were
men who believed absolutely in the Christian virtues
of unselfishness, generosity, charity and humility, with-
out ever connecting them in their minds with Christ;
and at the same time what they did associate with
Christianity was just on a par with the formalism and
smug self-righteousness which Christ spent His whole
life in trying to destroy.
"The chaplains as a rule failed to realize this. They
remonstrated with their hearers for not saying their
prayers, and not coming to Communion, and not being
afraid to die without making their peace with God.
They did not grasp that the men really had deep-seated
beliefs in goodness, and that the only reason why they
did not pray and go to Communion was that they never
connected the goodness in which they believed with the
God in Whom the chaplains said they ought to believe.
If they had connected Christianity with unselfishness
XXU INTRODUCTION
and the rest, they would have been prepared to look to
Christ as their Master and their Savior. I am certain
that if the chaplain wants to be understood and to win
their sympathy he must begin by showing them that
Christianity is the explanation and the justification and
the triumph of all that they now do really believe in.
He must start by making their religion articulate in a
way which they will recognize. He must make them
see that his creeds and prayers and worship are the sym-
bols of all that they admire most, and most want to be.'^
CONTENTS
I. The Gospel of Good Will: Christ's Expecta-
tion OF Men I
II. Falling Short of Good Will: The Meanness
OF Sin 46
III. Restoration to Good Will: Repentance and
Forgiveness 80
IV. Good Will in Secular Vocations: Service . 108
V. The Cost of Good Will: Sacrifice . . .135
VI. By-Products of Good Will: The Christian
Virtues 162
VII. Good Will in Society: Reform . . . .191
VIII. Fellowship in Good Will: The Church . . 217
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL: CHRIST'S EXPECTA-
TION OF MEN
"You have always taken it for granted, sir, in all our conver-
sations, that I was a fine fellow, in sympathy with fine ideals.
But that is not what surprises me : it is to find — that you are
right." Jerome K. Jerome, The Passing of the Third Floor Back,
p. 190.
Our lesson for to-day is from ''The Passing of the
Third Floor Back"; the text is the remark of a Jew
converted from cunning trickery to frank honesty. This
play is the drama of conversion by expectation ; re-
generation by appreciation. It portrays the influence of
The Stranger, who is Christ, on as unpromising a lot
of persons as ever gathered together in a boarding house.
The Prologue shows us a satyr, a coward, a bully, a
shrew, a hussy, a rogue, a cad, a cat, a snob, a slut,
a cheat, and a passer-by, The Stranger, — Christ.
2 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
In the Epilogue we meet these same individuals again,
yet with all their objectionable characteristics gone:
we meet them as a generous old bachelor; two pure
lovers; a devoted husband and wife; an honorable
Jew ; an entertaining party ; a self-respecting maiden
lady ; a generous rich aunt ; an important person ; the
refined lady of the house, and The Stranger who now
is the friend of them all.
How has The Stranger-friend, the Christ, wrought
this wonderful transformation? By seeing and re-
veaHng to each one of them his or her ideal. In the
grasping lodging-house keeper he sees and reveals the
generous lady she really is ; unwilling to charge him as
much as he is able and willing to pay. In a powdered,
painted, giggling, gushing, silly simpleton he sees and
reveals a ''clever, witty, beautiful, graceful, comely
woman, perhaps a little pale — there are white roses
and red — with delicate features on which the sculptor
Thought has chiselled his fine Hues, giving to them char-
acter, distinction; her still-bright eyes unspoilt; with
her fit crown of soft brown hair that time has touched
with no unkindly hand."
To see how the change is wrought, however, we
must give not mere extracts, but in two or three cases
the whole conversation.
Christ's expectation of men 3
First, The Stranger has a friendly talk with Harry
Larkcom, a low, ill-mannered, mercenary fellow who
has just been trying to make an assignation with the
servant girl in return for a gift of imitation emeralds.
The Stranger
How well you play !
Larkcom
{He swings round on his stool.) Hullo ! — you there,
old cockerlor — {He encounters The Stranger's eyes.
Somehow they put him out of countenance.) Think so?
The Stranger
You have the touch of one who loves music.
Larkcom
Here. {He rises, grins up into The Stranger's face?i
What's the Httle game? Want to borrow money?
The Stranger
You see, it would be of no use. You see through me
at once.
Larkcom
(The Stranger is smiling. He turns away, ashamed
of himself.) Only my bit of fun. {By way of explana-
tion). My weak spot — anybody telHng me I know
anything about music. Here, of course — (yVith
4 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
disgust.) Ah! All they understand here is ''Tumpty,
tumpty, turn."
The Stranger
And so you give them — what they understand.
Larkcom
Oh well! somebody's got to do something to liven
things up a bit.
The Stranger
Ah ! yes. (He puts a hand on the lad^s shoulder.) Some
kind, good-natured body.
Larkcom
Oh well ! it comes easy — and I like doing it.
The Stranger
Yes.
Larkcom
{There is something about The Stranger that invites
confidence.) My idea was to have been an entertainer.
The Stranger
It was a good idea. You would have succeeded, I
am sure.
Larkcom
You see, IVe got a voice.
5
The Stranger
And you have humour and a sense of fun, one reads
it in your eyes.
Larkcom
(Suspicious for an instant — till he looks into The
Stranger's eyes.) That's right. Why, sometimes —
when I like to take the trouble — I'll have 'em all round
me here laughing. Not an easy crowd to start, mind
you.
The Stranger
It is your vocation. It would be wrong of you to
waste your gifts.
Larkcom
Question is, would it pay ?
The Stranger
I think it would. And then, that is not the only
question, is it? You would be giving pleasure to so
many.
Larkcom
''Giving." Here, don't you run away with the no-
tion that Harry Larkcom is a philanthropist. What's it
going to put into little Harry's money-box? {He slaps
his pocket) That's the question little Harry always
asks himself.
6 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
Always ? Are you sure ?
Larkcom
Ami —
The Stranger
You play them "Tumpty, tumpty, tum." Why?
Larkcom
Why ! Because —
The Stranger
Does it give you any pleasure — you, a musician !
Does it add anything to the "money-box"? {The lad
stares.) No. You do it because you are just a good
fellow. You will have them all around you, laughing.
Wherever you are, Hfe shall be a little brighter; dull,
tired faces shall be made to smile. You give them —
so much more than money. You give them — yourself.
Don't you call that being a philanthropist?
Larkcom
Of course, you can put it that way.
The Stranger
What other way ?
christ's expectation of men 7
Larkcom
I do like seeing people jolly round about me ; hearing
them whisper to one another that Harry Larkcom's the
life and — Gar on ! Who are you getting at ? — you
and your philanthropists ! I just like their admiration
and applause. That's all I do it for.
The Stranger
Their gratitude, their appreciation. Are you not
entitled to it ?
Larkcom
You are determined —
The Stranger
The thanks of those you serve : that is the true "pay"
of the artist.
Larkcom
Here. Am I an artist now ?
The Stranger
And the artist is always a philanthropist, serving his
fellow-men, not only for the sake of the money-box.
Larkcom
I wonder. My old mother always would put it that
way. "Harry's never so happy," she would say, "as
when he's making other people happy."
8 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
Ah ! She knew you. She would have been so proud
of you.
Larkcom
Well, it would be better than the sort of jobs I'm
doing now.
The Stranger
You will forgive me. I have seen it so often. You
artists are never content doing any other work than
your own. All the rest is waste of time.
Larkcom
Would you mind one day my trying over one or two
little things of my own on you ?
The Stranger
I should be delighted.
Larkcom
Honour bright ?
The Stranger
Honour bright ! It will be pleasant — looking back
— to think that I perhaps was of help to you in the
beginning.
Larkcom
Don't say anything about it to any of the others.
(The Stranger signifies understanding.) "Harry Lark-
com— artist!"
christ s expectation of men 9
The Stranger
(Smiling.) And philanthropist.
Larkcom
And philanthropist. (Laughs.) Good night, in case
I don't see you again — (holds out his hand) — partner.
The Stranger
Good night, partner.
As a result of this conversation Harry Larkcom be-
comes a professional entertainer with *'Fun without
Vulgarity" for his motto.
Again The Stranger has a talk with a rich, broken-
down, smutty, shady old book-maker, who is trying to
get a beautiful girl who loathes his very touch to marry
him as a means of supporting her indigent and quarrel-
some parents. The Stranger had met the girl's
eyes as she was starting out for a walk with the old
gambler; and as a result of The Stranger's look she
had decided not to go with him. The conversation
between Wright, the old gambler, and The Stranger,
starts with the former's remonstrance against this silent
interference.
Wright
I want to ask you a question. (He looks around,
draws The Stranger further aside.) **Heat of the
lO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
room" be damned. It was the moment she caught
sight of you that she changed — suddenly discovered
that she wasn't feeling well — {with a sneering laugh).
What's the understanding between you two?
The Stranger
You think it was I who influenced her ?
Wright
I don't think anything about it. I was watching.
Her eyes were fixed on yours all the time.
The Stranger
May it not have been merely her Better Self pleading
to her ?
Wright
Her Better Self ! What better can she do for herself
than marry me? I'm rich. Ain't I going to be kind
to her ? Ain't I going to settle money on her — money
on herself, to spend as she likes? {With increasing
vehemence.) Ain't I good enough for her?
The Stranger
And she ? Would she have been good enough for you ?
Wright
(Puzzled.) She ! Good enough for me !
christ s expectation of men ii
The Stranger
Taking all your gifts — your love. Giving you noth-
ing in return but the cold embraces of a shameless
woman.
(A silence.)
Wright
You don't understand. The world ain't a story-book
— all Jacks and Jills and love in a cottage. The girl's
got to live.
The Stranger
Ay ! To live ! It is a fine thing to live ! (He turns
again smiling to little Old Joey.) You shall give her Life !
Wright
(Staring.) Give her Life ?
The Stranger
The lad she loves. (Old Joey darts a glance at Chris-
topher, where he sits all unconscious.) She shall cleave
to him, cherish him. She shall be the mother of children
— children who shall crown her brows with honour !
Love ! Labour ! That is Life to a woman. You shall
give her Life !
(Again a silence.)
Wright
(Peevishly) All jolly fine. What about me? Where
do I come in ?
12 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
Man, you love her ?
Wright
Yes, I know I do.
The Stranger
Then it is all quite simple. There is nothing else to
think of but what is best — for her.
Wright
Yes, there is. There's me. Ain't I got any rights?
The Stranger
Ah, yes. The right to serve.
Wright
Here, you're making a mistake. You're talking to
me as if I were some high and mighty Knight Errant
sort of a chap. It's silly of you. I ain't even a gentle-
man. I'm only a common little old man. Why, I was
a book-maker — that's all I was. You know, a betting
man — a bit shady at that. Daresay it's all right
what you say. Only (he taps his breast; his voice has
risen to a plaintive whine; Self-pity has given to it pathos)
— I ain't got it in me.
The Stranger
Are you sure it is I who am making the mistake ?
christ's expectation of men 1 3
Wright
{He makes a gesture of the hands, and, shaking his head,
creeps to the easy-chair. Sits crouching with his hands
stretched out to the fire.)
The Stranger
You are so sure, (smiling) *'Sir Joseph!''
Wright
{He turns.) How did you know that used to be my
nickname ?
The Stranger
You were a public character. Wherever you went,
men spoke of you — of your fine lordly ways, of your
wondrous kindness. Women also.
Wright
Flinging your money about a bit when you've got
plenty of it, that ain't the same as giving up the woman
you love.
The Stranger
Forgetting Self — forgetting all things but the loving
of her, and the serving of her ! Ah yes, he would be a
great gentleman who could do that. You — you do not
feel yourself quite equal to it ?
14 the gospel of good will
Wright
{He turns a poor, troubled face towards The Stranger.)
Why mightn't she come to love me — in time? I
would be good to her — and kind — and — {The quiet
eyes are fixed on him. The foolish words die away)
The Stranger
I think you could win her love more readily. So
that she would think of you till the end always with
deep wonder — teach your name to her children that
they, too, might learn to love and honour it.
As the result of this conversation Wright gives up
the girl, and helps on her marriage with his young rival.
The third and last of these transforming interviews
that I will cite is with Jape Samuels, a tricky Jew who
is trying to sell the stock of a non-existent silver mine.
Samuels
Don't want to make your fortune, do you ?
The Stranger
Do not all men ?
Samuels
Got thomething here thath going to make mine. I'm
going to be a millionnaire. Got a thilver mine here —
{he strikes the papers with his hands) — worth — I'm
CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 15
that exthited about it, I go about telling everybody I
meet. {Laughs.) Of courth they don't believe me.
The Stranger
Why should they not ?
Samuels
Well, it ain't thenth, ith it? If a fellow hath got hold
of a good thing, he keepth it to himthelf — doethn't
want to let a lot of other people into it.
The Stranger
It depends upon the ''fellow." There are generous
fellows who like to share their fortune with their friends.
Samuels
{He looks at The Stranger; grows holder) Jutht
exthactly what I thay. Why not share with your
palth ? Ethpethally when — ath in thith cath —
thereth enough for all. {All the time he is eying The
Stranger, advancing from point to point.) Would you
like a thmall parthel? {He opens his papers, pushes
them across the table, towards The Stranger.) You^d
do good with the money. I can thee that. For a mere
couple of hundred — Here, don't lithen to me. Look
at the figurth for yourthelf. They'll thow you. {He
seats himself the other side of the table.)
l6 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
(With a gentle movement he pushes them hack across the
table.) You are — is it not so ? — a Jew ?
Samuels
{He starts hack as though struck. With snarling anger)
Veil, what if I am? You can't help what you wath
born. Ath a matter of fact, I ain't a Jew — not now.
And if I wath, what differenth would that make ?
The Stranger
Your word would be sufficient.
(Samuels stares.)
The Stranger
The word of a Jew.
(A silence.)
Samuels
What makth you thay that?
The Stranger
So many of the noblest men I have known, men I
have loved, {a faraway thought is in his eyes) have been
Jews. It is a great race — a race rich in honourable
names.
Samuels
{He is hard at work thinking) Yet to hear the way
they talk and thneer, you'd think there wath thome-
thing dithgrathful in even having been bom a Jew.
christ's expectation of men 1 7
The Stranger
The Jew shall teach them their mistake.
Samuels
{He glances up — fidgets in his chair.) Of courthe, I
don't thay that thome among uth mayn't be a bit tricky.
The Stranger
There are to be found everywhere those who are not
ashamed to bring dishonour on their people.
Samuels
{He rises) Jutht exthactly what I thay. Thereth
good and bad everywhere. We're no worthe than
anybody elthe. We can hold our own — I don't thay
ath we can't. If it'th a game of who'th going to betht
whom — very well, we're in it. If a thentleman cometh
to uth, treath uth ath a thentleman —
The Stranger
He will find that the Jew can also be a gentleman.
{A moment — he touches lightly the papers.) You were
going to be so kind —
Samuels
{He stares at The Stranger, then at his wonderful
papers, then again at The Stranger.) Yeth, I did —
What do you think about it — yourthelf ?
l8 the gospel of good will
The Stranger
That your offer is most generous — that I accept it,
with all thanks.
Samuels
(He is still staring at The Stranger.) Don't you
think — you'll forgive my thaying it, but you don't
thrike me exthactly ath a bu thine th man — don't you
think it would be better to leave it over for a day or
two ? — conthult a friend ?
The Stranger
What friend better than yourself ?
Samuels
(Slowly he draws hack the papers) Got mythelf
to think of. Wath forgetting that. You thee, if you
wath to take my word and anything by any chanthe
wath to go wrong, I thould feel — {Laughs, then gravely)
well, I thould feel ath though I'd been thelling the
whole Jewith rathe for a couple of hundred pound th or
tho. 'Tain't worth it. {He moves toward the door —
turns.) Thorry. Thomething elthe, perhapth — thome
other time.
In these conversations we see souls in the very process
of salvation : putting off the vulgarity and vanity and
trickery they had mistaken for themselves, and putting
Christ's expectation of men 19
on their better selves, which The Stranger discovers
and reveals to them. As Mr. Samuels says to The
Stranger in the Epilogue, ''You have always taken it
for granted, sir, in all our conversations, that 1 was a
fine fellow, in sympathy with fine ideals. But that is
not what surprises me : it is to find — that you are
right." In the same way Wright, the old gambler,
finds his real self in ordering portraits of both himself
and his landlady, at much more than the artist's price,
of the artist lover of the young woman whom he him-
self gives up : thus helping the lovers to get married.
That, not the smutty, flashy gambler, proves to be the
real man.
So Larkcom with his new motto, "Fun without Vul-
garity," taking pleasure in giving pleasure irrespective
of what is in the house, proves to be the true Harry
Larkcom : instead of little Harry of the money-box.
The method of The Stranger in the play was a
favorite method of Jesus. In the unstable Peter he
discovers and proclaims the rock on which to build his
church. In Zacchaeus, the hated publican, he discovers
and reveals the scrupulously just son of Abraham. In
the surprised woman of Samaria he discovers and re-
veals a herald of the Messiah, a disciple of the religion
of the Spirit.
20 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
This is the method to-day of those who are dealing at
close quarters with sin and sinners.
In his "Beside the Bowery" Dr. John Hopkins Deni-
son gives a striking instance of it in Mrs. Eliza Rock-
well, ''The Lady of Good Cheer," as he calls her. She
had come to call on the long-suffering, much-abused
daughters of a brutal, drunken father; who not only
abused them himself but in his crazed drunken condi-
tion had threatened to bring home a crowd of his drunken
companions to carouse all night, leaving the girls at
the mercy of a roomful of intoxicated men.
The Lady of Good Cheer had brought some food for
the girls, including a birthday cake in honour of the
birthday of one of the girls.
''They were in the midst of a jolly Little birthday
party, when they heard a heavy stumbling step on the
stair. "He's coming!" cried the girls. For the Lady
of Good Cheer the situation was a dangerous one. No
one had come to her aid. To face alone a man who was
so mad with drink that he had tried to kill his own
children is hardly a pleasant task, and this man was a
desperate character, who in his present mood would
not hesitate a moment to strike a woman or knock her
down. Yet retreat never entered her mind. If her
heart beat more rapidly as she waited to see what sort
Christ's expectation of men 21
of a creature it was with which she had to deal, no one
could have detected it.
In a moment the door was thrown violently open,
and a huge man entered with the lurching, swinging
stride of a sailor. He had been fighting, his coat was
torn, a heavy blow on the cheek bone had caused a
swelling that made his eyes seem narrower and more
pighke than ever, and his drooping, sandy moustache
had a stain of blood upon it. He was from the North
of Ireland, and his origin was evident in his speech,
thickened though it was by drink.
''Gi' me s' money, Jessie," he shouted, ^'gotter have
s' money!"
"I haven't got none," said Jessie sullenly.
''Yes, ye have, too! don't give me no back talk! I
know yer tricks!" and he advanced upon her with
doubled fist.
The Lady of Good Cheer rose and stepped forward
with a swift movement that brought her between the
enraged man and his daughter.
''Good evening, Mr. Sanderson," she said.
He had been so absorbed in his quest for the money
that he had paid no attention to her. Now he turned
upon her with surprise and wrath. The veins on his
forehead thickened. With that sullen scowl on his
22 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
face he was as ugly a beast as ever assumed a human
shape, and many a strong man would have thought
twice before pursuing the conversation.
''What're ye doin' here?" he shouted. ''Teachin'
my girls to disobey their father. I'll teach you to
butt in."
He gave a quick lurch toward her. His movements
had the uncertain and violent suddenness of a man mad-
dened by alcohol. In another moment he would have
struck her down, as he had just knocked down two men
who barred his way in the saloon. She faced him, tall
and slender, with head erect. Her aquiline nostrils
quivered a little, and her firm lips tightened slightly,
but from beneath her high brow her deep, steady eyes,
unflinching and calm, looked him full in the face.
''Mr. Sanderson," she said quietly, ''I know you are
a gentleman, and that you would never do anything dis-
courteous to a lady."
With those eyes upon him, the drunken brute faltered.
His hands sunk to his side. A foolish smile, half of
embarrassment, half of conceit, came over his face.
''A gentleman? Yes, sure I'm a gentleman!" he said.
He gave his shoulders a sudden hunch, as if his coat were
too tight for them, and expanded his chest in imitation
of the person of quality he was supposed to resemble.
Christ's expectation of men 23
Then he let out a cracked and maudlin laugh, that
sounded like the crow of a hoarse rooster.
The girls looked on, amazed that he had not struck
down their visitor. He could hardly account for it
himself. When he rushed at any one with his huge
fist poised, he was accustomed to see either fear or rage
in his victim's eyes, and then it was easy to strike. But
in these eyes there was no trace of fear nor rage, nor yet
that more maddening expression of disgust and contempt.
They were challenging him on a point of honour, as if
they refused to accept him at his face value. They
seemed to question and probe, but not to laugh at him.
There was almost a reverence in them. He felt that
she had found in him something that deserved respect,
and it pleased him. He paid little attention to her
words, but the sympathy in her voice arrested him.
She was not fault-finding, as other women were. Vague
images out of the past rose before his bleared eyes:
the image of a white-haired woman by the fireside,
whose hands were stretched out to bless him, the vision
of a fair-faced bride who long ago had trusted him and
believed him true. The Lady of Good Cheer talked
on of his home, and of little Nellie, and of her disappoint-
ment that her birthday had been forgotten.
^'Poor little Nellie!" said Sanderson, maudlin tears
24 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
coming into his eyes. ''Shure, 'tis a shame ! It's a bad
day she's had for sure ! Never mind, dearie, your dad'll
give you a fine present some day! But I'm too poor
now. I'm out o' work. What can a man do ? Dear !
Dear ! it's terrible !" and he gave a long sigh.
**You see we have a birthday cake, anyway," said
the Lady of Good Cheer. "Isn't that nice? Sit down
and join the party."
''No," said Sanderson, "I must go." A sudden
fierceness came into his face, and he turned to Jessie.
"Now give me that money! I've got to have it! I
won't stand no foolin' !"
He lifted his huge fist again. For the moment he was
out of the range of the glance by which the Lady of
Good Cheer had held him.
"Mr. Sanderson!" she called.
Her voice, though quiet, was so firm and authorita-
tive that Sanderson turned, expecting a tirade and pre-
paring to face it with a burst of rage. But instead of
a scolding he met a glance of grateful confidence that
seemed to thank him for his quick understanding and
prompt response. She seemed so sure that no further
word could be necessary, that he gave a gasp of aston-
ishment. Before he could speak she was inquiring in a
tone of great sympathy how he had come to lose his
25
position as pressman, and to meet with such hard luck.
There is nothing a drunken man loves more than to
dilate on his misfortunes, and Sanderson, wilKng to be
beguiled, sank down on the sofa.
He sprawled with his huge length over the sofa, and
she began to speak seriously and sympathetically of the
Hfe he had been living. She told him plainly what
she thought of his behaviour, and he sat quietly and
listened, although he would have knocked a man down
for saying half as much. For he felt that, though she
rebuked him, it was because she had found something
in him she respected and trusted, and he recognized
that she had a right to speak as she did. It was the
same right which he had acknowledged in those who
years ago had beKeved in him — the claim which faith
and love always have over a man's Hfe. The battle
was won long before help came, and the girls were safe
that night from terrors worse than death. On her way
uptown the Lady of Good Cheer ended her account of
the evening by saying: ''I don't care what you say!
I Hke Mr. Sanderson. There's something that's really
worth while at the bottom of that man."
Rev. Frank H. Decker of Church House, Providence,
is past master of the same method of the Master. He
26 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
had sent a new applicant for hospitality out with a
trusty resident of Church House to bring a bundle of
clothing which a friend had offered to give to the House.
On the way back with the clothing the new man said
to his trusty companion, ''Let's pawn these clothes,
and clear out.'* The trusty reported the remark to
Mr. Decker, and Mr. Decker sent for him and said:
"I hear that you proposed to pawn the clothing you
were sent to bring, and clear out." "No," said the
man, ''I didn't say, 'Let's pawn them.' I said 'Some
fellows if they had these clothes would pawn them.' "
To which Mr. Decker, intent on finding the best rather
than the worst in the man, replied, "There is something
splendid about that lie of yours. It shows that you
care for my good opinion. Now I will show you how to
get it." How many of us would have had enough of
the Christ Spirit to see the good concealed behind the
lie ; instead of merely the evil on the surface of the pro-
posal to steal?
Another applicant for Church House hospitaUty was
sent to carry home some chairs that had been reseated
at the House. At the end of the first block he put down
the chairs on the sidewalk and said to the trusty com-
panion, "I ain't going to lug these chairs. Why should
I?" and went off. Later at meal- time he reappeared.
27
Mr. Decker in calling his attention to the affair, instead
of blaming the man apologized to him for his own con-
duct, saying, "I began too far along with you. I as-
sumed that you could appreciate kindness. I see you
can't. Perhaps people never have been kind to you.
Now make yourself at home here in Church House, and
let us show you what kindness is."
That man became one of the most devoted members of
the House; willing to do the roughest, most disagree-
able work, of which there is a great deal, to help the
House and its head.
With these scenes from the play, and these modern
instances of the application of this Christ method of
appealing to the good man within the bad man, we
may now see how the principle applies to preaching.
Preaching is the art of keeping constant and urgent
before men Christ's expectation that in every relation
of life they are to do and be what absolute Good Will
requires. As examples of this Christian expectation I
have taken for this first lecture benevolence, tem-
perance, and preparedness for peace and war.
First; benevolence. The man who looks out for
himself and his family and friends exclusively, so far
as real seriousness goes, giving to causes and appeals
such loose change or small checks as will silence impor-
28 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
tunity and maintain respectability, can hardly be called
in this matter a Christian. He is doing what it is per-
fectly easy and natural to do. There is nothing large
and generous about him ; nothing supernatural ; nothing
specially Christlike. Even if now and then in response
to stirring appeals, or devices that subject his contribu-
tions to the limelight of publicity, he gives large sums ;
large even in proportion to his income; he does not
thereby become much enlarged ; he does not rise to the
stature or fulfil the expectation of Christ.
Christ and the Christian preacher expect every
disciple to devote all he has to the service of Good Will.
He expects him to put every dollar where, all things
considered, in view of his talents, responsibilities, con-
nections, and place and function in the social system,
it will do the most good. He expects him to give all to
God and his fellows; reserving for himself only what
God and right-minded men see that he needs for maxi-
mum efficiency in his specific station. Christ expects
his disciple to care for every person in need ; every cause
that is effectively promoting human welfare. To those
which come closest to his connections and interests he
expects him to give up to the point where giving more
would do more harm to himself and his family than it
would do good to the person or cause to which it was given.
CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 29
Christ, however, is reasonable : and the Christian
preacher ordinarily will not expect his people to deprive
themselves of the means of efficiency in their station
and work, to give to others. That would be the folly
of selling our oil instead of lighting our lamps. We owe
ourselves and our famiHes a care for the conditions of
health, happiness, and efficiency which we owe no one
else; and we ought to be as generous with ourselves
and our famiHes as we would wish and expect another
to be in our place. That reasonable provision the rea-
sonable Christ not only allows but expects his disciples
in all ordinary circumstances to make. To do so is not
selfishness: it is perfectly consistent with entire Good
Will ; for it is what we would wish and advise another
servant of Good Will to do were he in our place.
Yet even with this explanation and limitation Christ's
expectation is stupendous. Even if Good Will gives
back to us all that we need ; it is a hard thing to give
it all in the first place. To give to the church, and
charity and reform, and education and missions ; to
individuals and families in distress ; to cities in devasta-
tion, and countries under oppression, seems impossible
to the natural man. He says '^I can't look out for all
their interests. I can't hold all human and social needs
as objects of my will ; I am not big enough, nor wise
3© THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
enough, nor generous enough. Christ says, "You can;
you are big enough : I will stretch your will, expand
your heart, so that every good claim will appeal to you
as something to which you will go out in generous re-
sponse : giving gladly when you can do so without sacri-
ficing a more intimate and urgent claim : withholding
regretfully when giving in this direction would cause
more disastrous sacrifice elsewhere."
Christ expects that universal and at the same time
reasonable benevolence of every disciple. That is his
measure of the capacity of every human heart : he
will not own as his disciple any man who is less benevo-
lent. There are two premises in the benevolent appeal
as in every syllogism : a major and a minor. The major
premise of the Christian man is, "I desire all good : my
entire resources are at the service of universal Good
Will." The minor premise of a successful appeal must
be, "This particular cause represents more good than
any other cause to which I could devote this gift."
The Christian man, the man who comes up to Christ's
expectation, has assented to the major premise once for
all. You don't have to argue that with him in each
new case. The minor premise is always an open ques-
tion on which in each case he must be specifically con-
vinced. The man who is not a Christian, the man whom
31
Christ has not expanded and transformed, lacks the first
premise ; so that even if you convince him of the second,
you are not by any means sure that his gift will follow.
It is a question of chance, emotion, publicity, vanity,
whether he will say 'Yes' or 'No.' With the Christian
you have merely to establish the minor premise; and
the gift is sure to follow if the man is a real follower
of Christ. All you have to do is to show him where the
most good lies : to the most good in general he is already
committed by his acceptance of Good Will as his prin-
ciple of action in response to Christ's high expectation.
In the name of Christ then the preacher says to his
congregation from the pulpit, and to individuals in
personal appeals: ''You are big and generous enough
to devote all you have to the greatest good to which it
can be put. I count on you for that : you wouldn't be
Christians if you were any smaller or less generous.
I present this specific cause : I can't judge for you how
it compares with other claims; how much you ought
to give. I trust you to do that justly; and whether
you give much or little, anything or nothing, I shall
feel sure that Christ is well pleased with you, and you
are well pleased with what you have done.
The preacher who comes to his congregation with
this great Christhke expectation will get more money
32 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
than one who flatters, and wheedles, and brings pressure
of unwelcome publicity, or resorts to secular devices:
and he will be developing benevolence as one specific
feature of the Gospel of Good Will.
Temperance may be preached on either of three planes.
By temperance I mean self-control of all appetites and
passions. You may try to scare men into it by showing
pictures of the drunkard's stomach ; and giving detailed
descriptions of venereal disease. That is the appeal to
prudence ; to caution ; I had almost said, to cowardice.
The man who is temperate on such grounds will be a
more comfortable man physically than the man who
recklessly gratifies his appetites and passions. But
spiritually he is not much bigger than the man of in-
temperate indulgence. Indeed from some points of
view he looks smaller ; and the contempt in which the
ascetic is held by the crowd of jolly good fellows with
whom he refuses to run to the same excess of riot is not
without its measure of justification. From the merely
physical point of view appetite and passion in process
of gratification is a bigger, stronger thing than appetite
and passion repressed. All who have to do with young
men know that this anchor alone does not hold. We
throw it out with the rest for what it is worth . We doubt-
less restrain a few weaklings by it. But this is not the
Christ's expectation of men 33
main reliance of a wise teacher and preacher. It is not
the method of Christ.
A second approach is Httle better. We may point
to the disgrace which follows unlawful indulgence. We
may appeal to a man's desire to be respectable in the
eyes of respectable men and women. This is the mod-
ern equivalent of what St. Paul called ''the law"; the
judgment of society. Yet a man may restrain appetite
and passion for these reasons, and still be a very small
soul. He too is a coward ; afraid of the speech of people
rather than of the penalties of nature.
Jesus never condescended to that plane : and though
we cast out this anchor after the other, for real holding
power, if we are wise, we rely on something far stronger
and higher. We appeal to a bigger and better man
than the man who always asks, "What will people say
about me and do to me, if I am as indulgent in these
matters as I would be if I dared ? ' ' Whether in ourselves
or in others we don't much respect that attitude ; and
we can't hope to inspire much respect for it in our
parishioners.
The Christian call for temperance is an appeal to
consider the consequences of drunkenness and licentious-
ness to the wives and daughters of the poor. We do
not wish the home life of the drunkard's wife and chil-
34 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
dren, for women and children dear to us. But we are
large enough to care for the home life of all men, women,
and children ; and Christian temperance is such control
as through influence and example shall tend to dis-
courage the blasting of homes by drink; and make
happy and decent homes for all. To that bigger, better
self that wills the good of all whom our conduct even
remotely affects, the preacher of Christian temperance
will appeal.
The same is true of sex. I often ask a College class
how many of them would wish for their mothers and
sisters the life of the prostitute? The very thought of
such a thing is horrible. How many wish it for the
sisters and daughters of somebody else? The man
who wishes something for his mother, sister, wife, daugh-
ter, which he does not, to the extent of his direct and
indirect influence, wish for other men's mothers, sisters,
wives, and daughters is not a very large and noble sort
of man. *'You are not so small and mean as that," the
preacher says. ''You are chivalrous enough by prac-
tice, precept and example to seek for all women their
dignity, their happiness, their life; even though these
women are too unfortunate, or too silly, or too perverse
to cherish these things for themselves. Expect chivalry
of men : expect a Good Will as generous and chivalrous
Christ's expectation of men 35
toward woman as is the Will of Christ; and men like
Wright and Harry Larkcom in the play, men strongly
tempted to licentiousness, will respond to the call to
be in this respect their better selves.
For self-control on that generous, chivalrous Chris-
tian ground is something all men in their inmost hearts
respect and admire. Prudential self-control, whether
of the physical or social type, the libertine with some
show of reason may affect to despise. But even he
knows and feels that the man who refuses for his own
passing pleasure to wreck homes, ruin girls, and doom
to misery and shame a whole class of wretched women :
— even the libertine knows that this man of chivalrous
self-control is a bigger, stronger, braver, better man than
himself. Invite even him to be that man of chivalrous
self-control, and to his great surprise, perhaps, he will
admit in theory that you are right : and if the contact
between you and him is intimate enough and constant
enough : if you can get and keep Christ and this Chris-
tian chivalry in close enough touch with his heart, his
changed conviction will bear fruit in a changed life.
To keep that positive picture of Christ and Christian
chivalry clear before the eyes, warm within the heart,
and compelHng behind the will, as what Christ and you
expect of the men to whom you speak in public sermon
36 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
and in private interview — that is the fine Christlike
art of preaching Christian temperance.
Here in the United States we have more of such tem-
perance than is to be found anywhere else in the world :
so much that when we tell foreigners the truth about
the Christian young people in our schools and colleges,
our Endeavor Societies and Christian Associations, they
hardly can believe us. They have not yet learned to
trust the Christian expectation which takes for granted
chivalry in men and chastity in women when once its
rational and noble basis is made clear. Still even here
in America we have hardly developed more than one or
two per cent of the power latent in this Christian appeal
for a temperance that is rooted and grounded in the great-
ness and nobleness of a Will that seeks the Good of all ;
the injury of none.
Good Will, likewise, rather than the letter of any
ancient precept, must solve in each specific case the
question of peace or war. Christ does not expect of
his followers either peace or war, as such. He ex-
pects Good Will toward all. When that Good Will
comes to be the spirit of all men and nations, peace
will follow as surely as daylight follows sunrise. It
is the Christian's privilege and duty to have that Good
Will toward all, to develop it in others, and to the extent
CHRIST'S EXPECTATION OF MEN 37
of his influence make it the policy of his nation, and
through his nation to commend it in the form of in-
ternational agreements, treaties, and courts of arbitra-
tion to all the nations of the earth.
Unfortunately, this Good Will is still far from being
the rule of all individuals and of nations. As long as
some individuals and some nations are animated by
self-will, and are capable of lapsing into positive ill will,
so long it may become at any time the duty of Chris-
tian men and Christian nations, as an expression of their
Good Will toward all, to resist by force the aggressions
of selfish men and selfish nations. Such resistance is
not a violation, but an expression of Good Will. It is
not good for the oppressed to be oppressed, nor for the
oppressor to oppress them; and the Christian man
and the Christian nation is doing a service to both
parties when he uses force to resist any injustice to him-
self, or to his nation, or to nations with which he is
identified by proximity, treaty, or other bonds of obliga-
tion. If it is the duty of a Christian nation to use force,
it becomes also its duty to have a reasonable amount of
force to use. A Christian country cannot live up to its
obligations to itself, to other nations with which it is allied,
and to humanity, unless it maintains a sufficient military
force to enable it to resist aggression and injustice.
38 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Of course the possession of a ready military power is
a temptation to its misuse. The fact that a country
adopts a policy of preparedness to fight increases ten-
fold the obligation to maintain a Christian sentiment
which will refuse to fight so long as the ends of honor
and justice can be secured by other means. The danger
of militarism from preparedness is real. Power of all
kinds involves serious risk. It is easier to be generous
without great wealth than with it; yet the generous
rich man can do much more good than the generous poor
man. It is easier for an emasculated man than for a
man of vigorous virility to control appetite and passion ;
but no one in these days advocates that easy but dis-
credited device for self-control. Precisely on the same
ground, while Good Will may be easier without than
with an army and navy, Good Will that maintains an
army and navy, uses them strictly in the service of
justice, and refrains from the injustice they give power
to do, is a far greater manifestation of Good Will, and
therefore a deeper and higher Christianity.
That such Good Will is not an empty dream of the
cloister, but a growing reality in the minds and hearts of
Christian men the world over, is illustrated by the fol-
lowing statement of Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Forster,
Professor of Education in Munich. I quote a German
CHRIST S EXPECTATION OF MEN 39
all the more willingly in this connection because so many
sentiments of a contrary tenor have come from that
country. In an address to the youth of Germany on
the present war, Dr. Forster says :
" Hate disorganizes, love disciplines. Fill yourselves
with deepest sympathy for all who suffer in war, whose
hearts are crushed, whose bodies are broken, whose
homes are burned. To indulge unbridled antipathies
is not in harmony with that great discipline of soul by
which alone we can win the day. England needs Ger-
many, and Germany needs England. England has
given us invaluable higher points of view for the treat-
ment of labor questions and social work. She has taught
our revolutionary spirits to moderate our party passions.
Let us always remember this, and in that remembrance
grasp again for the future the proffered hand. It is for
that better England we are fighting when we do all we
can to humble and tame thoroughly and for its own good
that lower England that is now in power. The national
principle has had a disastrous destructive effect on
world civihzation. A nation destroys itself, annihilates
the whole sum of civihzation, if these national unities do
not see that a wider phase must follow — the reestabHsh-
ment of true cooperation between the different races. In
the union of races will the universal Christ be born in us."
40 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
An Englishman, John Oman, in his ''The War and
its Issues" teaches the same lesson. "We can have no
part in any gospel of hate, as if at the present time the
Germans were mere fiends in human shape. We may
have to recognise that they have adopted a cause for
which they must suffer, but we should do so in sorrow,
as a judge who must condemn, yet who would be no
judge did he condemn with a light heart or in the heat
of passion. Even more than towards others, we must
exercise the judgment of charity towards the enemy,
recognising that we are sure to hear of the evil and not
the good, and allowing for the possible bias of our own
hearts. And while we know it is vain to say " Peace "
when there is no peace, or set up any other standard
of peace except what will endure, we would not have a
war pursued beyond that necessary point, and would
have no share in inflicting a ruin which was merely
vindictive. We will not imagine that much conquest
and little conciliation can destroy Germany and save
Britain. We should recognise that a peace to be abid-
ing must be established in righteousness and a sense of
mutual benefit and Good Will."
The same basis alike of just peace and righteous war
is set forth by Felix Adler in his "The World Crisis
and its Meaning." "We have dwelt too long upon the
Christ's expectation of men 41
cosmopolitan ideal of the likeness subsisting underneath
the differences that distinguish men from one another.
We must insist as we never yet have done on respect
for the differences themselves, on the right of men and
nations to be unHke ourselves, on our obligation not
only to tolerate but to welcome the differences, recog-
nizing their fruitful interdependence and seeking to
achieve their eventual harmony. This is the new con-
ception of human brotherhood without which war and
the preparations for war will not cease. There must be
created throughout the world, not the belief in an indi-
vidualistic cosmopoHtan brotherhood such as the peace
movement has hitherto advocated, but a deep sense of
the worth of the different types of civilization, and the
need of each to be complemented by the rest.
"Thus national humility, compatible with proper
confidence in a national destiny, is the keynote of inter-
national ethics. Not the pride of any people, in its
poor conceit esteeming itself the torch-bearer or the
model for all the rest ; but the humihty of each people,
the consciousness of defect, is the fundamental condi-
tion of human peace and progress. In the last analysis
there must be a bond of high and pure self-interest to
tie the nations together. That highest and purest
self-interest is interest in the development of each
42 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
nation's own national personality, as conditioned by
and accomplished through its beneficent influence in
multiplying the variety and beauty of the psychic types
among mankind. By patient effort, by a more pene-
trating ethical teaching, and by the wit and wisdom
to create institutions and instrumentalities suitable to
foster the better traits, we may work for, if we shall not
live to see, the time when the angelic song shall be ful-
filled, of peace among men because they shall have
learned to take towards one another the essential inward
attitude of Good Will."
Christ's expectation is neither war on any provoca-
tion, nor peace at any price ; but Good Will, expressed
through peace where peace is justly possible ; expressed
through war where war is inevitable. Rightly and
broadly understood Christ does not forbid participation
in war, or preparedness for war. To quote again John
Oman on this point: "So long as religion means a
greater sense of social responsibility, no man can be
governed by a mere negative ruling from any quarter."
The preacher's duty about preparedness for and
participation in war is not to tell his people precisely
how many officers and men, battleships and sub-
marines, we shall have; nor even when war shall and
shall not be declared. It is to make sure that the spirit
CHRIST S EXPECTATION OF MEN 43
in which we prepare for and declare both war and peace
shall be one of Good Will toward all the nations con-
cerned.
Good Will requires such measure of preparedness
as will defend us against aggression, fulfil our obliga-
tions to our neighbors, maintain our rights in treaties,
and contribute to the justice and peace of the world
an influence commensurate with our numbers, our
wealth, and our intelligence. Less is folly; more is
crime. That the preacher of the Gospel of Good Will
should proclaim; leaving to statesmen the determina-
tion of precisely what is that measure of preparedness.
The Christian attitude toward war is happily expressed
in the epitaph proposed for Rupert Brooke and Roland
Poulter : " They went to war in the cause of peace and
died without hate that love might live."
Perhaps some one will ask "What rewards are given,
here or hereafter, for responding to so high an expecta-
tion, and living so great a life?" It is its own reward :
and to look for extraneous recompense is to miss it
altogether. Unless Christ, and the Christlike Spirit
in our fellow-men, appeal to us as the life we supremely
admire and desire, we can have no part or lot in it.
Christ and his Good Will refuse to take second place
as means to happiness here or heaven hereafter. Who-
44 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ever attempts to put rewards first and Christ and
his expectation second, whether for himself in practice,
or for others in preaching, belittles and beUes the whole
Gospel of Good Will; and so, missing the Christian
life, as a matter of course misses the ^'rewards" he is
so eager to secure. He that loveth rewards more than
Christ is not worthy of him ; and being unworthy of him
is incapable of appropriating the blessings he confers.
Still, while it is impossible to get rewards by seeking
to discount them as something separate from Christ
and his Spirit of Good Will, certain benefits and bless-
ings come with this life as by-products, which the
preacher has a right to couple with his presentation of
the Gospel of Good Will.
Breadth of heart, as John Galsworthy calls it, is the
first and greatest. He who rises to Christ's expecta-
tion becomes thereby one in sympathy and affection
with all whom his Hfe touches, and all whom his sym-
pathy and prayer can reach. He grows great with
something of the greatness of the Father whose Good
Will to all men and all nations he shares and serves.
He becomes one with Christ in an intimate and blessed
fellowship of aim and endeavor, service and sacrifice;
so that he is never alone or companionless : but in what-
ever he undertakes feels the supporting presence, the
45
steadying purpose of the Great Master who comes across
the seas and the centuries to take up his abode in the
heart of every faithful follower.
He enters into a profound and tender communion
with a company of men and women, larger or smaller
according to the scope and range of his life, who share
his purpose, and whose purpose he shares ; so that each
looks upon the other as an incarnation of Christ's Spirit
of Good Will; and each is loved and cherished by the
others on this high and holy plane.
This communion and fellowship of the Spirit of mutual
Good Will toward each other and toward all is so much
deeper, sweeter, stronger, richer than ties of propinquity,
passion, profit or pleasure, that those who have once
found it recognize it as the pearl of great price for the
sake of which all other goods like wealth, honor, leisure,
amusement, so far as they may conflict with it, are
eagerly given in exchange.
II
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL: THE MEANNESS
OF SIN
"The devil takes sweet shapes when he tells lies." John
Masefield, The Widow in the Bye Street, p. 218.
Our text is taken from our most effective modern
preacher of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, its meanness
and cruelty and wantonness. If he dwells chiefly on
sexual sin it is because there the apparent good offered
is most alluring and intense; while the resulting evil
is most cruel and heartbreaking.
This contemporary English poet, both in the rough
experiences of his life, and the coarse frankness of his
language, has shown himself to be like Jesus in at least
one particular — his genuine friendship for publicans
and sinners. Above most modem writers he has the
art to turn sin inside out; and in place of the brave,
gay pleasures for which it is sought, show the unspeak-
able misery and woe it inevitably brings to those who
have to pay its bitter penalty. As Dickens showed
46
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 47
Steerforth the seducer in the light of the grief of the
Peggotty household, John Masefield shows sexual sin
against the background of the betrayed woman's shame ;
or the misled boy's broken-hearted mother.
For a straight lesson to the libertine there is nothing
better than Masefield's lines in "The Everlasting
Mercy."
O young men, pray to be kept whole
From bringing down a weaker soul.
Your minute's joy so meet in doin'
May be the woman's door to ruin ;
The door to wandering up and down,
A painted whore at half a crown.
The bright mind fouled, the beauty gay
All eaten out and fallen away.
By drunken days and weary tramps
From pub to pub by city lamps
Till men despise the game they started,
Till health and beauty are departed.
And in a slum the reeking hag
Mumbles a crust with toothy jag,
Or gets a river's help to end
The life too wrecked for man to mend.
A more elaborate and artistic treatment of the evil
woman is found in "The Widow in the Bye Street."
There the cruelty of leading an irmocent boy astray
is revealed in terms of the humble but happy home the
wanton woman destroyed for the widowed mother.
48 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
The story is about the fall of the boy through the wiles
of the evil woman : but the title is ''The Widow in the
Bye Street" ; and the reader is made to see each move,
not as the mere outward acts of the principal actors;
but as it cuts into the flesh and eats into the heart of
the poor widow-mother. That is where you must look
to discover the real sinfulness of sin. Without this
background of mother love and domestic joy, the folly
of the boy, the sin of the woman, could not be seen as
the cruel and utterly despicable things they are.
The story opens with a picture of this poor widow
in her home struggling to buy bread for the son who was
all her life's delight.
Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son :
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.
She rose from ragged mattress before sun
And stitched all day until her eyes were red,
And had to stitch because her man was dead.
Sometimes she fell asleep, she stitched so hard,
Letting the linen fall upon the floor ;
And hungry cats would steal in from the yard.
And mangy chickens pecked about the door,
Craning their necks so ragged and so sore
To search the room for bread crumbs, or for mouse,
But they got nothing in the widow's house.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 49
Mostly she made her bread by hemming shrouds
For one rich undertaker in the High Street,
Who used to pray that folks might die in crowds
And that their friends might pay to let them lie sweet ;
And when one died the widow in the Bye Street
Stitched night and day to give the worm his dole.
The dead were better dressed than that poor soul.
Her little son was all her life's delight,
For in his little features she could find
A gHmpse of that dead husband out of sight,
Where out of sight is never out of mind.
And so she stitched till she was nearly blind,
Or till the tallow candle end was done,
To get a living for her little son.
Her love for him being such she would not rest,
It was a want which ate her out and in,
Another hunger in her withered breast
Pressing her woman's bones against the skin.
To make him plump she starved her body thin.
And he, he ate the food, and never knew.
He laughed and played as little children do.
When there was little sickness in the place
She took what God would send, and what God sent
Never brought any color to her face
Nor life into her footsteps when she went.
Going, she trembled always withered and bent,
For all went to her son, always the same,
He was first served whatever blessing came.
50 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Sometimes she wandered out to gather sticks,
For it was bitter cold there when it snowed.
And she stole hay out of the farmer's ricks
For bands to wrap her feet in while she sewed,
And when her feet were warm and the grate glowed
She hugged her little son, her heart's desire.
With "Jimmy, ain't it snug beside the fire?"
So years went on till Jimmy was a lad
And went to work as poor lads have to do,
And then the widow's loving heart was glad
To know that all the pains she had gone through,
And all the years of putting on the screw,
Down to the sharpest turn a mortal can,
Had borne their fruit, and made her child a man.
He got a job at working on the line.
Tipping the earth down, trolley after truck,
From daylight till the evening, wet or fine,
With arms all red from wallowing in the muck,
And spitting, as the trolley tipped, for luck.
And singing "Binger" as he swung the pick,
Because the red blood ran in him so quick.
So there was bacon then at night, for supper
In Bye Street there, where he and mother stay ;
And boots they had, not leaky in the upper.
And room rent ready on the settling day ;
And beer for poor old mother, worn and grey.
And fire in frost ; and in the widow's eyes
It seemed the Lord had made earth paradise.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 5 1
And there they sat of evenings after dark
Singing their songs of "Binger," he and she,
Her poor old cackle made the mongrels bark
And ''You sing Binger, mother," carols he;
"By crimes, but that's a good song, that her be :"
And then they slept there in the room they shared,
And all the time fate had his end prepared.
That is the background. For the story thrown on
that background I must refer you to the book itself.
A loose woman,
A copper coin for any man to spend
meets the boy at a country fair, leads him astray
through posing as virtuous and unhappy, and appealing
to his pity and his passion. He spends his money on
trinkets for her :
Joy of her beauty ran in him so hot.
Old trembhng mother by him was forgot.
He loses his job ; is used as a tool to bring another lover
back to his mistress : finally kills the other lover and is
sentenced to be hung. All the sad tale is so told that
the poor pleasures of the strumpet and the boy are seen
and felt in terms of the heartache and anguish of the
mother, "crying herself blind" ; sorry for her own want
and misery, but more sorry for the poor boy's shame
52 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
and delusion. She tells him what true love is ; and tries
to show him that this is counterfeit.
"I know a woman's portion when she loves,
It's hers to give, my darling, not to take ;
It isn't lockets, dear, nor pairs of gloves.
It isn't marriage bells nor wedding cake.
It's up and cook, although the belly ache ;
And bear the child, and up and work again.
And count a sick man's grumble worth the pain.
Will she do this, and fifty times as much?"
J. "No. I don't ask her."
M. "No. I warrant, no.
She's one to get a young fool in her clutch.
And you're a fool to let her trap you so.
She love you ? She ? O Jimmy, let her go ;
I was so happy, dear, before she came.
And now I'm going to the grave in shame.
I bore you, Jimmy, in this very room.
For fifteen years I got you all you had,
You were my little son, made in my womb,
Left all to me, for God had took your dad,
You were a good son, doing all I bade.
Until this strumpet came from God knows where,
And now you lie, and I am in despair."
Before his death the boy wakes up with disgust
At finding a beloved woman light,
And all her precious beauty dirty dust,
A tinsel-varnished gilded over lust.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 53
When the mother comes and takes a room to be near
him in prison he asks her,
"Where did you get the money for the room?
And how are you living, mother ; how'll you live?"
"It's what I'd saved to put me in the tomb,
I'll want no tomb but what the parish give."
"Mother, I Ked to you that time, O forgive,
I brought home half my wages, half I spent,
And you went short that week to pay the rent.
"I went to see'r, I spent my money on her,
And you who bore me paid the cost in pain.
You went without to buy the clothes upon her :
A hat, a locket, and a silver chain.
0 mother dear, if all might be again.
Only from last October, you and me ;
0 mother dear, how different it would be.
"We were so happy in the room together,
Singing at 'Binger-Bopper,' weren't us, just?
And going a-hopping in the summer weather.
And all the hedges covered white with dust.
And blackberries, and that, and traveller's trust.
1 thought her wronged, and true, and sweet, and wise,
The devil takes sweet shapes when he tells lies.
"Mother, my dear, will you forgive your son?"
" God knows I do, Jim, I forgive you, dear ;
You didn't know, and couldn't, what you done.
54 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
God pity all poor people suffering here,
And may his mercy shine upon us clear,
And may we have His Holy Word for mark,
To lead us to His Kingdom through the dark."
Then at the end — the end save for the poor mother's
going crazy after his execution — comes the mother's
great soliloquy and prayer: one of the profoundest
spiritual passages in contemporary literature.
''Red helpless little things will come to birth,
And hear the whistles going down the line,
And grow up strong and go about the earth.
And have much happier times than yours and mine ;
And some day one of them will get a sign.
And talk to folk, and put an end to sin,
And then God's blessed kingdom will begin.
" God dropped a spark down into everyone.
And if we find and fan it to a blaze
It'll spring up and glow, like — like the sun.
And light the wandering out of stony ways.
God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays,
And light of prayer is spreading heart to heart;
It'll light all where now it lights a part.
" And God who gave His mercies takes His mercies,
And God who gives beginning gives the end.
I dread my death ; but it's the end of curses,
A rest for broken things too broke to mend.
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 55
0 Captain Christ, our blessed Lord and Friend,
We are two wandered sinners in the mire,
Burn our dead hearts with love out of Thy fire.
" And when thy death comes, Master, let us bear it
As of Thy will, however hard to go ;
Thy cross is infinite for us to share it,
Thy help is infinite for us to know ;
And when the long tnmipets of the Judgment blow
May our poor souls be glad and meet agen.
And rest in Thee. Say 'Amen,' Jim." ''Amen."
From this widowed mother's prayer one rises with a
solemn sense of the cruel cost of sin ; and pity for the
poor innocent sufferer whose love compels her to pay
for short-lived selfish pleasure in lifelong loving pain;
bearing, as she says, her share of Christ's infinite cross.
Not every preacher can be a literary artist; but we
all can use the artist's work to show that pain of inno-
cent and guilty alike is ever the ugly other side of
the smooth and glossy surface of sin. To do that is to
make men hate it, and lead them to repent.
With the passing of the arbitrary God, laying down
rules and regulations for his own delectation; doing
each particular act as a special favor or disfavor to the
individual immediately concerned, sin in the old sense,
as a highly imprudent defiance of such a God, is pass-
56 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ing too. Indeed, if that be sin, the sinner on such
terms appeals to us as rather admirable and heroic.
There is enough of the old Adam in most red-blooded
males between the ages of fifteen and forty to shake
the fist of defiance in the face of such a God, and leave
his rules and regulations to be observed by such "plas-
ter saints" as regard ''safety first" as the supreme
spiritual grace. The Gospel of Good Will, however,
gives us an altogether different view of sin ; showing it
not as a dash of bravado which evokes our admiration ;
but as a taint of meanness which we pity and condemn.
Bacteria and the animals seek their meat from God
wherever they can find it: and if the body of an ani-
mal, or the body of a man, offers the most attractive
and available food, they take it without scruple or
hesitation; without malice and without remorse.
They seek their own good; and fail to seek the good
of their victims. Yet their action, evil as it is from
the point of view of their victim, is not sin. In its
ethical aspect sin is the choice of a lesser in preference
to a greater good; and the penalty is the loss of that
greater specific good which the preferred lesser good
displaces. In its religious aspect sin is the choice of
some Httle specific good in preference to the greatest
good of all — fellowship in Good Will with the Father,
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 57
with Christ, and with Christian men and women : and
the religious penalty for sin is the loss of that fellow-
ship. To fail at one point in religion is to fail altogether.
Good Will is one and all-inclusive : and deliberately to
fall short of it at one point is to fall short of it altogether.
We cannot take part of it and leave part of it, as a
superficial ethics permits us to do. Like an egg, re-
ligious character and relationship is either wholly good
or wholly bad. It cannot be part good and part bad.
A single cherished sin shuts one completely out of real
fellowship with God, and Christ, and Christian men.
A person, and a relation to a person, can't be split.
We are either wholly for or wholly against Good Will.
That is why religion is infinitely more searching and
exacting than ethics. Customs, laws, public opinion
can be divided, and the man who lives by these may
be part good and part bad : generous and a drunkard,
genial and a libertine, truthful and a brute. Good Will
claims everything or nothing. The various ethical
losses and the one unescapable religious loss will become
clearer as we consider specific sins.
Men fall into intemperance partly through physical
craving for exhilaration ; partly through mental uneasi-
ness and a desire to throw off care and anxiety ; mainly
through an impulse of good fellowship and conxaviality
58 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
— a desire to share physical exhilaration and mental
relaxation in congenial company. All these things are
so far good : they are the premiums intemperance
carries with it. If these things stood alone, and no
losses were charged on the opposite page of the ledger,
intemperance would be not sin but an unmixed good;
and every man who didn't drink and gorge would be a
sinner and a fool.
Over against these little goods gained, however,
stand greater goods lost : — self-control, employment,
reputation, health, livelihood for himself and' his family.
These greater goods displaced measure the folly, the
iniquity, the meanness of the sin of intemperance.
The preacher's problem is to appreciate these little
goods for which the glutton gorges, the drunkard drinks,
and the drug victim takes his ''one more shot";
through such generous and fair appreciation to come into
sympathetic relations with the intemperate man; and
then to make him feel how insignificant they all are in
comparison to the steady nerves, the strong will, the
regular business, the happy family, the comfortable
home he is allowing them to displace. If the intem-
perate man can be made to see that, he will see that
intemperance is not the brave, smart, genial, generous
thing it seems under the bright lights of the club or bar-
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 59
room; but the cowardly, stupid, weak, mean thing
that it is. When he sees that and is thoroughly ashamed
of himself, he is in a mood to believe you when you tell
him that no man who does such a mean and cruel thing
can have part or lot in God's Good Will which is work-
ing in the world to make it kind, happy and whole-
some : no comradeship with Christ who came to make
that Good Will plain and winsome : no fellowship with
the great and goodly company of men and women
who have Good Will as the spirit of their lives. Not
until, on the basis of a hearty appreciation of the Httle
good for the sake of which he drinks or overeats, or
takes drugs, we have made him feel the misery and
meanness of the losses he inflicts on himself and others :
— not until then have we preached the whole of the
sane and searching Gospel of Jesus Christ to that in-
temperate man.
Licentiousness has its roots in passions implanted in
man for good. Nature does not allow any generation
to be more than one remove from their normal inten-
sity. Keen pleasures, physical, aesthetic and social,
are attached as premiums to the fulfilment of their
functions. What wonder that youth seizes eagerly
and recklessly on these offered goods. Unless one enters
sympathetically into the force and worth of all the good
6o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
there is in sensuous pleasure, he will not be in a posi-
tion to preach to young men the fearful losses that are
charged up against the Ubertine. For the penalties
are tremendous. By long, slow, sacrificial struggle,
by fearful social ostracism inflicted on women who are
either the authors or the victims of sexual sin, the race
has built up the pure home; its most beneficent and
beautiful institution. To the extent of his ability
the libertine tears that laboriously reared structure
down, and deprives some unfortunate woman, or a
whole class of such women, of their birthright of love,
loyalty, respect and protection in a pure and happy
home. Whoever for a Httle passing pleasure can ruin
human happiness ; break the hearts of grieving parents ;
doom to desolation and probable disease innocent and
guilty alike, is mean and contemptible. He is un-
doing civilization's most costly and beneficent work.
Reared himself in a pure home ; desiring it for his own
sisters and daughters; he is seeking to make a mean
exception in his own favor to the way he desires other
men to treat them. Such conduct, however strongly
urged to it by forces which Nature has found essential
to the perpetuation of the race, marks a man as
altogether contrary to God's Good Will; incompatible
with the character of Christ; antithetic to that Spirit
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 6 1
of Good Will which binds all pure, brave men and women
together in Christian fellowship.
The preacher has not preached the Gospel to good
purpose unless his community as a whole, and every
individual in it, has been brought to look on licentious-
ness, not indeed without intelligent sympathy for the
mighty forces that drive and drag men and women
into it, but with such a sense of the essential meanness
of any man or woman who condescends to buy per-
sonal pleasure at such a fearful price in social deteriora-
tion and human degradation, as shall make them treat
it, whether in others or in themselves or in their chil-
dren, as a loathsome, cruel, dastardly disgrace.
Gambling is another of the Devil's sweet-shaped lies.
It comes disguised as a form of Good Will. We love
excitement, uncertainty, risk : and a few dimes or dol-
lars add these elements to what would otherwise be a
dull and tame affair. When both parties can afford
to lose, a little bet adds zest to the contest or game.
To refuse seems churlish and timid ; to make the wager
seems generous and brave.
Yet there is a fallacy in this phrase ''can afford to
lose." Either the loss makes a difference or it doesn't.
If it does, it involves an unsocial attitude. If it doesn't,
then it is useless ; and might as well be omitted.
62 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
The tendency and example of gambling even on a
small scale, for social good-fellowship, lends encourage-
ment to gambling on a more serious scale; involving
grievous hardship to the loser, and loss of reliance for
gains on productive industry to both winner and loser.
The man of Good Will, if he thinks his way through to
the consequences and influences that flow from gambling,
will refuse to have anything to do with it. If much is
evil, as all admit, the tendency and influence of even a
little cannot be good.
Speculation in its unadulterated form is gambling,
and begets the gambler's anti-social attitude. The
direction of capital into sound and useful channels of
production is honest and honorable, an expression of
the capitalist's Good Will. But that involves expert
knowledge, which in turn involves keen mental labor.
The shrewd investor is, whether intentionally or not,
a pubHc benefactor. He puts capital at the disposal of
enterprises that effectively serve real needs; and with-
holds capital from those that are doomed to fail. So
long as the present economic order lasts the capitalist
has as important a function as the laborer.
When, however, one merely ''takes a flier"; bets on
the strength of rumor, tip, or guesswork that some-
thing of whose management, resources, prospects, and
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 63
processes he knows next to nothing will go up or down ;
he is contributing nothing. If in the long run he gains
(which is very unUkely), he is getting something out
of society he doesn't deserve and hasn't earned. If
in the long run he loses (as in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred he will), he gets precisely what he deserves.
Worse, however, than the money lost is the loss of
reliance on regular industry; the impatience with slow,
sure earnings; the precarious financial status of his
family ; the irresponsible, unsocial, and ultimately anti-
social attitude toward the world, which the habit of
speculation entails. We cannot rely for strenuous
social service, and costly sacrifice of time and money,
on any man who is intent on getting rich quick by the
rise and fall of securities to the management and study
of which he brings no intimate knowledge. Just in
proportion as the speculative habit grows, will in-
dustry, domestic security, and social service dwindle
and decline.
Laziness is native to us all. Leisure, loafing, is delight-
ful ; and the love of it nature has put into us abundantly
as a means of self-preservation. The good-natured,
care-free loafer appeals to us. As compared to the
fuming, fretting busybody, who is forever on the rack
of exertion, there is a good deal to be said for him ; as
64 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Stevenson has shown in his '^ Apology for Idlers." Yet
on the other side of the account we find poverty; if
the man have no inherited or otherwise gratuitous
wealth; and even if he has, we find the shirking of
services which his fellows and society need. With so
much that needs to be done in the home, the school,
the state, charity, reform, science, art, literature, the
man or woman who retires at night with nothing use-
ful accomplished is a pauper and a parasite : unworthy
to be called a servant and son of Good Will ; unworthy
of the name of Christian ; unworthy of the fellowship
of earnest and arduous Christian men and women.
Not until all the idlers, rich or poor, are heartily
ashamed of themselves, and everybody in the com-
munity looks on the sin of idleness as disgraceful, has
the Gospel been rightly preached.
Frivolity has its roots in a hereditary love of excite-
ment. Our ancestors lived on the perilous edge of
life; were compelled to be alert to protect themselves
against wild beasts and hostile tribes, to find game for
food, and pasture for their flocks and herds. Cards
and dancing, the ''movies" and the theater, the trolley
and the automobile, place artificial excitement and un-
necessary motion within the reach of us all. And
many there be, especially of women, who go in at these
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 65
open doors of opportunity for frivolous dissipation.
There is good in it all. It is better to be excited than
to be depressed; it is better to be on the move than
to sit stil] and mope. But when there is so much suffer-
ing to be relieved; so much knowledge to be acquired
and diffused; so much wrong to be righted; so much
sympathy needed; it is a burning shame that at the
end of the day, the week, the month, the season, any
man or any woman should have to show as good ac-
compKshed only so many luncheons and dinners eaten;
so many cards shuffled; so many miles travelled; so
many plays or pictures seen; so many dances and
parties attended. As incidental diversions; as dessert
after the roast beef of usefulness and the salad of help-
fulness, these amusements have their important place.
It is a great mistake to overlook the good they each and
all contain, or to condemn or prohibit specific amuse-
ments. But to give up to them the whole or any con-
siderable proportion of one's life, is to withdraw from
the ranks of the useful and serviceable ; to fall short of
Good Will; to lose touch with Christ; and to miss
altogether the fellowship in service which binds true
Christians together in the spirit of active Good Will.
The Gospel has not been preached as it should be until
every one within hearing has been made thoroughly and
66 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
heartily ashamed of indulging for themselves or tolerat-
ing for their children a life of meaningless excitement,
with its inevitable cost and counterpart of strength and
steadiness undeveloped, duties undone, services shirked,
and opportunities thrown away.
Unkindness saves a great deal of effort. It is easier
to snap and snarl; to upbraid and find fault; to be
cross and hateful ; than to take the trouble to appreciate
the feelings of others and control speech and conduct
with a view to causing as little pain and as much pleas-
ure as a just consideration of mutual claims permits.
Wherever a sad heart can be made happy or a wrong
will set right, there is an open door into Good Will:
and whoever, from unimaginative laziness and hard-
heartedness refuses to enter it, or turns his back upon
it, shuts himself out from that kindliness which is the
heart of God, the soul of Christ, and the Spirit in which
all true Christians live and love.
Jealousy, envy, fill a little soul full of its own im-
portance. If it could have this premium of being
puffed up, and pay no corresponding penalty, then
these qualities would be virtues; petty virtues to be
sure, but not the pitiful sins they are. The penalty is
inevitable : a soul full of self has no room for eager
interest in other things and generous devotion to other
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 67
persons ; no chance to share the Good Will which ranks
others at least on an equality with ourselves. So long
as we are shut in with our own envy and jealousy, we
are automatically and hermetically excluded from the
Christian fellowship.
Censoriousness, likewise, is a cheap and easy device
for securing the sense of self -exaltation. To call another
man stingy, unless it be in sorrow and with a view to his
reformation, impHes that I am generous by contrast.
To point out with glee the impurity of another gives
me a false sense of the purity of my own contrasted
heart. When I denounce the hypocrite, except in pity
and desire for his conversion, I cannot help drawing,
and hoping others will draw, the inference that I by
contrast am sincere. But to pay for these specious
emotional gains, I lose the sympathy I ought to feel for
others, as well as the modest sense of my own short-
comings. In judging others I condemn myself as guilty
of having a soul just big enough to take in the evil, but
not big enough to take in the good, in other men and
women. Into such a soul the great-hearted Father,
the compassionate Christ, the Spirit of Good Will by
no possibility can come and take up their abode.
Conceit and pride are closely akin to censoriousness.
They swell out one's vanity ; and give the semblance of
68 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
greatness to the soul that harbors them. But the proud
heart is so hollow ; the conceited soul is so empty ; that
it is a fearful price one has to pay for indulging in these
expensive spiritual sedatives. Not to the proud and
conceited ; but to the meek and the poor in spirit is
assured the blessedness of Christian fellowship.
Cowardice is good so far as it saves one's skin ; but
it becomes detestable when it costs the repudiation of
one's convictions ; the failure to stand up for unpopular
reforms; the refusal to risk hfe for country. The
shame that is heaped upon the coward is the measure
of the worth of the interests he allows to go unprotected
and unserved in order to save and protect himself.
Obviously no coward can share Good Will with the Christ
who suffered crucifixion rather than fail to bear witness
to the truth the Father gave him to see and serve.
Treachery is even worse than cowardice ; for cowardice
is merely saving oneself from general risks and dangers.
Treachery is the betrayal of some special cause with
which we are intimately identified ; the benefits and
fellowship of which we have enjoyed ; and for the loyal
support of which we have given some explicit or tacit
pledge. To betray such a cause, or the person who
represents it, as Judas did Jesus for thirty pieces of
silver, is almost the lowest depth of meanness into which
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 69
sin can bring a man. To be sure even here some good
is sought and gained : the thirty silver pieces have
their normal purchasing power even in the hands of the
traitor : but all that they can buy is so insignificant in
comparison with the honor lost by treachery, that their
value in comparison is negUgible ; and treachery stands
out as almost wholly and inexcusably mean. No traitor
can have a place in the Kingdom of which the Father's
Good Will is the rule; Christ's sacrifice the supreme
inspiration ; and the spirit of loyalty and mutual devo-
tion the very breath of life.
The good the traitor seeks ; his office, or position, or
bribe money, however insignificant and contemptible,
is at least substantial. The hypocrite gets nothing but
the favorable opinion of those whom he deceives ; and
even that favorable opinion is given not to what he is,
but to what he pretends to be. The hypocrite parts
company with all reaHty.
Hypocrites are of two kinds : those who pretend to
be better than they are; who were the more common
in New Testament times ; and those who pretend to be
worse than they are; who are the more common,
especially among young people, at the present day.
Whatever the form, the essence of hypocrisy is the same
— an entire absence of genuineness — the posing as
70 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
something one is not. Obviously Good Will, as it lives
in the Father, as it flashes out in Christ's scorn of the
Scribes and Pharisees, as it dwells in the hearts of all
genuine Christian men and women, is infinitely removed
from the posing of the hypocrite. Meanness, smallness,
the selHng of the birthright for a mess of pottage, —
which is the essence of all sin, — can go no farther down
than this ; that one ceases really to be himself and be-
comes merely an impression — false at that — imposed
on the minds of others.
Lying, too, has the double aspect common to all sin.
In its meaner forms it is a device for shirking responsi-
bility, escaping criticism, defrauding customer or credi-
tor, and springs from the innocent instinct of social
self-preservation. In its higher forms, as used by cul-
tivated people, it is a generous desire to be more enter-
taining than a plain statement of the case will warrant ;
to deck out a situation in colors contributed by the
narrator's "happy artistry." Many of the most charm-
ing women in the world, some of the world's most
famous men, especially those of the mihtary and sports-
man types, are half -unconsciously addicted to lying as
the most natural way of making themselves and their
experiences interesting.
On the other hand, lying of all kinds tends to break
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 7 1
down confidence between man and man ; and, by crying
*'wolf" when there is no wolf, to invite disaster when
the real wolf appears. The Har refuses to dwell in the
same world of mutual understanding with his fellows ;
he shuts them out of his little life, and in so doing shuts
himself out of theirs. People learn to distrust him,
and in distrusting him to distrust human nature. Lying
is intellectual highway robbery; and its penalty is
mental soHtary confinement.
Stealing has the same two aspects that are the com-
mon marks of sin. A man wants something which
belongs to another. He wants it very badly. He is
poor, and the man who has it is so rich that he would
never miss it. Or the chance to steal is so general and
indirect that the man from whom he steals will not
even know that anything has been taken from him.
This is the case in the more prevalent forms of stealing
to-day ; the steaHng that is carried on by respectable
citizens and honored church members in every branch
of industry, commerce, and poHtics. I want to support
my family a little better, or give my son a more expen-
sive education, or maintain my daughter in a wealthy
social, circle. I cannot do these things if I confine my-
self to producing goods or rendering services which I
offer to the world at their current market value. But I
72 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
can do these things very easily if I organize a corpora-
tion and take, as unfortunately the laws of certain states
allow me to take, a large block of the stock for com-
paratively worthless property or insignificant services.
I can do these things if, as director of a railroad, I use
my power as the representative of the stockholders and
the trustee of the public to get portions of the road
built by a construction company in which I have an
interest; and then, as a member of the construction
company, sell to the railroad in which I am a director
the constructed road at several thousand dollars a mile
more than its construction cost. I can do these things
for my wife and children if, holding a majority of stock
in a corporation, I sell it to parties who will use the
controlHng interest thus acquired, to make the stock of
the minority stockholders comparatively worthless. I
can do these things if, as owner of a controlling interest,
I use the power it gives me to vote exorbitant salaries
to myself and my friends, or to withhold dividends and
pile up a surplus until the poorer stockholders are com-
pelled to sell for less than it would be worth if the busi-
ness were fairly managed.
I can do these things if I buy things which I am un-
able to pay for ; if I use my political influence and posi-
tion to secure franchises, favors, exemptions, which will
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 73
allow me to make profit out of the public loss. These
and countless similar forms of stealing all have at their
core the innocent and laudable desire to make money,
gain power, secure position for myself, my family, and
my friends. All that is praiseworthy. The presence
of this ambition is an indication of many personal,
domestic, and social virtues. We cannot withhold a
certain admiration and affection from thieves of this
type, whom we meet in business, in society, at the club,
and even at church.
On the other hand, when we realize how ruthlessly
they strip the hard-working man of the savings of a
Hf etime ; how they impoverish the widow and orphan ;
how every honest workingman in the community has to
work harder and live poorer to make up for his share
of the general loss that corresponds to their dishonest
gains, we despise the methods by which these men have
gained their wealth.
Murder is a widely prevalent form of sin to-day.
In saying this, I do not refer to the rapidly increasing
number of cases of violence and bloodshed. Alarming
as that is, it is but an insignificant fraction of the total
murder that goes on in our modern Christian civiliza-
tion. As Professor Ross has pointed out in his ''Sin
and Society/' the modern assassin "wears immaculate
74 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
linen, carries a silk hat and a lighted cigar, sins with a
calm countenance and a serene soul, leagues or months
from the evil he causes. Upon his gentlemanly presence
the eventual blood and tears do not intrude themselves.
This is why good, kindly men let the wheels of com-
merce and of industry redden and redden, rather than
pare or lose their dividends. This is why our railroads
yearly injure one employee in twenty-six, and we look
in vain for that promised ' day of the Lord ' that ' will
make a man more precious than fine gold.' Our iniquity
is wireless, and we know not whose withers are wrung
by it. The purveyor of spurious life-preservers need
not be a Cain. The owner of rotten tenement houses,
whose 'puir enables him to ignore the orders of the
health department, foredooms babies, it is true, but for
all that he is no Herod. The mob lynches the red-
handed slayer, when it ought to keep a gallows Haman-
high for the venal mine-inspector, the seller of infected
milk, the maintainer of a fire- trap theatre."
The murderers we meet in every walk of life to-day,
members of every club or church we join, present in
evening dress at almost every dinner or party, like the
thieves previously considered, are simply the men who
want big dividends with which to maintain their famihes
in luxury, and do not inquire too curiously how many
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 75
human lives they needlessly shorten to increase those
di\'idends, or how many human heads they cut off with
their coupons.
Statistics of a year's accidents to workingmen in
Allegheny County, in which Pittsburg is located, pub-
lished in the Nation of March i8, 1909, show that
526 men were killed in that county by industrial acci-
dents in the twelve months from July i, 1906, to June
30, 1907. In addition 2000 were seriously injured, of
whom 500 were so crippled as to be discharged from
the hospitals permanent wrecks. While the speed and
pressure of the work render a large number of these acci-
dents unavoidable, in a group of cases investigated 35
per cent were attributable to the employers' negligence ;
in other words, the employers preferred to commit that
amount of murder rather than pay the slight cost of
life-saving precautions and devices.
In Bangor, Maine, a family moved into a tenement
which had previously been occupied by a patient sick
with tuberculosis. The landlord neither informed the
incoming tenant of the fact, nor had the house disin-
fected. The child of the family died of tuberculosis in
consequence. When asked why he did not have the
house disinfected, the landlord excused himself on the
ground that he could not afford the ten dollars, more or
76 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
less, which it would cost. Murder for ten dollars is a
depth of depravity to which most bandits would scorn
to condescend.
The rookery landlord and the jerry-builder, the adul-
terator and the maker and vendor of deleterious patent
medicines, the quack doctor and charlatan "healer,"
the purveyor of polluted water and infected milk, the
man who fails to fence dangerous machinery and provide
safety couplers for his cars, the owners of unsanitary
tenements and fire-trap theatres, the men who over-
work children, and employ women on conditions fatal
to either health or character, — these murderers, num-
bered by hundreds, and whose victims are counted by
tens of thousands, are the ones who do the wholesale
human slaughter of to-day. There are a hundred times
as many men guilty of murder through commercial com-
plicity in the United States to-day as there were five
hundred years ago, when the bow and arrow and the
tomahawk were the weapons employed. In so far as
preventable disease and calamity exist in our communi-
ties, we all are sharers in responsibihty for the murders
their permitted continuance entails.
What shall we do about it? What has Good Will to
say ? We must call it by its plain hard name of murder
every chance we get. We must make the men who are
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 77
guilty feel themselves to be the murderers they are.
We must make their practices so odious, that every
decent man will be ashamed to have a hand in them.
The great demand of the hour is ethical insight ; to
point out in precise terms the meanness and cruelty and
misery-producing power of specific sins. If the pro-
moter of dishonest business schemes could see the priva-
tion in country homes, where the hard earnings of years
of toil are swept away by the floods of water with which
he has diluted the stock they purchased in good faith ;
if the licentious man could see the years of agony and
degradation, released at last by squaKd and ignominious
death, which the victims of his passing pleasure must
drag out in consequence of what he and men hke him
have made of them; if the inconsiderate husband, the
merciless employer, the gHb scandalmonger, the corrupt
legislator, the reckless speculator, could be made to see
just what their conduct means in want and woe and
lingering pain and premature death to their innocent
and helpless victims, they would speedily repent and
mend their ways.
Sin in all its forms ; the sinner in all his disguises ; is
foolish, mean, contemptible ; utterly and irreconcilably
opposed to and estranged from Good Will, Christ,
and the Spirit in Christian men. To make that fact so
78 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
plain that the wayfaring man cannot fail to see it, and
feel it, and take it to heart, is the second task of the
preacher : second only to the first task of making men
see and beheve in Christ's great expectation of entire
Good Will. Good Will is the primary fact; for until
that is seen and felt you cannot make men see and feel
by contrast the meanness and disgrace of falling short
of it. The best you can do is to conjure up some fright-
ful image of punishment in the hereafter. That fright-
fulness in God we no longer fear; any more than we
respect it in men who adopt it as a mihtary policy.
God is Hght and in him is no darkness at all. His Will
is altogether, always, and toward everybody good.
Christ revealed that goodness; Christian men and
women reproduce it ; and the really dreadful penalty of
sin, in addition to the specific goods forfeited by it, is
the unworthiness of fellowship with God, with Christ,
and with Christian men which cherished sin entails.
To make that fearful loss, that dreadful penalty felt as
the supreme wretchedness it is ; and so drive men to
escape from it in penitence, confession, and conversion,
is the second task of the preacher. Not the cheap and
discredited terror of problematical vengeful torment in
the hereafter ; but the loss of fellowship with God and
Christ and all who have the Spirit of Good Will — this
FALLING SHORT OF GOOD WILL 79
is the weapon of the true Christian minister against the
ever present hydra-headed monster sin. To wield that
weapon effectively is doubtless much harder than to
brandish the old red battle-axe of an arbitrary danma-
tion ; and requires of the minister more Christlike gifts
of mind and heart. Already we see rising among us a
ministry that shall be able to make men loath, hate and
repent of sin because they see and feel the meanness
and hideousness of it as contrasted with Good Will to
others and to all which Christ and Christian men reveal,
and which it is their supreme privilege to serve and
share.
Ill
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL: REPENTANCE AND
FORGIVENESS
'*I have put myself on trial in the court of conscience and a
verdict has been rendered of ' guilty ' — guilty of having lived
for many years of my life indijfferent to and ignorant of what was
going on behind these walls. I want to see for myself exactly
what your life is like, not as viewed from the outside looking in,
but from the inside looking out. For somehow, deep down, I
have the feeling that after I have really lived among you, marched
in your lines, shared your food, gone to the same cells at night, and
in the morning looked out at the pieces of God's sunlight through
the same iron bars — that then, and not until then, can I feel the
knowledge which will break down the barriers between my soul
and the souls of my brothers." Thomas Mott Osborne. Within
Prison Walls, pp. i6 and i8.
My text is taken from the speech to the inmates of
the New York State Prison at Auburn by the chairman
of the Commission on Prison Reform appointed by the
Governor, who was about to serve a week's imprison-
ment with them. At the conclusion of the speech from
which the text is taken the inmates asked about him
80
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 8 1
the question that was asked about Jesus, "What manner
of man is this?"
Another speech made by Mr. Osborne September 25,
191 5, in reply to the critics of his administration as
Warden of Sing Sing, will serve as our morning lesson.
Whatever we may think about this or that method he
has employed, we can't fail to detect in this speech the
true Christian ring of a costly Good Will for the
prisoners.
"In all earnestness I say to you that Sing Sing could
stand my death, but Sing Sing could not stand my re-
moval. I love my home and children as you do. They
are far away while I am at work down there in Sing
Sing. I'm doing my bit. Can you afford to let me
go home? (Loud shouts of "No.") It's more impor-
tant to you and to the State than to me. I can afford
to go home to those I love and end my days in the spot
I love. But the State cannot afford to let me go —
yet.
"I don't expect to stay there long; I don't expect to
live long. A man can't stand it — can't stand the
responsibility of control over the destinies of so many
of his fellow-men, for I'm Czar of Sing Sing. I feel the
strain and I want to go home. But I won't go home until
I find a man to take my place and to carry on the work
G
82 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
I have tried to start. I am proud of it, but the real
credit belongs to the boys behind the bars, for no one
can save them ; they must save themselves.
"Men who are sent to Sing Sing are no longer trying
to escape the reputation of having been in Sing Sing.
They advertise the fact. A young man the other day
advertised for a job, and in the advertisement said he
had just come from Sing Sing. It's my job to find out
how Sing Sing can be turned from a curse into a bless-
ing, and I pray your help.
"Now, I have been pictured as a sentimentaHst.
That is not true. I am no worshipper of sentiment,
but I am a devotee of common sense. I have no sym-
pathy with crime, nor have I any sympathy with the
criminal. But I have a fellow-feeling. I repeat, I have
no sympathy with the criminal, and no soft-hearted
man has any business dealing with crime or criminals.
"I have, as I see it, just two duties to the State.
One is to keep my charges in Sing Sing, and the other is
to see that they become capable and desirous of leading
useful lives when they get out. Under the old system
no wonder they came out brutes. Now, do you want
these men, who are leaving Sing Sing at the rate of
fifteen hundred a year, to go out vindictive, ready to get
their revenge for the hell they have been through; or
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 83
do you want them to go out feeling that the scale has
been balanced; that they have paid and are square
with the world and not ashamed of having paid ? There
is no choice. A man who feels right with the world is a
better citizen than the man who wants to get even.
Life and property are safer.
"You have all heard a lot about escapes from Sing
Sing. I'll tell you the truth. Since December there
have been three escapes. That's less than there ever
was before in that time. Why, people talk about
escapes from Sing Sing as if it were a new invention.
They have always been escaping from Sing Sing.
"Let me correct another impression. There is no
traffic in 'dope' at Sing Sing. There are plenty of
ways to get it; there always were plenty of ways to
get it in Sing Sing. Why don't they use it. Because
they know it is best not to ; they know that the Mutual
Welfare League will lose its privileges if the members
use drugs. It is no religious or moral motive back of
it ; it is selfishness. But it works. The whole system
of responsibihty works because it is human nature to
rise to responsibility.
"I am asked, Where is the punishment? I reply,
I am not a behever in mere punishment that has no end
in view. BrutaHty never made a better man. Punish-
84 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ment ? When you send a man to prison, when you take
his Hberty away, you have already inflicted the most
terrible punishment you can inflict. It isn't the ma-
terial discomforts that make a prison. I have suffered
more physical discomforts in camp than I have in
Auburn prison. Do they want to get rid of me and
have a return to the old brutality? To keep a man in
a cell and make him take drugs to forget — that is not
only brutahty, that is blasphemy. When you take
away the right of speech, God's most precious gift,
you make a man a brute.
*'But, men and women, here is an experiment of
immense importance to the whole civilized world — it
is a determination of the question. Can democracy deal
with the prison problem ? It is not so much a problem
of having men safe in prison ; it is a problem of keeping
them safe after they get out."
Here we have the stuff Christian forgiveness is made
of — sacrifi.ce of ease, comfort, home, and shortening of
life : no sympathy with crime or the criminal as such :
fellow-feeling for the man who has been a criminal: a
desire and a plan for his restoration to employment and
the Good Will of the Christian community: firm pro-
tection of society with no brutaHty in the treatment of
the wrong-doer: the transformation of the prisoners
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 85
from vindictive foes of society, to its disciplined and
well-disposed servants.
Mr. Osborne has been persecuted and maligned as
Jesus was, and every reformer has been and will be.
But what is reviling, persecution and false accusation,
compared to having a convict say of one, as a convict
in Sing Sing said to Mr. Shuster, as reported in the
Independent for July 19, 191 5.
''I tell you Tom Osborne has the right idea, and he's
carrying it out wonderfully. He is making the State
prison what it ought to be — a place not for the sup-
pression of all that is human in us, but a place for the
making of good citizens to go back to society. Under
the old system, if you weren't a criminal before you
entered Sing Sing, they made one of you before you
went out. Now it's just reversed. If there is any-
thing wrong with you when you come in, they take it
out of you before you leave. And they do it, not by
brute force, but by fair play and common sense."
After making all necessary deduction for this con-
vict's optimism, the mere fact that he expresses himself
in this cordial way shows that he at least, if not every
convict, is responding to Christian treatment with
genuine appreciation and heart-felt gratitude.
To condemn sin is easy. It comes natural to the
86 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
censoriousness of our hard unregenerate hearts. To
condemn sin with a sympathetic appreciation of the
genuine goods for the sake of which men are drawn into
it, is less easy and more rare. Yet, as we have seen,
this is what every preacher who would be a power for
good in a community must do. A still harder task,
however, awaits preacher and layman alike. Having
condemned the sin ; we must invite the sinner to repent-
ance with full assurance of the forgiveness of his sins by
God, by Christ, and by ourselves and our fellows, so far
as we are sharers with Christ in the Father's Good Will.
Repentance begins in a man as soon as he sees, feels
and confesses how large the goods lost are in compari-
son to the little goods his sin has gained. The prodigal
son thinks first of the food in the father's house ; later
of the father and his forgiveness. Yet repentance is
not complete and permanent until the penitent has some
sense of Good Will toward him, either in his fellow-man,
or Christ, or the Father, and some assurance of being
taken back into a fellowship in which he is looked on
not with condemnation for the sin he has committed,
but with favor in view of his repudiation of it. It is
only as it is thrown onto the background of Good Will
that sin is felt as not merely the loss of this or that
specific good and therefore folly ; but as the failure to
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 87
come up to the best in personal worth and relationship,
and therefore needing repentance. Repentance and
ofifered forgiveness must go hand in hand. A man can
be sorry he is in a scrape, and wish he were well out of
it : a man can confess that he is a fool and lament the
greater goods he has lost : but he can't repent until he
beheves and feels Good Will welcoming him, mean and
contemptible as he has been, into its noble fellowship
and service.
Christianity is the good news that no sin is too heinous
to be forgiven provided the one who has committed it
repents. For proof it points first to Christ praying for
his murderers, "Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they do." He appealed to his Father's Good
Will, knowing that it could not wdthhold forgiveness
from any penitent. He exemplified it in his own atti-
tude. "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the
prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her : how
often would I have gathered thy children together, even
as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and
ye would not!" What is more to the point, Christ
expects his followers to be so filled with the Spirit of
Good Will that until seventy times seven they will for-
give repented sin and restore to favor and friendly
intercourse the repentant siimer.
88 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Hence our willingness to forgive serves a double pur-
pose. It is the proof of God's forgiveness of our short-
comings : for Good Will in God cannot be less and lower
than Good Will in ourselves. It is at the same time
the best evidence of our fellowship with the Father
and with Christ: for forgiveness is the hardest task
Good Will has to face; and if we are equal to
that until seventy times seven : if, in other words,
willingness to forgive unto the uttermost is our per-
manent attitude, then we share Good Will in its most
vital and exacting expression. It thus becomes the
preacher's privilege to assure every man who has done
wrong of complete forgiveness; by the Father and
Christ as the witness of the Father : and also by all
true Christians who share the Father's Good Will and
have the Christhke Spirit. A man who would not for-
give the worst wrong, even if done directly against
himself, or against those dear to him, when satisfied
that the wrong-doer was truly penitent, would be out
of Good Will; no son of the Father; no brother of
Christ; no sharer of the Christian Spirit. A Christ
who did not so forgive would be no savior of the world ;
no witness to Good Will. A God who would not forgive
at the first sign of genuine penitence would be no God
of Good Will, but a Devil; meriting not the worship
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 89
and praise but the scorn and contempt of Christlike
men. Forgiveness of the repentant wrong-doer is so
essential an attribute of God, so fundamental a quality
of the Christlike Spirit, that God could not be God;
Christ could not be Christ ; the Christian could not be
a Christian \vithout it.
Are we Christians then? Can we rise to this high
calling ? In my brief pastorate I found that the hardest
task I had to undertake was not to convert sinners,
which is comparatively easy if you are dealing with the
grosser t>^es of sin, but to induce the Christian people
of the Church to welcome into vital fellowship and
cordial social recognition the reformed drunkard and
the repentant woman who had gone astray. Unless
the preacher succeeds in developing the forgiving spirit
in his people: not the forgiving spirit in general in
church on Sunday; but the forgiving spirit toward in-
dividual offenders who have directly or indirectly
injured individuals; the Christian Church is only a
heathen body in a Christian dress; and preaching is
only a parrot-like repetition of platitudes. The vital
Christian preacher toward each repented sin, then, has
a double task : to assure the offender that God forgives
him and to bring himself and his fellow-Christians into
the forgiving spirit toward him.
90 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
The preaching of Christianity, then, with reference
to drunkenness and the drunkard, should be that any
man who has been guilty of this sin; and who has
come to see and feel how contrary it is to Good
Will ; who is sincerely sorry for the cruel wrong it has
done; and who puts it from him in sorrow and loath-
ing; is as welcome a child of the Father as the tem-
perate man who never went astray; is a brother of
Jesus Christ; and entitled to as kindly and courteous
a reception by Christian people as the holiest saint.
Can you then greet with cordial Christian friendliness
the man who has led your son into dissipation and dis-
grace? Suffering as you do the sorrow and shame his
sin has brought to you and those dear to you, can you
still forgive him when he repents? If you can, God's
Good Will is in you; Christ is with you; of such as
you are the Kingdom of Heaven. If you can't you have
yet to learn the first rudiments of Christian living.
Can you forgive the man who has led your sister or
daughter astray; filling her Hfe with bitterness and
shame, and your heart and home with sorrow and
humiliation? Can you restore to your friendship a
man or woman who has bought their selfish sensual
pleasure at such a tremendous cost of pain and misery
to you and yours, on evidence that he too shares the
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 9 1
pain and misery he has caused, and loathes himself for
having done it ? If you can, you are in Good Will. If
you couldn't or wouldn't, you are not a Christian, not
in Good Will toward that repentant offender; but a
heathen breathing out evil against one who, however
evil he has been, is now repentant of evil and seeking
good : and therefore is in his actual present attitude
and intent a nobler man, a purer woman, than you
with your hard and unforgiving heart toward him on
account of his repented past.
Toward the lazy, shiftless, inefficient, incompetent
employee ; who is sorry for the waste and loss and in-
jury his incompetence has caused ; can you be apprecia-
tive, friendly, cordial, kindly? I don't ask, Can you
take him back and retain him in your employ? Some-
times that is right, and sometimes it is not. Forgive-
ness does not always involve restoration to previous
status. A railroad superintendent cannot rightly take
back a careless switchman, however penitent; for he
owes more to the thousands of passengers than to the
single switchman. A theological seminary president
carmot rightly retain a listless professor, however sorry
he may be for his shortcomings ; for it owes more to its
hundreds of students, and the tens of thousands in their
future congregations than it does to that one uninspir-
92 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ing teacher and his dependent family. But the super-
intendent of the railroad, the president of the Seminary
can, and if a Christian must, feel a personal kindliness
for the man he is compelled by official duty to discharge.
Whether he retain him if he can ; whether he discharge
him if he must, the employer if he will himself remain
son, brother, sharer in Good Will, must retain or
discharge him, if he is truly sorry for his inefficiency,
with something of the same sorrow and suffering which
the repentant employee feels. Vicarious suffering; the
innocent for the guilty; was not enacted once for all
some nineteen centuries ago. It is the law of Christian
living in every vital relation of life, Hke that of em-
ployer and employee, yesterday, to-day and forever.
Toward the frivolous young man or woman, if he or
she comes to a sense of his or her wicked worthlessness,
and is sorry for it and ashamed of it ; we may have to
be officially hard : if, for instance, we happen to be
school principals or college presidents with intellectual
standards to maintain : but if we are Christians, if we
live in Good Will, we are bound to have kind hearts,
good wishes and a forbearing spirit ; and as far as our
personal feelings toward them go, give them as cordial
an appreciation and as sympathetic a treatment as we
have for their more diligent brothers and sisters who
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 93
through the whole trying eleven hours bear the burden
and heat of scholastic requirement.
A man has slandered us : injured our standing with
persons for whom we care : and subjected us to dis-
trust, criticism, defeat and injury. Later, too late to
undo the harm, he comes to us and says he is sorry.
Can we feel toward him the kindliness one child of God
should feel for another? If we are sharers with Christ
and our fellow-Christians in Good Will we can. And if
we can't then while we may be no worse than our slan-
derer was when he slandered us : we are harder, meaner,
more unkind and cruel than he is now. He is now in
Good Will ; and we are by our own fault out of it. He
is in the Heaven of God's favor; Christ's grace; the
Christian fellowship. We are in the hell of hard, un-
forgiving hate.
A dishonest promoter, with glowing prospectus, forged
testimonials, false hopes of large dividends secures the
hard earnings and savings of a lifetime: Kves luxu-
riously on the salary he votes to himself or the profits
he unjustly appropriates : and when the crash comes
leaves us penniless in old age. Hundreds of such
tragedies are happening every day. Ordinarily the
swindler of this type is too remote, too impersonal,
for his victims to know personally. But suppose we
94 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
do know him; and know that he is truly sorry; not
merely for the prison sentence he receives, but for the
privation he has caused us. We probably should not
feel called upon to invest any further savings in his
enterprises. But if we are Christians we should will
him no more harm than the protection of society against
similar swindlers requires him to suffer. And as soon
as that object is accompHshed, if convinced of his
penitence attested by works meet for repentance, we
should favor his release on parole, or even his complete
pardon. Otherwise in the sight of God, measured by
our participation in Good Will, we are and shall be,
if not worse than he was, worse than he is and means
to he.
An avaricious employer coins money out of the life-
blood of our boy or girl ; and by compelling him or her
to overwork in unsanitary surroundings, causes disease
and premature death. Just for a few more dollars he
murders our dear one. For, if not ours by birth, if we
are in Good Will all boys and girls are ours by the
adoption of sympathy. And tens of thousands of them
are being slain every year by the avarice of greedy
employers and murderous conditions of employment.
When he sees and confesses the murder he has
committed, repents, and abandons his miserly and
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 95
murderous habits of employment, can we forgive him,
and count him among those whom common devotion
to Good Will makes friends ? If not, we are not Chris-
tians. If we can, we have learned the lesson and re-
produced the meaning of the cross of Christ.
Some one has been inconsiderate, haughty, exclusive,
supercilious to us, or to those we love ; causing bitter
pain and grief. If he repents, can we overcome our
resentment, and wish for him full measure of the happi-
ness he has cruelly refused to give to us and ours ? The
answer to that question will show whether in our social
relations we are Christians, or mere heathen still.
Another has been jealous of our standing, our talents,
our wealth, and tried his best to pull us down. After-
ward, seeing the injury he has done, he is sorry, and
tries to make amends. Can we give him our favor, our
influence, our support as heartily as if he had always
rejoiced in our good fortune ? We can if we have Good
Will, as Christ has it ; as hosts of our fellow Christians
have it.
Another has worried the life out of us by perpetual
nagging, fault-finding, complaining and uncalled-for
criticism. Seeing how weary and disheartened he has
made us, he repents, and begins to try to see some good
amid the obvious bad in us. Can we welcome him
96 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
back to our friendship ? That will show whether Good
Will is really in us, or our profession of Christianity is
an empty form.
A man has annoyed us by his intolerable conceit,
until we can hardly endure the sight of him. He comes
to see how silly and petty it all is, and is heartily ashamed
of himself. Are we as ready with our welcome to the
new man as we were with our abomination of the old?
We shall be, if we are Christians ; and share with Christ
and all true Christians God's Good Will.
A coward betrays us; a traitor gives away a cause
for which we have labored long and hard. When they
see the injury they have done they feel Hke Judas ready
to go hang themselves. Are we wilHng, so far as justice
to our cause permits, to take them back into our friend-
ship and favor? If Christ be in us, if we are with him
in Good Will, we shall ; if not, we shall not.
Finally if a hypocrite, whom we have detested as
utterly hollow-hearted and unreal, confesses and re-
nounces the loathsome sin, can we give him another
chance? This is perhaps the hardest test of all: for
we can't help suspecting that his repentance is only one
more pose ; and we don't hke the idea of being fooled
by him. If we do give him our confidence, our fellows
will smile and call us ''easy." Yet that is a risk Good
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 97
Will calls US to run whenever not mere words but works
meet for repentance are in evidence. It is better that
we should be deceived in an honest attempt to forgive
one who was and still is a hypocrite, than that we should
refuse forgiveness to one who merely has been a hypo-
crite ; is sorry for it ; and is resolved henceforth to be
a sincere man.
The forgiveness of sin is not something done once for
all in ancient history, or eternal in the heavens ; but
it is something we all are called upon to do every day,
and the spirit of which we need to have with us and in
us all the time. To keep that spirit alive in himself
and his people; to pronounce unchristian every man
and every act whereby forgiveness and its appropri-
ate expression are withheld, is one of the preacher's
hardest tasks; and one which if successfully accom-
plished is the clearest evidence of a successful and
faithful ministry. For the man or community that
has the forgiving spirit is in Good Will. While one
who fails to forgive in this personal costly way is out
of it altogether.
The question will arise in the minds of those famil-
iar with traditional views. What has the Cross of
Christ to do with the forgiveness of sin? If God were
a jealous, arbitrary being ; a stickler for his own offended
98 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
dignity and the majesty of his law, we can see how the
death of an innocent victim might be necessary to
buy him off : just as believers in a personal devil (who
by the way is not so very different from such a God)
thought a ransom to him necessary. Undoubtedly in
St. Paul's attempts by Rabbinical reasoning to explain
Christ's death in terms of the Hebrew sacrificial system
there are passages which lend themselves to such inter-
pretation. If that is the way you think and feel about
God, and Christ's sacrifice, undoubtedly you can sup-
port it by ''proof texts" from the Bible. On the other
hand, if you think of God as the Fatherly Good Will to
all his children : most tender to those who have gone
farthest astray ; and most eager to welcome the prodi-
gal's return (a view for which there are far more ''proof
texts"), the idea that such Good Will to men needed
any ransom or appeasement of wrath is monstrous and
absurd. All forgiveness, as we have seen, involves
sacrifice of merely individual feeHngs, and power to rise
above them to a point of view high and large enough to
include the offender's welfare. If Jesus had not been
equal to that; if he had not stood ready to pay the
full measure of such devotion to the real welfare of an
evil and hostile world, he would not have revealed God's
Good Will : he would have fallen below what the best
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 99
Christian men and women have attained. In that deep
and real sense Christ bore the burden of the world's
iniquity : the chastisement of our peace was upon him :
and with his stripes we are healed. He did in a typical
historic situation, on a large world scale, what every
one of his followers is repeatedly called upon to do : —
he rose above his individual pleasure and preference to a
universal devotion to the good of all whom his action
could affect : and he paid with his Hfe the cost of such
devotion. If Good Will were not thus self-sacrificing,
self-transcending; if Christ had not revealed it in
agony and blood; if countless Christian men and
women did not share this sacrificial attitude and bear
their portion of this cross, sin would be unforgiven
and unforgivable; the sinner who had fallen would
be irrevocably doomed ; and his restoration to divine
and human favor would be impossible. In that sense
Christ had to suffer for our salvation : but in the
same way every Christian has to suffer for the for-
giveness and restoration of those who wrong him and
those dear to him, and in wronging them wrong the
world. Christ's cross is not unique but typical : Cal-
vary is not local but cosmic : sacrifice is not temporal
but eternal. The lamb was slain from the foundation
of the world. Only he who dies to self can live to God's
100 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Good Will, and restore wrong-doers to their forfeited
place in that Good Will.
As the basis of forgiveness, sacrifice is necessary : not
in an external, forensic, or merchandising sense ; but in
the intimate, personal sense of including others, however
undeserving they may have been, in the Good Will
which one shares toward them with God. So under-
stood, the preacher may and should freely use the suffer-
ings of Christ as the strongest appeal to Christians to
be forgiving ; and to wrong-doers to believe that God's
Good Will forgives them the instant they repent.
For Christ's sacrifice is so clear and compelling : so
individual and so universal: so enshrined in Hterature
and art, emotion and conception; that it reveals the
forgiving Good Will of God a thousandfold more
effectively than the fragmentary, scattered sacrifices of
his followers ; obscured as these are by famiharity, im-
perfection, and entanglement with sordid details.
The preacher then will preach Christ and him crucified
as the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. But it will
be a cross borne in the heart of the Father as well as
the Son : a cross of which each faithful and forgiving
follower bears his part.
Good Will, conditioned by the structure of the uni-
verse and the freedom of man, seeks for each and all
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL lOI
the greatest good these conditions permit. When a
man does wrong, Good Will resists the wrong action in
the interest of those who are wronged by it ; and also
in the interest of the wrong-doer. For it is good for the
transgressor to find his way made hard. When he turns
from it and repents, Good Will instantly accepts him as
potentially its servant. To go on identifying the wrong-
doer with the wrong he has repudiated would be not
only brutal but stupid. It is not merely contrary to
Good Will; it is contradictory to the facts. The re-
pentant wrong-doer is right : and if God did not recog-
nize it he would be unreasonable : if recognizing it he
did not forgive he would be unrighteous. Forgiveness
is not a special favor, exceptional, gratuitous. When a
wrong-doer has repented it is the only decent thing to do.
A man who would not forgive another man who repented
the wrong he had done him would be an inhuman brute.
A God who would not forgive a man who repented the
wrong he had done, would be a devil. Christ has re-
vealed the reasonableness and righteousness of forgive-
ness so clearly and beautifully that whoever falls below
it ceases to be divine and human ; and becomes brutal
and fiendish.
The fact that so much of our theology presents a God
who is reluctant to forgive, and forgives only by special
I02 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
arrangement, shows how far we are from having incor-
porated into it the disposition and insight of Jesus. As
Jesus taught us, the fact that *'we ourselves forgive
every one that is indebted to us" (Luke xi. 4), is sure
proof that a God who is not inferior to us cannot do less
than forgive us our sins. Refusal or hesitation to do so
is unmistakable evidence of the uneliminated brutality
of the God or man who fails to forgive.
Forgiveness is the most distinctive note Christ brought
to the world ; and explains why he was so insistent on
repentance. For until the wrong-doer repents it is
neither rational nor righteous to forgive him. To for-
give the unrepentant, or, in Mr. Osborne's words, to sym-
pathize with the criminal as criminal, is to enter into
compHcity with his wrong-doing. Only on the basis of
stern condemnation for the deliberate and unrepentant
wrong-doer is forgiveness consistent with moral and
spiritual integrity. Cherished and unrepented sin, as
we saw, shuts the sinner entirely out of fellowship with
Good Will. That truth must be firmly held and un-
compromisingly proclaimed. Then with equal confi-
dence the complementary truth must be added : that
not by special arrangement, or forensic dickering, but
as the essential expression of the intrinsic nature of Good
Will, each and every sin is forgiven, the worst wrong-
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 103
doer is restored to the favor of God, of Christ, and of all
Christian men, the instant he sincerely repents the
wrong that he has done. As sure as sin shuts out the
sinner ; so sure sincere penitence brings forgiveness and
the welcome to the Father's house of the returning prod-
igal. We are all prodigals: sacrificing over and over
again, until seventy times seven, the greater and the
greatest to the little and the less; but as often as we
repent, even unto seventy times seven, we are assured
of the forgiveness and fellowship of God, of Christ, and
all men who have the Christian Spirit. This is the best
part of the good news the preacher of the Gospel of
Good Will is commissioned to preach.
He has, however, more to do than merely to preach
it. He must bring himself and his people to practice it.
Forgiveness is kindness toward a person who has been
doing something which we abhor. It is personal Good
Will shining through intense disapproval. It is close
and friendly contact with a person whose act and atti-
tude we shrink from and antagonize. It is not natural,
and therefore rare. When it occurs it is supernatural
and indicates the presence in the heart of him who for-
gives, of something superhuman, divine. That some-
thing is Good Will in its most costly, sacrificial form.
Who is the agent of forgiveness? In the deepest
I04 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
sense, of course, God, and God alone, can forgive sins.
That, however, is only another way of saying what was
said above, that forgiveness is an act of supernatural,
divine love. For God is Good Will ; and whatever can
be done only in Good Will, is done in God and through
God.
In another sense, equally profound, Christ is the one
through whom all sins are forgiven. For Christ is the
historic representative, accepted as such by an ever in-
creasing proportion of the race, of that self-sacrificing,
outgoing love which holds dear and sacred every human
soul, however depraved. Since Christ means that, and
without that forgiveness is impossible, we rightly regard
him as the Forgiver and Saviour of all who have sinned.
There is no other door into the sheepfold. Other foun-
dation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus
Christ.
All this, however, may be accepted either in a dry,
dead, traditional sense, or in a fresh, vital, world-con-
quering sense. Of late the church, for the most part,
has accepted it in the dry, dead, unfruitful sense. The
church that takes it in this sense is doomed. The
preachers that preach it are offering their diminishing
congregations a gospel of mere words.
The agents of God's forgiveness are individual Chris-
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL 105
tian men and women. The real church is the com-
pany of those who have God's forgiving love in their
hearts, and bestow it on their fellow men. Wherever
one such soul forgives and loves another, however un-
worthy that other be, there the kingdom of God comes
and spreads. Whoever forgives others has the indis-
pensable experience within him by which to interpret
the reported and transmitted forgiveness of God in
Jesus Christ. To those who lack that experience in
themselves, or lack some human friend to act as its
interpreter to them, forgiveness, however eloquently
reported in book or sermon, remains a sealed message,
an untranslated and untranslatable cipher. Forgive-
ness is a personal relation, and requires for its full and
adequate expression two parties, both human, sharing
together the condemnation of whatever has been wrong
in either; bearing toward each other mutual respect,
and mutual affection. Until God's forgiveness is thus
incarnated, until Christ's forgiveness is thus repro-
duced in the specific situation where it is needed, toward
the particular individual who has done the wrong, it
remains something up in the clouds, back in ancient
history. It is not a vital, flesh-and-blood reality, doing
its redeeming, transforming work in the midst of breath-
ing, erring, repenting men and women, in the homes,
I06 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
and factories, and farms, and stores, and offices, and
prisons of the actual modern world.
If we are to help save the world, we must not merely
report forgiveness as a fact in eternity, or as an event in
past time. We must not merely symbolize Christ's
sacrificial love upon the altar, or announce it from the
pulpit : we must act it out ; we must be the agents of it.
For though it is true that one may learn of Christ's
forgiveness from sermon or Bible, even then it is experi-
ence of forgiveness by a human father, mother, teacher,
or friend, which gives the hearer or reader the power
to interpret in real terms the reported or recorded for-
giveness of Christ.
Real forgiveness, genuine salvation, requires that
some one who has the love of Christ for men in his heart
shall come close to the individual who has done wrong,
touch him at the sensitive point of his particular wrong-
doing with mingled kindness for him and condemnation
for his sin, and win him to share with the one who loves
him, and with God, their common condemnation of the
wrong which he has done. Whoever makes such loving
forgiveness the principle and spirit of his life, thereby
enters and abides in the kingdom of God, and the body
of Christ. Wherever one such soul forgives and loves
another who has done wrong, there the kingdom of God
RESTORATION TO GOOD WILL IO7
comes, there the church of Christ extends and spreads.
All who have that experience, have the experience
wherewith to assure themselves that the reported for-
giveness of God in Jesus Christ includes and applies
to them; and to all whom, with the insight of love,
they lovingly forgive.
IV
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE
"All business should be done so that the advantage is distrib-
uted. Business success should mean much more than the enrich-
ment of an individual. It should mean that the community is
enriched." William H. Baldwin, Jr., in An American Citizen
by John Graham Brooks, pp. 282-283.
These are the words of a brilliantly successful rail-
road president. Our lesson will be a series of brief
selections from his biography, showing the attitude
towards business this successful railroad president main-
tained. Before describing this attitude as an ideal for
all vocations it is well for us to recognize that in one
man at least, in the most intricate and delicate of all
vocations, that of railroading, this attitude, here in the
United States in the twentieth century, has been a fact,
and a successful fact.
"There was never a moment when, in the deeper, wider
currents of his mind, he was not moved by impulses
greater than the acquisition of wealth : never a moment
108
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 109
when this was not a secondary and subordinate object
of his energies."
*'He early learned that interests between the manage-
ment and the laborer are one and the same only as both
sides try to make them the same. This harmony does
not come of itself, nor is it to be taken for granted. All
the truth it holds has to be created by honorable pur-
pose and Good Will."
"He came to think of the railroad as having one final
justification, — namely, the development of business in
the communities through which it passed. It was there
to make life easier to the farmer. It was there to cheapen
products to the consumer. It was there to assist in the
distribution of congested city populations."
''His whole idea of the railroad was to develop it in
the interest of everybody along the route. Its pros-
perity was to be the common prosperity. Baldwin not
only held that as a theory, but he acted upon it practi-
cally."
''With stubborn valor he took the position that all
business necessary to he done, can be done without base-
ness. It can be done without low trickeries and with-
out organizing injury against one's fellow men."
"Among his best and surest gifts was that rare power
of putting himself so vividly in the place of another, as
no THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
to enlarge and humanize his observation. He was
always helped by asking, 'What should I think and
do, if I were actually in that man's place? ' "
"Our transportation system is our largest machine
and also our most important. It is so important that
the motive in its management should be elevated and
broadened. It should be first a social motive and not
a personal one. He insisted that the propaganda for
teaching this social motive to the people could not begin
an hour too soon."
" In the spirit of fair play, he asks the simplest ques-
tion: If these bilHons of capital have to be organized
in order to protect themselves against disrupting rival-
ries, do not the laborers working for these organizations
have the same need of combination ? Do they not need
it for the same reason ? Is capital exposed to cut- throat
competition in any greater degree than labor is exposed
to it? How can capital have the face to ask for com-
bination, in order to free itself from a murderous compe-
tition, when labor suffers every bit as much from the
same cause? An encouraged immigration of unskilled
foreigners subjects the common workman in this country
to the most relentless pressure, and yet he is to be de-
prived of the very instruments of self-protection which
capital claims and is strong enough to get."
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 1 1
" I need, as an employer, an organization among my
employees, because they know their needs better than
I can know them, and they are therefore the safeguard
upon which I must depend in order to prevent me from
doing them an injustice."
"The function performed by railroads has become
too important to the body pohtic to permit of any solu-
tion of these serious labor and wage questions, except
by intelHgent consideration on the part of the representa-
tives both of the management and of the employees."
"Collective bargaining and voluntary arbitration
are possible only when the employer recognizes the right
of the employed to have a voice in the fixing of wages
and conditions of employment. The recognition of
committees of employees is absolutely essential and is
judged to be inevitable."
"His religion of Good Will is a religion which required
in his case Uttle ritual or institutional expression. He
lives it quite as much on Monday as on Sunday. He
lives it in his office and on the train. He lives it in the
turmoil of a strike and in the treatment of his subordi-
nates. He fives it with the negro, for whom he asked
justice as he asked it for the trade-union. It is this
refigion which gave him the pity and tolerance for the
prostitute even while enforcing the law against her."
112 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
''His assertion that the private dividends should not
be first, but strictly subordinated to the common wel-
fare, is an unflinching ethical proposal. There is no
better definition of social morality than conscious sub-
mission of our action to the good of the community.
To make the common weal the controlling test of cor-
porate action would moralize business as it would moral-
ize politics. It would revolutionize our wealth-making
more profoundly than most sociaUst schemes now in
vogue. This principle of using corporate power first
for public ends, was not with Baldwin a mood of phrase-
making. It had to him a clear-cut meaning on which
he was willing to act."
''Baldwin did not vapor about ideals or force them
upon unwilling ears. There never was in him a taint of
the 'holier-than-thou' attitude, yet he was an idealist
in its strict and proper sense — a mind moved by ideas.
What haunts him and even drives him is a moral im-
agery of something better. The propelling idea in his
case is moral because it consciously includes the good of
other people. If the mental picture is that of his rail-
road, he conceives of it in relation to pubHc welfare.
The railroad must be more and more efficient in a ser-
vice that includes everybody. He does not think of it
merely as a machine out of which a few private pockets
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II3
are to be filled. Its one justification is that it helps
toward a development in which all men share."
''It was never for a moment his purpose to make all
the money he could possibly acquire. With moral
deliberation, he set limits to his own acquisition. He
would make money, but he would make it with condi-
tions. He would neither be a parasite nor a gambler.
Upon principle, he would grow rich more slowly if there
were any question of straight and honorable methods.
In a case of proposed railroad extension, he was asked,
as an official, to take advantage of plans then secret
and buy certain properties. He considered it, but re-
fused. 'I could have made a pot of money out of that,'
he said, 'but I should have sold too much of myself.' "
With this twentieth-century, American fact as text
and lesson, we may now apply this "religion of Good
Will" to other representative vocations.
To transform into expressions of itself all secular
vocations is the practical aim of Good Will ; and there-
fore the objective at which the preacher by words and
the layman by works must aim. We must see in sharp,
clear contrast the difference between the man who is
and who is not enlisted in the service of Good Will, as
that difference comes out in the secular vocations.
Stated in general terms that difference is that the seK-
114 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ish man does not consider, and the servant of Good Will
does consider, the consequences of his action to all
who are affected by it precisely as if he bore those conse-
quences in his own person. Let us then run through
a representative Kst of vocations, putting the natural
man who serves his own will first, and the Christian
man who serves Good Will second in each case. That
will show what the preacher has to preach, and the
layman has to practice, to make the world the Kingdom
of Good Will and of Christ as its historic champion.
The natural man, as worker, thinks first of his pay ;
and secondly of doing his work well enough to hold his
job and continue to draw his pay. The man who has
heard and obeyed the call of Good Will thinks first
of his work and the substantial benefits it will confer
on the consumer of its product ; does it heartily with his
eye on the good it is doing ; and takes his pay gratefully
as more or less of an equivalent given him in return
for the service he has rendered. The natural man
therefore does his work slavishly and grudgingly: the
disciple of Good Will does it freely and gladly ; giving
full measure, whether the measure of pay is quite full
or not.
The natural man, as player of any game plays to win,
by fair means or foul. The man of Good Will in every
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 1 5
game virtually offers the prayer, "Fair play; and may
the best man win." He would rather be beaten fairly
than win unfairly: and when the better man wins
will be as glad for him, and as appreciative of his skill
and prowess, as though those superior quahties had
been his own. The boy who can do his best and still
be glad to find in another a better than his best, has
gone a long way on the Christian road : and the preacher
who can enter his young people on that arduous race
is doing his part as coach of their spiritual athletics.
Pluck, training, courage, perseverance, and also courtesy,
honor, chivalry, magnanimity, must mark the spiritual
athlete who will win the prize of Christlike character
offered by Good Will.
The natural employer of labor, the employer who
recognizes no will but the will of his own interest, will
pay as little wages, and provide as inexpensive condi-
tions of Hfe and labor as possible ; and let his relations
to his employees end then and there. It is the preach-
er's duty to make every such employer chronically un-
comfortable. He will make the cold-blooded, hard-
hearted grinder of the faces of his employees realize
that not to make his relationship to his employees
an expression of Good Will, is to be himself out of that
Will altogether. Bits of it he may pick up in his home,
Il6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
his club, his associations with other employers. But
in the full comprehensive fellowship of Good Will no
employer of labor can be, who fails to make the welfare
of his employees the constant object of his will.
On the contrary the employer who is himself in the
employ of Good Will aims to make his employees
participants in the financial profit; the social spirit;
the good name and good order, which binds employer
and employees together in mutual loyalty and devotion.
Precisely how this is to be done or how far it should
be carried, through profit-sharing, arbitration, welfare
work, social centers, athletic teams, the preacher may
not be enough of an accountant, a business man, or
a sociologist, to point out in detail. Unless he is an
expert he will do best to leave these details to the em-
ployer to work out in his own way. His business is
to make sure that the employer, if he thinks of him-
self as a Christian, shall as an essential part of that
thought think of his employees as partners, brothers,
helpers, friends, whose interests are included in the
interest he takes in his business as a whole.
The Christian employee, in proportion to the number
in his class, is rarer than the Christian employer. The
natural man as employee does as little as he can : feels
no responsibility for use of time, care of tools and plant,
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE II7
economy of materials, or soundness of product. He
regards his employer as his natural enemy; and too
often values his union chiefly as a means of fighting
him.
The Christian employee, the employee who lives in
Good Will, makes his employer's interest his own;
whether this interest is reciprocated or not ; even if the
employer be a big and perhaps corruptly managed
impersonal corporation. He will give it his best work,
his best thought, his best care ; whatever he gets in
return. If he joins a union and fights for and by col-
lective bargaining, as he has a perfect right to, he will
be careful to do no injury beyond what may be neces-
sary to make his employer realize his rights and treat
him as a fellow-man. With malice toward none, with
charity for all employers, the Christian employee will
do his best work as long as he works at all ; and when
he strikes it will be under the stern necessity of a last
resort in the interest of justice ; not as a welcome chance
to show his animosity.
This Gospel of Good Will, when preached to work-
ing-men and their unions, will not always be a welcome
one. But the preacher must be as plain with the em-
ployee as with the employer ; hold up as high and hard
a service of Good Will before the one class as before the
Il8 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
other. The Christian solution of the labor problem is
not as simple, as easy, as congenial to the heart of
the selfish man as many of the panaceas offered appear
to be. But if once generally applied it can be guar-
anteed to work : and not only solve the problem, but
make heroes of those who do their part in its solution.
The selfish man as merchant aims to make as much as
he can out of his customers and still retain their trade
against competitors. If cheap goods- will bring larger
profits and more frequent sales than substantial goods,
cheap goods he will sell. If worthless or deleterious
goods, Hke most patent medicines, 3deld the largest
margin of profit, and develop a habit which it requires
repeated purchasing to satisfy, those he will advertise
and urge his customers to buy. The customer in every
transaction is regarded, not as a man to be served to the
best of the merchant's ability for a fair return ; but as
a profit-producer to be exploited. ''Let the buyer
look out for himself, it is no business of mine to look
out for him," is the heartless motto. It is the preacher's
duty to show that merchant that he is nothing more
nor less than a legalized pirate, preying on the neces-
sities of his fellow-men. The preacher very likely
does not know enough about merchandising to tell
the merchant just how much profit he should charge
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS I SERVICE II9
when virtual monopoly gives him the chance to charge
what he pleases. But if he is fit to be a preacher, he
does know what the spirit and attitude of a merchant
toward his customer ought to be ; and he will not allow
that merchant to be comfortable in his own mind, or
well esteemed by others, unless the goods he sells, the
prices he charges, are determined not alone by the pres-
ence or absence of effective competition; but by a
genuine desire to serve the customer by giving him at
a price fairly representing the value of his skill, his risk,
his capital, his labor, the commodity that customer
desires. That is what it means to preach Good Will
to a merchant. On no lower terms has the preacher
the right to assure the merchant that he is filHng his
place and performing his function as Good Will requires.
The professional man takes as his province some line
of service, Law, Medicine, Religion, which involves
for its thorough comprehension a prolonged training,
and a developed insight which the laity as a rule cannot
attain. They consequently are entirely at his mercy;
absolutely dependent on his skill, integrity and honor
for the soundness and worth of what he gives them in
professional service and advice. Hence the professional
man must be one of two things : either a free and con-
scious servant of Good Will as it applies to the cases
I20 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
with which he professionally deals ; or else a downright
charlatan, palming off under the protection of his pro-
fessional authority not merely worthless but positively
deleterious substances or services. The temptation to
be a charlatan is at times very strong. It is cheap : it
is profitable : and in individual cases it appears easy to
escape detection. The lawyer, physician or minister
who has not felt at some time or other the tempta-
tion to substitute the cheap guess for the costly
certainty, the easy evasion for the expensive solution
of a hard problem, is probably rare. Good Will in the
Christian professional man involves bringing to bear
on each specific case the fruits of the world's best science
and skill as it applies to that case: the resolute re-
fusal to offer anything less than the best one is capable
of acquiring and using. The Christian professional
man is thus the representative of Good Will in some
specific sphere not easily accessible to the layman : and
he is bound to make the interest of patient, client or
parishioner his own; yes more than his own: he is
bound to place it above personal profit, convenience,
reputation, or in critical cases his own health and life.
As the professed representative of a single difficult
phase of Good Will, he must see that that Will is done,
whatever the cost to himself. The Gospel is not fully
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 121
and faithfully preached until every professional man in
the community is taught to measure himself by the
high standard of doing disinterestedly and devotedly
all that Good Will requires of the man who represents
it in one of its more arduous and technical forms.
The scientist likewise is tempted to accept hearsay
and tradition for first-hand truth. The former is easy,
cheap and respectable: the latter is hard, expensive
and often at first unpopular. Formerly this duty of
truthfulness on the part of the scientist was not ade-
quately recognized; and the easy repetition of tradi-
tion, the cheap adoption of respectable error, was
thought to savor of orthodoxy. Our generation has
learned the lesson that Good Will is at the same time,
especially for the man who assumes to be an expert,
the will to truth ; though there are sections of the world,
and branches of the church, where Good Will is still
confounded with the will to He ; if the lie only be in the
interest of ecclesiastical tradition. Against all that
the preacher must set his face: he must put truth,
however unpopular, however unsettling, however ap-
parently dangerous, above orthodoxy, above safety,
above immediate comfortableness. For Good Will
cannot permanently be promoted by falsehood; and
all the immediate good that temporarily seems to be
122 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
gained by pious fraud has to be paid for when ultimately
the truth comes out, as it surely will. The blame for
the disillusion and doubt the truth brings attaches not
to the men who bring the truth, but to the men who
clung so long to error — and taught others to cUng to it.
The preacher must rid himself of behefs which he
holds at second hand ; and profess to believe only the
things which he sees with clearness and holds in sin-
cerity. Any make-believe in his own thinking will
betray itself in a tone of unconscious insincerity when
he attempts to influence others. It would be easy to
name whole ecclesiastical communions whose clerical
utterances on certain subjects carry to the candid no
conviction whatever; simply because we feel sure that
they have never dared to be frankly candid and sincere
with themselves. On the contrary the preacher who is
the conscious servant of Good Will, becomes so fearless
in his rejection of falsehood, so single-minded toward
the truth, so transparently honest in his distinction
between what he is sure of, and what he is uncertain
about, that all who hear him catch the holy contagion
of transparent truthfulness.
Special pleading or elaborate argument in the pulpit
seldom convinces anybody : but the confident assertion
of a man who is transparently sincere with himself,
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 23
carries weight with all who see and feel his sincerity.
Historical and metaphysical matters may be doubtful :
but there are plenty of moral and spiritual truths to
which the sincere preacher can bear convincing testi-
mony. The preacher who lives in Good Will will
never be tempted to the impossible task of trying to
convince his people of something of which he himself
is doubtful. On the other hand mere truthfulness is
only one special section of the total sweep of Good Will.
It would be easy to name one or two denominations which
have so prided themselves on their intellectual sincerity
that they have lost the perspective of other phases of
Good Will, hke charity, modesty, sympathy. Truth-
fulness for the scientist is vital : and if he fails in that
point, he fails totally. But for the ordinary man, truth-
fulness is merely one of a hundred ways in which Good
Will seeks and finds expression.
The teacher's temptation is not so much to falsehood ;
as to indifference; to the half doing of his work; to
thinking that because he has "got off" something in
the presence of the learner, therefore the learner has
learned : whereas the getting off of truth is only the
easy end of teaching: the real test being whether the
truth is brought home to the minds of the pupils, and
there appropriated and sympathetically shared. To
124 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
shirk this harder task is the great temptation of the
teacher; one into which a teacher without conscious
Good Will is pretty sure to fall.
The teacher then must be taught to see teaching as
an opportunity to put truth so clearly, convincingly,
pictorially, appreciatively, sympathetically that the
pupils will assimilate and organize it into the structure of
their minds, and embrace it with the affection of their
hearts. The preacher must know and feel, and make
teachers know and feel, the infinite difference between
a teacher who teaches a lesson and is done with it
when it is off his mind, and a teacher who lives imagi-
natively and sympathetically in the minds of his pupils ;
and prepares, presents, reviews and examines with a
view to the effective assimilation and organization of
truth in the minds of the pupils. Only the latter
teachers enter and abide through their vocation in Good
Will. Educational officials, like presidents, principals
and superintendents, if they know their business, will
refuse to have on their staff of teachers any men or
women who are not Christians in the sense of being the
sympathetic servants of their pupils.
Wealth, the product of past and the control over
future labor, can either be a curse or a blessing to its
possessor and to the world. Gained unscrupulously;
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 25
held greedily ; invested recklessly ; wielded mercilessly ;
spent ostentatiously; given away promiscuously; it
has untold power to harden, and hurt, and degrade. To
do these things is natural and the line of least resistance
for the capitaHst. If he does these things it is the
preacher's duty to denounce him as the enemy of Good
Will. On the other hand gained, invested, saved, spent,
given in such ways and such proportions as Good Will
demands, capital becomes a mighty benefit and the
capitalist a mighty benefactor.
The preacher may not be enough of an economist
and financier to tell the capitaHst in detail precisely how
to avoid the curse and win the blessing that the posses-
sion and use of capital involves. But he must be an
expert in the right attitude of the capitaHst toward it.
He must help his wealthy men to offer their wealth
conscientiously, wisely, disinterestedly to the service of
Good Will. He must help them to make sure that the
proportion of their wealth they invest in productive in-
dustry win do more good so invested, than it would if
invested in other forms of production; or if given, or
spent on himself and his family. The rich man must be
sure that the amount of money spent on himself and his
family will do more good so spent than it would if invested
or given. He must be sure that the money he gives
126 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
tends to do more good so given than it would if given in
other directions, or invested, or spent. This is a hard
task ; and with or without help in detail from the preacher
the rich man is pretty sure to make a great many mis-
takes. But it is the rich man's duty to make this effort ;
and the preacher's duty to keep him aware that only
through such a devotion of every cent he has to the most
effective service of Good Will can he win the blessing and
escape the curse of riches. It is the preacher's task to
point out this very narrow way to every rich man in his
congregation ; and to assure him that while to unregen-
erated human nature such a disinterested distribution
of one's resources is impossible, it is, at least in intent
and aim, not only possible but imperative for all who
have Good Will. Giving is hard to the man whose
will is merely the resultant of his natural desires. Why
should he give "away" — away from himself — what
he so laboriously has won? And if he does give, there
is sure to be some self-centred motive behind it; "to
be seen of men" ; or to get rid of annoying importunity.
Good Will once made the object of the individual will
identifies the giver with the person or cause he seeks
to help. If being seen to give will incite others to give
too, he will let the light of his giving shine : not for
his own individual glory, but that Good Will may be
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 1 27
glorified and better accomplished through other generous
hearts. But if no such good is to come from publicity,
the giver who gives in Good Will will prefer not to let
his left hand know what his right hand doeth. He will
be so intent on Good Will ; so identified with its aims,
that personal mention in connection with it would be
unwelcome, because distracting attention from the gift
and its aim to the giver and his merits — a very minor
consideration in the mind of any man who has Good
Will at heart.
There is hardly a better test of one's progress in Good
Will than this — whether one wishes to be known in the
matter other than as such knowledge strengthens Good
Will in others : or whether one regards his gift, and the
good it may do, as a means to his own popularity and
reputation. How far short of giving from Good Will
most of us fall may be seen in the difference in size
between an anonymous gift to the contribution box,
and the public subscription we would make to the same
cause.
Shall the Christian fight? He prefers peace. He
will not fight for aggression or gain. Yet rather than
let tyranny oppress the weak, arrogance break down civ-
iHzation, lust ravish the defenceless, greed exploit the
poor, hypocrisy block the way to Heaven, the man who
128 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
is animated by Good Will will fight with the army and
navy, with the police and the courts; and on the un-
civilized frontier with his revolver and his own right
arm. Yet he will do it without malice; with sorrow
that he has to; with forgiveness at the first sign of
penitence; with outstretched hands of helpfulness
the instant the vanquished surrender. As long as the
motive of the fighting is not the enemy's harm as such ;
but the repression of the injustice he is seeking to com-
mit ; fighting is not merely consistent with, it becomes
expressive of Good Will, which is the essence of Chris-
tianity. Incidental injury to our enemy, if it is merely
incidental to doing good or repressing evil, because it
is not made the prime object at which the will aims, does
not vitiate the will. Whoever inflicts injury sincerely
regretting the necessity of doing so, because Good Will
requires it, becomes therein the true Christian soldier.
The writer who writes whatever comes into his head,
regardless of its effect on the reader, is unchristian. He
wields the mighty power of the pen to the wanton injury
of multitudes of readers. Some incidental injury to
the immature and the unprepared, if accepted as a
regretted necessity, as a means to greater goods on
the whole, is, like injury inflicted regretfully in war,
consistent with and expressive of Good Will and there-
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS : SERVICE 1 29
fore Christian. But harm intentionally done for fame
or gain, in indifference or self-conceit, marks a writer
as anti-Christian — the enemy of Good Will.
The artist in sculpture, painting or drama is subject
to the same test as the writer. Harm done incidentally
with reluctance as an unavoidable means to a greater
desirable benefit on the whole is not only permissible
but laudable. Great art, like nature, is bound to harm
some who are not prepared to receive it worthily. But
no artist can positively will that harm, or fail to deplore
it, without coming under the condemnation of Good
Will, and forfeiting the fellowship of those who share
and serve it. Beauty is a large element in that good
which is the end and aim of Good Will : but unless the
good in the beauty of an artistic creation is clearly greater
to those who behold it worthily than the harm to those
who behold it unworthily, the work of art and the artist
who creates and exhibits it is an enemy of Good Will.
For while good and beauty to a great extent coincide,
good is the more inclusive term; and therefore ulti-
mately beauty must be weighed in terms of good. A
work of art which has as its foreseen and deliberately
accepted chief result the stimulation of lust, however
beautiful, is an unchristian product; and excludes
the artist who creates it from the fellowship of Good
130 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Will. If this be Puritanism it is a Puritanism that is
as old and noble as Plato and Aristotle and Jesus.
Beauty is a precious thing; but offending beauty is
condemned by all who have Good Will.
Taxpaying is a rather searching test of the extent
to which one has become identified with Good W^ill.
The man who is living in his own will as supreme
will hate his taxes ; dodge them ; make private deals
with the assessors. Between him and the public wel-
fare which his taxes are to support and serve there
is a great gulf fixed, deep and wide as the gulf be-
tween hell and heaven — indeed, profoundly appre-
hended it is that very gulf, — and the natural will,
unless it gets across on some such shaky bridge as
regard for reputation, or fear of fine and imprisonment,
cannot cross it.
Good Will spans that gulf — or rather for it the gulf
does not exist : the interests of the public and the inter-
ests of the man who has been born again into Good Will
become identical; and the bearing of his fair share of
the public burdens is to such a man a positive delight.
He takes just as much satisfaction in the payment of
his full taxes as he does in buying beef steak for his
family or a suit of clothes for himself. He is big enough
to make the taxes, and the services they perform.
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS: SERVICE 131
just as much objects of his will, as the clothes on his
back or the food on his table.
The ofi&ce-holder whose will is the resultant of his own
personal interests will be inefficient, corrupt and corrupt-
ing. It takes a will as large and generous as Good Will
to make a man in office treat that office as a trust to be
executed as faithfully, as disinterestedly, as devotedly
as he would attend to his private affairs. Good Will
in office as the Will to make the interests of the state
or country one's own will be a frequent theme with the
true preacher.
Even the reformer, if he be not in his reform as a
service to Good Will, finds himself caring more for his
own prominence than for the success of his cause. When
the men who are satisfied with, and are profiting by,
the abuses he attacks, turn upon him and revile him
and persecute him, he will weaken, compromise, "let
up." One who would carry through to a successful
issue any great reform must be patient, persistent,
brave, magnanimous, good-natured, disinterested; and
these qualities come and stay with a man only in so far
as he makes Good Will his principle of action. The
preacher may not always be able to say in detail what
reforms are wise and timely and what are visionary and
impracticable : but he ought to be an authoritative
132 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
expert on the motives on which every reformer should
prosecute his reforms; and the interpreter of Good
Will as it applies to the reformer's personal attitude and
temper.
These are by no means all the specific vocations and
relations in which a man stands ; but they are enough
to make clear the vital and eternal difference between
a man who lives his Kfe and does his work from himself,
by himself, and for himself, and the man who, wherever
he touches the world, and his fellows, tries to make his
conduct expressive of Good Will.
To keep that contrast clear before the minds, warm
within the hearts, of his people is ever the preacher's
mighty duty, and the layman's stupendous task. In
that contrast as it works out in detail, the richness and
variety of which has been only suggested, are to be
found the stuff for scores of sermons. No preacher who
thinks out in detail that eternal difference will ever
lack for vital themes on which to preach.
If we summarize even the few specimen vocations we
have considered the result will make the fundamental
issue clear, and show the Gospel of Good Will in some-
thing of its splendid transforming and transfiguring
power.
Who then in his vocation is the Christian? He is
GOOD WILL IN SECULAR VOCATIONS I SERVICE 1 33
Whoever as worker puts the thought of the enjo>'ment
of the consumer alongside the thought of his pay :
Whoever as player wants the best man to wdn :
Whoever as employer ranks the wages and health of
his workmen on a level wath profits and dividends :
Whoever as employee keeps his employer's interest as
clearly in mind as his own, and as warmly at heart as
his union's :
Whoever as merchant by good wares at fair prices
brings producer and consumer together :
Whoever as professional man rates the character,
health, prosperity, of parishioners, patients, clients
above popularity, station or fee :
Whoever as scientist prizes truth above fame or gain :
Whoever as teacher enjoys the mental growth of his
students more than the spread of his own reputation :
Whoever as o\sTier treats his wealth as a Hability to
be invested, spent and given in such proportions as on
the whole will do most good :
Whoever as giver helps the recipients to become in
turn also givers :
Whoever as fighter maintains good will toward his
enemies on all points save the few on which he believes
them to be wrong :
Whoever as writer makes his readers love good and
hate evil :
134" THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Whoever as artist sets things as they are in the fair
light of things as they should be :
Whoever as taxpayer takes positive pleasure in
bearing his full, fair share of community burdens :
Whoever as citizen votes to his private injury when
private and public advantage conflict :
Whoever as office-holder rates efficiency and service
above honors and emoluments:
Whoever as reformer wins the hate of men who know
him for the sake of men whom he never will know :
Whoever as man, wherever he touches the world,
makes his fellow-men and himself equal objects of Good
Will.
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE
"She will have left an inspiring example to posterity. She has
lost everything, but she has saved her own soul, and she has
saved the liberties of Europe." Charles Sarolea, How Belgium
Saved Europe, p. 194.
The lesson from which the text is taken is too long
and detailed to quote at length. I will summarize the
substance of it : giving in the author's own words only
the conclusion.
Of sacrifice on a large and conspicuous scale there is
no more shining modern example than the action of
Belgium at the outbreak of the great war, as it is set
forth by Sarolea in his *'How Belgium Saved Europe."
Territorially the smallest nation of Europe ; half Flem-
ish, half Walloon ; half plain, half mountain ; half
agricultural, half manufacturing; half CathoHc, half
agnostic; neutral and protected in its neutraHty by
treaty; this nation so recently ruled by the execrable
Leopold II, this little peace-loving nation, was given
13s
136 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
the twelve hours of night between seven in the evening
and seven in the morning to make the most momentous
decision in all her history. On the one side was the
promise, if the word of a treaty-breaking, consciously
wrong-doing nation can be called a promise, of the
integrity of the Belgian kingdom, prompt evacuation
of her territory and indemnification for damage. On
this side was physical Hfe, material comfort and unin-
terrupted prosperity. On the other side was the horror
of an unequal war; the devastation of her country by
a policy of studied and systematic frightfulness ; death
for thousands of her sons ; poverty, starvation, or exile
for millions of her citizens. Yet rather than sacrifice
nationaUty to the risk of absorption by an aggressive,
hateful and domineering autocracy; rather than sacri-
fice treaty rights and the civiHzation that rests upon
them to the ambitions of treaty-breaking militarism,
Belgium, single-handed and unsupported through those
terrible days of August, 19 14, cheerfully, unitedly,
patriotically, religiously sacrificed the material to the
spiritual ; the individual to the social ; the national
to the international ; and gave her little but essential
contribution to the cause of humanity and liberty,
democracy and essential Christianity, in the hour of
its greatest danger. Belgium has suffered the loss of
THE COST OF GOOD WILLI SACRIFICE 137
all things — all save her soul. But, in consequence of
her sacrifice, there is still hope for the cause of national
liberty and international honor ; there is still hope for
a peace too strong in the aUiance of federated nations
for any one nation however autocratic and militaristic
and perverse to break ; and there is the certainty that
Httle Belgium has risen to rank with Palestine and
Greece among the nations whose heroism has helped to
save the world, advance the cause of civilization, and
reveal anew the Godlike capacities of our common
human nature.
Now that the tremendous sacrifice in blood and treas-
ure, in the comforts of home and the shrines of art and
religion has been made, we can all see that through this
sacrifice Belgium has won a far more exceeding and
eternal weight of glory than could have come through a
thousand years of ease-loving self-indulgence. As Mr.
Sarolea says : —
''In order to understand the dogged resistance of the
Belgians we must appeal to the deepest instincts of
man, to the elemental impulses of Hberty, and perhaps
still more must we appeal to the higher motives of out-
raged justice, to the moral consciousness of right and
wrong. Until we take in the fact that from the begin-
ning the struggle was lifted to a higher plane, we shall
138 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
fail to understand the true significance of the war.
From the beginning the war was to the Belgian people
much more than a national war: it became a Holy-
War. And the expression 'Holy' War must be under-
stood not as a mere literary phrase, but in its literal and
exact definition. The Belgian war was a crusade of
Civilization against Barbarism, of eternal right against
brute force."
*'So true is this that in order adequately and clearly
to realize the Belgian attitude, we are compelled to
illustrate our meaning by adducing one of the most
mysterious conceptions of our Christian religion, the
notion of vicarious suffering. In theological language,
Belgium suffered vicariously for the sake of Europe.
She bore the brunt of the struggle. She was left over
to the tender mercies of the invaders. She allowed
herself to become a battlefield in order that France
might be free from becoming a shambles. She had to
have her beautiful capital violated in order that the
French capitol might remain inviolate. She had to
submit to vandaHsm in order that humanity elsewhere
might be vindicated. Belgium will have lost every-
thing. The material damage, the destruction of thou-
sands of cities and villages, the total collapse of industry
and trade are incalculable. The damage to the monu-
THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE 1 39
ments, sacred to art and religion, is not only incalcu-
lable but irreparable. The sufferings inflicted upon
millions of people baffle imagination, but the moral and
spiritual gain is equally inestimable. Belgium will
have proved to all the world her determination and her
right to exist as a free nation. She will have earned
the sympathy and admiration of the whole world. She
will have left an inspiring example to posterity. She
has lost everything, but she has saved her own soul ;
and she has saved the liberties of Europe."
If newspaper correspondents and secular writers
rise to the heights of such a spiritual interpretation of
current events, the Christian preacher cannot afford
to preach sacrifice as merely an exceptional ancient
transaction : he must measure the life of men and na-
tions to-day by the same high standard, and proclaim
an ever deepening and widening sacrifice.
The principle of sacrifice is as fundamental and uni-
versal as the laws of arithmetic. It is inherent in the
very nature of choice: which cannot take one of two
or more alternatives without sacrificing the others.
We have already seen that sin is the sacrifice of the
greater to the lesser good ; and that service involves the
sacrifice of the lesser to the greater good. In every
specific form of service there is latent or explicit the
I40 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
sacrifice of some minor competing goods. Under the
names of temperance — the cutting off of competing
pleasure, and courage — the taking on of incidental pain,
the Greeks taught the same lesson. Without sacrifice
it is impossible to choose : impossible to take a single
step in moral and spiritual living.
Yet fundamental and universal as sacrifice is in the
spiritual Hfe, it should never be presented as an end in
itself, nor carried beyond the limits set by Good Will.
For Good Will cares for us no less than for those we serve ;
and sacrifice beyond the point reasonable and efficient
service requires is sour and silly asceticism. Hence
preaching and practice should always emphasize, not
the lesser good foregone, but the greater good achieved.
Still sacrifice is so essential to the service of Good Will,
and so likely to be either underdone or overdone, that
its universal necessity and its reasonable limits will be
the frequent theme of the preacher. And we shall get a
concrete and vital, as distinct from abstract and theoret-
ical insight into the laws and the limits of sacrifice if at
the outset we follow, even at the risk of partial repeti-
tion, some of the same relations as in the previous chapter
on service : drawing out in each case the sacrifice that is
latent in the service ; and showing how the efficiency of
the service sets a limit to the extent of the sacrifice.
THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE 141
The worker who does his work with an eye to the
consumer's benefit, will have to sacrifice in labor the
difference between the amount required to make a poor
article that will barely "get by," and a standard article
that is sound, durable, and serviceable. That difference
measures the portion of the Cross of Christ he has to
bear.
On the other hand, to do one's work so nicely that
one loses on every contract, cannot afford to buy tools,
cannot pay his bills, as is the case with the over-con-
scientious carpenter who planes both side of plank for
a plank walk, or the housewife who keeps house so
immaculately that she has no time or strength left to
entertain, is to defeat in large measure the very ends
at which reasonable sacrifice aims. To give all the
work Good Will requires in its consideration of the
benefits of our work to customer and consumer, and to
stop working precisely when that point is reached, is
the fine art of the Christian worker's sacrifice in con-
nection with his work.
The player who plays fair sacrifices a good many
games he might win by unfair means. That is his
part of the Cross of Christ. Yet it is a mistake to go
as far as one eminent university president did in dis-
countenancing curved pitching on the ground that it
142 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
was intended to deceive the batter. Strategy with its
incidental deception is an essential part of such games
as baseball and football : and to cut that out would
defeat the whole object and enjoyment of the game.
When the theater, dancing, cards, billiards in any
particular community have become so misused that
their predominant effect on those who participate in
them is degrading and demoralizing, it may then and
there be part of the sacrifice Good Will requires to give
them up. But wherever they can be reclaimed to their
legitimate uses of recreation and wholesome social inter-
course, then their reclamation rather than their renuncia-
tion is the more acceptable sacrifice to Good Will. The
use and enjoyment of these amusements up to the point
where they predominantly injure others or ourselves,
is a much finer and harder Christian art than either
their excessive indulgence or their total repudiation.
The Christian employer of labor must sacrifice what-
ever part of his profits and his time is necessary to make
his relations with his employees brotherly and sym-
pathetic; the conditions of their work sanitary; and
their remuneration just. No employer can enjoy Good
Will on less sacrificial terms.
At the same time he is not called upon ordinarily to
give his employees so much that he bankrupts his busi-
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 43
ness; fails to provide for lean years, depreciation, and
fluctuations in demand. He is not called ordinarily to
be so extremely sacrificial that he ceases to be an
employer and becomes an employee. To remain an
employer and still be a Christian ; at least until there
is a radical revolution in our methods of production and
distribution, is the fine art which Good Will requires of
the Christian employer. The preacher as a rule does
not know enough about manufacturing and merchan-
dising to draw that fine fine where reasonable sacrifice
ends and suicidal bankruptcy begins : but he should
know enough about the sacrificial principle and its
limitations to help the Christian employer to draw
that fine for himself and his business as Good Will
directs.
The Christian employee as his part of the cross of
Christ must give up sabotage, soldiering, maHngering ;
all malice and uncharitableness toward his employer.
He must regard his employer as a brother whose inter-
ests are as precious to him as his own. Good Will,
however, does not call upon him to take whatever wages
and submit to whatever conditions his employer, whether
individual or corporation, may seek to impose upon
him. Good Will includes the workingman's rights as
well as his duties ; and warrants him in insisting on the
144 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
right to unite; the right to collective bargaining; the
right to compensation for accident ; and the right to
decent conditions of labor. It is better for society and
better for the employer in the long run, as well as better
for the workingman that he should have these rights :
and the preacher of Good Will is bound to stand by him
and encourage him in all reasonable and unmalicious
ways in which he seeks to secure and maintain his rights.
Needless oppression ; needlessly low wages ; needless
unsanitary conditions of labor are no part of the cross
Good Will imposes on the workingman. It asks no
workingman to be content with his wages unless those
wages represent under prevailing conditions his fair
share of the combined product of labor, capital, risk,
and skill of superintendence. And it does not require
him to be content with prevaihng conditions, if he is —
not sentimentally desirous — but reasonably sure of a
practicable better economic order which would give
fairer distribution without vastly lessened production.
All the workingman is called upon to sacrifice is his
laziness, his selfishness, his malice, his hostility, his
recklessness and irresponsibility. Whatever Good Will
for him, for his employer, and for society per-
mits, he is at liberty to pursue with all his might.
Only what Good Will forbids toward society, toward
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 145
his employer, toward himself, is he as a Christian
employee called on to forego.
The Christian merchant's share in the cross of Christ
is the sacrifice of all profits over and above his fair reward
for bringing commodities to the customer at the time and
place, of the quahty and quantity desired. Such re-
ward must include interest on capital, risk, loss on unsold
goods and bad bills, skill, taste, and many other things
besides the money and labor cost of keeping and selhng
the articles sold. But extra profits on inferior goods :
extra profits on misrepresentation; extra profits on
taking unfair advantage of monopoly or the customer's
ignorance ; extra profits secured in any way which in-
volves treating the customer in a way he would not be
willing to be treated if he knew all the facts : extra
profits in short due to any act or attitude inconsistent
with Good Will toward both merchant and customer,
the merchant must forego who would Hve as a Christian
in the fellowship of Good Will. The banker, the land-
lord, the promoter, all who exchange one valuable thing
or certificate of value for another come under this search-
ing requirement of the Christian merchant. To sell
for more than, all things justly and broadly considered,
the buyer would wilHngly pay ; in other words for more
than Good Will would have him pay ; is to cease to be
L
146 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
a Christian. But that requirement, severe and search-
ing as it is, leaves ample room for large returns for large
and valuable service in the difficult spheres of exchange
and distribution. Even on these terms a Christian
merchant may make a great deal of money. Good
Will gives him his just dues.
Judged by Christian standards, in the hght of Good
Will, there is not the sharp difference between the pro-
fessional man and the ordinary laborer or business man
which is usually drawn. Like every worker and trader
the lawyer, physician or preacher is bound by Good Will
to give for a fair and reasonable fee or salary his best
services. The only difference is as we have seen that
the professional man, by virtue of his long and costly
technical training, is an expert, while his clients, patients
and parishioners are not : and consequently they cannot
judge as readily as the buyer of ordinary goods and
services whether or not they are getting the best that
skill and dihgence can give them, on terms which, count-
ing cost, preparation and quaHty of service, are fair and
reasonable. For that they are mainly dependent on
the honor of the professional man. In that sense, and
in that only, the professions are more honorable — re-
quire and deserve on the average a higher type of honor
— than other vocations. All workers, laborers, mer-
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 147
chants, manufacturers, professional men, to be Chris-
tians, must charge for their services what Good Will for
all concerned allows. But since those concerned have
not as adequate abihty to check up the quality of the
services and the reasonableness of the charges of the
professional man, as they have in the case of non-pro-
fessional workers, the professional man therefore stands
to that extent in a Httle more intimate responsibility to
Good Will. If he is not a Christian^ Good Will fails
more completely of being done, and with less oppor-
tunity for redress, than if non-professional men in their
vocations are disobedient. The professional man, how-
ever, is himself an object as well as a subject of Good
Will, and reasonable provision for his own comfort, and
the dignity of his profession, is part of his Christian
service.
The scientist has his specific cross. Formerly astro-
nomical, geological, biological truth ; to-day economic,
political, social truth, is frequently unpopular ; clashing
with ancient prejudices, vested interests, the mental
inertia of the aged and the well-to-do. There are places
where the speaking of the truth would deprive a man of
his professor's chair, his pulpit, his poHtical office, his
reputation, his HveHhood. The man who holds any of
these things above truth has no part or lot in Good Will.
148 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
When a scholar's views clash with tradition, preju-
dice, or profit, the sacrifice of everything inconsistent
with the truth as he sees it, even if it be his reputation,
his position, his living, must be made cheerfully and
bravely as the price of continued fellowship with Good
Will, with Christ, and with all sincere Christian men.
The scholar, however, is not under obligation to carry
a chip on his shoulder, and provoke popular animosity
by defiant proclamation in aggressive form of every new
view he comes to hold.
The teacher, the educational administrator, has a
heavy cross to bear. Many schools, many so-called
Christian colleges even, are honeycombed with shirk-
ing, superficiality, compromise, unreality, inefficiency,
favoritism, slipshod ways of instruction, finance and
management. Good Will requires every teacher, super-
intendent, principal, president so to carry its intellectual
and moral standards; the genuine training of the stu-
dents ; and the service to the community through them,
on mind and heart, that whatever loss of popularity,
loss of numbers, loss of athletic prominence those stand-
ards and that training for service require will be cheer-
fully borne as the price of being Christian. Most
teachers in schools and many teachers in colleges have
an amount and conditions of work put upon them which
THE COST OF GOOD WILL*. SACRIFICE 149
are inconsistent with giving their individual pupils
all that they really need. But whoever as teacher
accepts as his or her ideal anything less than the best
for those pupils his time, training, strength and execu-
tive ability enables him to give, becomes thereby un-
christian. Judged by what Good Will requires adminis-
trator and teacher to do for their pupils, and for society
through them. Christian schools and colleges are still
as rare as the sacrifices required to make them truly
Christian are costly. At the same time the Christian
teacher is not called upon to kill himself by overwork ;
still less by worry. Good Will includes the teacher's
welfare.
The cross of the rich Christian, as Jesus pointed out,
is a pecuKarly heavy one. To make his money service-
able to Good Will involves so much weighing of the
worth of one investment against another ; of one bene-
faction against another; of one expenditure against
another; and of each investment against all benefac-
tions and expenditures; of each benefaction against
all investments and expenditures ; and of each expendi-
ture against all investments and benefactions, that those
of us who have little wealth may well breathe a sigh of
relief. For not until the amounts and proportions of
all these uses of property are — not infallibly, for that
150 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
is impossible — but conscientiously determined as Good
Will for all concerned directs, can the rich man fully enter
or remain in the Kingdom of Good Will. Investments
that depend for profits on hard or dishonest dealings,
benefactions prompted by rehef from importunity or
desire for popularity, expenditures on self and family
that do not represent in happiness and efficiency more
value not only to them but to the world than would
any practicable alternative, shut the door of the King-
dom of Good Will in the rich man's face. Having more
than others, he is called to sacrifice more : for apart
from sacrifice no man can see God, or know Christ,
or have fellowship with men and women who are really
Christian.
At the same time the rich Christian is not ordinarily
called upon to give away all his goods. That would
be a much easier and a much more useless and mischiev-
ous act in most cases, than to use them in proportionate
service. Good Will includes the rich man's usefulness
and happiness ; and reasonable care for that is part of
his Christian task.
Whoever gives and is known to give assumes a seri-
ous sacrifice of which the money given is often the least
serious part. Multitudes of beggars, agents, repre-
sentatives of benevolent causes swoop down upon him ;
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 151
and if he will give according to Good Will, he must sift
these claims, dividing the unworthy from the worthy,
making a scale of those which through merit, propin-
quity or affinity with his own intelHgent interest, should
take precedence. He will have to say *'no" oftener
than '^yes." He will get more criticism than gratitude ;
yet he must take it all good-naturedly and continue to
give. For complaint, ingratitude, misunderstanding, is
the price every giver has to pay for giving not where it
is easiest and most popular; but where his judgment,
interest and location make it possible to do most good
and least harm.
Promiscuous, indiscriminate giving almost always does
far more harm than good. The benefactor himself,
as well as his beneficiaries, is dear to Good Will and is
justified in protecting himself against perpetual impor-
tunity, and the damage that giving without careful
investigation into need, character and efficiency is
almost sure to do. A Httle given discriminatingly and
wisely is much more acceptable than much given promis-
cuously and foolishly. The preacher, at the same time
that he trains his wealthy and poor alike to give as an
inescapable part of their sacrifice to Good Will, must
do all in his power to protect them from irresponsible
agents, lazy loafers, organizations that beg money and
152 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
maintain officers for obsolete or fantastic ends, and
institutions that seek endowment in order to grow
bigger rather than to be content with doing better
the modest task to which their present funds are ad-
equate.
The sacrifice of the Christian soldier, in addition to
those which are inherent in the profession, and which
every soldier must make, is the repression of all mahce
toward those whom he fights. Good Will permits no
*'Song of hate"; but requires that the hands be out-
stretched in helpfulness to the enemy the instant he
surrenders. As long as evil men and nations bring on
unjust wars, good men and nations must stand ready
to fight in self-defence and in defence of humanity and
civiHzation : and while Good Will sets limits to hate
and mahce it sets none to the energy and efficiency with
which unavoidable war while it lasts shall be prosecuted.
A man or nation, however, that fights where arbitration
is a practicable substitute for war, fails utterly of the
sacrificial spirit which is essential to fellowship in Good
Will.
The writer and the artist are called to sacrifice the
easy gain and cheap fame which can be had by any writer
or artist of mediocre abihty who will play on the preju-
dice or inflame the passions of bhnd and brutal men.
THE COST OF GOOD WILL*. SACRIFICE 1 53
Fame and gain come to the true artist and author;
but there are stages in their careers when they must
take less of these for the sake of more beauty, truth,
purity and love. Apart from such sacrifice, actual at
some time, potential at all times, no poet, painter,
sculptor, can be spiritually great.
This however is not to say that harm to some may
not be part, and a legitimate and inevitable part, of
strong, brave handling of unpleasant facts. If the
creative God in his Good Will permits incidental evil,
as we well know he does, the creative artist and author
cannot expect to escape the same conditions and the
same necessity. Evil that is not chosen for its own sake,
but accepted as the condition of greater good on the
whole is no more culpable in the human artist than in
the divine. This limitation on the sacrifice of artist
and author leaves him all the freedom in his art a great
artist needs and a good artist wants.
Sacrifice is an element in all personal relations. The
deeper the relation, the higher the sacrifice. A friend
is a second self : he doubles our joys and multiplies our
interests. But his problems at the same time become
our problems : his burdens our burdens : his disabilities
our disabilities : his failings our failings : to be shared
in sympathy, and removed by helpfulness. Friendship
154 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
that seeks only gain is not friendship, but selfishness
posing in friendship's attire. The preacher must hold
his people up to this sacrificial side of their friendships
and affections.
The lover who lives and loves in Good Will must
sacrifice all gratifications of passion that are inconsistent
with the orderly and decent life of family and society;
that would rob woman of her self-respect and social
standing, and children of their birthright of physical
health in a pure and happy home. In youth, and in the
bachelorhood prolonged by the necessity of getting an
economic footing before a family can be supported, this
sacrifice, where the opportunities for indulgence are wide
open and importunate ; where strain of work is intense ;
and hours of leisure are either empty or filled with recre-
ations that are suggestive and stimulative of passion,
this sacrifice often seems a very heavy one to pay, day
after day, year after year, through the period when
physical vigor is at its maximum. Good Will however
requires it : on no easier terms can Christian fellowship,
and the complete self-respect that goes with it, be had.
All honor to the splendid fellows, more numerous in
America to-day than anywhere else in the world, or ever
before, who have the strength and self-control to pay
that heavy price ! They are God's chosen ones who
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 55
bear the brunt of civilization's battle with our unelimi-
nated brutaUty.
In our admiration and our sympathy we must never
forget or let them forget, that love in all its expressions
is intrinsically good, not evil : and we must work by
hospitality, social centers, wholesome and happy oppor-
tunities for intimacy between young men and young
women to make Hfe before marriage as normal as possible,
and early marriage the privilege of as many as possible.
It is not love or passion, or the natural attraction of the
sexes for each other that we are called upon to sacrifice ;
but its cruel perversions. To pure love that blesses
all it touches there is no Hmit set by God's Good Will or
man's just laws.
When friendship and love pass into marriage and
found the family, the joy and gladness of life reach their
highest point. Well-married husbands and wives come
closest to heaven. But with the gladness come sorrows :
with the joy, and as its counterpart, come the greatest
sacrifices one is ever called on to make : harder in some
respects even than the sacrifice of the soldier when he
enlists for war. For when two persons rightly marry,
each gives up not only exclusive ownership in the income
of his property: but himself as a self-sufficient inde-
pendent being. Henceforth, his property, however the
156 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
legal title may run, is common property : his inter-
ests are predominantly common interests : his Ufe is
a common life : what is good for both is the aim of each.
Expenditures of time, money, strength : indulgences
in amusements and recreation: risks in enterprise and
investment which before were pardonable or even praise-
worthy, now in competition with common interests
and responsibilities become undesirable and even cul-
pable. The glory of the new conjunct life condemns
pretty much all that is exclusive in the old individualistic
life. Both the man and the woman have become not
merely new creatures; but one new creature in whom
neither retains the old self.
The ideal of this relation is to have all things in com-
mon : talking over expenditures, undertakings, pleas-
ures, duties, until the will of both is expressed in
every act and interest of each. The next best thing,
often the best practicable, is that the mutual interest
shall be acknowledged once for all in general terms:
and then by allowances of money : free disposal of time :
liberty in forming circles of acquaintance : opportunity
for all kinds of social life : each shall trust the other, and
be trusted in turn, to work out the details of such indi-
vidual self-expression as shall enrich the common Hfe:
and to renounce such ambitions, whether of clubs, or
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 1 57
dissipations, or speculations, as are merely divisive and
tangential : taking one out of the family life in a way
or to an extent inconsistent with enriched and enriching
return.
The preacher should make his people appreciate,
expect and prepare for this strain of readjustment as
an inevitable part of the blessedness of married life.
And in individual cases that seek or will accept his
pastoral counsel he should help them and hold them to
this inevitable sacrifice as the noble and costly side of
the relation which he expects them to be too strong and
brave to shirk in selfish querulousness, or evade in cow-
ardly divorce.
Our greatest, if not our deepest blessings, come
through our country: its institutions, its laws, its
Hberties, its protection of person and property. Here
again sacrifices commensurate with these great boons are
required of every person who worthily receives them.
Cheerful payment of one's full fair share of taxes;
generous devotion of time and strength to the formation
and promulgation of sound policies; faithful work at
the primaries and the polls ; readiness at personal cost
to seek and hold office oneself ; help to put the right men
into office and to keep the wrong men out, are the least
a man of Good Will should do as a citizen.
158 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Finally as the crown and consummation of this practi-
cal devotion, day after day, year after year, in times of
peace, comes the duty and privilege and glory of giving
his life, or the life of husband or son, to the service of
his country in just and righteous war. The man of
Good Will however must rise higher than nationahsm
in his patriotism. President Wilson at the close of his
message in December, 191 5, called attention to the new
era on which we have entered. It is the era in which
we have had the greatness of world-concerns thrust
upon our attention. We cannot think world-thoughts
worthily without being prepared for whatever sacri-
fice our world-responsibiHties may call. Not in readi-
ness for aggression or insolent interference in the affairs
of other nations: but in sympathy for all who are in
disorder and oppression, we must be strong enough
to render our reasonable and proportionate service;
by peace wherever peaceful arbitration is possible :
by war wherever righteous war is unavoidable. The
nation that lives up to the Gospel of Good Will must
accept the perpetual sacrifice which world-wide responsi-
bility involves. On no easier or cheaper terms can any
nation rise from nominal to vital Christianity. The
more we prepare for war in this spirit, the more zeal-
ous shall we be to avoid war, and wherever possible to
THE COST OF GOOD WILL: SACRIFICE 159
establish justice through arbitration and treaty. Here
as everywhere sacrifice is not made for itself. The
fearful sacrifice of war is one to be prepared for at all
times : but actually to be made only when every device
of patience, remonstrance, arbitration, and negotiation
has proved unavaihng. To have military power is
a national necessity : to use it save as a last desperate
resort is a national disgrace.
The Gospel of Good Will requires the Nation to bring
reasonable military preparedness to the altar: but it
bids the nation search earnestly in the thicket for the
tangled ram of such conciliation as will save the actual
sacrifice of its sons on the red altar of war. Every
Christian nation must stand ready to do what Belgium
did in 1914. But we hope and pray that the spread of
the Gospel of Good Will may render the actual offering
of so costly a sacrifice never again a national necessity.
Sacrifice in every case is the obverse of service : the
price we have to pay in private loss for personal or
social gain. That price must be paid in each case up
to the Hmit where more sacrifice would involve less
effective service ; and less efficiency of the servant for
future service. All the wealth and popularity that can
be maintained without compromise of principle it is the
Christian's duty to secure and maintain. For Good
l6o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Will includes him along with his country, his constitu-
ents, his cause : and justifies him in taking for himself
such remuneration and support as is not inconsistent
with the best good of others and of all.
The supreme sacrifice is that of Jesus Christ: and
it was made, Kke our sacrifices, in loyalty to his vocation
and his personal relationships. He felt called to preach
the Gospel of Good Will in a community and an age
where formaHsm, legalism, Pharisaism were on the
throne. To preach effectively this Gospel under these
conditions was to bring down on his head the hatred,
jealousy and spite of those who were wedded to and
profiting by these false gospels. By keeping quiet,
or by confining his ministry to remote rural regions, he
could have escaped the enmity of the rulers at the
nation's capital. Such a policy of self-protection, how-
ever, would have made him false to his calHng ; unfaithful
to the unshepherded sheep on whose superstitions the
formalistic wolves were all too prone to prey. He
refused to save himself by sacrificing the truth, and
sacrificing his fellow-men who were entitled to hear
the truth from his lips, and see it in his life. In fidelity
to his vocation as the Son of Man, the typical repre-
sentative of humanity, the Savior of the world, he pro-
claimed his truth boldly, aggressively, persistently;
THE COST OF GOOD WILL : SACRIFICE l6l
and sacrificed his life to do it. So long as he could teach
it more effectively by Kving than by dying, he post-
poned his trip to Jerusalem ; and escaped out of the
midst of his enemies. But when open attack at the cost
of his Hfe was the most effective witness against error
and for truth, he did not flinch from drinking the full
cup of torture, ignominy, and death. True to his
vocation as revealer and teacher of the highest spiritual
truth, he laid down his life. For the full enjoyment of
that Gospel, and its diffused spirit and multiplied fruits
throughout the world, we are indebted to him and to
his sacrifice. The preacher is abundantly justified
in making that sacrifice the central theme in his preach-
ing, provided he preaches it not merely as a sacrifice
made once for all to appease an estranged God; but a
sacrifice we must all repeat in faithful and heroic devo-
tion to our daily tasks and social relationships.
VI
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL: THE CHRISTIAN
VIRTUES
"My religion is very simple. I love God and all my brothers."
Charles Rann Kennedy, The Servant in the House, p. 22.
These words of our text are spoken by Manson, who
represents Christ. He comes into the Vicar's household
in the disguise of a servant, and in the regular course
of his service, and the conversations incidental to it,
separates in that household the sheep from the goats.
The text contains his separating principle. If Good
Will for all your brothers is your aim you go to his right
hand. If honors and emoluments, promotions and
preferments for yourself are your aim, then even though
those honors and emoluments happen to be ecclesiasti-
cal, your place is on the left, and your destination the
outer darkness.
There is in the play only one hopelessly lost soul —
only one that even Christ can't save. He is James
Ponsonby Makeshyfte, D.D., the Most Reverend the
162
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 63
Lord Bishop of Lancashire. And why can't Christ
save him? Why does he turn him out of the house?
Because his real motto is: ''Give as Httle, and grab as
much as we can" ; because there are spheres of human
Good which he despises; because he is unwilling to
sit at the table with a working-man ; because he fails
to include in his idea of good the welfare of the work-
ing-man ; because his will is no bigger than his personal
interests, and the dignities and emoluments of his eccle-
siastical office. A man can't be as little as that, and
share in the fellowship of Manson, Christ. For Christ's
fellowship is not primarily an affair of learned lore,
stained-glass windows, and ecclesiastical millinery: all
of which the Bishop has in abundance : it is genuine
love of God and all his brothers, which the Bishop
utterly lacks.
The Vicar, the Reverend William Smythe, is half
lost, half saved : and in the end is saved so as by fire.
He has climbed to ecclesiastical preferment by taking
unfair advantage of his poor brother whom he drove
to a Hfe of dissipation : and by listening to the false
and foolish advice of his ambitious wife, who loves him
more than she loves God, and is more anxious to see him
win a great reputation as scholar and preacher and
churchman than to see him doing the greatest good to
1 64 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
his people. There is this sign of genuineness about him,
however, that he heartily despises the Bishop, and can't
endure to have the old hypocrite around poisoning the
air of his house. Under Hanson's influence he becomes
sincerely sorry for the wrong he has done his dissolute
brother, Robert Smith, a humble scavenger. In the
end he shakes off the selfishly ambitious influence of his
too fond wife, joins his humble brother in doing the
disagreeable and dirty work of cleaning out the church
drain, because that happens to be what the people really
need to have done. His repudiation of his wife's bale-
ful influence is the turning point. She cares nothing
for his real usefulness, everything for his preferment,
as comes out in their conversation.
Auntie
{Now thoroughly afraid.) What do you mean by the
truth, William?
Vicar
I mean this : What is the building of this church to
you? Are you so mightily interested in architecture,
in clerical usefulness, in the furtherance of God's work ?
Auntie
I am interested in your work, William. Do you take
me for an atheist?
by-products of good will 165
Vicar
No : far worse — for an idolater !
Auntie
William —
Vicar
What else but idolatry is this precious husband-wor-
ship you have set up in your heart — you and all the
women of your kind ? You barter away your own souls
in the service of it : you build up your idols in the fashion
of your own respectable desires : you struggle silently
amongst yourselves, one against another, to push your
own god foremost in the miserable httle pantheon of
prigs and hypocrites you have created !
Auntie
(Roused.) It is for your own good we do it !
Vicar
Our own good ! What have you made of me ? You
have plucked me down from whatever native godhead
I had by gift of heaven, and hewed and hacked me into
the semblance of your own idolatrous imagination ! By
God, it shall go on no longer ! If you have made me less
than a man, at least I will prove myself to be a priest !
Auntie
Do you call it a priest's work to —
1 66 the gospel of good will
Vicar
It is my work to deliver you and me from the bondage
of lies ! Can't you see, woman, that God and Mammon
are about us, fighting for our souls?
Auntie
{Determinedly.) Listen to me, William, listen to
me —
Vicar
I have listened to you too long !
Auntie
You would always take my counsel before —
Vicar
All that is done with ! I am resolved to be a free man
from this hour — free of lies, free of love if needs be,
free even of you, free of everything that clogs and hin-
ders me in the work I have to do ! I will do my own
deed, not yours !
Auntie
{With deadly quietness.) If I were not certain of one
thing, I could never forgive you for those cruel words:
William, this is some madness of sin that has seized you :
it is the temptation of the devil !
Vicar
It is the call of God !
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 67
Yet even the ambitious wife is saved after much
protestation. When the Vicar finally joins his humble
brother, takes off his coat and sets about the dirty and
dangerous work of cleaning out the drain, she is brought
to give him her blessing, "God's might go with you,
William! Accept him, Christ!" and she is last seen
taking with one hand her husband's hand, and with her
other hand the hand of his humble and formerly wronged
and despised scavenger brother, so that the three form
a kind of cross.
The real church Manson or Christ is building, the
church Robert, the drain-digger, belongs to, the church
to which he and Manson win his Vicar brother and his
ambitious wife, ''ain't psalms, and 'ymns and old maids'
tea parties, mind you"; it is "no dead pile of stones
and unmeaning timber; no aggregation of Gothic
arches and stained-glass windows."
"When you enter it you hear a sound as of some mighty
poem chanted. Listen long enough, and you will learn
that it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of
the nameless music of men's souls — that is, if you have
ears. If you have eyes, you will presently see the
church itself — a looming mystery of many shapes
and shadows, leaping sheer from floor to dome; the
work of no ordinary builder !
1 68 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
" The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of he-
roes : the sweet human fiesh of men and women is moulded
about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable : the faces of
Httle children laugh out from every cornerstone: the
terrible spans and arches of it are the joined hands of
comrades; and up in the heights and spaces there are
inscribed the numberless musings of all the dreamers of
the world. It is yet building — building and built
upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep dark-
ness: sometimes in blinding light: now beneath the
burden of unutterable anguish : now to the tune of a
great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of
thunder. Sometimes in the silence of the night-time
one may hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades
at work up in the dome — the comrades that have
climbed ahead."
Robert Smith, the dissipated scavenger brother,
understands and is drawn to that church. "I think
I begin to understand you, comride, especially that bit
abaht the 'ammerins an' the harches. S'pose there's
drain 'ands wanted in that there church o' yours?"
He goes in to dig the drains. With all his bad record
he has two redeeming traits. He is tender to his long-
lost, new-found daughter, and he works — works for
the good he can do. "I work — and work well ; that's
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 69
more than some of 'em can say — and I don't get much
money for it either." When reminded by the Vicar
of the stench and horror and darkness of his drain dig-
ging, he replies, ''What's it matter, if the comrides
up above 'av' Hght an' joy an' a breath of 'olesome air
to sing by? 'Igh in the dome, the 'ammerins of the
comrides as 'av' climbed aloft ! " And when the Vicar
in deepest penitence says, ''I call myself nothing: I
am nothing — less than nothing in all this living world,"
Robert, proud of the place in the service of the whole
his humble vocation gives him, exclaims, ''But I
call myself summat — I'm the Drain-Man, that's what
I am." His place and function of service, his humble
share in doing God's Good Will, makes him brother of
Manson, the Servant in the House — Christ.
That is a Gospel every right-minded man in the world
accepts as soon as he clearly sees it. Of course it is
hard to give a twenty-minute sermon the clearness and
force of a well-acted two- and- a-half -hours play. But
if we take the same theme ; show the greatness and
glory of Good Will however humbly done; we shall
get something of that response which this great play
wherever presented has evoked. Good Will, whether in
a play or sermon, is the only thing big enough to make
a thoughtful man give all his little self possesses in happy
170 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
whole-hearted exchange. All the Christian virtues flow
out of this love for God and all one's brothers: this
devotion to their real good regardless of the honors
and emoluments one's service to them may involve.
Christian character, and all its constituent virtues,
are by-products of Hving in Good Will. To aim at
character directly; to cultivate the Christian virtues
like Benjamin FrankHn, giving one day to patience,
another to chastity, another to generosity, is to miss
altogether the Christian point of view, and become a
conceited prig. If we trust and serve Good Will, all
these graces will come trooping after us. But if sought
directly they fly beyond our reach.
The most characteristic Christian virtue is modesty;
or as the New Testament calls it meekness, humility,
poverty of spirit, not being puffed up. One who sees
how vast is Good Will; what splendid achievements
it is making ; and how much remains to be done ; will
come to see how small and how imperfect is his little
contribution to the great whole. A young Christian,
like a novice at any work or sport, may be filled with
self-importance, and say and do things to show off his
newly acquired accomplishments. But it is the sure
mark of the novice — this self-centered, self-conscious
air of importance and superiority. He who has come
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 171
to admire Good Will in Christ and his fellow- Christians,
and has learned to measure himself by that perfect
standard, will understand how far his best achieve-
ments fall short of it; and will be modest as a matter
of course ; as the inevitable corollary of the plain fact
of his manifold shortcomings. Whoever like the Bishop
in the play is proud and puffed up, has failed to see Good
Will and his own true place far below its high require-
ments. To cultivate modesty directly is impossible :
for the more we think we have of it, the less modest we
are. But Good Will, by its contrast with our imperfect
wills, induces modesty. The preacher will teach his
people to measure themselves and each other by that
searching standard.
Purity of heart is likewise directly unattainable.
The more we dwell on it, the more we are conscious by
contrasts of the lusts over which purity is the victory.
Dwelling on it even for the purpose of preaching it to
others is spiritually ultra-hazardous. The more we
think about purity the less pure we become. As Pascal
says, ''Few persons think of modesty modestly, or of
chastity chastely." On the contrary, if we live in Good
Will for all men and women, out of that thought will
flow a reverent and tender regard for all that concerns
their welfare : most tender and most reverent in refer-
172 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ence to those sacred instincts and functions on which
the perpetuation of the race through the union of the
sexes is so beautifully based. The Christian preacher
will seek purity for his people, not by exhortation to it,
but by deepening their reverence for Good Will in its
provision for love as the fountain of life.
Gentleness is a sickly, sentimental affair when culti-
vated for its own sake ; and marks the mollycoddle and
the sissy. Hard, coarse, rough brutality is more manly.
But the gentleness that comes of keeping before one's
eyes and in one's heart Good Will is strong and firm.
It refuses to hurt another's feelings, not from fear or
weakness, but because that other person is a child of
the Father, a brother or sister of Christ, an actual or
potential agent of Good Will. To harm another by
word or deed is to hurt what is dear to oneself — a stupid
contradiction. From one in whom Good Will dwells,
no harsh act, no cross look, no cruel word will come:
because such acts and looks and words contradict the
Good Will which is one's inmost principle of life. To
be sure we have lapses here more than elsewhere; for
our looks and tones and acts reflect too often not what
we permanently mean to be ; but what we lapse into in
unguarded moments. Yet if these be promptly fol-
lowed by repentance and the request for forgiveness,
'BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 73
they cannot destroy the gentleness which is what every
disciple of Good Will seeks to express. The preacher,
then, will preach not gentleness directly ; but the devo-
tion to Good Will out of which gentleness inevitably
flows.
Charitableness Hkewise, when cultivated directly,
is an easy-going, indifferent, almost effeminate quality.
But when it comes as the result of living in Good Will
for others, it is at once keenly critical and kindly merci-
ful toward their faults and failings. The Christian sees
in his brother's failing a defeat of Good Will for him :
and he cannot help being sorry, and hoping for better
things next time. He cannot rejoice in another's iniq-
uity ; both he and his brother are included in the Good
Will which it is his precious privilege to serve. Good
Will therefore is the seed of which charitableness is the
fruit.
Cheerfulness, or as the New Testament calls it, hope,
is another Christian grace which the preacher cannot
profitably exhort his people to cultivate, but which will
surely follow wherever Good Will is preached persua-
sively. Accident, sickness, poverty, loneliness, unpopu-
larity, failure, sin, bereavement, death — one or more
of these evils confront us most of the time : no one
can escape them altogether. Earthquake, tornado, vol-
174 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
cano, conflagration, flood, insect pests, war, unemploy-
ment, over-production, imperfect distribution, robbery,
theft, failure of employers or debtors, breakdown of
character of those in whom our lives are bound up,
events wholly or largely beyond our foresight and con-
trol, bring upon us suffering and loss. If we are merely
children of nature, desiring the good things these mis-
fortunes take away, then we shall be at the mercy of
these accidents, bereft and comfortless.
The Christian preacher, however, offers the sufferer
a chance to serve and share Good Will. Here in human
history, in human hearts, in human homes, in Christ
and the spirit of Christian men and women, in ourselves
so far as we are Christian, we see, and taste, and touch
and handle a Good Will which would not willingly sub-
ject those whom it loves to suffering. This is the best
thing we know in the world. Therefore we believe
it is the purpose for which the world was made. We
know that we cannot shield those we love from all these
incidental and accidental evils. We do not know or
believe that God could do it in a world like this, where
finite forces follow their own unvarying laws, and finite
wills follow their own always imperfect and often per-
verse devices. Good Will is not omnipotent in the
sense that it can produce any specific result it pleases,
, BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 75
regardless of the conditions of life in a rational and law-
abiding world. Prayer which rests on and fosters that
delusion is perverse ; fatal to true worship and rational
comfort. If getting what we happen to want out of
an arbitrarily omnipotent God is the kind of comfort
his people crave, then the frank and honest thing for the
preacher to say is that there is no such comfort to be
had ; and the persons who are weak and foolish enough
to ask for it, would not be worthy of it, even if it were
to be had. No : God's Good Will is conditioned by the
rational laws of its own uniform and beneficent opera-
tion. It can achieve supernatural results; but they
are supernatural in the sense of being above what the
merely natural heart of man could accomplish ; not in
being above what law will permit.
Good Will is still at work in the world and at war with
evil, even when evil strikes us most severely. It is
blessing others, even when in some few particular re-
spects the general order it permits hurts us : and we
can rejoice in its blessing of others ; help it on ; and so
share its outgoing to others ; be its agents ; have it in
our hearts. And if we are fruitful, and keep on having
Good Will toward others ; in due time others who have
Good Will, will recognize a kindred spirit in us and
welcome us as brothers and sisters in its fellowship and
176 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
service. Giving it to others ; receiving it from others in
return; we shall live more and more in it; and thus
become more and more sure of it. Whatever accident
or evil man may take away, this experience of being
both object and subject of Good Will remains, and grows.
We can be for Good Will at all times : and we can be
assured that Good Will at all times is for us: and if
that be for us, and we for it; nothing that happens
can be effectively against us, or separate us from our
fellowship with God, with Christ and with our fellow-
Christians. We can join hands in cleaning out the drains,
like the saved souls in the play : and in doing it we can
be as happy as Robert Smith.
To be sure this fellowship in Good Will cannot readily
be extemporized in time of trouble. Those who are
not ready when the invitation comes cannot go in to
the feast. Those who desired only things, and lose those
things they desired, lose all ; and naturally are comfort-
less. But those who, with the things they had, also
had Good Will as the spirit of their Hves; doing its
service, sharing with others its fellowship, have some-
thing so much better than things, while they have things,
that the best part of their life remains when the things
they had are by accident or misfortune taken away.
To purchase this pearl of great price they are willing to
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 77
part with all their other possessions. No misfortunes
can leave him bereft who keeps Good Will in his own
heart; and shares with and receives from others this
same precious treasure.
Sickness may take away certain powers and forms
through which one has expressed and enjoyed Good
Will : but it cannot rob one who really has Good Will
in his own heart, and rejoices to recognize it in the
hearts of his fellows, of this his most valued possession.
Indeed sickness often brings out within one a devotion
to and appreciation of Good Will which health, and
the absorption in routine health permitted, had failed
to develop. Health can express Good Will in most
ways so much more effectively than sickness, either
acute or chronic, that one who has it in his heart
will take every reasonable precaution to be well and
keep well. Yet when sickness comes, whether from
exposure, or overstrain, or contagion, or one's own folly,
he will find in more patient cheerfulness; in increased
gratitude ; in deepened tenderness, ways in which he may
in part make up, and sometimes more than make up,
for the forms of serving Good Will which the sickness
has rendered temporarily or permanently impossible.
The rest, trust, peace, and patience which Good Will
imparts to the heart in which it dwells, does much
178 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
to hasten recovery and avert disease. A man or woman
who regards himself or herself as the son or daughter,
agent and embodiment of Good Will in the world, with
some of its specific work to do and love to manifest,
will be so regular in exercise, temperate in diet, restful
in sleep, moderate in work, that he or she will not have
a twentieth part of the ailments that overtake the
man or woman who is bent on self-indulgence, or per-
sonal ambition, or social preferment, or mere business
success. Christianity of this sort, altogether apart
from any special theories about the nature of disease or
the unreahty of matter, is the greatest health-giver
and life-preserver in the world. Good Will is a Gospel
which, if faithfully preached and practiced, for the most
part keeps its adherents well and strong ; and yet when
sickness does overtake them makes them patient and
cheerful to bear it.
The Christian preacher must also show his people
how to be contented in whatever state they are. Pov-
erty has its consolations for one who is in Good Will.
The Christian, to be sure, can express more Good Will
with ample furniture of fortune than without it. He can
keep workmen steadily and remuneratively employed :
educate his children : support good causes and reforms :
help the poor: provide for the old age of himself and
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 79
his family so much better with money than without
it, that for the sake of these ends, all of which are
precious in the sight of Good Will, he will earn and save
and invest all that he can consistently with the claims
that come upon him from day to day. Yet just because
he seeks and holds his wealth not for itself ; and not for
himself considered as a selfish individual ; but for Good
Will, and for himself as its agent, the best part of his
wealth — the end it serves — will remain with him,
even if he fails to secure the wealth ; or if, after securing
it, he loses it. Good Will, though in some ways it can
be better served by the rich, in other ways can be
effectively served by the poor. Sympathy, affection,
appreciation are often better gifts and better services
than those money can buy ; and these the poor are often
able to give more generously and naturally than the rich.
The preacher will teach his people that if they really
live in and for Good Will, riches or poverty, though
not as the Stoics would say indifferent, is yet a minor
matter. Wealth honestly gained and justly and gener-
ously used is preferable, and on the whole more service-
able; but poverty is also endurable, even welcome, as
developing sympathies and charities which wealth too
often stifles and stunts.
Finally the Christian who lives in Good Will develops
l8o THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
an efficiency, an economy, a serviceableness which, not
always but frequently; not universally but generally,
makes him friends ; finds him employment ; brings him
recognition, help, support ; and tends to take away his
poverty. All these things Good Will tends to add unto
the man or woman who cheerfully, diligently, faith-
fully, generously gives to its service what he has, be that
little or much. Robert in the play gets his daughter,
his brother, and even his formerly supercilious sister-in-
law in return for the humble service he renders.
The man who is trying to do right in a world that is
going wrong is often like Elijah afi&icted with a sense of
loneliness. It is the preacher's privilege to show him
that he is serving, not an unrealized ideal, but God's
slowly coming, surely conquering Good Will, which
generations before him have served ; which millions of
his contemporaries are serving, and which generations
after him will serve ; and that he has a great and grow-
ing companionship with Christ and an innumerable
company of fellow- Christians. Nor will the minister
permit this companionship in Good Will to remain per-
manently one-sided. He will make sure that this man is
recognized, appreciated, befriended, loved, by some other
sons and daughters of Good Will, and welcomed into the
intimacy of a friendship founded on this common bond.
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL l8l
The man who lives in and works for Good Will at
times gets criticised, makes himself unpopular: and is
persecuted for righteousness' sake. All manner of evil
is said against him falsely ; because there are sure to be
persons with whose interests his service of Good Will
fails to coincide. All the ultra-conservatives in politics
and religion ; all the thoughtless and reckless radicals ;
all the grafters; all the selfishly sensitive; all the
sillily sentimental ; all the hypocrites ; all the Scribes
and Pharisees ; all the Bishop Makeshyftes, at one time
or another are bound to be against the man who disin-
terestedly and conscientiously makes Good Will his
principle of conduct. Woe to him if these people speak
well of him ; for it is a sure sign that Good Will is feebly
apprehended and timidly performed. To be alone and
to be reviled is hard. But to be sure that one is saying
and doing what Good Will, and all its honest and en-
lightened sons, desire one to say and do, is not to be
alone; but to have the support and approval of the
best company on earth and in heaven. Living in such
high and wide fellowship, one can stand the criticism
and condemnation of those who are out of it ; or only im-
perfectly and unintelligently in it. Here again, usually
but not always, in the long run the man who consist-
ently does the Good Will soon or late comes to have
1 82 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
his integrity recognized; comes to be loved by those
who share with him the same high service; and even
to be respected by the very men whom he disinterestedly
opposes ; and who from self-interest continue to oppose
and maltreat him. It is the preacher's richest privilege
to give the man who is persecuted for righteousness'
sake the assurance and the experience of this divine and
human support.
Failure is much harder to bear than criticism. To
work long and hard ; to do one's best ; and then from
one's own miscalculation, or defect, or blunder; or
from the ingratitude, greed or treachery of others to
fail of the result at which one aims, is very hard to bear.
If that is the whole story it is almost unendurable. Yet
to the man who lives in Good Will that is not the whole
story. He may fail to secure the specific object at
which he aimed; but the preacher stands before him
and by his side to assure him that he cannot fail to be
in Good Will, unless by his own fault he falls out of it.
The effort he puts forth counts as just so much added
strength to the cause of Good Will in the world. The
training acquired in this defeat ; the influence exerted ;
the protest registered ; will all be helpful in the renewal
of the same general campaign at other points and at
later dates. No effort put forth in the service of Good
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 1 83
Will can ever be lost. As the location of the ball on the
gridiron at any given time, and the final score, are the
resultants of all the efforts put forth on both sides ; on
the side of the losers as well as on the side of the winners ;
so the preacher will tell men Good Will is stronger, and
its triumph sooner, in consequence of every ounce of
energy, every unit of resolution, every atom of intelli-
gence any defeated man has put forth in its behalf.
Many battles may be lost ; many soldiers may be slain ;
many captains may be vanquished : but the campaign,
the cause. Good Will goes marching on: and every
faithful fighter in its behalf; every honest worker in
its service, has his share in the conquest he helps to
achieve. Even his partial and temporary failure con-
tributes its part to hasten the eternal and total triumph.
And here too whoever keeps on fighting and working
in Good Will draws soon or late to his side supporters
and comrades with whose aid he makes his defeats
progressively less, and his victories increasingly fre-
quent.
Every man has defects and handicaps, makes blun-
ders, says and does foolish things of which he is heartily
ashamed. Yet if one is heartily devoted to Good Will,
and sure of his place in its favor, even his acute mistakes
and chronic failings cannot cast him down. Here or
1 84 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
there, again and again, he may be a discredit to himself
and to the Good Will he seeks to serve. But the
preacher is there by his side to tell him that Good Will is
so magnanimous ; its service is so varied ; that no man
is so awkward and clumsy, so stupid or ill- trained, so
inefficient and incompetent, but that on many sides and
in many ways outwardly, and altogether in his heart
inwardly, he can be its useful, honorable servant and
well-beloved son. The preacher will tell him that if a
man makes up his mind and sets his heart to count
oneness with Good Will the supreme thing for which he
cares ; the one thing on which he stakes his happiness :
he will find that no physical disabilities; no mental
weaknesses ; no social disqualifications ; no spiritual
dulness, can separate him from what he most desires.
The only disqualification that can exclude the humblest
from the wedding feast is the deliberate neglect to put
on the wedding garment that is freely offered to all
invited guests — the garment of Good Will.
In addition to our own sins and the sorrow and shame
they bring, we have to bear the effects of the sins of
others : the sins of a dishonest partner ; the sins of an
unfaithful or drunken husband ; the sins of a dissolute
son or a wayward daughter ; the sins of competitors
who make honest dealing almost financially suicidal;
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 185
the sins of slanderers that destroy our good name ; the
sins of employers who break down our health ; the sins
of rulers that misrepresent us and plunge us into extrav-
agance, or debt, or war.
If we are mere children of nature, craving the good
things of which the sins of others deprive us, we shall
be soured, embittered, dejected, comfortless. But the
preacher is ordained to assure us that if we beUeve in
Good Will, working for the good of us and of others;
if we enter eagerly, generously, bravely into its service,
we shall have its fellowship and cheer ; and that is so
much deeper and stronger and sweeter than anything
any wrong-doer can take from us that we shall be opti-
mists even in an environment in which to all outward
appearance everything makes for pessimism.
The wives of drunken and brutal husbands ; the hus-
bands of insincere and ostentatious wives ; the employees
of heartless corporations and the employers of shiftless
help ; merchants who are crushed by cruel competition ;
investors who are fleeced by unscrupulous manipulators ;
friends who are alienated by mischief-makers; lovers
who are separated by worldly parents or gossiping mis-
chief-makers : — all who suffer unjustly from the wrong-
doing of others are welcome to enter through the open
door of disinterested devotion the blessed fellowship
1 86 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
of Good Will, and of all its sincere, simple, straight-
forward disciples. Here is comfort free for all; which
Good Will alone can give; and which no other man's
evil will can ever take away. Whoever wishes to Hve
in Good Will can have what he wishes for the asking.
''Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find;
knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every
one that asketh receive th; and he that seeketh findeth ;
and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." Under-
stood not of a future, far-off heaven; but of a present
and intimate fellowship in Good Will, this and a host of
kindred Scripture invitations become self-evident on
the lips of the preacher who has the insight and tact to
utter them at the right time and in the right way to the
afficted persons who need to hear them.
Faith in immortality, grounded in faith in Good Will,
is a distinctively Christian grace. Bereavement is the
severest of the sufferings to which we are subjected, and
for this the preacher must provide a comfort which is
at once genuine and noble. Union based on mutual
sharing of Good Will is the highest, hoHest, sweetest
thing we know here on earth : and the more we ap-
preciate it ; the more we live by it, in it, and for it, the
surer we grow that it is the end for which the world
exists and for which we were born ; and that the sepa-
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 187
ration of death cannot utterly defeat and destroy it.
Proof in the sense of physical evidence of physical sur-
vival, so tliat the physical order would be incomplete
and contradictory without it, there is none. But we
have moral and spiritual evidence of immortaUty in the
sense that our highest and hoHest affections ; our deepest
and tenderest aspirations ; our bravest and noblest sacri-
fices would be put to permanent confusion and futility if
what we hold so precious and strive so hard to be worthy
of were withheld. In that case we should be better,
kinder, braver, than the world of which we are a part.
Good Will as reflected in human hearts would be left un-
related to a kindred Good Will at the heart of things ; a
mere temporary sport of chance coming from and going
to an order inferior to itself, yet triumphing over it.
This the greatest spirits of our race, those who have
most fully entered into and worked for Good Will, stead-
fastly refuse to believe. Expectation of eternal service
and fellowship in Good Will gives him who has it such
a dignity and worth ; such a strength and calm, that
the experience of it in ourselves, or the appreciation of
it in others, goes far to prove it ''too fair to turn out
false." Most persons who, like Jesus and Paul, have
suffered much and advanced far in this enlarging and
uplifting fellowship simply cannot believe in, any more
l88 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
than they can will, the extinction of a life and love so
precious. This assurance of faith, attested by the vast
majority of the faithful, it is the preacher's honest privi-
lege to offer for the comfort of all who mourn the loss
through death of those whom the fellowship of Good
Will had ennobled and endeared.
Our own certain death, if we are living in this faith,
gives us no anxiety and no alarm. There as here, for-
ever as now, we serenely trust Good Will to make a
heaven which it will be our privilege to serve and share.
For a heaven not upbuilt by the free and harmonious
effort of many sons and servants of Good Will would
be no heaven : and with no such work to do and cause
to serve, neither Good Will, nor our wills a sharers of
it, would have worth or meaning. For, as the ideaHsts
teU us, to be or to exist at all means to fulfil purpose;
and a purpose that makes the present Hfe noble, and
requires eternity for its fulfilment, is the pledge and
prophecy of a blessed immortality.
In addition to the idealistic evidence that immor-
tality in Good Will is the only satisfactory fulfilment of
the world-purpose, there is the pragmatic evidence
that whoever hath this hope in him purifieth himself
even as Good Will is pure. One cannot cherish the
anticipation of an eternal life of perfect Good Will, and
BY-PRODUCTS OF GOOD WILL 189
at the same time cherish malice and pride and cruelty
and greed and sloth.
This faith makes judgment automatic and inexorable.
In the clear transparency of the spiritual world those
who have Good Will are forever welcome to its fellow-
ship : those who have the lurking grudge, the mean
jealousy, the hollow insincerity, are automatically shut
out.
Pictorial representations of this automatic judg-
ment by Good Will, are found at the end of Plato's
" Gorgias," and in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment.
Phillips Brooks' sermon on "The Law of Liberty" also
states it beautifully and convincingly.
"By this law we shall be judged. How simple and
subhme it makes the judgment day ! We stand before
the great white throne and wait our verdict. We watch
the closed Hps of the Eternal Judge, and our hearts
stand still until those lips shall open and pronounce
our fate ; heaven or hell. The Hps do not open. The
Judge just lifts His hand and raises from each soul
before Him every law of constraint whose pressure
has been its education. He lifts the laws of constraint
and their results are manifest. The real intrinsic na-
ture of each soul leaps to the surface. Each soul's
law of liberty becomes supreme. And each soul, with-
I go THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
out one word of condemnation or approval, by its own
inner tendency, seeks its own place. They turn and
separate, father from child, brother from brother, wife
from husband, each with the old habitual restrictions
lifted off, turns to its own ; one by an inner power to the
right hand, another by a like power to the left; these
up to heaven, and these down to hell. Do we need
more? It needs no word, no smile, no frown. The
freeing of souls is the judging of souls. A liberated
nature dictates its own destiny."
A partial foretaste of this final judgment those who
live in Good Will achieve here and now, in the spiritual
discernment with which they joyfully recognize and are
recognized by a kindred Good Will in those of their
fellows who have it : and perceive and pity the absence
of it, and consequently the impossibility of spiritual
fellowship, in those who have it not.
VII
GOOD W^LL IN SOCIETY: REFORM
"We all love power — to be on the winning side. You cannot
help being there when you are fighting the slum, for it is the cause
of justice and right. How then can you lose? And what matters
it how you fare, your cause is bound to \\in. Every defeat in
such a fight is a step towards victory, taken in the right spirit.
In the end you will come out ahead. With a mother who prays,
a wife who fills the house with song, and the laughter of happy
children about me, all my dreams come true or coming true, why
should I not be content ? In fact I know no better equipment for
making them come true : faith in God to make all things possible
that are right: faith in man to get them done: fun enough in
between to keep them from spoiling or running off the track into
useless crankery. An extra good sprinkling of that!" Jacob A.
Riis, The Making of an American, pp. 424-425 : 431-432.
With these passages from the " Making of an Ameri-
can " for our text, we will go to the same happy warrior's
''The Battle with the Slum" for our lesson.
''The battle with the slum began the day civilization
recognized in it her enemy. It was a losing fight until
conscience joined forces with fear and self-interest against
191
192 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
it. When common sense and the golden rule obtain
among men as a rule of practice, it will be over.
^' The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but
the great changes which the nineteenth century saw, the
new industry, pohtical freedom, brought on an acute
attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too
many of us had supposed that, built as our common-
wealth was on universal suffrage, it would be proof
against the complaints that harassed older states ; but
in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that.
Having solemnly resolved that all men are created
equal and have certain inalienable rights, among them
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we shut our
eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was as if a
man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to
bed with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula
was all right, but merely repeating it worked no cure.
When, after a hundred years, we opened our eyes, it was
upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the working-
woman in our cities ; upon ' knee pants ' at forty cents
a dozen for the making ; upon the Potter's Field taking
tithe of our city life, ten per cent each year for the trench,
truly the Lost Tenth of the slum. Our country had
grown great and rich ; through our ports was poured food
for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets mul-
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 1 93
titudes huddled in ignorance and want. The foreign
oppressor had been vanquished, the fetters stricken from
the black man at home ; but his white brother, in his
bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a dis-
tinct note of menace. PoUtical freedom we had won ;
but the problem of helpless poverty, grown vast with the
added offscourings of the Old World, mocked us, unsolved.
Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently its stamp upon
the government of our cities, and it became the scandal
and the peril of our poHtical system.
''Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle
has got to be fought, and fought out. For it is one
thing or the other ; either we wipe out the slum, or it
wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It
cannot be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and
surrender means the end of government by the people.
We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when
the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall
look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth
Avenue.
"In the battle with the slums we win or we perish.
There is no middle way. We shall win, for we are not
letting things be the way our fathers did. But it will be
a running fight, and it is not going to be won in two years,
or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep on
o
194 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment
that waits upon the third and the fourth generation of
those who forget the brotherhood. As a man does in
deaHng with his brother so it is the way of God that his
children shall reap."
The slum is simply society's diseased tissue at its most
inflamed point. What Mr. Riis says of it is true of the
whole long list of poHtical, economic, social, and moral
and international reforms.
Society is imperfect. It is never a complete expres-
sion of Good Will. It is the resultant of Good Will on
the one side, and of resisting matter and hard himian
hearts on the other. There are usually two sides to a
social question ; and some truth on each side. There
are two ways of taking each side : one that is right and
one that is wrong. Ordinarily it is not the preacher's
business to tell his people which side of a debatable social
question they shall take : but to show them how to take
whichever side they join in the right and not in the wrong
way.
For instance the preacher ought not to tell his people
whether to vote the Republican or the Democratic ticket.
If he attempts to do so he will antagonize good people
in his congregation who honestly differ from him : and
to that extent forfeit and deserve to forfeit his influence
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 1 95
over them for more important issues. He ought to draw
a sharp Hne, not between Republicans and Democrats ;
but between Christian RepubHcans and heathen RepubH-
cans ; between Christian Democrats and heathen Demo-
crats.
Who then is a Christian RepubHcan? and who is
a heathen RepubHcan? Who is a Christian Democrat,
and who is a heathen Democrat ?
A Christian Republican is a man who believes that
Good Will calls for a strong centraKzed government, in
which the power of the whole is made effective for the
benefit of each part : in which the profit of the individual
and the prejudice of the locality is sacrificed to the inter-
est of all and the judgment of the nation. He is willing
to pay a higher tariff to keep in employment working-
men in whom he has no direct interest ; he is glad to pay
a bigger tax to have forests conserved, deserts irrigated,
rivers and harbors dredged, hundreds of miles from his
home ; to have scientific researches prosecuted ; explora-
tions made ; foreign policies maintained, and the mihtary
and naval power requisite for their support developed.
The Christian Republican desires the nation to do all
the Good Will it can ; even at the expense of his pri-
vate, local interests as a consumer of a particular com-
modity ; as a dweller in this or that town or state ; as a
196 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
member of this or that profession or vocation. To make
Republicans Christian Republicans — Republicans who
desire the nation to express all the Good Will it can, at
whatever cost of taxation ; at whatever risk of corruption
centrahzed power inevitably invites : beheving the benefi-
cence on the whole outweighs the corruption ; and the
good of the whole is greater than the cost to its constit-
uent parts : — that is the preacher's duty to his Re-
publican parishioners.
On the other hand, if there is in his congregation a Re-
pubHcan who, just because he happens to be a manufac-
turer of woollen or tin goods, does not care how much
more his fellow-citizens have to pay for their coats and
dinner pails, so long as that increase comes to him and
his locahty and his business in extra profits ; who is a
Repubhcan for the sake of Republican office or Republi-
can graft ; it is the business of the preacher to make him
ashamed of himself : to show him that as such a Repub-
hcan he can have no part or lot in Good Will for his
country ; and brand him as the parasite and traitor that
he is.
The Christian preacher likewise will try to make his
Democratic parishioners Christian Democrats : Demo-
crats, that is, who stand for the principle that the locahty,
the special interest, the individual should be let alone as
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM I97
much as possible ; that the individual can make a better
use of his money and manage his local affairs better than
a central government can manage them for him; and
that a sturdy independence is better for all concerned,
and therefore for the nation as a whole, than a nursed,
coddled and fostered prosperity provided and controlled
by governmental agency.
Bad Democrats, on the other hand : Democrats who
care not how the working-man must reduce his standard
of Kving, or even go hungry, if only they buy their goods
cheap ; Democrats who are indifferent to the destruction
of our forests, the obstruction of river and harbor traffic,
the decline of efficiency in army and navy, so long as
taxes are low : Democrats who are in politics for their
pockets rather than their principles : — these the preacher
will rebuke in the same searching and merciless way as
he does their RepubHcan counterparts, as traitors to
their country and enemies of Good Will.
If this is the attitude of the preacher toward the two
great parties, what shall it be toward parties that spring
up in support of moral issues, Hke the Progressives
and the Prohibitionists? Precisely the same. There
are Christian Progressives and unchristian Progressives ;
Christian Prohibitionists and unchristian Prohibition-
ists. The Christian Progressive sees the political ma-
198 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
chines of both old parties grinding and crushing the
people they were created to serve; captured and cor-
rupted by powerful vested interests : and he stands for
the restoration of power to the people ; and the recapture
in their interest of both governmental and party machin-
ery. The Progressive with this programme is a Christian :
and the preacher will honor and encourage him as a man
who stands for important aspects of Good Will which in
the strife of the regular parties, and by corrupt alhance
among the leaders of both of them, had come to be neg-
lected.
The unchristian Progressives, the disgruntled ofhce-
seekers who hope for personal advancement in a new
party, the unpractical visionaries, the temperamental
agitators, who fasten themselves upon every new move-
ment, the preacher will condemn as useless and mis-
chievous disturbers of the peace.
The Christian Prohibitionist likewise; the man who
sees clearly and feels deeply the misery and degradation
and corruption the sale of liquor carries in its train;
and who beheves that for the moment the pushing of the
fight against this evil is more important than the support
of the great domestic and foreign policies for which the
regular parties stand : — the Christian Prohibitionist
should be honored and upheld. The unchristian Prohi-
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 1 99
bitionist ; the man who sees only one issue at a time,
and sees that red and reckless ; the denunciatory Pro-
hibitionist, the ascetic Prohibitionist, the self-exalting
Prohibitionist, the Christian minister, with such gentle-
ness and humor as he can command, will criticise and
expose.
The Christian preacher, whatever he may do as citizen
outside the pulpit, will not, as preacher, be a partisan of
any party : he will not preach RepubHcan, or Democratic,
or Progressive, or Prohibitionist doctrine. He will be a
partisan of Good Will in all these parties, and the foe to
whatever in any of them opposes it. He will hold the
Gospel of Good Will so precious, that he will not risk his
influence for that by antagonizing in the pulpit honest
beliefs of his people on minor matters of detail.
Before we can see the preacher's duty toward industrial
problems and parties we must call to mind the present
stage of industrial development.
As long as life was simple, as long as every man was half
farmer, half jack-at-all- trades, as long as business con-
sisted chiefly in the exchange of goods and services be-
tween individuals who were approximately equal, if not
in wealth, at least in opportunity, individual justice,
justice between man and man, was all the justice needed.
Now that many essential services, like transportation,
200 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
light, water, communication, have become monopolies;
and most of the rest through concentration of capital
and mutual understandings have acquired many of the
attributes of virtual monopoly, the individual in buying
these commodities and services, and in selling his own
services and products, is no longer on an approximate
equality with the public service corporation or even the
private corporation ; but largely at its mercy. But the
mercy of a corporation is proverbially lacking. A cor-
poration, left to itself, becomes a mere machine for de-
claring dividends ; with both mercy and justice, to say
the least, not in the focus, but at best on the dim pe-
riphery of its attention.
Since the corporation ordinarily cannot be made dis-
interestedly and directly expressive of Good Will, it be-
comes necessary for some commission, or board of con-
trol, to be placed over it to compel it to conform not
merely to the letter of the law, but to the spirit of Good
Will. Such commissions or boards have as their function
the enforcement of the rights of patrons and employees ;
the prevention of violation of the spirit as well as the
letter of the law ; and the definition of the terms and ap-
plications of the law when they are uncertain or in dis-
pute.
The object of these laws and commissions is to lift the
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 20I
plane of competition where there is competition ; and to
restrain the power of monopoly where there is monopoly.
Protection against the exploitation of child labor : re-
striction of the hours and the conditions of the labor
of women and children : provision for working-men's
compensation in case of accident, so that the cost of such
accidents shall not fall on the poor working-man or his
family, but shall be distributed among the consumers
of the product as part of its just price : working-men's
insurance at moderate rates, with state protection and
support, instead of the exorbitant terms and tricky poli-
cies which uncontrolled private companies have imposed :
— these are some of the more urgent reforms Good Will
has been demanding and will continue to demand in the
immediate future.
Welfare work ; rest rooms ; provision for luncheon at
moderate cost; recreation and social opportunities for
employees are other forms Good Will takes when it enters
the heart of a powerful individual or corporation and
controls its attitude toward employees. Recognition of
labor unions ; readiness to deal with them ; a grateful
sense of whatever help they can give their employees
toward just wages and wholesome hours and conditions
of work is another sign that Good Will toward the em-
ployees is present in the heart of the employer.
202 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
When possible on an open, fair and honest basis, profit-
sharing is the crowning consummation of Good Will
under the competitive system of production and distri-
bution. When capitalist, entrepreneur and working-
man, each and all have a share proportioned to their
contribution to the profits of their joint enterprise ; then
we have as much Good Will in industry as present condi-
tions permit, and the immediate future promises as prac-
tically possible.
When Good Will in business has achieved public con-
trol of the plane of competition, arbitration, welfare work,
profit-sharing, working-men's participation in manage-
ment, there will doubtless develop the need of further
safeguards and firmer cooperation; and these may in-
volve steps still further in the direction of socialism.
When they prove their beneficence and practicaHty Good
Will in men and society will adopt them. But for the
present and the immediate future those who have this
Good Will must be careful not to let go the values of
independence, initiative, and resourcefulness in the
competitive system, before they are sure of greater gains
from socialistic experiments.
Individualism aims to give each man all the liberty
consistent with the like liberty for everybody else. But
there are two fatal indictments against uncontrolled
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 203
individualism under modern conditions. First : liberty
is not an end but a means ; and when set up as an end
amounts only to an empty abstraction : good as a war-
cry in times of revolution against tyranny, but entirely
incapable of producing a satisfactory mode of life. We
need freedom not from tyranny only but in participation
in a common good ; and of this freedom in a common
good individualism gives the mere form without the sub-
stance.
Second : the Hberty individualism offers, however it
might work out between equals, when applied to parties
grossly unequal inevitably results in the enslavement of the
weaker by the stronger. The Hberty offered by individu-
alism turns out to be no Hberty at all : for to the weaker
party it presents the alternative : — ''Accept the terms
offered by the stronger, or starve on terms satisfactory
to yourself" : — which is practically no alternative at all.
SociaHsm is weak in just the opposite way. Individ-
uaHsm provides goods and services ; but at cruel cost to
the exploited laborers. SociaHsm promises to take
excellent care of the laborer ; so good care in fact that the
individuaHstic motive to enterprise and thrift would
be greatly in danger of becoming relaxed. But where
are the goods and services coming from if the nerve of
individual responsibiHty is cut ?
204 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
The post-office is cited as an example of collectivist
efficiency. Yet the efficiency of the post-office comes
through men trained under the regime of competition.
As long as the momentum of individuaUstic initiative
lasted, sociaUsm would work ; but that would not be for
long. SociaHsm in its more extreme form is conceivable
only as the first stage in a process of economic degrada-
tion ; the brief stage namely during which the momentum
acquired under individuahsm would last. IndividuaHsm
gives us magnificently efficient and economical produc-
tion with grossly unjust and unequal distribution. So-
ciaHsm offers us just and generous distribution, with
enormously decreased and deteriorated products to dis-
tribute. One offers the empty heart and the full hands ;
the other the full heart and the empty hands.
The preacher's duty is the same toward economic
policies as toward poHtics. He must see and approve
the good in individualism ; and see and condemn the evil
in individuahsm. He must see and approve the good in
sociaHsm; and see and condemn the evil in sociaHsm.
As preacher he can rarely venture to say at what precise
moment and to what precise extent free contract shall
end and government control begin ; government control
end and government ownership begin. As preacher
his task is to make free contract considerate ; knowing
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 205
that considerate contract leads logically and emotionally
to profit-sharing, welfare work or government control :
to make government control impartial as between cap-
itaHst, consumer and employee ; knowing that the logic
of control of services, rates and wages drives inexorably
in the direction of government ownership.
On the other hand, if ever, and so far as, government,
ownership, or a control amounting to virtual ownership,
is reached, it will become the urgent duty of the Chris-
tian preacher to preach with all his might the old in-
dividuaHstic virtues of economy, industry, dihgence,
initiative, enterprise : for when once the competitive
motives to these individualistic virtues are withdrawn
disinterested Christian benevolence will be the only safe-
guard against laziness, shiftlessness, stupidity, corrup-
tion, reaction, and retrogression. Under the individual-
istic regime, the phases of Good Will most needing to be
preached are the sociaHstic virtues : under the socialistic
regime the virtues most needing to be preached would
be the individualistic virtues. But the Christian
preacher should never become either the mere individ-
ualist or the mere socialist. His business is to help in-
dividuaKsts to be Christian individualists, and in so
doing he will carry them a long way toward socialism.
His business is likewise to help socialists to be Christian
206 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
socialists, and if he does that effectively he will hold
them to the homely individual virtues which too many
socialists sadly lack, and by lacking seriously discredit
their cause.
Thus the Christian preacher's vocation is to serve
both economic parties ; and is equally important which-
ever of the two happens to be uppermost. At the same
time since he preaches not what men like but what they
need ; and men always need most the qualities, not of
the order under which they are living and which are en-
forced by that order, but the quaHties of the order
under which they are not living and but for the preacher
would be unenforced, the preacher's message on these
subjects in neither case can be altogether popular.
The wise minister will not preach directly for or
against woman's suffrage. He will scorn to withhold
from woman anything that would add to her dignity
and power which she reasonably and earnestly desires.
At the same time he will so magnify her contributions
as wife, mother, comrade, friend, hostess and teacher,
that her possible service as voter will be seen to be a
very minor fraction of her total service to society.
If in politics and labor problems the preacher must
see and serve Good Will on both sides of controverted
questions, in the family may he not take sides, and lay
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 207
down the law for society to follow? Many preachers
so assume ; and many laymen acquiesce. But here
again his highest usefulness Hes not in hot partisanship
nor cold neutrality ; but in helpful service to the needs
of both parties.
Divorce is of course the burning issue respecting the
family. The Christian preacher as the exponent of
Good Will holds up as the ideal for every normal man and
woman indissoluble monogamous marriage. Mankind's
prolonged experiment in living has proved that for the
normal individual in a normal society such marriage is
happiest, holiest and best for all concerned. The whole
trend and tendency of the Christian minister's teaching
and preaching will make for such permanent and fruitful
union. He will include the promise of such a union in
the marriage ceremony. He will counsel patience and
forbearance when married men and women seek his
advice in times of strain. He will train young men and
women to regard marriage as a lifelong obligation to
be fulfilled at cost of serious sacrifice. He will refuse
to remarry persons who in selfishness and petulance,
restlessness or infatuation, have been divorced. For the
sake of the priceless blessings Hfelong devotion brings to
husband and wife, to parents and children, to family
and society, he will urge men and women to pay the
208 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
high price that devotion frequently costs when the other
party is poor, or sick, or irritable, or unreasonable. On
no lower or easier terms can Good Will for the family
be proclaimed.
Yet when the pearls of a pure affection are persistently
trampled under the feet of swinish greed, lust, and hate-
fulness; when through no fault of the innocent party
life for him or her is made intolerable with no prospect
of benefit or blessing to the guilty one ; then the Chris-
tian minister will recognize what most Christian states
already allow — the right of the innocent party to divorce
and remarriage. The true marriage is so much more
blessed than any other mode of Hfe that it does not need
to be bolstered up by the enforced continuity of marriages
which are perverted into loathsome sensuality, hideous
hate, intolerable wretchedness. The Christian preacher
should have so much sympathy for the unhappy vic-
tims of bad marriages, and so much respect for the
blessedness of good marriages, that he will recognize and
approve the desire to escape the bondage and degrada-
tion of such an unchristian union. He will not in a
spirit of formal literahsm ask whether the guilty party
has committed the one specific sin which Jesus happened
to mention as a legitimate ground of divorce. He will
ask in a broad, sympathetic, common-sense spirit whether
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 209
Good Will for the individuals concerned and for society
calls them to continue to pay this heavy price or not.
If in his best judgment it does not, he will sanction
divorce; admit the innocent divorced person to the
fullest Christian fellowship; and even perform the
marriage ceremony where there is the promise and pros-
pect of a new and happy lifelong marriage. To do less
than that would be to miss the spirit of Good Will,
through being a stickler for the precise letter in which
its general conditions were declared by Jesus and em-
bodied in the Holy Scriptures — an attitude which is
unworthy of the free and friendly preacher of Good
WiU.
If politics, economics and the family are to be treated
by the preacher indirectly through principles rather
than directly in detail, surely distinctly moral problems
like the brothel, the saloon, and the gambling den are
spheres in which the preacher may advocate specific
social programmes. Not on questions where there is
honest and earnest difference of opinion between men of
equal Good Will ; at least not unless he gives full and
generous acknowledgment to the earnest and honest
Good Will of his opponents. Even here he will be most
effective as preacher, whatever he may do in his capacity
as an individual citizen, if he confines his preaching for
p
2IO THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
the most part to principles ; and leaves to the mayor,
the police, good government clubs and the voters the
specific measures in which his principles shall be em-
bodied.
Concerning the social evil it is his province to make men
see and feel and reverence the beauty and beneficence
of Nature's provision for the reproduction and im-
provement of the human race through the selection of
the best in each of two individuals brought together by
the mighty attraction of sex. The holiness of pure love
he will teach them to revere as God's choicest gift.
On the background of such a reverence he will throw
the beastliness of the lust that would pollute and pervert
it in selfish and irresponsible sensuality; so that every
man who hears his message will be ashamed to treat any
woman with anything less than chivalry. On this back-
ground he will throw the odiousness and cruelty of the
greed that destroys and sells the bodies and souls of
women for the gratification of the lusts of brutal men.
The preacher will make the whole sordid and loathsome
traffic to appear the cruel, monstrous, degrading contra-
diction of Good Will it is. Having created and kept
alive that sentiment his work as preacher is done : and
if that is faithfully, fearlessly and effectively done, the
proper legislative, executive, and police measures will
GOOD WILL IN SOCIETY : REFORM 211
follow in proportion to the political, business and social
influence his congregation has in the community; and
the minister will be more not less a power, than if as
preacher he were to attempt to say whether this or that
specific regulation shall be adopted. The Christian
ministry always has been and always will be the most
potent foe of this unspeakable iniquity : and in the future
as in the past the preacher's main contribution will be
sentiment aroused by principles, rather than legislation
applied or misapplied in details.
The same is true of intemperance. The horror and
beastliness of it ; the cruelty to wife and children ; the
injury to society and posterity will be a frequent theme
with the preacher whose people are subject to that temp-
tation. He will unsparingly denounce the meanness and
infamy of men who make a sordid living- by catering to
the vices of the weak, and impoverishing their wretched
families. If this is temperately, faithfully and fearlessly
done, poHtical action in restriction of the liquor traffic will
follow : and follow all the more surely and effectively than
it would were the preacher to attempt to tell his people
to vote to put prohibition into the state or national
constitution before there is sentiment to enforce it in
the villages and cities of which the state and nation
are composed. As a citizen the preacher may make
212 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
stump speeches if he please; but the pulpit is not the
place, nor the hour of Sabbath worship the time, to ad-
vocate state-wide statutes, or amendments to the con-
stitution of the country. Important as those things are,
the preacher has larger and less divisive issues : issues,
too, on which he is or ought to be more of an expert than
he usually can be in constitutional amendments, statutes
and police regulations.
The same principle governs the minister's attitude
toward international affairs. He will instil into the
minds of his people the horror, the futility, the waste,
the wickedness of all war that is honorably avoidable.
He will point out the infinitely superior economy and
efficiency of arbitration where that is practicable. He
will labor to build up a sentiment which will unite the
nations in a league of peace.
Yet he will recognize that, to say nothing of barbarous
tribes, even nominally Christian nations are not yet
actually Christian in their policies toward other nations.
Whenever self-defence against wanton and arrogant
aggression demands it, whenever weak nations for which
we have by treaty or proximity special national obli-
gations need our protection against outward attack or
protracted internal strife, wherever the maintenance of
the laws and rights of nations against their unscrupulous
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 213
and deliberate disregard requires it, then rightfully
and firmly he will call upon his nation, as he would an
individual in similar situation, to take up arms ; not in
malice, not for aggrandizement or glory, but as a costly
sacrifice essential to the doing by the nation of its part
in the service of Good Will.
Peace-making and peace-loving as every minister of
Christ must be, he will advocate such sufficient pre-
paredness for war at all times as will reduce to a min-
imum the necessity for actual war; and make the
nation's voice effective in behalf of international
justice. Bitterly as he opposes mihtarism he will
advocate so much military strength in his own na-
tion as is necessary to protect both his own nation
and the world from domination by those nations in
which it is enthroned.
On all these matters, and a host of others, child labor,
the juvenile court, prison reform, charity administra-
tion, rural betterment, civil service reform, arbitration
of industrial disputes, the minister may not be unin-
telligent or indift'erent: neither can he wisely be dic-
tatorial in detail. To create and sustain sound convic-
tions and Hvely sentiment is his mighty province, a
province so mighty that he makes a fearful mistake when
he forfeits his authority and influence within it to con-
214 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
tend over the debatable details of their application.
Not of course that details and appHcations are unim-
portant; or that principles and sentiment amount to
anything unless they are appHed in detail. But in the
intricate and delicate team-work of society, principles
and sentiments are the Christian minister's specific
assignment : while application in detail through legis-
lation and administration are not. Let the minister
stick to his assignment ; and urge the other social
agencies to be faithful to theirs : and through the united
efforts of clergy and laity, preacher and citizens, Good
Will is sure to be done more effectively than if ministers
seek to legislate and enforce ; while the citizens are
left hazy about spiritual principles, and spiritless in
moral sentiment.
This team-work view of the minister's relation to social
problems is at present far less popular than the indi-
vidual-star view, which measures the minister by what
he can accomplish directly, and set down to his individual
credit. But the sacrifice of individual credit for speedy
and showy specific results is the price one has to pay
everywhere for the greater ultimate efficiency of team-
work.
To this principle there are of course exceptions in
times of acute crises; when the minister happens to
GOOD WILL IN society: REFORM 21 5
be at the same time an expert in politics, or economics, or
social reform ; or when no layman or group of laymen can
be induced to take the lead in application of Christian
principles to crying social needs and wrongs. Then the
minister may be forgiven if he temporarily leaves the
ministry of the word to serve tables ; if he neglects the
cultivation of sound convictions and earnest sentiments
in others to become himself on his own account a leader
in a Republican, or Democratic, or Progressive, or
Prohibition campaign ; or to take sides in a lockout or
strike ; or to close this or that specific saloon.
Of course all that has been said about the minister as
minister in the pulpit, and in his pastoral relations, does
not interfere with the minister's doing his part as a
citizen side by side with his fellow-citizens of his own
and other parishes in direct political, economic, moral
and social reform.
Mr. Riis was offered repeatedly political offices in
which to carry on his fight against the slum. But he
invariably declined with the remark that he could do
most by sticking to his last as a reporter.
Unless he be an exceptional man in exceptional circum-
stances the preacher will do best to follow his example.
Direct activity in specific measures of reform is not a bur-
den to be laid on the shoulders of every preacher : and it
2l6 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
is grossly unfair to judge the ministry by such an expecta-
tion. If he is fitted to be a preacher at all his chief
efl&ciency will come through the convictions and senti-
ments he imparts and quickens in the men and women
to whom he ministers.
VIII
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH
"The new Church Universal, then, would be the militant,
aggressive body of the reborn, whose mission it was to send out
into the life of the nation transformed men and women who would
labor unremittingly for the Kingdom of God. The supreme func-
tion of the church was to inspire — to inspire individuals to will-
ing service for the cause, the Cause of Democracy, the fellowship
of mankind." Winston Churchill, The Inside of the Cup, p. 366.
The book from v^hich our final text and lesson is
taken strikes simultaneously two notes: service of the
fellowship of mankind, and intellectual honesty. The
former is our theme. A generation ago the latter was
the burning issue. It is important still. Good Will
has no affinity with falsehood. Yet that is not the
burning question to-day. A man, as the result of early
training and environment, may hold views about such
matters as the virgin birth which critical, scientific his-
tory finds it impossible to accept : and at the same time
be a devoted and accepted servant of Good Will, a man
the latchet of whose shoes the critical, scientific his-
217
2l8 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
torian is not worthy to unloose. And on the contrary
a man may be scientifically correct in his views about
these matters, and still be at the farthest remove from
that Good Will in which vital Christianity consists.
Our lesson from this book is in two parts : the first,
negative and specific, showing precisely what the true
Church and its members cannot be — selfish plunderers
of their fellows under respectable disguise : the second
positive but abstract, showing the attitude toward Hfe
the Church and its members must take : and that for
this attitude there can be no dogmatic, traditional, or
rituaHstic substitute.
The first part, the description of what the church can-
not be and cannot tolerate in its members without its
own stultification is put into the mouth of a working-
man, Garvin, who has lost his fortune, and is in danger
of losing his child, as the result of the dishonest deaHngs
of the prominent churchman, Eldon Parr.
*' ' Well, I was a Traction sucker, all right, and I guess
you wouldn't have to walk more than two blocks to find
another in this neighborhood. You think Eldon Parr's
a big, noble man, don't you? You're proud to run his
church, ain't you? You wouldn't beHeve there was a
time when I thought he was a big man, when I was kind
of proud to live in the same city with him. She'll tell
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 219
you how I used to come home from the store and talk
about him after supper, and hope that the kid there
would grow up into a financier like Eldon Parr. The
boys at the store talked about him : he sort of laid hold
on our imaginations with the library he gave, and Elm-
wood Park, and the picture of the big organ in your
church in the newspapers — and sometimes, Mary and
me and the boy, in the baby carriage, on Sunday after-
noons we used to walk around by his house, just to look
at it. You couldn't have got me to believe that Eldon
Parr would put his name to anything that wasn't straight.
'' ' Then ConsoHdated Tractions came along, with
Parr's name behind it. Everybody was talking about
it, and how it was payin' eight per cent, from the start,
and extra dividends and all, and what a marvel of finance
it was. Before the kid came, as soon as I married her,
we began to save up for him. We didn't go to the the-
aters or nothing. Well, I put it all, five thousand dol-
lars, into ConsoHdated. She'll tell you how we sat up
half the night after we got the first dividend talking
about how we'd send the kid to college, and after we
went to bed we couldn't sleep. It wasn't more than a
year after that we began to hear things — and we
couldn't sleep for sure, and the dividends stopped and
the stock tumbled. Even then I wouldn't believe it of
220 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
him, that he'd take poor people's money that way when
he had more than he knew what to do with. I made up
my mind if I went down to see him and told him about
it, he'd make it right. I asked the boss for an hour ofif,
and headed for the Parr building — I've been there as
much as fifty times since — but he don't bother with
small fry. The clerks laugh when they see me coming.
I got sick worryin', and when I was strong enough to be
around they'd filled my job at the grocery, and it wasn't
long before we had to move out of our Httle home in
Alder Street. We've been movin' ever since,' he cried,
and tears of weakness were in his eyes, ' until we've come
to this, and we'll have to get out of here in another week.
God knows where we'll go then.
^* ' Then I found out how he done it — from a lawyer.
The lawyer laughed at me, too. Say, do you wonder I
ain't got much use for your church people ? Parr got a
corporation lawyer named Langmaid — he's another one
of your milHonaire crooks — to fix it up and get around
the law and keep him out of jail. And then they had to
settle with Tom Beatty for something like three hun-
dred thousand. You know who Beatty is — he owns
this city — his saloon's around here on Elm Street.
All the crooks had to be squared. Say,' he demanded
aggressively, 'are Parr and Langmaid any better than
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 221
Beatty, or any of the hold-up men Beatty covers?
There's a street- walker over there in those flats that's
got a million times more chance to get to heaven — if
there is any — than those financiers, as they call 'em-
selves ! I ain't much on high finance, but I've got some
respect for a second story man now — he takes some
risks I I'll tell you what they did, they bought up the
short car lines that didn't pay and sold 'em to themselves
for fifty times as much as they were worth; and they
got controlling interests in the big lines and leased 'em
to themselves with dividends guaranteed as high as
eighteen per cent. They capitalized the ConsoHdated
for more milUons than a Httle man like me can think of,
and we handed 'em our money because we thought
they were honest. We thought the men who listed the
stock on the Exchange were honest. And when the
crash came, they'd got away with the swag, like any
common housebreakers. There were dummy directors,
and a dummy president. Eldon Parr didn't have a
share — sold out everything when she went over two
hundred, but you bet he kept his stock in the leased lines,
which guarantee more than they earn. He cleaned up
five milHon, they say. . . . My money — the money
that might give that boy fresh air, and good doctors. . .
Say, you believe in hell, don't you? You tell Eldon
222 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Parr to keep his charity, — he can't send any of it here.
And you'd better go back to that church of his and pray
to keep his soul out of hell.'"
As I have said the second part is more abstract. It
isn't so easy to draw worthily the individual saint as it
is the individual sinner : for the sinner is small, with
sharp outlines and clear-cut angles ; while the man who
lives in Good Will is large, S)nnmetrical, well rounded,
and therefore a difficult subject for a striking portrait.
Even in abstract description, however, the true church
and churchman tower above the mean manipulator
of securities, the donor of parks, playgrounds, Hbraries
and settlement houses with money wrung from the
plunder of the poor. I cite his long attempt to describe
the true church, as a vague feeling after rather than a
definite finding of the church as the fellowship of Good
Will.
"He began by referring to the hope with which he had
come to St. John's and the gradual reaHzation that the
church was a failure — a dismal failure when compared
to the high ideal of her Master. By her fruits she should
be known and judged. From the first he had contem-
plated, with a heavy heart, the sin and misery at their
very gates. Not three blocks distant children were learn-
ing vice in the streets, httle boys of seven and eight,
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 223
underfed and anaemic, were driven out before dawn to
sell newspapers, little girls thrust forth to haunt the
saloons and beg, while their own children were warmed
and fed. While their own daughters were guarded,
young women in Dalton Street were forced to sell them-
selves into a life which meant slow torture, inevitable
early death. Hopeless husbands and wives were cast
up like driftwood by the cruel, resistless flood of modern
civiHzation — the very civilization which yielded their
wealth and luxury ; the civiHzation which professed the
Spirit of Christ, and yet was pitiless.
" He confessed to them that for a long time he had been
blind to the truth, had taken the inherited, unchristian
view that the disease which caused vice and poverty
might not be cured, though its ulcers might be alleviated.
He had not, indeed, clearly perceived and recognized
the disease. He had regarded Dalton Street in a very
special sense as a reproach to St. John's, but now he saw
that all such neighborhoods were in reahty a reproach to
the city, to the state, to the nation. True Christianity
and Democracy were identical, and the congregation of
St. John's, as professed Christians and citizens, were
doubly responsible, inasmuch as they not only made no
protest or attempt to change a government which
permitted the Dalton Streets to exist, but inasmuch
224 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
also as, — directly or indirectly, — they derived a profit
from conditions which were an abomination to God.
It would be but an idle mockery for them to go and
build a settlement house, if they did not first reform
their lives.
" When he, their rector, had gone to Dal ton Street to
invite the poor and wretched into God's Church, he was
met by the scornful question : * Are the Christians of
the churches any better than we? Christians own the
grim tenements in which we live, the saloons and brothels
by which we are surrounded, which devour our chil-
dren. Christians own the establishments which pay us
starvation wages ; profit by politics, and take toll from
our very vice ; evade the laws and reap milHons, while
we are sent to jail. Is their God a God who will Hft us
out of our misery and distress? Are their churches for
the poor? Are not the very pews in which they sit as
closed to us as their houses ? '
" One inevitable conclusion of such a revelation was that
he had not preached to them the vital element of Chris-
tianity. And the very fact that his presentation of re-
ligion had left many indifferent or dissatisfied was proof
positive that he had dwelt upon non-essentials, laid
emphasis upon the mistaken interpretations of past
ages. There were those within the Church who were
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 225
content with this, who — like the Pharisees of old —
welcomed a religion which did not interfere with their
complacency, with their pursuit of pleasure and wealth,
with their special privileges ; welcomed a church which
didn't raise her voice against the manner of their Hves —
against the order, the Golden Calf which they had set
up, which did not accuse them of deliberately retarding
the coming of the Kingdom of God.
''Ah, that religion was not religion, for religion was a
spiritual, not a material affair. In that religion, vainly
designed by man as a compromise between God and
Manamon, there was none of the divine discontent of
the true religion of the Spirit, no need of the rebirth of
the soul. And those who held it might well demand, with
Nicodemus and the rulers of the earth, 'How can these
things be?'
" Truth might no longer be identified with Tradition,
and the day was past when coimcils and synods might
determine it for all mankind. The era of forced ac-
ceptance of philosophical doctrines and dogmas was
past, and that of freedom, of spiritual rebirth, of vicari-
ous suffering, of willing sacrifice and service for a Cause
was upon them. That cause was Democracy. Christ
was uniquely the Son of God because he had hved and
suffered and died in order to reveal to the world the mean-
Q
226 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
ing of this life and of the hereafter — the meaning not
only for the individual, but for society as well. Noth-
ing might be added to or subtracted from that message
— it was complete.
" True faith was simply trusting — trusting that Christ
gave to the world the revelation of God's plan. And
the Savior himself had pointed out the proof : ' If any
man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether
it be of God, or whether I speak for myself.' Christ
had repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had
demanded material evidence : true faith spurned it,
just as true friendship, true love between man and man,
true trust scorned a written bond. To paraphrase St.
James' words, faith without trust is dead — because
faith without trust is impossible. God is a Spirit, only
to be recognized in the Spirit, and every one of the
Savior's utterances were — not of the flesh, of the man
— but of the Spirit within him. 'He that hath seen
me hath seen the Father ' ; and ' Why callest thou me
good ? none is good save one, that is God ' ; the Spirit,
the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate in the human
Jesus.
" To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blind-
ness, and then, and then only, we might behold the Spirit
shining in the soul of Christ.
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 227
'' The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine
message which would convince and transform and elec-
trify those who heard it to action — a presentation of the
message in terms which the age could grasp.
*' No man might venture to predict the details of the
future organization of the united Church, although St.
Paul himself had sketched it in broad outHne : every
worker, lay and clerical, labouring according to his
gift, teachers, executives, ministers, visitors, mission-
aries, healers of sick and despondent souls. But the
supreme function of the Church was to inspire — to
inspire individuals to wilHng service for the cause, the
cause of Democracy, the fellowship of mankind. If she
failed to inspire, the Church would wither and perish.
And therefore she must revive again the race of in-
spirers, prophets, modern Apostles to whom this gift
was given, going on their rounds, awaking cities and
arousing whole country-sides.
" But whence — it might be demanded by the cynical
— were the prophets to come ? Prophets could not be
produced by training and education ; prophets must be
born. Reborn, — that was the word. Let the Church
have faith. Once her Cause were perceived, once her
whole energy were directed towards its fulfilment, the
prophets would arise, out of the East and out of the
2 28 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
West, to stir mankind to higher effort, to denounce
fearlessly the shortcomings and evils of the age. They
had not failed in past ages; when the world had fallen
into hopelessness, indifference and darkness. And they
would not fail now.
" The meaning of life, then, was service, and by life our
Lord did not mean mere human existence, which is only
a part of Hfe. The Kingdom of heaven is a state, and
may begin here. And that which we saw around us was
only one expression of that eternal hfe — a medium to
work through, towards God. All was service, both here
and hereafter, and he that had not discovered that the
joy of service was the only happiness worth living for
could have no conception of the Kingdom. To those who
knew, there was no happiness like being able to say, 'I
have found my place in God's plan, / am of use J Such
was salvation."
The essential contrast between the church of Eldon
Parr and the new Church Universal, as here set forth,
is the contrast between a church composed of plunderers
of the weak and poor, and a church devoted to the ser-
vice of the Good Will which includes and cares for the
humblest and most defenceless of our brothers and sisters.
In preceding chapters we have said nothing about the
Church, the Bible, the Sabbath, the Sacraments, pubHc
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 229
worship, prayer, missions, or the ministry as a con-
secrated order. Without any of these aids Good Will
may be done, the Kingdom may come, through the
obedience of individuals and their informal cooperation
with each other. Not until we recognize this fact can
we appreciate the real mission and true value of these
agencies. They have no magical virtue or mysterious
eflScacy in and of themselves ; and the claim that they
have brings them into deserved disrepute. Apart from
them all a man may live in and by and for Good Will ;
and if he does he is a Christian. To deny him that
title, and to insist on something more as essential is to
miss the whole point of the Gospel of Good Will. Who-
ever doeth that Will is brother and sister and mother of
Christ; though he never enter a church, or open a
Bible, or say a verbal prayer, or partake of the sacra-
ments, or do or refrain from doing a single thing on
Sunday which he would not do or refrain from doing on
the other days of the week.
Still, while not essential as ends, all these things are
precious means of keeping alive in one's own heart, and
enkindhng in the hearts of others, the love and service
of Good Will. There is no other important interest or
enthusiasm that attempts to dispense with organized
association. Athletics, business, literature, history, art,
230 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
science, banking, engineering, manufacture, agriculture,
education, labor, all have their clubs, associations, con-
ferences, conventions, organized locally, nationally and
many of them internationally. For the same reason
men and women who enjoy Good Will desire to share it
with each other ; profit by each other^s experience and
insight; provide for its communication to their chil-
dren, and its extension to those outside its fold. Worth-
less, positively mischievous, spiritually deadly, when set
up as an end in itself, the church as a means of fellow-
ship in Good Will is so natural, so useful, so necessary,
that practically all who have that Will at heart, and see
the church as the provision for its expression and prop-
agation; unless prevented by some false attitude on
its part, or some misunderstanding on their own part;
will desire to share and support its worship and its work.
One of the preacher's most important tasks is to
protect the church from the misconceptions which have
arisen about it. When a convert asked Billy Sunday
*'Do I have to join the church?" he repHed, ''No, you
don't have to take a steamer to go to Europe. The
swimming is good." Neither the steamer nor the church
is helped by attributing to it a magical value of its own :
its value as an instrument to ends greater than itself is
in each case ample justification. Joining the church is
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 23 1
the normal and usual corollary of accepting Good Will
as the support and guide of Hfe. But to preach the
church as the main proposition, is to obscure the great
spiritual issues which it is its function to proclaim. To
increase men's faith and obedience and trust in Good
Will should be the preacher's single aim; and if that
aim be genuine and effective, additions to membership
in the visible organization which represents it will follow
as warmth follows sunshine. But to aim at member-
ship directly for its own sake, is like attempting to warm
a room by breathing on the bulb of the thermometer.
Christian unity consists in community of Good Will :
the sense of oneness of aim that binds together all who
are striving for the common good. It tends toward
church unity : yet is not dependent on it, and need not
be postponed until church unity is reahzed.
In so far as racial, cultural, or temperamental differ-
ences call for different social, intellectual, and devotional
expression Good Will welcomes and supports diversity
in polity, doctrine and worship. In so far as economy
and efficiency demand centralization, as they certainly
do in rural regions. Good Will calls for church union, or
at least church federation.
So long as denominational differences last, the member
of a denominational church, if he is full of Good Will,
232 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
will have the feeling toward his denomination that a
soldier has toward his particular company : — some-
thing a little more intimate than his feeling for the army,
yet entirely subordinate to that. He will expect the
soldiers of other companies to be as loyal to their
companies as he is to his : when the good of the service
requires it he will readily transfer his membership to
another company, and welcome men from other com-
panies to his own : cherishing as the deepest bond of
imity loyalty to the army as a whole of which the several
companies are merely constituent parts. Good Will is
inclusive, not divisive ; and in due time will develop the
outward unity all its children so eagerly desire.
The Bible is not infallible; not everything in it is
scientific, historical, or even final moral truth. Good
Will came into the world before the Bible ; made the
history the Bible records ; lived the Hfe the Bible por-
trays ; and is as much bigger, stronger, richer than the
Bible as facts are bigger than records ; as deeds are
stronger than words ; as life is richer than letters.
The moment we see this, however, we begin to see how
marvellous a help the Bible is to all who seek to live in
Good Will. Once we get a vital, first-hand impulse to
Good Will from a Hving person or group of persons,
who are doing it; then the example, the teaching, the
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 233
spirit of those who lived this life long ago, comes with
an inspiration, an encouragement, an illumination which
throws floods of light on the path Good Will now calls us
to follow. The Bible is more helpful than the precepts
and illustrations of modern doers of Good Will, because
of the greater freshness and simpKcity of characters and
situations ; because of the more thorough winnowing of
essentials from non-essentials wrought by time and
art. In these writings, not preserved by miracle from
the incidental errors and limitations of the times in which
they were composed, but cherished with reverent affec-
tion by three score generations of men, there is such a
clearness of issue between Good Will and the evil forces
that are opposed to it, that we get a sharpness of out-
Hne, a naivete, which no later literature has been able
to approach. The same spirit animates these writings
that animates the words and deeds, the songs and
speeches, the letters and discourses of Christian men
to-day : but in them this spirit shines through a far more
transparent medium, and is obstructed by less irrelevant
detail. Furthermore the Bible contains the original
records of the words and deeds, the life and death, of
the great Master of Good Will, and the acts and writings
of those who caught their inspiration from him at first
hand.
234 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
A man can be a Christian without reading the Bible :
he can be a much better one by reading it : and, other
things being equal, the more he reads and reflects upon
it the better Christian he will be. It is, and will remain
forever, the supreme Hterature of Good Will. The
unique supremacy of the Bible is best maintained
by a frank and thorough criticism which abandons
all false defences ; admits all sorts of human blemishes ;
and in spite of them all; yes, on account of them
all, sees there a transparent revelation of the glory
of Good Will; which we more sophisticated moderns
seem powerless to achieve. Put the Bible on its in-
trinsic merits; and it will fare better and rank higher
than it ever has under the claims of a miraculous in-
fallibility. A preacher who does not know his Bible as
a mathematician knows his multiplication table; and
who does not use its examples, its precepts, its phrases,
as constantly, will miss his best material for illustration
and inspiration.
The Sabbath likewise is a dreary end ; a most useful
and helpful means. It is the great opportunity to re-
member, reenforce and express Good Will. The Sab-
bath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, as
Jesus emphatically declares.
Ordinarily there are better things than work or
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL: THE CHURCH 235
play for Sunday. Rest, change, simple social inter-
course, neighborly helpfulness, reading, reflection, wor-
ship, prayer, are better for the individual and for society
than a continuation of the labors and sports of the
week days; and therefore Good Will invites to these
Sabbath occupations all who seek its fullest fellowship
in highest consecration. Not that work and play
on that day are intrinsically and universally bad; or
that the clerk or bookkeeper kept at his desk all the
week should not have his game of golf or tennis on Sun-
day afternoon : but that friendliness and rest, meditation
and worship are ordinarily better : — that is the general
ground on which Good Will claims that these better
things shall have first place in our plans for Sabbath
observance. Because a worshipful Sunday is helpful
to that individual and social well-being which is the ob-
ject of Good Will ; and a secular Sunday is injurious to
individual and social well-being ; therefore the highest
type of Christian will aim as a rule to put worship into
his Sunday plans and keep distraction out.
Friendship has its hand clasp : affection its kiss : all
sorts of clubs, associations and fraternities have their
initiations and banquets. In all these cases the things
done are not essential; nor possessed of mysterious
efficacy. They are outward and visible symbols of an
236 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
inner loyalty and devotion. Yet few friends refuse to
shake hands; few lovers dispense with the kiss; few
fraternities or orders omit all rites and ceremonies.
The sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper
bear a similar relation to fellowship in Good Will. Of
themselves they are nothing; but taken in faith; in
other words, regarded as seals, symbols and signs of
our fellowship with Christ in Good Will, our gratitude
and our devotion to him, they give a pubHc confession,
a social recognition, to this fellowship which make it
at once more intimate and more objective. One can be
a Christian without them; as a friend can be a friend
without ever shaking hands ; or as a lover can be a lover
without ever kissing his beloved. But one can be a
more assured ; a more influential ; a more sociable ;
a more substantial Christian by accepting and utiHzing
the symbols which reach across the seas and the cen-
turies and link us to Christ, and to all who have received
these symbols from him, or his appointed representa-
tives.
Public worship is not essential to that Good Will in
which Christianity consists. One can be a Christian
without it. Yet if one is in earnest about Good Will ;
he will desire from time to time to call it consciously to
mind ; reconsecrate himself to its service ; and share his
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 237
enthusiasm for it with Hke-minded men and women.
That is precisely the opportunity which pubHc worship
affords. The congregation and each individual is hfted
into an attitude and atmosphere in which Good Will is
held as the supreme object of reverence and service ;
the supreme guide to aspiration and conduct. One who
habitually enters into this attitude and atmosphere will
develop Good Will and express it toward others, far
more effectively, systematically and persistently than one
who depends on its fortuitous occurrence to his individ-
ual mind and heart. As the years, the decades, the
generations pass, the man and the family that unites
in pubHc worship will become very different from the
man and the family that do not reenforce the chance
promptings of the heart by this systematic means.
One can be so much better a Christian with than without
such aid ; that he who deliberately neglects it, choosing
as he does less rather than more of the power of Good
Will over his life, finds the little Christianity that he
has fast slipping away from him ; and spiritual bank-
ruptcy staring him in the face.
Even verbal prayer likewise is not of the essence of
Christianity. As Jesus repeatedly tells us, a man who
does Good Will without ever consciously saying ''Lord,
Lord," is better far than the man who is explicitly
238 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
prayerful but disobedient. To the men of silent obedience
admission to the Kingdom may come as a great sur-
prise to themselves ; and a great shock to their orthodox
critics; but we have Jesus' word and our own insight
that it surely comes. Yet a man is very foolish who
does not pray. As Arthur Balfour once said at the
conclusion of a long and rather inconsequential dis-
cussion on prayer, ''But to be at his best a man must
pray." Prayer is a device for keeping our thoughts,
our aims, our words, our acts, consciously under the
guidance and control of Good Will. It is about as
necessary to the best Christian living as contact with
the wire is to an electric car. The car may move in
the desired direction without such a contact; but its
movement under such chance propulsion will be fitful,
costly, insignificant, unreliable. A Christian conceiv-
ably might serve Good Will without praying; but his
service would be intermittent and spasmodic. Who-
ever is deeply in earnest about Good Will, will be eager
to keep it clear before his mind, warm in his heart, com-
pelling behind his will ; and prayer is the approved de-
vice for doing these things.
Prayer is not a blank check on omnipotence, by pre-
senting which, properly endorsed, anybody can secure
anything he happens to want, and is willing to
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 239
ask for in that form. Petition is a proper part of
prayer — even petition for specific things ; just as
petition is a perfectly proper part of the intercourse
between friends; but it is not the principal part. A
friend whose chief relation to us consisted in asking for
this or that special favor or specific object, would not be
one whose disinterested devotion we should rate very
high ; or even one whose friendship we should care to
keep. Precisely so, if we have not risen above making
prayer primarily a means to gaining this or that specific
favor ; we are not on very honorable terms with God
and his Good Will. God is not mocked : and if we get
Httle from such prayer, we get all we deserve. Prayer
is primarily communion, fellowship; mind with mind;
heart to heart ; will with will. Incidentally it doubtless
has other effects : but its chief effect is the filling the
mind and heart and will of him who prays so full of
Good Will, that by his resulting action Good Will is
done, as apart from the prayer it would not be done.
Not my will but Good Will is what in true prayer we
most desire. It seeks the positive presence and power of
Good Will in us, doing through us and for us, what we
alone, or trusting to chance influence, could not or would
not do.
Undertaken in pride of race, or pride of opinion, or
240 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
pride of superior virtue, missions are an injury aKke to
missionary and convert: but undertaken in the desire
to give the best we have in moral motive, in spiritual
comfort, in medical skill, in industrial arts, in intellectual
interest and power, missions are so essential and con-
summate an expression of Good Will, that no preacher
who fails to preach them, and to train his people to
support them, appreciates what Good Will requires of
those who would share in its world-wide application.
If that Will is good for me, it is good for my. neighbor :
if it is good for my section of the city, it is good for every
section of the city : if it is good for my old and settled
community, it is good for the frontier town : if it is good
for my country and my race, it is good for every country
under heaven, and for all the races of the earth. Granted
that Good Will begins at home, and is mainly expressed
in secular vocations and domestic and local services :
yet if my will stops anywhere short of the ends of the
earth it is not Good Will which I am seeking and serving.
To carry Good Will where there is most ill will, where
the actual situation is most painful, is to come closest
to it, to share it most, and serve it best. The Gospel
of Good Will requires more sacrifice than the doctrine
of the eternal damnation of the heathen ever did.
The depth and extent of missionary contribution and
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 24 1
devotion, not as a thing apart from secular and home ser-
vice or as a substitute for it; but as its crown and con-
summation, will ever be one of the best tests of Good Will.
The minister is no more essential to Good Will than are
Church, Bible, Sacrament and Sabbath. There is no
miraculously imparted grace of which the priesthood is
the custodian and distributer. The minister is the
guardian, exponent and teacher of that life in and for
Good Will which is common to minister and layman.
The minister is related to Good Will in precisely the same
way as the butcher is related to meat, or the carpenter
to houses, or the shoemaker to shoes. The butcher
eats meat, the carpenter lives in a house, the shoe-
maker wears shoes the same as do other men. But in
addition the butcher provides meat, the carpenter
houses, the shoemaker shoes for other men. They
are simply the specialized agents, set apart to provide
these commodities. Precisely so the minister Hves in,
and by, and for Good Will the same as other Christian
men. But in addition to doing that Will for himself,
he shows his fellows how to see it, and do it, and enjoy
it. He judges himself and all men by the standard of
that Will : points out its appHcations : exhorts to the
sacrifices it requires : imparts to all who live in it the
hope and comfort it contains.
242 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
Just because the function in which he speciaHzes is
so precious and vital, the insight requisite is so keen,
and the character required to present and represent it
worthily is so high, the ministry is a highly honorable
profession : but its honor rests on no mysterious superi-
ority. It rests simply and solidly on the worth to the
individual and to society of knowing, loving and serving
Good Will.
The minister is simply the man who is set apart by
society to keep vivid the vision, and active the service, by
others as well as by himself, of Good Will. If he does
that work well he is entitled to such salary as will give him
the tools, the freedom, and the connections required for
doing his best ; and to the honor that is due to an impor-
tant social service cheerfully and effectively rendered.
But he will keep closest to his Master, and come clos-
est to men the less he thinks of the honor, and the pro-
fessional standing he shares with the lawyer and the
physician ; and the more he thinks of the social service
rendered, and the spirit of service he shares with the
Christian butcher, the Christian carpenter and the
Christian shoemaker. The minister hke his Master
should think of himself chiefly as one who serves.
Other vocations offer larger remuneration, higher
honors, more conspicuous careers : but none offers more
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILLI THE CHURCH 243
close companionship with God, or more vital relations
with one's fellow-men ; none renders more valuable ser-
vice for the ennobling of individuals, the upbuilding of
institutions, the healing of the nations, and the redemp-
tion of the world.
This Gospel of Good Will carries with it momentous
implications. If this is true, many other things supposed
to be true and important are false or trivial. Good
Will is not called upon to go out of its way to tear down
these trivial falsehoods. It patiently waits to see them
fall down as soon as the sufficiency of the Gospel of Good
Will is estabKshed. Is then this Gospel of Good Will
true and sufficient?
The tests are pragmatic. Does it make men Chris-
tians? Does it make earth heaven? These tests we
may now apply.
A man, in response to Christ's expectation, acquires
and maintains the habit of spending his money, control-
ling his appetites and passions, choosing peace or strife,
and making every other decision with an eye single to
the greatest good of all who are affected ; as the Father
who loves all his children will.
Every thought or deed or word that falls below that
generous aim he scorns as meanness unworthy of him,
and repents as sin.
244 THE GOSPEL OF GOOD WILL
All men who fall into meanness or sin, the instant they
are ashamed and sorry he forgives; and therein finds
assurance that God and Christian men likewise forgive
his own sins, and restore him to their favor.
He chooses and fulfils his vocation with a justice and
generosity which make the interest of client, customer,
consumer as precious to him as his own.
He pays whatever price of sacrifice such disinterested
devotion to universal good in a world still largely evil
may require; accepting that cost as his portion of the
cross of Christ.
He thinks little about his own character, his own vir-
tues, his own salvation even : but trusts the Good Will
he has toward others to enlarge and enrich his soul into
the stature and likeness of Christ.
Where good and evil are mixed, with some of each on
both sides of disputed questions, he appreciates the good
and opposes the evil in both ; giving his influence to the
one where, all things considered, he finds most good and
least evil.
He joins and supports the church, cherishes its lit-
erature, its sacraments, its times and seasons, its wor-
ship, its missions, its ministry, not slavishly or super-
stitiously, but freely and gladly as the appointed agencies
for keeping alive and handing on the Gospel of Good Will.
FELLOWSHIP IN GOOD WILL : THE CHURCH 245
A man who believes and lives this Gospel, whatever
else he may believe or not believe, do or refrain from
doing, is a Christian.
Wherever and to whatever extent this Gospel is
preached and practised, no matter what the racial,
intellectual, social, economic or political status, there
and to that extent earth becomes a household of heaven.
These fruits the Gospel of Good Will, when clearly
preached and faithfully practised, brings forth : and on
thia power to make men Christian, and earth heaven,
it rests its claim to be the true Gospel of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ.
Printed in the United States of America.
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the New Testament may find out for himself as to Jesus' view
of his own person. A secondary purpose has been to interpret
this self-revealed personality. The author divides his discus-
sion into two main parts : The Human Side of Jesus Christ and
The Divine Side of Jesus Christ. Under the former he takes
up Christ's consciousness of his limitations, his consciousness
that he was representing another and his consciousness of his
subordination in prayer. Under the latter he considers Christ
as Master of the Past, Master of the Present, and Master of
the Future. The book concludes with a chapter on the rec-
onciliation of the human and the "divine elements.
The Centennial History of the American
Bible Society
By henry OTIS D WIGHT, LL.D.
Recording Secretary of the Society
In two volumes. Cloth, 8vo
The American Bible Society was organized in May, 1816.
Its work has been so interwoven with the development of the
American republic that there will be felt a very general in-
terest in this account of its one hundred years of existence.
This has been prepared by the Recording Secretary, who, for
many months, has been engaged in gathering the necessary
data and in writing the narrative. The volume will be found
full of information not only as to the history of the society
but also as to the results achieved in its distribution of the
Scriptures throughout this country and in the far ends of the
earth.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
REFERENCE DEPARTMENT
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