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WHAT IS A
CHRISTIAN

JOHN W POWELL

NOV R 1916

BR 121 ,P7 1915

Powell, John Walker, 1872-

1953.
What is a Christian?

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

2&^&

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN?

A Book for the Times

JOHN WALKER POWELL

AUTHOR OP " THE POETS' VISION OF MAN
"THE SILENCES OF THE master"

"him that overcometh"

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1915

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1915.

NorfoooU Presa

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick <fe Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

THE MEMORY OF

MY FATHER

A FRONTIER METHODIST PREACHER
OF THE OLD SCHOOL

AND OF

MY MOTHER

A SIMPLE CHRISTIAN

INTRODUCTION

The war in Europe has caused great search-
ings of heart among thoughtful people the
world over, who are asking if this is all we
have to show for nineteen centuries of Chris-
tian teaching. Browning's lines come to
mind, of the Christ

"Whose sad face on the cross sees only this,
After the passion of a thousand years."

President Eliot declares the Christian ethics
a failure. John Galsworthy announces the
death of mystical Christianity. A writer in
the Century discusses the collapse of the
church. The man in the street is asking,
"Is the Christian ideal indeed practicable,
or must the world go back in the end to the
ancient doctrine that Might makes Right?"

The magazines in particular have been
filled with discussions of this sort. It is true
that as the first shock of the great catastrophe

viii INTRODUCTION

has passed away and men have begun little
by little to find themselves and to think more
or less clearly, the problem is seen to be less
acute than was at first supposed.

The great war is seen to be no isolated phe-
nomenon, but merely the culmination of a
long period of incubation.

The brutality of militarism appears on
second thought to be not much worse than
the brutality of industrialism.

Nevertheless the twentieth century has
been rudely startled out of its complacency,
and the world has been driven to look to the
foundations of its thinking ; to ask the mean-
ing of its ultimate ideals, its fundamental
principles.

While the discussion concerning the break-
down of Christianity was at its height, one
of the popular magazines in a moment of
unusual insight propounded the far-reaching
query, "What is a Christian?" How far
may one lag behind his Master in thought
and practice without forfeiting his right to
the title ?

INTRODUCTION ix

It is true the magazine in question light-
heartedly desired an answer in five hundred
words. Nevertheless the question struck at
the root of the matter, and gave rise to some
real thinking.

The answers received by the magazine
revealed a surprising degree of popular spirit-
ual insight. Coming from laymen rather
than ministers, from men more than women,
from the plain people, not the professional
classes, and being fairly distributed over the
whole country, they constitute perhaps the
most comprehensive plebiscite on religious
questions ever taken in America.

In the main these letters show that the
common religious thought has progressed
greatly in thirty years.

There was little mention of orthodoxy, little
emphasis on details of doctrine, little con-
fusion of thought over problems of scholar-
ship. Neither the doctrine of Evolution nor
the dust which filled the air a few years ago
from the critical disintegration of the Scrip-
tures seemed to worry the writers in the least.

x INTRODUCTION

This was not the complacent dogmatism
which ignores the problem, but the steadfast
conviction that the results of critical scholar-
ship have not affected the main question.
Evidently the world has moved since Robert
Elsmere and The Reign of Law.

Christianity was defined in terms of the
spirit rather than the letter, — even as re-
gards the teachings of Jesus himself.

Moreover the distinction between a religion
and a system of ethics was not lost sight of.
The heart of the whole matter was found in
personal loyalty to Jesus Christ, and the desire
to embody his Spirit in the common life.

None the less, in spite of the high degree
of insight displayed by these popular letters,
the confusion of tongues which arose with
the outbreak of the war, and no less the
vagueness of outline more or less character-
istic of the letters themselves, suggest the
desirability of undertaking a more definite
and comprehensive answer to the fundamental
question — though it may require much more
than five hundred words.

INTRODUCTION xi

The papers which follow represent a series
of discussions before a congregation of average
folk, who seemed to find them enlightening.

It is needless to say that they do not pre-
tend to be exhaustive. They do undertake,
however, to be comprehensive.

They are the outgrowth of a fairly wide
acquaintance with theological scholarship.
There are many works of popular theology
which deal with single phases of the theme,
but the author knows of no other single book
which attempts to survey the whole field for
the general reader.

The aim has been to keep the matter within
the range of the utmost brevity compatible
with any degree of clearness, and to present
the so-called modern standpoint in untechni-
cal language with a view to helping the man
in the street to clear up his thinking.

Any reader who cares to follow up the
various phases of the subject in works of
popular religious teaching is referred to the
bibliography which is appended to this intro-
duction. Not all the writers therein referred

xii INTRODUCTION

to agree in all points with each other, nor
with the viewpoint set forth in these pages.
The author ventures to believe, however,
that in the main the conclusions he has advo-
cated will be generally recognized as essential
Christianity.

If some would add thereto, few, he believes,
would subtract from his conclusions, nor
would any deny the name Christian to one
who should embody in a fair and growing
degree the spirit and ideals for which he
contends.

It would not be difficult to answer the main
question in a single sentence.

Jesus himself virtually defined a Chris-
tian as one who loves God with all his heart
and his neighbor as himself.

John Wesley wrote a tract on "The
Character of a Methodist," in which he
adopted this definition, simply expanding it
in terms of eighteenth century thought.

An aged and saintly minister of the Bap-
tist church was once asked, "What is a Bap-

INTRODUCTION xiii

tist?" He replied, "A Baptist is one who
believes that no form of worship, nor book,
nor creed, nor priest, can come between any
man and his Lord."

Such definitions are infinitely suggestive.
Our difficulties begin when we ask what
they mean.

If the Christian ideal could be clearly de-
fined or perfectly realized, it would cease to
interest us, for the simple reason that it would
no longer be an ideal.

It is the greatness of Christianity that no
age has been able to exhaust it; that each
succeeding generation has found new light
to break forth from it, has grown by it, and
has found it in turn to grow in significance
and power.

It is by this that it has challenged the
ages, and has given men reason to regard it
as the supreme and ultimate revelation of God.

Every age has had its own answer to the
question, What is a Christian? The spirit-
ual ideal of the twentieth century is quite

xiv INTRODUCTION

other than that of the seventeenth, which in
turn differed from the viewpoint of the
twelfth as that from the faith of the first
century.

In the beginning it was enough that a
man should follow Jesus.

After his death, two questions were asked
by the apostles of those who would unite in
their fellowship : Do you believe that Jesus of
Nazareth was the promised Messiah of whom
the prophets spake? and, Do you believe
that God raised him from the dead?

There were many other things which were
believed and taught by the apostolic church.
To charge, with some recent writers, that
Peter and Paul corrupted the simplicity of
the primitive ideal by concessions to the
demands of the world, by reason of their
ambitious desire to transform the growing
church into a world-power, is to beg the whole
question of the essential character of the
Christian teaching.

Nevertheless, it is evident that the theo-
logical interpretation of the Christian message

INTRODUCTION xv

was second in order of time if not of im-
portance.

The fundamental question concerned the
Messiahship of Jesus as witnessed by his
resurrection: "If thou shalt confess with
thy mouth Jesus as Lord (i.e., Messiah or
Christ), and shalt believe in thine heart that
God hath raised him from the dead, thou
shalt be saved."

It was regarded as desirable, — in some sense
essential, — that the believer should receive
the gift of the Holy Spirit ; but those disciples
of Apollos whom Paul found at Ephesus were
accepted though they had "not so much as
heard whether the Holy Spirit were given."

Social workers have often pointed to the
community of goods practiced by the infant
church at Jerusalem as an essential part of
New Testament Christianity ; but there is
not a shred of evidence that such commu-
nism was observed anywhere outside of Jeru-
salem, whether at Rome, or Ephesus, or
Corinth, or Antioch, or any other of the
apostolic churches.

xvi INTRODUCTION

It was simply such communism as was
practiced during the early months of the War
in Brussels or Antwerp, where the common
distress induced those who had means to
share with their less fortunate brethren.
Blockaded communities on the Dakota
prairies in frontier days often resorted to
the same method of meeting the situation.

. When Ananias kept back part of the money
which he and his wife received for the sale of
their land, Peter rebuked him not for keeping
the money, which the apostle declared was
their own to do with as they saw fit, but for
lying to the Holy Spirit.

Three hundred years later new conditions
confronted the growing church, and new
definitions of discipleship became necessary.

Various attempts had been made to inter-
pret the faith in terms of the prevailing
philosophy. Two questions in particular,
both of them utterly foreign to both the lan-
guage and the spirit of the New Testament,
exercised men's minds.

The first was whether Christ's essential

INTRODUCTION xvii

nature was of the same or only of similar
substance to that of God — whether one
should say homo-ousion or homoi-ousion. The
other was whether the Holy Spirit proceeded
from the Father alone, or from both the
Father and the Son.

Both questions, it is manifest, were con-
cerned with the central dignity and worth
of the person of Christ. The present gen-
eration is concerned with the same issue,
though the form of the discussion is greatly
changed.

So great was the popular interest in these
questions that we are told one could not ask
for a fish at the market, or desire the atten-
tions of the barber at the bath, without being
met with a volley of theological reasoning.

Finally the church, in council at Nicea in
325, voted in effect that a Christian was one
who accepted the statement of faith cham-
pioned by Athanasius, namely, that the Son
was of the same substance, homo-ousion, with
the Father, and that the Holy Spirit pro-
ceeded from both the Father and the Son.

xviii INTRODUCTION

We have nothing to do at this point with
the validity of these distinctions. It suffices
merely to point out that the determining
mark of a Christian in the fourth century
differed widely from that of the apostolic
age.

During the Middle Ages a Christian was
one who was obedient to the church.

This involved the acceptance of the stand-
ards of belief, but the essential thing was
obedience. King John of England was ex-
communicated, not for his crimes, nor be-
cause he was a heretic, but because he refused
to abide by the judgment of the Pope.

With the coming of the Reformation the
matter became yet more confused. The Ro-
man Church still declined to recognize as
Christian any who refused to obey her will.
In the Protestant churches orthodoxy be-
came once more the test, but there was much
dispute as to the essentials of the orthodox
faith.

This controversy still echoes in ecclesias-
tical circles, as witness the exclusion of Ed-

INTRODUCTION

xix

ward Everett Hale from the Federal Council
of the Churches of Christ in America a few
years ago.

Of course, in no age was the matter as
simple as this brief outline of ecclesiastical
history would indicate. Every age has had
its standards of belief, its forms of ecclesias-
tical discipline, as well as its notions of
Christian morals.

Two tendencies are noteworthy, however,
particularly in the mediaeval period.

The first is a growing danger that the
demands of the moral life be obscured by em-
phasis on orthodoxy and conformity. Brown-
ing's bishop of St. Praxed's is fairly typical
of the mediaeval ecclesiastic.

A good example of the religious standards
of the time is found in Benvenuto Cellini, as
arrant an old reprobate as ever flourished
in the world, a boastful swashbuckler who
thought little of killing a man before break-
fast, and whose moral standards in general
were, to say the least, somewhat informal.

He records that after his unjust imprison-

xx INTRODUCTION

merit by Pope Paul (another of the signs of
the times), during which period he enjoyed the
utmost spiritual consolation from his devo-
tions, his sanctity was evidenced by an
actual halo which surrounded his head, and
which was plainly seen by his friends — after
he had called their attention to it — though
it was more clearly visible in the twilight,
and flourished better in the moist atmosphere
of Italy than in the drier climate of France !

The second tendency is that of a double
moral standard, one for the ordinary man
and another for the saint.

The Catholic Church has long distin-
guished between "precepts" and "counsels
of perfection." The former are commands
of Jesus which are absolute and binding upon
every one. The latter are special virtues sug-
gested by the New Testament, the practice
of which is not obligatory, but which may be
chosen by any one who desires to follow the
higher path and to acquire special merit.
Such are the practice of celibacy, or the
monastic withdrawal from the world.

INTRODUCTION xxi

The Protestant churches reject this dis-
tinction, but the spirit of it persists to this
day in the feeling that the ordinary citizen
is not bound by as lofty a moral standard as
the church member, who in turn is entitled
to a certain measure of indulgence unbecom-
ing in the minister.

Underneath these tendencies, however, and
beneath the particular emphasis on special
phases of the Christian teaching peculiar to
each age, the world has never failed to recog-
nize a way of thinking about life, a spirit and
a moral ideal, which are essentially Christian.
The question, What is a Christian? is con-
cerned with the understanding of these deeper
essentials.

What is the common denominator of the
Christian centuries, of theological parties
and religious sects ?

What is there which in every age has under-
lain its particular type of religious teaching,
and which has broadened and deepened in its
influence upon mankind until it has over-
shadowed all other forms of religious specula-

xxii INTRODUCTION

tion, and to-day challenges humanity with
its claim to universal supremacy?

If the Christian ideal must be set aside, if
the Christian thought is too restricted to
interpret reality as the modern world per-
ceives it, just what precisely is the ideal, what
is the philosophy which must be given up ?

The question presents several distinct
phases, none of which must be overlooked if
our answer is to be completely satisfying.

There is a Christian way of thinking about
things, of interpreting the world in which we
live.

There is a Christian type of moral life, a
Christian ethical ideal.

There is a Christian spirit ; a form of emo-
tional experience based on the acceptance of
the Christian philosophy and the attempt to
carry it out in practice.

There is a Christian type of society, a
Christian program for the working out of
human relations.

There is a Christian hope for the destiny
of the individual and of the race.

INTRODUCTION xxiii

Finally, there is a Christian organism in
which the whole movement finds embodiment
and expression.

To regard any single one of these elements
as the whole of Christianity is to miss the
significance of them all, for they bear a close
relation with each other.

We may consent to regard certain of them
as of more fundamental importance than the
rest; we may regard as Christian any man
who measurably conforms to any of them.
But we have not answered the question with
which we began in a way which can ulti-
mately satisfy any one unless we take all of
them into account.

All these phases of the Christian teaching
and life have their root, not in pure specula-
tion, not merely in certain forms of logical
reasoning, but also in the history of more
than nineteen centuries. Our judgment of
them must rest, therefore, not alone on the
logic of rigor and vigor, but on the logic
of experience as well. Certain events and
characters of which history is the judge

xxiv INTRODUCTION

must enter into our understanding of the
whole.

From this discussion it is evident what
must be the standpoint from which our under-
standing of the whole matter begins, as well
as the natural divisions into which the sub-
ject must fall.

That the outcome will not be final and con-
clusive goes without saying. Life is fragmen-
tary, tentative, developing, in this as in
every age. No man can see it as a whole.
No man can exhaust the significance of its
factors, no man can see the end from the
beginning.

One can only declare the truth that is in
him, in the hope that his vision may help his
brother on the road to Enlightenment, and
in the faith that in the fulness of time every
lover of the truth shall have a part in that

"Far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

John Walker Powell.
Minneapolis,

August, Nineteen Fifteen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A few of the more or less popular discussions of
religious problems are listed here.

The Philosophical Background

Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson.
Personalism, Borden P. Bowne.

The Problem of Human Life; The Truth of Religion,
Rudolph Eucken.

Pragmatism; The Meaning of Truth, William James.
What Can I Know ? George Trumbull Ladd.

Works on General Theology

Outlines of Theology, William N. Clarke.
System of Christian Doctrine, Henry C. Sheldon.

The Modern Viewpoint

Culture and Restraint, Hugh Black.

Studies in Christianity, Borden P. Bowne.

The New Theology, R. J. Campbell.

Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton.

Can We Still Be Christians? Rudolph Eucken.

The Finality of the Christian Religion, Geo. B. Foster.

What is Christianity ? Adolph Harnack.

xxvi BIBLIOGRAPHY

Things Fundamental, Charles E. Jefferson.
Reconstruction in Theology, Henry Churchill King.
What Ought I to Believe ? George Trumbull Ladd.
Religious Certainty, Francis J. McConnell.
Religions of Authority, A. Sabatier.
The Gospel for an Age of Doubt, Henry van Dyke.

The Bible

Sixty Years with the Bible, Wm. N. Clarke.
Verbum Dei, Robert F. Horton.
Beacon Lights of Prophecy, A. C. Knudson.
The Problem of the Old Testament, James Orr.
Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testa-
ment, George Adam Smith.

Teaching of Jesus

The Kingdom of God, A. B. Bruce.

The Ideal of Jesus, Wm. N. Clarke.

Jesus and the Gospel, James Denny.

The Teaching of Jesus, Robert F. Horton.

The Ethics of Jesus, Henry Churchill King.

The Message of Jesus (Outline Studies), Shailer
Mathews.

The Ethic of Jesus, James Stalker.

The Mind of the Master, John Watson (Ian Mac-
Laren) .

Social Problems

The New Crusade, Charles E. Jefferson.

Crowds, Gerald Stanley Lee.

The Church and the Changing Order, Shailer Mathews.

BIBLIOGRAPHY xxvii

Jesus Christ and the Social Question; Approach to
the Social Question, Francis G. Peabody.

Christianity and the Social Crisis; Christianizing the
Social Order, Walter Rauschenbusch.

Sin and Society, Edward A. Ross.

My Religion, Leo Tolstoi.

The Call of the Carpenter; The Carpenter and the
Rich Man, Bouck White.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAOR

I. The Faith of a Christian .... 1

II. The Ethics of Jesus 22

III. The Christian and War 54

IV. The Christian and Wealth .... 88
V. The Christian Ideal 114

VI. The Christian Hope ...... 140

VII. The Christian Church 166

xxix

WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN

The present generation is impatient of theo-
logical distinctions. It would like to abolish
all the creeds and unite the churches in one
great religious trust.

There is a good deal of common sense in
this reaction against the theological hair-
splitting of former times. We refuse to be-
lieve that a man's opinions on the minute
details of history or metaphysics are sufficient
either to admit or to exclude him from the
kingdom of grace and glory.

Fifty years ago the orthodox Christian
was quite convinced that no Unitarian could
be saved. There are not wanting many to-
day who have some doubt regarding the
Christian Scientist.

2 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

A sounder instinct gleams through the
reply of Father Taylor, the Boston patriarch
and friend of Emerson, to some of his Metho-
dist brethren who inquired if he thought the
gentle Concord philosopher had been saved.
"All I know," was the tart response, "is
that if he has gone to Hell, he'll change the
climate."

John Wesley anticipated the modern point
of view when he declared: "I am sick of
opinions. I am weary to bear them; my
soul loathes the frothy food. Give me solid,
substantial religion; give me a humble,
gentle lover of God and man, a man full of
mercy and good fruits, a man laying himself
out in the work of faith, the patience of hope,
the labor of love. Let my soul be with those
Christians wheresoever they be and whatso-
ever opinions they are of."

He published the life of a Unitarian minister
for the edification of the Methodist folk, and
when taken to task therefor replied, "I have
nothing to do with this man's opinions, but
I dare not say he is not a Christian."

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 3

But while we acknowledge the justice of
this, we all realize that there is a Christian
way of thinking about things, as well as one
that is not Christian. Robert Ingersoll may
have been an excellent man, but his was not
a Christian philosophy. Herbert Spencer was
a man of the finest character, whose life bore
many traits of the Christian ideal, but his
thinking was diametrically opposed to that
of Christianity, as he and every one else well
understood.

We are also coming to see that philosophy
bears fruit in life ; that in the long run a
man's moral ideals will be determined by his
answer to the fundamental questions re-
garding the nature of existence.

Details of doctrine, such as the questions
raised in the fourth century about the pro-
cession of the Holy Spirit or in the sixteenth
about the nature of the Eucharist, may not
have an immediate bearing upon conduct;
but the deeper and more far-reaching ques-
tions regarding the existence and character
of God and His relation to humanity are

4 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

bound sooner or later to determine the moral
ideal. The pragmatists have taught us that
any idea which has proven fruitful in actual
life must be regarded as essentially true;
but the converse of this proposition is equally
valid, namely, that a true idea will work
good to humanity and a false one will work
harm.

It is of the highest importance, therefore,
that we shall know what is the essential
Christian philosophy. What is Christian-
ity's answer to the deepest questions of the
human spirit concerning the nature of reality,
the ground of human existence, the end and
purpose of life?

Volumes have been written on this ques-
tion, and it is difficult to sum the matter up
within the limits of a single chapter in any
way that shall be entirely satisfactory.

There are four elements, however, which
may be regarded in some sort as constituting
the essence of the Christian philosophy.
They are the Fatherhood of God, the Brother-
hood of Man, the Mastership of Jesus Christ,

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 5

and the Immortal Destiny of the Human
Soul. Let us see briefly what these mean.

Christianity grounds its life on the convic-
tion that the Universe is neither an accident
nor the product of a blind Necessity, the
mere interaction of matter and motion, of
law and force. On the contrary it regards
all Reality as the continual activity of One
who knows what He is doing and where He
is going.

This is what Christianity means by a
personal God. It believes that all existence
has its root in a conscious and intelligent
Purpose, and that this purpose is good.

I am not attempting now to defend this
conviction, but merely to define it, being
fully persuaded that when it is rightly under-
stood it commends itself to intelligence, and
stands in its own right, without need of
further witness. It is simply the faith that
life is not meaningless ; that the intelligibility
of Nature which makes science possible is a

6 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

sufficient ground for confidence in the ra-
tionality of the whole process.

Christianity has nothing to do with ques-
tions of order and method in creation; but
it stands ready to defend to the uttermost
its conviction that life is real and earnest and
worth while, and that it is grounded in no
blind and barren mechanism but in an eternal
and patient purpose for good not unlike that
of a wise father for his children.

This of course implies the spiritual sonship
of humanity. It suggests that man is capable
of understanding in some degree the reason
and purpose of his existence ; that there is
in him a capacity for some measure of spir-
itual communion with the Being Who created
him and to Whom he is morally responsible
for the use he makes of the gift and opportu-
nity of life.

No doubt when one undertakes to think
these simple propositions through they in-
volve a considerable amount of philosophical
and theological reasoning. They raise many

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 7

perplexing questions. It is possible we shall
never fully understand them or exhaust their
significance.

But in the terms in which we have stated
them they are broad and simple and funda-
mental. A Christian is a man who grounds
his life upon these propositions ; and no man
who denies them can be completely and
fruitfully a Christian, no matter how nearly
he approximates the Christian ideal in his
personal life.

This is not saying that a man will lose his
soul for denying these principles; but there
can be no doubt that in the long run the
Christian ideal stands or falls with them;
and the nineteenth-century philosophy which
began by questioning them has issued in
the twentieth-century doctrine — exemplified
these last days — that might makes right,
and that the Christian doctrine of brother-
hood and mutual service must be cast as
rubbish to the void.

8 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Christianity likewise pins its faith to the
dignity and worth of humanity, and lays
the foundation for its ethical teaching in the
doctrine of universal brotherhood. It in-
sists on a measure of moral freedom in human
nature. It refuses to interpret humanity by
its brute origin ; it measures man rather by
his spiritual kinship with his Creator.

There is nothing especially distinctive in
this, as compared with other forms of reli-
gious faith. The stoic philosophy in partic-
ular was akin to the Christian ethics in the
lofty dignity of its conception of human
values. Christianity simply represents the
completest development of the spiritual in-
terpretation of humanity, finding the basis
for its conception of human dignity in its
doctrine of God.

The point, however, to be kept in mind
in this connection is that Christianity has
actually superseded all other forms of religion
in the thought life of the modern world ; and

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 9

the question is not between Christianity's
conception of humanity and that set forth
by other faiths, but between Christianity
and the scientific doctrine which regards
mankind as nothing more than a by-product
of evolution, being in reality nothing but an
exceedingly intricate automaton, whose con-
scious processes are nothing more than chemi-
cal reactions — in Spencer's phrase, "motor
excitations in the ganglia."

Christianity refuses to be bound by this
doctrine of mechanism.

It insists that such a theory of existence
leaves out all the most important elements of
the problem and simply abandons all attempt
to interpret reality.

Claiming the right to believe that the Uni-
verse itself is personal rather than mechanical
in its deepest ground, Christianity looks upon
the human personality as akin to the divine,
and hence vested with all the dignity and
infinite value of sonship to God.

Finding this worth in man as man, it re-
fuses to be bound by caste and class distinc-

10 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

tions; to regard any race, however back-
ward or degraded, as alien or outcast.

It declares that the strong and the weak,
the civilized and the barbarian, the cultured
and the ignorant, are bound together by ties
which cannot be broken and which it is per-
ilous to ignore.

Thus it finds in the essential character of
mankind the ground for its personal ethics
and no less for its social theory. It bids
the strong bear the burdens of the weak,
and to use the advantages given them by
their larger opportunities in the interest of
the common good, that the whole level of
humanity may be lifted and the path of
spiritual attainment be opened to the weak-
est and most ignorant.

No way of looking at humanity less com-
prehensive than this or with a less resolute
faith in the essential worth and dignity of
human nature and the possibilities hidden
beneath the most unpromising exterior can
be regarded as Christian.

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 11

III

Christianity is more, however, than a
system of metaphysics or of ethics.

It is an historical system of faith, of wor-
ship, and of practice, which traces its origin
to the life and teachings of a single man whose
character it regards as the embodiment of its
loftiest ideals, and to whose personality it
pays the utmost reverence, both offering to
him and demanding in his name the highest
allegiance.

No type of thought and life which ignores
this history can consistently be called Chris-
tian. We may not settle in advance the
problems of historical research, nor insist
that spiritual truth can be absolutely bound
up with any happening in time or space ; but
we have a right to insist that the history of
Christianity shall receive adequate explana-
tion.

Sober thought refuses to believe that a
great and creative personality can be the
product of imagination.

12 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

The greatest characters of fiction and
mythology are when all is said the product
of manufacture, of the synthesis of traits
and characteristics found in the experience
of humanity itself. Such products of the
imagination always bear the mark of the
tool. They share the weakness and limita-
tion of their creators. No one imagines that
Jupiter or Hercules, that Don Quixote or
Jean Valjean, ever existed. We know plainly
that the former were the product of the
collective imagination of the Greeks, as the
latter of the creative genius of their authors.

It is far otherwise with the characters of
Confucius or Gautama or Socrates. Little
as we know of the actual history of these
men, whose images have come down to us
colored by the imagination of their disciples,
no serious student of history has the slightest
doubt not only that they existed, but that
they made upon the mind and heart of their
time essentially the impression that is handed
down to us.

If the character of Jesus Christ transcends

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 13

them all, so that by common consent it is
impossible to sum him up under the cat-
egories of ordinary humanity, it is the more
unbelievable that he was the product of the
crude imaginations and narrow prejudices
of a group of Jewish peasants and rabbis.
Christianity does not stand or fall with any
particular attempt to understand or inter-
pret the person of Christ; nevertheless in a
real and abiding sense Christianity is Christ.

The only God it knows is the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. That is to say, it believes
in God as Jesus revealed Him by precept and
example, and can think of God in no other
terms. When it wants to know what God is
like, it turns to Jesus Christ for the answer
to this question.

It acknowledges Jesus as the ethical Master
of mankind. It believes that he revealed
the possibilities of manhood; that he em-
bodied in his own character the loftiest ideals
in a way that cannot be transcended; that
every succeeding generation may under-
stand him more perfectly, may more com-

14 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

pletely incarnate his ideal in its ethical life,
but that it cannot outgrow him or leave him
behind.

There is one element in the Christian in-
terpretation of Jesus which is largely over-
looked in the religious thinking of the pres-
ent day, but which has nevertheless played
an extremely important part in the history of
the Christian faith. That is the conception
of Jesus as in some sense the Redeemer and
Savior of mankind.

Christian thought has from the beginning
looked on Jesus as something more than a
spiritual teacher, or even as the incarnation
of the moral and spiritual ideal. It has
found in him the supreme spiritual dynamic.

His death has been regarded as the central
moral tragedy of history, in some strange
fashion involving the character of God Him-
self in a hand-to-hand conflict with the powers
of evil; so that it holds a unique relation to
the spiritual history of the race, and is a
fountain of healing power wherein the

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 15

ceaseless tragedy of human experience shall
find its solution and the moral weakness of
mankind be strengthened for ultimate vic-
tory.

Once more we are not concerned to defend
this doctrine, or even to define it in detail,
but only to point out its central place in
historic Christianity. If it is ever to be set
aside as of no essential importance, the burden
of proof is upon those who would reject it.
It may have been subject to many grossly
crude and imperfect interpretations, but that
it has hitherto held the central place in the
Christian philosophy of the spiritual life there
can be no doubt.

In the Christian way of thinking about
things Jesus Christ is more than an ideal.
He is the unfailing fountain of spiritual
power; and he holds that place in virtue
of the totality of his human experience,
whereby he can enter sympathetically into
the struggles and passions of the weakest of
his brethren and can enable them to be more
than conquerors in life's battle.

16 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

It is evident that the essential thing in
the Christian attitude toward Jesus is not
intellectual interpretation but ethical loyalty.
It does not ask of any man that he shall
understand Jesus; it does insist that he shall
obey him.

The modern world has grown weary of
theological discussions, and it resents the
attitude of orthodoxy in denying the name
Christian to any who bear the spirit of the
Master though they may not interpret him
under the traditional forms. The attitude
of Jesus himself to the men and women about
him furnishes ample precedent for the broad-
est spirit of tolerance. But no man in the
first century or the twentieth is entitled to be
called a Christian who does not offer to Jesus
Christ the most heartfelt loyalty. Richard
Watson Gilder expressed the heart of the
matter in his well-known lines :

"If Jesus Christ be man,
(And only a man), I say
That of all mankind I will cleave to him,
And to him I will cleave alway.

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 17

" If Jesus Christ be God,

(And the only God), I swear
I will follow him through heaven and hell,
The earth, the sea, and the air."

The Christian faith concerning the Father-
hood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and
the Mastership of Jesus Christ does not,
however, exhaust its thought about life; for
these things find their completion in the
conviction that human destiny is not limited
to the brief years of earthly existence, but
that to every soul is granted the opportunity
and possibility of the immortal hope.

A man may be Christian in his spirit and pur-
pose and be in doubt on this point, but there
could be no Christianity without it. The
Christian interpretation of life is one in which

" Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence : truths that wake,

To perish never ;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,

Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy
Can utterly abolish or destroy !"

18 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

The Christian view of immortality is not
some vague hope for the persistence of the
race, for the treasuring up in some other form
of existence of the net results of human ex-
perience, somehow detached from the per-
sistence of the human consciousness. It is
the simple and inextinguishable belief that
death is only an incident in individual
experience, and that the soul which begins
here graduates from this kindergarten and
primary school into the larger experience
of an exhaustless future.

Nor can we ignore the fact that Christianity
regards this conception of life as involving
grave moral risk. The crude notions of
Hell which medieval Christianity inherited
from paganism may have been outgrown.
Our growing experience of the healing power
of spiritual truth, our insight that punish-
ment is in its essence remedial rather than
retaliatory, may enlarge our hope

" That somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill;"

but that must not blind us to the note of

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 19

solemn warning which has formed so essen-
tial a part of the message of every great
spiritual teacher, and was so gravely and
sternly enunciated by Jesus Christ.

Life from the Christian viewpoint is a
matter of infinite possibilities, and for that
very reason a thing not to be trifled with or
lived idly or carelessly. The brighter the
radiance of its spiritual light, the darker by
contrast the shadow cast by moral failure
and wrong.

The essential meaning of the whole system
of Christian thought, from its belief in God
and its loyalty to Jesus Christ to its fairest
pictures of the immortal hope, is that life
has a great and inexhaustible meaning, by
reason of which it is also an achievement and
task which is set before every human soul.
To him that overcometh shall be given a
crown of life, but those who through wil-
fulness rebel against the high demands of
the spirit, or through cowardice make the
great refusal, can have no part in the glory
of such a destiny.

20 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

The largest hope that the yearning sym-
pathy of the greatest souls has been able to
write over the shadow of such loss is that
those who have made shipwreck of life may
pass into

"That sad, obscure, sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain, which must not be."

This then is the Christian philosophy.

Men may differ in their understanding of
any of the elements of this thought, but no
philosophy of life which leaves out any of
these things can be termed in any adequate
sense a Christian philosophy. A man may
follow the Christian ideal or manifest the
Christian spirit without accepting this phi-
losophy, but such moral and spiritual grace is
none the less the fruit of the Christian teach-
ing, the twilight glimmer of light after the
sun has set. In the long run there can be no
day without the sunshine.

The Christian ideal cannot long survive
the decay of the Christian philosophy. If
this way of thinking about things be sound,

THE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN 21

we may more adequately understand it as
the ages go by, but we cannot exhaust or
transcend it.

If Christianity is in any sense the ultimate
religious faith, it is this Christianity which
we have however imperfectly outlined. This
is what all the theologies have tried to say.
These are the essential ideas which underlie
the teaching of all the churches and which
have been embodied in the Christian thought
of all the ages since the days of the apostles,
however the form and emphasis may have
varied from generation to generation ; and
this is the first part of our answer to the ques-
tion, What is a Christian?

THE ETHICS OF JESUS

We tried in our first discussion to show that
Christianity has by no means meant the
same thing at every stage of its history;
and moreover that it is made up of several
elements and involves several distinct points
of view, all of which are essential to a complete
understanding of what is meant by it.

The first of these elements was found to
be the Christian philosophy of life; and we
undertook to sum up briefly those things
which a Christian ought to know and believe
to his soul's health.

We come now to the second important ele-
ment in the complete answer to the question,
What is a Christian ? namely, the Christian
standard of life, its moral ideal.

And first of all, we must undertake to
analyze the moral teachings of the founder of

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 23

Christianity. We are all agreed that a doc-
trine is known by its fruits, and that no one
ought to be called a Christian, however
correct his intellectual notions, unless his
life squares with the principles of his Master.
Again we come to a subject upon which
volumes have been written. In a general
way we know what we mean by a Christian
life based on the teaching and example of
Jesus. The Golden Rule, purity of life,
patience, gentleness, charity, unselfishness,
— these are the things which go to make up
the Christian ideal in the common thought
of mankind. It is when we come to partic-
ularize, to define the elements of these princi-
ples or their application to the problems of
everyday life, that our difficulties arise.

Laying aside all the critical questions
raised by modern scholarship regarding the
authenticity of the New Testament records
and the degree to which we are entitled to
feel that we have the ipsissima verba of Jesus,

24 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

or even that the teaching as we have it has
not been colored by the minds of the New
Testament writers ; and assuming that in
the gospels we have a fairly accurate record
of what he said, there still remain serious
difficulties in the way of a satisfactory under-
standing of his teaching.

To begin with, Jesus made many extreme
demands: "I say unto you that ye resist
not evil"; "swear not at all"; "take no
thought, saying, what shall we eat or what
shall we drink"; "sell whatsoever thou hast
and give to the poor," etc. On the face of
it, these sayings of Jesus make an absolute
demand for non-resistance, for the abjuring
of patriotism and national loyalty, for poverty
and even for celibacy.

Jesus also said a great many contradictory
things. He bade men love their enemies,
yet he said, "If any man come to me and hate
not his father and mother, he cannot be my
disciple." He taught the principle of non-
resistance, but he likewise said, "I came not
to send peace but a sword," and told his

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 25

followers that if any of them lacked a sword,
he should sell his garment and buy one. He
himself made a whip of small cords and drove
the traders from the Temple, while the biting
scorn of his bitter arraignment of the Scribes
and Pharisees is not surpassed in the whole
literature of invective.

The difficulty of reconciling these statements
with each other or of squaring the demands of
Jesus with the conditions of everyday life has
led to several interpretative expedients.

The most convenient way, of course, is to
adopt such sayings as please us and ignore
the rest.

A good many modern interpreters, having
first agreed with themselves that only the
sayings which represent the passive virtues
can be regarded as truly Christian, assert
that when he declared these great truths
Jesus rose to the supreme moral height, but
that when he showed anger toward the
Pharisees or displayed force against the
traders in the Temple, he sinned against his
own principles.

26 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

This is, of course, at the outset to for-
swear that loyalty to the Mastership of
Jesus which Christianity historically demands.
To adopt this position is to substitute some-
thing else for Christianity, which may be
better and may be derived from certain ele-
ments in the Christian tradition, but which
surrenders the religious history of the last
nineteen centuries as abortive and futile.

Akin to this rejection of Jesus in the name
of his own teachings is that other form of
skepticism which regards the whole Christian
program as an impractical idealism, ema-
nating from the brain of a dreamer, and
which a practical world will do well to ignore.
At best it can only be classified with Plato's
Republic and the Utopia of Sir Thomas
More as suggestive attempts to picture ideal
conditions, the practical value of which lies
simply in the way in which they illustrate cer-
tain phases of ethical philosophy. They may
play no small part in the training of the philo-
sophical mind, but are not to be taken seriously
as contributions to a practical social program.

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 27

Still another class of interpreters regard
the teaching of Jesus as intended only for
those who are willing to withdraw from the
world of everyday life and live for the ideal
kingdom of the future. They were never
intended for the guidance of humanity in
general. Jesus had no thought of Chris-
tianizing this world, of developing a Chris-
tian civilization; but only of gathering out
of the world a loyal remnant who were ex-
pected to follow his precepts so far as pos-
sible in their relation with the world about
them, but could expect to see them completely
fulfilled only in that divine event to which
the whole creation moves.

The historic attitude of the Catholic Church
toward the teaching of Jesus is an attempt to
compromise by distinguishing between the
"precepts" of Jesus, which were intended
to be obeyed by every one and to lay down
the principles of a Christian social order in
the world, and the "counsels of perfection,"
which could be perfectly realized only under
the ideal conditions of another world, but

28 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

might be chosen and put in practice so far
as the weakness of the flesh would permit by
those who felt called to be saints.

The ordinary citizen might make war,
accumulate wealth, marry, and live the com-
mon life of mankind in the world, guided
only by the general principles of integrity and
loyalty to the truth. The higher call and
the life of religious devotion demanded pov-
erty, chastity, and non-resistance, and could
be followed only by the monk and nun. It
involved a complete separation from the
world and a denial of all human ties.

There remains for consideration one other
class of interpreters, of whom Tolstoi was the
most conspicuous representative, who de-
mand literal obedience to the precepts of
Jesus in the world of common life; who in
obedience to his command regarding the
taking of oaths would do away with the
state, which rests upon the oath of alle-
giance; in obedience to the law of non-re-
sistance would forbid the police power no
less than war, and require a man to remain

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 29

passive, not only when his own life or prop-
erty is in danger, but even when the life or
honor of his wife or daughter is attacked;
in obedience to the law of poverty would
forbid all property and establish universal
communism; and in obedience to the law
of love would require that the slightest whim
of the meanest beggar shall be law to his
prosperous neighbors.

Regarding all of these methods of inter-
preting Jesus, three or four things should be
said :

The notion that the Kingdom of God is
an imperium in imperio, a little group of
brands plucked from the burning, of elect
souls who have chosen to separate themselves
from a doomed world and to be guided by
laws and principles utterly contradictory to
the life of the world and completely practi-
cable only in a future state, is an entirely
understandable one in behalf of which much
might be said. It was for centuries essen-
tially the accepted understanding of Chris-
tianity, and is held to-day in its main outlines

30 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

by the whole conservative party in the Chris-
tian church.

If we reject this viewpoint, it is only for
two reasons ; first, that it has itself never
been able consistently to carry out its own
literalism, but has weakened its spiritual
power by a never-ending succession of com-
promises with the world ; and second, be-
cause we believe that the essential principles
of Jesus have a wider validity than men have
dreamed, and that his spiritual power is in
fact in the long run capable not merely of
redeeming a mere handful of elect spirits
out of a doomed race, but of redeeming
humanity itself, of purifying and elevating
the whole of human society and of Chris-
tianizing civilization. Of such a dream the
New Testament writers themselves caught
glimpses when they wrote of a day when the
kingdoms of this world should become the
Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.

This conviction is supported by the fact
that some of the religious ideals cherished by
the earlier interpreters of Christianity have

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 31

been definitely set aside by the verdict of
history.

Monastic asceticism is one of these. The
monastic orders failed, not because their
leaders ceased to be loyal to the principles
with which they began, but because the
monastic ideal was itself a false and distorted
one which was contrary not only to the
weakness of fallen human nature, but to the
real demands of the loftiest spirituality.

If Christianity means that it is better to
starve and mistreat the body than to live a
normal, wholesome physical life ; that the
loftiest spiritual attainments are not com-
patible with the obligations and responsibili-
ties of marriage and parenthood, or the loyal
discharge of the obligations of everyday life ;
then the world has once for all discarded
Christianity, and we had best recognize the
fact and set about adjusting ourselves to
the situation as it exists.

Mankind will never go back to the ideals
of St. Simeon Stylites, who lived for thirty
years on the top of a pillar ; of St. Catherine,

32 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

who had herself bound to a cross for several
hours of every day ; of St. Anthony, who
fled to the desert to escape the contamina-
tion of the world ; nor of any other of the
ascetics of the medieval world, whose pic-
turesqueness at the distance of several
centuries is only equaled by the morbid
unwholesomeness of their whole attitude
toward life.

The double moral standard involved in
the Catholic distinction between precepts
and counsels of perfection is likewise one
which offends the moral judgment of man-
kind. We all refuse to believe that there is
one standard of life for one man and another
for his neighbor.

Of course, we realize that for particular
occasions and under special circumstances a
greater demand may be made upon some
individuals than others. College boys in
training for a football game are subject
to a mode of life which is not normal and
which if continued too long would defeat
its own end of high physical efficiency ; but

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 33

for a brief period the special sacrifices de-
manded bring about proportionate results.

So a doctor is compelled by the demands
of his profession to make sacrifices which the
ordinary citizen escapes ; the teacher and
the minister must make peculiar sacrifices
to their calling; the work of the missionary
demands a degree of heroism and self-devotion
to which everyday life is a stranger ; the
soldier lives under conditions which would
utterly destroy humanity if the attempt
should be made to apply them universally.

But we refuse to believe that these special
sacrifices involve any higher degree of spir-
itual worth than the common life. The cate-
gories of right and wrong can be applied only
on a universal basis. A system of ethical
teaching must be susceptible of universal
application or it is valueless. The teaching
of Jesus is for all mankind or none.

Finally, there is no hope in literalism. If
one logically and consistently attempts im-
partially to apply the principle of literal
interpretation to everything which Jesus said,

34 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

he lands in hopeless confusion and contradic-
tion.

Even Tolstoi can make headway only by
accepting one or two of the sayings of Jesus
which he will interpret literally and which
he will then make the standard for the inter-
pretation of everything else ; anything which
seems to contradict these sayings is set aside
or interpreted out of existence.

Is there any way out of this deadlock?
Can we interpret the teachings of Jesus in
any way which will reveal them as clearly and
indisputably the supreme law of human life?

There are two or three guiding principles
which must be applied in any adequate study
of the words of Christ.

The first is the clear recognition of his
paradoxical method.

As Wendt pointed out, Jesus was an Orien-
tal, with the Oriental's poetical gift, his free-
playing imagination and love for figurative

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 35

speech. It was necessary to startle men out
of their mental and spiritual sluggishness;
to challenge their attention and to compel
them to think. Accordingly, Jesus habit-
ually employed modes of speech which have
been an unending stumblingblock to our
forthright and literal western minds.

Thoughtful readers of the New Testament
are coming to realize how much of metaphor
there is in the speech of Jesus. When he
declared men must eat his flesh and drink
his blood, we no longer puzzle our brains with
metaphysical mysteries as to how the bread
and wine of the Eucharist can be transformed
into the actual literal flesh that hung on the
Cross, or the blood that was poured out of
his side. We frankly recognize a daring
metaphor.

Even the doctrine of the New Birth is
nowadays interpreted less by the grammar
and the dictionary than by the broad recogni-
tion of a general spiritual law of which birth
is the aptest symbol.

We do not so readily recognize the number

36 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

of statements to be found among the sayings
of Jesus which are couched in an extreme and
superlative form that could not possibly be
accepted literally. An instance is his keenly
humorous remark about the futility of trying
to remove the grain of dust from our neigh-
bor's eye when one has a floor joist in his own.

So when he said, "I came not to send peace
but a sword," no one has ever imagined that
he meant what he said; men have always
understood the saying as a vivid and start-
ling expression of the inevitable effect of a
spiritual revelation in a world so largely
governed by selfish and unspiritual motives.

In like manner, when he promised his
followers a hundred-fold return in this pres-
ent life for all the sacrifices they had made
for the Kingdom of Heaven, Peter and John
were not misled into expecting to become
possessors of vast landed estates; nor did
even Tolstoi attempt to interpret this saying
literally.

Our common sense reduces the parallax in
such sayings as instinctively as our brain

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 37

unifies the double visual image projected by
our two eyes.

So when Jesus declared that no man could
be his disciple without hating his own mother,
no one has ever for a moment imagined that
Jesus meant this literally. We recognize
it plainly for what it is, an extreme and
startling statement of a profound spiritual
truth. The statement in the form in which
it was made could not by any possibility be
true. We frankly discount it by the appli-
cation of common sense.

The same principle is applicable to the
remark of Jesus that faith equivalent to a
grain of mustard seed could transplant trees
and remove mountains. No one imagines
that two or three earnest and devoted Chris-
tians by agreeing in prayer could have
brought the Panama Canal into existence
without physical effort. We regard the
vision and courage which attempted so gigan-
tic a project and put it through to a successful
conclusion as a real fulfilment of the promise
of Jesus.

38 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

These instances of paradoxical method are
sufficient to excite the suspicion that possibly
the other startlingly difficult sayings of Jesus,
over which the conscience of Christendom
has stumbled for two thousand years, are
susceptible of the same interpretation.

Some one asks in alarm, "Did not Jesus
mean what he said?"

We answer, Yes, by all means, but he very
seldom said what he meant.

He undertook to challenge the human con-
science by a loftier ethical ideal than men had
dreamed of.

He knew the danger of laying down pre-
cepts which succeeding generations under ever
modifying conditions must find increasingly
difficult of interpretation and application.

He wanted to compel men to think out
their moral principles, and to be guided by
them because they had come to recognize
their validity, not because they had been
announced with authority.

Accordingly he was forever saying things
which could not be literally interpreted, in

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 39

order that men might be driven in spite of
themselves to think out their meaning.

The principle of non-resistance, the pro-
hibition of oaths, and the warning against
anxiety for temporal blessings must all be
interpreted by this principle.

When he bade men resist not evil, he was
not prohibiting the punishment of wrong or
the defense of the right, he was declaring
the supreme worth of the virtue of forbear-
ance.

The prohibition of oaths had nothing to
do with political allegiance, it meant simply
that a man's word ought to be as good as
his bond.

The warning against worldliness and es-
pecially the spirit of anxious absorption in
material things was nothing more than a
vivid, thought-compelling statement of the
superior worth of the spiritual over the tem-
poral.

The second guiding principle for the in-
terpretation of the teachings of Jesus is to

40 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

recognize that he was stating ultimate prin-
ciples rather than laying down specific rules.

Every lawyer knows the difference between
constitutional law and statutory enactment.
Strictly speaking, a constitution should be
nothing but the statement of general fun-
damental principles. The statute law is an
attempt to apply these principles under
specific conditions to specific cases.

It is impossible to enact any law that is
valid at all times and under all conditions.
It is possible so to analyze the principles of
justice as to arrive at a fundamental legal
doctrine which is universally valid and which
the judgment and practical sense of every
generation must apply for itself.

It is impossible to find among the sayings
of Jesus anything that is unmistakably in-
tended as definite command, to be always
and everywhere obeyed. Some of his sayings
have that appearance at first glance, but when
we look carefully at the circumstances under
which they were uttered and their relation
to his other and broader sayings, we see

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 41

plainly that they were at most nothing more
than illustrations of a back-lying general
principle.

What Jesus undertook to do was not to
legislate for all times and all conditions of
human society, for that in the nature of things
is impossible ; but he sought by every means
to establish in the hearts of his followers the
recognition of the broad fundamental social
and ethical principles upon which all sound
living must rest, and which constitute the
supreme moral ideal of humanity, — the
flying goal toward which we may forever
approach but which we can never exhaust
and surpass.

The third guiding principle is that the aim
of Jesus was not to conform the outward
actions of men to the letter of the moral law,
but rather to transform them by the awaken-
ing of a loftier and truer inward spirit.

This is the significance of his doctrine of
the New Birth. He declared that the only
way to get good fruit is to make the tree good.

42 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

If one desires grapes, he must not look for
them on a thorn tree. Other moralists have
aimed at constructing a perfect ethical sys-
tem ; Jesus aimed at regenerating human
lives, that the law might be forever written
on men's hearts.

Here once more we must be careful not to
press his sayings to their absolute limit. He
did not mean that some men were essentially
thorn trees, from whom no good fruit could
be expected. But he recognized what every
thoughtful person knows, that "'tis one thing
to know and another to practice"; that
external pressure, whether of physical force
or of social constraint, may compel men
outwardly to obey the correct rules of con-
duct, but it cannot make bad men good.
Nothing can do that but some spiritual in-
fluence whereby their whole inner attitude
toward life is changed.

Accordingly Jesus was more concerned to
set in motion spiritual forces which should
of themselves work out in human life a
truly moral order than he was to present

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 43

men with a perfect Pattern for their outward
conduct.

The adoption of this mode of interpreting
the ethics of Jesus seems to leave us without
any ultimate Moral Authority. "The Pope
has wine, but no wife. The Sultan has many
wives, but no wine." Which of them is
right? Or are they both partly right and
partly wrong ?

As a matter of fact we have never really
had an authority, appeal to which could settle
this question. The very fact that Christen-
dom itself is split in two over the question
as to where the seat of authority lies indi-
cates that the whole matter rests at bottom
on our choice of authorities, which in turn is
dictated by a thousand influences of desire
and prejudice as well as of reason.

So our loss is only an imaginary one. In
the long run nothing has any real claim upon
our ethical obedience which does not com-
mend itself to our trained and cultivated moral
intuition.

Nothing is gained by paying verbal trib-

44 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

ute to the authority of a moral principle,
and then locking it away in a glass case be-
cause it is not practical under the limitations
of everyday life. Even an imperfect moral
ideal which is a living factor in our life and
has an actual influence upon our conduct is
worth infinitely more than the most perfect
ideal to which we pay only verbal reverence.
If we will take our common sense, stimu-
lated and purified by a loyal devotion to the
loftiest spiritual purpose, and apply it to
understanding the teaching of Jesus, we shall
find that these three principles which we have
outlined will be sufficient to put us in touch
with his purpose, to enable us to understand
and grasp his spirit, and to comprehend the
essential ethical principles which he sought
to establish in human life.

Ill

We come now to ask what are the essential
elements in the Ethics of Jesus? They are
four in number :

First, character is the chief good.

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 45

Not possessions, nor fame, nor honor ; not
success nor prosperity ; not physical pleas-
ure and ease ; not even happiness in the
common understanding of the word which
implies the satisfaction of all the ordinary
desires of the human heart — including many
that are entirely normal and in most cases
legitimate : none of these can completely sat-
isfy the human spirit nor fulfil the highest
demands of life.

No man has attained who has not become a
good man, pure and loyal and true of soul;
whose character, though bought at the cost
of all the common aims of existence, will
stand the test of every temptation and bring
him into communion with the Divine.

Second, judgment must lie upon the spirit
of life rather than upon its outward conform-
ity to the letter of the law.

This is the other side of the principle sug-
gested a moment ago, that Jesus aimed at
producing a right spirit rather than at shap-
ing men's outward acts. The essence of the

46 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

moral law itself lies in its spirit rather than in
the letter. Hence men must be judged by
the spirit which seeks expression in outward
acts rather than by their acts themselves.

The outward law concerns itself with the
various degrees of the crime of murder;
Jesus declared that the real sin lies in the
spirit of hatred which engenders the crime.
The law carefully guards the outward purity
of men's lives; Jesus said, "Whoso looketh
on the sin with desire hath committed it
already in his heart."

This is a principle which cuts both ways.

Its demand is infinitely more searching
than that of the outward law. By it a great
many respectable citizens of irreproachable
conduct stand condemned, because in their
hearts they have transgressed through de-
sires they do not deem it expedient to grat-

ify.

But on the other hand it relieves men of
the intolerable burden of Pharisaic literalism.
"'Tis not what man does that exalts him, but
what man would do."

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 47

"What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me :

A brute I might have been but would not sink i' the
scale."

Men are to be judged, not by the success
with which they have put their ideals into
practice, but by their inward love and loyalty
to the ideal; as a child's often mistaken at-
tempts to help are taken by a wise love not
for what they accomplish but for the motive
that prompts them.

Thus men are forever set free from the
bondage of the letter, to live henceforth in
the liberty of the spirit.

Third, love is the supreme dynamic of the
moral life.

Love toward God is the fountain of spir-
itual power.

Love toward men is the spirit which alone
can inspire those actions which shall be es-
sentially right.

The love of which Jesus speaks is not the
pleasant sentiment of friendly affection, but
"the set purpose to serve and please." It is

48 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

the quality which St. Paul celebrates in the
Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, and
implies such a genuine recognition of each
other's need and such a genuine spirit of good
will as must make wrong to one's neighbor
impossible because unthinkable, and bind
humanity together in a perfect civilization.

Finally, the aim of all life is mutual service.
No man is truly good who merely abstains
from doing harm. The final test of all
actions is whether they serve the well-being
of men.

These four principles sum up the whole of
the teaching of Jesus. It is these that dif-
ferentiate it from the ethics of Confucius or
Buddha. Though susceptible of such brief
statement, they are without limit in their
application to human conditions and in their
power to uplift and transform human society.

In order that men might better understand
the character of these general principles, we

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 49

find Jesus applying them to some of the
specific problems of life as he met them from
day to day. In the examination of these
instances other subordinate principles emerge
which are still general in form, but which
serve to narrow the field of application and to
clarify our judgment in applying the larger
principles of the Master to the problems
which arise in our own lives.

The first is loyalty to truth and right at
all cost. "Blessed are they which are perse-
cuted for righteousness' sake."

Martyrdom is not an end in itself, a thing
to be sought for its own sake.

There is no particular virtue in suffering,
nor is the martyr to be regarded as more truly
and greatly a saint than many another whose
outward life has been uneventful and whose
moral contests have not been open to the
public gaze.

The soldier on the battle field gives the most
spectacular exhibition of courage and patri-
otic loyalty, but for all that he may be no

50 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

more worthy a citizen than the wife who
suffers alone at home, or the man of business
who struggles arduously and patiently to
provide the sinews of war and to keep alive
the whole nation upon whose backing the
success of the army depends.

Gouverneur Morris and Benjamin Franklin
were as true patriots and sacrificed themselves
for their country's good as unhesitatingly
during the troublous days of the American
struggle for independence as any soldier
whose bloody footprints stained the snow
at Valley Forge. "They also serve who
only stand and wait."

The crux of the whole matter is the inner
loyalty which no threat of pain or ruin can
shake. No man is a disciple of Jesus who
is not ready to take up the Cross in the
Master's name.

The second is the doctrine that enmity
and revenge must give place to forbearance
and love.

The spirit of retaliation is a survival of

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 51

primitive brute instinct which must be up-
rooted from the human heart.

Even in the administration of justice we
are beginning to see that patience and for-
bearance may enable us to transform the
criminal into a good citizen.

In private life we all know, if we do not
always practice, the principle that forgive-
ness and the returning of good for evil heap
coals of fire on our enemy's head, and go far
toward making enmity impossible.

Finally, selfish ease and indulgence must

everywhere give place to the spirit of mutual

helpfulness if society is to rest upon a sure

foundation.

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

A Scottish philosopher several hundred years
ago hesitatingly suggested that the rulers of a
city would commit no wrong if they should so
legislate as to put an end to poverty within
the city's gates. We are coming to see that
as a matter of social stability the existence of

52 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

great wealth side by side with abject poverty
is a serious menace ; and that the few have
no right to luxurious ease and self-indulgence
while the many are shut out from the necessi-
ties of a well-ordered life.

So the science of human society is coming to
pay tribute to the insight of Jesus, who taught
as a matter of personal righteousness that men
must give up their own selfish comfort and ease
for the sake of their neighbor's need.

This brief review of the teachings of Jesus
is, of course, extremely cursory and super-
ficial, but enough has been said to show the
essential character and purpose of his ethical
doctrine.

To push any of the sayings of Jesus to
their logical extreme is to weaken, not to
strengthen, their significance for humanity.

Surely the outline here given of his ethical
principles does not soften his demand for
the complete surrender of the heart of man
to the will of God. This is no soft and easy
doctrine which is here set forth.

THE ETHICS OF JESUS 53

But neither is it an impossible demand
which must of necessity take no account of
average humanity, and leave men floundering
in the discouragement of acknowledged spir-
itual impotence.

Jesus began his ethical teaching with the
demand for a righteousness which should ex-
ceed the righteousness of the Scribes and
Pharisees ; but he closed it with the promise
that the simplest act of kindness toward the
least of men should be regarded as an act of
loyalty and devotion to the Eternal Judge
Himself.

Ill

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR

In our discussion of the ethical teachings of
Jesus we found that the two most important
things to be borne in mind in approaching the
sayings of the Master are, first, that he con-
tinually employed the method of paradox
in order to startle men into seriousness and
compel them to think ; and second, that he
was concerned with laying down fundamental
principles rather than with enacting specific
rules of conduct.

The main elements in his ethical teaching
were found to be, first, that character is the
chief good; second, that judgment is based
upon the motive and spirit which underlie
human action rather than upon conformity
to the letter of the law ; third, that service
is the aim, and love the supreme dynamic, of
a rightly ordered life.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 55

We come now to apply these principles to
the first of the two chief ethical problems of
mankind, the problem which has been forced
violently upon the attention of humanity
during the past few months; namely, that of
war.

The question before us is a threefold one.
First, can a Christian consistently engage
in war even in obedience to his country's de-
mand ; second, can war be defended in any
respect as a means of settling international
disputes, without coming into direct conflict
with the spirit and teaching of Jesus ; and
third, can it be abolished?

If the principles which we have adopted
for the interpretation of the New Testament
be sound, the question is not to be settled by
appealing to the specific words of Jesus, no
matter how emphatic they may appear.

The Quakers have long defended the doc-
trine of non-resistance by appealing to the
words of Christ.

Tolstoi, as we have seen, founded his doc-
trine upon two injunctions of Jesus: "Resist

56 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

not evil," and "Swear not at all." The first
he declared to be absolute in its character
and to forbid not only private revenge, but
even the organized attempt of society to
suppress wrong through the exercise of the
police power. The second was interpreted to
forbid the taking of the oath of allegiance,
and so to put an end to government.

This mode of interpretation runs so directly
counter, not only to our common sense but
even to our most carefully reasoned theories
of society and the state, that Professor Har-
nack is justified in saying that if Tolstoi's
interpretation be Christianity, then Chris-
tianity has no further concern for us.

The instinct of self-defense, and much more
of the defense of the weak and dependent,
is too deep-seated to be gainsaid. The in-
stinct for government is equally fundamen-
tal. To assume that Jesus Christ had any
idea of overthrowing either of these funda-
mental characteristics of humanity is either
to make him a visionary enthusiast whose
maunderings have no interest for sensible

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 57

men; or else to assume that humanity as
originally constituted is a complete failure,
and that the Almighty has undertaken to
destroy the work of His hands in order to
make a new start.

Both these alternatives are so extreme that
they ought to be adopted only as a last resort.
As a matter of fact, Tolstoi himself took back
with his left hand all that he had given with
his right, when, after strenuously insisting
that the words of Jesus were to be literally
understood and unshrinkingly applied to
human problems, he confessed that this was
an impossible ideal, and declared that it was
set forth by Jesus on the principle that one
must aim very much higher than the mark
he really intends to hit, as a man who desires
to cross a violent current to a point directly
opposite must appear to be rowing toward a
point far up the stream.

This concession leaves us exactly where we
were before, and bids us ask what is that
point directly opposite which Jesus would
have us reach. In answering this question,

58 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

we have no other guide than that wholesome
and spiritually-minded common sense which
we found to be everywhere necessary to the
understanding of Jesus.

A sound interpretation [of his teaching
avoids these impossible extremes of literalism
and at the same time affords a principle suf-
ficiently lofty and powerful to serve as the
supreme guide in the affairs of men and

nations.

When we look closely at those sayings of
Jesus which seem to inculcate the doctrine
of non-resistance, we find that they are in
reality nothing more than specific applica-
tions of his fundamental principles of love
and service.

When these principles are applied to the
differences which inevitably arise between
men in everyday life, Jesus interpreted them
as carrying with them three things ; first,
a demand that all men should recognize the
rights and necessities of others, preferring
to sacrifice themselves rather than to cause

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 59

others to suffer; second, the spirit of the
utmost forbearance, patience, and self-con-
trol in dealing with those who would inflict
wrong upon us ; third, the utter absence of
the spirit of revenge in our attitude toward
those who have wronged us. The disciple
is to forgive unto seventy times seven. We
are bidden to love our enemies, to return
good for evil, to overcome evil with good.

In these three principles is summed up the
entire ethical philosophy of Jesus as it re-
lates to the natural conflict of rights which
inevitably takes place in an imperfectly devel-
oped social order, as well as to the more
serious disorders which arise from the pres-
ence of evil and perverse men.

Regarding these principles, it is easy to
see at the outset that they run directly
counter to the spontaneous impulses of human
nature. It is natural for men to seek their
own welfare, to assert their own rights, and
to leave others to look out for themselves.

The political economy of a century ago
erected this principle of self-interest into the

60 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

governing law of human affairs, and declared
that all that was necessary in this world was
to give it a free rein and let the conflict of
interests bring about a stable social order,
as the balance of centrifugal and centripetal
forces keeps the earth in its orbit.

A further study of the laws which govern
human relations, however, has cast serious
doubt upon this principle; and economists
to-day are seeking for the most efficient
means of restraining the impulses of self-
interest and insuring a wholesome regard
among men for the interest of others. It
may be we shall ultimately discover that the
law laid down by Jesus Christ is in reality
the soundest foundation for commercial pros-
perity and social well-being.
| There is no doubt, however, that the
teaching of Jesus runs directly counter to
natural impulse, nor can we doubt that
history hitherto has been based on the op-
posite principle of self-assertion. The law
of the survival of the fittest has governed the
rise and decay of empires ; and war has been,

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 61

from the dawn of time, the principal occupa-
tion of the human race.

Yet there can be no doubt that if these
principles of Jesus were put in operation,
they would go far to abolish strife of all
kinds between men and nations.

If we may assume that there is possible a
just settlement for all differences of opinion
and all conflicts of right, then the law of
mutual regard and of mutual forbearance is
the only foundation for the attainment of
that end.

Before we undertake to apply these princi-
ples to the problem before us, it is necessary
to ask how far they involve the doctrine of
non-resistance. Do they forbid self-defense
or the punishment of criminals?

By no means. Love does not mean senti-
mental indulgence or weak yielding to the
impulses of others. The steadfast enforce-
ment of righteousness is the truest love and
the largest service. That father is not the
most loving who is most weakly indulgent

62 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

toward his children, nor is there anything in
experience to indicate that to allow violent
and wicked men to have their own way and
to work their will upon the weak and defense-
less can have any good end.

But experience increasingly shows that the
steadfast application of the principles of for-
bearance, patience, self-control, and forgive-
ness are in the long run the most powerful
weapons against oppression and wrong. A
soft answer turneth away wrath.

An immediate application of force may
sometimes be necessary to restrain the evil-
doer and prevent the injury that he would
work ; but when once he has been prevented
from putting his evil impulses into effect,
the application of the principles of Jesus to
all further dealings with him is a much more
effective way of meeting the situation than
the opposite method of violence and revenge.

We have learned that even in the punishment
of criminals nothing is gained by undue sever-
ity. At the opening of the nineteenth century
more than a hundred crimes were punishable

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 63

by death under the English law, yet this
severity did not avail to put an end to crime.
We are coming to see that the object of
punishment is not vengeance but reformation.
The Warden of Sing Sing prison inaugurated
a new era not long since when he went un-
armed into a room filled with prisoners, sent
out all the guards, and talked with the pris-
oners, man to man, regarding various phases of
their life together. In treating them as men
and not as dogs he enlisted all of their own
best impulses, and already we are told that
the results are apparent in the temper of the
men and their attitude toward the obliga-
tions that are laid upon them. If this is true
in dealing with hardened criminals, it is in-
finitely more true in the common relation-
ships of human life, wherein by far the
greater portion of our differences grow out of
our ignorance of each other's life and our fail-
ure to understand each other's needs and
desires.

64 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

At this point the question arises, Can these
principles be applied to international affairs?
Can states be called upon to practice the law
of self-sacrifice and service ?

General von Bernhardi emphatically says,
No ; that the state exists to protect and
enhance the welfare of its subjects, whose
interests are jeopardized in any act of self-
sacrifice on the part of the state; and that,
therefore, the Christian law cannot be held
to apply to international affairs. Let us
look at this matter a little more closely.

There can be no doubt that there is an
element of truth in the contention that the
powers and responsibilities of the state differ
in many respects from those of the individual.
Society is an organism. It is more than a
mere aggregation of individuals, and its rights
and duties are more than the sum of individual
rights.

The state exists not because individuals

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 65

have agreed together to band themselves into
such an organization and to delegate to it
certain of their own individual rights and
powers, which they undertake henceforth
to waive. Rather the state is brought into
being through the very existence of a large
number of people living together in a re-
stricted territory, where their various needs
and common interests create the necessity
for an organized life.

There are a great many things which society
as a whole can do, which no individual ever
could do. Both the need and the power to
supply it are created through the existence
of the common life; so that there is a very
real sense in which a nation is to be regarded
as a greater person, with its own rights, duties,
and responsibilities, and with its own larger
conscience.

Even the mob spirit is something other than
the sum of the individual impulses of the
people who constitute it. Public opinion is not
merely the sum of the opinions of the majority
of individuals, or even that sum minus the

66 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

sum of the opinions of the minority. It is
something more intangible and at the same
time more real and powerful than this.

The spontaneous personification of nations
which takes place in our common speech
illustrates a half-unconscious yet instinctive
recognition of this truth. Uncle Sam, shrewd,
tolerant, humorous, kindly, does not exist
alone in the imagination of cartoonists. He is
a real being, the embodiment in concrete form
of all the common characteristics and im-
pulses and ideals of the American people.
Bluff, hearty John Bull is the spirit of Eng-
land. A truth is expressed under the guise
of these half-humorous personifications which
defies analysis in the terms of logic.

This STATE-PERSON of necessity exer-
cises many powers and rights greater than
those of the individual. The right of the
state to punish wrong-doing is not simply the
delegated blood right of the individual to
vengeance. The state stands to the wrong-
doer rather in the relation of a wise father to
a wilful and rebellious child. No individual

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 67

could ever take that relation to the criminal.
It belongs to the state as a matter of inherent
right.

The real question is, whether war is one of
those essential rights and powers of the state.

The question is in reality a double one;
namely, Is war ever an essential right of the
state, and must it be forever and necessarily
a function of the state?

In answering these questions, several con-
siderations must be kept in mind.

^The first is that the state itself exists as a
power superior to and taking cognizance of the
relations of individuals; so in all matters of
conflict and dispute between individuals, the
state exists to adjust these relations and to
insure the establishment of justice.

Hence all disputes and conflicts of interest
between individuals which cannot be adjusted
by private means and the application of
the Christian spirit may find their proper
adjustment through the organized life of the
state.

68 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

But it is easy to see that no such larger and
all-inclusive power exists with relation to
states themselves. This means that while a
great many minor matters of difference and
dispute may easily be settled by conference
and adjudication, in the larger matters which
affect the essential life and well-being of the
state itself there has hitherto been no possible
arbitrament but that of reason and mutual
concession, or failing that, the sword.

In this connection it is necessary to keep
in mind the fact that so far at least in human
history there have been bad states as well as
good states. At best, the life of the state is
imperfectly moralized; for while public opin-
ion is something more than the sum of all the
private opinions, nevertheless it is the product
of private opinions, and waits upon the devel-
opment of private character and judgment.

If we have not succeeded in perfectly
moralizing the relation of individuals to each
other, still less have we been able to apply
the principles of justice to all the relations of
the state-person.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 69

This being the case, it is inevitable that
conflicts of interest should sometimes arise
even between comparatively good states —
conflicts touching interests so fundamental
that no adjustment has hitherto been possible
save through the appeal to the sword. Under
such circumstances, to deny the right and
justice of warfare is simply to shut one's
eyes to real life and to try to live in an im-
possible world of dreams.

This is, of course, more plainly evident in
the case of a conflict between a good state
and a bad. Outside of the closet no one has
ever denied the right of a peaceful and well-
behaved people to defend themselves against
an incursion of savages; and the right of
any nation to defend itself against aggressions
which would destroy the liberty of its people
is equally well established.

What is needed at this point is to face
frankly the demands of common sense, and
to rid ourselves of the uneasy feeling that this
right somehow conflicts with the Christian
ideal.

70 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

That it represents a state of affairs that
falls short of the ultimate standard set by
Jesus Christ for the life of men and nations
there can be doubt; but defensive warfare,
war in defense not only of national life and
liberty but sometimes, it may be, even in
defense of national ideals, is not only the right,
but the duty of nations in a world so imper-
fectly moralized as this one in which we live.

When once we have plainly seen this truth,
that the State-Person, in pursuance of its
supreme ends, in protecting and developing
the welfare of its people, is charged with a
right and a responsibility which does not
exist as between individuals, we begin to see
how it may be that a Christian may love his
neighbor as himself and stand ready to apply
the principles of sacrifice and forbearance to
the utmost degree in his personal relation-
ships, and still consistently obey the call of
his country to take up arms.

The definition of war as one little girl's
papa going out to murder some other little

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 71

girl's papa is nothing but sentimental bosh.
When the welfare of the whole people is
involved or a great principle is at stake, the
individual ceases to exist as an individual and
becomes only a cell in the body politic. His
acts in this relation are no longer the acts of an
individual.

War is not legalized murder, but it is, or
at least may be, the endeavor to defend the
right and to attain the largest social well-
being ; and even though it may be undertaken
in a mistaken cause, it is still justified so far
in the experience of humanity as the only
known means whereby certain supreme ends
of human existence could hitherto be attained.

It is only on this ground that we can under-
stand and appreciate the undoubted influences
for good which have resulted from war.

War demands the supreme sacrifice of the
individual to the common weal.

Hence in spite of all the suffering and heart-
break involved, and in spite of the degrading
and brutalizing influences which inevitably

72 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

accompany it, war has a remarkable power
to heighten the moral tone of the community
and to purify and ennoble the common life.
No one can observe the seriousness and moral
earnestness which characterizes the people
of Europe in the present struggle without
feeling thai* even this dreadful sacrifice may
prove to be not too great a price to pay for
such ennobling of humanity.

It is undoubtedly true that wars have fre-
quently had a remarkable effect on civilization.

The Crusades, for example, broke down the
tyranny of church and state, enlarged the
boundaries of human thought, and marked
the beginning of the modern period with its
immeasurable developments of political and
intellectual freedom.

The French Revolution, with all its excesses,
re-created the French nation. The Franco-
Prussian War, brought about as it was by the
intrigues of Bismarck and carried out with
bitter and needless severity, nevertheless
hammered the German people into unity and
created the German consciousness; and its

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 73

effect upon France was in many respects no
less beneficial.

The American Revolution did almost as
much for democracy in England as in America,
and the Civil War not only destroyed slavery,
but was followed by an unparalleled industrial
and intellectual expansion of both the North
and the South.

The recognition of this principle also ex-
plains and justifies the place held in history
by the great struggles for liberty. The world
would be infinitely poorer without the story
of Thermopylae and Marathon, of Lepanto
and Liege.

Who shall dare to say that the characters
of Leonidas and William Wallace and Arnold
von Winkelried, of Gustavus Adolphus and
Cromwell, of Washington and Grant, of
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are not
among the noblest in the history of mankind ;
knightly souls, as truly and loyally Christian
as St. Francis or Thomas a Kempis or William
Booth ?

74 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

III

But now, having recognized the worth and
significance of human history and human in-
stinct, and the place which war has actually
held as an instrument of God for the working
out of His own great ends in the experience
of the race, let us make haste to see the more
excellent way foreshadowed in the Christian
ideal.

There is certainly no doubt, despite General
von Bernhardi, that the Christian principles
of consideration for others, of forbearance
and self-control, and even of self-sacrifice,
are capable of being applied in the relation of
nations no less than in individuals.

They have been illustrated many times in
the history of Europe during the past few
hundred years, even if it be true that some-
times nations have maintained the attitude
of forbearance for their own ends and as a
cloak to their ulterior designs. Even such
concessions bear eloquent witness to the possi-
bility of a Christian policy.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 75

The forbearance of England in the Vene-
zuelan case, of Canada in the Fisheries
dispute, and of the United States toward
Mexico are all instances in point.

Many important and vital questions have
arisen in a hundred years between Great
Britain and the United States, and more than
once relations have been so strained that a
single spark might have produced an explosion.
Nevertheless, the resolute purpose of the
national leaders to find some way for the
peaceful solution of the difficulties has never
failed to bear fruit, and only the conflagration
which broke out last year in Europe over-
shadowed one of the most significant events
in human history, — the celebration of our
hundred years of peace.

Europe sneered at our pretense of dis-
interestedness when we invaded Cuba, and
again when we intervened a second time to
restore order; but we have proven our faith
by our works.

With all her history of militarism and con-
quest, and with all the wealth England has

76 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

undoubtedly received from her colonies, his-
tory will bear witness to the fact that wherever
she has gone she has taken up the white man's
burden, and that the nations she has ruled
are the greatest beneficiaries of her policy.

Above all, who shall say that Belgium has
not in these last days afforded a supreme
example of national self-sacrifice; and has
disproven von Bernhardi's doctrine by taking
thereby a loftier place on the scroll of fame
than she could ever have achieved by the
prosperous discharge of the usual functions
of the state.

If we ask how this ideal of the Christianizing
of world-relations is to be attained, there is no
better answer than that of Kant, whose
essay on "Perpetual Peace" remains after the
lapse of a hundred years the profoundest
utterance which has yet been made on this
theme.

Kant declared three things to be essential
to a lasting world-peace — a peace which
should be anything more than a temporary

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 77

intermission in a state of perpetual warfare.
The first is "Representative Government";
the second is "The Political Organization of
the World"; and the third is "The Spirit of
Hospitality."

By representative government Kant really
meant what we have in mind when we talk of
Democracy.

Thoroughgoing democracy, or the direct
exercise of the functions of government by the
whole people, he did not believe in. He
recognized the danger of the mob-spirit in
government, the necessity which was embodied
in the American Constitution of affording
some check upon popular impulse. He knew
that the tyranny of majorities may be as
oppressive as that of an autocracy. He had
no idea of intrusting the delicate adjustment
of foreign relations to the clumsy devices of
popular government.

But he recognized no less that in the last
analysis the people do the fighting and pay
the bills. He felt that their best instincts
are to be trusted, and that in the long run

78 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

they are more likely to do what is just and
right than an irresponsible bureaucracy in-
tent on furthering its own ambitions. So he
insisted that governments must be responsible
to the people and truly representative of the
best public sentiment of the nation if inter-
national relations are to be established on a
sound basis.

This of necessity carries with it the abolition
of secret diplomacy. Not that a wise discre-
tion must not be allowed to the agents of the
government in the conduct of diplomatic
negotiations; but secret treaties and un-
acknowledged "gentlemen's agreements" be-
tween foreign offices are a fruitful source
of suspicion and distrust, and the intrigues of
far-sighted diplomats have more than once
plunged nations into needless strife.

Only when the relation between states is
regarded as a matter of public concern to be
settled in the open, with all the cards on the
table, can the people be assured that their
true interests are being served.

The wisest students of public affairs are

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 79

agreed that this is not the least important
lesson to be learned from the present conflict
in Europe, and that only by increasing the
responsibility of the governments to the
popular conscience and will can the founda-
tions be laid for a lasting peace.

Kant's second maxim finds expression to-day
in the various schemes which are proposed
for an international tribunal for the settle-
ment of disputes, — with or without an armed
power to enforce its decrees.

We have already seen the necessity for this.
Hitherto there has been no court of last resort,
such as the state itself affords for its citizens
in their disputes, save that of the sword.

Kant was emphatically opposed to a "world-
state," as destroying the sovereignty which is
the very life of every state; but he saw as
clearly as any one the necessity for some sort
of machinery for the peaceful adjustment of
international relations. Conflicts of interest
are bound to arise. Justice must be assured
and the interests of neutral states, the "inno-
cent bystanders," must be safeguarded.

80 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Since Kant's time two types of federated
government have been worked out in human
experience.

The American Union, which in his day had
not emerged from the experimental state, is an
actual government, a super-sovereignty over
sovereign states, such as Kant himself opposed.

It is becoming increasingly evident in the
United States that under the conditions of
modern life the tendency in such a federation
is for the sovereignty of the individual states
to be more and more absorbed in the power
of the central government. The Civil War
proved that the Union is no mechanical
mixture but an organic unity, and the tend-
ency of the last twenty years has been to
increase the centralized authority of the
Federal Government. Nevertheless the peo-
ple at large are fairly satisfied to have it so,
and the interests of all are in the main pretty
thoroughly safeguarded.

But the Civil War also proves that such a
league of peace may break down under the
stress of peculiar circumstances, and it may

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 81

well be that while it works admirably in the
case of a homogeneous people it would not be
adapted to the case of nations so diverse in
language and customs and interests as the
peoples of the old world.

The other type of a federated government
is to be found in the British Empire.

Here the central government exercises but
the remotest shadow of authority. Canada
and Australia and South Africa are to all
intents and purposes independent nations, ex-
ercising all the rights of sovereignty, includ-
ing those of setting up tariff barriers and
coining their own money, — powers forbidden
to the American states.

To the casual observer the bond which
holds the British Empire together is a rope of
sand, and the greatest surprise of the present
war to Germany was the fact the colonies
remained loyal to the mother country and
furnished troops and munitions of war in the
crisis. Even yet German statesmen can
scarcely be convinced that if the struggle
should be prolonged, Canada or India would

82 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

not get out from under the burden and leave
the Empire to her fate.

As a matter of fact nothing holds the British
Empire together but sentiment. If England
should attempt to exercise a real authority
over her colonies, she would lose them in a
day, — as no one knows better than England
herself. She learned her lesson in 1776,
and is not likely to make the same mistake
again.

But the very weakness of the empire is its
strength. The one thing that statesmen are
slowest to learn is that sentiment is the
mightiest factor in human affairs. The
British Empire is nothing in the world but
an Arbitration League between great states,
who for the sake of sentiment have agreed
that they will not go to war with each other
under any circumstances, but will find some
way of adjusting their mutual interest at
all costs.

This suggests that after all the most im-
portant of Kant's maxims is the third; namely,
that of "Hospitality. " It is for this reason

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 83

that we have ventured to introduce this dis-
cussion of method into a study of essential
Christianity ; for this is nothing less than the
application of Christian principles to inter-
national affairs.

What Kant meant by " hospitality" is
that nations must learn to rid themselves of
race hatred and suspicion; that they must
come to trust each other, and to subordinate
their selfish impulses in the interest of peace
and mutual welfare.

As a matter of fact there are no irrecon-
cilable interests between civilized states.
France and England are hereditary enemies.
They have fought each other from Crecy to
Waterloo. Yet to-day they are fighting side
by side. It is not many years since Kipling

wrote,

" Make ye no truce with Adam-Zad,
The Bear that walks like a man.'*

Russia was at that time regarded as England's
most dangerous rival, both in the Near and
the Far East. The Crimean War was fought
to prevent her from securing Constantinople.

84 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Now England sees no objection to such an
event. All these traditional difficulties have
been adjusted, and Germany has become the
bete noire in the path of world-peace. To-
morrow may witness a new alignment.

When men have come to see the absurdity
of all this, and have realized the essential
solidarity of human interests in a world as
compact and genuinely organic as this we
live in has come to be, then we shall begin to
apply the Christian principles of forbearance
and mutual good will to international af-
fairs, and the swords will be beaten into
plowshares.

It is evident that this Christianizing of
national life, of the State-Person in its rela-
tions with its peers, must be a fruit of the
growing Christianization of public opinion.

As individuals grow more Christian in their
relations with each other, and their moral
insight becomes correspondingly quickened,
the field of international relations must
inevitably be brought more and more under
the dominion of the Christian ideal.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 85

It is doubtless a far cry to the consumma-
tion of this hope; but as the spirit of Jesus
Christ takes an ever deeper hold on the hearts
of men, they will not forever be content with
war's crude and wasteful method of attain-
ing international justice, but will strive more
and more for a common understanding and
mutual good will among the nations of the
earth.

It is objected to this hope that the warlike
virtues of courage and self-sacrifice are among
the greatest treasures of the human spirit,
and that the abolition of war will reduce man-
kind to the flabby bourgeois virtues of pros-
perity and ease.

The answer is found in all the glorious
history of spiritual sacrifice. The sisters of
charity who spend their lives in the service of
the poor; the humble missionaries who pour
out their souls without stint in behalf of the
needy inhabitants of the dark places of the
world ; the martyrs of science, the heroes of
industry, and the innumerable multitude of

86 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

earnest spirits in every age who count not
their lives dear unto themselves that they
may be of service to their fellow men and
establish the kingdom of righteousness unto
the ends of the earth, are sufficient witness
to the spiritual resources of the race.

While the earth stands there will never
be a time when men will not be called upon
to sacrifice themselves for righteousness' sake.
The Cross will not die out of human experi-
ence, nor need we fear that it will ever become
an easy thing in this world to do right.

The physical heroism which faces death at
the cannon's mouth makes a far less demand
upon the resources of the human soul than
the spiritual courage required of him who
will follow Jesus Christ in a world of sin and
spiritual conflict.

"Peace? When have we prayed for peace?

Is there no wrong to right ?
Wrong crying to God on high
Here where the weak and the helpless die,
And the homeless hordes of the city go by,

The ranks are rallied to-night !

THE CHRISTIAN AND WAR 87

Peace ? When have we prayed for peace ?

Are ye so dazed with words ?
Earth, heaven shall pass away
Ere for your passionless peace we pray !
Are ye deaf to the trumpets that call us to-day,

Blind to the blazing swords ? "

— Alfred Noyes.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH

The problem of war holds the central place
in all our thinking just now by reason of the
terrible holocaust which has overtaken
Europe, but it is not the most fundamental
ethical problem of mankind.

The root cause of war is undoubtedly the
desire of the strong to exploit the weak.
Indeed a recent German economist and his-
torian goes so far as to say that the political
organization of mankind into states had its
rise historically in the desire of a vigorous
and predatory group to take possession of
the products of toil of a weaker or less aggres-
sive people.

The fundamental problem of human civili-
zation is that of the production and distribu-
tion of goods. If Christianity is to afford
the constructive principles upon which the

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 89

highest human welfare must rest, it is neces-
sary for us to ask what Christianity has to
say on the economic problem.

Practically the question assumes this form,
Can a Christian hold wealth? or to state the
question more broadly, Is Christianity com-
patible with a social order in which men are
divided into rich and poor ?

Here again we are met at the outset with
a confusion of tongues, evidencing a very
general confusion of thought.

On the one hand, there are those who de-
clare that Jesus was a Socialist; that he
believed in the abolition of private property,
or even that he would have all things held in
common; that his doctrine forbids every
form and degree of wealth and enjoins ab-
solute poverty and the refusal to make pro-
vision for the future.

On the other hand, there are those who argue
that the institution of private property is so
embedded in his teaching that his whole ethical
system falls to the ground if the economic struc-
ture of society should be materially changed.

90 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

If we turn from attempts to interpret the
teaching of Jesus in a thoroughgoing way
and look at the spontaneous practical atti-
tude of men toward that teaching, we find
the same confusion.

On the one hand, there is a widespread
feeling that riches are incompatible with
Christianity, and that the church has be-
trayed her Lord by the deference she has
paid to wealth and power ; on the other hand,
there are a great number of well-to-do and
rich in the church who are conscious of no
inconsistency between their religion and their
business life.

On the one hand, St. Francis of Assisi is
held up as the typical Christian. On the
other hand, Mr. Rockefeller is admired as
the type of a successful combination of busi-
ness efficiency and spiritual character.

Again we turn to the teaching of Jesus
to see if it affords any clear light upon this
crucial problem of human life.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 91

Once more we find the same apparent con-
tradiction when we undertake to interpret
him literally.

The Sermon on the Mount declares that no
man can serve God and Mammon, and bids
men lay up their treasures in heaven rather
than on earth. It tells them to take no
thought for the morrow, but to live as the
birds who have neither storehouse nor barn.

When the rich young ruler came to Jesus
declaring that he had kept the command-
ments from his youth up and asking what
further duty was laid upon him that he might
enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus told him
to sell all that he had and give to the poor.

He declared that it was easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God;
and this needle's eye was not a hypothetical
door in the wall of Jerusalem so small that
camels could get through only by being
stripped of their packs and getting down on
their knees. This gate existed only in the
imagination of commentators who wanted

92 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

to save the literal interpretation of Jesus's
words and still leave some loophole for their
rich patrons. Jesus meant a needle's eye,
and the form of the statement declares the
utter impossibility of a rich man being saved.

Jesus's own practice conformed to this teach-
ing. He held no property; he depended for
his living on the generosity of his disciples, and
the little group who traveled with him had a
common purse and lived from hand to mouth.

The church at Jerusalem after his death
apparently followed the same principle. Its
members sold their property and turned the
proceeds into the common treasury. They
gave themselves up to the service of worship
and praise and the proclamation of the Chris-
tian truth, and took no thought for business.

So far the case seems to be clear for the
absolute demand for poverty if one will be a
loyal follower of Jesus.

But, on the other hand, Jesus accepted the
proposition of Zacchaeus to give half of his
goods to the poor and to restore fourfold
to any man whom he had wronged.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 93

When Nicodemus came to inquire the way
of life, Jesus said not a single word about
his property, but simply told him he would
have to have a new spirit and attitude
toward life if he would enter the Kingdom
of God.

The Apostles themselves left their homes
to become companions of Jesus; but they
did not surrender their property, and after
the resurrection Peter and his friends went
back to their fishing nets until the new call
sent them out to spend their lives in proclaim-
ing the gospel.

The little family at Bethany whose friend-
ship meant so much to Jesus seem to have
been in comfortable circumstances ; and one
of Jesus's friends at least had a house in
Jerusalem much larger than the majority of
the houses, since it had an upper room fur-
nished where the Master might eat the
Passover with his Disciples.

Even during the communistic period of
the early church in Jerusalem, as we have
seen, there was no requirement that its mem-

94 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

bers should sell their property for the common
fund ; and Ananias and Sapphira were
punished not for keeping back part of their
wealth, but for pretending they had given
all when they had not. Outside of Jerusalem
there is no trace of the practice of com-
munism; and after the first few years the
Jerusalem saints, having given up all their
property, became a perpetual burden upon
the other churches throughout the Empire
and were supported by collections taken in
Rome and Macedonia.

In point of fact we find here, as we have
found before, that there is no hope in literal-
ism; that the demands of Jesus are not
susceptible of being reduced to simple, hard
and fast rules which draw a sharp line of
demarcation through human life, on the one
side of which lies duty and on the other side
disaster.

In some instances, his requirement was due
to the peculiarities of an individual case; to
some extent, it was governed by the general
conditions of the age in which he lived; to

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 95

some extent, he employed in this connection
the same method of paradox which we found
so arresting and thought-compelling in other
directions.

St. Francis of Assisi accepted literally the
injunction of Jesus to sell all and give to the
poor. The policy did not prove successful
or capable of wide application in St. Francis's
own experience, and as a matter of fact, we
honor him for the sweetness of his spirit, for
the greatness of his love, and for his unshrink-
ing loyalty to the truth as he understood it,
rather than for his specific example in this
connection.

Origen of Alexandria in the third century
carried out literally the suggestion of Jesus
that some men are called to become eunuchs
for the Kingdom of God ; but the good sense
of the church has even from his own day
repudiated such extreme measures, and has
believed that the practice of celibacy ful-
filled the most extreme requirement in the
mind of Jesus. If this saying is to be inter-
preted by common sense and Origen was

96 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

wrong in his interpretation though splendidly
loyal in his obedience, it is possible that the
same is true of St. Francis.

It is true that Jesus was not an economist.
He was not concerned with the problems of
statecraft or of business, with laying down
the scientific laws which govern the economic
realm. He refused to be a judge or divider.
When appealed to regarding the lawfulness
of paying tribute to Caesar, he simply told
the Jews that so long as they accepted Caesar's
money, they were under obligations to Caesar.
He refused to discuss the political principle,
but made clear the moral obligation.

There can be no doubt that the ethical
principles of Jesus are susceptible of wide
application in the political and no less in the
economic field, but we are left to discover
for ourselves what those applications may be.
Broadly speaking, anything which in the
long run is true statecraft is Christian, and
will be found to rest upon the ethical princi-
ples laid down by Christ. In like manner,
anything which proves ultimately to be sound

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 97

economic practice cannot be inconsistent with
the Christian teaching.

But the discovery and application of the
Christian principle to the economic field is
to be made not through slavish submission
to the letter either of Jesus's teaching or his
practice; but by the broad understanding
of his moral purpose in the light of experience.

Turning, therefore, from the attempt to
find in the words of Jesus a clear and well-
defined rule for Christian practice, and apply-
ing once more our principle of sanctified
common sense to the interpretation of his
teaching, we find a good many things which
throw light on our problem and which sug-
gest certain general principles which if carried
out in human life would lead the world in the
direction of a stable social order.

To begin with, there are a number of things
in the practice and teaching of Jesus which
bear directly on the problem of wealth.

98 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

In the first place, Jesus displayed, both in
his practice and in his teaching, a virtual in-
difference to wealth. He tried to make men
see that there are so many things of greater
importance that it is a waste of life to spend
it upon the acquisition of property. The
pursuit of truth, the building of character,
the practice of the spirit of helpfulness, —
these are the aims which should absorb the
soul and which leave small room for greed.

Agassiz, the great American naturalist,
was once offered $700 a night for a course
of lectures; but he replied, "I haven't time
to make money," and he kept on teaching
natural science to undergraduates for a small
salary, too absorbed in the discovery and
proclamation of truth to care whether he
made money or not.

John Wesley was no ascetic and had little
in common with St. Francis, but when the
taxgatherer, supposing that so famous a
man as Mr. Wesley must be living in corre-
sponding style, wrote to him to say that he
had not made return of his silver plate, Mr.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 99

Wesley replied, "I had overlooked the matter ;
I have two silver spoons, — one in London
and one in Bristol ; that is all the silver plate
I expect to possess while so many in England
are starving for bread."

This is the working of the spirit of Jesus
in human life.

In the next place, Jesus plainly recognized
and declared the snare of riches.

He saw how luxury and ease tend to under-
mine the moral character and to unfit men
for strenuous moral effort. He knew how
easy it is for mankind to become the slaves
instead of the masters of their possessions;
to become so entangled with things that they
are no longer masters of themselves or of
the conditions of their life. He knew that
wealth breeds power, and power tends to
make men hard and tyrannical. It was for
this reason that he was continually warning
men against the snare of wealth. It is the
care of the world and the deceitfulness of
riches that choke the word of truth and
make it unfruitful. It is the worship of

100 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Mammon which crowds God out of the human
heart.

One of the most heart-gripping of the par-
ables of Jesus is the story of that man whose
wealth accumulated till he knew not what
to do with it, and he said, "I will build
larger storehouses and there I will bestow this
great wealth, and I will say to my soul, ' Thou
hast much goods laid up for many years —
take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry,' "
and God said unto him, "Thou fool!"

King Midas was gifted with the power to
turn everything he touched into gold, and his
heart rejoiced, but the reeds by the riverside
whispered, "King Midas has ass's ears";
for the rose he plucked, the wine he drank,
the lips of the child he kissed all turned to
gold, and the king realized the utter folly
that mistakes the true riches and seeks only
material gain.

Moreover, Jesus emphatically taught the
necessity of getting rid of anything in life
which has become a snare of the soul. Better
be blind and maimed than to be led by sight

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 101

and touch into actions which destroy the
soul. Better far that a man be poor and
engaged in a daily struggle for existence than
that his soul should be degraded into a money-
bag and his whole life grow flabby and mon-
strous, lapped around with luxury.

Also the general principles of Jesus, his
supreme doctrines of love and service, have
an important bearing on the problem of
wealth.

In the first place, they demand the loftiest
integrity.

It does not require a wide experience of
life to realize that absolute and unflinching
honesty is not often the pathway to great
wealth. We do not mean that all riches are
dishonestly acquired, but the investigations
and revelations of the last few years in
America, and the perpetual struggle against
graft and chicane in which we are engaged,
give ground for the suspicion that most
wealth is tainted money.

We may not go as far as Oppenheimer, the

102 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

historian to whom we referred, who de-
clares that the state itself had its origin in
the desire to get something for nothing and
to enjoy the possession of wealth earned by
the labor of others; but there is a growing
feeling on the part of all sober and intelli-
gent students of human life that if the prin-
ciples of absolute integrity were applied to
the business world, it would cut deep into our
great fortunes and insure a much wider dis-
tribution of the products of industry.

Jesus also insists that the ruling principle
in life must be that of service.

Economically, this means that the em-
phasis in business must be not upon profits
but upon the service of human need.

Whether an element of profit is necessary
in order to make business possible is a ques-
tion for economics to settle, but it is un-
doubtedly true that hitherto the accent has
been on the wrong syllable. Business has
been conducted for profit, and the service
was incidental. The tendency, therefore, has
been to increase the profit to the largest de-

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 103

gree which the traffic will bear, and to reduce
the service to the minimum which the public
will stand.

The change of emphasis which is being in-
sisted upon by the growing demand of public
sentiment in its relation to all the business of
the world is directly in line with the Christian
principle.

The law of love must further be applied to
the whole field of the production of wealth.

Men have been very slow to realize this
truth. Human slavery persisted for eight-
een centuries after Christ, and it is but little
more than fifty years since the Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of the United States de-
clared that the black man had no rights which
the white man was bound to respect. We are
still prone to interpret business purely in the
terms of economic cost and profit, and are
slow to measure the human factors involved.

Of all the children in the United States
between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, one
in six is a wage earner, and there are whole
industries in which the weight rests on the

104 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

shoulders of women and children. We are
coming to see that this must not be ; that
economics must be interpreted in the terms
of humanity; that the cost of a shirt waist
is not the sum paid for the material and the
labor employed in making it, but the priva-
tion and suffering and moral risk run by the
seamstress in her garret and the shopgirl in
the department store.

Men have always applied the test of Chris-
tianity in a general way to the possession of
wealth and have asked of the rich man,
Where did he get it? The San Francisco
millionaire, the foundations of whose fortune
were laid by stage robbery, knows that if
that were discovered, he would suffer in public
esteem.

Within the last few years, the world has
come to feel that a fortune made in beer and
whisky is tainted money — though we ordi-
narily distinguish between the money made
by selling liquor over the bar and that made
through the possession of brewery or distillery
stock.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 105

But some day we shall understand that
every dollar of wealth in the world has been
paid for by human cost, by toil of heart and
brain and hand; and that wherever the
conditions of its production have dwarfed
the lives and imperiled the souls of those
whose toil created it, it is stained with blood.

The most alarming thing which I have
read in years was the admission made by the
younger Mr. Rockefeller before the Indus-
trial Commission not long ago, that he knew
nothing whatever about the labor problem.
Mr. Morgan, son and successor of the money
king of the last quarter of a century, said
essentially the same thing a few days later.

Here are two men who control and ad-
minister hundreds of millions of dollars.
Their wealth is employed in many industries;
it buys the labor of millions of their fellow
human beings ; yet they frankly admit that
they are concerned only with the cash profit
on their investments, and that they know
absolutely nothing about the conditions under
which those profits are made.

106 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

That is an awful thing to say. These
men have no right not to know the labor
problem. They are directly responsible for
the bodies and souls of millions of men, with
their wives and children. If it is impossible
for the bankers who control the industries
of our day to understand and be responsible
for the labor conditions under which their
wealth is created, then the foundations are
laid for the greatest revolution in human
history. For in the name of humanity,
society must wrest from these men the con-
trol of human industry in order that it may
be administered intelligently in the interest
of mankind.

The tyranny of six per cent must be over-
thrown. This world does not exist for the
sake of wealth, but for the sake of folks ;
and it is an intolerable thing that the control
of human lives should be vested in young men
who have no interest in or knowledge of the
fundamental human problem.

Finally, the law of love and service governs
the use that shall be made of one's wealth.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 107

All men are trustees of society for their
possessions.

The world has made great progress in this
direction in the last hundred years. It has
come to pass that multi-millionaires maintain
toward the world a somewhat apologetic at-
titude, as though they were half -ashamed of
their wealth. Mr. Carnegie declared a few
years ago that it is a disgrace for a man to
die rich, and he has been exhausting his in-
genuity in devising methods of disposing of
his wealth in ways that shall be most useful
to mankind. It was said the other day that
the benefactions of Mr. Rockefeller have
amounted to a quarter of a billion ; and the
most miserly business man of the last gener-
ation, Russell Sage, left at his death his
entire fortune to be distributed for the public
good.

We do not always realize, however, that
the principle holds good for the man whose
wealth is counted in hundreds or thousands no
less than for him whose fortune numbers mil-
lions. Whatever we have, we have not for

108 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

ourselves, to employ for selfish ends ; but
we hold it in trust for our neighbor.

Ill

In all this we have been anticipating the
application of the principles of Jesus to the
conditions of modern life.

If the law of integrity must be expanded
into a recognition of the right of labor to a
larger share in the profits and the right of
the public to more efficient service; and if
the law of love must be held to govern the
production of wealth no less than its use,
then Christianity is bound to cut deep into
the historic social order.

Christianity plainly sets itself in opposi-
tion to the economic interpretation of life.

It insists that not the production of wealth
is the chief aim nor the ruling motive in human
history, but the production of manhood, —
however important the economic factor may
have been, and however necessary it may be to
take it into account in any attempt either to
explain the past or to control the future.

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 109

The economic life is concerned only with
producing the material for living. Chris-
tianity is the assertion of the supremacy of
the spirit over the flesh, of manhood over
material possessions.

It protests against the tyranny of things.
It bids men free themselves from the entangle-
ment of worldly possessions ; to be too great
of soul and too high of purpose to go forever
bound to the satisfaction of their physical
wants. It is better that a man should know
truth and feed his soul on beauty and stretch
himself in aspiration after unattainable ideals
than that he should be a well-fed and pam-
pered animal, forever in bondage to food and
clothing and his physical body.

In particular Christianity sets itself in
opposition to luxury and self-indulgence. It
protests against the senseless extravagance
which spends its life in mere social display
and misses all the worth-while ends of
human existence. Monkey dinners at New-
port, balls at which the refreshments cost
hundreds of dollars per plate, and all of that

110 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

sort of thing, stand forever condemned by
the simple appeal of Christianity for moral
heroism and spiritual worth.

Thus Christianity recognizes the necessity
of adjusting oneself to existing social and
economic conditions, and lays down princi-
ples by which men are to be governed under
all conditions.

If the Christian man is born to the posses-
sion of wealth, Christianity does not require
him of necessity to rid himself of his wealth ;
but it bids him be bigger than his money, to
refuse to become a slave to it, to maintain
his spiritual life and freedom in spite of it, to
regard it as a means rather than as an end
in itself, and to use it not for selfish indulgence
but for the service of his fellow men.

If the Christian man finds himself in a
social order where the exercise of his gifts of
mind and heart lead to the possession of
wealth, Christianity has no word of condem-
nation for him; but bids him maintain his
integrity, to sacrifice his economic interests

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 111

unhesitatingly whenever they come in con-
flict with the demands of the soul, to put the
largest possible degree of Christian considera-
tion and brotherhood into his business life,
and to employ the wealth which he has thus
acquired in whatever way shall contribute
most to the well-being of humanity.

But when all this is said, it remains true
that the application of the teaching of Jesus
even in its broadest principles to the economic
life of the world tends utterly to transform
it, to change its emphasis from economic suc-
cess to human service.

There is reason to believe that when this
influence has had its perfect work, the result
will be a transformation of the economic life
of man as thoroughgoing and complete as
has already been brought about in the politi-
cal world in the transition from a centralized
imperial authority to democracy.

If Christianity requires that human costs
be considered as of paramount importance
in the production of wealth, if it insists no
less upon absolute justice in the distribution

112 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

of the products of industry, if it enthrones
human values in all the relations of men with
each other, it means sooner or later the aboli-
tion of poverty and no less the abolition of
great wealth.

Christianity does not mean the mechanical
leveling of human society. It recognizes
diversities of gifts and capacities, and it is
entirely compatible with a distribution of
wealth which is proportionate to the varying
contributions men make to the world's life
by reason of this human diversity. None
the less a world thoroughly Christianized will
be a world which no longer rests the weight
of the social structure upon the mud-sills
of economic slavery and degradation.

It is the ultimate aim of Christianity to
create a social order in which the weakest and
humblest shall have a fair opportunity to
develop his powers and capacities in the free
exercise of such gifts of mind and heart as
God has given him; a world in which there
shall no longer be a few who are oppressed by
their own luxury, degraded by idleness and

THE CHRISTIAN AND WEALTH 113

self-indulgence, and a great multitude whose
lives are dwarfed and crippled by lack of
the necessities of life ; but in which the laws
of justice and brotherhood shall have so
equalized human conditions as to make it
possible for every human being to stand
erect, a free man, and to devote himself
freely to the service of God.

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL

War and wealth are the two most serious
problems in human society, and a study of the
relation of Christianity to these involves, as
we have seen, a fairly comprehensive survey
of the whole field of Christian ethics.

It is desirable, however, to sum up the
Christian ideal a little more completely and
systematically.

We have seen what were the main out-
lines of the ethical teachings of Jesus.

We approach the matter now from the other
side and endeavor to sum up the net impression
of Christianity upon the thought of mankind.

In the light of everything that Jesus taught,
and in the light as well of nineteen centuries
of Christian teaching and influence, what
kind of man is to be regarded as a perfect
Christian ?

114

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 115

Before we take this question up in detail,
however, one very important observation
must be made.

We have been discussing Christianity up
to this point entirely from the point of view
of theory; first, its philosophical theory, its
interpretation of life, and second, its ethical
theory, the demand it makes upon life.

But Christianity is not primarily a theory ;
it is an experience. Christianity is a life.
It had its beginning in the experience of
friendship and daily association with Jesus.
It persisted after his death because of the
spiritual experience of the early disciples,
growing out of their relation to him.

It has endured through nineteen centuries
because of its spiritual vitality, because of its
dynamic quickening of the emotional life,
inspiring the hearts of men with courage and
zeal, enlarging and transforming their lives
and creating within them the ideals we have
sought to describe.

116 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance
of this distinction. The world has had many
ethical theories. What it has lacked is a
moral dynamic.

Lecky, the English historian, in a well-known
passage pointed out the utter failure of the
lofty stoical ideal to exert any real influence
upon human conduct, and declared that it was
reserved for Christianity to present to mankind
in the character of Jesus a personality so win-
some and powerful that the brief record of his
active life has done more to soften and re-
generate mankind than all the disquisitions of
philosophers and moralists.

Life always comes before theory, in point
of time. Men ate for thousands of years
before they reasoned out the science of
physiology. They enjoyed roses and violets
long before they elaborated the science of
botany.

So they loved and hated, they lived together
in communities and nations, and sought to
work out in practical experience the problem
of human relations, long before any system-

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 117

atic attempt was made to construct a the-
ory of the ethical life.

The same principle is equally true in the
religious realm. Men did not first construct a
theological interpretation of the universe and
then endeavor to experience their theology.
They experienced emotions of wonder and awe,
of reverence and worship, and constructed their
religious theories to interpret the experience.

Christianity builds upon the foundation of
universal human experience. Mankind is in-
curably religious. Among the Jewish people
this religious impulse reached its highest de-
velopment and expressed itself in the purest
form.

Jesus Christ coming into the midst of the
religious life of Judaism simply purified and
vivified the religious ideals of his race, and
raised the religious emotions of his followers
to the height of a spiritual passion which
became a life-giving, fructifying influence in
the world, having power to reproduce itself
in the lives of others with whom the first
disciples came in contact.

118 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Christian theology is nothing in the world
but an attempt to rationalize that experience,
to explain and interpret it. Christian ethics
is but the attempt to express in a complete
and systematic fashion the ways in which the
Christian impulses find normal expression in
human life.

A mere philosophical and ethical theory
would have been superseded long ago. Chris-
tianity has survived the centuries because of
this living experience which has knit the
generations together in a continuity of life
and feeling.

Paul and Peter had little in common on the
intellectual side. They were made blood-
brothers by their common devotion to their
Master, and their common experience of
heightened religious feeling and quickened
ethical purpose which grew out of it.

The theology of Justin Martyr and Origen,
of St. Augustine and St. Francis, of Thomas
Aquinas and John Calvin differs not only in
many particulars, but also not infrequently
in fundamental principles; but they are all

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 119

sharers of a common spiritual experience.
They have all drunk from this stream of
warm spiritual emotion and dynamic moral
purpose which has flowed through human
history from the personality of Jesus.

The critics of Christianity have seldom given
adequate consideration to this vital fact.

They have addressed themselves to a dis-
cussion of Christian theory, and have never
been at a loss to find gaps and flaws in it,
whereupon they consider that they have done
away with Christianity. They forget that
life is the fact, and theory but the interpreta-
tion of the fact. No man's digestion was
ever directly affected by the limitations of his
knowledge of physiology.

Brudder Jasper, the darky preacher of
Richmond, had a famous sermon on "The
sun do move." He saw it in the morning on
one side of the house and in the afternoon on
the other. The house hadn't moved, hence
the sun must have moved. We smile at
Brother Jasper's logic, but we set our watches
by the sun as well as he.

120 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

The Christian Scientist who believes that
matter is an illusion, and the materialist
who denies all spiritual existence, both build
their houses out of brick and mortar.

To have a mistaken theory is unfortunate,
but to ignore facts is tragic. The life of
Christianity is the most significant fact in
the history of the last nineteen centuries,
and the one most commonly ignored by his-
torians.

The central thing in Christianity, viewed
as life rather than theory, is its experience of
God.

The Christian believer has experienced an
emotional exaltation so unique and powerful
that it seems nothing less than the immediate
contact of the soul with the divine. It car-
ries with it the quickening of his spiritual im-
pulses, the purifying of his moral insight, the
strengthening of all his loftier ethical purposes.
It makes him a wiser, stronger, better man.
It implants within him a spirit of good will
which impels him to spend himself in the
service of his fellow men.

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 121

This spiritual experience is not at all times
equally vivid and powerful, nor does it seize
upon all individuals in the same way or to the
same degree. It is subject to all the psycho-
logical laws which govern the emotional experi-
ences of mankind in every department of life.

The love of a mother for her babe, of a son
for his mother, of husbands and wives, is not
always equally vivid. The impulses which
are set in motion in moments of strong feeling
are taken up by the moral will and purpose
and carried out in everyday life under all its
fluctuations of emotional intensity ; but these
warm human emotions are what make human
life the rich and colorful and beautiful thing
it is, and so it is this deep undercurrent of
spiritual emotion which constitutes vital
Christianity.

From this point of view a Christian is one
who shares the Christian emotion and experi-
ence. His theological interpretation of it
may be faulty, his answer to the ethical
demand of Jesus may be imperfect; but
because his life has been touched by the

122 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

power of the Christian spirit he is more truly
a Christian than many another whose theo-
logical theories and ethical ideals may be per-
fect, but who has never connected his theories
with life.

The greatest word in Christian speech is
love. Jesus himself summed up the whole
meaning of life in the command, "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and thy neighbor as thyself." That man is a
Christian whose life is moved in any degree by
that spirit ; and he is Christian to the degree
to which he is impelled and controlled by it.

We come now to ask in the light of all we
have learned of the teaching of Jesus and of the
essential nature of the Christian experience,
what kind of man a perfect Christian would
be. What is the Christian ideal for the
personal life? How will the vital experience
in the soul of a perfect Christian express itself
in actual life ?

If our understanding of the spirit and pur-

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 123

pose of Jesus is correct, such a man will not
be an ascetic, a bloodless and anaemic recluse,
living in retirement and spending his life in
meditation and devotion. He will not find it
necessary to withdraw himself from the normal
life of mankind or to wear himself out in a
fruitless struggle against the normal impulses
of life. Such a man will not be morbidly
introspective, forever engaged in feeling his
own spiritual pulse or pulling his spiritual
experience up by the roots to see whether it is
growing.

Nor, on the other hand, is it at all certain
that such a man will of necessity be a radical
reformer, a wielder of the big stick against
all the wrongs and failures of human society.
There will doubtless be times when he will be
called upon to strike mighty blows against
wrong and oppression, but there could be no
greater mistake than to suppose that only the
ascetic on the one hand and the reformer on
the other are to be regarded as the typical
Christian.

Asceticism is a false and morbid ideal, born

124 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

in part of pagan philosophy and in part of a
mistaken devotion to the letter of a few of
Jesus's sayings. Spirited and aggressive re-
form has often been the product of the Chris-
tian motive, but it is a tool to accomplish
certain results, one which can only be applied
under certain conditions and must always be
wielded with self-restraint and wisdom. The
reformer ought to be a Christian and the
Christian must sometimes be a reformer, but
the Christian ideal is much larger than this,
and must not be confused with the narrower
purpose and more limited function of reform.

If we should undertake to describe a perfect
Christian life on the positive side, I think we
should say that it would be characterized,
first of all, by the recognition of spiritual
forces and relations. It would be a deeply
religious life in the sense, not of assiduous
devotion to religious forms and practices, but
of living continually under the stimulating
consciousness of its spiritual heritage.

Its attitude toward God would not differ
essentially from that of a splendid and loyal

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 125

and hard-working son who is a partner in his
father's business, who finds in his father's
friendship and comradeship a great joy and
a powerful stimulus in carrying out the respon-
sibilities of his daily life.

Such a Christian life as this would be great-
souled. That is to say, it would not be moved
by petty ends and mean motives. It would be
incapable of being absorbed by trivial things.

The indictment which Christianity brings
against so much of human life is that it is not
worth while.

"For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking."

To pursue amusement and pleasure, social
prestige, political ambition and business
success as the chief things in life, is to
betray a woeful lack of perspective ; to get
the whole center of gravity of life in the
wrong place. It is not that any of these
things are wrong in themselves, so that the
Christian must withdraw from them and live
as though they were not; but that they

126 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

should be mere incidents of a life devoted to
higher ends.

The Christian is one who is engaged upon
the great task of building a character worthy
to endure beyond this brief experience; of
establishing in the world the great ideals of
purity and justice and truth; of helping his
fellow men in their sorrows and struggles ; of
establishing the kingdom of righteousness and
peace and joy in holiness of spirit.

To imagine that such an one ought to be too
solemn to find pleasure in a jest, too serious
to take any relaxation in play or pleasure, too
conscious of life's tragedies ever to unbend
from his stern devotion to the moral impera-
tive, too absorbed in the contemplation of
heaven to know or care anything about the
affairs of this life, is utterly to misconceive
the spirit and attitude of Jesus or the real
demand of the Christian ideal.

A Christian is one who uses all these things
merely as a means to a larger end, and so is
everywhere master of himself and of the
conditions of life instead of becoming a slave

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 127

to his impulses or to the circumstances in
which he is placed.

Such a life will be characterized by the spirit
of kindness and love.

Love is not sentimental gush nor easy-
going tolerance — it is entirely compatible
with strength and dignity, with resoluteness
of purpose, with keen endeavor to accomplish
the work of the world.

It simply means the spirit of modesty, of
considerateness, of courtesy, of patience and
forbearance ; the recognition of other's rights,
the set purpose to serve and please. It means
unselfishness. It means a life measured not in
terms of what one is going to get out of it
but of how much one can put into it. It
means a high moral earnestness, an unhesitat-
ing consecration of oneself to the good of
mankind and the service of the kingdom of
God.

Such a life is a life which will not shrink
from sacrifice, which has learned to put first
things first, and knows that nothing which life
can give can ever make up to any man the

128 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

loss he sustains when he subordinates right to
self-interest, or fails by reason of cowardice or
indifference to be true to his own loftiest ideals.

Ill

When once the Christian ideal is interpreted
in this broad and sincere fashion, an innumer-
able multitude of examples rush to mind.

One recent magazine writer convinced him-
self that the Christian church was a failure as
soon as it was born, because it misapprehended
its Master and sought to inculcate philosophy
and win ecclesiastical power instead of allow-
ing the religious impulse to run a perfectly
free course in the world. Another is quite
sure that there are no Christians left ; that
perhaps indeed there never have been any, —
with the possible exception of St. Francis.

But when one looks frankly and simply
at the history of Christianity, interpreting the
Christian ideal in the light of ordinary good
sense, though with a clear recognition of the
lofty purity of its moral imperative, it becomes
clear that while there has never been and can

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 129

never be a perfect Christian, a man whose
life completely embodies and illustrates the
whole significance of Christian love, neverthe-
less, from the days of the Apostles until now
an innumerable multitude of whom the world
was not worthy have borne witness to the
power of the Christian motive and have
handed down the torch of Christian light and
life to succeeding generations.

St. Francis was indeed a Christian, not be-
cause of his poverty or his asceticism, but in
virtue of his splendid loyalty to the truth as
he understood it, and above all of the exhaust-
less tenderness of his love.

A very different type was Martin Luther,
rugged, uncouth and simple, but he was no
less a Christian when, in the light of the insight
that any man might draw near to God in the
simplicity of his own heart, without need of
priest or mediator, he faced the emperor and
the church with the noble words: "Here I
stand; I can do no other, God help me!"

Reformers whose zeal purified the state,
established justice and advanced the cause of

130 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

liberty and democracy : Calvin at Geneva,
John Knox in Scotland, Garrison and Wendell
Phillips in America, were nobly Christian
in their loyalty to justice and righteousness
and their uncompromising opposition to op-
pression and wrong at all cost.

Lord Shaftesbury spent his whole life and
fortune in self-sacrificing service of the poor
and oppressed, and when he died, uncounted
thousands of the common people followed his
casket through the streets of London to its
resting place in Westminster Abbey, while
grimy newsboys, the tears marking white
furrows down their cheeks, said one to another,
"Our Earl is dead."

William Booth left the ministry of the
Methodist church that he might give himself
unreservedly to the service of the London
slums.

Florence Nightingale faced death in the
trenches of the Crimea to minister to the
wounded and suffering.

The heart of David Livingstone is buried
in the Africa he died to save, and on the slab

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 131

that covers his body in Westminster Abbey
is inscribed his noble appeal to the Christian
nations to heal the hurt of Africa, " the open
sore of the world."

But not monks and reformers and phi-
lanthropists and missionaries alone have em-
bodied the spirit of Jesus Christ.

Washington was a Christian when he stood
in simple dignity for liberty and justice, and
by his wisdom and integrity guided the infant
republic to the establishment of a stable and
just government. He was Christian when he
put aside all thought of ambition and refused
to allow the plot of his officers to offer him
the crown so much as to come to a head.

Garibaldi was Christian when he struggled
to liberate Italy from the cruel oppression of
Austria and said to the young men of his
country, "I promise you forced marches,
short rations, bloody battles, wounds, im-
prisonment and death — let him who loves
home and fatherland follow me!"

Abraham Lincoln was a Christian states-
man when he freed the slaves, and when by

132 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

example no less than precept he taught his
countrymen how to carry forward their great
task "with malice toward none, with charity
for all, with firmness in the right as God gave
them to see the right."

Who shall say that a soldier like Philip Sidney
was not a Christian, who when he was dying
on the field of battle gave the cup of water
someone brought him to a wounded comrade
with the words, "You need it more than I."

In St. Paul's Cathedral in London is a
simple cenotaph erected to the memory of
Chinese Gordon, who was murdered at Khar-
tum. On it is this inscription: "To the
memory of Charles George Gordon, who
always and everywhere gave his strength
to the weak, his substance to the poor, his
sympathy to the suffering, and his heart to
God."

These are the outstanding lives, the heroes
of the faith. With them comes a great multi-
tude which no man can number, who through
great tribulation have maintained their loyalty
to the spirit and purpose of their Master.

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 133

They all, from the least to the greatest, are
fragmentary lives. They would have been
the last to claim virtue for themselves, the
first to confess that they were chief of sinners.
As has been well said, Christianity is a flying
goal. The ideal itself grows ever more lofty
and perfect as our understanding broadens
and deepens. We have this treasure in
earthen vessels. It could not be otherwise
in such a world as that in which we live.

To shut our eyes to actual conditions and
spend ourselves in the pursuit of unreal and
impossible fantasies is a waste of energy, and
an utter failure to comprehend the spirit
and purpose of the loftiest spiritual truth the
world has yet received.

On the other hand, to fix our eyes on the
weaknesses and faults of good men, and to
deny the power and worth of the Christian
ideal because it has hitherto found but im-
perfect fulfilment in any life, is idle folly.

The Christian ideal is that of a life marked
by simple purity and integrity, and moved by
great-hearted devotion to the service of God

134 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

and man. Such an ideal may be set aside
when any of its critics can suggest one that is
worthier or which has more power to command
the devotion of men.

The standards of personal character do
not, however, exhaust the Christian ideal.
It is true that the emphasis both in the teach-
ing of Jesus and in the historic development of
Christian ethics is upon the individual life, but
it is always the individual in social relations.

The present generation has witnessed the
greatest expansion in Christian thought since
the Reformation, in the growing recognition
of the social significance of Christianity.

It is a commonplace of present-day discus-
sions that the solidarity of mankind has been
very greatly enhanced by the developments of
the last hundred years. Families, communities,
and nations no longer live in isolation from
each other, but the whole world is bound
together in the most complex web of mutual
interest and mutual dependence.

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 135

As a result the social obligations of men
have been intensified. New definitions of
sin have been made necessary, new applica-
tions of old ethical principles are revealed.
The highwayman of the seventeenth century
robbed his victim at the point of a pistol;
his successor in our day organizes a blue-
sky mining company, or sells building lots in
the bottom of a ravine. Men formerly
committed murder by knife or poison ; to-day
by selling impure milk or putting the price of
ice beyond the reach of the poor.

All this has necessitated a broader inter-
pretation of Christian ethics. A thousand
new questions have arisen. What is the
bearing of Christianity upon the duty of a
working man in the matter of labor unions,
or the question of the open shop ? What has
it to say to the holder of Standard Oil or
Steel Trust stock ?

The responsibility for injustice and wrong
has become so widely distributed as to lose its
weight upon the individual conscience. A
few years ago the representative of one of the

136 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

popular magazines began investigating polit-
ical graft in American municipal government.
He began by considering the tribute exacted
by the police department from the resorts of
vice. This led on the one hand to the owner-
ship of property, the existence of slums and
tenements ; and on the other hand to the
influences which brought about the election
of city officials. Presently he discovered that
public service corporations were involved.
More than once it happened that the men
who financed a campaign against vice grew
hostile when the investigation began to lay
bare the wider ramifications of the evil of graft.

In the end the investigator summed up
years of study by throwing the responsibility
back upon the whole business organization,
and — contrary to the maxim of Burke —
indicted the whole people. The recent in-
vestigations of industrial conditions in Colo-
rado have brought to light a similar shifting
of responsibility.

The significance of all this for our discussion
is to indicate that if Christianity is to have

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 137

any meaning for the modern world with its
vast complex of social and industrial relations,
its ethics must be interpreted in a broader
way than ever before.

It is not enough to ask what is the duty of
individuals in their direct personal contact
with each other; but how the spirit of the
Christian ethics can find embodiment in the
whole web of the social order.

A little reflection shows, however, that no
new principles are required. The application
of the laws of love and service to the new con-
ditions is the only thing which can purify
modern life and destroy the abuses under
which mankind is suffering to-day.

The social ideal of Christianity is that of
a world bound together by mutual service;
a world so organized that the power of evil
men to exploit their weaker or less fortunate
neighbors shall be reduced to a minimum; a
world in which all discoverable injustices in
the organization of society shall be eliminated.

If this results in lessening the profits which
accrue to any social group, this only means

138 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

that hitherto this group has been getting more
than its fair share of the product of toil.

A clear-eyed and courageous Christianity
must insist that no man has discharged his
full duty when he has applied the Christian
spirit to his concrete personal relations ; but
that his conscience no less than his practical
judgment must be socialized until he shall
apply in all the multiplied activities of his
business and political life the same funda-
mental principles which bid him sacrifice his
own interests for the sake of his fellows,
and shall do his part to establish justice and
good will as the organic law of the social order.

It is worthy of note that when Jesus sought
a single name by which to make known the
total aim and purpose of his activity he found
it in the Kingdom of God.

The chief good, the pearl of great price to
purchase which it was fitting that a man
should sell all that he had, was neither individ-
ual happiness nor individual salvation. It
was the Kingdom of God, the redeemed and

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 139

glorified social order in which the will of God
should inform and permeate every relation of
the entire structure, so that the whole of hu-
manity should be lifted up to the level of the
perfect social ideal.

The glowing promises of the closing chapters
of the Book of Revelation have to do not with
a Paradise in some distant star, but with a
City of God which cometh down from God
out of Heaven, adorned as a bride for her
husband, to make this world its permanent
abiding place. Into it shall enter nothing
that defileth or that loveth and maketh a lie ;
but they shall bring the honor and the glory
of the nations into it.

This is the supreme vision which Christian-
ity sets before mankind. The world can
never go back to the individualistic faith of
our fathers. No man to-day can be thoroughly
and vitally a Christian who does not make
the achievement of this perfect social order
the supreme hope of his heart and the supreme
end of his practical endeavor.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE

In all this discussion of the beliefs and ideals
of Christianity, we have said almost nothing
of certain matters which formed the staple of
Christian preaching a generation ago.

Perhaps the greatest theologian America
has produced, a saint, and one of the great
preachers of the world, was Jonathan
Edwards. His most famous sermon was en-
titled, "Sinners in the Hands of an angry
God." In it he described men as suspended
by a thread over the bottomless pit of eternal
woe.

The note struck by Jonathan Edwards has
formed so characteristic a part of Christian
teaching that to many people Christianity
means nothing else than the attempt to

140

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 141

frighten men into virtue by fear of hell fire.
When Kipling desires to contrast the teaching
of the gentle Buddha, and to urge upon Chris-
tians a broader charity toward their heathen
brothers, he addresses them as

"Ye who tread the Narrow Way,
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day."

Forty years ago one seldom heard a ser-
mon, and certainly never an evangelistic
appeal, which did not rest its case mainly
upon the sinner's impending doom.

To many earnest and thoughtful people
the loss of this sense of the exceeding sinful-
ness of sin and the awfulness of God's wrath
against it accounts for the spiritual flabbi-
ness of modern life and the failure of the
church to make any impression upon the
world.

There can be no doubt, as we have already
seen, that Christianity regards life as involving
a genuine moral risk, or that it regards sin as
involving utter spiritual disaster and death. It
is doubtless true that the thought of our day is

142 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

extremely superficial at this point, and that
the world is impatient of the stern warning
which religion utters.

The changed emphasis in religious teaching,
however, is not merely a weak concession to
the spirit of the time. It is due in large
part to factors in modern thought which are
in reality the product of Christianity itself.

Chief of these is the recognition of the
spiritual possibilities of human nature. Men
have come to see that it is possible to trans-
form bad men into good. Their attitude
toward the criminal is no longer that of
vengeance, but rather of desire for his reforma-
tion. Our penal institutions are becoming
reformatories, and there is a growing convic-
tion that in the heart of the worst man lie
buried possibilities of goodness which need
only to be quickened into life and given an
opportunity for development to change the
whole character of the man.

On the surface this attitude seems to involve
a denial of one of the teachings of orthodoxy
which has long been regarded as a corner-

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 143

stone of religious truth ; namely, the depravity
of human nature by reason of which the heart
of man is inclined to evil and that continually,
— on which account he deserves damna-
tion and can be saved only by being born
again and receiving a new nature in place
of that which he inherited from our first
father.

This doctrine in its traditional form was
the product of devotion to the literal inter-
pretation of the scriptures, and has largely
given place in modern theology to a recog-
nition of the weakness and imperfection of
undeveloped humanity, by reason of which
it is like a little child and needs the for-
bearance and wise guidance of parental love.
The child may still be wilful and rebellious,
and so cut himself off from the family life
and from his Father's help. The change
of attitude involved in his self-surrender
to his Father brings about such a transforma-
tion in his spirit and life as may justly be
called a new birth.

The new theology insists no less earnestly

144 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

than the old on the necessity for this changed
attitude, and upon the grave peril of moral
degeneration and death which is involved
in the persistent attitude of wilful self-
assertion. But the new theology takes the
parable of the Prodigal Son rather than the
Epistle to the Romans as the basis for its
psychology of religion.

It is not always realized that the old the-
ology made provision for quite as broad an
interpretation of sin and regeneration through
its doctrine of "prevenient grace." The
sinner at all times was subject to such opera-
tion of the divine Spirit in his soul as made
it possible for him at any time, by simply
changing his attitude toward God, to come
immediately into the relation of sonship
and receive the regenerating influence of
divine grace.

Translated into untechnical language, this
meant that although there was in reality
nothing good in ordinary human nature, the
divine power was continually at work even
in the hearts of bad men, supplying those

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 145

rudimentary impulses toward good which,
if given free play, had power to transform
the bad man into a good one.

Modern thought simply does away with
the theological machinery which was the
tribute paid to the literal interpretation of
the New Testament, and says there are in
the heart of the worst man good impulses
which, if stimulated and developed, are capa-
ble of transforming him into a good man.
All we have lost is a considerable amount of
obscure theological reasoning, and we have
gained a more frank and simple approach to
the human soul.

This change in the theory of spiritual
dynamics, coupled with a growing recognition
of the reformatory rather than vengeful pur-
pose of punitive measures, have largely dis-
placed the appeal to the motive of fear in
Christian preaching. Men have come to
feel that there is not much moral value in
refraining from sin simply for fear of punish-
ment.

All that was really of value in the old way

146 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

of getting at things is preserved in the recog-
nition that every act has its unescapable
consequences, and that the evil and selfish
impulses of human nature will lead to sure
personal and social disaster if indulged.

The other principal element in the Christian
preaching with which most of us were familiar
in our childhood was the glowing and vivid
description of Paradise. This also has been a
favorite point of attack for the critics of the
faith, who regard religion as an attempt to
bribe men into virtue by promises of reward.

No doubt this motive has often been crudely
employed in Christian preaching, and the
world has happily outgrown it. We have
come to see that there is little moral value
in obedience which must be purchased by a
gift.

It may be worth while, however, to stop
just for a moment to note that there is a
broad sense in which the hope of reward
plays a large and legitimate part in all human

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 147

life. From the scholarships and medals and
honorary degrees which are the prizes of
scholarly attainment, to the vast profits
which reward enterprise and foresight in the
commercial realm, men pay universal tribute
to this motive in their ordinary activities.

The kind of prizes which appeal most to
men may differ widely in individual cases.
As character is developed and the spiritual
insight becomes more profound, the character
of the desired reward becomes higher and
purer. Doubtless, the true saint is he whose
virtue is its own reward ; that is to say, who
finds in the consciousness of spiritual victory,
and the approval of right-thinking souls,
the enduring satisfaction which repays him
for all of the sacrifices involved in the spiritual
struggle.

But to deny the power of this motive to
sustain men in the conflict, and to inspire
them to look beyond the present moment
to the future achievement, is simply to lose
oneself in words and to refuse to face real
life.

148 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

The real meaning of the promise of heaven
which has played so large a part in Christian
thought and life is the enthronement of hope
in human experience; the assurance that in
God's good time every human problem will
be solved and every normal desire of human
nature find its ultimate satisfaction.

Christianity is the religion of hope. It
looks out upon a world which is confessedly
imperfect and fragmentary, and refuses to
believe it a finished world, done with and set
aside.

It refuses equally to believe it an accidental
world, a by-product of processes and forces
which no one can understand and of which
we know nothing.

It finds rather in the very imperfection of
the world the promise of hope. It looks
upon creation as a process. It anticipated
by nineteen centuries the doctrine of evolu-
tion which declares all existence to be a
progress toward some far-off end. It sees in
every springtime the promise of harvest, in
every seed the promise of growth, in every

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 149

flower the promise of fruit. It knows that
childhood is imperfect, but sees the promise
of childhood fulfilled in manhood.

So when it finds humanity imperfect, it
dares to look forward to the dawn of a new
day when the lessons of life shall have been
learned, when the individual shall have at-
tained to the full spiritual stature of the
sons of God, and human society become
the heavenly kingdom.

Ill

In the early church the Christian hope
took the form of the anticipation of the
speedy return of Christ to set up in person
his kingdom in the earth.

Certain of Christ's own sayings seemed
to promise such return, at least in the form
in which they have come down to us. It is
impossible to be certain whether Jesus him-
self said these things in this form, or whether
by reason of the crude Messianic hopes
which his disciples shared with the rest of
the Jewish people they misapprehended what

150 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

he did say and reported him imperfectly;
but there is no doubt that the New Testa-
ment writers shared the belief of their breth-
ren that the generation then alive would
witness the return of Christ and the setting
up of his miraculous heavenly kingdom on
earth.

There is equally no doubt that they were
mistaken. The generation of the apostles
fell on sleep and were gathered to their
fathers. Nineteen centuries have passed
away and history goes on in its accustomed
way.

Nevertheless, the hope of the literal re-
turn of Christ to set up a miraculous kingdom
on the earth has persisted. Men have com-
forted themselves with remembering that a
thousand years are with the Lord as one
day, and that the mistake of the early dis-
ciples as to the time does not of necessity
vitiate the hope of his coming.

We have no desire to enter into the con-
troversy over the return of Christ, but there
are two or three things which must be said.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 151

The first is that those interpreters of
prophecy who find in the books of Daniel,
Ezekiel and Revelations indications that these
are the last times, or who regard the war
in Europe as Armageddon, have had their
predecessors in every age. The Beast has
been Nero, Mohammed, Caesar Borgia and
Napoleon; the Scarlet Woman has been
Islam, the Roman Church and Mrs. Eddy.
The utter lack of any general agreement
among the advocates of this point of view
as to the interpretation of the prophecies
renders the sober thinker somewhat skeptical
regarding the whole religious conception in-
volved.

If we will remember the principle which
we have elsewhere found so fruitful in inter-
preting the sayings of Jesus, namely that he
meant not what he said, but what he meant,
we may discover that it is not necessary to
take him literally in this connection.

He said, This generation shall not pass
away until these promises be fulfilled. He
said, There are some standing here who shall

152 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

not taste death until they shall see the king-
dom of God come with power.

If we ignore the literal implication of these
words and content ourselves with their spirit,
we shall see that they were amply fulfilled
in their own time and have received repeated
and larger fulfilment throughout Christian
history.

The little group of frightened disciples
who fled from the mob in Gethsemane, or
warmed themselves tremblingly at the fire
in the outer court of the high priest's palace
while their Master met his trial within, were
utterly crushed by his crucifixion. Their
hopes were destroyed, and they said sadly
one to another, "We trusted that it had
been he who should have redeemed Israel."

But something happened in Joseph's garden
which turned their despair to wonder and
hope and radiant joy. John and Peter found
the tomb empty. Mary looked into the
face of One whom she supposed to be the
gardener, heard him say, Mary, and clasped
his feet with the rapturous cry, Rabboni.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 153

Doubting Thomas looked upon a form he
thought never to see again, and put his
finger into the print of the nails and his
hand into the thrust of the spear, and won-
deringly cried, My Lord and my God.

Waiving the debate as to the physical
reality of these apparitions, or even the
authenticity of the stories themselves, some-
thing happened to these men and women
which turned them from a scattered group
of crushed and disappointed mourners into
a radiant band of death-defying enthusiasts
who lived henceforth in the glad conviction
that the kingdom of God was come with
power.

Once more the little group gathered in an
upper room in Jerusalem for prayer and
praise, and to talk over the wonderful events
of the past few weeks. They were still
blind and ignorant as to the larger meaning
of their Master's teaching. They had no
conception of his spiritual power. But while
they waited there came suddenly upon them
a baptism of spiritual inspiration.

154 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Again we waive the question as to the
nature of this experience. Something hap-
pened on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem
to that little band of Jewish peasants which
made them a flaming fire and sent them
forth to light the torch of spiritual enthusiasm
throughout the Roman Empire. In less than
twenty years men were saying in remote
Greek cities, "They that turn the world
upside down have come hither also." Within
a generation Roman Emperors were consulting
what to do to check the new movement. In
less than three hundred years the gibbet
on which a Jewish peasant met a malefac-
tor's death became the proud standard of the
Roman Empire, and the armies of the world
marched under it with the slogan, "In This
Sign, Conquer." Was not this a fulfilment
of the promise of Jesus?

One other event of striking significance to
the Jewish mind must be taken into account.

Remember that the Jew regarded himself
as chosen of God; he believed implicitly in
the miraculous history of the Old Testament.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 155

He looked confidently for the day when Jeru-
salem should be the capital of the earth and
the king of the House of David should give
the law to the Roman Empire.

Is it any wonder that even to Jewish Chris-
tians the destruction of Jerusalem was the
end of the world? It at least marked the
end of a mighty epoch in the spiritual his-
tory of mankind. To us who look back upon
it from the viewpoint of modern civilization, it
was at worst nothing more significant than the
destruction of Louvain. Nineveh and Bab-
ylon have disappeared. Alexandria was de-
stroyed by the Caliph Omar. The fall of
Jerusalem to us is only one of many similar
catastrophes in human history. But to the
devout Jew, even the Jewish Christian, it
was a cataclysm even more overwhelming
than it would be to a modern Englishman if
the German army should lay England waste,
and London on heaps, a smoking ruin, and
of Westminster Abbey should leave not one
stone upon another.

We do not insist that those commentators

156 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

are right who see in the destruction of Jeru-
salem the literal fulfilment of all the Apoc-
alyptic prophecies of the Old and New Testa-
ments; but to a vivid historical imagination
it seems amply sufficient to meet the thought
in the mind of Jesus when he foretold the
destruction of the temple and the tribulation
that was to come upon all flesh.

At all events, the most earnest believer in
the impending advent of Christ would not
insist that this doctrine is a part of essential
Christianity, or deny the name Christian to
one who finds in the recurring outbursts of
spiritual power in human history the essen-
tial fulfilment of the Christian hope.

The expectation of a Messianic Kingdom
to be inaugurated by the spectacular return
of Christ has been transformed in the Chris-
tian consciousness of our day into the hope
of Christianizing the social order.

It is easy to see that such a hope would
have been meaningless to the apostolic age.

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 157

The early church was recruited largely from
the lower orders of society. To dream of
exerting an influence upon the whole political
structure of mankind so great as to transform
its fundamental political theory and recon-
struct the entire social and economic fabric
was beyond the power of the human imagina-
tion in its wildest flights. The most which
could be hoped for was to rescue as many as
possible out of a doomed world, and to await
the judgment of God to overthrow the an-
cient order of things and to create a new
heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness.

It is otherwise with us who stand upon the
pinnacle of nineteen centuries of historical
development. We have seen the old order
reconstructed not once or twice.

The Roman Empire which in the first
century seemed as stable as the everlasting
hills long since crumbled into dust. The
ecclesiastical empire which was set up on
its ruins to maintain the outlines of a social
order amid the chaos of the barbarian inva-

158 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

sion has likewise long since disappeared.
The institutions of feudalism which suc-
ceeded in turn gave place to the autocratic
empires of France and Spain; and now at
last we behold the whole world under the
sway of democracy.

But when we look at this development we
see that democracy itself is one of the fruits
of Christianity; that it was implicit in the
teaching of Jesus and Paul and that it is the
leaven of the Christian evaluation of human
nature which has been working throughout
all the centuries to bring about this result.

In their dismay over the terrible catastro-
phe that has befallen the world men are
telling us that Christianity has broken down
and that the boasted progress of civilization
is an illusion.

Yet this very war bears eloquent witness
to the immeasurable influence which Chris-
tianity has exerted upon human ideals, when
we consider the strenuous efforts made by
all parties to the conflict to justify themselves

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 159

at the bar of the world's conscience. The
very dismay which has fallen upon humanity,
the feeling that this war is somehow a dis-
grace to mankind, the protest of all the peoples
that it was forced upon them, and that they
are fighting in self-defense against the un-
warranted aggressions of their neighbors, tells
of a new motive and a new spirit in human
life.

A hundred years ago war was still an honor-
able profession and no nation would have
dreamed of apologizing for being engaged in
it. Not only has the world progressed by
attempting to mitigate the severities of war,
so that captives are no longer sold into slav-
ery and the women and children of the con-
quered put to the edge of the sword; but
war itself has become a horrible thing, a
crime against humanity. Nothing could bear
such powerful witness to the hold of the
Prince of Peace upon the heart of the modern
world.

The economic and social progress of man-
kind has been not less remarkable.

160 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

The majority of the inhabitants of the
Roman Empire were slaves. Our writers
on industrial problems indulge in much lurid
rhetoric over wage-slavery and the condition
of the poor; but one has only to read the
economic history of even a few centuries ago
to realize how vast has been the progress of
social justice.

The recognition of the profound influence
already exerted by Christianity upon human
society has enlarged the Christian hope ; and
prophets to-day are dreaming, not of the re-
turn of Christ to destroy the world and set
up a new and miraculous heavenly kingdom.
They are dreaming of a world of righteous-
ness and peace, of brotherhood, of mutual
service; of a world where poverty shall be
abolished, where every child shall be born into
a heritage of physical comfort and intellectual
opportunity; a world in which the ancient
abuses of the social order shall have been done
away and the whole level of humanity lifted
to the plane of the Kingdom of God.

No doubt, this dream seems to many but

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 161

an idle tale. We do not expect its advent
to-day or to-morrow. But we, too, may com-
fort our hearts with the reflection that one
day is with the Lord as a thousand years. A
mushroom will spring up in a night. If you
are fortunate some October morning, you may
see one push its way through the dead leaves
and spring before your eyes to its full growth.
But you cannot, by watching, trace the devel-
opment of an acorn into an oak tree.

A baboon and a Hottentot baby may be
born the same day in an African jungle, but
the ape will be full-grown and the grandfather
of a generation of apes before the baby has
grown to maturity. We need not wonder
that the Almighty takes many centuries for
the development of humanity if He took a
thousand ages to fit the earth for the habita-
tion of man.

Christianity faces the future with an un-
conquerable faith, believing that every up-
ward step in the history of mankind hitherto
is the promise of that far-off divine event to
which the whole creation moves.

162 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Yet even this does not exhaust the Chris-
tian hope, for Christianity insists on inter-
preting life not only in terms of the whole
race as an organic unit, growing through
the centuries and learning its lessons until
it shall attain ultimately the full stature of
maturity, but equally in terms of the individ-
ual. It insists that every man is a child of
the Infinite, and it refuses to measure his
life and destiny by months and years.

This is the meaning of those visions of
Paradise which cheered the hearts of our
fathers. The hope of heaven is not a reward
to bribe men into virtue; it is simply the
declaration that their individual personal
lives are not meaningless or fruitless; but
that every longing and aspiration of the
human soul is a promise of ultimate fruition,
a draft upon the boundless resources of Al-
mighty God.

The shortness of human life is, after all,
the supreme tragedy of mankind. We start

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 163

out in youth with such lofty ideals, only to
sink into the sad disillusionment of the
middle years as we realize how far short we
have fallen. We send forth our hearts in
friendship and love, only to discover that
chance and change are busy ever ; that with
the best will in the world our friendships are
marred by human selfishness, are interrupted
by the shifting scenes of our pilgrimage;
that even the deepest and sweetest human
affections do not fulfil their promise to our
hearts; and death drops its curtain over all,
sending us down the afternoon slope of life
lonely and bereaved.

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour :

The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

An immeasurable sadness has fallen upon
the world in these last days through the
eclipse of the immortal hope. Under the
spell of the scientific method men have re-
fused to believe anything which could not
be demonstrated, and the contemplation of

164 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

that bourne whence no traveler returns has
chilled and darkened their minds.

But Christianity refuses to be browbeaten
by the tyranny of the material world. Basing
its faith on its experience of the love of God,
on the spiritual power of Jesus Christ — which
certainly was not confined within the tomb in
Joseph's garden, whatever men may think of
his physical resurrection — Christianity faces
the future with inextinguishable hope and

joy.

The Christian belief in immortality does
not rest on the evidence collected by the
Society for Psychic Research, but on the
veracity of God, on the trustworthiness of
spiritual instincts, on the conviction that the
Universe is not bankrupt.

Men no longer paint glowing pictures of
heaven. Streets of gold and gates of pearl
have become mere figures of speech. A
harp and crown no longer figure in the hopes
of saints. Nevertheless the Christian belief
is as simple and direct to-day as it has ever
been. It simply dares to believe that the

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE 165

loftiest ideals and purest aspirations of men
will be fulfilled, and that the love upon
which death lays so rude a hand will blossom
into a fairer and deeper joy when the day
breaks and the shadows flee away.

"There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall
live as before ;
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound ;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much
good more ;
On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect
round.

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall
exist ;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good,
nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the
melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too
hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the
sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ;
Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it
by-and-by."

— Browning, " Abt Vogler."

VII

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

We have summed up the main outlines of
Christianity ; its fundamental convictions,
its ethical demands, its individual and social
ideals. It remains to ask, what is the rela-
tion of the Church to all this ?

Are we to say with some that the church
has been the chief obstacle to the spread of
essential Christianity; that it has from the
beginning failed to understand its Lord, and
that the nineteen centuries of ecclesiasticism
have been utterly abortive? Or are we on
the other hand to identify Christianity and
the church, and to regard the indifference or
hostility which the present age displays to-
ward the church as the chief sign of its spirit-
ual decay?

That the present time is marked by an
attitude of indifference rising in some quarters

1G6

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 167

to bitter hostility toward organized Chris-
tianity there can be no doubt. It not in-
frequently happens that in gatherings of
working men the name of the church is hissed
while the name of Jesus Christ is met with
cheers. Socialism in the main is bitterly
hostile to the church. The labor movement
is largely indifferent. Labor unions hold
their meetings on Sunday, and it is the general
testimony not only of labor leaders but of the
leaders of the church itself that those who
work with their hands are seldom found with-
in its doors.

Conditions in Europe have during the last
quarter of a century been much worse than
in America. The Catholic Church has been
bitterly hated in Italy and almost driven out
of France. In Germany the great mass of
the population has been estranged from the
church. But even in this country statistics
reveal a pitifully limited growth in proportion
to the amount of time and money expended.
Church statistics are notoriously inaccurate,
but they err if at all mainly on the side of

168 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

optimism ; yet even so they indicate that the
growth of the church has not kept pace with
that of the population. The gain in church
membership for 1914 in the United States
was something more than three quarters
of a million, or about two per cent; while
the population increases something more than
three per cent each year.

Two or three years ago 1600 churches in
the state of Illinois were reported as having
closed their doors in a single year. The prob-
lem of the rural community and of the small
town rivals that of the city, where down-
town churches by the thousand have been
sold and turned into motion picture houses
or garages while the church followed its more
prosperous members uptown.

Mission boards in all denominations appeal
ever more earnestly for support, yet most of
them have during the past few years been
compelled to face large deficits or cut down
their work.

The total seating capacity of the churches
in an average city would probably not accom-

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 169

modate a fourth of the population, yet not
one church in twenty is filled to its capacity
excepting on Easter Sunday or Christmas.
The Sunday evening service has become the
bugbear of ministers and an ever-increasing
problem for the average church.

The motion picture show, the Sunday
theatre and ball game, the automobile and
the Sunday paper have been blamed for this
state of affairs, but the condition itself is
all but universally admitted.

There is a widespread feeling that this
condition is due not so much to religious in-
difference as to the failure of the church to
meet the spiritual needs of the time.

A brilliant professor in a leading Univer-
sity, in reply to a questionnaire regarding the
attitude of University men to the church,
replied, "A lover of religion will avoid all
the churches, liberal and orthodox, as a
lover of wine would avoid empty bottles."
Perhaps this particular professor was more
interested in making an epigram than in
stating the exact truth, but there can be no

170 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

doubt that many essentially religious men
both among the educated and the working
classes are estranged from the church.

It is undoubtedly true that we must dis-
tinguish between Christianity and churchian-
ity9 and realize that the failure of the church
to hold its own under the conditions of pres-
ent-day life is not necessarily the failure of
the Christian faith. But while this is true,
the insistent demands of the historical church
for recognition as the official custodian of
spiritual truth no less than the equally em-
phatic insistence of her critics that she be
cast out as a failure makes it necessary for
us to consider earnestly the question of the
real place of the church in human life, and
her function in the religious training and
development of mankind.

With our main contention hitherto I fancy
the great majority of Christian teachers in
all the churches would find themselves in
substantial agreement. Doubtless many of
them would place the emphasis in a different
place at one point or another. Some may

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 171

feel that we have treated the authority
of the New Testament somewhat cavalierly.
Possibly many would regard the treatment
of other important matters, such as the
New Birth or Eternal Punishment, as hardly
adequate.

But in the main the discussion thus far
has dealt with the great fundamental con-
victions and ideals in which all Christendom,
ancient and modern, agrees. If a few things
which by some are regarded as essential have
been set aside or inadequately stressed, it
will doubtless be admitted that the matters
herein set forth constitute the main factors
of essential Christianity ; and that any man
whose life displays the influence of these
ideals and convictions is entitled to be re-
garded as Christian.

When we come to speak of the church,
however, the case is otherwise. There are
two main conceptions of the place and func-
tion of the church in the spiritual history of
mankind, and they are so essentially con-
tradictory that it is impossible to find a

172 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

common denominator for them. One or the
other must be definitely set aside.

In accordance, therefore, with the author's
own deepest convictions he has chosen that
view of the church which seems to him most
clearly justified both in logic and experience.
That in so doing he must part company with
a very large part of the Christian world with
whose principal beliefs and spiritual aims he
finds himself otherwise in entire harmony
is a matter of profound regret.

But if we are to find a complete and satis-
factory answer to the question, What is a
Christian? we must face the problem of the
Christian organism. One can only be loyal
to one's own convictions and set forth that
interpretation of organized Christianity which
seems to him to appeal most widely to the
common sense of mankind and to be destined
to fill the largest place in the social and
spiritual history of the future.

Rudyard Kipling once wrote,

"If England was what England seems,
And not the England of our dreams ;

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 173

But only putty, brass and paint,

How quick we'd chuck 'er, but she aint ! "

Every patriot realizes the force of the lines.

No nation measures up to the ideals of its
citizens. America seems to the casual ob-
server to be made up of cheap politics, of
superficial statesmanship, of graft and chi-
cane, of incompetence and selfishness in public
office, of greed and materialism in private life ;
yet this is not the America we love.

For the America of our dreams is the land
of the free and the home of the brave. It
stands for equal opportunity, for universal
justice, for democracy, the government of
the people, by the people and for the people.
It is for the sake of these ideals which find
such fragmentary and imperfect realization
in our actual political history that we love
the flag and stand ready to sacrifice our all
for our country's good.

The same spirit ought in reality to be ap-
plied to the Christian church. If the church
were what the church seems, and not the
vision of our dreams; but only ecclesiastical

174 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

politics and millinery, and bigotry, and empty
pharisaism,

" How quick we'd chuck 'er, but she aint ! "

For the church is nothing after all but the
attempt of the Christian ideal to embody it-
self in institutional form for the sake of
perpetuating itself in the world, of implant-
ing its ideals in the human heart, and stamp-
ing its impress upon human history.

That such an embodiment of a spiritual
purpose should be a growing organism, for-
ever imperfect and forever under the neces-
sity of readjusting itself to the growing life
of mankind, ought to be taken for granted.

To charge the mistakes and failures of the
mediaeval church to the account of Chris-
tianity is as unjust as to charge the existing
chaos in the political conditions of Mexico
to the account of democracy.

The nature of the church has been often
misunderstood by its leaders themselves.
Claims have been made in its behalf which
cannot be justified at the bar of history. Mis-

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 175

takes and failures have marked her career
from the beginning even until now, and doubt-
less will continue till the end of time.

But when all is said the church remains in
essence and ideal the body which the spirit
of Christ is forever fashioning for itself in
the life of the world. It is the pillar and
stay of the truth, the fulness of Him that
filleth all in all.

It is necessary to look for a moment at
certain claims which have been made in
behalf of the Church which seem to have
been set aside by the experience of man-
kind.

The first is the claim to wield absolute
authority.

The mediaeval church claimed both in-
tellectual and spiritual authority. It alone
had power to declare religious truth, and to
doubt its creed or dispute its interpretations
of truth was a mortal sin. It claimed equally
the right to declare the ultimate standards of

176 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

right and wrong, to punish the guilty, to
grant indulgences, to forgive the penitent.
To the Church had been committed the keys
of heaven and hell; whatsoever she bound
was bound in heaven, whatsoever she loosed
was loosed in heaven.

This claim was apparently founded on the
words of Jesus. But, as we have seen, these
words are to be interpreted not by the gram-
mar and the dictionary but by life itself ;
and the claim of the church must be justified
at the bar of experience if it is to stand.

There can be no doubt that if spiritual
life rests upon exact information, either as to
theological truth or as to ethical demand,
some final authority is necessary to declare
that truth. President Patton of Princeton
has defined Christianity as a piece of super-
natural information, and declared this infor-
mation to be contained in the Scriptures.

But inasmuch as there are some two or
three hundred Christian sects each claiming
to have the correct interpretation of the Scrip-
tures, it is evident that nobody knows ex-

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 177

actly what that piece of supernatural infor-
mation is, and there must be some court of
final appeal.

The attempt of Protestantism to rest its
case upon the authority of an infallible
Bible has broken down completely, and there
is no stopping place short of an infallible
church ; with power to declare not only what
was true nineteen hundred years ago, but
equally what that truth means in relation to
the new conditions of the present time.

But the infallibility of the church equally
breaks down, if for no other reason, because
an infallibility which has to justify itself to the
fallible reason of the individual before it can
get its decrees accepted is practically useless.

As a matter of fact, as we have seen, Chris-
tianity is not a piece of supernatural infor-
mation at all. It is a spiritual ideal which
carries with it a spiritual interpretation of life
and reality and which commends itself to the
spiritual intuitions of humanity and stands or
falls by its power to satisfy the needs of the
human soul.

178 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

Such a faith has no need of an external
authority. No infallibility whether of Pope
or Bible can be of the slightest service to it,
and the attempt to find such infallibility in
church or book has been one of the most
serious obstacles to the progress of the truth.

The notion of an infallible and authorita-
tive church dies hard, but it has been def-
initely set aside by the experience of the
last thousand years ; and the future lies
with that growing and flexible organization
of spiritual impulses and ideals which shall
most fully and freely represent the spirit of
Jesus Christ.

The second is the sacerdotal interpretation
of the church, its claim to be the sole deposi-
tory of spiritual power and grace.

According to this point of view the
sacraments of the church are not merely
the outward and visible signs of an inward
and spiritual grace, but they are efficacious;
that is to say, the performance of the rite
at the hands of the authorized official of

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 179

the church is fraught with miraculous spiritual
power.

In this case everything depends upon the
legitimacy of the priesthood who exercise
this power. It was committed at the begin-
ning by Jesus to his apostles, and can only
be possessed by those upon whom the hands
of the apostolic succession have been laid.

This is the High Church ecclesiastical doc-
trine. Like the infallibility of the church
it claims to rest upon the words of Jesus.

But the principles which we have found to
be necessary for the understanding of his
teaching throw doubt upon the doctrine at
the outset, and the experience of history
tends to confirm this doubt. If this view
were correct, we should have a right to expect
those communions which claim the apostolic
succession to have a monopoly of spiritual
power, a thing which the advocates of sacerdo-
talism in their wildest moments have not
dared to assert. So far is this from being
true that the greatest spiritual advance in
Christian history has often been made

180 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

through those whom the sacerdotal party
has refused to recognize as Christian at all.
Add to this the fact that sober history can
find no trace of the apostolic succession, and
the doctrine becomes one more of the never-
ending succession of misapprehensions which
have clogged the spiritual development of

mankind.

Setting aside these excessive claims to
authority and spiritual power which have
wrought so much harm in religious history,
and interpreting the church in the broadest
sense as organized or institutional Chris-
tianity, we must further recognize the serious
weaknesses and mistakes which have hindered
its true mission.

The first is the tendency which the Chris-
tian church shares with every organization
to become an end in itself rather than the
means to a larger end.

Secular history bears abundant witness to
this tendency. Political parties which were
born in the enthusiasm of a great social

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 181

movement are forever degenerating into po-
litical machines, having no aim greater than
to perpetuate their power and to distrib-
ute the spoils of office among their loyal
henchmen.

It is not to be wondered at that this fate
not only overtook the Catholic Church in
the Middle Ages, and necessitated the Refor-
mation in order to set free the spiritual life
which was being dwarfed and cramped under
the incrustations of ecclesiastical power ; but
that the Protestant churches which were born
of the spiritual enthusiasm of the Reforma-
tion, or of great revival movements such as
puritanism and the Wesleyan Revival, have
fallen under the same condemnation.

Too often the ministers of the church have
become mere ecclesiastics, contenting them-
selves with running the machinery of the
church and building up its influence and
power in the world, forgetful of the larger
social and spiritual ends which were com-
mitted to its charge.

This peril is enhanced when the church

182 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

becomes too closely linked to the political
life of the state, until it becomes merely an-
other department of the political machinery.
But even in free America the church has
not been free from this fault.

The second failure of the church is its
tendency to conservatism.

The more vital and important any truth in
the life of men, the slower they are to change
their method of interpretation. Religion is
concerned with matters affecting the very
destiny of the soul. It is not to be wondered
at, therefore, that in matters of religious
opinion men should be more conservative
than at any other point in their intellectual
life.

This is not an unmixed evil. It has often
served as a steadying force in the life of the
world ; and always it has this beneficent
result, that it compels men to think their
thought through, and to make sure that in
their enthusiasm for new ways of thinking
and in their endeavor to interpret new ex-
periences and deeper knowledge they shall

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 183

not lose sight of the largest and most signifi-
cant bearings of their thought upon the ethi-
cal and spiritual life of the race.

But when this healthy conservatism of
humanity in matters pertaining to the spirit-
ual life becomes a narrow and hide-bound
bigotry, then the new wine of the spirit must
burst the old bottles of dogma and creed.

The enormous advance in knowledge which
has been afforded by the science of the last
hundred years, and the new ethical and
social problems which have resulted from in-
dustrial progress, have made necessary the
re-statement of the whole body of Christian
truth in the terms of present-day thought
and life ; and the time has come when the
natural conservatism of the church must be
cast aside in the spirit of an earnest and
reverent eagerness to discover the larger
meanings of the Christian message.

If the church fails to meet this situation,
and endeavors to restrain the growing power
of progressive thought, the increased pres-
sure thus brought about is likely to result

184 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

in an explosion which might be disastrous to
the ancient machine.

Once more, there can be no doubt that the
church has failed to adjust itself to the new
conditions of life which have resulted from
the industrial and social revolution of the
past century, and that in many ways it no
longer ministers to the real needs of humanity.

In its reaction from the shallow worldli-
ness of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies evangelical Christianity has tended
to become narrowly pietistic; and to act as
though men had no interests other than the
spiritual and no duty in life except to prepare
for death.

As a result it has left out of account all the
varied and complex social needs of the world.
It has ignored the world of culture. Its
attitude toward amusements has been chiefly
negative; and it has not infrequently laid
the ban of its severe displeasure upon those
who have endeavored to interpret its ethical
teachings in the interest of social regenera-
tion. The minister who interested himself

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 185

in the housing conditions of his people, or
attacked the most glaring abuses of the in-
dustrial order, has been told to leave these
things to the secular authorities and preach
the simple gospel.

No thoughtful man can observe the signs
of the times without realizing that the church
must mend her ways at this point or be cast
as rubbish to the void.

The spiritual interests of mankind are
paramount, but they are intimately wrapped
up with the normal interests of his daily life.
Christianity is for the whole man or it is
nothing at all. It must not only make him
ready for heaven but it must bring a heaven
upon earth.

It is the task of Christianity to-day not only
to re-translate its spiritual message in terms
which the common man can understand ; but
to attack the abuses of the social order; to
proclaim in no uncertain fashion the ethical
demands of Jesus in terms not of the thirteenth
century nor of the eighteenth but of the twen-
tieth ; to elevate and purify the daily life of

186 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

the world in all its manifold and complex in-
terests, not only industrial and commercial
but educational.

It must even direct its attention to the
social life, and foster such normal and whole-
some opportunities for recreation and pleas-
ure as shall minister to the largest well-being
of mankind.

The church must enlarge her conception to
make room for this work. She must adjust
her machinery, or reconstruct it if need be,
until it is fitted to minister to the actual
needs of living men and women. Merely
to condemn the modern world because it is
too interested and absorbed in its own life
to hear her call is futile. Her Master's
method was to mingle with all men, to seek
out human need wherever it was to be found ;
and he bade his church go out into the high-
ways and hedges and bring the needy to his
feast.

The final weakness of the church is to be
found in the failings of church members.

It is useless to ignore the fact that the world

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 187

insists on judging the church member by a
higher standard than that which it applies
to the man in the street. This may be unfair ;
but it is human, and it cannot be escaped.
If church members indulge in shady business
transactions, in uncharitable and malicious
gossip; if they fail to adapt their business
methods to the demands of the social ideal ;
if they lower their daily life to the standards
of the world about them, and fail to impress
mankind with the grace and sweetness of
their Master's spirit ; the world sees and takes
note, and the church must bear the burden
of their unworthy lives.

Due allowance should be made for the fact
that the man in the street sometimes hides
himself behind the weaknesses of church
members, and to that end often accuses them
unjustly. But when all is said we must not
fail to recognize the responsibility that rests
upon the individual member of the church
to bring his life into harmony with the ideals
he professes, lest he stand convicted of a
practical unfaith which not only imperils his

188 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

own moral character but becomes an almost

insuperable obstacle in the path of the cause

he represents.

Ill

But after every concession has been made
to the critics of organized Christianity, it
remains true that the world owes an immeas-
urable debt to the Christian Church as the
custodian of its loftiest ethical ideals and the
minister of spiritual progress. In spite of
the fact that the church has frequently mis-
apprehended her own nature and mission ;
that she has shared the limitations and failings
of all human institutions ; that her history
has been marred by much that was out of
harmony with her own ideals and so has
weakened her influence and paralyzed her
own most earnest efforts, the church remains
the one institution in human life which has
stood for God and righteousness, which has
borne witness to the worth and dignity of
human nature and the immeasurable signif-
icance of human destiny ; the one organiza-
tion which has its root in the purpose to

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 189

serve mankind, and whose influence in the
main has been to inspire and uplift the
human race.

In spite of the narrowness and bigotry of
mediaeval theology; in spite of the abuses
of ecclesiasticism ; in spite of the Crusades
and the Inquisition, of worldly popes and
unworthy priests, of paganism in worship and
laxity in morals, the Christian church was
sole custodian of spiritual light and life
throughout the Middle Ages, and handed
down the torch to the modern world.

And to-day, in spite of all her weakness and
limitation, in spite of the sectarianism which
divides her forces, in spite of the narrowness
and bigotry of ecclesiastics and the timidity
of religious leaders, in spite of theological
conservatism and lack of aggressive leadership,
of the mistakes of preachers and the weakness
of church members, the church remains the
one institution in the civilization of the world
whose supreme aim it is to establish the
Kingdom of God and to lift mankind out of
its moral darkness and social degradation

190 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

into the light and joy of spiritual power and
moral victory.

This world is so constituted that every
human ideal necessarily seeks to embody
itself in institutional form. It is impossible
for great truths to hang suspended in the air
or merely to exercise a vague and general
influence upon public opinion.

Political truth creates political parties;
intellectual truth founds schools and estab-
lishes professorships ; economic truth organizes
itself into industries and commercial bodies ;
social truth is forever forming institutions
such as charity organization societies and
peace conferences, in order that its ideals may
have a local habitation and a name and may
be brought to bear directly upon the organized
life of the world.

To suppose that the great creative spiritual
ideals of Christianity could be content to
float in the air and to exert only a general
influence upon civilization is to fail to appre-
hend the essential genius of humanity. As a
shellfish secretes his shell from his own flesh

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 191

and the waters with which he is surrounded,
so truth is forever secreting an organized
body out of the world of men ; and the body
which Christian truth thus creates for itself
is the Christian church.

It is the task of Christianity to teach men
its lofty and inspiring conceptions of philo-
sophical truth. It must train them in the
practice of Christian virtues and the pursuit
of its moral ideals.

Especially does it desire to implant these
things in the hearts and lives of youth. If
political democracy finds it desirable to es-
tablish public schools, to inculcate reverence
for the flag and inspire patriotic devotion
by national holidays and the teaching of
national history, is it to be wondered at that
Christianity seeks to gather the youth of the
world into its institutional life in order that
the plastic mind of childhood should be in-
formed and directed by the loftiest ideals
the heart of man has conceived ?

It is the task of Christianity also to bear its
message of hope to all who have fallen under

192 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

the power of moral evil; who through igno-
rance or wilfulness have become the victims
of their own lower nature and whose lives
are degraded and distorted thereby.

Christianity is a message of hope to all the
derelicts which strew the banks of the stream
of life. The evangel of moral regeneration
and victory is to be proclaimed wherever
human hearts are human, wherever there is
sin and moral weakness and spiritual hunger.
This work will not perform itself, but needs
the backing and guidance of institutional life.

Added to this is the task of holding before
the world the inspiring vision of the Christian
ideal, of comforting men in their sorrow by the
vision of the immortal hope, of keeping alight
the fires of social enthusiasm and spiritual
consecration on the altars of the world.

Surely no greater task was ever laid upon
human hearts than this. Small wonder that
men have forever fallen short of its demand,
that their mistakes and failures have weakened
their power and distorted their vision; so
that from age to age the spirit of the Christian

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 193

faith has been compelled forever to seek new
channels of expression, and one reformation
after another has broken the crust of institu-
tional conservatism and burst forth in a new
flood of spiritual power beyond the limits
which had been set by human ignorance and
mistake.

Small wonder that in spite of everything
the lofty vision of a church without spot or
wrinkle, the bride of Christ, the body of which
he is the head, the fulness of his divine life
and power, should have held the imaginations
of earnest men in all ages and should have
power still to inspire them with the largest
devotion and the most eager self-sacrifice.

When all is said the Christian church, like
the England or the America of our dreams, is
not the historic organization we have known ;
but the loftier and purer ideal of which the
historic institution is the imperfect but forever
growing embodiment.

The Christian church is not the Catholic
nor the Lutheran nor the English church;
not the Presbyterian, nor the Congregational-

194 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

ist, nor the Methodist. It is all of these,
and it is more than all ; for it is the ever-
growing vision of the Christian ideal ; forever
purifying itself ; forever becoming more deeply
understood ; forever challenging mankind to a
deeper consecration to the service of its eternal
purpose ; and forever embodying itself in the
institutional life of the world under forms
which vary from age to age, which are con-
fessedly imperfect and subject to all the limita-
tions of the flesh, but which none the less are
worthy of the deepest reverence and most
earnest devotion of the lover of his kind,
because when all is said they are attempts to
express the loftiest visions and the worthiest
ambitions of which humanity is capable.

In The Servant in the House, Manson,
the butler, is a new incarnation of the Son of
Man. He comes to bring to his brother, the
clergyman, a new vision of the Christian hope,
and to help him rebuild his church, which has
fallen into disrepair. The crypt of the old
church is so full of dead men's bones that the

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 195

life of the whole community has been poisoned,
and men have ceased to find in the church
the fountain of inspiration and life. Before
the larger work can be accomplished it is
necessary for the minister to call in his other
brother, the drain-man, and get rid of all the
dead foulness which is stifling and poisoning
the life of the people. But it is also necessary
to catch a vision of the real church which the
Bishop of Humanity is undertaking to con-
struct in the world. Of this true church,
which has never yet been realized in human ex-
perience, but which is the dream and purpose of
every lover of the Christian ideal, Manson says :

"I am afraid you may not consider it an
altogether substantial concern. It has to be
seen in a certain way, under certain conditions.
Some people never see it at all. You must
understand, this is no dead pile of stones and
unmeaning timber. It is a living thing.

"When you enter it you hear a sound — 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

196 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

will presently see the church itself — a loom-
ing mystery of many shapes and shadows,
leaping sheer from floor to dome. The work
of no ordinary builder !

" The pillars of it go up like the brawny
trunks of heroes; the sweet human flesh of
men and women is molded about its bulwarks
strong, impregnable : 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 darkness : some-
times 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."

To this church every man belongs who is
moved in any measure by the Christian spirit,
who founds his life in any degree upon the
Christian philosophy, who strives however
feebly toward the Christian ideal, whether
or not his name be found on the church
register.

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 197

That he ought also in virtue of this rela-
tion to the Church Invisible to join himself in
practical devotion and service to some branch
of the Christian organization is only a counsel
of common sense.

In the present crisis in Europe, we of
America, secure in our distance from the
struggle, may indulge our sympathies with
one side or the other according to our prej-
udices; but the loyal citizen of Germany or
France has no such discretion. He must go to
the front or prove traitor to the deepest
obligations of his manhood. And when he
goes to the front he must go not as a free
lance, a guerrilla, obeying his own impulses
and disregarding the plans of commander in
chief; but he must enter the ranks of the
organized army and become part of the
machine.

The parable needs no exposition. If Chris-
tianity be in any sense true, if its ideals have
any right to challenge the loyalty of humanity,
then there can be no neutrals in the spiritual
warfare of mankind. We may not compre-

198 WHAT IS A CHRISTIAN

hend the program of the Commander in Chief.
We may not in all respects approve the tactics
of the General Staff. We may criticize the
field equipment, we may recognize the blun-
ders of captains and corporals. But we have
no right to refuse to enlist.

With all her limitations and mistakes the
Christian Church is still the Army of Jesus
Christ, on the firing line of the world's spiritual
battle; and she claims the loyalty and devo-
tion of every soldier of righteousness, until
her armor of "gray, war-dinted steel" is
exchanged for the robe and palm of victory,
and the imperfections and weakness of the
Church Militant have become the radiant
perfection of the Church Triumphant which is
without fault before the Throne of God.

INDEX

Agassiz, Louis, 98.
Apostolic Age,

Communism in, xv, 93, 94.

Interpretation of Christianity,
xiv, xv.

Baptist, Definition of a, xiii.
Bernhardi, General von, 64, 74.
Browning, Robert,

Quotations from, vii, xix, 20,
47, 165.

Carnegie, Andrew, 107.
Catholic Church,
Asceticism, 31, 123.
Distinction between "pre-
cepts" and "counsels of per-
fection," xx, 27, 32.
In France and Italy, 167.
In the Middle Ages, xviii.
Cellini, Benvenuto, xix.
Christian as Reformer, The, 123,

124.
Christian Doctrines,
Atonement, 14, 15.
Future Punishment, 18-20, 140

-146.
Immortality, 17, 18, 162-165.
Incarnation, 11-14.
Love, 47, 61, 103, 122, 127.

New Birth, The, 41, 42, 143-

146.
Return of Christ, 149-156.
Total Depravity, 142.
Christianity and the Social Order,
103, 109, 111-113, 134-139,
156-162, 184, 185.
Christianity as Experience, 115-

122.
Christians, Typical, 129-134.
Church, The,

Apostolic Succession, 178-180.
Authority of, 175-177.
Greatness of, 188-198.
Mistakes of, 180-188.
Modern Conditions, 167.

Edwards, Jonathan, 140.
Everybody's Magazine,

Popular discussion in, ix.
Evolution, Doctrine of, ix, 6, 9.

Francis of Assisi, Saint, 90, 95,
129.

Gilder, Richard Watson,

Quotation from, 16.
Goldsmith, Oliver,

Quotation from, 51.

199

200

INDEX

Gray, Thomas,
Quotation from, 163.

Hale, Edward Everett,

Exclusion of, from Church
Council, xix.
Harnack, Professor A., 56.

Ingersoll, Robert, 3.

Jesus,

and Poverty, 91-94, 98-101.
Authority of, 11-17, 43-44.
Doctrine of Non-resistance, 39,

58, 61-63.
Paradoxes of, 35-39.
Principles of, 44-53.
Second Coming of, 149-156.

Kant, Immanuel,

Essay on Perpetual Peace, 76-
85.
Kingdom of God, The, 91.
Kipling, Rudyard,

Quotations from, 83, 141, 172.

Lowell, J. R.,
Quotation from, 18.

Mair, or Major, John, Scottish
Scholastic Philosopher, 51.

Nicea, Council of,

Homo- or homoi-ousion, xvii.
Noyes, Alfred,

Quotation from, 86.

Oppenheimer, Franz, 88, 102.
Origen of Alexandria, 95.

Peace,

Heroism of, 85-87.

Kant on "Perpetual," 76-85.

Rockefeller, John D., 90, 107.
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 105.

Servant in the House, The, 195.
Spencer, Herbert, 3, 9.
State as an Organism, The, 64-
67.

Taylor, Father, 2.
Tennyson, Alfred,

Quotation from, 18.
Tolstoi, 28, 34, 36, 55-57.

U
Union, American, 80.

W
War,

Benefits from, 72-73.

INDEX

201

In Europe, The, vii, xvi, 7, 72,

76, 198.
The Christian and, 70, 73.
Wealth,

Production of, 103-106, 108.
The Christian and, 110.
Use of, 106-110.

Wendt, 32.

Wesley, John, xii, 2, 9

Wordsworth, William,

Quotation from, 17.
World Court, A,

Lack of, 69.

Need for, 79.

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