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WHAT IT MEANS TO BE
A CHRISTIAN

The Evangelistic Message in Outline

BY
EDWARD INCREASE BOSWORTH

New Testament Profesfeor
In the Oberlia Graduate School of Theology

THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON CHICAGO

THE NEW V

PUBLIC LIBR/ ' '

ASTO i
T1JLOEN FOUNDATIONS
R 193 ■ L

Printed In the United States of America

THE JORDAN & MOKE PRESS
BOSTON

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

The pages that follow, prepared at the request of the
Congregational Commission on Evangelism, present the
gist of what has been worked out in many class-room dis-
cussions, open forums and personal conversations. What-
ever value the presentation may have is largely due to the
fact that it has been produced through intimate contact
during many years with the actual needs and questionings
of men and women looking for light on the problems of
religious life. This experience has led to a realization of
the very great evangelistic values of the point of view
represented in these discussions. Those accustomed to a
different point of view may nevertheless perhaps find in
these pages suggestions useful to them in the presentation
of religious experience from their own angle of approach.
In these days of peculiar tumult in life and thought we
may well be ready to gather from every quarter whatever
may prove to have constructive value in building up that
faith in God, in Jesus Christ, in the latent possibilities of
good in all men, without which civilization cannot longer
develop.

A much more extensive treatment of the subjects dis-
cussed might easily have been given but the purpose of
the Commission seems better accomplished by compact
statements. Some phases of religious life and thought

Preface

are not discussed at all. Those have been selected upon
which it seems most desirable to concentrate the attention
of persons who are being urged to begin the Christian way
of living, to begin to pray and work and sacrifice in hope,
to begin to feel out for the guidance of the living Lord as
he leads on in the development of a race of men wise,
powerful, honest and friendly.

Edward I. Bosworth.
Oberlin, Ohio,
September 7, 1922.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

The Wonderful Way of Living

Purpose of the book 1

General statement of the Christian way of living 2

What we mean by the will of God 2

The goal of the will of God an honest and friendly world .... 2

CHAPTER II

Becoming Aware of God

How make God real to men 5

1. By counting on normal mysticism 5

2. By beginning with their unrecognized religion 6

Two common experiences in which to look for the feel of God . 7

3. By helping them feel after God in definite acts 9

(1) Beginning to pray 9

(2) Dropping a grudge and righting a wrong 12

(3) Taking up a neglected duty 13

Evidence that God is being found 14

CHAPTER III
Is There a God?

Can the existence of God be proved? 16

How much evidence is necessary to make it reasonable to begin to

feel after God? 17

Evidence making the existence of God probable 18

Does the fact of human suffering forbid the supposition that there

is a good God? 25

What is human suffering? 25

Its vital contribution to human progress 25

God shares human suffering 26

CHAPTER IV
Christian Prayer

What is prayer? 29

Does God give attention to details? 30

Prayer getting something from God to share with another ... 31

Contents

How does anything pass from the life of God into the life of a

praying man? 32

What passes from the life of God into the life of a praying man? . 33

Why did God not help the needy man directly? 34

Power in prayer a growth 35

The relation of " the laws of nature " to prayer 35

Do predestination and determinism preclude answer to prayer? 37

CHAPTER V
Who Is Jesus Christ?

How do we tell who anyone is? 40

What was Jesus' deepest feeling and desire? 40

1. Feeling the will of God and the desire to let it out in action 40

2. Feeling a unique sense of responsibility for leading all men to do

the will of God 42

CHAPTER VI
How Does the Suffering of Jesus Help Men?

Suffering one element in the life of Jesus 45

Men's sense of the connection of Jesus' suffering with their moral

victory 46

What does the suffering of Jesus mean to us? 47

The suffering of Jesus and God's forgiveness of sin 50

What is God's forgiveness? 50

What wrong has a man done to God? 51

What does God do through Jesus to make forgiveness possible? . 52

Does God's forgiveness remove the consequences of sin? ... 53

CHAPTER VII

The Resurrection of Jesus

The resurrection a part of the religious experience of Jesus ... 55

What was the resurrection of Jesus? 56

The relation of the resurrection of Jesus to Christian experience . 57

CHAPTER VIII
What Is it for a Bad Man to Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

and be Saved?

What is a bad man? 60

Who are bad? 61

What becomes of a persistently bad man? 62

God's way of saving the bad man 64

What is it to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? 65

What is salvation? 67

Contents

What is the Holy Spirit? 68

What is an honest and friendly world? 69

Will Jesus come back to earth on the clouds? 70

CHAPTER IX
Life After Death
How use the prospect of life after death to induce men to begin the

Christian way of living? 72

What may we suppose the future life to be? 73

Why should we expect a future life? 74

What is the practical advantage of a belief in immortality? ... 78

CHAPTER X

Some Objections to Beginning the Christian Life

1. " Cannot succeed in business and be a Christian " 83

2. " I shall be all right if I do the best I can " 84

3. " No interest in the subject " 85

4. " The inconsistencies of Christians " 85

5. " Have tried it and failed " _ 86

6. " Some things in the Bible I do not believe " 86

7. " Christianity may not be the ultimate religion " 87

8. " Anyway it is not necessary to join the church " 88

CHAPTER XI
Choosing the Great Adventure

The mysterious facts of life 91

Life a great adventure 92

Choosing the great adventure 93

What It Means to be a Christian

Chapter I
THE WONDERFUL WAY OF LIVING

The purpose of this book is to stimulate thought on
two questions:

How shall we tell a man what it means to become a
Christian?

Why should a man become a Christian?

The book must be brief. Its statements may, there-
fore, sometimes seem dogmatic, but they are always
meant to stir the mind of the reader to produce something
better than the book. In these statements the use of the
technical terms of theology will be avoided as much as
possible. They mean quite different things to different
" schools of theological thought," and their introduction
into popular discussion would be confusing rather than
enlightening. Anyone who has attempted to talk to a
street full of people or to a factory group at the noon
hour knows that he cannot ordinarily use such terms as
" regeneration," " justification," " sanctification," " the
Kingdom of God," to good effect. He must express the
meaning of these words in the homely vernacular of those
whom he wishes to influence.

In trying to tell a man what it is to become a Christian
it is often necessary to study the man. Whiting Williams
says that a man is like an island. If you wish to land
valuable goods on an island it may be necessary to row
all around it to find the best landing place. So, if an idea

What It Means to be a Christian

is to be delivered to a man, it may be necessary to look
carefully all around his life for the best place to land it.

But no matter who the man is, four general state-
ments may be made at the start about what it is to become
a Christian. The amplification of these statements will
run through the book:

1. To become a Christian is to begin a certain wonder-
ful way of living that men will be glad to continue always,
even into the far ages.

2. In this way of living there is a glad and growing
awareness of working with the unseen energy that we call
the will of God to create a good world — a good world
here and now and, after the incident of death, a good
super-world called heaven.

3. Such a good world is one in which all kinds of men
work well together; that is, do all kinds of work with a
common end in view and an invincible good-will in their
hearts. It is a growing power to work in sincerity and
friendliness with all other men.

4. It is a life which utilizes all the incentives to such
work that God has been pouring, and still is pouring, into
the life of man through the personality of Jesus Christ.
For this reason it is called the Christian life.

What do we mean by the will of God ?

Our idea of will is gained from knowledge of our own
wills. A man's will is the intelligent set of his personality
toward a goal, the determined push of his personality on
its environment. The will of God is the intelligent set of
a Vast Mind Energy toward a goal.

What is the goal of the will of God?

The goal of the will of God may be ascertained in two
ways: First, by looking back over the long evolution of

The Wonderful Way of Living

life to see what are the central trends that have actually
been produced by the will of God; and second, by dis-
covering the great passions of Jesus Christ in whose per-
sonality the central trends of the normal evolution of man
seem to have gained wonderful expression in terms of
human life. The result in each case is the same. The
goal is seen to be a race of men, honest, friendly, and power-
ful, working together with God to carry life forward
everywhere in the universe. The vast Mind Energy that
we call God has been always feeling, thinking, willing to
produce such a race of men. God's wanting men has been
and is the force that vitalizes and directs evolution. This
Mind Energy so acting has been God loving low forms of
life up into man-life, and loving man-life up into the far
reaches of a " fullgrown man, unto the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ," 1 — loving man up from
the cave man to the Christ man. It is this power that
has kept the generations of men going on and has bound
their thoughts and actions into a degree of unity that
makes progress and history possible. It is this power
that fills the mind of man with brightening ideals of
democracy, liberty, peace, with keen sense of humor, and
with the hope of mastering all the powers of nature for
the good of mankind.

This vast Mind Energy, the will of God, is near enough
to us to give us being and keep it going, yet distinct
enough from us to give us a chance to be ourselves, and so
to permit the interplay of feeling and interchange of
thought essential to religion. The nature of this close
connection is a part of the unsolved mystery of personality.

The energy of the will of God is always rising in every
man's soul to make him an honest, friendly, powerful man.
These great basic qualities are necessarily the product of

• Ephesians 4 : 13.

What It Means to be a Christian

time and the long discipline of life. How much is involved,
for instance, in honesty! It means the determination to
see all the facts, however uncongenial they may be; to
report exactly what is seen; and to adjust properly all
one's life to these facts at any cost. We ought rather to
say, therefore, that the will of God is always rising within
a man to make him a man of growing honesty, friendliness,
and power.

Furthermore the will of God is always rising in him to
summon him to work with it in the creative evolution of
an honest, friendly, powerful world, a world civilization
all of whose laws, customs, and institutions shall be in
accord with these fundamental qualities of life. This de-
veloping civilization overflows through the phenomenon
of death into a larger world at present unseen by us.

This wonderful way of living is " eternal life " or " eter-
nal living." It is following out trends along which it will
find food for itself, grow better and stronger eternally.
" This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only
true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus
Christ." 2

'John 17 :3.

Chapter II

BECOMING AWARE OF GOD

The fundamental feature of the wonderful way of living
has just been said to be a glad and growing awareness of
working together with the unseen energy called the will of
God for the continuous creation of a good world here and
now, and, after the incident of death, a heavenly super-
world.

How shall we make God real to men ?

How, then, shall we help multitudes of men and women,
only normally mystical, to understand what we mean by
God? There are multitudes of men, and women, and
children, in country, village, and city, filling the streets,
factories, railway trains, stores, offices, and movies, who
are never touched by evangelism of any kind. How can
God be presented to them so that they will see how to feel
after him and how it feels to find him — what the feel of
God is?

1. By counting on normal mysticism

Man's nature is adapted to the discovery of God. The
spirit of man needs the Spirit of God. It is possible to
count on a degree of mysticism in the normal man. Mysti-
cism in its ordinary, normal form is a rational desire to
have to do with the unseen. All men live more or less in
the unseen; they are thinking about the unseen past,
about the unseen future, about persons or things of the
present temporarily out of sight. In the common activi-
ties of modern life men are being accustomed to the idea

What It Means to be a Christian

of working with powerful unseen force for the common
good. In this way the motorman and his passengers ride
through city and country; cities are lighted and factory
wheels begin to turn in the twinkling of an eye. Men
more and more are coming to understand that there are
unseen potencies of life and death in the microbes within
and all about their bodies. It is a mistake not to count
upon a sane, wholesome mysticism in trying to make men
aware of God.

2. By beginning with unrecognized religion

All men have some unrecognized experience of God.
It is inconceivable that so vast a being as God should for
years have been close to the life of a man and yet have
produced absolutely no result there. Even men who
think themselves irreligious have some unrecognized re-
ligion. We should naturally expect this to be some simple
and universal experience. The place to begin is at these
points where God is making some impression on their lives.
If an ignorant man from the African interior has come
into the midst of all the electrical appliances of the Jo-
hannesburg mines, the best way to make him aware of the
electricity in the atmosphere that has been all about him
all his life is to call his attention to some familiar electrical
phenomenon which he has never known by that name,
rather than at once to try to have him learn to read a more
or less difficult text-book on electricity. The multitudes
of men and women who crowd the streets, the factories,
the movies, the stores, the offices, the railway trains, need
to be led to recognize the feel of God in certain familiar
commonplace experiences not hitherto thought of as re-
ligious, rather than to be asked to read some more or less
doctrinal, metaphysical, or devotional books, even in-
cluding the Bible in many cases.

Becoming Aware of God

Where should they look for the feel of God ?

Evidently to the highest and best experiences they have
already known. In various forms these will be essentially
two: The first is the satisfaction produced by having done
honest successful work. The merchant feels it as he looks
back upon the thirty years in which he has built up an
honorable business in the village. It is a satisfaction be-
yond that which his bank account gives him. The farmer
who took wild land forty years ago and has brought it
under cultivation by the processes of scientific farming has
the same feeling. So does the author of a book recording
the result of painstaking research, even though his author's
royalties may not pay for having its copy typewritten!
So does an artist, or a physician, or a mother running a
happy hygienic home. When Stanley came out from the
interior of Africa after a successful expedition, and sat
down in Cairo to write out his report, he said: " No honor
or reward however great can be equal to that subtle satis-
faction that a man feels when he can point to his work and
say, ' See, now, the task which I promised you to perform
with all loyalty and honesty, with might and main, to the
utmost of my ability and God willing, is today finished.
Say is it well and truly done? ' And when the employer
shall confess that it is well and truly done, can there be any
recompense higher than that of one's inward self ? "
The other highest experience in human life is the satis-
faction found in friendships — friendships with wife and
children, brothers, sisters, and parents, with the other
friends and neighbors with whom we laugh heartily and
sorrow sincerely. Everyone has at least the imperfect
beginnings of friendship with some one. There is some
one whose society he would prefer to utter and permanent
loneliness.

Now if we are to make God real to men we must begin

i 7

What It Means to be a Christian

with these real though unrecognized rudimentary experi-
ences of his presence and lead out from them into larger
and conscious acquaintance with him. If God is thought
of as somewhere else than in these great basic experiences
of life, he is made to seem unreal and is likely to be missed
altogether. The satisfaction found in ordinary social co-
operation may be made to lead naturally out into con-
scious recognition of the energy of God pushing up into
the lives of men to secure such cooperation on a world
scale. When the will of God is seen to be the Energy
urging men on to make great inventions for the good of
men, to paint great pictures for the ennobling of men's
purposes, to develop mines for the common welfare, to
devise better and fairer ways of doing business, to think
out finer philosophies of life, then the joy which men feel
in such activities will be recognized as the beginning of the
discovery of God. It will lead on into triumphant con-
scious acquaintance with him. Men will consciously
join him in the Great Enterprise of establishing on the
earth a race of men, powerful, honest, friendly; they will
look forward naturally, as the greatness of God grows
upon them, to maintaining such a civilization in a super-
world after the incident of death is past.

This is what Jesus called having "faith in God." Faith
is the reaching out of the whole personality to work to-
gether with the unseen energy of God in good will and at
any cost for the common good. God answers back to
such faith. Jesus apparently had the same thing in mind
when he said that the pure in heart would see God. The
heart is the center of personal life. A broken-hearted man
is a man whose life has broken down at the center. The
heart is " the hot spot in consciousness," the central point
at which a man takes up his life and sets it decisively in a
certain direction. A pure heart is an unadulterated cen-

Becoming Aware of God

tral purpose, a clean dominant ambition, a deep resolve to
work with God for the common good at any cost.

3. By helping them feel after God in definite acts

What has been said so far about utilizing men's normal
mysticism and beginning with their unrecognized religion
might issue in a somewhat vague frame of mind, extremely
vital and valuable, but lacking the concentration of experi-
ence into definite acts at a given time that has so much to
contribute to the development of a habitual awareness of
God. There are three specific actions which in many
cases mark the conscious beginning of an awareness of
God:

Beginning to pray.

Dropping a grudge or righting a wrong.

Taking up a neglected duty.

(1) Beginning to pray

How shall we get men to praying? How shall we pre-
sent praying to men of only ordinary mysticism in such a
way that it shall be more to them than merely " saying
prayers " or talking to themselves, and really lead to a
greater habitual awareness of God?

The nature and scope of prayer will be discussed in a
later chapter, but here it may be said that praying to God
is a definite reaching out to have consciously to do with
God in the sphere of feeling and thought. If this is to be
a real experience it must be closely knit up with those very
real human relations, in friendship and work, that con-
stitute the warp and woof of life. It must issue normally
in some form of action that has reference to another man.
This must be so because God is a Vast Mind Energy
setting itself close up to every man and bent on getting
from every man cooperation in producing an honest and

What It Means to be a Christian

friendly world. Most men will never find prayer to be a
real contact with God until they pray with expectation
that through prayer something good from God is going to
pass through them to another man. This is well illus-
trated by the experience of an influential Association Sec-
retary in helping a member of his Bible class to become
aware of God:

" He said he used to pray regularly but really never got
any help from it and had given it up. . . . After some
conversation about ideals of life, I was convinced that he
lacked one thing — a great unifying principle in his life.
I did not argue with him about belief in God. I asked
him if he would take the Golden Rule for his ideal for a
week and live up to it. He promised to do so, and also
promised to come to see me at the end of the week.

" He came back at the appointed time and in response
to my inquiry as to how the week had gone, said, ' Not
very well. No one can live up to an ideal. I have tried
the best I know and I cannot do it.' I asked him if he
really wanted to succeed and on his replying that he did,
I suggested that he ask God's help in the matter. He
said, ' It is no use; I do not believe in God.' But, said I,
you are failing with your present plan. You feel you are
not satisfied. Something tells you there is something
better than you have yet reached, and yet you are unable
to attain it. Let me suggest something to you. Before
you retire tonight sit down alone and say something like
this, ' O God, I have tried for a week to do by others as I
would like them to do by me and every day I have failed.
I want to live up to that ideal and to be all that I know
I ought to be. If there is any power that can help me I
want it.' Then go to bed and sleep, if you can. In the
morning just before you go down to breakfast, stop for a
minute and say, ' O God, I am going out to another day's

Becoming Aware of God

work. I made a failure yesterday. I want to do better
today. I want to be kind to the other fellows in the
office. I want to do by them as I would like to have
them do by me. Help me today.' Get your breakfast
and go to work. I asked him if he would do that. He
said ' I will try.' I urged him to give it a fair trial, to try
for a week faithfully and come in again.

" At the end of the week he came in and with a different
expression on his face than I had seen any time before.
In response to 'How has the week gone?' he replied,
' First rate. Now I know there is a God.' I asked him
how he knew and he said, ' Because he has helped me this
week to live the best week of my life.' I said, Are you
sure about it? Maybe you are deceiving yourself. He
said, ' No, I am not deceiving myself, I know. I have
talked the matter over with God every morning and every
evening and some power — I do not know what it is —
has helped me succeed where before I failed, and I believe
the power is God.'

" That was the beginning of the establishment in that
young man's life of a confidence in God that no power has
been able to shake. I have known him for several years
and he has become a strong, active Christian." 1

Prayer, then, is a means of becoming aware of God, and
ordinary men will pray intelligently when they see that
there is a place for prayer in those commonplace relations
of life that mean most to them. God is in the very thick
of life. Men live in the midst of God's life. Prayer is a
kind of normal soul action that stirs both God and men.
The experience to be aimed at is not to be " alone with
God " in an isolation that never will appeal to the multi-
tudes in the street and at the movies; they have a whole-
some love of being with a lot of people, in pleasant social

1 Farnsworth, " The Christian Appeal," pp. 4-6.

What It Means to be a Christian

relations. There will come great emergencies in almost
every life when a man may wish to be alone with God.
Almost anyone may learn to like a few moments alone
with God when he wakes up in the morning. Even then
he will be thinking in prayer about the day's work into
which he is about to enter, and the people he will meet.
For the socially-minded multitudes the actual practice of
prayer will largely be in the quick contacts and reactions
of the day's busy life.

It is of utmost importance therefore to present praying
to men in such a way as to make it seem an immediately
feasible way to produce valuable results in the day's work.
In this way a growing awareness of God in the work and
friendships of daily life will be developed. God can be
counted on to respond. Man does not do all the seeking.

(2) Dropping a grudge or righting a wrong

Jesus strongly emphasized the necessity of dropping a
grudge if one would become aware of God: "When ye
stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one." 2
It is necessary not only to drop a grudge but to right any
wrong. Jesus drew a vivid picture of a man who had
reached the altar in the temple ready to offer a gift to God.
He had perhaps made an expensive journey by land and
sea to bring his gift to Jerusalem. As he stood with the
priest by the altar he remembered that a neighbor had
been injured by him. Jesus said that it was useless to
proceed with the sacrificial gift. He must leave it with
the priest, go back home and right things with his neigh-
bor. Then he might return to present his offering. " If
therefore thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there
rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee,
leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way;

> Mark 11 : 25.

Becoming Aware of God

first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer
thy gift." 3

A little probing often reveals bitterness in the heart, a
great wrong which it seems impossible to forgive, a spirit
of envy or dislike of some one which makes his success a
source of discomfort and his failure an unconfessed satis-
faction. When this has been laid before God, generally
in private prayer, not in general terms but with specific
mention of the individual's name, an awareness of God
breaks out in the soul. This is entirely natural. It is
necessary to agree with God in his feeling about an indi-
vidual who has done wrong or suffered a wrong, in order
to have any peaceful awareness of his presence. It is
impossible to work with God for a friendly world so long
as there is an unfriendly state of heart.

(3) Taking up a neglected duty

Sometimes awareness of God begins where opposition
to his will at some definite point other than dropping a
grudge ceases. It is more or less clearly recognized that
an alteration must be made in the way of living. Some
unwelcome occupation must be taken up. A life work
which involves hardship must be chosen. Some heavy
obligation must be assumed. At certain definite points
the will of God is pushing an individual forward so subtly
as to give opportunity for the individual initiative requi-
site for character. When opposition to the will of God
gives way, the sense of the presence of God may be very
marked. In the new joy of carrying life forward with
God, the person realizes that every sense of duty is an
opportunity for the enlargement of life.

In going around the circumference of a man's life to see
where the idea of feeling after God may best be brought

» Matthew 5 : 23-24.

What It Means to be a Christian

home to him, regard must be had for his temperament.
The mystical element is more highly developed in some
temperaments. Such persons are ready immediately to
pray and find their most distinct response from God in
prayer. Others are most naturally interested in practical
attempts to improve conditions in individual or com-
munity life. In various forms of philanthropy that
absorb their attention they find a growing awareness of
God. They get acquainted with him by working with
him. Men of another temperament find God becoming
real to them when some obscurity in thought is cleared
away. Their lives seem to halt at the point where an in-
tellectual difficulty confronts them. As soon as this is
removed they go forward with satisfaction in the way of
life. This is especially true of those who have been
accustomed to think of religion as strictly identified with
certain " doctrines " which they have either resented or
not understood.

What ought a man to consider as evidence that he is becoming
aware of God ?

A man's awareness of the pure air that he has long been
unconsciously drawing in with every breath sometimes
comes to him only after pain and struggle. When he has
been nearly killed by escaping gas in a close room, or when
he has suffered from asthma, he appreciates the easy
breathing of pure air. So when a man through struggle
with a fierce temptation, through sorrow, or through
threatened failure in some important undertaking, recog-
nizes his need of God, the awareness of God's steady pres-
ence with him makes life a new thing. A man may
sometimes learn to appreciate deep breathing of pure air
by simply having his attention called to its effect upon
him, without having the painful experiences just men-

Becoming Aware of God

tioned. So a man may have a growing awareness of
God's presence without painful experience preceding it.

A man does not help himself by striving to enjoy pure
air or by striving to feel God. The best evidence of con-
tact with either is healthful life. Healthful life in the
sphere of man's higher nature means a growing sincerity,
a strengthening friendliness, and a consequently deepen-
ing peace in all the experiences of a busy daily life. This
deepening peace, or sense of normality, is a natural conse-
quence of a growing sincerity and friendliness. Trying to
) appear to be what one is not and maintaining a grouch or
'. a grudge involve a nervous strain and a rasping friction
| that make peace impossible.

Chapter III
IS THERE A GOD?

It might seem as if the proof of God's existence should
have been the subject of the preceding chapter. It would
seem logical to inquire whether there is a God before ask-
ing how to become aware of him. But most people have
no doubt about the existence of God. So soon as a really
thinkable idea of God in terms of real life is presented to
them, they accept it as a matter of course. The only
problem for them is how to become aware of God.

There are some, however, who either do not, or think
they do not, believe in the existence of God.

Can the existence of God be proved ?

The possibility of proving God's existence depends
upon what we mean by " proved." In a sense the exist-
ence of God, like any other fundamental reality, must be
discovered not " proved." The existence of God can no
more be proved by abstract reasoning apart from human
experience than can the existence of oxygen. Both are
forms of energy that must be discovered by some one
capable of having experience of their presence. This
experience when reported by those who have had it may,
of course, furnish data, which will be used by others in a
process of reasoning.

" Thou canst not prove the Nameless, 0 my son;
Thou canst not prove the world thou movest in;
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone;

Is There a God?

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal — no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal — nay, my son;
Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee
Am not thyself in converse with thyself;
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven; wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt."

A man, then, may not look for conclusive proof at the '
start that there is a God. He must feel after him and
find him. The justification for a situation in which a man
must find out for himself whether there is a God is the
fact that the resolve and effort to search for him constitute
a valuable character-making process. Furthermore,
since God as conceived by Christianity is so powerful a
force, if he were to thTust his presence upon us in im-
mediate absolute demonstration we should be over-
whelmed by it and not have sufficient opportunity for
initiative left to make character possible.

How much evidence is necessary to make it reasonable to
begin to feel after God ?

God as conceived by the Christian religion is so great a
value that evidence sufficient to create only a probability,
or even a possibility, of his existence, would impose upon
all right-minded men an unescapable obligation to try to
discover him. If the father of a lost child hears a vague
rumor that a lost child has been found in a neighboring
city, he does not wait for proof before he takes a trip to
the city. A child is of such value to a true father that the
father is ready to act in such a case on evidence that
creates only a remote possibility. So a Christlike God is
of such value to a true man that a true man is ready to
search vigorously and thoroughly, acting upon what is
only a clue.

What It Means to be a Christian

In scientific research a man does not wait for proof
before he institutes a series of painstaking experiments.
He takes the best clue he has, however slight, and lets it
guide him in a search for experience through experiment.
The truly scientific spirit does not content itself with
criticising its best clues. On the contrary it works its
best clues hard.

What then are the clues that make the existence of such
a God as was described in the preceding chapter seem
possible enough to warrant a great adventure in feeling
after him? What is the evidence that makes the existence
of God seem probable or possible?

Evidence making the existence of God probable

In the first place, modern thought tends to the conclu-
sion that behind all the phenomena of nature and human
life there is one energy, unifying all things though mani-
festing itself in very different forms. Where shall we look
for a clue as to the nature of this energy? Apparently we
must infer it from the character of the highest ■phenomenon
in which it expresses itself, namely, human personality of
the highest type. This type appears in good and capable
men, in good men able to bring things to pass. Whatever
else this unifying energy may be, it must involve good
will working to a purposed end. We are able to take the
best specimen of personality that the human race affords,
the historical personality of Jesus, and say, " Here is at
least our best clue to the nature of ultimate energy, to
the nature of God."

In objection to this view it might be urged that, since
there are so many bad personalities among the highest
class of phenomena, they too must be allowed to shape
our view of the force behind all things. However, a study
of the nature of man shows that man was meant to be

Is There a God?

good, for if he is good — if he exercises good-will — his
personality experiences a high and harmonious develop-
ment. On the other hand, when he is bad, he is evidently
acting against the laws of his being; his personality be-
comes confused and ultimately suffers wreck. So we may
still say that it is man, evidently meant by the very nature
of his being to be good and capable, that gives us our
best clue to the nature of the one force behind all things.

Another possible objection to this view is found in the
fact that since there is such a diversity of phenomena in
which this one force has expressed itself, we ought to find
our clue in the sum total of phenomena, high and low,
rather than in capable good men. However, we find that
these miscellaneous phenomena are gathered up in one
evolutionary process that issues in the capable good man
as its highest known product up to date.

A further objection is this. If we should find ourselves
necessitated by weight of evidence, which has not yet
appeared, to believe that man, in all phases of his being
consists of chemical reactions, of highly organized matter,
could we continue to hold the working idea of God, pre-
sented in the preceding chapter? It would seem that we
could. The case would be this. A man, consisting of
chemical reactions or whatever else the behaviorist psy-
chologist may suppose, is a being capable of thinking and
loving, capable of turning back upon his past and dis-
covering the evolutionary theory, capable of conceiving
vast plans for the improvement of the race through the
manipulation of an evolutionary process, capable of finding
out how far off the stars are, what they are made of, and
where they will be a million years from now. Man, a
being made up of chemical reactions, can do all this.
According to the Christian idea man and God are the
same kind of being; God is a father and men ate his sons.

What It Means to be a Christian

The Christian working idea of God conceives him to be
doing the same kind of things that men do: thinking,
feeling, willing, loving, working to an end. Therefore,
even though God, as well as men, were finally conceived
to be made up of chemical reactions he could be conceived
to be doing all these things, because we know that men
actually do them. The question of ultimate interest
when one starts upon this line of inquiry is regarding the
nature of the atom, or of its mysterious nucleus.

A second evidence of the existence of a Vast Mind
Energy working with unabating good will toward a
worthy end is found in the indications of design in the
universe. Darwin was at times greatly moved by this
consideration: "Another source of conviction in the
existence of God connected with the reason and not with
the feelings impresses me as having much more weight.
This follows from the extreme difficulty, or rather impos-
sibility of conceiving of this immense and wonderful
universe, including man with his capacity of looking far
backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind
chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel com-
pelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind
in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve
to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my
mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I
wrote the ' Origin of Species,' and it is since that time
that it has very gradually, with many fluctuations, be-
come weaker." l

There are cases where no adaptation of means to any
worthy end appears, and these may somewhat lessen the
force of the argument, but they do not destroy it. On
the whole the universe reveals orderly processes working
out worthy results, and not an irrational chaos. Particu-

1 " Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," Volume I, p. 282.

Is There a God?

larly if we hold in some form a theory of evolution do we
feel the need of positing a designing Mind Energy, for the
evolutionary process is itself the most wonderful exhibi-
tion of apparent ingenuity known to the human mind.
Furthermore we are finding out that it is susceptible to
the manipulation of personal will; men are able to use
the process to accomplish remarkable results.

A third consideration making the existence of God a
probability is man's need of God and capacity for reaching
out to work with him.

There is in man's nature an elemental outcry for two
things: (1) unity, in itself and in all the universe about it;
and (2) sympathy. The instinctive desire for unity in
the universe is the persistent incentive to scientific investi-
gation. The instinctive and more wide-spread desire to
find sympathy is at the basis of religion. This cry for
unity and sympathy is essentially the cry for God. It is
not meant that every individual is conscious of the need
of God and of capacity for reaching out to him, any more
than that every man is conscious of capacity to recognize
the beautiful. But men in general in all ages give unde-
niable evidence of this need and capacity.

The argument is this: In all the evolution of life, as
John Fiske has pointed out, wherever there has developed
in any organism a deep need of, and capacity for working
with, something outside itself, the environment has
furnished that something. Evolution has been possible
because this has been so. This creates a strong presump-
tion that, since man, the highest product of this evolution,
appears with a deep-seated need of and capacity for such
a being as God, there is some such being. " To suppose
that during countless ages, from the seaweed up to Man,
the progress of life was achieved through adjustments to
external realities, but that then the method was all at

What It Means to be a Christian

once changed and throughout a vast province of evolution
the end was secured through adjustments to external
non-realities, is to do sheer violence to logic and to common
sense. . . . All the analogies of nature fairly shout against
the assumption of such a breach of continuity between
the evolution of Man and all previous evolution. . . .
The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary
ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion
a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless
groping and stumbling it has been rising to the recognition
of its essential kinship with the ever-living God. Of all
the implications of the doctrine of evolution with regard
to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be
that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion." l

It is sometimes said that, because the religious instinct
can be traced back to crude superstition in the early
stages of human development, it is therefore discredited
and cannot be properly regarded as furnishing evidence for
the existence of the being it reaches out to find. But it is
equally true, that modern science can be traced back to
crude superstition, and this does not shake our belief in
the reality of the forces with which scientific investigators
seek to become acquainted. In all development of the
race from lower to higher, the lower will necessarily seem
crude and superstitious when afterward viewed from the
standpoint of the higher.

A fourth consideration making the existence of God a
probability is the experience of many men of large intelli-
gence in many centuries. They have not merely reached
out instinctively to find God, as was pointed out in the
last paragraph. They have reported an experience that
seems best explained upon the theory that it has resulted

» John Fiske, " Through Nature to God," pp. 189-91.

Is There a God?

from contact with an unseen Mind Energy so much higher
and holier than themselves as to be properly called God.

The best and most complete literary record of such
experience is found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures,
and preeminently in the report of Jesus Christ's personal
experience with God.

Any one of these four lines of evidence creates such
reasonable probability or possibility of the existence of
God as lays upon men an absolute obligation to undertake
the search for him. The Christian God is a possible value
too great and high to be ignored by any right-minded man.

It is of course recognized in all this discussion that the
real nature of God's relation to his universe of personal
and impersonal being is at present an unsolved mystery.
The same sort of mystery confronts us when we try to
understand the way in which our own mind energy
operates on its own body and the environing world. It is
not a mystery which prevents our' reaching out to have
contact with other mind energy in either God or our fellow
men, or with the forces that are present in our bodies and
their physical environment. We love and work with our
friends, dig our coal and work our farms, without being
troubled by the unsolved mysteries connected with these
operations.

It is also recognzied that no one would rest the whole
case for the existence of God solely on the immediate
outcome of his own personal experiment. He would not
feel that his own failure to secure at once a satisfactory
experience in finding God proved conclusively that there
is no God. He would always take into account the
experience of others. No one seeking acquaintance with
an unseen physical force through a series of experiments in
his laboratory would consider his own failure in a particu-
lar experiment to be final and conclusive. He woiald take

What It Means to be a Christian

into account the experience gained by experimenters in
other reputable laboratories.

Does the fact of human suffering forbid the supposition
that there is a good God ?

The prevalence of human suffering seems to many
persons inconsistent with the idea of a good God, or at
least it introduces a paralyzing suspicion that lessens
eager persistence in feeling after him. This is especially
true just now when the terrible experiences of the great
war are fresh in our minds. It is felt that a being who
could not prevent such suffering would be too weak to be
called God, and a being who could but would not, would
be too wicked to be called God. The full dimensions of
the difficulty need to be faced. The suffering occasioned
by the great war is impressive because of its dramatic
character rather than because of any peculiar intensity or
numbers involved. It is said that during the nineteen
months of America's participation in the war twice as
many Americans were killed by automobile accidents
alone as were killed in the war. The sorrow of surviving
friends in the former case was just as great as in the latter.
Probably it would be possible to go over the earth at any
time and gather several groups as large as the whole
Armenian group, each of which would be suffering as
keenly as that tragic group has suffered. That is, human
suffering, often in extreme forms, has been wrought into
the very warp and woof of life century after century.
The realization of this fact makes some feel that the
kindest thing we can say about the whole human situa-
tion is that there is no great directing intelligence sur-
rounding human life. In meeting this difficulty it is
necessary first of all to consider the nature of human
suffering.

Is There a God?

What is human suffering ?

It is not easy to define human suffering, because it is a
personal experience and personality is an unsolved mys-
tery. We recognize at once that personality is a complex
unit and that suffering is only one element in a complex
experience. When a college boy is on the last lap of the
mile run, apparently in physical agony, his throat aching,
his legs heavy, and the ground rising up to meet him, but
sure that he is winning the race and will by winning add
points enough to the score to win the intercollegiate track
meet for his college, is he suffering or is he happy? We
cannot understand the boy's condition if we concentrate
attention exclusively upon the single item of his distress.
The same thing is true of civilization as a whole. If an
inhabitant of Mars should spend a week on the earth
inspecting its civilization and should, in his passage from
city to city and village to village, inspect only the spots
where animals are slaughtered for the market, he would
get a very distorted view of the earth's civilization. If
he should see no homes, libraries, churches, schools, hos-
pitals, parks and baseball games, but only slaughter
houses, he would carry back to Mars an utterly misleading
report of human life on the earth.

Human suffering makes a vital contribution to human
-progress

If we look back along the whole course of the evolu-
tionary process, we see that suffering has been not simply
an incidental feature of a complex process but an essential
characteristic of God's way of producing a race of power-
ful, honest, and friendly men. The process, including
suffering as one of its essential elements, has actually had
this result. Mankind has grown stronger and better by

What It Means to be a Christian

means of it. Life has emerged from the animal stage
and entered the human stage; the primitive man-animal
has become the Christian friend.

It is not hard to see, in part at least, how suffering has
made a vital contribution to this result. Whenever any
evil causes suffering enough, men will discover and remove
its cause. Famine drives men to dam the Nile, to devise
systems of irrigation and new methods of cultivation, to
invent means of swift transportation. When men have
suffered enough from dreadful diseases they will discover
and remove the causes of them. When they have suffered
enough from poverty they will discover and remove its
causes. When they have suffered enough from war they
will discover and remove its causes. The experience of
mankind with suffering is begetting in them a sublime
confidence that they can in the course of time discover and
remove the causes of all the known evils which make men
suffer. They even dare to believe that they can eliminate
the prime and prolific cause of the worst forms of suffering
known to man, namely, the evil will of man. One Jesus
Christ has appeared on earth confident that he can lead
men on to this great achievement, and establish upon the
earth a race of men powerful, honest, and friendly. It is
in connection with this movement that the value of what
appears to be the most outrageous form of suffering
appears most clearly, the suffering inflicted on the inno-
cent by the evil will of the brutally selfish. Such suffering
we have learned, for reasons that will appear in another
connection, to call " redemptive," or emancipating.

God shares human suffering

There is one further idea connected with suffering in its
relation to the idea of God. Man's enlarging idea of God
has more and more necessitated the conviction that God

Is There a God?

shares human suffering. The Christian conception of the
evolutionary process regards the life of God as most
intimately involved in it. The suffering that has charac-
terized the process all the way along must have involved
God. Furthermore, calling God " our Father " neces-
sarily involves attributing suffering to him. He is no true
father who does not share the suffering of his children.

Suffering, then, constitutes no reason for doubting the
existence close at hand of a good God. A being powerful
enough to bring life up from low forms to highly developed
men is powerful enough to be called God. A being good
enough to suffer with advancing life and with all the woes
of his human children is good enough to be called God.

As was said above, suffering is only one element in
complex personal life, whether that life be the life of God
or of man. The fountains of laughter and tears are near
together in the life of both God and man. What may
take the place of suffering as an incentive to progress in
more advanced stages of evolution we do not know. The
bearing of personal immortality on the question is to be
considered later. Under present conditions suffering
seems indispensable, something to be borne bravely when
it comes and even with victorious consciousness of helping
to carry life forward.

The late Dr. Frank T. Bayley once gave me the follow-
ing lines, said to have been found on the wall of a room in
a hospital:

" The cry of man's anguish went up to God,

Lord, take away pain!
The Shadow that darkens the world Thou hast made;

The close coiling chain
That strangles the heart; the burden that weighs

On the wings that should soar —
Lord, take away pain from the world Thou hast made

That it love Thee the more!

What It Means to be a Christian

" Then answered the Lord to the cry of the world,

Shall I take away pain.
And with it the power of the soul to endure,

Made strong by the strain?
Shall I take away pity that knits heart to heart

And sacrifice high?
Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire

White brows to the sky?
Shall I take away love that redeems with a price

And smiles at its loss?
Can ye spare from your lives that would cling unto mine

The Christ on his cross? "

Chapter IV
CHRISTIAN PRAYER

Prayer as a definite act calculated to secure the begin-
ning of an awareness of God has already been considered
(p. 9). But because prayer is an activity central in all
the development of the Christian's wonderful way of
living it properly comes up for further discussion here.

It is central in the Christian way of living because it
brings the spirit of a man face to face with the idea of God
as a present living reality and is a distinct effort to act in
accordance with that idea. It is conscious outreach in
reverent thought and feeling to God, expecting a response.
It is perhaps not so much a reaching out as it is a reaching
in to the depths of the soul, for it is in those depths, in the
very heart of a man, that the energy of God touches him
most vitally.

It follows from this that prayer is by no means exclu-
sively an effort to get something from God. The best
moments of a son with his father are not necessarily those
in which the son is asking his father for something. They
are often those restful moments in which there is a free
interplay of feeling and interchange of thought, a thinking
and feeling back and forth. In such moments the praying
soul of a man is storing up life energy that will be let out
later in high purpose and its unflinching execution.

It is conceivable that such an experience might come to
seem mere soliloquy, a communing of the soul with itself,
a kind of spiritual gymnastics that makes for health but
that does not involve the intelligent action of any energy
other than that of the soul itself. If a man should reach

What It Means to be a Christian

the conviction that such is the case, his activity would be
simply thinking and not praying. There may be a cer-
tain broad sense in which all thinking is a kind of uncon-
scious praying, but it is not what the Christian means by
praying. The Christian feels that he is having to do with
a responsive Mind Energy, with a heavenly Father to
whom one may come on occasion1 with an asking and
from whom there will be a getting. When a man prays
to the vast all-enfolding Other that we call God, that
Other is conceived to be stirred and to give out consciously
something that would not otherwise be given out. There
doubtless is the permanent disposition to be giving out
whatever is needed, but the giving out does not occur
until the particular need arises and the heart opens in
prayer to receive. This implies that God gives attention
to each one of countless individuals.

Does God give attention to details ?

The universe is so vast and the individuals in it are so

many that it is hard to think of the mind of God being

able to give attention to the details of each individual's

life.

" As the poor earth's pale history runs,
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million, million
suns."

God may be good so far as he goes, but can he go so far in
capacity for attention as to reach each individual in all
the details of life? Modern science shows that the force
behind all phenomena is expressing itself with the most
careful precision in the world of the minute. The atom
itself is made up of particles which move in " intricate
but ascertainable orbits," so that we have the new science
of atomic astronomy.1 It is not unthinkable that a power

1 Oliver Lodge, " Substance of Faith," p. 49.

Christian Prayer

that can so express itself in an individual atom should
attend to the wonderful individual man, who looks into
the atom and begins to understand its astronomy. It is
evident that the great force shaping human civilization
does actually produce more and more concern for the
individual. The individual child, the individual poor and
sick and blind, the individual everywhere is being more
and more carefully conserved.

If there is to be a getting from God in response to an
asking, the asking must be for what God has and is.
God has in his very nature resources to be used in the
evolution of a friendly world. Therefore the asking must
be for something to be used in a friendly way, for some-
thing that can be directly or indirectly shared with
another.

Prayer getting something from God to share with another

Jesus emphasized this in his clearest teaching about
what actually happens when a man prays and receives
answer. When Jesus was asked to teach his disciples to
pray he drew a picture of ordinary neighborhood life in
which prayer was reduced to its simplest terms. In this
picture there were three persons : a well-to-do man with a
plenty, a man in need, and a friendly go-between.1 A
man at midnight was awakened by a knocking at his door.
Standing on the threshold in the darkness he found a
friend, hungry and tired. He had no food for his unex-
pected guest. So he went to the house of a well-to-do
neighbor with whom he was on very friendly terms and
said to him: " Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend
of mine is come to me on a journey and I have nothing to
set before him." After some rather humorous grumpy

'Luke 11 : 1-13.

What It Means to be a Christian

objection, which Jesus introduced to give the incident a
flavor of life and reality probably much enjoyed by his
listeners, the sleepy friend got up and gave him " as many
as he needed." The bread was taken home and shared
with the hungry traveler. Jesus reported this as being a
picture of what actually happens in prayer, taking pains
only to add that if a sleepy neighbor could finally be pre-
vailed upon to give what was asked, " how much more "
would response be made by a heavenly Father whose door
opens to everyone who knocks.

Two questions arise here whenever a man considers
whether or not it is worth while to begin praying: What
passes from the life of God through his praying friend to
the man in need, and, how does it pass?

How does anything pass from the life of God into the life
of a praying man ?

It passes in accordance with the laws that describe the
action of all mind energy, the laws in accordance with
which all intercourse between the minds of men goes
steadily on. Men are distinct from each other. Individu-
ality is a fact. There seems to be a sort of gulf between
individuals. But nevertheless physical, physiological,
psychical forces are of such a nature as to facilitate orderly
intercourse between individuals. The higher civilization
becomes, the more direct and reliable this intercourse is.
It is accomplished with a diminishing amount of interven-
ing apparatus, and with increasing precision. The post
gives way to the telegraph, and the telegraph to the
wireless.

In accordance with physical laws men are expected to
draw from their physical environment something to share
with other men. The farmer and the miner, acting in
accordance with the fixed laws of nature, get food and fuel

Christian Prayer

to share with other men. So, in accordance with the
common psychic laws that describe the action of all
Mind Energy, men in that species of human action called
prayer get something from the great thinking, feeling,
loving Mind Energy all about them to share with other
men.

What passes from the life of God into the life of
a -praying man?

The two chief values known to man, namely, feeling and
thought. By feeling is not meant a passing whim or mood
but that fundamental element in personality that merges
into will and warms the intellectual faculty with desire.
The quality, intensity, and persistence of such feeling
often determine whether life shall be a success or a failure.
If a man has in sufficient degree the feeling of hope,
courage, friendliness — the proper morale — he may be
carried on to success. If he lack this feeling he will fail.
When your friend comes to you in the midnight darkness
of discouragement, tired and hungry in the long journey
of life, what can you do for him? You can, on the spot
without his knowing it, go down into the inner depths of
your being with a simple prayer: " Friend, lend me three
loaves; for a friend of mine is come to me from a journey,
and I have nothing to set before him." Out of the vast
underlying life of God feeling may rise within you and
become a part of yourself, which you can share with him.
He will go on his way, the crisis successfully past.

In the same way thought may pass from the mind of
God through you to him. Success often depends upon
having the right thought in an important juncture. If
the physician or the business man, the farmer, the teacher,
the mother in the home, gets the right idea at the critical
time, there will be success, otherwise perhaps failure.

What It Means to be a Christian

Your friend comes to you in great perplexity. He must
decide upon his life work, or there is a desperate situation
in the home which the mother does not know how to deal
with, or business seems to be going on the rocks. What
can you do to help? You can again, on the spot, secretly
go down into the depths of your being and feel after the
underlying Mind Energy of God: " Friend, lend me three
loaves; for a friend of mine has come to me from a journey,
and I have nothing to set before him." Then the right
thought may come to you, become a part of yourself that
you can share with your friend in need. He may in this
way be sent on to years of usefulness in the world that is
ever growing more near to God's desire.

It is from this point of view that the meaning of prayer
" in Christ's name " and " for Christ's sake " becomes
evident. Christ is committed with all the energy of his
being to the production of a friendly race of men. All
prayer, therefore, which connects itself with his name and
sake will be necessarily for something to use in a friendly
way. These expressions identify the person who prays
with the dominant ambition of Christ. This is the dis-
tinctive characteristic of Christian prayer as contrasted
with pagan prayer.

Why did God not help the needy man directly ?

Why did God leave the lonely traveler to make his way
to his friend's door and look for help there? Doubtless
God had been helping directly. God had been his unseen
companion in the midnight darkness all along the lonely
way. But the man was not able to recognize this. He
had not yet " found " God, or his sense of God was tem-
porarily dim. Furthermore God seems to have ordained
that help shall often pass from himself to a man in need
through another man, in order that in this way brother-

Christian Prayer

hood may be built up in the world and men be bound
together in a world unity. By sharing with each other
what is drawn from our spiritual environment through
prayer men are brought together in brotherhood and
'\bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

Power in prayer a growth

Since the man who prays Christian prayer is a man
who, according to Jesus' teaching, stands between a great
Friend-with-a-Plenty and a friend in need, it follows that
he who would pray well must take pains to develop both
friendships. He must do what he can to develop his
friendly feeling toward God and toward men. He must
cultivate friendly desire in both relationships. He must
learn how to absorb from God and how to share tactfully
with men. This takes time and thought and the disci-
pline of experience. It takes time to understand the
movements of God's will, to detect its subtle pressure on
and in the human will. Especially it takes time to reach
an intelligent understanding of, and strong tactful sym-
pathy with, the real needs of those with whom we have to
do. This comes often through finding ourselves the ob-
jects of another's prayerful sympathy. All the varied
years of human life are calculated to develop enlarging
capacity for praying. The long history of life in the earth
shows that God has been wanting men to find out the laws
of the physical and psychic world and to learn how to
work with him in the use of physical and psychic force for
the common good.

The relation of " the laws of nature " to prayer

To what extent do " the laws of nature " limit the scope
of prayer? If we should include psychic law in the laws

What It Means to be a Christian

of nature, it has become evident that in the sphere of
psychic action these laws facilitate rather than limit the
possibilities of answer to prayer. It is because of fixed
psychic laws that feeling and thought pass from one
mind to another, that men ask and get from each other,
and ask and get from God in the sphere of thought and
feeling. But'does the law of cause and effect as it is seen
outside the sphere of man's psychic life, in the natural
world, prevent the answer to prayer in that sphere?
Theoretically it is not inconceivable that God should
directly operate on physical forces in answer to prayer.
Man's experience with these forces teaches that they are
exceedingly sensitive to the manipulation of a personal
will. The more men learn about the forces of nature and
the invariable laws of their action the more they are able
to do, not in spite of, but because of, this invariability, in
answering each other's calls for help.

Human experience seems to teach, however, that God
does not often operate upon natural forces in answer to
prayer. He has left them to constitute a fascinating field
for human investigation and discovery. In this field,
men, spurred on by great needs which are not directly met
by answers to prayer, have achieved the discoveries and
inventions that characterize modern civilization. No one
could wish this to be otherwise. Such achievements con-
stitute a large part of the glory and joy of living. In
connection with all such effort there is chance enough for
such prayer as could be answered by God's putting a
thought into the mind of a man. Perhaps this has
occurred many times in the long history of scientific
research. New scientific hypotheses sometimes spring up
in men's minds in strange ways. A man dying of thirst
in the middle of a desert where it never rains would not
think of asking God to make it rain, but he might ask God

Christian Prayer

to put into some man's mind the thought of going out
into the desert on some errand with a supply of water.

Does the theory of predestination or philosophic determinism
preclude answer to prayer ?

It is perhaps sufficient to say that there is no more
reason why the theories of predestination or philosophic
determinism should stop requests made of God than that
they should stop the requests that men are constantly
making of each other. If either of these theories makes
petition to God unreasonable it makes all petitions to men
unreasonable. If on this ground it is unreasonable to ask
God to guide us by affecting our thought and feeling, it
is equally unreasonable on this ground, for a pupil to ask
his teacher to make a suggestion that will guide him in
his research work.

The whole subject of prayer clears up somewhat when we
recognize that prayer is not an effort to bend God's will,
to persuade God to do something that he would rather not
do, but that it is the reverent opening of the heart and
mind to such incoming of the feeling and thought of God
as may be appropriate to the situation in which we find
ourselves. There is need to take account, too, of human
frailty and shortsightedness. Children ask their parents
for many things that they do not get, and they get many
things that they do not ask for. This does not warrant
their concluding that it is useless ever to ask. Some
things they get only when and because they ask. And
they always have their parents' love, however much they
may be wisely left to learn some things by painful experi-
ence. Prayer is no device for eliminating the necessity of
learning some things by experience in living.

There is need to emphasize again the thought that while
prayer is a reaching into the unseen, it is not the fading

What It Means to be a Christian

away of that which is seen. It is not being mystically lost
in God. It is not the surrender of individuality. On the
contrary it would seem that true prayer develops at one
and the same time a sense of God, of self, and of other men.
Coming into the presence of God necessitates a clearer
consciousness of men, for men are God's great concern.
It gives a new significance to all life. Professor Walter
Rauschenbusch gave beautiful expression to this thought:

" In the castle of my soul
Is a little postern gate,
Whereat, when I enter,
I am in the presence of God.
In a moment, in the turning of a thought,
I am where God is.
This is a fact."

" When I enter into God,
All life has a meaning.
Without asking I know;
My desires are even now fulfilled,
My fever is gone
In the great quiet of God.
My troubles are but pebbles on the road,
My joys are like the everlasting hills.
So it is when I step through the gate of prayer
From time into eternity. ^.i

When I am in the consciousness of God,
My fellow men are not far off and forgotten,
But close and strangely dear.
Those whom I love
Have a mystic value.
They shine as if a light were glowing within them."

" So it is when my soul steps through the postern gate
Into the presence of God.

Big things become small, and small things become great.
The near becomes far, and the future is near.
The lowly and despised is shot through with glory."

Chapter V
WHO IS JESUS CHRIST?

The wonderful way of living that we call the Christian
life is one which utilizes all the incentive that God pours
into the experience of men through the personality of
Jesus Christ. It is called the " Christian " life because of
his connection with it. " Wherever Christianity has
struck out a new path in her journey it has been because
the personality of Jesus had again become living, and a
ray from its being had once more illumined the world." l
How shall we make Jesus Christ so real to the multitudes
of men, women and children in country, village and city
that they will feel his power and receive the tremendous
moral incentive that God is pouring into the life of man
through him? How shall we make people realize who he
is and what of it ?

It is unfortunate that the effort to do this has so gener-
ally made use of obscure metaphysical terms. Many
people think of him as for some reason the center of ill-
natured controversy about the " incarnation," the
" atonement," the " trinity." Henry Drummond some-
where said that he came on into his university years before
he saw that Jesus was more than a doctrinal convenience,
a theological device for bringing an offended God and
sinful men together. To many he is a name to curse by,
a labor agitator, or simply a teacher of a more or less
reliable ethic.

"Bousset, " What is Religion?" p. 237f.

What It Means to be a Christian

How do we tell who any one is ?

A stranger enters a room. How shall we find out who
he is? We may learn his name. It is John Smith. We
may learn that he is the son of old John Smith. If we
know his father this may throw some light on who he is.
But a son is often very different from his father. If we
learn that this, stranger's fundamental conviction is that
he can paint a picture which will bless every person who
looks at it, we know a great deal about him. But before
we know him at all adequately it is necessary to know the
answer to one other question, namely, Can he paint the
picture? That is, in order to tell in any fundamental way
who a person is we must know, first, his deepest feeling
and desire, and second, the success with which he can
express his deepest feeling and desire in action. We
need to know what he thinks about himself and the
corroboration which his thought about himself finds in
what he shows himself able to do.

What was Jesus' deepest feeling and desire ?

1. First of all Jesus had a deep direct feeling of the Mind
Energy which we call the will of God and a consuming un-
relaxing desire to let it out in action. He knew the " feel "
of God. He had the supreme religious experience with
the mighty will of God. In this experience he so explored
and adjusted himself to the will of God as to give it supreme
expression in terms of human life and death. We learn
from a study of his life and teaching what the will of God
did with him and would do with the life of every man and
all mankind. Our problem is to make this religious ex-
perience of Jesus seem real to men and women of ordinary
outlook and capacity. If this is to be done they must
some way see themselves in the life of Jesus.

Who Is Jesus Christ?

This means first of all that they must find in him what
they recognize as high reality in their own best experience.
They must realize that he had to do with the same will of
God with which they themselves are in daily contact. The
same will of God that rises in them to claim them for the
honest and friendly life and for cooperation in producing
an honest and friendly world, rose also in him for the same
purpose.

They must feel in the second place that Jesus' religious
experience with the will of God was a growth, as is ours, and
as all real human experience must be. Like ourselves he
faced uncertainties that called for moral adventure, for
experiment as a means of attaining experience, conviction
and character. Character for him, as for us, came by
thinking and living his way through difficult problems, by
going forward when he could not see far ahead, by feeling
the tremendous pull of temptation and resisting it.
Among the early Christians he was nearly lost in the
sublimations of vague and complicated speculation, but
this process was fortunately arrested by others who
showed that he " was tempted in all points like as we are,"
and " learned obedience through the things that he
suffered."

" Gospels " of a superior type survived many that were
inferior and these better Gospels passed on to posterity
the picture of one who had his growing experience with the
will of God in an ordinary neighborhood. He lived in a
home in which apparently it was necessary often to ask,
What shall we eat, and wherewithal shall we be clothed ?
He was a business man, under the necessity of making
fair bargains, pleasing critical customers, dunning de-
linquent debtors, employing more or less satisfactory
workmen and working himself for more or less satisfactory
employers. He mixed in the social life of the neighbor-

What It Means to be a Christian

hood, its weddings and funerals, politics and gossip, made
friends and enemies. Almost all of his life was spent and
his character developed in the same plain daily life that
we all live. His brief public life which ended in apparent
public disgrace, presented a series of extraordinary crises,
but even they were made up of the elements of the real
human life that we all live.

2. Jesus' deepest feeling and desire were not simply the
direct feeling of the will of God and the desire to do it.
He had also the unique feeling that God laid on him personal
responsibility for leading all men to feel and do the will of
God as he himself was feeling and doing it. This unique
sense of responsibility for world leadership was a growth
which can be more or less successfully traced by an analysis
of the collections of reminiscences and teachings that have
come down to us in the Gospels. His unique sense of
leadership was a vital part of his religious experience,
something that he finally felt to be unavoidably involved
in being faithful to his inner feeling of God. It necessarily
assumed an outward expression in terms of current Jewish
ideas such as " Messiahship," " Kingdom of God," " End
of the Age." Some of the temporary implications of this
Jewish phraseology became later part of a sacred Christian
tradition and outlasted the sense of reality that they
originally expressed. That which is of vital importance
to us is the fundamental element in the religious experi-
ence of Jesus, namely, his profound sense that the will of
God was thrusting upon him, or rather rising up in him to
work into his very soul, a sense of responsibility for lead-
ing all men to unite with him in working with the will of
God for the development of an honest, friendly, powerful
world.

The will of God rising within him communicated to
him God's own passion for men. The same tremendous

Who Is Jesus Christ?

passion, or love, of God for men, which expressed itself in
the long evolutionary process by which God brought men
into being, filled the soul of Jesus with great confidence in
the possibilities of men and with desire to see those possi-
bilities realized. He stood over the apparent wrecks of
human life with God's passionate desire in his soul and
saw new men and women rise up out of the wreckage.

He said of all who would join him in doing the will of
God, in working for an honest and friendly world, that
they would be mother, sister and brother to him. He
would gather men about him in such close personal rela-
tionship as to share his own religious experience with them.
They would feel God as he did. The wonderful interpre-
tation of his religious experience found in the Fourth
Gospel brings this out in the message which he is repre-
sented to have sent by a woman to his " brothers " : " Go
to my brothers and say to them, I ascend unto my Father
and your Father, and my God and your God." They
would feel men as he felt them, putting themselves in
the place of others as he did; they would follow him in
giving all men a square deal, in doing unto others as they
would that others should do unto them. They would
share his experience in feeling God within them pouring
out forgiving love to penitent men: " whoseover sins ye
forgive, they are forgiven unto them." They would
share their leader's power to bring wonderful things to
pass: " Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers " ;
" He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he
do also; and greater works than these shall he do." That
is, Jesus is represented in the Gospels to have felt the will
of God thrusting him into the responsibility of supreme
world leadership in the sphere of religion, a leadership in
which he would liberate all men from bondage to evil by
leading them into such measure of his own religious ex-

What It Means to be a Christian

perience as they might be trained to achieve. It involved
for them long discipline in his own life of honesty and
friendliness but with victorious hope of success. His
great disciple had caught his thought when he taught his
converts that by " speaking truth in love " they might
become " full grown " men reaching even " the measure
of the stature of the fulness of Christ." 2

Have this deepest feeling and strongest desire of Jesus
found any corroboration for themselves in what he has
shown himself able to do? Is he like a man with an artist's
feeling and desire in his soul who shows himself able to
paint the great picture? Is he succeeding in claiming men
for his great enterprise? Is he getting men to join him in
working with the will of God in its evolution of an honest,
friendly, powerful race of men?

Before considering this inquiry there are still other
points to be noted in the effort to tell who Jesus was and
what of it.

* Ephesians 4 : IS.

Chapter VI

HOW DOES THE SUFFERING OF JESUS HELP

MEN?

In trying to tell who Jesus is and what of it in such a
way as to bring into the lives of men the moral incentive
that God pours into human life through him, we face the
fact of his suffering.

Suffering one element in the life of Jesus

Suffering in his life, as in all human life, was simply
one element in a complex experience. The record of his
public life in Galilee is a record of exuberant gladness.
He " came eating and drinking." He " exulted in the
Holy Spirit " as he went about curing the sick; restoring
cripples to useful work, self-support and self-respect;
turning back into orderly community life the many dis-
ordered minds preyed upon by current superstition;
seeing the poor, the disheartened and evil-minded rise up
into new life as he brought with the penetrating power of
his friendship the good word about the nearness of the
heavenly Father and the better days to come.

But in later months, when he felt the will of God pressing
into his soul the responsibility of a leadership best de-
scribed at the time as " Messianic," the element of suffer-
ing began to grow. As the experience deepened it became
a tense expectation of an overwhelming climax in the near
future which led him to say: " I have a baptism to be
baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accom-
plished!" As the climax drew near he began to feel a
sort of terror that he described as like unto death: he

What It Means to be a Christian

" began to be greatly amazed, and sore troubled " and
said that his soul was " exceeding sorrowful even unto
death." During the hours of arrest, court trial, and
execution that swiftly followed he evidently passed
through a religious experience of profound suffering
entirely beyond the sphere of physical pain.

Men's sense of the connection of Jesus' suffering with their
moral victory

Men have seized upon this outstanding feature of Jesus'
religious experience, his suffering, and have connected it
with the moral victory that has been experienced as they
have adopted at any cost Jesus' ideals of life and have let
their affections follow him out into the unseen world.

It has been inevitable that men should look for some
rational explanation of the connection between the suffer-
ing of Jesus and the remarkable moral victories that have
appeared in the lives of those who look to him as leader.
These explanations have necessarily been made in the
terms of contemporary thought. In no other way could
they be made real and valid for each generation. But
human thought through the centuries has been passing
through various stages of development and this has
necessitated the re-casting of these explanations. The
different explanations that made the matter clear to men
who lived in the varying thought worlds of the first and
third and sixteenth centuries may not make the matter
clear to men who live in the thought world of the twentieth
century. The effort to force upon the twentieth century
an explanation suitable to the obsolete thought world of
a past century tends to discredit the religious experience
by making it seem artificial. Fortunately the experience
of moral redemption goes on generation after generation
in the lives of those who adopt the ideals of Jesus at any

The Suffering of Jesus

cost and let their affections follow him out into the unseen
world, whatever be their attitude toward any one of the
various " theories of the atonement " that have been
helpful at different periods in the long history of Christian
experience.

What does the suffering of Jesus mean to us ?

As a matter of personal experience what do we find in
the suffering of Jesus that brings us moral incentive and
that we can with enthusiasm and passion urge upon men
whom we wish to see begin the Christian life?

We see in Jesus the supreme human religious experience
with the will of God, the will of God let out into human
feeling and action. In the will of God there must be both
joy and pain — the joy of carrying life forward and the
pain that a Father must feel when his unselfish life and
desire press up against the brutal selfishness of his human
children (p. 26). As the will of God rose in the soul of
Jesus he shared both its joy and pain. In his deepening
experience with it he came to feel the feeling of God about
the wrong-doing of men. His desire for men deepened as
God's desire for them unfolded in his soul and his suffering
over their wrong-doing became keener as the element of
suffering in the will of God pressed up for larger expression
within him. In the last days and hours his desire for the
righteousness of his nation and of the world, which his
nation had seemed appointed to lead into righteousness,
gtew into a consuming passion. It expressed itself in the
bitter cry, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killeth the
prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how
often would I have gathered thy children together, even
as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not! " In those tense hours the leaders of the
nation pressed against him and the will of God within

What It Means to be a Christian

him with a hard brutal hatred which struck him down in
the open shame of crucifixion. In the suffering of Jesus'
soul over the wrong-doing of men, we have an everlasting
expression of the suffering that constitutes one element in the
vast will of the heavenly Father. If there were nothing
else but suffering it would be a picture of weakness, but
it is the suffering of strength. The will of God has been
strong enough to vitalize the process that has brought life
up from amceba to men. The Christ on the cross was a
strong Christ, one who had lived a life of matchless moral
power prophetic of the best that man can ever hope to be.
The utmost that a father can do to get hack a son who has
gone wrong is to show his son how he feels in the center of
his being about his wrong-doing. The utmost that a father
can do to cure a child of lying is in some way to show the
child how he hates a lie. If he does not hate a lie he can
do little to redeem the child from falseness to truth.
There is a powerful illustration of this in the Life of Pro-
fessor Austin Phelps:

" He and honor were one thing in our minds. The
scene in his study when one of his eldest children told the
first lie is too well remembered. The child was seven,
and the falsehood was proved and acknowledged. To the
young father this commonplace incident was a heart-
rending experience. He had come home from a journey
exhausted; but the moral crisis must not wait for a man
to rest. The awe in the little offender's heart when the
fatigue of travel deepened upon that sensitive face with
the deadly pallor of overwhelming emotion cannot be for-
gotten yet. He spoke to the child in a low, stern, yet
quivering voice such as befitted the solemnity of some
tremendous moral event. It ceased to be an event, — it
became an epoch to have uttered a falsehood. He spoke
of the holiness of truth and of the beauty of honor; he

The Suffering of Jesus

dwelt in language quite clear to the little child's mind on
the enormity of that little act.

" Beneath his breath he touched for a moment upon
the tendency of falseness in the heart. Liars he said in an
awestruck, all but inaudible tone, liars he said went to
hell. But then and there before the child could cower
before the moral shock of his displeasure, a displeasure
which coming from the ideal of fatherly gentleness,
seemed like the rebuke of offended God Himself — this
too human father bowed his face and wept bitterly.
Those heavy sobs, that melting sight never heard or seen
before or since, effected what word or rod could not have
done. Awed into shame, silenced by this revelation of
the truth that no soul sinneth to itself, the child crept to
his feet and sobbed with him. At that hour was the
abhorrence of dishonor born in the heart. That lie was
the last."

In the profound religious experience of Jesus' last hours
the heart of God was laid open to human eyes. Men
have never been able to turn their eyes away from it. An
increasing number of men look at it, generation after
generation, try to understand and explain its meaning.
It becomes more and more clear, as Jesus' great missionary
disciple said, that " God was in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself." Men find God and repent at the
cross of Christ.

In that great tragedy men see what the real nature of
human selfishness is. They see that human selfishness
will strike down anything that gets between it and its
desire, as it could be shown that the political and ecclesi-
astical machine did in the case of Jesus. The person who
is selfish in what are apparently unimportant details of
daily life, may see there what selfishness really becomes
when highly developed. An inconspicuous sore spot in
the skin is not understood until one has looked at a highly

What It Means to be a Christian

developed case of cancer and seen there what the sore
spot means.

Men see in the suffering of Jesus not simply how far
human selfishness will go, but how far the heart of God
goes in its reclaiming desire. Jesus on the cross could
have used the words he is said to have uttered the evening
before: " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

Jesus' suffering was not an isolated expression of the
element of suffering in the will of God. He taught his
disciples that as the prophets had so suffered in other days
they too must join him in this as in all other experiences
with the will of God. He represented himself as at the
head of a long procession of men going out through the
city gates to the place of execution. " If any man would
come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me." The suffering of the innocent
inflicted by the evil will has in the nature of the case re-
demptive value. The soul of man is so made that when it
sees such suffering it resents the presence of the selfish
evil will in itself and is redeemed from bondage to it.

The suffering of Jesus and God's forgiveness of sin

What has been already said of the suffering of Jesus
may be applied to the great fact of God's forgiveness of
man's sin. There is in Christian thought a vital connec-
tion between the suffering of Jesus and God's forgiveness
of man's wrong-doing.

What is God's forgiveness ?

God's forgiveness involves three things: (1) a wrong
done to God by a man; (2) the man's repentance, that is,
the wrong regretted, stopped, and, if possible, made right;
(3) a change on the part of God from disapproving to
approving love. The heart of a heavenly Father never

The Suffering of Jesus

ceases to love, but so long as the wrong is unrepented the
love is a disapproving love. When a child disobeys his
father, the father does not cease to love him, but as a true
right-minded father he resents and disapproves the dis-
obedience. When the disobedience is repented the
father's love breaks out in some form of approval. Very
impressive language is used in the Bible to describe the
enthusiasm with which God expresses his approval of peni-
tent men. He sinks their sins in the unexplored depths
of the sea far out from continents and men. Their sins
are cast behind the back of the Infinite One. In the plain,
homelike speech of Jesus, the forgiving God is like a
father who, at the first sight of his penitent son far down
the homeward road, runs to meet him, throws his arms
about his neck, kisses him over and over again and when
he gets him home gives him the best things there.

What wrong has a man done to God ?

In what way could a frail man wrong the mighty God?
What could a man do to God which would in any sense
hurt God and for which a man ought to apologize to God?
The wrong done springs out of the character of God and
the nearness of God to the life of man. God is a loving
Mind Energy set close to the life of a man, always feeling
of him and saying, " I want you. I want you." His
love is, in the teaching of Jesus, the love of a father for a
child whom the father plans to gather into a great enter-
prise which it is his fundamental ambition to accomplish.
Now if a son fails to work with his father in an enterprise
in which his father ought to have his cooperation, the
father suffers a grievous wrong. When a father sends his
son to a technical school to prepare for a responsible place
in the father's extensive manufacturing plant, and the son
wastes his time in dissipation, the father suffers a wrong

What It Means to be a Christian

for which his son, when he comes to himself, will apologize.
If the son does paltry things instead of the main thing for
which he was sent to college he wrongs his father; if he
neglects his studies and runs a peanut stand on the corner
of the campus he owes his father an apology. If a son in
any way abuses or neglects his brothers and sisters in
their time of need he hurts his father at a most sensitive
point. Nothing hurts a father so much as to have his
children abused or neglected. That is, when a man in a
life of growing selfishness sets himself against the steady
pressure of the unselfish loving will of God in any form of
social, personal, or business life, a grievous wrong is in-
flicted on the will of God. God is hurt and an apology
involving a fundamental reorganization of life is necessary.

What does God do through Jesus to make forgiveness
possible ?

Since God's forgiveness (not love), as defined above,
can take place only on condition of repentance, it is
natural to ask, What does God do through Jesus to make
forgiveness possible? The righteous desire to forgive in-
volves doing everything possible to induce the repentance
that is the essential condition of forgiveness. What God
does to make men repent and quit their selfishness has been
already discussed (p. 48). Here where it is the personal
affront to God involved in human selfishness that is es-
pecially in view, it is in place to re-emphasize the exhibi-
tion of God's personal feeling that is made by him over
against human selfishness. This personal feeling comes to
its clearest historical expression, as was said above, in the
life of Jesus, and especially in the final suffering of soul
that brought Jesus to physical collapse in death before
there was time for the crucifixion wounds to kill him.
This distress of Jesus' soul, which was the rising within

The Suffering of Jesus

him of the element of pain in the will of God, has made
the cross on which Jesus hung a symbol of penitence and
forgiving love. Perhaps this has contributed in some
cases to an unwarranted and superficial literalism. The
significant spiritual fact would be just the same if Jesus
had been hanged or electrocuted instead of crucified.
When a man sees Jesus brought to a premature death by-
spiritual pain over the selfishness of men, realizes that
this is an expression of one element in the heart of the
heavenly Father, and, according to the measure of his
meager ability, feels the same way over his own selfish-
ness, then he comes to an agreement with God in Christ,
in God's feeling about his selfish life. The great " recon-
ciliation " x takes place. He is in a vital sense " crucified
with Christ." He feels about his own selfishness as Jesus
Christ felt about all selfishness when he was being cruci-
fied. The purifying power of his heavenly Father's
forgiving love works out in his penitent heart redemption
from his bondage to the selfish habit. The burden of
feeling the feeling of the heavenly Father about the
selfishness of his children has been laid upon the con-
sciousness of Jesus, and men, moved to penitence by the
sight, experience moral redemption.

Does God's forgiveness remove the consequences of sin ?
It might seem as if in a world where the law of cause
and effect is universal nothing could remove the natural
consequences of human sin. And yet it is evident that
the one great effect of sin is at once removed by the for-
giveness which follows repentance. That great conse-
quence is the disapproval of God. The sense of estrange-
ment from God disappears at once and is replaced by a

1 This is the word which in the Revised Version of the New Testament has re-
placed the word " atonement " that occurred once in the Old Version of the New
Testament.

What It Means to be a Christian

glad sense of being reconciled to God. This is a common
experience in the many sins, repentances, and forgivenesses
that characterize all friendship whether with God or men.
On the other hand there are certain consequences of sin
that are not removed by forgiveness. Sin, or selfishness,
injures the personality of the sinner. It blights and
stunts personality. In regard to these consequences of
sin it may be said that forgiveness establishes a relation-
ship that tends in the course of time to remove them. A
child disobeys its mother by going out to play in the rain.
There are two consequences of this disobedience: the
mother's disapproval and a bad cold. When the child
repents of the disobedience, throws its arms about the
mother's neck and means never to disobey again, the
mother's disapproval instantly disappears. The cold,
however, continues; but under the mother's care it tends
to disappear. That is, the great law of recuperation and
recovery, that runs through all nature, begins to operate.
It is another application of the law of cause and effect
coming into the situation. When the prodigal son felt his
father's arms about him all the estrangement, which was
the chief consequence of his selfish life in the far country,
disappeared, but it may have been a long time before he
recovered from the physical effects of his dissipation
sufficiently to do a full day's work. Still the atmosphere
of the home tended to the recovery of physical health.
When we extend our vision to include a life after death
the prospect of complete recovery is brighter. This pros-
pect comforts us at the point where we most need it,
namely, the remembrance of the corrupting influence
which we in our selfishness may have exerted upon those
who are no longer within our reach. We may yet in the
long future be able to do something to help in overcoming
the evil effect of our lives upon them.

Chapter VII

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS

In presenting Jesus to men so that redeeming moral
incentive shall pour into their lives, what shall be said
about his resurrection? What was the resurrection of
Jesus and what is its practical value in the experience of
modern men?

The resurrection a part of the religious experience of Jesus

All of Jesus' life was a profound religious experience
with the will of God. We can partly, and with reverent
imagination, follow him through the religious experience
of his trial before the Great Court, his hearing before the
Procurator and the terrible hours when he hung in naked
shame and agony of body and spirit on the cross. But
what was his experience while Joseph and Nicodemus
were wrapping the bruised limp body in cool linen ? What
was it while his body lay in the rock sepulcher? Where
was he ? What was he doing ? Was his experience exactly
what he had anticipated? Where is he now, and what is
he doing? Did he before his death anticipate in detail all
that he has experienced in the centuries since? If we
believe in personal immortality at all we must of course
believe in the personal immortality of Jesus. In that case,
all these and other questions necessarily arise.

The belief of the early Christian leaders was that Jesus
continued to have a religious experience with the will of
God after his death. In this experience his passionate
desire to share with men whatever might come to him
from the will of God was as strong as ever. They ex-

What It Means to be a Christian

pressed this idea by saying that " God raised him from
the dead " and that he was " at the right hand of God
making intercession for us." We should naturally expect
this to be true, for if death is simply an incident in develop-
ing life, the consuming life passion of a great soul cannot
abruptly cease with death. Jesus' intense -passion for
working with the will of God in leading men fonvard into the
creation of an honest and friendly world must have continued
with unabated force after death. The resurrection of Jesus,
then, meant to him the corroboration of the sense of
" Messianic " leadership which had been developed in his
soul, as it had seemed to him by the will of God. This
supreme leadership was continued after death and was to
be further developed in ways that were perhaps yet to be
learned by him in the long succession of human centuries.

What was the resurrection of Jesus ?

Different answers would probably have been given to
this question by different people in the large miscellaneous
company of his disciples that was formed soon after his
death. This company included Jews from many parts of
the world.1 Some Jews from Alexandria would probably
have resented the idea that the dead body of Jesus had
any connection with the experience. At the death of a
good man the spirit was supposed to escape from its prison-
body and to live a free bodiless life. On the other hand
some Palestinian Jews would have considered the resurrec-
tion to have necessarily consisted in the revivifying of the
corpse, or possibly the passage of the soul into another
similar body. Still others would have thought of a resur-
rection as involving the transformation of the corpse into
a superior kind of body, or the assumption of a superior
kind of body without any connection with the corpse.

> Acts 2 : 5.

The Resurrection of Jesus

When these different classes of people heard that Jesus had
experienced a " resurrection " each man assumed it to have
been what he believed a resurrection must be. In this
way a variety of views regarding the resurrection of Jesus
probably at once became current and expressed themselves
devoutly during the next few decades in appropriate
narratives.

The essence of the experience would seem to have been the
actual presence of the personality of Jesus communicating to
the disciples his own victorious sense of appointment by God
to world leadership in the great movement to establish a race
of honest, friendly, powerful men on the earth. Something
happened which convinced the inner circle of disciples
that Jesus was still with them with unabated power and
purpose, and which transformed their doubt and bitter
disappointment into permanent enthusiasm. Whether
or not the appearances of Jesus that accomplished this
result could have been recorded by a camera or dictograph
is a matter of no particular importance. The significant
thing is that the religious experience of Jesus was being
continued within the precincts of his human relationships.
His career on earth was not ended. The life of God was
continuing to pour moral incentive into the life of man
through the personality of Jesus. This was being ac-
complished not simply through the remembrance of his
career in Galilee, a little later perpetuated in historical
Gospel records, but through his continued personal con-
tact with human life.

The relation of the resurrection of Jesus to
Christian experience

The first Christians adopted the ideals of Jesus: they
prayed to God and loved each other generously. They
let their affections follow Jesus out into God's unseen

What It Means to be a Christian

world, which necessarily seemed to them to be a series of
physical heavens above, in the highest of which God's
throne was established and Jesus was located in possession
of supreme power under God. As a result there flowed
into their souls a wealth of moral incentive that trans-
formed their lives. It was accompanied in many in-
stances by an emotional upheaval due to personal tempera-
ment, current fashions of religious experience, and the
peculiar presuppositions of their thought world. Its
deeper and more lasting influence was found in the ex-
perience of a new " love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kind-
ness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control."

This wonderful Christian experience in the course of no
long time penetrated various religious and philosophical
thought worlds of the day. Wherever it went it seized
upon the high titles used in each for deities and claimed
them for Jesus, the source under God of their wonderful
experience. He was proclaimed as " Logos," " Lord,"
" Saviour," in sections of the Greco-Roman world where
these titles were used to denote high deities. Everywhere
men found a new moral redemption as the Christian life
spread and men looked up into the heavens to Jesus as
Lord and Saviour.

Is it necessary to attribute the religious and ethical
success of Christians to the influence of the living person-
ality and teaching of Jesus upon them? May not the
idea of personal contact with the immortal spirit of Jesus,
running through the centuries, be a delusion ? Apparently
not. The persistence of an idea constantly appealing to
experience, in various types of temperaments, and in the
face of a developing scientific scrutiny of all phenomena,
makes the truthfulness of that idea highly probable.
Furthermore, experience shows that men in general need
such help as comes from the personal contact that they

The Resurrection of Jesus

think they have with the personality of Jesus. The
probability, therefore, is that they have what they need
rather than the delusion that they have what they need,
especially when such a personality as they need is seen to
have appeared historically in the race and to have antici-
pated the continuance of his connection with the life of
the world. Otherwise we should have to say that Jesus
Christ is the only person in the history of the race, imagi-
nary connection with whom persistently works moral
redemption. This is less reasonable than to suppose
that the connection is real.

How shall we make modern men and women see how to
avail themselves of the help that comes from God through
Jesus ? Our inherited answer to this question is that we
must urge them to " believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and
be saved."

Chapter VIII

WHAT IS IT FOR A BAD MAN TO BELIEVE ON'
THE LORD JESUS CHRIST AND BE SAVED?

To save a man is to rescue him from an evil career and
its consequences. It means making a bad man perma-
nently good.

What is a bad man ?
God and man are by their very natures meant for each
other. A bad man is a man who works against, instead of
with, a good God. He fails to fall in with God in the
mighty, subtle push of God's will for an honest and
friendly world. Since the point of God's impact is in the
depths of the man's being, in his heart, it is in his heart
that resistance is made and the badness centers. He has
no " faith " in his heart. That is, he does not mean in his
heart to work together with the unseen energy of the will
of God for an honest and friendly world. All badness, or
sin, toward God is necessarily also sin against society, for
God is set on producing a certain social result. The bad
man sets himself against the great upward trend of the
moral evolution of mankind, which the will of God is
vitalizing. In the midst of an evolution in which all men
ought to say, " What the world needs we will all work
together with the will of God to get," he says, " What I
want I take." He is a selfish man, that is, a man who
looks out only for himself without considering the interests
of others. His selfishness may be active or passive, de-
fiant or lazy. " Wicked and slothful " were the adjectives

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

by which Jesus characterized such a man. It may be
openly brutal, or superficially refined, luxurious and
cultured.

There is no form of selfishness so private as not to be a
matter of public social concern. A physician may lock
himself up in a room where apparently he can injure no
one but himself, and get dead drunk. But while he is
drunk there may be an accident in which six men lose
their lives because he was not on hand to give them the
surgical aid that would have saved them. A soldier who
indulges in any private vice which lessens his alertness at
the time of a great drive sins against the members of his
company, his officers, and the great cause for which the
army is fighting. In God's great drive for an unselfish
civilization any private vice which lessens a man's alert-
ness is a sin against God and civilization. A man who
assents to methods of doing business or to political mea-
sures that operate against the trend toward an honest and
friendly world is bad. Certain methods and measures
that are not ideal may be steps toward an ideal, but when
they clearly block the way to something that is high and
better, assent to them constitutes a form of badness.

Who are bad ?

It is not always easy to tell who are really bad. A
man's character is determined by what he is becoming
rather than by his present attainment, by the direction in
which he is moving and not by his absolute position. It
is impossible to determine at once whether a man is be-
coming more or less selfish. Appearances are not a
certain guide. A man robust and florid, standing by an
invalid in a wheel chair, may seem to be the more healthy
of the two, but the robust man may have within him the
beginnings of a fatal disease and the invalid may be on

What It Means to be a Christian

his way to perfect health. The beginnings of unselfish-
ness are sometimes found in very unpromising places.
Jesus found them in many instances outside the synagogue.
Allowance must also be made for the fact that our
standards of goodness and badness are sometimes quite
artificial. A man whose conversation is loaded with oaths
may seem to us worse than the woman who gives him a
contemptuous stare, but the man's heart may be warm
with unselfish purpose and the woman's frigidly indifferent
to human need.

What becomes of a 'persistently bad man ?

What are the natural and necessary consequences of
selfishness in the personality of a selfish man? Is there to
be anything in the future experience of such a man that
he ought to dread and avoid? Can these consequences
be so pointed out to a selfish man as to make him desire
to be a Christian? Or is this an illegitimate appeal to a
low motive? The passing away of the literal interpreta-
tion of certain Biblical statements regarding the bad
man's future, has seemed sometimes to involve the idea
that nothing very serious happens to him. But when a
man actively or passively sets himself against the upward
set of God's will toward universal honesty and friendliness
something must in the nature of the case happen to him.

The natural consequence of setting one's self against
honesty, or sincerity, is not hard to see. The man who
fails to be honest is unready at any cost to see and report
things just as they are rather than as he would like them
to be. The necessary consequence is that he loses the
-power to see things as they are. The man who persistently
misrepresents the value of real estate finally loses his
power to make a true estimate and will be unable to trust
his own judgment at a time when he would like very much

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

to do so. A class of men appear in the Gospels who faced
Jesus with unwillingness to make a true estimate of the
character of his deeds and words. The consequence was
that with perverted moral vision they finally saw in him
a product of hell — to their own terrible peril. These
are the men in modern life to whom truth has ceased to
seem true, the old men who sneer at the abused ideals of
their own earlier years when they see younger men holding
them.

The natural consequence of persistently failing to take
a friendly interest in others is loss of the power to feel a
friendly interest in any one. It is the denial of a deep
wholesome instinct of the soul. It is turning back into
the soul, to stagnate there, a stream of interest meant to
flow healthily out. This results in spiritual disease. It
means dropping out of vital relationship with others and
so being left alone. Being left alone brings pain. A little
child has an instinctive dread of being left alone. The
solitary cell is one of the most painful forms of prison
discipline.

The pain of loneliness is necessarily accompanied by
the pain of idleness, for the person who is having no co-
operation with others can do practically nothing. Jesus
said, " I can do nothing of myself." Such a person is
" lost," lost out of the group and place where he belongs,
without friends and without work, an aimless wanderer.
He is terribly described as one who " walks in the dark-
ness and knows not whither he is going." He has no sense
of direction or destination, no reason for going this way,
rather than that. He gropes in thick darkness all alone.

" Thyself thy own dark jail."

Something like this we occasionally see, when a man in
middle life or old age describes life as " beginning like a

What It Means to be a Christian

dream and ending in a grope." When such a career is
continued after death, it would seem that instead of being
a member of a vast company of honest, friendly men work-
ing with God in the great enterprises of a super-world,
this man would be puttering away sullenly, painfully,
feebly in a little lonely self-made hell.

" 0 doom beyond the saddest guess
As the long years of God unroll
To make thy dreary selfishness
The prison of thy soul."

Is the final result idiocy, or insanity, or the dissolution of
personality, or relapse into animalism, or may there be
slow recovery of normality through painful discipline?

God's way of saving the bad man

What is God's way of making a bad man good and so
keeping him out of the heavy gloom of persistent selfish-
ness ?

The bad man is in God's world and God's world is a
place calculated to develop unselfishness, not selfishness.
A world produced by the long expensive process of evolu-
tion cannot have been intended to be a breeding ground
for selfishness. The world is not a sinking ship to escape
from, but is a great ship being built by God to be ready
for some high enterprise.

God has put the friendly instinct deep down in the soul
of man. The desire to get and give help wells up in every
little child so ready to say, "Let me help!" It is in
every mother's heart, even far back in the animal stages
of man's evolution.

God has made friendship produce satisfaction and sel-
fishness produce pain, as we have just seen.

God has evolved the daily life of man, a situation full of
relationships tempting men into the friendly use of power.

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

The family with its sevenfold appeal made by mother,
father, sister, brother, husband or wife, son and daughter
is a tremendous incentive to unselfish living. Widespread
suffering makes a powerful appeal especially in our day
when multitudes of men and women, each having only a
little to give, can quickly assemble their money and cable
it to distant parts of the world.

The deep social trend compels men either to be friendly
or be ruined. Business cannot go on unless all connected
with it are ready for a square deal. Nations cannot de-
velop unless they learn friendly cooperation. Everywhere
irresistible forces are crowding men together and making
them dependent on each other's honesty and friendliness.

Most important of all, as we have seen in the preceding
chapters, God has introduced into his wonderful world in
the fulness of time a personality who more and more,
century after century, operates as a great Saviour, the Lord
Jesus Christ.

What is it to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ ?

To believe in a person is to accept him as what he sup-
poses himself to be and to treat him accordingly. A
physician supposes himself able to cure a certain serious
disease from which we are suffering. If we believe in him
we accept his estimate of his ability and treat him accord-
ingly, that is, we take his medicine and follow his direc-
tions. We do not believe in him without evidence. We
need to find out what his medical training has been and
what success he has had.

When we believe in a leader we do four things: (1) We
convince ourselves that his ideals are true and practicable;
they are neither erroneous nor doctrinaire. (2) We con-
vince ourselves that he is genuinely devoted to them him-
self; he will make any necessary sacrifice in order to

What It Means to be a Christian

realize them. (3) We adopt these ideals as our own,
prepared to make any personal sacrifice necessary for their
realization; and (4) we try to secure all possible personal
connection with the leader himself. Believing in a leader
in this way means committing ourselves to the movement
of which he is the leader. It means joining him in his
enterprise.

In order to believe in Jesus therefore, it is necessary to
see first of all what his ideals are and how he proposes to
realize them. They stand out in simplicity and clearness
in the Gospels. There are three of them, two of which
we have continually been emphasizing: (1) God is a
powerful heavenly Father near at hand; all men should
pray to him and work with him for an honest and friendly
world. (2) Men must work together with invincible good
will for human brotherhood, for a civilization in which
every man will wish for all other men such a fair chance
at all good things as a man would like his brother to have.
(3) Men should with growing conviction count upon an
opportunity after death to continue working together for
the common good.

It is clear that these ideals are true and practicable. It
is being demonstrated in our day that civilization cannot
persist unless these ideals are given a dominant place in
social, industrial and political life. It is clear that Jesus
gave himself with utter sincerity to their realization, and
that he was convinced that God laid upon him the re-
sponsibility of supreme leadership in a world movement
for their realization. Therefore when we believe in
Jesus we adopt his ideals at any cost and reach out for
whatever connection with his person may prove upon
experiment to be available. We find in him such an ex-
pression of the life of God in terms of human life, death, and
immortal spiritual presence as warrants the glad surrender

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

of our lives to him, a living Lord and Leader in a great world
enterprise.

This following of his leadership is of such a nature as to
develop the initiative essential to character. It does not
subject us at any point to sheer authority. We have to
use judgment and take some wholesome chances in the
effort to discern his form leading the way in the unfolding
will of God. We have wholesome responsibility laid upon
us for discovering how his clearly stated ideals are to find
proper realization in the industrial, social, political life of
our day. Such " believing on the Lord Jesus Christ "
results in " salvation."

What is salvation ?

Salvation means being saved, or rescued, from a daily
life of growing selfishness and its ultimate ruin of person-
ality, to a daily life of growing unselfishness and its in-
evitable enlargement of life. It involves a deepen-
ing acquaintance with God, to know whom is eternal life,
for in following Jesus Christ as leader we are following the
clearest, most concrete expression of the life of God known
to man. We are following him into such doing of the will
of God, such direct working with the will of God as neces-
sarily results in knowing God. Being saved through
" believing on Jesus Christ " involves also the vital right-
ing of all social relationships, because in Jesus Christ is
expressed God's great passion for a truly social life, an
honest and friendly world.

Does this mean that the person who has " believed on
Jesus Christ" will commit no more selfish acts? It
means rather that by connecting himself with Jesus Christ
and his ideals he has met the conditions essential to the
successful growth of the unselfish habit. He has received
into his life a re-enforcement that insures success. He is

What It Means to be a Christian

like an army that has been so re-enforced that the crisis of
the battle is past, and hard fighting through the rest of
the day is certain to bring victory. The moral re-enforce-
ment that comes from the life of God and his Christ in the
unseen world is often called by Christians " the Holy
Spirit," or " the Spirit of God."

What is the Holy Spirit ?

The term Holy Spirit was traditional in Jewish religious
teaching before Jesus' day. Its use seems to have de-
veloped in a time when God was localized in the highest of
a number of stationary heavens, and was thought of as
affecting life on earth by sending spirits, and finally the
Holy Spirit of God. It was naturally expected that the
influence of God on human life would be all pervasive in
the Messianic New Age. The New Age, therefore, would
be the Age of the Spirit of God; God's Spirit would be
" poured out on all flesh." Therefore that mighty moral
kindling in the hearts of believers which followed the
resurrection of Jesus was necessarily thought of as the
might of the Spirit of God in the souls of men beginning
the New Age. It was a subduing and at the same time
an uplifting influence that made men fearless. It took
away the four dark fears that rested with heavy gloom on
life in the first century: fear of poverty, slavery, death,
and demons or fate. Christians did not fear poverty;
they even gave away their property. They did not fear
slavery; Christian slaves were even advised to refuse
emancipation if it should be offered to them. They did
not fear death; it was a going to be with Christ. They
did not fear fate or demons; they looked toward fateful
astral powers in the cold stars above them, and thought of
the dark demons' underworld beneath them, knowing

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

that neither height nor depth could separate them from
the love of Christ.

The essential, permanent feature of this experience in
our day is the sense of the rising of the cleansing life of God
within us, the purifying power of the friendship of the
living Christ. Perhaps we need to guard against impair-
ing the spontaneity and simplicity of this experience by
trying to force it into the fixed traditional mold of a meta-
physical doctrine of the Holy Spirit. However this may
be, the point is that a mighty re-enforcement of moral
purpose comes from the unseen world into the hearts of
those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and that this
produces " salvation " both for the individual and the
social system that is in process of becoming an honest and
friendly world.

What is an honest and friendly world ?

We might logically enough at this point try to picture
in detail the sort of human society that would adequately
represent the ideals of Jesus in the stage of social evolution
that the world has now reached. Is there any place in
it for the competitive principle? For the wage system in
industry? For exclusively communal ownership? What
is the place of nationalism and inter-nationalism? What
about inter-racial and inter-class relationships? These
and many other questions are thrust upon men as items in
the unfolding will of God under the spiritual leadership of
Jesus Christ. But in urging men to begin the Christian
way of living it would seem to be a mistake to identify
the Christian life with any specific answer to these ques-
tions. In beginning the Christian life a man commits
himself to candid inquiry, in a spirit of self-sacrifice and
devotion, regarding the proper expression of the ideals of
Jesus in all phases of modern life. A man may not be

What It Means to be a Christian

relieved from the character-making necessity of answering
these questions for himself. How the church may help
him in this process is a question to be raised in a later
chapter.

A certain phase of traditional Christian thought is being
emphasized just now in a way that tends to paralyze the
sense of responsibility for applying the teaching of Jesus
to all phases of life. It is often represented to be an
essential element in " believing on the Lord Jesus Christ."
It is the conviction that Jesus is to return in visible form
to the earth whenever human society has become suffi-
ciently degenerate to demand such a demonstration. All
effort to stop this degeneration by the application of
Christian principles to social life is thought to be unad-
visable because it delays the return of Jesus on the clouds.

Will Jesus come back to earth on the clouds ?

Probably no one who recognizes the great religious
values of the evolutionary theory feels like dogmatizing
about the future of the human race on this planet. What
cataclysms might possibly take place in a great evolu-
tionary process and what religious values might be in-
volved in such cataclysms no one can foresee. But certain
things seem reasonably clear.

We see that God has arranged a process of world de-
velopment in which men, when they have suffered enough
as a result of any evil, will rise up to work with God in
the discovery and removal of its cause (p. 26). One of
the most interesting stages in the evolution of civilization
ever known in the history of man seems now to have
arrived. It is the point at which man has made a most
interesting beginning in the mastery for the common good
of the resources of the earth, sea, air, and inter-stellar
spaces; in the understanding and creative use of the

Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ

principle of evolution; in grappling with the Christian
problem of world brotherhood in the sphere of industry,
practical politics, and international diplomacy. Why
should God break in at this interesting point with a cata-
clysm and deprive man of the great chance for effort and
glorious achievement that the best men are eager to use
and that all God's past dealing with the race seems to
have been preparing men to use? For centuries God has
been developing human character by laying on men the
responsibility of working with him under the spiritual
leadership of Jesus Christ for the creative evolution of an
honest and friendly world. Why should he now abandon
this policy and snatch this great character-making oppor-
tunity out of their hands? Men are beginning to see
that the spirit of honesty and friendliness must pervade
all phases of human life if civilization is to persist; they
are feeling the spirit of Christ calling them to follow him
in the great Christian enterprise; and a rapidly growing
number of men are ready to follow him at any personal
cost. At such a juncture why revert to a temporary view
of God and the world that naturally enough passed into
primitive Christian thought from its Jewish and pagan
environment?

Chapter IX

LIFE AFTER DEATH

How , if at all, can the prospect of life after death be used as

a motive to induce men to begin the Christian way of

living ?

Evidently only by showing why a future life would be
desirable, and that the chance to live it depends upon
living the Christian life here and now. It might seem
logically necessary to show first of all the reasons for be-
lieving that there will be a future life. But practically
this is not the first thing to do. Men have very little
difficulty in believing in the reality of anything that seems
thoroughly desirable. Most men have a sublimely opti-
mistic belief that nothing is too good for them, that what-
ever seems really desirable will in some way turn out to be
possible. Therefore the first thing is to form a rational
idea of a desirable future life.

The popular idea of the future life is largely determined
by certain statements in the Bible, calculated to appeal to
a sensuous Oriental temperament of the first century, en-
during physical distress inflicted by relentless persecutors.
The filthy clothing of vermin-infested prisoners is to be
replaced by pure white linen; the chained hands are to
be freed to wave palms of victory; the calloused fingers
of slaves who are working in mines or rowing in the galleys
will play soft music on harps; the terrible thirst and heat
of the blazing noonday sun under brutal overseers begat
visions of shady places where " neither shall the sun
strike upon them, nor any heat," and where shepherds

Life After Death

direct them to cool fountains of living waters; frightened
tear-stained faces of women who beg for mercy before
merciless officials are to be wiped dry by the gently omnip-
otent hand of God. The long sad processions of Arme-
nians moving out into the hot desert could appreciate these
words, but the multitude of men, women, and children
with whom we have to do in ordinary times do not feel
their appeal. Such pictures of the future life seem to
them unreal, simply literary productions. Such a future
life does not seem to spring naturally and necessarily out
of real life as we know it now. It lacks the element of
adventure that makes the present life attractive. It is
too tame to be really desired.

What may we suppose the future life to be ?

It seems natural to think of the future life as some
larger development along the line of the highest trends of
the present one. The highest experiences of the present
life have been seen to be interesting work and reliable
friendships, work for the common good in friendly co-
operation with God and men. The future life, therefore,
should be a situation in which men in honesty and friend-
liness will work powerfully together with the will of God
upon the unfinished universe of God. The universe as we
look out upon it from this planet is evidently an unfinished
universe. Everything is in process of becoming. We
think then of life after death as participation in a civiliza-
tion in which life never weakens, work never gives out,
friendships never end. We think of it as a life full of
adventure — challenging difficulties, high successes hardly
won after many failures, great sacrifices, much hearty
human laughter. We think of it as the " future " life
only in its relation to the present of an individual now on
earth. As a matter of fact it must be for millions the

What It Means to be a Christian

" present " life, and the life that they have been living for
ages past. It is the larger life that perhaps environs us
on every side in a " world " which we have no organs
consciously to perceive.

The hope of such a life is free from the reproach with
which those who hold it are often met. It is sometimes
represented to be far nobler to do one's utmost in the
honest and friendly life here without being hired to do so
by the promise of a future reward in heaven. But the
future life as conceived above is not future reward in re-
turn for so much present sacrifice. The hope of it is
simply the desire to keep on working with a multitude of
others for the common good. Anyone who did not resent
the idea that his chance to work for the common good
must end with death would be a moral quitter. He
would show that he did not care enough about the un-
selfish, honest, friendly life to wish to keep on living it.
He would show that he did not care enough about other
men and God to wish to go on working with them forever.
He may feel that there is no good reason for believing in a
continuation of consciousness after death but he will
regret the unwelcome conclusion. Herbert Spencer said
that " it seems a strange and repugnant conclusion that
with the cessation of consciousness at death there should
cease to be any consciousness of having existed." l Pro-
fessor Huxley said: " It flashes across me at times with a
sort of horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more
of what is going on than I did in 1800." 2

Why should we expect a future life ?

It might seem as if the natural thing to do at this point
would be to examine human personality and see whether

1 " Facts «nd Comments," p. 103.
» Life, Volume II, p. 67.

Life After Death

the mind or soul shows some power to survive the dissolu-
tion of the body. The effort to do this has not yielded
any decisive result. There are certain facts which indi-
cate such superiority of mind to body as would lead to
the supposition that the mind could get on without a
body. On the other hand there are phenomena which
indicate that the so-called soul is so dependent upon the
body that it could not exist without a body. Professor
Ladd of Yale in 1915 summed up the evidence from the
psychologists' standpoint in these words: " The results of
more than forty years' study of the subject enables the
author to say that in his judgment the case as it stands at
present is a ' drawn battle,' with the accumulating evi-
dences from the purely scientific points of view turning
against rather than in favor of the objections"; that is,
turning against the objections to immortality. The
connection of the soul with the body " is not absolute and
necessarily final; it may be — and indeed there are certain
good grounds for believing that it is — capable of develop-
ing powers by which it shall outgrow this condition of
dependence." 3 Bergson in 1912 said: " But if, as I have
tried to show, the mental life overflows the cerebral life,
if the brain does but translate into movements a small
part of what takes place in consciousness, then survival
becomes so probable that the onus of proof falls on him
who denies it rather than him who affirms it." 4

It might seem, too, that we should look to communica-
tions from the dead for evidence of the survival of the
soul after the death of the body. While very interesting
data have appeared in the investigation of the Society for
Psychic Research it cannot be said that any very satis-
factory results have been secured.

» Ladd, " What May I Hope," pp. 223f.
4 Bergson, " Mind Energy," p. 73.

What It Means to be a Christian

The field is left clear for the introduction of certain
great general considerations that grow steadily stronger
with the evolution of Christian experience.

(1) It violates our sense of justice to suppose that men
who have made great sacrifice to secure advantage for the
race should have no chance to participate in the advantage
they have sacrificed so much to gain. The injustice
would not seem so flagrant in the case of those who are
fairly well off, possessed of good incomes, interesting work
and friends. But there are multitudes of others who
always live under painfully adverse conditions during their
long period of sacrifice for the common good. It would
seem a flagrant injustice that Jesus whose suffering has
worked out so mightily for the advancement of the race
should have no participation in that which his suffering
gained.

" But were he man,
And death ends all; then was that tortured death
On Calvary a thing to make the pulse
Of memory quail and stop."

(2) If there is no life after death there would seem to
be a shameful waste of supreme values. This is not a
wasteful universe. It is one in which there is a conserva-
tion of energy. It would seem as if the supreme form of
energy found in personal character must be expected to
survive. Especially if a man is the product of a long
expensive evolutionary process would it seem intellectually
confusing to find his existence snuffed out when he reaches
the climax of desire for immortal occupation. " Now the
more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution
by which things have come to be what they are, the more
we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence
of the spiritual element in Man is to rob the whole process
of its meaning. It goes far toward putting us to perma-

Life After Death

nent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that any one
has yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason
for our accepting so dire an alternative." 5

(3) If there is no personal immortality then ultimately
the whole human race, it would seem, goes to waste, for
there seems reason to suppose that the earth will finally
become uninhabitable. When that time has come the
long career of humanity will have produced nothing that
survives. This consideration weighed heavily with Dar-
win. " With respect to immortality nothing shows me
(so clearly) how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is,
as the consideration of the view now held by most physi-
cists, namely, that the sun with all the planets will in
time grow too cold for life, unless indeed some great body
dashes into the sun and thus gives it fresh life. Believing
as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more
perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought
that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to com-
plete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.
To those who freely admit the immortality of the human
soul, the destruction of our world will not seem so dread-
ful." 6

(4) If in some way the planet should be preserved and
the race continued, there could be no perfect civilization
possible on earth without personal immortality. A per-
fect civilization is one in which personal relations are per-
fect, that is, one in which men love each other in true
friendship. But when men fully recognize the fact that
friendship cannot last, then they will so suffer over friend-
ship hopelessly broken by death that there can be no
perfect civilization. Probably in such a situation men
would refuse to let friendships grow. But that would

6 John Fiske. " The Destiny of Man," p. 1 1 cf.
• Darwin, " Life and Letters," Volume I, p. 2&2.

What It Means to be a Christian

mean no perfect civilization. When men become con-
vinced that there is no personal immortality civilization
is doomed to remain on a low level.

(5) Personal immortality is necessarily involved in the
Christian idea of God. The Christian God is a Christlike
heavenly Father. Such a being loves his children. If
they were to go out forever one by one in death, he would
be hopelessly sorrowing.

The Christian God is a powerful Father. It would be
a cheap, weak, unchristian God who could not keep his
child in existence. It is inconceivable from the Christian
standpoint that a friendship with the mighty God which
has been developing through a lifetime should be utterly
extinguished by a bullet crashing through the brain! A
necessary corollary to the proposition that there is a
heavenly Father is the immortality of the heavenly
Father's child.

What is the -practical advantage of a belief in immortality ?

We have considered a working theory regarding the
character of the future life and reasons for believing that
there will be such a life. What good does it do to count
on it? How does such a counting on it help a person
here and now to begin, and keep on in, the Christian way
of living? What effect has a belief in the future life on
present character?

Good character may be defined as the state of person-
ality in which a growing good will is expressing itself in
increasingly efficient action. When a man is becoming a
truer friend and is getting power to express his friendliness
in some useful form of work, his whole personality is in a
certain state or condition which may be comprehensively
described by the phrase " good character." Starting
with this definition it is clear that a belief in personal

Life After Death

immortality has a clear and direct influence upon char-
acter.

Belief in immortality makes a man more painstaking in the
development of his friendships, because it makes them seem
more valuable

One element in value is durability. A soap bubble
may for a moment be as beautiful as a diamond, but it is
not as valuable, because, among other reasons, it is not
as durable. When men are recognized as immortal,
friendship becomes a lasting phenomenon which it is worth
while to cultivate. No one takes pains to develop ac-
quaintance with his fellow passengers on a street-car
because he and they are not long to be together. If,
however, he is traveling across a continent, or making a
long ocean voyage, he at once endeavors to establish
friendly relations with his fellow travelers because he and
they have a long journey to make together. If he sees
among his fellow passengers some one with whom he has
had trouble, he seeks an early opportunity to come to a
friendly understanding with him because they have a
long journey to make together.

Furthermore these immortal personalities are doing a
bigger thing than they could possibly be doing if their
activity were confined to a brief lifetime, and so the
friendly relationship with them has more significance
than it could otherwise have. When people a few years
ago recognized the fact that a certain man walking along
the street was not the ordinary pedestrian he seemed to
be, but, instead, was Mr. Weston making his long walk
from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, they all applauded
him. He was making a longer journey, doing a bigger
thing, than was at first evident. So when a man realizes
that his friend has begun an immortal career the possible

What It Means to be a Christian

achievements of which no man can measure, friendship
with him assumes a new significance.

Belief in a future life contributes to the development of good

character by making a man take more pains with his

work

Belief in a future life leads a man to do more honest
work, for, as has been said above, those who would be
affected by dishonest work are recognized by him as more
valuable beings since they are immortal. Anyone feels
more obligation to be honest with a man than with a dog,
because men are more valuable than dogs. Immortal
men are more valuable than merely mortal men would be,
and so dishonest work done for them is a more serious
matter than it would otherwise be. It was probably for
this reason that the Wall Street Journal a few years ago
in an editorial said that anyone would rather do business
with a man who believes in immortality than with one who
does not.

The man who believes in immortality will take more
pains with his work because he believes that in this way
he proves his right to have work of a high order assigned
to him in the future life. The best thing about a piece of
work well done is that it registers itself in the personality
of the man who does it, and he goes forward fit for a more
important task than he would be fit for if he had left a
slovenly piece of work behind him. The way in which a
man does the job he has in this life determines the kind
of job it will be safe to give him in the next life. If he
does his work well he lives under the great law of enlarging
opportunity: " Thou hast been faithful over a few things,
I will set thee over many things."

Life After Death

Belief in immortality contributes to good character by giving

a man the poise and self-control essential to the finest

work and the best friendship

It is the small frictions of life, producing nervous irri-
tation, that destroy the fineness of friendship and prevent
putting fine finish on work. What is needed is some big
inspiration constantly operating in life, something big
enough to make all small things seem small. A man may
be making an ocean journey in an uncomfortable ship
with very inadequate and irritating service, but if he
knows that every throb of the machinery drives him
nearer friends and home, the irritating circumstances
seem small and lose their power to annoy. A pedestrian
who finally stands in the presence of the Matterhorn
forgets the blisters on his feet. So the man who has
formed the daily practice of immortality has that within
his life which makes small annoyances seem to be the petty
things they really are. He has taken the long look
toward that far horizon against which no trifle can loom
up large. He has put himself under the steadying spell
of eternity.

Belief in immortality gives the steadiness and poise
essential to fine work and friendship because it relieves
from the nervous strain of envy. Much of the irritation
incident to living comes from the sullen discomfort we
feel at seeing others have possessions or opportunities
superior to our own. This tends to disappear when a
man feels certain that there is a long time ahead, and
that, if he does to the utmost of his ability every piece of
work that comes his way, he is absolutely certain sometime
and somewhere to have the largest opportunity he can
possibly fit himself to use. He may see others go before
him into positions that he would like to occupy himself,

What It Means to be a Christian

and not be disturbed by it, because he is sure that if he
does his utmost in his present position the long future will
surely bring him his chance.

Life can go on successfully now, only on the condition
that many first-class men hold second-class places. In
any great business enterprise there must always be men
in reserve to step forward at a moment's notice and fill a
sudden vacancy in the front line of the administration.
If this is not the case a great business may be wrecked.
If men of first-rate ability are to be held in second-rate
places they must feel some assurance that they will some-
time and somewhere get their chance to make the largest
contribution which they are capable of making to the
common good.

Chapter X

SOME OBJECTIONS TO BEGINNING THE
CHRISTIAN LIFE

Many objections are raised by men who begin to feel
the obligation to join the Christian Enterprise pressing in
upon them. The following are some of them:

(1) " Cannot succeed in business and be a Christian " :
The first inquiry here is what is meant by " succeeding in
business." Does it mean laying up a sizable fortune, or
does it mean making a living? If it means accumulating
" a fortune," why should a man prefer accumulating a
fortune to doing the thing he knows to be right? When
the alternative is put to men in this definite form they
feel the force of the obligation and many of them respond
to it.

But only a comparatively small fraction of the entire
population are moved at all by the expectation of becom-
ing " rich." The rest look forward simply to having
enough to carry them through life with a degree of com-
fort. In very few cases does being a Christian interfere
with this prospect. Indeed as a matter of fact it gener-
ally increases the prospect of success so defined. In rare
instances it may mean failure even to make a living.
Hardly any one dies a martyr's death as a result of being
a Christian, but occasionally some one must and does.
Definitely facing this possibility does not make the
Christian life unattractive.

Furthermore in meeting this objection it is helpful to
inquire just what is the particular feature of business life

What It Means to be a Christian

that must be given up in order to be a Christian. What
would be a concrete case of it? It is generally seen to be
something that the common conscience of men, Christian
or non-Christian, resents, something so inherently mean
that no one will openly defend it. " Business " is in the
main honest and honorable. It is the world's work. It
is a very large part of life. It has to proceed on lines that
in the main lead upward and onward, on lines that are in
accordance with the upward trend of the moral evolution
of man. When Christian men, ready to apply the funda-
mental teachings of Jesus to all sides of life, go into
business they find that the main lines of business are
meant to proceed on Christian principles. The flagrantly
un-Christian phases of business life appear almost entirely
in connection with the desire to become " rich." The
inherently Christian character of all " business," using
" business " in the broad sense, is at once apparent, when
we try to imagine what would happen if all the millions of
honest and friendly business men in stores and banks, in
factories and on farms should be replaced by dishonest
and unfriendly men and women.

(2) " I shall be all right if I do the best I can " : Here
again, the issue is made clear by an understanding of what
is meant by the words used. What is it to do the best
one can? Is a person doing the " best he can " if he does
not try to find out by experiment and experience whether
or not there is a God all about him? Is he doing the
" best he can " if he never prays; if he never takes pains
to find out what the teaching of Jesus is, and what help
in living an honest and friendly life men have received
from God through him? When an apprentice goes into
a shop to learn a trade he is not doing the " best he can "
if he ignores the foreman. When a man is climbing the
Swiss mountains he is not doing the " best he can " if he

Objections to the Christian Life

ignores the guide-posts and fails to consult the guides
whom he meets from time to time.

(3) " No interest in the subject " : Here again an in-
quiry regarding the exact facts is in place. What is it he
feels no interest in? Perhaps he has an utterly wrong
idea of what the Christian life is. It has long been identified
in his mind with some theory of the atonement or some
doctrine of the trinity or the inerrancy of the Scriptures.
When he finds out that being a Christian is a certain
wonderful way of living and what that way of living is,
he may realize that he is very much interested in it or,
anyway, that he ought to be.

As has been said before, it may be possible to kindle his
interest by beginning with the interest that he already
has. Did he ever in any emergency, or in childhood,
pray to God? Did any friend of his ever pray? Is he
interested in any enterprise that is being carried on for
the common good of the community and that returns
nothing that is exclusively his own? What does he mean
to accomplish in life? What is the thing that he thinks
it would be most satisfactory to look back upon in old age
as having been accomplished by him? Has he any inter-
est in life after death? Has any friend ever died whom he
would be glad to see again? Does it seem to him at all
possible that his friend is still in existence? Does he
believe that Jesus Christ ever lived? What does he
think Jesus Christ stood for? Has he among his friends
anyone who believes in Jesus Christ? Very many persons
who on the surface seem even to themselves to have no
interest in religion and who never go to church are never-
theless very much interested in certain essential features
of the Christian way of living.

(4) " The inconsistencies of Christians " : But does he
not know some Christian who is consistent? Anyway the

What It Means to be a Christian

definite thing wanted of him is that he shall adopt Jesus
Christ's wonderful way of living and reach out to the im-
mortal spirit of Jesus for whatever help may be had. The
fact that some others pretend to have done this but have
not is no reason why he should not. The fact that Bene-
dict Arnold pretended to be a loyal citizen and was not,
would not have excused George Washington for refusing
to be loyal to the Colonial cause. The fact that Judas
Iscariot pretended to be a disciple and was not, would not
have justified Peter for refusing discipleship.

Furthermore some who seem inconsistent may turn out
to be persons who are contending against great odds and
are really winning out.

(5) " Have tried it and failed " : What were the facts
in the case? What considerations induced him to try it?
Perhaps he never made his trial of the Christian life in
view of any considerations, but simply under stress of
some merely emotional appeal. If certain reasonable
considerations influenced him at that time are they not
still valid?

How did he come to give up the attempt to live the
Christian life? Perhaps some temptation got the better
of him and a reawakened conscience may do its work
again. Has he got on better since he gave up the Christian
life than he did while he was living it?

(6) " Some things in the Bible I do not believe " : But
are there not some things in the Bible that he does be-
lieve? If so, what are they? And will he commit him-
self with all his heart to living in accord with what he does
believe?

The Bible reports the high spots in the growing ac-
quaintance with God experienced by one section of the
human race. Its outstanding feature is its report of the
religious experience of Jesus Christ and of men who fol-

Objections to the Christian Life

lowed his lead. The comparative value of its very differ-
ent parts, produced in widely separated periods of time,
and the extent to which it may incorporate erroneous and
transient ideas are matters which can be settled by critical
study. Its challenging feature is Jesus Christ and his
wonderful way of living. This challenge is insistent and
unavoidable, a challenge that is involved in the very nature
of life. It stands out to be met in some way by every
man, no matter what he may think about the credibility
or incredibility of some parts of the Bible.

(7) " Christianity may not be the ultimate religion " :
We need not be immediately concerned to know whether
it is or not. The main question is, Does it meet the im-
mediate need of men? If it does, we should make use of
it. The steam and trolley cars may not be the ultimate
modes of transportation, but if they best meet present
need we ought to use them. If there is an evolution in
religion we shall be sure of the best ultimate results if we
yield ourselves to what is best now. One is true to an
evolution when he accepts it in the highest stage that it
has yet reached. It is perfectly clear that Jesus wanted
men to have the best there is, and if there is ever to be
anything better than Christian faith in the heavenly
Father he will surely want men to have it and will do
what he can to guide them into it.

So far as we can now see there can never be anything
better for any personal being than to love God and all
other beings. So the objective held up in the teachings
of Jesus, it would seem, cannot be outgrown. There may
be great advances made in strengthening the heart of love,
extending its scope and increasing the efficiency of its
expression, but there is nothing better conceivable than
love. Love in this connection means the warm, active
desire to see a person become all his nature indicates that

What It Means to be a Christian

he ought to be, and so necessarily to see a society of indi-
viduals realize all its latent possibilities of healthful
growth.

(8) " Anyway it is not necessary to join the church " :
Suppose that a man has begun the wonderful Christian
way of living. He is reaching out with the energy of
faith to work together with the will of God under the
leadership of Jesus Christ for an honest and friendly world ;
he is winning one of the great prizes of life, the growing
conviction of immortality. Why should he not join
some Christian church?

The reason for doing so is found in the function of the
Christian church. The church is the only organization in
the zvorld whose Junction it is to recruit, train, and continu-
ally inspire men, women, and children to work with the will
of God under the leadership of Jesus Christ for an honest
and friendly world.

It recruits men, women, and children for this great
enterprise. Its members go everywhere laying friendly
tactful hands on people, speaking to them about the mean-
ing of life, speaking to them about the vision of life that
shaped itself in the mind of Jesus Christ. On the Lord's
Day the minister of the church speaks in public service
about some of the many phases of his Lord's Great Enter-
prise. He creates an atmosphere in which it is not diffi-
cult for men and women to express the beginnings of
interest in the Great Enterprise in which the scores, or
hundreds, of Christians about them in the public service
are supremely interested.

The church trains its members to take part in the Great
Enterprise. The church building in a community is the
headquarters of the friendly people. All the changing
phases of the friendly Enterprise are brought up for study.
The life of the community is faithfully surveyed. The

Objections to the Christian Life

changes demanded by the application of the ideas of Jesus
to community life are studied, and practical measures
devised for making these changes. The successes of the
Enterprise in other lands are studied, and under the influ-
ence of such study one and another go out from the church
to spend their lives in distant parts of the world. People
are trained to see the difference between a Christian
lawyer, doctor, teacher, farmer, business man, and the
non-Christian man in any of these occupations.

The church continually inspires its members to keep on
in the Christian way of living. It is a band of people who
help each other live up to the high purpose that is to carry
them out into the everlasting life. Men and women out
of the thick of life come to the church on the Lord's Day
tired and discouraged and get something that sends them
back to their work with new courage and resolution.
Here is generated and sustained .the spirit that founds
hospitals and colleges, humanizes prisons, operates social
settlements and directs the development of society. It is
the power house of the civilization of friendly workmen.
A large proportion of the best brains and heart of the
community are in the church. When men in public wor-
ship sing the great hymns of the church together, unite
with an earnest, broad-minded, large-hearted leader in
common prayer, listen together to the reading of the
Bible and to preaching about the great truths of life,
their highest purposes are strengthened. Something is
gained by doing these things together that cannot be
gained when each man does them by himself. A college
or high-school student does well to think alone sometimes
about the meaning of his school life in all its phases. But
such individual meditation does not take the place of the
experience that is gained by being one of a great crowd
at the convocation, at the football game, the rally before

783459A'

What It Means to be a Christian

the game and the celebration afterward. There is need
of uniting with other men in a democratic lifting up of
hearts together before God in public worship.

In the church's Bible school the long history of God's
will unfolding in human experience is studied, and life
grows stronger and deeper. The book born out of life
touched by the Spirit of God pours its message into the
lives of those who study it. It is the Book of Life. The
Bible school is rapidly broadening its scope so as to in-
clude a variety of courses in a system of religious education.

How can a person who has committed his whole life to
the Great Enterprise which the church is organized to
carry on keep out of the church? There is no other
organization devoted to this great purpose. Where else
should he go than to those like-minded with himself?
There may be so-called " churches " that have not
caught the spirit of the Great Enterprise. But there are
very few in which are not to be found some persons who
have. Certainly one would not stay out of the church
except as a result of the conviction that the church had
become hostile or indifferent to the Great Enterprise it had
been organized to promote. It is conceivable that a par-
ticular church might miss Christ's central objective and
make requirements for admission which a conscientious
man could not meet. In that case he could not join this
church and could only comfort himself by recognizing
that the life of God is not confined to the church.

Chapter XI

CHOOSING THE GREAT ADVENTURE

We live our lives in the midst of certain mysterious facts
from which we cannot escape, and which challenge all men
to a great adventure.

The mysterious facts of life

The first of the mysterious facts of life is a man himself.
He is a form of energy strangely capable of making
certain great assertions: "I am"; "I was"; "I
know"; "lean"; "I ought"; "I will"; " I feel pain
and cry"; " I feel happy and laugh "; "I want food";
" I want to do something " ; "I want not to be alone, —
I want a sex mate, and others with whom to laugh, and
cry, and work." This mysterious being also feels a
wonderful capacity for becoming.

This wanting, working, crying, laughing being finds
himself in the midst of the mystery of time, of which he can
conceive neither beginning nor ending. He finds himself
in the midst of the mystery of space, limitless in every
direction. There is the mystery of ceaseless motion all
about him. The blood races through his veins, the stars
fly through space, and the electrons never cease their
orderly movement in the atom. The mysterious stream
of human life flows on. Hour after hour, age after age,
beings like himself appear in birth and disappear in death.
There is the mystery of universal becoming. Everything
that man sees about him is becoming more or less. He has
discovered the evolutionary process and now feels himself

What It Means to be a Christian

to be living in a vast universe which in all its parts is in
process of becoming.

Finally there is the growing sense of the mysterious one
energy in all things. In all the evolution of the earth and
its life there has been a unifying upward trend that has
issued in man and mankind's prospective unity and control
of the earth.

All these mysterious facts make a man feel sure that
some big thing is going on and that the big thing concerns
him. It involves him and all men in a relation from which
he cannot break away and in which he must act.

Life a great adventure

Life, therefore, in all of its aspects is a great adventure.
For this reason men love to live. So soon as all element
of adventure disappears from an enterprise men lose inter-
est in it. A business enterprise the profits of which are a
dead certainty regardless of the skill of its managers ceases
to be interesting. A friendship which is certain to persist
and which has revealed to the full all of its possibilities
becomes monotonous. The fact that it is certain never
to be any more than it is at present deprives it of its
attractiveness. A science which has no more problems to
present, in which everything possible has been discovered,
no longer draws students.

This which is true in business, in love, and in science is
also true in religion. The unabating power of religion
over the souls of men lies in the challenging adventure
that it presents. The Christian religion appeals to men's
desire to run a risk, to take a chance, to join in a great
adventure. Donald Hankey has told us that becoming a
Christian is betting your life there is a God. Jesus Christ
is an unseen leader. His great vision of an honest and
friendly world must be worked out in ways that no man

Choosing the Great Adventure

has yet been able fully to foresee. It unfolds step by step
through experiment and experience. We do not present
to men a final set of dogmas, expecting to be satisfied if
they give a more or less intelligent intellectual assent to
them. We present a way of living in which one looks out
to God the heavenly Father in frequent prayer, in which
one wishes to join all other men in using all resources for
the common good, in which one looks out for spiritual
leadership to Him who saw the vision of the life of man as
it ought to be, and in which every new experience strength-
ens the conviction that the life is too good and strong ever
to give out. The Christian is a great adventurer, follow-
ing an adventuring Christ leading on in the forward move-
ment of the vast adventuring will of God.

Choosing the great adventure

A man must show himself a true man by choosing to
enter the great adventure. The drifter, the morally lax,
the man in whom spirit sinks down into flesh, does not get
on well in the midst of the mysterious facts of life. A man
must gird himself tightly and move out boldly after Christ.
He must take up his life resolutely and put it decisively
into Christ's enterprise, to be and to do all that an unfold-
ing sense of duty may reveal. Then all the mysterious
facts with which he is linked contribute to the strength-
ening of his life. He takes his place with God and good
men in carrying life forward and begins to experience those
profound satisfactions that can come only when life is
being carried forward decisively.

The great adventure with the will of God never seemed
more inviting than it does today. Upheaving forces are
felt underneath all the life of the world. Great loves and
hates are kindling, whole layers of society that have seemed
stolid are beginning to stir with the consciousness of

What It Means to be a -Christian

wanting more life. It is the time to preach the Gospel
of God in terms that people on the street can understand.
It is time to infuse into the lay membership of the church
an enthusiasm for communicating the wonderful way of
living. If the Christian way of living is to spread widely
and rapidly the minister must take his lay members into
close partnership with himself in this most vital part of
his work. Christian men and women everywhere in
business and social life must find out how to make those
whom they meet every day feel the power of the life that
beats within them. They must know how to share it
with others and so be true to its inmost spirit.

" Needs must there be one way, our chief
Best way of worship; let me strive
To find it, and when found, contrive
My fellows also take their share;
This constitutes my earthly care.
God's is above it and distinct,
For I a man with men am linked
And not a brute with brutes; no gain
That I experience must remain
Unshared."

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Full text of "What it means to be a Christian. The evangelistic message in outline"

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