Chapter 2

There is also much loose talk about the subnormal brutes in our penitentiaries. Thomas Mott Osborne, believing in the possibilities even in such men, proceeded to call forth those possibilities by trusting the men and making an appeal to their manhood. Dangerous, foolish, immoral were the comments which were made upon the enterprise; but it worked, and he has in the process fitted those men to return to a decent common life with their fellows.

Herbert Gray has said: "I remember the time when I supposed that Jesus loved all men simply because He believed it to be His duty, and whether or no He found in them anything to be loved. The idea was, of course, grotesquely foolish. God himself could not love what is essentially unlovable. No! Jesus loved men and women because He could always find in them something worthy to be loved--some possibility, at the worst, which was a fit object even for divine love. He could detect in each instance that which justified the declaration that man was made in the image of God."

There is very little use in arguing questions of the elimination of war, the reorganization of industrial relations, new methods of dealing with criminals, school technique, or the foundations of political government with those who are unable to detect in men elements of worth which can be counted upon. The basis on which such people take their stand is so far removed from that of those who see this world of human relationships as a field for the operation of the creative spirit that only misunderstanding is apt to result from such discussions.

When one has not that understanding of human relationships, then domination, coercion, suppression, restraint are the logical methods which must be employed in all those fields when men and women do not evince a desire to co-operate in the common life. The protection of the interests of the right-minded must take precedence over the indulgence in sentimentality. When we are strong enough we'll talk disarmament. Knock the brute down first and argue with him afterward. Without discipline you can't have education. No government can allow its citizens to talk against it. These are sentiments which we hear again and again. They proceed quite reasonably from a different but false conception of human nature.

It is useless to try to meet such reasoning and prove it false, as long as we leave unchallenged the basis from which it proceeds. There is where the work has to be done. There is where there is a call for a new evangel today, to reveal to men that same simple message that Jesus proclaimed so long ago, that this is God's world and that we can bring to development the good that lies everywhere about us in men. When we have done that we can discuss these problems in terms of understanding. Until we have done it, we are merely beating the air.

We in the modern world need, above many things, a new understanding of forgiveness. In spite of much that has been written by our really great Christian thinkers who have been blessed with the child-like heart, and in spite of the experience of the many who have tried it out, forgiveness is still regarded by the great multitude as a somewhat difficult Christian duty. It is the response which we have to make when one who has wronged us comes repentant. Instead of exacting our rights, we must generously call the debt off, although as we have heard lately, these are some things which it would really be un-Christian to forgive.

But as Dr. Nash reminds us: "If man sinned against, draws back into his innocence and waits until the offender comes to himself, he abandons his little world to the devil. * * * Forgiveness alone makes a full repentance possible." And Herbert Gray carries the thought still farther when he says: "The secret of Christ's demand is in the fact that forgiveness is the only ultimately successful way of overcoming evil. * * * It ends evil because it wins the evildoer. It gets at the root of evil and undermines the spirit which produces strife. It saves the sinner because it makes its appeal to the good that is in him and calls it into life."

Those who say that we must forgive our enemies, but that of course it would be immoral to do so while they are still unrepentant, are as far from understanding Christ's principle as a certain churchman, whom I once heard say that he had no hope of our ever achieving Christian unity, but that he was still praying for it. So far from being the dutiful response to an attitude of repentance, it is rather the creative power which brings out the latent possibilities which have been obscured by sin and evil.

It is the basis of what might be called the divine process of getting even. A group of boys were playing ball one time, and one of the number in a spirit of exasperation threw the ball into a swamp, where it was lost. The owner of the ball came in to his uncle fuming and declaring that he was going to get even. "What are you going to do about it?" asked his uncle. "How are you going to get even?"

"Oh, I'll fix him. We won't let him play on the team," said the boy.

"It was a rather dirty trick, wasn't it? Sort of a low-down thing to do?" continued the uncle.

"It certainly was, but I'll get even."

"You might say, then," said the uncle, "that he was like the swampy mire that he threw the ball into, compared with the firm, high ground where you were playing?"

"Yes."

"Well, if you are going to get even," concluded the uncle, "you'll either have to go down into the mire with him or get him up on to the clean, hard ground with you. Think it over."

The next day, when his uncle asked him how he had made out, the boy replied: "You know I thought about what you said, about getting even, so I told him we wanted him to pitch for us; and he not only played a dandy game, but he said he would get me a new ball." The boy had found the divine way of getting even.

I am not concerned to apply this principle to the many corporate and social evils of our time; for if only I can succeed in making clear how true and how vital it is as a key to human relationships, and how central it was in Jesus' teaching, its wider application can safely be left to you. Creative love is the healing spirit most needed in the world today.

If, in presenting those aspects of Jesus' message which reached the hearts of the simple with a vitalizing power, giving them a new grip on life and a sense of at-homeness in God's world, I have conveyed the impression that here is a safe and easy way out of life's difficulties, I have failed in my task. Because a view of the world is true and because a method of approach is the only ultimately successful one, it by no means follows that it is always a safe method for the individual. Indeed Jesus abundantly reminded His followers that they need not expect less of opposition, antagonism and persecution than He Himself had received. The following of the way of love would make for division and strife even in that place where it would be hardest to see it arise--in one's own home. It could not be expected that evil corporately and socially entrenched would always give way before the power of redemptive love glowing in the life of one individual. It might mean that the lives and labors of many would have to be spent to the utmost before love would achieve its victory.

It is indeed in the light of such a possibility that the social character of the gospel is doubly emphasized. The kingdom has a meaning only when we realize that far beyond the individual triumphs for love that may be achieved, there is a field that can be won only by the corporate faithfulness to the ideal of the group. The individual may lose by all the worldly standards, and his life may seem an ineffectual protest or gesture, but it is the type of losing in which the soul is found and which sooner or later wins out for the group over the entrenched evil of ages.

In a decade in which, following a more imperfect, yes, even a sadly futile ideal, millions of men have been content to give their lives, we have no cause to feel that men will not be ready to pay the price. They are even too ready to sell themselves for that which is worthless. If they but knew, to adapt our Lord's words, if they but knew the things that belong unto their peace, but now they are hid from their eyes!

But why is it, we are sometimes tempted to ask, that the way of love stirs up strife and bitterness? Does not that outcome of some of our endeavors argue a failure on our part to express the healing spirit? It may be that, of course; but is it not generally because that method is essentially an appeal to conscience, and a conscience stirred, but not completely won, drives its possessor to an extreme of reaction? It was no accident that some of our leading Christian ministers were the most bitter detractors of conscientious objectors during the war. The very existence of the latter was a continual challenge to the consciences of those ministers. They had to maintain their different attitude the more vehemently. As some of our friends remind us, love is not a mushy thing, and it sometimes has to inflict pain.

The world is growing old in its sophistication. The developments in scientific research, during the last century especially, have led many to feel that in the ever-growing complexity of the life of the universe and in the ever-widening reaches of our knowledge there is, each decade, less and less place for God in the world and less and less occasion to pay attention to the words of a half-mythical Syrian teacher. But out of that very sophistication has come the reaction that is leading many to question the whole interlocking system of philosophy, science, industry and politics that sums up the universe in terms of material things. It is time, they say, that we began to cut loose from the machine and get down to the human heart that is the one vital thing in the world:

"Not kings and lords, but nations! Not crowns and thrones, but men!"

To such comes with new and convincing power that which has been hidden from the wise and prudent, the vision that this is still God's world, in which, for all the learned data we have collected, there are still the almost untapped reservoirs of human possibilities awaiting not the test tubes of the scientist or formulas of the mathematician to bring them out, but merely the spirit of redemptive love as we have learned it in Jesus.

Richard Roberts has said it rather finely:

"The story of Jesus is 'the instance of love without a limit,' the love that will not let me go or give me up, that flings down party-walls and overleaps frontiers, flings wide the gate of friendship to the enemy, the impulse and the energy that creates the sovereign loveliness, the loveliness of a living society of men, purged of enmities and discords and hatreds, living out its manifold and abundant life in the unbroken harmony of unreserving fellowship."

If we can have the humility to see that there lies the heart and glory of the world, we can be content to let the wise ones erect their houses of cards as they may, while within the tottering structure we build the eternal Kingdom of God. We can then greet the new day with Alfred Noyes:

"It is the Dawn! The Dawn! The nations From East to West now hear a cry,-- Though all earth's blood-red generations By hate and slaughter climbed thus high, Here--on this height--still to aspire, One only path remains untrod, One path of love and peace climbs higher. Make straight that highway for our God."

* * * * *

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE by Elbert Russell

THE QUAKER OF THE FUTURE TIME by George A. Walton

THE CHRISTIAN PATRIOT by Norman H. Thomas

THE CHRISTIAN DEMAND FOR SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION by Harry F. Ward

RELIGION AS REALITY, LIFE AND POWER by Rufus M. Jones

HEROES IN PEACE by John Haynes Holmes

HIDDEN FROM THE PRUDENT by Paul Jones

* * * * *

William Penn Lectures are published by the Young Friends' Movement. Copies may be obtained from the Headquarters, 154 N. 15th Street, or from Walter H. Jenkins, 140 N. 15th Street, Philadelphia, Pa. Paper-bound copies at -- cents; in cloth, -- cents.