Part 10

Education in a democracy must be education for democracy; and education for democracy must itself be democratic in content and method. Such education practices and aims at intelligence rather than habit of mind. It trains its pupils to think and choose for themselves. It prizes initiative above conformity, responsibility above mere efficiency, social good will above unthinking obedience.

Such education is more difficult, of course, than education of the undemocratic type. We shall at times be tempted to fall back into the ways of the German schools in some respect or other, because they represent the line of least resistance in education. Specious arguments will be presented in favor of these ways by shortsighted "practical" men. Education of the German type is more efficient, they will say; it is more direct and practical; it brings more immediate results. It is more patriotic, moreover, they will insist; it better serves the ends of authority; it makes people more prosperous and contented, each in his appointed niche. But such arguments, we may well hope, will no longer win the uncritical assent that they have sometimes found. German education may be more efficient in the fulfilment of its end than American education--but what an end it has sought and reached! In the moment of our temptation to undemocratic short cuts in education, we shall henceforth look to the Germany of yesterday and today, and shall be strengthened to resist. Her ways are not our ways. Her schools cannot be ours. Education must mean to America something quite different from what it has meant to Germany.

The contrast between democratic and undemocratic types of education is as great with respect to religion as with respect to the rest of life. Germany has been most careful to maintain religion as a subject of instruction in her schools. But the content of this instruction in religion has been intellectualistic and formal. It has pressed upon German children a body of historical facts, moral precepts and theological dogmas; but it has not begotten the freedom of inward spiritual initiative. State-controlled, it has bent religion to state uses, and has in time begotten a generation who can believe in the "good old German God."

Religious education in America has been and will be more democratic. Horace Bushnell used to say that the aim of all education is the emancipation of the child. We teach and train our children in order that they may in due time be set free from paternal discipline. We fail in the religious education of our children if our teaching does not result in their final emancipation from a religion of mere authority and convention and their growth into a religion of the spirit. We aim, not simply to win their assent to a given body of beliefs or to attach them to the church as a saving institution, but to help them to become men and women who can think and choose for themselves. The Protestant principle of the universal priesthood of believers involves democracy in religion. And just as democracy can look forward only to failure unless it can educate its citizens, Protestantism will fail unless it can educate men and women fit to stand on their own feet before God, able to understand his will and ready to enter intelligently and effectively into the common human enterprises of Christian living.

_A second effect of the war, closely related to this, is that religious education will concern itself more directly with life, and will put less emphasis upon dogma, especially upon those refinements of creed which have operated divisively in the life of the Christian Church._ Its method will be more vital, and less intellectualistic. Instead of proceeding upon the assumption that true belief comes first and that right life is the expression of prior belief, it will recognize that adequate insight and true belief are more often the result of right life and action. "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching." If this be true of adults, it is even more true of children. Our plans of religious education will first seek to influence the life, and will deal with beliefs as an explanation of life's purposes and motives and an interpretation of its realities and values.

If they will realize this primacy of life, the Christian churches stand in the presence of a great opportunity. The experiences of these years have shown us how much more of Christian living there is in the world than bears the label. Religion is being tested, stripped of sham and embroidery, and reduced to reality. And there are being revealed breadths and depths of real religion that we had not understood. There is a vast amount of inarticulate religion actually moving the lives of men which the churches may lift to the level of intelligent and articulate belief if they will but approach it with understanding and a willingness to be taught as well as to teach.

In Jesus' story of the last judgment, there is surprise all around. Both those on the right hand and those on the left stand fully revealed to themselves for the first time, it seems. "Lord, when saw we thee ..." they cry on both sides. This war has constituted such a judgment day. A great moral issue has stood out, sharp, clean-cut and clear. It has set men on the right hand and on the left. It brooks no moral hyphenates; it permits no half-allegiance, either to country or to God. Beneath all pretense and profession, it lays bare the real man. It reveals the hidden qualities of nations. There have been many surprises. It has shown far more of evil in the world that we had deemed possible; but it has shown, too, far more of goodness and courage and true religion than we had thought was there.

Evil is here--real, powerful, poignant, and more unutterably bad than the farthest stretch of imagination had hitherto conceived that evil could be. Since the world began it was never so full of pain and suffering in body and mind, of needless death and of mothers brave but broken-hearted. And most of this is the result of supreme moral evil, the work of a power deliberately seeking world-domination and exploitation of the rest of mankind, even though it involve the extermination of other peoples, determined to use any methods that bid fair to bring about this result, and organizing deceit and lust and murder as the instruments of _Schrecklichkeit_.

But goodness is here too--strong, calm, cheerful, brave, self-devoting goodness. These years of war have revealed to us the supreme power of the human spirit to endure pain, to resist evil, and to count all else naught for sake of the right in which it believes and the good upon which its heart is set.

This goodness does not always call itself Christian, be it granted, or even know itself to be such. A chaplain in the English army writes: "There is in the army a very large amount of true religion. It is not, certainly, what people before the war were accustomed to call religion, but perhaps it may be nearer the real thing. It is startling, no doubt, and humiliating to find out how very little hold traditional Christianity has upon men.... So far as I am able to estimate, we are faced now with this situation, _a Christian life_ combined with _a pagan creed_. For while men's conduct and their outlook are to a large extent unconsciously Christian, their creed (or what they think to be their creed) most emphatically is not.... Nevertheless I feel that out here one is very near to the spirit of Christ. There is a general wholesomeness of outlook, a sense of justice, honor and sincerity, a readiness to take what comes and _carry on_, a power of endurance genuinely sublime, a light-heartedness and cheeriness (nearly always, I believe, put on for the sake of other people), a generosity and comradeship which are obviously Christ-like."[1]

There is strength and goodness at home, too. We had become accustomed in late years to hear it said that the churches were losing their hold upon the people of America. Whether or not that be true, the war has begun to reveal to America, as it has to our Allies, the depth and power of the real moral and spiritual life beneath the surface. Granted that we are witnessing no widespread evangelistic stirrings, no indications of a great revival. It seems probable, indeed, that the itinerant evangelists who had lately become the fashion among us, have passed the heyday of their power. Neither are the "prophetic" folk who misunderstand their Bibles so persistently and look so confidently for the second coming of the Lord, winning an assent at all commensurate with their effort. But there is a vast amount of quiet, sensible, devoted Christian living in America. There is more of genuine religion among us than we had realized. That religion, for the most part inarticulate, and hardly knowing itself to be Christian, is finding expression in action. The spirit in which America entered the war; the high moral aims which President Wilson, interpreter yet leader of his people, has set before the world; the quiet, matter-of-fact and matter-of-duty way in which the principle of selective service was accepted and carried out as democracy's method of mobilizing its power; the cooperation and the giving; the uncomplaining solemn pride of homes that have already made the supreme sacrifice--these are but the first evidences in America of a moral virility, a real religion, which, we may confidently hope, will strengthen us, with our Allies, not only to carry on to victory, but to resist the victor's temptations.

Will this deep, elemental, common religion of America come to understand itself, and to recognize its fundamentally Christian character? The answer to that question lies with the churches. And there are clear indications that many of them, at least, will not fail to realize and meet their opportunity.

Not that we shall do without dogmas. Religion cannot maintain itself as mere ethics. It is a way of living; but a way of living that justifies itself by a way of believing about God and duty and immortality. The point is, that in the natural order of growth life has a certain priority to belief, action to full understanding. And that certainly is the order of growth involved in the present situation.

As the churches share in the expanding and deepening common life and bring their beliefs to bear upon it, in interpretation of its ultimate motives and hopes, there will be growth on both sides. Men elementally Christian in action will come to know what they believe; and on the other hand the churches themselves will discern more clearly which of their customs and beliefs are relevant to the real issues of life and function in essential ways. Our creeds will become simpler, but more vital. And that will make possible a closer unity of the churches. One may well question both the possibility and the desirability of a complete obliteration of denominational lines. We may always have and need denominational loyalty just as we shall always have and need patriotism. But denominational loyalties can be incorporated into a higher loyalty to the inclusive fellowship of Christ's Church as a whole, just as national loyalties, we now see, can and must be incorporated into a higher loyalty to humanity which will be given expression and body in a world-wide League of Nations.

_We may expect religious education after the war, again, to be more fully Christian in its conception of God as well as in its view of life._

Jesus, so far as we know, never used the word "democracy." Yet just such a democratic world-community as we are now beginning in a practical way to understand and strive for, he taught and lived and died for. Christianity's ultimate ideal is no longer a mere ideal. It has become an actual political and social program and possibility.

"The brotherhood of mankind must no longer be a fair but empty phrase," wrote President Wilson to Russia; "it must be given a structure of force and reality. The nations must realize their common life and effect a workable partnership to secure that life against the aggressions of autocratic and self-pleasing power." The world's choice is between "Utopia or hell," is Mr. Wells' striking phrase, which he expounds in a remarkable article in _The New Republic_ on "The League of Nations." "Existing states," he says, "have become impossible as absolutely independent sovereignties. The new conditions bring them so close together and give them such extravagant powers of mutual injury that they must either sink national pride and dynastic ambitions in subordination to the common welfare of mankind or else utterly shatter one another. It becomes more and more plainly a choice between the League of free nations and famished men looting in search of non-existent food amidst the burning ruins of our world. In the end I believe the common sense of mankind will prefer a revision of its ideas of nationality and imperialism to the latter alternative."

Mr. Wells is right. The proposal to establish a league of nations presents itself in our day as a matter of plain common sense. Yet if there is one lesson written with perfect clearness on the pages of history, it is that common sense alone cannot save the world from the tragedies of error, self-will and sin, and that common sense motived by self-interest will in the end defeat itself. In his Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin has called our attention to the remarkable prophecy of the present world war made by Frederick W. Robertson in a sermon preached at Brighton on January 11, 1852, addressed to a generation that glorified commerce as the guarantor of world unity and sought to establish morality upon a basis of enlightened self-interest. The passage cannot be quoted too often, nor too firmly impressed upon the minds of the present generation, for there were those among us who, even up until the invasion of Belgium, kept protesting that there could be no war in a world so bound together by economic and commercial ties, and there are those now who find in such interests the only durable basis for world reconstruction. "Brethren," said Robertson, "that which is built on selfishness cannot stand. The system of personal interest must be shriveled to atoms. Therefore, we who have observed the ways of God in the past are waiting in quiet but awful expectation until He shall confound this system as He has confounded those which have gone before, and it may be effected by convulsions more terrible and bloody than the world has yet seen. While men are talking of peace and of the great progress of civilization, there is heard in the distance the noise of arms, gathering rank on rank, east and west, north and south, and there come rolling toward us the crushing thunders of universal war.... There is but one other system to be tried, and that is the cross of Christ--the system that is not to be built upon selfishness nor upon blood, not upon personal interest, but upon love."

If Wells has stated the world's alternative, Robertson has shown the way of final and permanent right decision. To common sense must be added love. The brotherhood of man must be established upon a common acknowledgment of the Fatherhood of God. The world community can ultimately be motived by nothing less than the life within the hearts of men of the God whom they come to know through Jesus Christ.

This means both that the world must become more religious, and that religion must become more fully Christian. We can no longer believe in any God less great or less good than the God whom Jesus Christ reveals. However much it may be tempted to the lower view from time to time, we may reasonably expect that henceforth the world is done with belief in a mere tribal or national God. The supreme and inmost bond of the world community can be nothing other and nothing less than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who regards all men as his children and who steadfastly seeks, with them and through them, the good of all.

Religious education after the war will be more democratic, more immediately concerned with life, more fully Christian. In so interpreting the present situation, we have had in mind especially the more or less formal religious education in the church and the church school. The same tendencies will influence the more informal and indirect religious education of children in the family. We have reason, indeed, to hope for a strengthening of family ties and a renewal of family religion. The sacrifices of these days are rendering relationships very precious that in a more careless, unthinking time we had accepted as a matter of course. And it is entirely possible that victory may wait until in America, as in England and France, there are few families that do not live in closer fellowship with the unseen world because their sons are there. The gradual disintegration of family life which the past half century has witnessed was but incidental to a rapid change in social, economic and industrial conditions. There is reason to expect that the family will so adjust its life to these conditions as to maintain its character as a social group, wherein genuine democracy and true religion may be propagated from generation to generation by that sharing of interests, occupations and affections which is the most potent and vital of all educational methods. That it should so adjust itself and so fulfill its primary educational function, should be a matter of the utmost concern to both Church and State, for it is hard to conceive how either the Christian religion or a democratic society could maintain itself without the aid of the family.

[1] "The Church in the Furnace," pp. 53-54.

VII

FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE WAR, TODAY AND TOMORROW

HARLAN P. BEACH

It might seem to the uninformed reader that foreign missions and war have nothing in common; for "what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial?" Fuller knowledge of the varied work of missions and of its many helpful contributions to African, Asiatic and Oceanic peoples would remove this misapprehension. Professor Coolidge, of Harvard, suggests some important points of contact between missions and the less developed races, particularly of the enterprise as carried on today in contrast with its earlier objectives.[1] How the races of mission fields that have been thus affected are contributing to the war at home and in the trenches, Dr. Arthur J. Brown has described most vividly in a paragraph upon the cosmopolitan composition of the allied forces at the front.[2] Missionary periodical files abound in references to the war's inroads upon missionary enterprises, and to the important mediating work of missions. A great volume of testimony would show that while missionaries still regard the upbuilding of the mind and the saving of souls as fundamentally desirable, the enterprise affects every phase of the personal and community life of the peoples to which it ministers.

Statistics of the missionary situation at the beginning of the war reveal the extent and scope of present-day foreign missions. In the latest full collection of such statistics,[3] one finds a series of tables devoted to "General and Evangelistic" data, to "Educational" activities of missions, and to "Medical and Philanthropic" enterprises conducted by missionaries. It is impracticable to present the totals of the seventy-two columns, suggestive of the many subordinate activities of missions; a few items will indicate the more important contacts established between the Protestant churches of Christendom and the fifty fields which their missions have touched in many helpful ways. In these mission countries 351 Protestant societies had as their foreign staff 24,039 missionaries, including 13,719 women workers and wives. Stationed at 4,094 towns and villages, they directed the activities of a native staff of 109,099 and of 26,210 churches, the communicant membership of which was 2,408,900, with 1,423,314 others under religious instruction. In their elementary schools were 1,699,775 pupils, while in secondary schools were 218,207, and in the colleges and universities 15,636 students were enrolled. In theological and Bible training institutions 10,588 were preparing for the Christian leadership of the churches. Their industrial schools had an enrolment of 10,125, and their normal students numbered 7,504. Mission hospitals and dispensaries were presided over by 1,589 physicians and trained nurses, aided by a native staff of 2,336. In the year reported, 3,107,755 individuals were treated, in single visits or during prolonged residence in hospitals. Orphanages numbered 245, with 9,736 inmates, and 39 leper homes sheltered 1,880 unfortunate outcasts. Such an exhibit, incomplete as it is, will indicate the manifold tendrils which have bound Christian missionaries to the hearts of the nations; and if Roman Catholic statistics for this date were available,[4] the importance of missions as a steadying and reconstructive force at present and in post-bellum readjustments would be even more manifest.

In discussing the war as affecting missions, only a few outstanding facts can be mentioned. Practically all of the mission world has taken sides in the tremendous conflict, most of these nations declaring for the Allies. Many of them have generously contributed the means and man force to hasten the day of peace. In 1917 nearly half a million from India were enlisted, of whom 285,200 were combatants and the rest were employed behind the lines in multifarious tasks. As a result of the recent conference at Delhi, it is hoped that another half million may be secured this year,[5] thus giving that Empire the numerical precedence among Britain's dominions. From North China alone some 135,000 laborers are serving the British forces in varied ways. "They come, also, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and the jungles of Senegal; from Madagascar and Tahiti, and several hundred thousand from French Indo-China and China proper. Black, yellow and white, East and West, educated and ignorant, progressive and backward, are laboring side by side."[6] So important is it that these polyglot assistants and warriors should be cared for in a Christian way that many missionaries have been called away from their distant fields to a manifold ministry to their adopted countrymen behind the trenches. Many of these recruits are Christian volunteers, especially so in the Indian contingent.